Beyond Urban Subcultures:

Urban Subversions as Rhizomic Social Formations

Maria Daskalaki & Oli Mould

homogenisation of the urban landscape (Sassen, 2009)

-- convergent consumption patterns-- architecture narrows-- usage of the city standardised

neoliberal world city paradigm perpetuates itself | landscape appropriates its own condition (Harvey, 1978)

“time to banish reason and let difference in?”

(Bridge, 2005)

so, cities are getting more similar yet more crowded…

2 stage ‘subculturalisation’ process:

othering…

marginalisation of activity is imbued into the world city building/capitalist process

continue to practice ‘outside’ the city | become identifiable | build up communities of practice (Wenger, 1991) | trends and fashions appear

accruing…

Rhizomic Social Formations

--“What if apparently global cultural forms are being enacted in ‘modernities’ where lifestyle construction through consumption is not second nature, where urban space is already saturated with tactility and social interaction, and identity markers of modernity (gender, race/ethnicity and class) retain their resonances? What then are the meanings attached to apparently common cultural practices? And what then is the substance of the microgroups via which they are enacted?” (Pilikington & Johnson, 2003: 266)

the moment of creativity when the story has yet to be written:

rhizome have strata | “unifications and totalizations, massifications, mimetic mechanisms, signifying power takeovers, and subjective attributions taking roots”(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 13)

Soft City (Raban, 1974)

Untruths (Bailey, 1991)

not of being, but of becoming

Palimpsest

Heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981)

not of being, but of becoming

previous conceptualisations been have posited as against/’othered’ | invite possibility and difference as part of the urban landscape (Pinder, 2009)