FLUID TERRAINS AND AFFECTS OF URBAN RESTORATION:
CONTEMPORARY NARVA
Tarmo PIKNER
Tallinn University, Estonia, tarmo.pikner@tlu.ee
Cities embody multiple dimensions of time referring to present, past and future.
Actual spatial settings carry virtual possibility articulated in arts and everyday
practice. According to J. Lotman (1999/1978) the city is a mechanism, which
constantly recalls its own history in a way that it has possibility to exist almost
synchronically with present.
However, this tendency towards synchronicity of places can become highly
negotiated in field of (urban) restoration.
This paper focuses on the question that how diverse urban constellations of
temporality assemble and co-exist along emergent dynamic spatialities? This
question is studied in the context of contested city restoration and its multiple
encounters. The tensions between absence and presence are central in formation
and understanding of urban places. This tension enact time-spaces as ‘terrains
indicating sensory and knowing field’ (Amin and Thrift, 2013), which forms part of
what is to be human. The study analysis characteristics and emotions of urban
restoration along affects as broad tendencies of force, which appear along means of
thinking and thought in action (Thrift, 2004).
The paper elaborates theoretical framework together with the tensions related to
restoration practice of Narva city centre, which was extensively destroyed in II World
War. More specifically the example focuses on complicated resonances of the
remarkable building of Narva College, which provokes and enables different
(embodied) interpretations of past and of present within urban space. The study
brings together cultural registers to integrate discursive, material and affectual lines
of forces in understanding spatio-temporal constellations.