Sensing the Urban Scene

As capitalist city making unfolds, people’s lived experiences of place are reshaped and repositioned in the territorial-subjective interface of/for capital circulation. Gentrification represents a capital-driven form of urban reassemblage that relies heavily on the production, exaltation, and commodification of a particular sense of place that attracts investors, visitors, and new residents, and that is overtly or silently violent for most long-standing residents. Specifically, it implies a symbolic and affective politics of place in which feeling and making sense of the urban scene are more the subjective galvanizers of capital than its experiential outcome. In this frame, creating a seductive urban “vibe” – an affective “semiosphere” – that speaks to the desire for a self/socially distinctive place-experience is a key psychosocial process interweaving slippery chains of linguistic, material, sensory, embodied, and other geoindexical signifiers. Gentrifying senses of place therefore imply a “semiocapitalist” dynamic that aims to embed located subjectivities into the symbolic economy of the city. With gentrification as a backdrop, this chapter develops a psychosocial account of sense of place as an attempt to bring located subjectivities into sharper focus in the field of psychosocial studies. Drawing on a collection of analytic and theoretical insights emerging from a series of walking interviews conducted in two gentrified neighborhoods in Barcelona (Spain), the text unfolds as an exploration of the often hidden affective gestures that articulate both place-seduction and “intimate” forms of resistance in the frame of structural dynamics of place-dispossession.