Daniel Paiva

The death and life of shopping malls: an empirical investigation on the dead malls in Greater Lisbon

Abstract At a moment when new retail formats are emerging and consumers are changing their preferences, it is vital to reflect on the existing shopping malls, which are being challenged in European cities. With their vitality endangered, many become dead malls, a phenomenon that has increased over recent years. With this in mind, the objective of this study is to explain the factors behind the proliferation of dead malls through an empirical analysis of the evolution of shopping malls in Greater Lisbon, Portugal. We combine three sets of retail change theories (cyclic, conflict and environmental) with current perspectives on the resilience of urban retail. We expect that our study will contribute toward current debates on the resilience of shopping malls. The methodology of our study comprises two stages. First, we updated the Greater Lisbon shopping mall database and analysed the growth and decline of each shopping mall type over the last 44 years. In a second phase, we conducted a fieldwork survey on 150 shopping malls, which allowed us to identify and profile the dead malls of Greater Lisbon. Our results show that dead malls match declining shopping mall types, and we discuss four factors affecting the resilience of shopping malls.

Collapsed Rhythms The Impact of Urban Change in the Everyday Life of Elders

This article discusses the impact of urban change in everyday life rhythms. Recently, urban space has been described and analyzed as polyrhythmic, being a congregation of diverse movements by different agents. While the role of materiality in this dynamic is recognized, the impact of urban change in everyday life rhythms is still underexplored. Seeing urban rhythms as comprised by affective relationships, I analyze how Lisbon’s recent macro-level spatial planning has affected the local everyday life rhythms of elders in Ameixoeira, a peripheral parish of the city. The article presents findings from 20 in-depth narrative interviews with elders who had lived for at least 40 years in the parish, with the purpose of understanding how urban change has affected their daily rhythms, which are stabilized by the resources of urban space. My conclusions identify a set of affective dimensions in which urban change has impacted the daily life rhythms of local elders.

Experiencing virtual places: insights on the geographies of sim racing.

Virtual spaces have emerged as everyday life spaces in contemporary societies. Very quickly, they have gained a cultural role in the daily life of their users, as these new territories gain their own communities, ideologies, and spatializations. However, little is known about how place is experienced in these different realms. This study seeks to understand place experience in virtual spaces, taking the sim racing virtual spaces as a case study and endeavoring to build a bridge between theory and empirics. This study uses ethnographic methods, which included a year-long participant observation period and a set of 20 in-depth interviews with users, in order to understand their narratives of the virtual geographies of two sim racing videogames: Gran Turismo and rFactor. The results of the study show that spirit of place, place ballets, and sense of place exist just as well among users of virtual spaces—despite the particularities of these new territories and their remaining tensions.

The pace of life and temporal resources in a neighborhood of an edge city

Recently, the phenomenon of social acceleration, which has profound impacts on everyday life, has attracted some attention from social scientists. At the same time, an increased engagement with social practices that are related to slowing down has also been highlighted, thereby unveiling an inherent tension between fast and slow times in contemporary societies. However, little attention has been paid to how fast and slow times are spatially dispersed and rooted. This study contributes to current discussions on the pace of life by considering the dynamics of speeding up and slowing down in the everyday life of residents in a neighborhood of an edge city and the role played by local resources in the performance of everyday life practices. We undertook our study in the Colinas do Cruzeiro neighborhood, in the municipality of Odivelas in the North of Lisbon’s metropolitan area, where we conducted 21 in-depth narrative interviews with residents with the purpose of understanding the spatiotemporal organization of their daily lives and the role of the neighborhood’s resources. Our results identify four different timestyles among the interviewees, all of them fluctuating between fast and slow temporalities in different ways. Thereafter, we identify and describe the main practices of speeding up and slowing down in the interviewees’ everyday life and the local resources, which are mobilized in Colinas do Cruzeiro in order to perform these practices. We give some conclusions after a brief discussion of the results. Our main argument is that local resources play a vital role in an individual’s ability to speed up or slow down and therefore more attention must be paid as to how local resources can become temporal advantages.

Assessing sonic affects in everyday life: looking for metacognition and metaemotion

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show how material gathering and elicitation can induce metacognition and metaemotions in interviewees and its usefulness for the study of affective phenomena. Design/methodology/approach – The author will draw on the exploratory study on sound affects conducted with five individuals in Lisbon’s metropolitan area in order to discuss these aspects. After presenting the methodology, the author will address the concepts of metacognition and metaemotion. Afterwards, the author will explain how these occur during the gathering of data by ordinary people and the use of elicitation of materials during interviews. Findings – Metacognitive and metaemotional experiences can be triggered through material gathering and their elicitation during interviews with the purpose of identifying aspects of the everyday experience that are usually unnoticed. Furthermore, they are instrumental to obtain empirical data that illustrates subjects in their everyday lives as simultaneously aff...

The first impression in the urban sonic experience: transitions, attention, and attunement

ABSTRACT The objective of this study is to understand the phenomenology of moments of transition between sonic environments in the urban context and conceptualize the role they play in the attunement of the body to urban spaces. It has been argued that transitions between different environments tend to be moments when sonic perception and feedback are enhanced and, as moments of interruption, they play a significant role in how we attune to urban places. Our study contributes to a greater understanding of these moments. We present the concept of sonic first impression to address the affective nuances of these moments, and the concept of sonic attunement to address how individuals tune in to urban places through sound. In order to explore how these concepts apply in practice, we have undertaken a participatory methodology with 12 volunteers, which included sound diaries and go-alongs. These methods allowed us to gather in-depth data about spatial and temporal transitions and issues related to the angle of arrival of the body. Our results unveil the role that sound plays in attunement to place, a role that encompasses both meaning and affect, active and passive hearing, consciousness and unconsciousness, mind and body, psychology and physiology.