New Publication from Passeio: Notes from Everyday Life 5 – Fragments of the Urban

A new volume of Passeio’s Notes from everyday life collection has just been published,  platform which now celebrates its tenth anniversary. Fragmentos do urbano (Fragments of the Urban) is edited by Helena Pires and Zara Pinto-Coelho. It consists of essays that have been published over the last few months, with contributions from Helena Pires, Zara Pinto-Coelho, Lucas Novais, Marinos Koutsomichalis, Teresa Lima, Catarina Bessa Rodrigues, Cynthia Luderer, Pedro Eduardo Ribeiro, João Sarmento, Carlos Norton, Abílio Almeida, Vinicius Zuanazzi, Francisco Mesquita, Teresa Toldy, Ana “Muska” Castro and José Vicente “Coda” dos Santos.

The introductory note reads:

The transition from the industrial paradigm to the urban paradigm has led to a transformation in the perception of everyday experience, through the reinvention of public space in particular. In other words, modernity can be associated with a certain fragmentary view of social and cultural reality, as manifested in urban life. This change corresponds to a “critical phase”, considering the process by which industrial society gives way to “urban society” (Lefebvre, 1970; 1968/1991). From a territorial point of view, fragmentation refers to a process of shattering, of exploding a spatial object, which could be called a city, if we understand it as the bearer of the ideal of social unity (Navez-Bouchanine, 2002). Spatially, the concept of fragmentation in urban spaces suggests discontinuities, cuts, boundaries, walls, visible and invisible, fractures, in short, a potentially explosive fabric constituted in the form of a mosaic, a juxtaposition of fragments, often disjointed from one another. In contrast to “conceived space” (Lefebvre, 1974), how can we understand fragmentation based on everyday life and the spatial practices of individuals? From “lived space”? How can we account for the lines of flight, the resistances, the ways in which urban fragments are (or are not) stitched together? Can dominated space be transformed into an appropriate place, symbolically or physically? As Lefebvre (1983) explains, the repetitive nature of everyday life gives it a false appearance of simplicity. On the contrary, it is in the repetitions, in the sameness of everyday life (Heidegger, 1986/2004; 1986/2005), that the unusual and the complex emerge. The surrealist montages that inspired Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project illustrate well the perspective of a new sensibility, stimulated by material culture, aimed at ‘telescoping the past through the present.’ In the manner of Aby Warburg, or even Gerard Richter, the crisis of modernity, dragging with it the crisis of experience, as a perception of the end of the unitary meaning of traditional structures and institutions, finds a new way of doing historiography, materialised in artefacts such as atlases that stitch together the accumulation of materials and images, in the manner of an archival mosaic. Often, it is the objects left behind that give an ethnographic character to the lives that pass through urban space, leaving a trail that allows us to guess the role of the subjects who, while remaining invisible, express themselves in these same objects. Although the materialist paradigm is not the only point of view adopted or exclusive to all the micro-essays presented in this publication, one can echo the Benjaminian perspective, according to which it is more interesting to talk less about people and more about objects or the spaces they inhabit. Christian Boltanski’s photographs, moreover, may also serve here as a metaphor for such a force or intensity deposited in the object. By analogy, in this book, in line with what defines the approach that has accompanied Passeio’s productions, we adopt the fragmentary as an epistemological and methodological model, without neglecting the principle of discontinuities that presides over montage or collage. In the sensitive experience of the immediate, according to this paradigm, social memory is realised, just as the meanings of place and seemingly ephemeral relationships are produced. The micro-essays gathered here thus seek to account for the ‘found objects’ that embody contemporary culture, as it manifests itself in urban public space.

The book is available in open access here at Passeio and also in the University of Minho repository.

[Published: 06-10-2025]