PLATTING TRANSHUMANT CITIES: THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON RESEARCHES WITH URBAN TRAJECTORIES

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss some theoretical and methodological aspects of researches with urban trajectories and their potential contribution to the urban studies, based on reflections of a doctoral research in architecture and urbanism. For both, it briefly outlines the notion of urban trajectories, as well as its potentialities as a strategy for knowledge of contemporary urban realities, in its complexity and dynamics. In dialogue with the idea of a “transhumant city” as proposed by Michel de Certeau, it discusses the imbrications between “peripheral” urban trajectories, the narratives that they delineate and that are delineated by them and a space-temporal cartography of the other cities that they reveal. In this sense, it points out important issues to reflection on the processes of production, appropriation and apprehension of the urban space: under the approach here presented, “peripheral” urban trajectories and their narratives allow more than punctuating inflections, conflicts and differences, placing in the center of the analysis the alterity they contain and wich are also producers of sociospatial alterities that must be taken seriously. The paper highlights the importance for urban studies to pay attention to the folds that simultaneously
configure territories, subjectivities and sensibilities; trajectories, narratives and
spaces; the production of knowledge and the production of space.