Miesto studijos: trys žvilgsnio perspektyvos
Urban studies: three trajectories of approach

Summary/Abstract: Recognizing the split of the epistemological subject in contemporary fields of interdisciplinary studies, we discuss three personages, each of them representing a certain perspective on the city and the tactics of the research. These personages are a tourist, a local and a researcher. Their tactics of being in the city are defined by the intensiveness of participation in spatial and temporal structures of urban week-days. While the ‘tourist gaze’ lacks history and thus is oriented toward unusual experience and sights, a local is ‘blind’ in the sense of comfortably unconscious participation in the monotony of everyday urban life. The perspective of the third personage, a researcher, is a balance between the spatial competence of the local and the curiosity of the tourist. Starting with the practices of flâneuring (Ch. Baudelaire, W. Benjamin) as well as spontaneous walks of surrealists and situationists’ drift, the tactics of rediscovering the city (through escaping the traditional perception schemata) remain topical. In the context of the nonrepresentational approach which focuses on bodily activities “embedded” in the urban space, the question of the tactics of escaping traditional perception schemata could be reformulated into the question of an active reinterpretation of spatial urban structures.

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