How do we define a city?
By the People who live in it. Wherever you go what is always changing are the people. How we live, move and interact with each other shape the dynamic core of a city.
Whilst remaining as objective as possible, the main goal of my study in Lagos would be the analysis of the community behaviours through the inhabitants themselves. Additionally, in order to describe the city from the inhabitant point of view and emphasise the cultural differences, an ordinary day of a Lagos local would be compared with one in Rotterdam as parallel lives in parallel worlds.
How well do we know our city?
Beyond people, a cityscape is dependant on the viewers perspective. The same streets change according to the position of the viewer, the same roof changes its shape depending on the height it is viewed from.
Collecting different life stories of the inhabitants of Lagos (a student, a house wife, a taxi driver or a business man) as a piece of a puzzle, I would like to describe the different perspectives that belong to Lagos.
Aurora
By the People who live in it. Wherever you go what is always changing are the people. How we live, move and interact with each other shape the dynamic core of a city.
Whilst remaining as objective as possible, the main goal of my study in Lagos would be the analysis of the community behaviours through the inhabitants themselves. Additionally, in order to describe the city from the inhabitant point of view and emphasise the cultural differences, an ordinary day of a Lagos local would be compared with one in Rotterdam as parallel lives in parallel worlds.
How well do we know our city?
Beyond people, a cityscape is dependant on the viewers perspective. The same streets change according to the position of the viewer, the same roof changes its shape depending on the height it is viewed from.
Collecting different life stories of the inhabitants of Lagos (a student, a house wife, a taxi driver or a business man) as a piece of a puzzle, I would like to describe the different perspectives that belong to Lagos.
Aurora
Dear Aurora,
ReplyDeleteI will comment on all blog entries to stimulate further reflexivity and indicate eventually interesting reading material in case someone is inclined to deepen his/her knowledge.
Your research idea is very appealing as it reverses academic truism and starts with the human as actor of change and center of attention. To be its not entirely clear if the two paragraphs are two separate proposals or two aspects of the same. I will address them commonly as the underlying logic is comparable.
I just want to add another Question to your two stated ones: Whose City? Which kind of people are representative for Lagos? Who for Rotterdam? The average guy? a representative share across the income scales? or the marginals?
In terms of reading I suppose you must have come across DeCerteau "The Practice of Everyday Life", if not you really should read his chapter on Paris rooftops, Jaap should have the book.