I am writing a paper at the moment where I want to link the practice of home making to thge German notion of Heimat. The first version of this paper will be presented as a lecture at the next European Sociology Degree Summer School in Dresden (12-23 September 2010). The following is uis the abstract:

Being at home is often thought to be possible without having a home. Homeless people can feel at home somewhere too, but I want to argue that today that we should be less focused on being and more on having. This is because I want us to be mindful of the properties of being at home, which are not modalities of being but modalities of having. Moreover, I want to develop the claim that the English word for Eigen, which we tend to be the core of identity: das Eigene, which is “proper” ,has become linked with a notion of cleanliness “being proper” which is linked to developments in the 19th Century, during the confirmation of modern, western, European society. Furthermore,. focusing on the development of the Victorian household (see Ian Roderick’s contribution to the very first issue of Space and Culture on Flow), I want to point out the links between the development of the modern European subject, and an emergent scientific outlook on social ordering. Finally, I want to focus more closely on that dimension of ‘being at home’ that we often forget: the domestic; and argue that the propriety of the domestic , to show that the “becoming homely” of modern Europe has above all become a matter of gendering.

… Joost

Salzburg

Eastern Europe’s cities are an education in different regimes of public space. Within the spatialisation Lefebvre describes as modernist, rationalized ‘Abstract Space’ public areas of cities are reduced to their function, utility and managed in terms of maximizing value within an overarching vision of land as a commodity to be bought and sold. Although utility is included in calculating its exchange value, this monetary abstraction – the price of land — ultimately over-rides even the use value of land and a necessary platform for economic activity. This tends to reduce city spaces to infrastructure which is understood in terms of needs such as transportation, costs of land and maintenance. Urban public space is a lost money-making opportunity if only because it is withdrawn from the real estate market. Elements such as sidewalks are thus reduced to the minimum required by social uses and safety standards.

In the late 20^th century, under what Lefebvre understood as a statist mode of production and accumulation, urban space is not just infrastructure but managed more consciously as a means of social control and as a way of facilitating commerce and trade. This implies policing the minutiae of uses of these areas, moving on loiterers and banning unproductive uses of space. Legitimated, tax-paying businesses are favoured by banning or limiting street traders and peddlers.  Traveling between Ukraine and Austria highlighted this for me on a recent trip.

Salzburg, Austria

Like many Western cities, the touristic ancient squares of Salzburg provide a good example of such management – a widespread approach, not something unique to Salzburg. Impeccably swept by street-cleaning equipment, stalls vending (usually gourmet) food simulate historical uses of the Platz and Markt and long-established cafes have the right to put out tables for patrons within carefully bounded,, but unmarked, areas. The invisibility of these boundaries of areas of entitlement undergird the simulacrum. The squares are thus vastly empty apart from specifically placed activities such as taxis queued for customers, tourists and tour groups headed one way or another, clustered around a fountain or jockeying for the ‘Kodak spot’ from which to take cliched snapshots as personal souvenirs of Salzburg. Missing in this sketch, and perhaps detectable only via tourists’ weary feet, is the genera absence of public seating and benches in these squares. The only available seating is in cafes for paying customers. Needless to say, itinerant peddlers and beggars have been systematically moved on by police.

These squares are amongst the most visited tourist sites, globally. The tourist experience is impeccably organized and planned in time and space in ways which reduce pilgrimage to historical and popular cultural sites to a series of commodity transactions. Alas, there is no outdoor music in this city of Mozart and The Sound of Music. Buskers are absent in favour of performances in the formal concert halls of the Salzburg Festivals where seats generally cost USD200 or more, marking it as an exclusive event for the global rich.

As Lefebvre noted, Abstract Space favours the visual at the expense of other senses. This is one reason why it is difficult to work out or back from Lefebvre’s separate ‘Spaces’. These are correctly cut off as analytical objects — but as he also argues contain previous spatialities within them. He divides each historical regime of space according to a corresponding historical dialectical mode of production. While he goes to great lengths to construct an ‘open text’ and avoid closure in his narrative subsequent deployment of his ideas tends to reify each ‘Space’ and hypostatize his argument. ‘Space’ becomes a thing, rather than a social process of spacing and ’spatializing’. Spatialisation is thus my preferred term and represents a step beyond Lefebvre.

It is true that benches appear to be a nineteenth century addition to cities (and one wonders at the history of public seating).  If there is one site where benches do appear in Salzburg, it is in parks and gardens. But in the vast majority of its urban public space, the human body is accommodated only in erect posture as a mobile pedestrian. These prevent non-residents from temporarily inhabiting a space unless paying for a seat. A specific form of exhausted meandering results, what Tiessen calls a ‘Meanderthal’ tourist mobility, which is unpredictable, distracted and slow paced. This distinct mobility is one of the more annoying aspects of tourism for more intent and directed locals whether on foot or in cars. It is directed from sight to sight in gross form but aimless from moment to moment until attracted by the allure and affect of visual objects – commodities, bargains, souvenirs in so-called ‘tourist traps’ or images of appetizing dishes or the site of food. The best haunts of locals are often more hidden and sometimes identified through the odour of cooking, rather than by visual cues.

L’viv, Ukraine

By contrast, L’viv, Ukraine (Lvov) is a historical city unfrequented by mass tourism. The birthplace of Sacher-Masoch, significant site of both the Holocaust and Holodimir, home of a famous Opera, and one of the few baroque cities untouched by the Second World War, like Salzburg the entire city-centre of L’viv is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Some of its squares have been developed for tourists in preparation for the 2012 European Football Championship. For example, the Toller Place is partly occupied by outdoor cafes (more expensive than the surrounding restaurants that also spill out onto the cobbled square). An ongoing effort moves unlicensed peddlers selling pastries off the square at least into alleys and entrance hallways of buildings. However an outdoor stage and seating hosts free entertainment and benches with bronze plaques discreetly advertising the local Lvivski beer are provided. Buskers offer competing renditions of Western and world music. There is thus a more complex visual and auditory touristic experience and clues to a fundamentally different regime of public space in contrast with the Abstract Space of Salzburg. Again, Lefebvre had a term for these environments whcih are the dialectical alter thesis of Abstract Space: ‘Differential Space’, a space characterized more by the rich co-presence of different uses rather than planned homogeneity and the result of myriad additions and subtractions. This square in the throes of revitalization in L’viv demonstrates how the two – Abstract and ‘Differential’ — are performatively interlaced and can be rebalanced in a more inclusive manner.

What really distinguishes L’viv from the cities of Western Europe is its extensive greenery, parks and promenades. Like Salzburg there are distinct seasons with less clement weather yet, lined with benches, L’viv’s public spaces support an active and inclusive public life which seems to include all ages, abilities, genders and social groups. Families with children occupy benches or stroll by elderly men playing chess in impromptu games on the benches. Strollers practice a now rare, genuine flaneurie – strolling in the heart of the city ‘to see and perhaps be seen’ — of the sort hosted by promenades such as Barcelona’s Ramblas. This is a way of participating in the life of the city and bringing these places alive. Nor is it simply a scene of pedestrian mobility. Rather than seeking what Perniola calls the ‘tranject’ — a simulated cinematic tracking shot as the visual synthesis of what a city is, people stroll and meander (perhaps more energetically than tourists), children trace complex racing zigzags, toy electric cars are available for rent for a few minutes, photographers pose tourists with life-sized plush animal, hawkers display Ukrainian memorabilia on some benches. Monuments to local personages and nationalist heros such as Taras Shevchenko overshadow the space. They underscore the importance of past events such as the historical tragedy of the Ukrainian famine and the pre-capitalist spatialisation of peasant serfdom which lasted into the twentieth century in Ukraine.

In L’viv’s public spaces, at times such as the early evening, ‘the city’ is much more obviously its occupants than its buildings and infrastructure. If Lefebvre refers to this as ‘lived spatiality’, let’s dub this ‘L’viv-ed space’. All-comers participate and are subject to the regulatory gaze of not only the police but the crowd, which provides a normative critical mass. While this public space is abstractly designed, it departs from the Abstract Space of the modernist city in a way which is dialectical on multiple levels – not just spatially but temporally in the way history is injected into the present.

A critical memory is unavoidable (even if it is as selective as Salzburg’s, for pogroms, genocides and the memory of the L’viv ghetto are generally repressed — the historical presence of a East European Hassidic Jewish population is difficult to imagine given the scant remaining population that has not emigrated).  Before and before this successive waves of invasion and violence have swept through the region.  As ‘Differential Space’, this is a spatialisation in which absence and presence intermix while abstract rationality and state nationalism are well alive.  Given the violence of the past, it is thus a historical irony that, if Salzburg provides a model for organized mass urban tourism, present-day L’viv provides an object demonstration in how to make lively, ‘L’vivly’, self-organizing public spaces in cities.  I don’t think either city boasts a ‘clean’ past – that is why they are such sites of historical significance – yet they boast different presents in the way they relate to the past temporally and spatially as tourist destinations.

- Rob

]]> http://www.spaceandculture.org/2010/11/07/livelylived-space-salzburg-and-lvivly-space/feed/ 4 http://www.spaceandculture.org/2010/05/26/book-review-limage-de-la-ville/ http://www.spaceandculture.org/2010/05/26/book-review-limage-de-la-ville/#comments Thu, 27 May 2010 00:33:08 +0000 Anne Galloway http://www.spaceandculture.org/?p=1259 Leenaerts, D. 2009. L’Image de la ville. Bruxelles et ses photographes des années 1850 à nos jours. Bruxelles: Collection Lieux de Mémoire, CFC-Éditions, 182 pages, ISBN:978-2-930018-79-9

Reviewed by Philippe Campays, Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand)

Space and Culture readers will find an interesting contribution to knowledge in social geography in Danielle Leenaerts’ L’Image de La Ville. The author presents a correlation between the development of the city of Brussels and the evolution of its photographic representation through a unique lens.

cc image credit: Un bâtiment sur la Grand-place à Bruxelles (Belgique) by “Romary”

A short introduction and the strategic location of the table of contents at the end of the manuscript engage readers, straight from the first pages, in a literary and photographic journey. In fact, the author suggests that one is a ‘lecteur-spectateur’ (reader-spectator) of an urban journey reflected in this literary excursion. The content of this chronology of Brussels from 1850 to the present day is extensive without being overbearing and is intended for a large audience. It is discreetly partitioned into five chapters, defined by momentous political events. Each chapter offers a carefully balanced dialogue between a textual historical and political account of the defined period and its illustrative photographic record. This is achieved both in terms of content and in the design of the layout where words and pictures have an equal weight. A pleasant monotone black and white or sepia tone rendering is kept throughout the book, probably in an attempt to avoid disrupting the flow from the quality of earlier photographic work. However the transformation of later photographic work could have been more clearly presented to motivate the reader-spectator further.

The relationship between city identity, architectural developments and photography is shown as a dynamic force with varying degrees of cohesion and convergence. In the early part of the book, the photographs are part of an historical account of the transformation of a medieval city to a new modern urban centre. The pictures are more historical records than artistic, intended to form a series of heritage inventory for cultural memory as well as a celebration of new construction sites. Prestigious architectural works (Claine, Fierlant) and common streets destined for extensive demolition are presented (Guémar, Kampfe). The topographical focus on the new monuments is the sensitive work of architect Radoux, while Mascré’s panoramic views reflect the urban design intentions of creating a politically and socially liberal city. According to Leenaert, the following period sees the strengthening of the link between Brussels and its photographic representation where Mayor Buls leads a return to a respect of heritage and existing organic unity of the city. Photoreportage (Hesleven) is born to respond to the need for visualizing political and social events and occurs alongside a new form of artistic work testing the idea of pure photography. The picturalisme movement emerges, motivated by haute bourgeoisie’s interest in the expression of Nature (Van Renynghe). Attention is given to printing processes to present an Impressionist rendering, moving away from the intention to emulation of the real and a focus on urban scape is recalled (Cumont, Mahy, Bovier) in this period.

The author suggests that the debate between tradition and modernity that marked the period between the two World Wars is reflected in the political hesitation in dealing decisively with Brussels’ urban projects, inherited from the past, in contrast to the boldness manifested in innovative developments of its new suburbs. In photography, the same polarity is observed between tradition (now pictoralist) and the call for modernist ideas. The relationship between photography and reality is illustrated in the romantic and subjective filters (Misonne); the Modernists use of artificial light (Champoux) and the photomontages that promote emerging modernist architecture (Kessels). The Subjektive Fotografie movement is strongly promoted in the city and Belgium from 1945. Brussels increasing role as an international bureaucratic centre demands the development of large architectural projects. The emergence of the subsequent growing cultural diversity in its inhabitants, further shifts the identity of the city. Photography becomes more open to the public, more vocal, addresses emerging social issues to describe the social landscape. Some photographs chose to show the Brussels ‘that was’ through social event (Dagnelie) or the emptying of dilapidated streets (Van Ommeslaghe). The reading of the urban space becomes strongly personalised (Klien, DeKeyser, Auquier) moving focus on people’s social context; and at times, in a constructed statement such as Carez and, Eeckhoudt’s work on the condition of new immigrants. From 1980 to today photography is at the crossroads between being a celebrated art-form and its role as representation of the city. The variety of photographic expression (supporting media) coincides with an increasing urban concern with representation.

Leenaert promotes many objectives for her book, one of which is to enable Bruxellois to culturally appropriate their city. Through this well constructed narration and thoroughly documented photographic portrayal of the city’s history, architecture and socio-political reality, the reader-spectator can simply discover a new aspect of Brussels’ cultural account and as such, enrich their understanding of its identity. One can also view this work as a further illustration of the role of photographic art in human geography.

Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull Volcano, Iceland captured by NASA satellite Terra – MODIS on April 15, 2010.

Editor update: Alain de Botton imagines a world without planes

Adam Pańczuk – Karczeby (2008-2009)

“In one of the dialects spoken in the east of Poland, which is a mixture of Polish and Belorussian, people strongly attached to the soil they had been cultivating for generations were called ‘Karczeby’. With their bare hands Karczeby cleared forests in order to grow crops. The word karczeb was also used to describe what remains after a tree is cut down — a trunk with roots, which remains stuck in the ground. This also applied to people — it was not easy for the authorities to root them out from their land, even in the Stalinism times. The price they paid for their attachment to their soil was often their freedom or life. After death, buried nearby their farmland, a karczeb himself became the soil, later cultivated by his descendants.”

via

I find myself increasingly asking similar questions, and given how many recent posts have been about new high-tech cities, I thought I could balance things out by pointing readers to Justin Partyka’s gorgeous photos of rural people and places in England.

For his collection The East Anglians, Partyka writes:

“For the last nine years I have been traveling the back roads of rural East Anglia, passing down drove and lane, track and way. On my journeys I discovered the remnants of the agrarian community that was once widespread throughout this region. For most people this is a world that no longer exists. It is a place where traditional methods and knowledge are still very much depended upon, and the identity of the people is intimately shaped by the landscape on which they live and work. Small-time farmers, reed cutters and rabbit catchers, these are the East Anglians – the forgotten people of the flatlands who continue to work the land because the need to is in their blood.”

“Central to an agrarian culture is the idea of land: not just working the land, living on the land, and owning the land (all which are important) – but that much deeper concept of being part of the land; the process of it becoming both physically and psychologically engrained in the human experience. It is impossible to escape the presence of the landscape. It creeps from the fields into the home. It enters through an open window, or a crack under the door; engrained in the palm of a hand, or on the sole of a boot. Leeks sprout from the curtains and the table top is fenland peat. The agrarian farmers I have come to know are so deeply rooted to the land, it is as if they have grown up out of the soil like a tree. Such an intimate relationship comes from what the rural writer, farmer and activist Wendell Berry, describes as “knowledge in place for a long time.”

“To enter into the agrarian world of the East Anglians’ is to experience a rural culture that has a direct lineage extending back to the region’s peasant farmers of the early Middle Ages. The agrarian farmer always has one foot firmly planted in the past. The old ways are proven to work and can therefore be relied upon. Everything is visibly engrained with history. Buildings are often cobbled together and are a ramshackle mix of wood, tin, and stone. And the agricultural machinery is a patchwork of rust, mud, and oil stains in which the past is embedded.”

“The agrarian farmer knows in fine detail the histories and biographies of his local landscape. After years of familiarity with the land he knows what is the best cycle of crop rotation on any particular field, where it lies wet in winter, and how best to plough, sow, hoe, and harvest that field to reap the best from it. Unaided by a map, he can negotiate the complex network of local droves and tracks by day and night, and walk the fields and woodlands, fen and marsh equally so. Inside the agrarian mind are the local wind patterns and river currents; along with the life stories of the local inhabitants, wildlife habitats, and tree and plant species past and present. I have been told of farmers who have come and gone, from what direction the fox will come to steal a chicken, and who planted a particular oak tree and when.”

“But during the last sixty years an agrarian way of life has become increasingly irrelevant in a modern society, and the East Anglians find themselves living on the margins. Most of the small family farms in East Anglia are now gone, while the fields of agribusiness have grown bigger, swallowing up the landscape as they go. The result is the depopulation of the rural landscape, and with it the loss of the knowledge of local place and the traditional skills of working the land that are so important to an agrarian culture. As one old-time farmer said to me, “It’s just one big tractor now and a thousand acres. There’s nobody on the land today.” “But” he continued, “there will always be those that straggle on – the awkward ones who remain.”

“I have spent many hours in the fields, patiently watching how man and the landscape intimately shape each other. If I am looking closely, occasionally I am offered a glimpse into the mystery of this ancient relationship. It is a fleeting moment; I click the shutter; and I wait…”

via Design Observer

Eli’s PhD project comprises an anthropological analysis of university culture, and he’s also looking at the socialisation of graduate students. I remember being told as a Master’s student that it was not entirely acceptable to study “our own,” and since I always thought that was bullshit I was really excited by Eli’s commitment to study academia. Anyone interested in institutional space and culture can check out an overview of the project, or read the full proposal (pdf).

I’m especially taken by his observations on fieldwork in French philosophy departments, and this fascinating post on reading as an ethnographic tactic.

Superb entry for a portable exhibition venue for Yorkshire Forward, by Various Architects. More at Dezeen.com

-Rob

Mónica Montserrat Degen’s recent book Sensing Cities: Regenerating Public Life in Barcelona and Manchester provides an illuminating discussion of the sensuous dimension of the urban everyday, particularly in the context of ‘regenerated’ neighbourhoods. In the book’s first section, Degen lays the theoretical groundwork for her analysis. Following Lefebvre’s notion of space as experienced “first and foremost through the sensuous body” (Degen, 2008, p. 18), and drawing upon his trialectic of space (spaces of representation [lived], spatial practices [perceived], and representations of space [conceived]), Degen outlines her notion of a “socially embedded aesthetics,” which conceives of “aesthetics” in its broadest (ancient Greek) sense as “the perception of the external world by the senses” (p. 38). This conception seeks to emphasize the situated and social nature of the senses, as well as the importance of corporeal perception in structuring urban space both mentally and physically. In the second section, Degen applies her theoretical framework within an extensive discussion of two ‘regenerated’ neighbourhoods: Castlefield in Manchester and El Raval in Barcelona.

Play Urban Sound Ecology by Amy MacDonald.

This recording was taken just outside the Alberta Legislature building in Edmonton on July 1, 2008 (Canada Day). Behind the domed Beaux Arts building is a large public space that includes a fountain and wading pool, and provides a popular recreational spot on hot summer days. This sound clip could be interpreted a number of ways in light of Degen’s book; one of these involves her discussion of the tension between individual agency and imposed order in urban sensescapes. The sound clip without visual imagery might bring to mind a place of play, independence, and individual whim, but the somewhat imposing and ’serious’ visual presence of the legislative building, with its potential connotations of abstract representations of space, certainly influences one’s perception of this particular sensory experience.

Degen’s work covers much ground, tying urban sensory geography to broader processes of globalization and, in turn, bringing these processes to bear on the everyday lived patterns and practices of the residents of (and visitors to) El Raval (famed for its narrow streets) and Castlefield. Accordingly, her book offers many fruitful paths of thought to follow. One of these, which particularly struck me, involves the paradoxical nature of sensuous experience. In her analysis, Degen recognizes and maneuvers within several tensions that are inherent in sensuous experiences—for instance, the interplay between the private, or personal, and public ‘senses’ of sense, and between reception and manipulation of stimuli and sensescapes, to name just two. In terms of the former, we perceive sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches (although, as Degen notes, “at the same time we touch we are touched”; 42) often on a very personal level; certain preferred sensuous experiences—favourite colours, music, and foods, for instance—become markers of identity and individuality, and are not expected to be shared by everyone we meet. Yet a “sensuous mapping” (p. 173) of Castlefield and El Raval residents’ perceptions of the sensescapes of their ‘regenerated’ surroundings suggests not only the senses’ vital role in shaping personal “attachments to places” (p. 175) but also the presence of a “common sensuous imaginary” (p. 175), revealing a commonality among private sensuous interpretations. Further, Degen’s discussion shows that what we might at first consider personal sensuous experiences are in fact inextricably tied to the publicness of a particular space, as access to, and engagement and representation within, public space are deeply affected by the “organization of the sensescapes” of those places in the processes of regeneration that is often effected by private forces (p. 195).

Tenement House Yard, New York from Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890
(Thanks to The Authentic History Centre).

Degen’s discussion also treats the interplay of reception and manipulation of sensuous experience and sensescapes, a “constant negotiation between an imposed order and individual agency” (p. 54). Dominant ideologies found in the conceived visions (representations of space) of planners and politicians provide controlled directives for activities and associated sensory experiences within ‘regenerated’ public spaces. These directives are based on the increasing need to market the experience of (regenerated) public space as a commodity, and often include the predominance of the visual; a drive towards ‘cleanliness’ and the removal of supposed sensuous pollution; and a bland, heavily edited sense of history couched within a ‘designer heritage aesthetic.’ Although these characteristics impose sensescapes upon residents and visitors that sometimes have upsetting results (such as the dissolution of El Raval residents’ strong social bonds), sensuous reorganization is not simply passively received in lived experience. Rather, individuals intervene, appropriating, personalizing, and subverting the sensescapes imposed by new housing and public squares. Degen reveals senses and sensescapes as active sites of struggle, in which individuals enter into dialogue with common conceptions of “good” urban planning and design.

Concert, Castelfield, 2004 (Thanks to BBC)

Degen’s work reminds us of the important role of the senses in mediating our experience with our local surroundings and the global forces that shape them, negotiating the public and the private, the social and the personal. As planners, developers, and designers hunt for the key to the ever-elusive ‘sense of place,’ Degen cautions that the role of embodied sensuous experience in making that sense, and in making sense of the world around us, should not be underestimated.

Reviewed by Amy Macdonald, University of Alberta, Canada.

- Rob