TY - CONF

T1 - Urban Instincts

T2 - Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting 2017

AU - Dunn, Nicholas Simon

PY - 2017/4/5

Y1 - 2017/4/5

N2 - The nocturnal city may be understood as a place and time wherein escape from the measures and restrictions of the daytime is possible. More specifically, it is a state of being, wherein improvisation as a tactic to the urban environment and for its appropriation is vital. To go nightwalking is a decisive act that is constantly in negotiation with the city and its contingent and fleeting features. Attempts to organise and control the nighttime city concern multiple actors in order to strongly encourage us to 'conform' (Edensor, 2013) in the urban landscape. Yet gestures of refusal against the banality, structures, rules and regulations that encompass the contemporary urban realm and lead to its 'tactile sterility' (Sennett, 1994) may be found in various spatial practices including nightwalking. Indeed the improvisational methods required when confronted with uncanny or unfamiliar places, encounters and behaviours necessarily raise issues of how to document such experiences on the move. This has led to experimentation with various methods of mapmaking and recording including: creative nonfiction, notations, photographs and sketches in an attempt to capture the itinerant and elusive nature of nightwalking. Combining both improvisational performance and creative endeavour, this paper will draw on extensive empirical data and personal experience in order to elucidate on the ongoing entanglement that occurs at the boundaries of body and urban landscape; day and night; space and materiality. Nightwalking is thus positioned as an improvisational strategy of coping with the pressures and confines of the daylight hours, its roles and responsibilities.

AB - The nocturnal city may be understood as a place and time wherein escape from the measures and restrictions of the daytime is possible. More specifically, it is a state of being, wherein improvisation as a tactic to the urban environment and for its appropriation is vital. To go nightwalking is a decisive act that is constantly in negotiation with the city and its contingent and fleeting features. Attempts to organise and control the nighttime city concern multiple actors in order to strongly encourage us to 'conform' (Edensor, 2013) in the urban landscape. Yet gestures of refusal against the banality, structures, rules and regulations that encompass the contemporary urban realm and lead to its 'tactile sterility' (Sennett, 1994) may be found in various spatial practices including nightwalking. Indeed the improvisational methods required when confronted with uncanny or unfamiliar places, encounters and behaviours necessarily raise issues of how to document such experiences on the move. This has led to experimentation with various methods of mapmaking and recording including: creative nonfiction, notations, photographs and sketches in an attempt to capture the itinerant and elusive nature of nightwalking. Combining both improvisational performance and creative endeavour, this paper will draw on extensive empirical data and personal experience in order to elucidate on the ongoing entanglement that occurs at the boundaries of body and urban landscape; day and night; space and materiality. Nightwalking is thus positioned as an improvisational strategy of coping with the pressures and confines of the daylight hours, its roles and responsibilities.

KW - walking

KW - cities

KW - nocturnal

KW - improvisation

KW - politics of space

M3 - Conference paper

SP - 1

EP - 4

Y2 - 5 April 2017 through 9 April 2017

ER -