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A city is a living organism. It is both a ‘hard city’, one that can be mapped in terms of roads, buildings, public spaces, and a ‘soft city’ of inhabitants, multiple belongings, itineraries, sounds, and desires (Raban, 1974). The process of ‘softening the urban fabric’ is the extent to which the ‘soft city’ informs, interplays, and eventually remaps the ‘hard city’.
The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, night-mare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city
one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban
sociology and demography and architecture (Raban, 1974:2)
A city is a living organism. It is both a ‘hard city’, one that can be mapped in terms of roads, buildings, public spaces, and a ‘soft city’ of inhabitants, multiple belongings, itineraries, sounds, and desires (Raban, 1974). The process of ‘softening the urban fabric’ is the extent to which the ‘soft city’ informs, interplays, and eventually remaps the ‘hard city’.
This is an area of growing interdisciplinary interest. Current debates focus on the relationships between economics, shifting societies and everyday cultural practices, providing challenging and interesting terrains for applied social research. At the same time, the current political and theoretical project is how to engage with opening spaces for critical reflection in order to advance views of how civil society changes, and make claims for new mechanisms and processes towards change. The proposed interdisciplinary symposium will attempt to engage with a range of approaches to space, social bonds, politics, culture and power.