[Themaintainers] [Paper] Urban maintenance and graffiti removal

[Jérôme Denis]

Dear Maintainers,

I hope everybody’s safe and that you manage to get through these dark times without too much suffering.

Please allow me to do a bit of shameless promotion in the hope that some of you may be interested. As some of you may already know, David Pontille and I (a pair of French STSish sociologists) have been investigating urban maintenance for several years now, exploring a variety of settings and practices. Recently, we conducted a quite exciting ethnographic fieldwork on graffiti removal in Paris, and we just published a paper in Social Studies of Science on this subject: Maintenance epistemology and public order: Removing graffiti in Paris <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/metrics/10.1177/0306312720956720>.
In this article, we try to show that Graffiti removal enacts a very specific kind of maintenance, which deploys a variety of epistemic tools and practices about urban order, from the broken window thesis, to the official documents that circulate between the municipality’s offices and the contractors, and the situated gestures and judgements made by the maintenance workers in the streets.
This is clearly non-heroic, non-romantic maintenance, the aesthetic and moral politics it performs is highly debatable, yet we do care for these maintainers who daily take care of Paris’s façades, and we wanted to somehow shed light on their skills and embodied knowledge, which we think can help us to think what urban maintenance is about.

An open access version of the paper will be online as soon as the regular issue is published, until then feel free to ask a “pre-print” if you do not have access to Sage’s publications.

Comments are more than welcome!

All the best

Jérôme


--
Jérôme Denis
Professor of sociology
Centre of Sociology of Innovation
i3 — Mines ParisTech
60, bd St Michel 75005 Paris, France
(+33)1 40 51 91 92
(+33)6 61 52 16 17

publications
 <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/search/index/?qa%5BauthIdHal_s%5D%5B%5D=jeromedenis&sort=producedDate_tdate+desc&docType_s=COUV+OR+ART+OR+DOUV+OR+OUV>scriptopolis.fr <http://www.scriptopolis.fr/en>


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.stevens.edu/pipermail/themaintainers/attachments/20200914/86211064/attachment.html>