Urban Communities “On the Scene”: Roles, Practices and Cultural Consumption

Paper provides a review of Marta Klekotko’s book “Scenes and Communities in the City”. The author has the ambitious task of proposing an approach to discovering and studying urban communities by analyzing the practices of urban everyday life. In this book Marta Klekotko proposes a matrix typology to describe the social practices that constitute urban everyday life. Klekotko’s analytical work mainly focuses on describing the practices of identity acquisition, reproduction and transmission by members of different social groups. In doing so, urban scenes and typical spaces become “models” for the acquisition of practices specific to the community in a particular space of the city. This approach is interesting because it allows us to organize the actions of individuals in the space of the city, both in communities and outside of them. However, there are not many practices that are situational and cannot be described by matrix typology without disadvantage.

urban scenes, urban everyday life, urban communities, spatial practices, social identity