Publication details
The Rhythmic Ornament of Everyday Mobility: Morphogenesis and Participation in Central European Cities
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In Central European cities such as Brno and Vienna, contemporary urban transfor- mations reveal ornament as a living rhythm that structures everyday experience. Revitalised tram corridors, participatory redesigns of public squares, and the ex- pansion of green infrastructures show how ornament emerges not as decoration but as a dynamic principle—an ordering process open to variation. The city thus becomes a kósmos in the Platonic sense: both a world-order and an ornament, a vibrant field where aesthetic, ecological, and social processes interlace. Draw- ing on Lukács’s conception of ornament as the unity of life and form, Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, and Deleuze and Guattari’s ritournelle, this paper understands urban space as a morphogenetic field in which movement, sound, and participa- tion create coherence. Tram lines, crossings, and transit nodes appear as aesthet- ic organs of the urban body—arteries and synapses through which perception, rhythm, and community circulate. Two current initiatives illustrate this living or- namentality. The Brno Music Marathon, a four-day international festival held in the historic centre, transforms urban architecture into a multisensory instrument. Its performances—ranging from concert halls to “living-room” busking installa- tions by artist Kateřina Šedá—create rhythmic correspondences between sound, movement, and built space. Similarly, Vienna’s Calle Libre Festival curates large- scale street art across the city, turning façades into open dialogues between artists and citizens. Both events enact ornament as participatory morphology, revealing how aesthetic order arises through collective rhythm, improvisation, and care. In Brno’s participatory budgets and Vienna’s community-designed plazas, ornament evolves through shared decision-making and creative intervention. Patterns of daily motion—people walking, vehicles gliding, lights alternating—generate an embodied ornamentality that renders urban life intelligible and emotionally res- onant. By interpreting such transformations through the lens of ornament, the paper bridges everyday aesthetics, ecology, and civic imagination. Ornament reap- pears as what Plato already described: both adornment and order. It embodies the rhythmic intelligence of the everyday world—the principle through which cities, like living organisms, sustain coherence amid change and transform beauty into the very process of collective becoming. |
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