Time-space Regionalization of the City: Retail Pacemakers and Rhythms
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper deals with urban rhythms and their role in production and perception of urban landscape. The paper employs Hägerstrand’s concept of pacemakers, Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis and Crang’s /Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope to build up a theoretical-methodological background for follow-up analytical description of urban temporalities. The beat of contemporary city can be perceived as a combination of many overlapping rhythms generated by wide range of urban pacemakers. Working and school hours, urban transport schedules or retail opening hours are the representatives of temporal borders structuring the individual timescapes and producing places with specific rhythmicities. The paper focuses specifically on retail activities as significant urban pacemaker with strong spatial fix. The empirical analyses are based on a large dataset of opening hours of all retail premises in the medium-sized city of Brno. The areas with specific retail temporalities will be delimited and their rhythmical profiles will be interpreted with respect to physical and social place-related attributes. Finally the basic typology of urban (retail) chronotopes will be developed to draw a synoptic map of urban time-space. |
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