Topic
Urban Pavements and their HiStories
Cobble-stones, concrete tiles, tarmac. Uneven, cracked, smooth, rough, slippery. Every city has its pavement – pavement made from different materials, each material representing a certain time and place. This project explores how a place can be read through its materials and materiality.
Underfoot: Urban Pavements and their HiStories in the (Post)Socialist Realm
This project combines the history of selected street pavements with the stories, experiences and knowledge of their walkers. By studying sidewalks and street pavements in the (post)socialist urban space, it retraces cultural, social and economic transformations from the 1980s to the present. While examining the tangible heritage of pavements in the (post)socialist realm — their materials, textures and traces — the project aims to uncover vernacular experiences, practices and memories of its inhabitants, and thus the intangible (emotional) heritage of urban space under transformation. By combining historical methods (analysis of textual and visual sources) with anthropological approaches (such as sensory walks) the project seeks to fuse material history with individual sensory stories. The project is funded by the FWF - Austrian Science Fund.
