Finding our place - people and things in urban citizen belonging

Abstract

This paper concerns the ways we each find our selves in our cities, how we find selfhood and community in the changing fluid spaces of cultural ebb and flow that constitute contemporary urban landscapes. Technologically infused infrastructures of buildings, transport and communication together with time based obligations of work and recreation intertwines with the physical spaces of built environment and human coexistence to create complex layers of 'being' in place. Continuously reconstituting our expectations, adapting to the fluctuating rules of changing roles, language, hidden meanings and socio-cultural historical inference, identity becomes an adventure of performative camouflage. Who do I need to be today? Who and what do I trust? Is it safe? This maze of physical, digital and cultural urban existences has variously been described as a happenstance of metaphors, an unknowable labyrinth, a memory machine and a drama in time. We have begun to explore being and belonging in place through the exploration of self through literature in the context of a student-tutor research partnership entitled Reading and Writing the City, based in a final year undergraduate study module. This study module poses the question 'what does it mean to belong to a place' and we supplement this question for our research project with 'what might being and belonging mean in a digitally augmented urban lifeworld' that further contributes to the research area for digital lifeworld being and belonging in place and the city. Though space is limited in this short paper, we attempt to outline key concepts and terrain related to 'Reading and Writing the City'. Discussion takes in the idea of research partnerships in a speculative university of knowledge for its own sake, what it might mean to belong to places, future cities based in a sustainable ecology of care, the nature and role of 'things' in belonging, and how digital augmentation of self, objects and environment impact identity and belonging.