Derives and Social Aesthetics in the Cities: Urban Marks in El Raval de Barcelona, Spain

Tensions between hegemonic conception of the cities versuseveryday perspective motivated me to propose two metaphorical andconceptual level of approaching to the urban phenomena: a.) ZenithalView as a metaphor of power practices in contemporary cities thatrepresent a dissociated reality of the subject who knows and lives,regardless of the geographical or corporal proximity of human beings,and b.) Impure view that metaphorically subverts the idea thatinhabitants’ look at the cities from the distant perspective of the observer because our life in the cities does perform, participate, incarnate and relational. Following the second approach, in this research I intent to recover the urban practice of derives as aesthetic interposition to public space and as a methodological resource to figure out the tensions between zenithal and impure view in the neighbourhood of El Raval of Barcelona through the language of its visual urban marks.