Practice-based PhD – Daniela Brasil, Weimar 2011.

EXPERIMENTING WITH THE URBAN EXPERIENCE:

Rio, Lisbon and Weimar.

A (re)search for creative collaborations and active exercises of citizenship.

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Mentors:

PROF. DR. JORGE GASPAR Centro de Estudos Geográficos – Universidade de Lisboa

PROF. DR. MARGARETH DA SILVA PEREIRA Programa de Pós-graduação em Urbanismo – Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

PROF. DR. MAX WELCH GUERRA Raumplanung und Raumforschung – Fakultät Architektur, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Financed by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) – Ministério da Educação e Ciência, Portugal.

KEY WORDS:  lived-experience, lived-body, 
participation, collaboration, collective creativity, active citizenship. art, urbanism, public space, extradisciplinarity.

ABSTRACT

This practice-based research examines platforms and encounters that have a participatory character 
as a strategy to create lived and shared experiences where new forms of appropriation of the city can emerge. It comprises a critical analysis of my professional experience in the intersection of art and urbanism over the past 15 years, i.e. selected projects that experimented with forms of strengthening active participation, collaboration and collective creativity. Through these examples I will discuss how experimental and artistic practices in public space can counter the crescent spectacularization and commodification of urban experience. Critical of cities becoming sceneries and human bodies becoming products to the benefit of capitalist power, I propose, initiate and analyze experiences that induce changes in perception, the exchange of perspectives, and that denaturalize habits and patterns of behavior. I suggest that when these sensitive experiences become imprinted in body memory, they empower citizens to have more active, creative, and critical attitudes towards their environments. Searching for new repertoires of everyday practices that contest commodification of both the body and the city, this thesis is oriented towards open-ended processes of constructing mentalities rather than those of planning changes on the material conditions of public space.

This research uses forms of academic investigation that merge intellectual debate and experimental practice, joining art, urbanism and related disciplines in an extradisciplinary (Howes 2007) attitude towards the city. Based on the materials generated by projects that combine theoretical knowledge with artistic sensibility, 
I sustain the affective and corporeal involvement of researchers in the situations they analyze and co-create, opposing the traditional academic critical distance. This practice-based PhD intends thus, to articulate the themes of situatedness and positionality (Haraway 1999, Harvey 2000) with the playfulness, accessible vocabulary and horizontal structures presented in the case studies. They are seen as methodologies of artistic-urban research that disseminate and cross-fertilize ideas in order to interfere in and contribute to the constant process of actualization and construction of our cities and societies.