Suchergebnisse

This article examines the praise and controversy that a change in color to the façade of the Główny railway station in Wrocław, Poland, provoked during 2010–2012. Ethnographically following the definitions and makings of a "historical" color during the reconstruction process, it pinpoints two contrasting and conflicting ways of valuing and devaluing historicity: the "scientifically accurate" historicity versus the "familiar" one. Examining urban experts' practices of valuating the historicity of this building, the valuation devices urban experts relied upon, and the versions of historicities they consequentially produced, this article shows that the "good" of historicity is not a given but is discovered and learned about by various actors during the very activities that constitute valuation.

Introduction to Sensing Urban Values. This special issue assembles a set of papers that respond to a neglected, undertheorized yet crucial question relating to spatial politics and urban renewal: How do economic and non-economic values depend on and co-constitute each other in different urban contexts? In response, the contributors to this special issue build on recent critical reassessments of value; they explore how the spatial and cultural politics of value unfolds in contemporary urban environments globally. They examine cases that traverse Poland, South Africa, Malaysia, Germany, and The Netherlands. The papers demonstrate a theoretical and empirically engaged concern with themes such as the cultural dimensions of place-making processes in contemporary cities; how identity, memory, heritage, and value-making processes may matter for the production of urban spaces today through sensing; aesthetic reorganizations of places, movements, and interactions with urban matters; and through storytelling. Taking up the theme of urban valuation with a multisensory approach has prompted the contributors to explore the multiple and translocal ways through which urban valuations unfold, are performed, and are experienced. This approach reveals the multiple valuations of spaces—not only economic but also symbolic—that inform the struggles for social and spatial justice in cities across the world as well as their scholarly examinations.