Yoga, Bingo and Prayer in Urban Renewal Areas

Political Sociology seminar

Event

Linda van de Kamp reflects on her new research project that starts with the observation that the way people relate to and imagine urban spaces, and thus how people influence the development of urban areas, results from very diverse cultural resources and social relations.

Particularly in urban regeneration areas, people bring different resources and experiences from a variety of places, involving connections from the local to the transnational scale level. This makes the urban space super-diverse and complex. This complexity is formed and reinforced by people’s engagement in different and specific socio-cultural infrastructures.

Focusing on a typical Dutch urban renewal area, Amsterdam-North, her project highlights three crucial, interrelated infrastructures:

1.  Industrial Heritage
2. Collective Rituals, and 
3. Media and Communication Technologies. 

She will study how various cultural agents – including artists, entrepreneurs, religious actors, and residents – create, access and contest these infrastructures and their resources. In doing so, Linda van de Kamp seeks to provide a grounded understanding of how the mix of socio-economic groups and different forms of culture influence urban regeneration, demonstrating the interplay between physical and socio-cultural aspects of urban infrastructures.

Published by  AISSR