The culture, history, and people of Basel City (i.e. Basler culture, Basler people).
Published in Chapter:
Third-Spaces and the Creation of Socio-Spatial Identity: Fostering a New Model of Creative Cities (Basel, Switzerland)
Copyright: © 2021
|Pages: 29
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-4948-3.ch008
Abstract
This chapter provides a polite critique of the conventional ways of thinking about space and the intertwined dialectics of the socio-spatial narratives. Conventionally, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) main document on the Creative Cities Network (UCCN) emphasizes two crucial pillars of sustainable development and urban regeneration which are creativity and culture. The first term deals with creative cities and urban areas, while the second addresses culture as the human product that takes either a tangible or an intangible form. Regarding the meaning of activities in contemporary human society, one of the aims of this chapter is to decode the cultural activities in the city of Basel in Switzerland. In other words, this chapter is about exploring some aspects of the cultural life and creativity in the ancient city of Basel from a sociological perspective. Theoretically, Basel's culture of festivals and carnivals could be seen as the fundamental quality that brings the people of the city together. For instance, the cultural features of Basel Fasnacht, Morgenstreich, and Basel Herbstmesse reveal highly important aspects of the tangible and intangible dimensions of the culture of Basel as an ancient, medieval European city dating back to the 4th century AD. Methodologically, this chapter aims to represent and produce anthropological knowledge using visual media of research through the methodology of the “Actor-Network Theory”. This method of research comprises three main steps: 1) collecting visual ethnography, 2) designing the Actantial model based on Aristotle's semiotic square, 3) creating visual storyboarding to finalize the Actantiality map through analyzing power dynamics among the human narratives, the historical and cultural narratives, the spatial-environmental narratives, and the official narratives of the state. The main findings of this chapter may confirm or rebut the author's two hypotheses, stating “the city's identity is a mutual manifestation of human-spatial interaction,” and “not all creative cities have to be modern ones; some ancient cities are indeed creative cities based on their cultural, historical and social uniqueness.”