The (un)made city: spatial fragmentation, social inequalities and (de)compositions of urban life

Abstract

This chapter reflects on the (un)made city and the dynamics of (de)composition of urban life. In recent decades, various voices have questioned the persistence of the modern idea of “the city” as a self-evident and unquestionable assumption of urban studies. Regardless of the positions and reasons suggested in a broad debate that involves the contemporary social processes of space production as well as the theoretical and epistemological perspectives from which these processes are analyzed, there is an underlying shared conviction that it is necessary to re-imagine and re-map the urban. In this sense, here urbicide refers to an open and complex urban process, which is neither teleological nor linear. Rather than a given reality (or an inevitable future), the idea of urbicide constitutes a working hypothesis through which to explore the sociospatial dynamics in contemporary urbanism, where the life and death of the urban are intertwined; that is, the city is made and unmade. Analyzing these processes implies a double movement: acknowledging the powerful social and spatial processes that "unmade" the city and, at the same time, showing (based on an ethnographic case) the ways in which its inhabitants are actively involved in "remaking" the city, in composing the urban.