Blog | Thematic Focus Mapping

On the 22nd of November, 2022, Claudia Mock from the Methods-Lab of the CRC 1265 organized the hybrid lecture and workshop “Visualizing Narrative Spaces” with the visual artist Simone Rueß, who shared insights into her work, which deals with the inscription of politics into urban structures, home-making practices and memory processes within biographical narrations, contextualized through drawings, animations, objects and installations. In this blog post, Simone Rueß reflects on the hybrid workshop, which was conceived as a performative narrative in which diverse participants from various disciplines developed individual visual approaches in a collective action.

Idealised values of common identification and consensus often attributed to urban neighbourhoods are romanticised, transfiguring and problematic. The socio-spatial construct of the neighbourhood is constituted not only by what we have in common and what we share, but also by dissent and conflict. We argue that conflict is not to be seen as deficient but can rather be constitutive and, in some cases, even productive for the socio-spatial (re)production of urban neighbourhoods. A research design that combines theory on social negotiations, rules and conventions in the public sphere with critical mapping techniques based on workshops conducted in the field helps to analyse the ambivalent role of conflicts in Berlin-Neukölln.