Градски общности и пространства на града - наследство и културно взаимодействие
Urban Communities and Spaces of the Town - Heritage and Cultural Interaction

Summary/Abstract: The text presents the results from a field research, carried out within the frames of the international research project "Heritage and Dialogue between Cultures". In this sense it goes into an indirect dialogue with other texts from that issue, as far as the fieldwork in the town of Plovdiv was in a team. The main methods used in the study are life stories and participating observation, so the circle of problems includes mostly the narrative presentation of urban heritage and the interaction between cultures. The town is presented through the personal interpretations of individual inhabitants as an interaction between the physical and social spaces and the communities. The dialogue between cultures is found mainly in living together and sharing common places and spaces of the town, common memory, common way of life. The social and the communal are the different dimensions of Plovdiv's way of life and culture, as well as of the specificity of being, or at least claiming to be a plovdivchanin. The emphasis is on specific models of behavior and urban way of life, on traditional and modern ways of inhabiting the spaces and creating a common town heritage through real and symbolic interaction. Neighborhood and common spaces and places are presented through the territorialization of communities according to the model of the mahala, as well as through examining the new quarters, built mostly in the last quarter of the 20-th century. Studying cases, such as one of the new living quarters in the town, the author searches for the ways and forms of inhabiting the urban living places and of constructing new common and shared places.

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