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 Urban public space is a lost money-making opportunity if only because it is withdrawn from the real estate market.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/2010/01/28/portable-cities/ http://www.spaceandculture.org/2010/01/28/portable-cities/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:33:22 +0000 Anne Galloway http://www.spaceandculture.org/?p=1182

YIN XIUZHEN
Portable City: Jia Yu Guan, 2009
Courtesy Beijing Commune

“While Beijing has been the focus of inspiration for much of Yin Xiuzhen’s work, documenting the process of deconstruction and reconstruction, Yin has since installed her work worldwide, examining cultural changes in different locales. Investigating the repercussions of globalization, with the massive changes brought about by mass transportation and communication, where physical distances have decreased by massive leaps and bounds—she examines how the cultural fabric that identifies individual cultures are either reinforced or broken down by change. In addition to examining the effects of globalization, Yin also draws heavily from her personal experiences. In her work, Portable Cities, Yin recreates her personal images/memories of a city, and experiences of ‘living out of a suitcase’, into miniaturized cities.”

YIN XIUZHEN
Portable City: Melbourne, 2009
Courtesy Beijing Commune

“Taking found fabric and clothing from the city in question (i.e. Vancouver, Berlin etc.), Yin sews together little buildings, bridges, and greenscapes inside suitcases, manufacturing transportable cities. With landmark buildings recreated on a miniaturized scale in the likes of gingham cloth, corduroy, and cotton, and recorded soundscapes of the city in question, the pieces are at once humorous, nostalgic and poignant. With their hand-crafted appeal and use of old clothing, they infuse the anonymity of city-living with the personal. While globalization and the increased openness of China has allowed the possibility for more people like Yin to travel and visit all the cities within her suitcases, ironically it has also meant that the cities themselves have incurred a certain proclivity to becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Confronting the notions of increased homogenization of cultures and environments, versus the conflicting stratifications of wealth distribution and access to commodities and exchange, Yin’s work brings about questions concerning the desire for rapid modernization and globalization.”

YIN XIUZHEN
Portable City: Shenzhen, 2008
Courtesy Beijing Commune

via

“Now available for purchase or free download, Tokyo Blues is a photographic record of Nurri Kim’s 2002-2003 investigation into this humble industrial material and the very wide variety of uses to which it’s put in the everyday life of Japan.

From construction sites and homeless settlements to cherry-blossom viewing parties in the park, the ubiquitous blue tarp is a constant of Japanese life and a bearer of multiple registers of meaning. In sixty-four images from the boulevards, alleys, sidestreets and interstitial spaces, Tokyo Blues explores these dramatically different contexts, returning something ‘we see too often, and then forget to see’ to full, vivid visibility. The result is a book that provokes its readers to see the city around them with new eyes — whether that city is Tokyo, or their own.”

In addition to 64 beautiful photographic plates and an interesting essay by Do Projects and real-life partner Adam Greenfield, I was honoured to contribute the book’s foreword.

“Perversely enough, after spending some time with Nurri’s Tokyo Blues, I came to see the blue plastic tarp as the symbolic, and maybe even something of the actual, presence of nature in a city and a culture in which that quality is impossible…”

- Adam Greenfield, “Blueshifted”

Tokyo Blues has been published under a Creative Commons license as a free pdf download, but I encourage those taken by things spatial and cultural to get their hands on one of the signed (and very affordable) limited edition books.

Congratulations Nurri & Do Projects!

Carmakers around the world are cutting production as inventories build up to unprecedented levels. Storage areas and docksides are now packed with vast expanses of unsold cars as demand slumps.”

“Unsold cars at Avonmouth Docks near Bristol, UK.”

“Newly imported cars fill the 150-acre site at the Toyota distribution centre in Long Beach, California.”

“New cars jam the dockside in the port of Valencia in Spain.”

(via)

An arrow in the recreation yard at Camp Delta, Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba points the direction to Mecca, the Islamic holy city, so the detainees know which way to face if the call to prayer sounds while they are outside. Every cell and recreation yard has similar arrows. Photo taken in April, 2006. (U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood)

All detainees at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are given a copy of the Koran. Surgical masks are provided to the detainees so they can keep the Koran off the floor and prevent guards from touching it. Photo taken in April, 2006. (U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood)

(via)

- Anne

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 

Palo Alto Urban Petroglyph Project

These petroglyphs were all photographed from one particular road in and near Palo Alto, CA. It seems that the roadworkers had some good fun–or a tradition, of laying down their extra tar. Enjoy.”

I hope they actually ask what these are all about! (via anthrodesign)

- Anne

The Vancouver Sun reports that the city’s police are now using cardboard cops with radar guns to get drivers to slow down:

‘There may or may not be a police officer behind one of these cut-outs,’ Vancouver police traffic Staff Sgt. Ralph Pauw said at a news conference. Police will erect several on poles at the start of their shifts ‘and will stand behind one, two or all three of them,’ then take them down at the end of shifts, he said. The fake officers were relatively inexpensive to make, Pauw said. ‘We got the city sign shop to put them together, so it’s really only the cost of the plastic,’ he said, adding the cardboard is covered in rainproof plastic, so any graffiti just wipes off. The cut-outs were tested on the street for a few hours earlier this week and ‘a tow-truck driver pulled up and started talking to it,’ Pauw said.

Sender-in Jason says it reminds him of Latour’s sleeping policeman. Indeed.

- Anne

Rivers as artifacts by Matt Edgeworth

For the most part rivers tend to be regarded as more or less natural features of a landscape or townscape … Yet a river and its flow of water is actually often as culturally re-shaped, used and re-used, as any artifact or building … Are rivers natural or cultural? Rivers defy categorisation as one or the other. If we have to classify, we might call the river a ‘natural artifact’. Whereas the form of most artifacts is more or less fixed, the river has a wildness and fluidity about it that cannot be entirely contained. Unlike things crafted out of stone or other solid material, this artifact can escape the bounds of its culturally applied form … Yet it still makes sense to talk of rivers as objects. Rivers stand (or run) as entities in their own right. What is more, they have cultural affordances just like solid artifacts do. The difference is that their affordances tend to be associated with flow rather than form … There is a sense, indeed, in which rivers were the first artifacts. The great human transformation of the material domain may have started with things that were fluid rather than the fixed. From the moment that hominids placed stones across a stream to step across to the other side, or built a crude dam in order to create a pool for fishing or bathing, they were starting to influence and control the flow of water…

A river, then, is not simply the natural phenomenon we might conceive or describe it to be. It is just as appropriate to study its cultural dimensions as it is to examine its natural aspects – to see it as a material artifact. Indeed, as is the case with all artifacts, whether solid or liquid, it is inevitably a mixture of the natural and the cultural. The two aspects are inextricably intermeshed. The works and designs and projects of human beings are woven into the form and flow of the river, while at the same time the river weaves itself into the very fabric of human existence. It flows through the centre of towns, under bridges, beside parks and gardens, into sluices and culverts and cooling towers. It also runs through dreams, designs, projects, poems, memories and myth. It is a part of the human story. For towns and cities that are built on rivers, those rivers run as continuous threads through their history and development.

I may be biased by my previous life as an archaeologist, but I still don’t know any other disciplinary perspective that so persistently and convincingly troubles stable categories like nature and culture, and I think that Edgeworth’s essay is particularly evocative in its assessment of flow and the capacity to exceed form.

Besides mobile technologies, what other areas of study or practice could benefit from such an approach?

- Anne