Embodied Cities, Citied Bodies: Assembling Urban Research through Movement

Abstract

While urban environments are commonly characterised and studied as nodes in international networks of migration, economics, cultures and policies, they are also sites for everyday embodied experience through which local cultures and identities are performed and produced in dynamic ways. Cities are bricks and mortar, steel and sheet glass, concrete and bitumen, but they are also vulnerable bodies with their fleshy, wet textures, navigating the precarity of existing in and amongst others. These bodies both make and are made by urbanity, just as urbanity makes and is made by these bodies. And more. The flows and frictions that result from being in and moving through environments complicates the binary frameworks that are often used to study ‘the city’. This thesis inhabits the gaps between these polarities, attempting to mediate dichotomies of space and place, local and global, past and present, human and ‘non-human’, among others. To do so, I dwell in the specifics of the urban assemblages that are Sydney, Australia and Lisbon, Portugal. Drawing on ethnographic and autoethnographic methodologies, I offer a hybrid account of how these cities are (co-)produced through movement and how bodies passing-by are (co-)produced through cities. Urbanity emerges in the varied configurations of textures, structures and ruptures that both make and are each of these cities, as well as in the stories I tell here. As such, I argue that cities are not just physical points of interconnection, but as an object of study, urban assemblages require research approaches and methodologies that sit between academic disciplines.