On imaginal building as an urban substrata

Abstract

Imaginaries have not only nurtured the entire history of the urban, they have saturated the lexicon ongoing in the everyday life of cities, but also have constituted one of the lines of urban research experiencing nowadays one of the most challenging and suggestive periods of development. However, such subjects took time to shake off the label of a slippery and non-canonical raw material to the extent that they propose the construction of new understandings of the city. Indeed, this focus conceives of the urban as a psycho-socio-ecological arena, unfinished and metamorphic, the effect of a successive chain of daily interactions between tangible and intangible processes and, as such, an irreducible complexity in constant construction and reform. It is this situated and dated entanglement, embedded and transitive (as intrinsically subjugated to space and time), that goes about shaping and moulding the physical and metaphysical figure of the city. This paper serves only as an abbreviated guide through the essential bibliography of the interlinking and overlapping themes related to the (re)production of a city and its urban imaginaries.