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- Title
Urban Function of the Infraordinary: Dry Cleaners as Social Vertexes.
- Authors
Nielsen, Espen Lunde
- Abstract
The spaces of the city that we pass through daily are worn half invisible by use. Often, we are more concerned with the extraordinary than its opposite--what Georges Perec coined the infraordinary. This paper seeks to uncover the unheeded spaces of dry cleaners as a place of social coexistence that has "afunction that is separate from their practical use." A London dry cleaner serves as a testing ground; critical spatial practices and creative writing are employed as research tools. The dry cleaner does not simply clean clothes but is a social vertex and physical interface through which (non-)events unfold, trajectories thicken, and people of the neighbourhood coexist asfamiliar strangers through events in real time and deposits over time. It is a semi-public space and an implosion of the external neighbourhood, partly through allowing for occupation, inhabitation, and co-authoring. These latent qualities and spatial materiality of the infraordinary form vital components of the social dimension of the city and the everyday socio-spatial topography. Hence, the author is pledging for a recalibration of current urban development practices by allowing for a higher degree of disordering, porosity, and spatial co-authorship in a planning and architectural perspective, creating interfaces and "spatial gapes"for direct and indirect social interactions between the inhabitants.
- Subjects
PEREC, Georges, 1936-1982; DRY cleaning industry; EVERYDAY life
- Publication
Spaces & Flows: An International Journal of Urban & Extra Urban Studies, 2017, Vol 8, Issue 1, p57
- ISSN
2154-8676
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.18848/2154-8676/cgp/v08i01/57-67