Habitat Unit

URBAN TALK
June 3, 2019 | 6.00 pm | Neuer St. Jacobi Friedhof

Roadside Post-Urbanity
Mapping Nodes of Transnational Mobility

The pan-European traffic corridors are social backstage zones of the wealthy in Europe. Investigating recent transformations of major road connections between the former East and West of Europe, the project "Stop and Go" drove the entire triangle between Vienna, Tallinn and the Bulgarian-Turkish border, followed by an long-term exploration of Vienna's logistic hub Nordwestbahnhof. Logistic landscapes and the transnational streetscape are set in focus as places of everyday encounter and experience, challenging established meanings of publics and spaces.

The nodes where the flow stops are perfect places to investigate both the strategies of (supra-)national institutions to control mobilities and on site practices. Here, "doing with space" becomes a kind of "knotting." Publics are constantly undone and remade by the pragmatic tactics of mobile people appropriating the sites for dwelling-in-transit, establishing fragmented communities for doing trade or sharing experience or trouble. Like any logistics distribution centre these nodes must not be perceived as a single place, but as a distributed place of archipelagos. The alternative models of urbanism that ensue from these networked spaces are shaped by polyrhythmic densifications of arrivals and departures and the continual performance of difference.

Mapping and exhibiting have been applied as relational techniques to gain information from mobile experts from a wide range of mobilities: e.g. at the canteen of the biggest logistic company in Sofia, at the ferry-boat terminal in Tallinn, or during a bus tour to the Austrian-Hungarian border station. Maps and other items produced or collected on tour were augmented with graphic novels and audio tracks, objets trouvés and works by other artists, that we transported to and collected at our a stationary lab in Vienna. Results from fieldwork were displayed alongside broader findings in related locations, providing a means of involving local actors and public spaces. Contributing to research and becoming part of a project was attributing a unexpected value and respect for their nodes and knots, their way of living and doing publics, moving them from the margins of discourse to the stage of 'Europe' in the making.

Urban Talk Michael Zinganel Poster

Michael Zinganel works as a cultural historian and curator in Vienna about urban issues, transnational mobility, tourism and migration. With Michael Hieslmair he co-founded the research platform Tracing Spaces. Currently both are working about the history of the last inner-city logistic hub in Vienna.

URBAN TALK
June 3, 2019 | 6 pm

Neuer St. Jacobi Friedhof
Hermannstraße 99-105.
U 8 Hermannstraße oder Leinestraße
12051 Berlin, Neukölln