EUD7: Der translokale Gebrauch des urbanen im Europa der Migration. Städtische Arrangements in Comănești – Rumänien. Ruth Duma-Coman


About the book:

Within migration processes, urban actors expand, reorganize and link several places. They generate multiple connections. By circulating, moving and returning they produce the urban space. This process is understood as “the translocal use of the urban” and refers to the discovery and reinterpretation of scopes. Having as background the Eastern European labor migration and the focus on places of origin, this book deals with the constitution of the urban in use. For this, the book describes the Romanian small town Comănești and brings the everyday life of its citizens to the forefront.


About the author:

Ruth Duma Coman lives in Timișoara and Cluj, Romania. She holds a M.Sc. in Urban Design from HCU Hamburg and a B.Sc. in Raumplanung and Raumordnung from Vienna UT. She works as urban designer in the field of inner-city development and public urban spaces at Planwerk, an architecture and planning office in Cluj. As part of her PhD at the University of Art and Design Offenbach am Main, she is researching about spatial improvisation, urban design and transnational labor migration in Romania and Germany.


About the Series:

The City is an unfinished process, characterised by constantly shifting connections between the everyday practices of its human and non-human actors. Rather than an object, it is an open process or form which can only be grasped structurally. Everyday Urban Design investigates the interplay between discursive structures (e.g. codes, laws), spatio-material arrangements, agencies and actors as constructive parameters that provide the basis for the production of the city. The virtuality comprised within these infrastructures is not an illusory world, but the essence of a diagrammatic realm that is situated between representation and non-representability. With regards to the possibilities and constraints of urban design, this realm demands to be unveiled, de-constructed and rearranged. Such a diagrammatic variant of structuralism renders structure the productive tool for re-programming and connects research with projective methods and cultural practices of everyday life. Design and research converge by becoming performative.