Narratives on the margins: shifting epistemes for a methodology of the common

Abstract

The conjecture of political, economic, and social instability that plagues the West in contemporaneity summons us to discuss epistemological premises as agencies of the urban issues in its coloniality, pointing towards the necessary rupture of a discursive authorization regime which renders narratives on the margins of hegemonic urban production invisible. To revise such premises implies denaturalizing the modus operandi of western urban planning, causing modes of subjectivation that escape the normativity imposed by the patriarchal and neoliberal system to emerge, and enabling urban practices which restore the common (Dardot, Laval, 2017) as alternative rationality to capitalism and as a complex composition of differences. From the acknowledgment of narrative as an epistemology of experience, the methodology seeks to cartograph the historically erased and excluded narratives of the city, in order to update and broaden the limits of research methods in urban studies, in view of the complexity of the contemporary city. Ricoeur’s (1994) mimetic spiral allows us to operate urban drifts and interventions as narrated experience to glance at the singularities that compose the heterogeneity of the common and to bring out other arguments about the living city, capable of shifting the coloniality of knowledge that still prevails in urban planning.