Evental Urbanism: From event cities to affective urban ecologies

In recent years, the notions of events and event cities have become a core notion to explain urban transformation. Critical urbanists have used the notion events to raise a critique towards cultural-led planning and regeneration (Smith, Krivy) or to describe creative urban activism (Mayer, Harvey, Swingedouw). However, events have also served as an analytical framework to capture the bodily, material and sensorial practices taking place in everyday urban life (McGormack, McFarlane, Andersen & Harrison, Andersen). From both perspectives, events modulate the body and senses with implications for our experience of urban space-time. Often this involves interfacial modulations of affect in which interfaces and mobile devices engage the body and the senses, either to involve the citizen-user, or even to gather information. While these interfacial modulations of affect are increasingly inscribed into linear and strategic planning, this paper will argue along Grosz that we must rethink the real as “forces, energies, events, impacts that preexist and function both before and beyond, as well as within, representation.” (Grosz, 2011: 85). Thus, this paper will show how micro-perceptions and affects take place before and beyond the event as an intentional strategy. Thus to understand urban events as a force field of passions involves that we define events according to both the production of microperceptions and vitality affects (Massumi) and embodied every day rhythms (McGormack, McFarlane, Stewart). By taking the mental, social and environmental ecologies in Guattari’s The Three Ecologies as point of depature, this paper outlines an analytical framework for re-valuing the relational and embodied transitions of evental urbanism.