Pilot books. Describing places starting from practices

Drawing on interdisciplinary research experience, this paper aims at reflecting on the intersection between urban anthropology – and more specifically ethnographical approaches – and urbanism. Cities are facing rapid socio-demographic changes that often introduce new ways of using and signifying urban spaces; often the logics and deployment of these changes cannot be grasped through existing categories and rather claim for new ones to be outlined. It emerges a need to define and redefine the categories through which space is described and, eventually, governed. The paper discusses the importance of mobilizing ethnographic knowledge in the study of urban spaces and particularly in the production of descriptions and representations of urban uses, populations and spaces, arguing for the transformative potential of these descriptions. To this aim, the paper proposes a parallelism with a non-urban, nor-planning object: the pilot book, a handbook for along-shore navigation.