"The rhythmanalyst knows how to listen to a square, a market, an avenue."

In 2009/10 the MA Cities Design and Urban Cultures will focus on the relation between urban spaces and events. Rather than a system of surface signs or objects in space or a mere passive backdrop to the political spectacle, we will read the city as a reciprocal, indifferent or even conflictive relationship of spaces and events. We will investigate the urban environment as a complex reciprocity between actions and built form.

Using a variety of historical and contemporary case studies of mass events, uprisings and revolutions, we will discuss the synchronised theatricality that is developed between an urban environment and the social political performance, taking place within it.

Mappings and notations of movements in urban space will help us to study particular urban choreographies. We will try to understand how specific events have been either registered within the material properties of objects and spaces in the city, but also how architectural or urban layouts helped to charge the political meaning of large-scale population gatherings.

‘The rhythmanalyst thus knows how to listen to a square, a market, an avenue.’

Henri Lefebvre argues that the city offers a certain form of legibility in the way it orchestrates ‘spatio-temporal rhythms’ and suggests the possibility that a suitably knowledgeable observer would be able to plot the interactions of time and space in urban group practices and form. This ‘Rhythmanalyst’, as Lefebvre terms him, would be able to ‘read’ the routines of everyday life as they are played out in particular forms of space. Lefebvre and Régulier understood the different modes of spatiality unfolding from rhythms and the characteristic movements and differences within their repetition. The concept of Rhythmanalysis claims not only that there is a form of reflexivity between urban matter and the directives of the state, but also that there is a ‘collective rhythm’ formed from a complex overlapping and merging of political and non-political appropriation of spaces. For example, large boulevards and festive squares become the focus both of formal political rituals and of informal promenades, encounters, intrigues and daily routines.