Follow the River: City Regeneration in Tension as Works of Water

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15826/csp.2022.6.2.180

Abstract

The article looks at some examples of the urban regeneration strategies and initiatives in Medellín, Colombia. Being part of the process of regeneration of the country after the decades of the armed conflict the initiatives transform the city at least by creating the discourse that facilitates the social change in the city. The ontological proposal of feminist more-than-humanism focusing on materiality of water, particularly its rhizomatic connectivity, allows rethinking the concept of the city and its regeneration as generation of the inclusive space that provides habitat and life for anyone who wants to live in, around, through, and with the city. The revised initiatives are symbolically divided into two groups: water plans of connection-fragmentation policy and traces of water—mostly grassroots connectivity in response to the dominating power structures. They are not uniform groups and are the products/processes of tension between opposite tendencies. Creative tension is works of water. Water looks at limitations as at the opportunity to create the new. Its regeneration is not re- but generation of the inclusive habitat that provides life for anyone who wants to live in, around, through, and with the city.

Author Biography

Polina Golovátina-Mora, Norwegian University of Science and Technology-NTNU, Trondheim, Norway

Dr. Polina Golovátina-Mora is Associate Professor in Film and Media in Education at Faculty of Teacher Education at Norwegian University of Science and Technology-NTNU. She has a doctoral degree in history (Urals Federal University) and a master’s degree in Russian and Eastern European Studies (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), the latter as a Fulbright Scholar. She was an Erasmus Mundus Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pultusk Academy of Humanities in Poland. Her scholarship ranges across different languages and topics. A multilingual writer, she has published and presented her work in English, Russian, Polish, Czech, and most recently, Spanish. Her work includes articles and book chapters on historiography, representations of social processes (collective memory and identity construction, responses to the social structures and pressures). She has presented her work, including conference presentations, plenaries, and invited talks, in Colombia, the United States, Poland, Czech Republic, Finland, Turkey, Russia, Germany, and Italy. Drawn on critical post-humanist feminism, Polina’s research focuses on art-based and sensorial research methodologies and pedagogies, urban artistic practices, selected questions of critical social theory as well as questions of memory and creativity. She favors transmedia, intra-disciplinary and transregional perspectives. Her most recent research features narrative inquiry and discourse analysis studies on monstrous theory and how fear is constructed in contemporary cities and societies and through popular culture (especially in light of the renaissance of the vampire genre). Recent work (along with her husband, Dr. Raúl A. Mora) includes discussions of social and curricular constructions of bilingualism and multiculturalism and the use of Bourdieusian frameworks to analyze culture.

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Published
2022-07-11
How to Cite
Golovátina-Mora, P. (2022). Follow the River: City Regeneration in Tension as Works of Water. Changing Societies & Personalities, 6(2), 364–379. doi:10.15826/csp.2022.6.2.180
Citation Formats
Issue
Vol. 6, No. 2 (2022)
Section
Articles