Cultural Spaces

The contemporary city is a living cultural space produced by social relations that are neither neutral, uniform nor exact, and is subject to change under a multitude of forces ranging from economic, political and social factors to natural phenomena. Although relations of belonging and attachment to the city may persist, the flow of local and global conditions seems to have an impact upon collective experience in the urban territory. Connections caused by the flow of content coming from " everywhere " not only reveal disruption to the boundaries of the urban environment and power arrangements, but also point towards dissolution of meanings that might affect the collective public experience. For Delgado, the anti-city of the present leads to urbanization that is subjected to urban ideologies characterized by themed spaces that deny functional and human diversification (the " creative world-class city " promoted by " place entrepreneurs "). For Low, the public space – as a field of everyday practices – faces struggles between global and local forces that tend to reshape specific landscapes and identities. The contemporary urban space, which is also produced by a de-territorialized condition of interwoven transversalities, demonstrates both an excess of conditions that tend to disassociate people from the specific features of localities (as a genuine field of common experience), and also homogeneous forms of programmed consumption and the weakening of systems of political representation: actions that impose social discipline and affect the sense of primacy of the urban public space. From our point of view, this dissolution of the urban environment creates a public space that is no longer the physical counterpart of a civil society understood as a subject of the city, and leads to the impoverishment of symbolic systems, social polarization and retraction of collective forms of life, or even the reduction of 'public' value, which for Augé establishes " blind spots " or spatial conditions that promote alienation between the city and its citizens. In a context of increasingly hybrid, flexible and multi-layered public spaces (hybrid not just in production, but also in reception and continuous development), this paper investigates the following questions: What kind of public space can be produced/recognized in conditions in which urban form (its meanings and references) is a product of the sterilisation of multiple identities? To what extent might 'intensity' and 'density' provide conceptual keys for understanding the (re)signification of public space? What collective practices and discourses are being (re)produced as mechanisms for the signification of contemporary public space?

ABSTRAK Salah satu Dusun di Gresik yang masih memegang ritual budaya adalah Dusun Wedoro. Kegiatan daur hidup (kelahiran) secara bertahap dilaksanakan, dari proses sebelum melahirkan hingga pasca melahirkan. Setiap kegiatan ritual memiliki ruang yang membentuk sebuah ruang budaya. Metode yang digunakan adalah Deskriptif Kualitatif. Analisa menggunakan supperimpose peta atas ruang ruang yang terbentuk, dari masingmasing kegiatan ritual. Ruang budaya yang terbentuk tidak hanya karena ruang, waktu pelaksanaan juga berpengaruh terhadap terbentuknya ruang budaya. Pada proses kelahiran ruang budaya di hasilkan secara mikro di hunian.