Choubrah entre le passé et le présent : le palimpseste des ambiances d'un quartier populaire au Caire
[SHS:ARCHI] Humanities and Social Sciences/Architecture, space management
[SHS:SOCIO] Humanities and Social Sciences/Sociology
" حي شعبي " Hay chäby means, in the colloquial Egyptian, a popular district! In terms of ambience, popularity embodies certain ambient characteristics as it reflects the image of a poor district, densely populated, abundant with touches of misery and vulgarity. Yet, the sensory experience in Choubrah contains pale vestiges of a glorious past. During the commented-walks, names of palaces, intensive green shadows, or dilapidated luxurious façades pop up and change our perception. These sensory traces unfold another face of Choubrah's atmosphere. They allow us to enter into its temporal depth by reactivating moments of the past. In other terms, navigate its palimpsest. This article is a trial to reveal the history of Choubrah from a sensory point of view by letting these traces speak for themselves.
Ambiances in action. Proceedings of the 2nd International Congress on Ambiances / Ambiances en acte(s). Actes du 2nd Congrès International sur les Ambiances
Ambiances in action / Ambiances en acte(s) - International Congress on Ambiances, Montreal 2012
Politiques des ambiances - Que faire du fond inextricablement politique des ambiances ?
This paper seeks to recover the foundations in order to reflect the ties (today somehow distended) between sensations / perceptions and politics. It will be tried by renewing the long debate about common sense, as a principle of intersubjective constitution of sensory experience. In this framework, urban ambiances provide a particularly relevant field of experimentation: 1/ in order to certify ties between politics and sensations; 2/ for the sort of politics they indirectly occasion, namely a kind of conservatism; 3/ and finally in order to test some potential interventions on urban ambiances and their consequences.
Towards a sensory delineation of microclimatic urban ambiances in virtual reality
Virtual reality has been proved to be a good tool to communicate visual urban ambiances thanks to immersion and interaction. Our work consists in extending this use for a multisensory delineation and assessment of cities. We focus on the microclimatic ambiances and we discuss two approaches for their representation: the physical stimuli simulation and an evocative audio-visual world relied on perception knowledge and artistic practices.
Nouveaux usages de la couleur dans les espaces urbains ouverts - Relevés chromatiques urbains au croquis et constitution d'un outil générateur de discours
This study focuses on understanding the emergence of a new kind of urban highly saturated polychromy. We expose an exploratory work at the scale of the French city of Nantes. Our purpose is the constitution of a visual tool able to generate discourses from urban project's actors on their use of color.
"Rencontre sur les lieux": memory construction in urban ambiances - A video-based research approach
The paper discusses the place-bound construction of individual and collective memories. The question is to what extent atmospheres assist in processes of remembering and/or are remembered themselves. The paper discusses the advantages and challenges of using video analysis techniques. It suggests a framework for empirical research encompassing the analysis of immediate and reflected memory construction, and the role of urban ambiances in memory construction.
The portrait of a place - The lived and desired environment in the speech of the residents
The São Paulo State Department of Social Housing (SEHAB) decided to develop a new experience: to search in the residents' speech a precondition to think the urban projects for the area of Cabuçu de Cima (Jaçanã/Tremembé, North Zone) of São Paulo City. This proposal was also based on the demand of 5th International Biennale of Architecture in Rotterdam / 2012 - Making City for São Paulo Municipality where the guidelines was to think the city with the voice of the residents. Because of that we conceived eight workshops which the main theme was "lived and desired urban ambiance". We used dynamics groups to reveal the skills and "savoir faire" of the participants as also to strengthen the communicative expression and fluency of them. We faced a high challenge in this proposal: to recover and build up an exchange space between popular and the technical/scientific knowledge regarding the city. The idea was to reveal not only the Cabuaçu de Cima residents complaints but also their propositions for their enviroment.
Corpographies urbaines - Expériences, corps et ambiances
The body experiences the city through an interactive process and its synthesis can be called an urban bodygraphy: a kind of body mapping, where the mapped object cannot be distinguished from its representation, given the continuous and reciprocal dynamics that creates both. An idea based on the hipothesis that the urban experience is inscribed with different levels of stability in the body of one who experiences it, even unintentionally. The city lived spaces resist in the body designed by such experience: they resist in the bodygraphies resulted from their experimentation. Such affect relationships with the city - a process of subjectification that arise from sensory-motor experiences of lived spaces and which the result are ambiences - constitutes, in their different temporalities, a counterpoint to the flat viewing of the city-logo image, the city-outdoor and the scenaries of the ambiences spetacularised and disembodied.
Extérieur nuit. Pour une anthropologie biophysique et culturelle du paysage nocturne des parcs urbains
Interactions among social, faunistic, and floristic groups define new ecologies and cultural dynamics in nightscapes. Our inquiry is concerned with the interdependence between biophysical and semantic processes informed by the artificial lighting of urban public gardens and parks. The issues arising from such processes pertain to life sciences, technology, history, or anthropology. We have applied our research to two particular cases which had integrated lighting in their initial design: the parks of La Villette in Paris and Gerland in Lyon. We present three different protocols of nightscape ambiance analysis: physical-sensitive, quantitative-qualitative, and phyto-physiological. Our purpose is to further engage with other disciplines and extend our approach to historical gardens.
Ambiances in "Black Urban Areas", Salvador City, Bahia, Brazil
This work is part of a doctoral research in development, whose central theme is black populations and black urban areas in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The great diversity of forms of urban occupations in terms of social, economic, spatial, cultural, and historic aspects is observed in these urban areas. This research sheds new light on the problem, and fosters an understanding about urban areas in Brazil on cultural and historical specificities of black populations. Since the beginning of the last century, the foundation for the formation of some neighborhoods in the city was of African religions houses (Terreiros de Candomblé). The proposal presents a study considering that the African Heritage, the economic history and the natural resources shaped urban environments.
Police judiciaire et pratiques d'exception pendant la guerre d'Algérie
En juillet 1953, la création de la brigade des agressions et violences (BAV) apparaît comme une victoire pour ceux qui, depuis la Libération, n'ont jamais admis la dissolution de la brigade nord-africaine (BNA) de la préfecture de police de Paris. L'étude de la BAV, entre 1953 et 1962, montre que ce service (dont les prérogatives évoluent au cours de la période) était défini non en fonction de ses attributions, mais par la population dont il avait la charge. Cette police coloniale au cœur de la capitale a cependant refusé certaines des évolutions prônées par le préfet Papon au nom de la " guerre contre-révolutionnaire " qui visait le Front de libération nationale.
The Police and the "Algerian Medinas" in France. Argenteuil, 1957-1962
Fifty years after the end of the Algerian War of Independence, it should not be forgotten that this conflict was also played out in mainland France. Here, Emmanuel Blanchard shows the extent to which the control of territories with a strong Algerian presence was a key aspect of the war
La police et les "médinas algériennes" en métropole. Argenteuil, 1957-1962
Le drame du métro Charonne, que l'on commémore aujourd'hui cinquante ans après, rappelle que la guerre d'Algérie s'est aussi déroulée en métropole. Emmanuel Blanchard montre ici combien le contrôle des territoires d'implantation algérienne fut ainsi un enjeu majeur de la guerre.
La dissolution des Brigades nord-africaines de la Préfecture de police : la fin d'une police d'exception pour les Algériens de Paris (1944-1958) ?
Le 14 juillet 1953, la police ouvre le feu sur le cortège du Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques (MTLD) qui hésite à se disperser, place de la Nation, et dont quelques membres semblent vouloir apurer un contentieux violent qui couve depuis les défilés de mai 1952 pour la libération de Messali Hadj. S'ajoutant aux 5 morts de ces manifestations organisées en marge des mobilisations contre le général Ridgway dénoncé comme " Ridgway la peste "[1], 7 personnes dont 6 Algériens décèdent sous les balles et les coups de la police parisienne[2]. En interne, des responsables du maintien de l'ordre présents lors du " défilé de défense des libertés " du 14 juillet 1953 n'hésitent pas à reconnaître que les gardiens de la paix ont outrepassé les règles de l'usage des armes et agi en " système d'auto-défense " contre " des malfaiteurs [...] vivant en marge de la société et à ses dépens "[3]. Une partie de la presse prend pourtant prétexte de la supposée " émeute "[4] des Algériens pour réclamer la création d'un service de police spécialisé dans l'encadrement et la surveillance de cette population. Dès le 21 juillet[5] est annoncée la création d'une Brigade des agressions et violences (BAV). Cette décision marque une nouvelle étape dans un débat qui n'a jamais vraiment cessé depuis le début des années 1920 et ressurgit périodiquement depuis la dissolution du service d'assistance aux indigènes nord-africains (SAINA) en juillet 1945 : la présence de dizaines de milliers d'Algériens dans le département de la Seine nécessite-t-elle la création d'une police aux prérogatives spécifiques ou la marche vers l'assimilation juridique et sociale de cette population implique-t-elle un traitement policier de droit commun ?
The social-material performance of cozy interiority
Based on ethnographic observations and interviews in cafés in Copenhagen, and online descriptions in which users review their experience of cafés, this paper focuses on how materiality and sociality inter-relate to constitute a relaxed, pleasant sense of atmosphere: that which in Denmark as known as "hygge". Specific attention is given to material structures and social practices that create a sense of interiority.
L'ambiance attendue par le monde de l'art public à Montréal dans les années 1950 - Le discours d'humanisation de l'édifice et de la ville par l'œuvre murale abstraite géométrique vivement colorée
Discourse analysis shows that transformation of the ambiance, considered dull and cold, of Montreal in the 1950s was meant by the actors of the public art world: artist, architect, sponsor and critic alike. Their writings reveal a shared agreement to the effect that brightly coloured abstract geometric mural must counter the so-called nudity of the modern building, humanizing it by its beauty and its vitality. This modern public mural is a major innovation because it modified the aesthetic conventions of figuration and faded ambiance by one more contrasted, and the symbolic convention of commemoration, thus transforming the urban ambiance.
Bounding and breaking - An inquiry on the voicing of acoustic territories
In most urban settings, the multiplicity of human voices in a constant state of acoustic irradiation is overwhelming. They define territories, in conversation, in public transportation, in the, sometimes awkward, transitions between private and public place. They resonate identity, they are biographical sound happenings and they turn every listener into a bearer of this shared individuality. In the context of my interdisciplinary PhD research on voice as acoustic presence, inquired through the scopes of phenomenology of sound, and artistic research in the realms of documentary and sound art, this paper aims to discuss the voice as a modulator of acoustic territories in both its transgressive and communal potential.
Filmer le territoire et ses habitants pour capter, ressentir et représenter l'ambiance
This paper presents a territorial and anthropological research that produced the film "Stagioni e salotti sul Lemene". The documentary is set in the Italian regions of Veneto and Friuli and it shows the inhabitants as actors and as productors of the social and cultural atmosphere. We want to demonstrate that the audiovisual support could be a very useful tool for planners and architects. It represents and conveys the local atmosphere in order to protect the natural and cultural heritage. The film shows a sensitive and aesthetic tour on the magical Lemene river in the countryside of Venice. The landscape changes according to the musical rythm of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. This movie won the identity film festival in Italy (2011).
Ambiances balzaciennes - La poétique des effets sonores dans La Comédie humaine d'Honoré de Balzac
In Balzac's Human Comedy, not a man, not a place, not a landscape comes into being, into prose, without its own particular soundtrack. From the noises of everyday objects to the bustling Parisian streets, from the screams of the swine to the sigh of the dying, Balzac's fictional society is everything but silent. Using the lexicon developed by Jean-François Augoyard and his team in their 1995 Répertoire des effets sonores, we propose an analysis of two especially rich acoustic scenes, one taken from Le Père Goriot, the second from a lesser known short story: Z. Marcas. Unfolding the intricate network of sound effects that binds fictional characters with surroundings, allows us to see that ambiances, as the matrix where men and places recreate each other, are the very fabric of the balzacian novel.
SONAR - An introduction to "Auditory Spatial Awareness" in action
Through artistic means, this research deals with the notion of 'Auditory Spatial Awareness' as initially developed by Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter in "Spaces Speak are you listening, experiencing aural architecture" published at the MIT press in 2007. By exploring our capacity of capturing an emotional and behavioral experience of ourselves and our space through sound, this investigation raises questions about the resonance, the orientation, and the expansion of the body's limits through sound in space. "Auditory Spatial Awareness in Action" is staged in urban spaces and more specifically in "non-spaces" (Augé, 1992). It reveals itself to be not only a search for our memory through sound but also the experience of an aural spatial memory.
The sonic niche - A new design tool to enhance and create atmospheres with sounds in the contemporary city
The sonic niche is a design tool I first conceived for the project Soundscapes Oltrarno, in its "digital" version, where we can see it realized through the application of "Spot Sounds" and the use of new digital technologies. I subsequently theorized it in my doctoral dissertation as "a relational sonic space of intimacy and sharing whose changing boundaries are defined each time by its own structural and sound qualities" (Radicchi, 2010). The expressive possibilities offered by the sonic niche, in addition to its digital approach, are many. It is possible to change shapes, materials and soundscapes according to the purpose to be achieved and the place of its setting. The paper presents several design projects where the sonic niche was applied to enhance and create urban atmospheres in the city of Florence (IT): Soundscapes Oltrarno, SMLXL, Le Piagge: Listen!