Urban temporalities

dwelling between regimes of historicity

Abstract

This paper proposes a conceptual cartography of the temporalities that traverse urban experience in modernity and late modernity. To support it, the text articulates three complementary conceptual frameworks: Heidegger's existential analytic, which provides the temporal constitution of being-in-the-world as the fundamental structure of existence; the concept of "regime of historicity", elaborated by Hartog as a heuristic tool for understanding the temporal configurations of different societies; and Heynen's analysis of the constitutive tension between modernity and dwelling, providing the disciplinary framework for investigating how these temporalities unfold in the city. Drawing on this articulation, it examines how the modern futurist regime materialized in the metropolis as an apparatus of ontological homelessness. Subsequently, three late-modern reconfigurations are analyzed — presentism, updatism, and retrotopia — and their inscriptions in contemporary urban space. The cartography reveals that these temporalities converge in the disarticulation of authentic dwelling, phenomenologically understood as the fundamental mode of Dasein's inscription in the world.