Scenes from an urban outside

Abstract

This contribution to the Scenes & Sounds section of CITY reflects on the experience of feeling ‘outside’ the urban by focusing on urban absences. The argument is developed first through theoretical speculations on planetary urbanism, emotions and absences/presences. The paper then mobilises autobiographical accounts concerning the emotions that I experienced during a summer spent in an alpine village. The paper suggests that, in my emotional sphere, the village was a ‘constitutive outside’ of the urban, particularly through the manipulation of feelings of distance from, and proximity to, the urban. In this sense, the paper proposes that the village was not simply a ‘negative other’ of the urban; rather, it may be regarded as an outside which was relationally constructed in a position of continuity with the inside: the extra-urban may include and exceed the urban, and it may emotionally perform the role of a constitutive outside

Key words:

• planetary urbanism
• urban/rural
• presence/absence
• alpine village
• emotional geography

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as City editors who have generously dedicated their time and energy to review and improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Alberto Vanolo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8550-2338

Notes

1 To cite a very different example, post-colonial scholarship has widely argued that underdevelopment has been commonly conceived as the absence of development, giving rise to an understanding of the Global South that emphasises modes of production of absences and ultimately promotes the impossible quest for a Western idea of development (de Santos 2004; see also debates on post-development, for example Gibson-Graham 2006). A progressive conceptualisation of development hence implies recognising what is generally disqualified and made invisible or unintelligible and to consider it a serious alternative to hegemonic experiences.

2 I use the expression ‘autobiography’, rather than ‘autoethnography’ in order to emphasise the individual nature of the experiences and emotions described in this paper. Since parts of this paper describe conditions and feelings of loneliness and lack of meaningful contact with people, I decided to use an expression lacking the Greek root ‘ethnos.’ It should be acknowledged, however, that the boundaries between autoethnography and autobiography are uncertain (Moss 2001; Ellis 2003; Butz and Besio 2009). My autobiographical reflection is intended to enhance readers’ understanding of phenomena exceeding my individual experience, and in this sense it may be considered a form of ‘ethnographic I’ (Ellis 2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alberto Vanolo

Alberto Vanolo is Professor of Political and Economic Geography at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society of the University of Turin, Italy.