Published: 2023-12-20

Our housing estate. Urban bucolics

Dr Sebastian Latocha
Journal of Urban Ethnology
Section: Articles
DOI https://doi.org/10.23858/JUE21.2023.004

Abstract

The author introduces the concept of “urban bucolics” for texts (in the narrow sense) and all cultural practices (in the broad sense) that concern life in the city, but in which rural, pastoral, Arcadian – idealized – cultural patterns are manifested, contradicting the folk image of the city. The source of ethnographic data are the press and interviews with the inhabitants of the Józef Montwiłł-Mirecki housing estate in Łódź. Between those, the author weaves in a description of his own autoethnographic experience as an inhabitant of the estate and its researcher. The analytical categories that have been used in the article are mythization and Baudrillardian simulation. The aim of the article is to answer three questions: Why is the housing estate in Łódź perceived (in the local media, in the collective consciousness of inhabitants) as an urban space where people live as in rural Arcadia? How is idyllic existence manifested in urban bucolics? Is the division into the city and the countryside a current conceptualization?

Keywords:

folk culture, urban bucolics, myth, simulacrum, country, housing estate, city, Łódź, the right to the city

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Latocha, S. (2023). Our housing estate. Urban bucolics. Journal of Urban Ethnology, 21, 67–88. https://doi.org/10.23858/JUE21.2023.004

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