City Visualscapes, an Introduction

Abstract

Socio-anthropological studies on the city have addressed directly the audiovisual recently. This trend emerges from the awareness that the textual materials usually employed in research too often show their limits, given the complexity of the urban phenomena. The increasing use of audiovisual research raises a crucial question: what is the added value of photography and video, as well as of the many extra textual languages that increasingly are complicating research work? The simple diffusion of electronic text and the use of devices have taught us to manipulate text and images simultaneously, but in the process have changed the methodological approach of social sciences from the definition of questions and research hypotheses to the construction of the empirical basis, and finally the writing and analysis, seen as experimental practices that flow into what we might call an expanded search. Urban studies, having complexity as their main object as well as an undeniable encounter of paradigms and disciplines, have implicitly encouraged and made common the use and testing of audiovisual technology. City Visualscapes is an attempt to focus on those experiences of urban research that privilege languages employing experimental visual practices alongside more traditional research tools.

URBAN STUDIES IN ITALY

Anthropology has endeavored to identify levels of authenticity within them [the cities]. When the ethnologist studies a village [ … ] Those conducting the surveys (some of whom had anthropological training) felt completely at home in a village of 500 inhabitants, the study of which necessitated no change in their classical methods; whereas in an average-sized town they felt they were confronted by an entirely new problem. [Lévi-Strauss 1963: 369]

Reading the above words, everything seems very clear. The city, especially a contemporary one, has always put anthropologists off. Contemporary societies appear easier to analyse in their smaller segments, which show consistency and simplicity. Observable only in areas not yet invaded by complexity, these fragments lend themselves to analysis in relatively simple patterns.

Many scholars claim it is not reflections on the situation or the real nature of anthropology, but rather external events that have forced them to focus on urban environments. First it was the rise and crisis of American cities in the early part of the last century [Signorelli 1996]; while in England it was the emergence in social anthropology of problems related to changes underway in the colonies [Balandier 1955]. If by “anthropological contribution” we mean theories and practices on how to narrow down the field, define the research object, isolate the characteristics, develop a specific method of analysis and forms of subsequent representation, then to which urban anthropology works thus far do we attribute this contribution [Sobrero 1992; Semi 2004]?

Yet the relationship between urban studies and anthropology has somersaulted over the years. Urban anthropology, looking for new methods and analysis, has forced anthropology into a reflection on the subject–object relationship, and to general criticism of some of its naturalistic methods [Callari Galli 2004]. The simple–complex relationship in fact affects not so much the object itself as its understanding; there are no simple and complex societies, just societies that anthropologists have made simple through interpreting their rules, and other societies often called complex because we have yet to fully understand their mechanisms.

When it comes to Italy, the anthropologist Signorelli underlines a significant deficiency in the formulation of a solid theoretical and methodological foundation for urban research [Giglia 1989]. Although our sociology has focused on urban areas in the first decades after the Second World War, for Signorelli there is little anthropological research on Italian cities, and most of it, between 1950 and the 1960s, was strongly oriented toward the rural sector [Signorelli 1996]. This is due, for the anthropologist, to a powerful anti-urban bias in our country. Since the early 1960s criticism of capitalist society at least in Italy took the form of a critique of the city, considered the place par excellence of capitalist exploitation and consumerist alienation: that’s why a whole neo-Arcadian, pseudo-demographic literature [ibid.] has developed, which has always identified rural society and culture with protest, recognizing an anti-alienation strategy in the so-called recovery of roots. For example, the anthropologist Alberto Mario Cirese in Cultura egemonica e culture subalterne [1971], considered a central book for the systematization of Italian anthropological studies, proposes a reading of Gramsci that somehow suggests an adversarial relationship between rural and urban society; and the same emerges even in the works of the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose contribution to the social sciences has recently been debated [Sobrero 2015].

According to a reconstruction of the origin of Italian urban studies, made by Angela Giglia [1989], three main lines of research were established, “sometimes following parallel routes, more often following divergent routes.” First, the urban sociology with an archipelago of surveys originated between the 1950s and ‘60s that created a mapping of the forced march toward urbanization that the country was experiencing, along with the publication of many international classics. Second, the anthropology of the ‘70s that, with some delay, abandoned the demography field to tackle the “street corner alterity” of the Italian city, flanked for the first time by the works of several anthropologists from abroad. Finally, the oral-sources studies that have been widely circulating in Italy since the early ‘sixties and that have constituted a kind of “border territory [if not often a no-man’s-land] between sociology, anthropology and history.”

It was following the publication of a pivotal text such as Roma da Capitale a Periferia [Ferrarotti 1970], around the work of the sociologist Franco Ferrarotti and a group of scholars, who began to make a systematic use of audiovisual tools in their research, that these started to develop.

Nevertheless, the city has always been a privileged object of academic research internationally, and in our country has received growing interest by scholars from all of the social sciences: sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, semioticians as well as city planners, architects and urban historians. From this recent literature there emerges, first of all, how the city does not merely provide a background for social action but is rather the most complex form of human interdependence, as well as being an environment with specific structuring processes. One of the goals of an urban scholar should be to identify, analyze and understand the specificity of these processes [Hannerz 1980]. Secondly, this recent literature shows the strength and pervasiveness of re-territorialization processes; these processes, although often occurring in exclusionary forms, invite us to remember how the social actors and the spaces are constantly interacting with each other.

If we think of the research that has focused on urban areas of Italy, we cannot deny the need to violate some “academic stakes.” More and more researchers are in fact now convinced that by using qualitative and ethnographic practice many insights on the city can be integrated; furthermore it is possible, moving from urban specificity, to build a trans-disciplinary field of study that focuses on both empirical research and theoretical reflection. A dialogue can thus start from the ultimate assumption of the risk of going beyond the boundaries of disciplines without abolishing them, but rather emphasizing through the exchange their approaches and specific contributions.

Even the more “hard sciences” such as urban planning have recently begun a dialogue with social sciences. Faced with the crisis of techno-scientific knowledge many planners have begun to question in increasingly problematic terms the so-called story-turn: in other terms, they are considering the benefit of stories and qualitative research to analyze certain urban transformational processes [Attili 2007, 2008; Eckstein and Throgmorton 2003; Forester 1989; Mandelbaum 1991; Marris 1997; Sandercock 2003, 2004]. In this framework the planning can be read as being a continuous “conversational process of making sense together” [Forester 1989]; a process marked by linguistic acts and the construction and transmission of urban stories.

These are many and different stories produced by the plural subjects involved in the process of planning itself. Starting from these assumptions, planning is interpreted as a narrative interaction space where stories are potentially capable of conveying complex forms of ordinary and expert knowledge, informing the decision-making process through a plurality of different signifying frameworks.

At the basis of these new analytical approaches there lies the belief, shared by all disciplines, that there is no single technology that is able to represent urban processes. More and more scholars use the languages of film, photography and other methodologies as experimental tools to circumscribe and map the space, with the aim of telling us how our cities are transforming.¹

THE PARTICIPATORY TURN IN RESEARCH, EVALUATION AND PLANNING

The inclusion on what we have referred to above as a “conversational process of making sense together” [ibid.] is part, at least within planning theory, of a more radical transformation undergone by spatial planning in the postmodern period that is also a fundamental component of participatory approaches and strategies in research and evaluation. These approaches are characterized by reflexivity, flexibility and iterativity, in contrast with the rigid linear designs of most conventional ones and a key strength of theirs resides in exploring local knowledge and perceptions.

Moreover they focus on a process of sequential reflections and actions, earned with and by different actors (i.e., participants/beneficiaries/stakeholders)—who might be affected directly or indirectly by the practices adopted by the above-mentioned disciplines and professions—rather than on them. In this kind of process not only local knowledge and perspectives that people hold are acknowledged but they form the basis for research and planning and can inform all the other related processes (e.g., policy design, decision-making, budgeted expenditure, etc.) at different stages and levels.²

In this regard, participatory approaches are not used—or not only used—to empower vulnerable social groups, but rather to foster and enhance dialogical processes and mutual learning through getting a deeper understanding of each others’ perspectives and interpretations.

More specifically planning, at least in the last three decades and in the European context, has been described as an “open and complex system characterized by its enabling role within new forms of governance, its communicative rather then positivist rationality, its adoption of the entrepreneurial ethic and the shift from equality to inclusion as the primary social goal” [Brand and Thomas 2005: 40].

Planning, according to the “new,” predominantly discoursive nature it has, often employs images and metaphors in the management of communicative practices, invokes values, organizes data and arguments in particular ways, offers frames of reference that are used for the understanding of the deficits and challenges of urban development, and also calls into actions certain types of intervention. The same could also be said, to some extent, for the conduct and restitution of research on urban dynamics and phenomena as well as the evaluation of urban policies and programs [Cousins and Whitmore 1998; O’Sullivan 2012]. Therefore, if in conventional research it has often been the case that inappropriate recommendations have followed from a failure to consider the priorities, processes and perspectives of the affected social groups adequately, in participatory research in contrast the emphasis on a “bottom-up” approach, with a focus on priorities and perspectives defined and offered by the participants, has not only limited those kinds of failure and unintended consequence, but has shown both to enhance the effectiveness and robustness of projects and programs, which means also saving time and money in the long term.

Here we are not claiming that participatory approaches are the only way to conduct research and planning: much depends on the context and possibilities of and for its application and, as argued by Cornwall and Jewkes, key elements of participatory research are not so much methods as “the attitude of researchers, which in turn determine how, by and for whom research is conceptualized and conducted.” These authors continue by saying that a “key difference between participatory and other research methodologies lies in the location of power in the various stages of the research process,” and therefore that “the practice of participatory research raises personal, political and professional challenges that go beyond the bounds of the production of information” [Cornwall and Jewkes 1995: 1667–1668]. From the methodological viewpoint this means that the applications of research methods are also challenged, even though these have drawn a lot also on more conventional qualitative research techniques (such as focus-group discussions, observation and interviewing). In general they have placed more and more emphasis on other strategies of data collection, analysis and restitution, such as the use of mapping and other kinds of image production or the facilitating of visualized analyses, given the possibility they offer participants to explore, analyze and represent their perspectives in their own terms and frameworks.

In this regard other crucial issues addressed by the current Special Issue have been if and how using participatory, visual and narrative methodologies has helped (or could have helped) to bring out what is going on in contemporary cities and to grasp what is perceived and expected with respect to their visualscapes and their underlying dynamics. If they enhanced the consideration and activation of the different values involved, of the images held and ‘‘usable knowledge’’ available [Fareri 2009; Lindblom and Cohen 1979; Schön 1983]; making them a matter of discussion able to foster public actions, new imaginaries, mutual learning and distributed knowledge production.

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE RESEARCH: SIDE EFFECTS OF THE MEETING BETWEEN URBAN AND VISUAL STUDIES

In selecting contributions for this Special Issue we first had to keep a certain degree of “interdisciplinary tolerance,” amplified by the experimental nature of the research object; and, at the same time, we tried to promote and understand the different typologies of subjects that use audiovisual within their urban research. In a context such as Italian urban studies, favoring an interdisciplinary studies field doesn’t necessarily mean to blur the boundaries between disciplines, but rather to encourage dialogue between them [Cancellieri and Scandurra 2012].

A wide spectrum of possibilities and audiovisual experiences seems to find fertile ground within these contributions. In selecting the material we have in fact encountered very heterogeneous types of research. In the urban visualscape we explored, visual anthropology meets participatory planning, action research, purely geographical land mapping, even the gathering and qualitative use of data collected via satellite or through the monitoring of social networks.

But what is it that unites the different kinds of researcher in such a rich and varied panorama? First of all we are dealing with a “collaborative film dimension” between the producers of images and those who are their protagonists. As Sarah Elder rightly points out [1996], all documentary work is a recorded chronicle of the relationship between filmmaker and subject. But we witness the transition from a participatory mode of the subject within the researcher’s film project to a reflexive mode in which the subject takes an active role in different ways, which in turn leads to a “power of speech” over the research process and its results. This sort of “dense reflexivity” is unveiled according to the different approaches, sensitivities and formation of the researchers.

Within this reflexivity the use of audiovisuals takes on both a specific and a complex value, because it adds another element in the research chain: if actively involving one’s own informants is by now quite an established practice, the consequences of such an involvement still haven’t been investigated enough: the critical capacity of the parties involved, and how this capacity has a feedback effect on the research itself, are an aspect that has not been interpreted in depth.

Valentina Anzoise, in outlining some features of the visual methodologies adopted in two research projects on urban landscape perception, tries to establish a continuum in the field of relationships shaped by all those who, for various reasons, are involved in the research (citizens, researchers and other stakeholders). The techniques used, production of subjective images (i.e., native image-making or respondent-generated visuals), visual focus groups, and interviews with images—that is to say variations or experimentations with well-established and integrated research techniques—make us understand the possibilities offered by audiovisuals for increasing the several degrees of reflexivity through the various stages of research. In this field of relationships there arises the question of how it can be possible to “operationalize” and give rigor to this dense reflexivity, which provides a kind of gradual empowerment to the different subjects who are involved in the research. The reflexivity in this case not only assumes an epistemological value in an interpretive process, given within the ethnographic set, but is charged with a dynamic value of overcoming and repositioning of the subjects with respect to initial positions and questions.

The specific research context of the essay by Valentina Bonifacio and Rossella Schillaci, on the prison space and its relationship with the urban fabric, not only brings out immediately the ambiguous distinction between public and private spaces (the prison is part of the city but at the same time it is isolated from the rest of the structure), but prompts us to reflect on how the camera is not perceived as a mere object, a “technical factor” used by the researcher, but as a hermeneutic instrument, almost a “third person,” an intermediary between the researcher/camera operator and the subject filmed. The camera creates a different set of expectations and a different network of relationships than the ones set by the researcher’s position. The camera represents a connection, a means to reach the urban space beyond the usual boundaries and has the power, according to the authors, to make the interior of the prison visible from the outside, creating links with the outside urban space that surrounds the facility.

By the time the camera becomes a potential “ally” in the relations with the outside world, the repositioning of the subject in a chain of relationships inevitably brings with it a negotiation of the reflexivity levels and a reflexive implication of the subject involved in the research: “instead of being passively watched by the cameras, they decided to actively talk through them.”

This “variable geometry” of the relationship between urban anthropology and audiovisual language creates an epistemological tension that expresses an ethnographic vocation declinable in different contexts and according to different methodologies. Erika Lazzarino and the Dynamoscopio researchers use as a starting-point to explore the territory a—to some extent—classical methodology, that of action research, but condensing it into a lasting relationship with their research ground. The researcher marks her/his presence on the territory by documenting its changes and creating a new map through a series of interventions that also include visual research.

An operation of active cartography clashes with a cinematic narrative: the collision, the friction between the research on territory shared with its inhabitants and the practice of video-making develops a complex reflexive practice that creates identity, knowledge through images, and dynamic vision of a territory.

In the ImmaginariEsplorazioni project, established patterns of living narrated with the help of video-making are compared with the practices of the people involved in the research, creating an inhabiting performance that is the net result of those two elements and that feeds on this relation triggered by the use of the audiovisual.

The problematization of the use of audiovisual facilities as a planning tool in the context of action research, as a lens to read and bring out “sense elements” of urban space enriched by a different perspective, precisely due to the meeting between audiovisual and people involved in the research, is the focus of the work of Lidia Katia C. Manzo on the Chinese community in Milan. She uses a well-known theoretical debate in her discipline, not only to contextualize it critically in her research but also to make it an instrument of action with respect to the stigmatization of the Chinese community: “I explore how ethnography, particularly video-ethnography, could, together with critical research, contribute to praxis and more democratic urbanization beyond the theoretical assumptions.”

Becoming public and being shared, the video-ethnographic research becomes not only a tool to monitor a context but also a political tool to steer, as planner, the transformation of the urban fabric. The awareness that the public sharing of some audiovisual research affects social morale and, as emphasized by the author, political perception of a particular urban environment becomes an item of the research itself: “there is a push for the production of public anthropology using media potential to foster critical dialogues with those who are traditionally ‘just’ the ethnographic subjects.”

The contributions of both Angelo Romano and Simone Hardin, and Giuseppe Scandurra, also start from an attempt at reading the territory through the audiovisuals, but they use a different kind of methodology, that of participatory video and photography. Knowledge of the space of the homeless, who have taken part in the project, is brought to bear on an unprecedented mapping of the city, and conveys a new awareness of the role in the space of the actors involved. At the same time one tries to problematize the role of the researcher, who is forced to confront the multiple and dissonant self-representations provided by different informants.

Can the subject of the research compete with the ethnographer’s authority and truly become a co-author? The goal of the researchers in this case is to scale down the “authoritarian/authorial” space of the ethnographer, to leave a portion of narrative space that the subject involved is called to fill up. And it is the specificity of language—film in the case of Romano and Hardin, photography for Scandurra—that helps this movement, this “power shift.” The role of the researcher becomes that of equalizer of the weight of identity forces within the video-ethnographic setting. The aim is to create an intersubjective “vital space” shared between researchers and informants: “this fact is not to be intended as a loss of power in the visual representation but as a state of inter-subjectiveness with informants. Following this path enriches the ethnographer’s eye of a reflexive gaze, resulting from the interaction with informants, not an author but one point of view among many.”

Finally, a form of collective authorship that provides first-hand material directly to the research is the subject of Patrizia Toscano’s work who, in order to rebuild the social dimension of a public space, uses hashtags, markers that internet users use to make classifiable and traceable on the Web their photographs taken in the city, taking as given the representations that these users produce. Through this spontaneous and self-generating system of street photography she gives us an unprecedented mapping of the public space.

The sharing of material on the Web is the starting point while the ability to be connected becomes the dynamic observation point of the transformations of urban space, in a game of references between real and virtual dimension.

Even in this case we are in the presence of an element of “dense” reflexivity: “This makes it necessary to accept a fundamental assumption: what happens in the real world influences the virtual and vice versa; this entails an evolution in the meaning of the meeting place and broadens the reflection on public space also in the virtual world.”

The body in public space responds to the stimulus triggered by virtual space, creating a dynamic social interaction that shows an evolution of identities in the places of the research.

REPRODUCIBLE KNOWLEDGE VERSUS DESIRABLE IMAGES

The cognitive friction between a culture of the image and a restitution project of scientific knowledge is therefore a “quid” specific to audiovisual research.

On the one hand the technical tools provided by the social sciences implicitly suggest that the rules of a social system are part of a world in which phenomena exist and are measurable. This measurability allows us to explain cultural and social phenomena and to produce reproducible and transferable knowledge. On the contrary, images and their consumption aren’t so precisely quantifiable. An image is not in any way measurable nor can it be assimilated seamlessly to another, but often it is through this image that the cultural and social phenomena acquire coherence and meaning, and thus we are able to read and interpret a reality in a way that makes sense.³

In audiovisual research a continuous exercise of osmosis is demanded between the need for reproducible knowledge and the presence of sensitive images that are not immediately ready for placement within a predetermined cognitive grid, but which return the deep meaning of the fieldwork. The specific, primary scope of the audiovisual researcher is born from this clash.

Indeed, generating audiovisual data and using audiovisual tools has both a heuristic potential and an enabling one: i.e., the objects as tools, as “magnifying prostheses of our senses,” allow the research process to break the frames in which a researcher and other subjects involved are constantly embedded. Suffice it to think of artifacts such as aerial or satellite photography, or the now ordinary visualization practices enabled by smartphones or by software applications, from PowerPoint to the sophisticated techniques in new areas of research such as neuro-imaging and brain imaging.

The thesis underlying all of the contributions in this Special Issue is that the practices themselves which we use to visualize phenomena and discourses tell us a lot about the categories we use to think, imagine and interpret the world, and also to act in it. What makes these practices more interesting (but even more critical and challenging) from the point of view of research is the possibility we have today to share this huge amount of information and to generate knowledge that is increasingly public and intersubjective. However, as claimed by Martin Jay, we must hope that with the “increasing [of] our sensitivity to the historical complexities of the concept of experience itself, we will become more aware of how mediated our visual experiences are by the discursive contexts in which they appear” [2002: 92], i.e., by collective and individual biographies as well as by the “regimes of visibility” [Brighenti 2010; Jay 1988; Jenks 1995] that are reflections of the power practices of institutions.

On the other hand, our ability to see is closely linked to our knowledge (but this is true too for all the other senses!). We see what we know, and looking leads to the continuous transformation of our models and to the enlargement of our knowledge. In this sense one can speak of “stereoscopy of the gaze” [Bernardi 2002], since each single vision is the result of the interaction of different visual experiences, and the subjective evolution of the gaze itself results in a collective path of constant production and reproduction of ways of seeing, which proceeds by inclusions and exclusions (i.e., the process of framing that underlies the production of any type of -scape). In this sense one has to consider both the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of the gaze, as well as its spatial variability; and in addition to these, the variability of the media through which it is expressed has to be taken into account.

WE ARE ALL IN THE FRAME

The visionary insight of Walter Benjamin [1931], according to which the illiterate of the future would be the one who cannot take a picture, is especially timely. Today the audiovisual language is not only shared but is widely practised. Such a broad spectrum of video applications to research necessarily pushes us to think in more depth about the consequences of the pervasiveness of images and of technologies in the social sciences. The simple application of a technology in a scientific context radically changes not only our daily practices as researchers but our approach to research in its entirety.

Quite simply, one of the consequences of the spread of electronic text is that it seems natural for us to manage and manipulate images and text at the same time. So the possibilities for integrating video and images within our research path not only multiply but become “naturalized.” The sharing of content from different media also leads us to expect some kind of interactivity with the text. In confronting ourselves not exclusively with a text but with cross-media content we prepare ourselves for an active response according to our own choice in a not unidirectional path.

The foregoing is part of a broader reflection on the relationship between the social sciences and their object. In this regard, Anthony Giddens [1984, 1990] speaks of “double hermeneutic” to refer to the fact that the development of sociological knowledge is parasitical upon lay agents’ concepts, and conversely the notions coined in the meta-languages of the social sciences routinely re-enter the universe of actions they were initially formulated to describe or account for. The image that Giddens uses to describe this reflexive process is that of a spiral but, he points out, this model of knowledge production and reflexivity is not cumulative as that of natural sciences is said to be. Even though it has an enormous practical impact, and its concepts and findings are constitutively involved in the very essence of modern social life, “this ‘feed-in’ of sociological notions and knowledge cannot be readily channelled” [1990: 16]

The main features of this reflexive turn can be summed up in four moments. The first is that of the attribution of a more central role to language. From a theoretical point of view this means recognizing that any kind of knowledge is based on “situated languages” (and the same applies also to audiovisual language) both from the disciplinary point of view (i.e., that of their traditional scientific references) and the cultural, historical and geographical.

The second moment consists in the redefinition of the relationship between the observer and the field: all that is observed is observed by someone (even the cells observed through a microscope are observed by someone). This someone is in turn inserted into social relations and is therefore the bearer of a “situated gaze.”

The third moment relates to the double hermeneutic of social research, which has not to produce absolute knowledge, says Alberto Melucci, but “plausible interpretations [ … ]. Research produces interpretations that try to make sense of the ways in which actors in turn try to make sense of their actions. They are accounts of meaning, or narratives of narratives” [1998: 23].

And finally, the fourth moment regards the restitution of results, which are not to be considered “objective,” both for the reasons just expressed and because they are presented in the form of a narrative that makes use of a coded language specific to a scientific community.

The moments of this turn, which we have defined as movement toward an increasingly expanded research—in which the ethnographer’s notebook makes use of multiple devices, applications and collaborators, and in which also the field itself expands beyond the boundaries of what can be experienced directly by our senses—is intertwined with the need to adapt, integrate and multiply the knowledge and use of other languages and research tools.

Finally, the willingness to revise assumptions and results achieved, and the development of more collaborative practices, is leading to a broader epistemological breakthrough introduced, in this case, by the awareness of the impossibility of separating the object from its representation, the explanans from the explanandum, and to arrive, despite the use of increasingly sophisticated techniques, at an “objective description” of the world, purified from the weight of the biography, culture and interests of the author [Marzano 2006: 28]. The very opposition between observation and intervention that has dominated much of the history of social sciences today has been largely passed by the awareness that each observation is in itself an act of intervention and that the procedures used to make a phenomenon observable and describable often end up matching those of its production.

Therefore, starting from these assumptions that we have just briefly outlined, this Special Issue stands as an opportunity to try to think about the announced changes, as well as the emerging questions, which the use of a cross-media language is bringing in research practices

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Valentina Anzoise

VALENTINA ANZOISE is an urban sociologist at the European Centre for Living Technology, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her research focuses on urban/rural transformations, landscape and environment perception, and visual and collaborative research methods; and she has also been working on city attractiveness and sustainability, Knowledge Society dynamics and innovation policies. Since 2014 she has been President of the International Sociological Association’s Visual Sociology Working Group (WG03), and is currently Young Researcher within the EuropeAid project MEDIUM: New pathways for sustainable urban development in China’s medium-sized cities (mediumcities-china.org).

Paolo Barberi

PAOLO BARBERI, visual anthropologist and documentarian, is associate researcher at the University of Ferrara and teaches Visual Anthropology at IUAV—Università di Venezia. His most recent research interests are on using audiovisual tools in urban studies. Recent publications include È successo qualcosa alla città [Rome: Donzelli, 2013]. His film The Well: Water Voices from Ethiopia won an award at the 2012 Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival. E-mail: [email protected]

Giuseppe Scandurra

GIUSEPPE SCANDURRA teaches Cultural Anthropology and Communication at the University of Ferrara. Among his numerous essays and books are Tranvieri. Ethnografia di una palestra di pugilato (with F. Antonelli; Aracne 2010), Memorie di uno spazio pubblico. Piazza Verdi a Bologna (with E. Castelli, L. Tancredi and A. Tolomelli; Clueb 2011), and “Tracce Urbane” (with A. Cancellieri; FrancoAngeli 2012). Currently he studies a group of ultras in Bologna football, and does an ethnographic study on the relationship between the “Arab Spring” and the art world in Tunisia. Member of the Scientific Committee of the Gramsci Institute Emilia-Romagna, and Director of the Laboratory of Studi Urbani, University of Ferrara (http://sea.unife.it/lsu/). E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

In this introduction, the section “Urban Studies in Italy” was written by Giuseppe Scandurra, the section “Participative Turn in the Research, Evaluation and Planning” was by Valentina Anzoise, the section “Inside and Outside The Research: Side Effects of the Meeting between Urban and Visual Studies” was written by Paolo Barberi, while the sections “Reproducible Knowledge versus Desirable Images” and “We Are All in the Frame” were by Valentina Anzoise and Paolo Barberi.

The process is not linear, and significant gradations of participation may occur, e.g., already in the late 1960s Sherry Arnstein [1969] proposed the model of the “eight-rung ladder of citizen participation” to illustrate the different extent of citizens’ power in decision-making.

The detailed analysis of this issue would imply references to a debate (dear to postmodern anthropology) that opposes a critical culture of the image to a social science made of rules and methodologies that somehow control and categorize social reality in a dominating way. However, this would be beyond the scope of the present work. It is from the postmodern debate on the culture of the image that there arises the questioning of the data, rules and methodologies of social sciences that lead to a “forced categorization” of social reality: “For those who take seriously the implications of postmodernism as a mode of critical theorizing or cultural analysis, the attempt to produce a socio-anthropological understanding must necessarily be partial, because it cannot evade totalizations, systematizations and legitimizations through the deceptive great tales of modernity. [….] Therefore the sociological discourse with its categories and its totalizations reifies and misunderstands its own object of study; only image and textual interpretation, free from cumbersome categories, can produce a dense knowledge” [Featherstone 1991].

And this is what, to take another example, J. F. Lyotard calls figural thought as opposed to discursive thought [1971]. Figural thought proceeds by images and, thanks to its immediacy, is able to break down the barriers created by the discursive message, which is in some way pre-established because structured by rules within a linguistic system. So there is a flow of signifiers which transcend organized discursive language, but which impose themselves immediately without the need for mediations. In figural thought one comes in contact with stimuli and images extrapolated from the signifying chain of mediation of organized language. We are faced by a flux of floating signifiers, totally decontextualized, that can only affirm themselves through images and not through coded languages. That is the reason why postmodern thought, a sociological discourse made of “reproducible knowledge,” has lost its grip on reality, and should be replaced with an aesthetic reading of a social sphere immediately enjoyable, made of “sensitive image.”