Posts Tagged ‘paper’

In this paper, I will analyse some of the videos that were made at the occasion of the Welcome to My Place project, a collective video resource that started in February 2010 and where people can share the places that matter to them. In view of the videos and after some researches, I would like to propose a slightly different approach to the concept of non-place introduced by Marc Augé, and to the way places are appropriated. This paper is also intended to provide a short introduction to the philosophical notion of place and its main themes.

Spaces, places and non-places

A place is a meaningful location. According to John Agnew, it has a location (e.g. longitude and latitude), a locale (the material setting for social relations – e.g. walls, ground) and a ‘sense of place’. By sense of place, he means that the place is a space invested with meaning. In a slightly different formulation, Robert D. Sack defines a place as a “phenomenon that brings social and spatial together and in part produces them” (Source: “Place, a short introduction”, Tim Cresswell).

The sense of place is an elusive notion. We can however roughly describe it using the three following attributes:

-          The place’s identity, e.g. possibility to name the place

-          The social practices taking place, e.g. praying in a temple, selling in a market, eating in a restaurant

-           Traces of memory, e.g. literature, pictures about the place

(Source: Gamer theory, McKenzie Wark)

As an illustration, the following video introduces the history of the Westminster Reference Library in London. It shows that the building exists as a place thanks in part to the people who transmit its history. They participate in the preservation of the sense of place.

Marc Augé describes a non-place as a space that cannot be defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity. Highways and airports are examples of non-places. He goes further and describes how the sense of place is on the other hand simulated in historic towns, making places and non-places distinct and opposite (as a remark, binary oppositions form the basis of classificatory systems within cultures according to Claude Lévi-Strauss). It is a similar process to those described by postmodern writers such as Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. As Marc Augé puts it:

“Our towns have been turning into museums (e.g. restored, exposed and floodlit monuments, listed areas, pedestrian precincts) while at the same time bypasses, motorways, high-speed trains and one-way systems have made it unnecessary for us to linger in them.”

“A person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does and experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver [...] he obeys the same code as others, receives the same messages, and responds to the same entreaties.”

My argument is that non-places are much more frequent and rooted in human nature than Marc Augé suggests. This has direct consequences on how space is negotiated on a day to day basis. Transmission of identity, history and social practices is fragile. A sense of place relies either on a group of people assuring its continuity or on authoritative power, and is not necessary desired.

Places between sedentism and nomadism

Humans are incredibly adaptive and can accommodate very well either sedentism or nomadism. These two lifestyles are profoundly in us and even though we mostly have a sedentary life, our approach to space remains nomadic in many occasions.

Renting a house is a profoundly nomadic situation, either by choice or for pecuniary reasons. The rent is very often concluded without any knowledge of the history and identity of the house or flat. The sense of place is rarely transmitted from the landlord to the tenant, assuming the landlord has any sense of place for his property. Blocks of Victorian houses in London for example have surely a history, but unheard of by most of its inhabitants. They are furthermore easy to commoditise because of their very similar configuration.  Only their material structure influences the social practices of their inhabitants. One might argue that this material structure is informed by British tradition and in that sense transmits a persistent sense of place; because it forces inhabitants to manage their space in a certain way. I would however not give a disproportionate importance to this transmission and consider that these houses are mostly non-places, as functional and anonymous as an airport. In many cases, houses are not bequeathed anymore from one generation of a family to the other, and its sense of place is lost.

A difference between these places and non-places though is that inhabitants need to make them their home, and rapidly reinvent a brand new sense of place. The need to feel at home is described in details in La poétique de l’Espace by Gaston Bachelard. As he points out, this feeling could be reduced to the image of the hermit’s hut, the simplest expression of what being at home means. I think that we are all nomads. We all have this image of the hut in our imagination. We can make nearly every place our home, and move the next day. The sense of space is disposable. It is not an anomaly of modernity, but in human nature. Here is an example; few objects and a soundtrack are enough to generate a mobile and disposable sense of place.

For a nomad to appropriate a space, it might be faster to deal with a non-place in the first place. It avoids any complicated negotiations with a pre-existing identity. It is not always the best option however and I’m not advocating systematically anonymity. Dealing with a place and its pre-existing identity can also be helpful to invent or reinforce a narrative that the inhabitant can use to give meaning to his life. The place in this context is often the symbol of some support, like the house from the parents, or the car from the company.

I talked so far about houses, but the same process is observable in many other types of places: working places, places of celebrations, entire neighbourhoods.  In the following video, I wonder if the ‘cosmopolitan world’ mentioned by the owner of the café is not in fact a non-place. His strategy to provide an identity to his business is to rephrase cosmopolitanism with an Arabic sensitivity and décor. Place is maybe here a meeting place, as proposed by Doreen Massey: “each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations, an understanding that its character can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond” (Source: “Place, a short introduction”, Tim Cresswell).

In this video of the New Year celebration by the Kurdish community in Finsbury Park, the park is treated as a non-place so that the celebration of that other place, the Kurdistan can be fully experienced (read here an in-depth analysis of the park and its surrounding area).

An easy way to create a sense of place from a non-place is by using media. As you can see in the video below, film effects and a soundtrack instantly provide an identity to the parkland walk: an old-fashioned place to enjoy with friends.

In all these videos, the sense of place is created nearly from scratch by the occupiers, who prefer to treat the space as a non-place. That sense of place might be ephemeral or persistent depending on the intentions of the occupiers; it is their freedom to choose between nomadism and sedentism.

It remains that the overall and much contested trend is towards nomadism. It can be attributed to the phenomenon of ‘time-space compression’, “a term used to describe processes that seem to accelerate the experience of time and reduce the significance of distance” (Wikipedia). It is the direct consequence of trains, cars, airlines, television, and the internet. Information is instantaneous; the world is reduced to the in-flight map that indicates the position of the plane. Commuting is the norm and anyone who wants to ‘succeed’ in life has to move constantly.

Narrative architects

As explained in the previous chapter, people need non-places that are easy to appropriate. They need them because they might change of location in a couple of years, because they are already too busy managing their identity on the web or get a sense of authorship on their career. Places imposing a strong narrative are for most of us more appropriate for travels or visits, like the centre of Florence protected by the UNESCO. We are the product of freedom and the free market; legacy is a constraint, tradition is a reduction of choice.  However, non-places are not as blank as they look. Architects, urbanists, artists, politics, health and safety agencies, cultural agencies, all participate in the design of urban non-places and are what I call narrative architects, a term borrowed from Henry Jenkins (Source: Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche).

Childhood is fun and colourful; It is nice to go to work every day by bicycle; Streets are not to sleep in; I live in a place full of history. These statements portray an idyllic city. They form together a narrative of the ideal urban life. Narrative architects design elements in non-places that will evoke this story. The citizens will use these elements to reconstitute and internalize it.  The evocative elements are even expected a-priori in an all inclusive package of the modern city lifestyle. Non-places that include these elements tend to work better. Let me start with the example of the playground.

The designers of the playground didn’t write any story addressed to the children. But they knew that the concrete objects they designed for the playground will be associated with tales of mountains, castles and exotic adventures. They provided evocative elements that children can use to appropriate a very dry non-place, and transform it into a heterotopia. The concrete elements also provide a substitute for an unfenced environment perceived as not appropriate for children (and adults?) or requiring an unreasonable amount of surveillance.

Using the same logic, one juts need to put lines on a concrete ground to associate that space with football, and significantly alter its use. These evocative elements produce generic senses of place that are quick to internalize and convenient to use.

The American kitchen, British bathroom, Western or why not Japanese style living room are evocative elements that architect narrators uses to sequence the everyday storyline of their occupiers. Of course, you could imagine a house where you would take a shower in the living room, but most people prefer to stick with more common storyboards.

With these evocative elements in place, it is more difficult to divert from the prescribed user scenarios, to use a marketing term from mass production. But it is possible and people find unusual ways to appropriate their space. “People are able to resist the construction of expectations about practice through place by using places and their established meanings in subversive ways” (Source: Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche). Here is for example how wi-fi signals can be used to form an unexpected representation of the neighbourhood.

Politics of space

A sense of place reflects the values that are constantly negotiated and contested within a group. It might look intangible, especially in an urban environment where the landscape is a given for the nomad. In their willingness to pacify the space, local authorities take its control and by doing so erase the need for local communities to dialogue, which prevents any contestation and negotiation of public space, and de-facto its appropriation (see this study of the London N4 area I did in collaboration with the Transition Finsbury Park association).

The best way to put in evidence the relation between places, values and power is to imagine the destruction of places, or their disappearance from the map. Such an imaginary threat will help you list the people who would protest, their arguments, as well as the people who would agree with the destruction, and their counter-arguments. These two groups of people are the actors in the relation of power that maintain the existence of a place.

The place becomes a symbol of that balance of power and reinforces it. An evocative example is when the churches were higher than the town halls. In a period of time-space compression, the churches have not only to compete with the town halls, but with everything in every media. Spaces do not only compete between one another to capture the attention of people, and the sense they can give to them. They also need to compete with mobility. If they lose, they become non-places.

“Place is a form of fixed capital which exists in tension with other forms of capital. Political struggle over place often provide opportunities for resistance to the mobile forces at the origin of the time-space compression” (Source: “Place, a short introduction” by Tim Cresswell). The green movements such as transition towns want to valorise the local for its more sustainable qualities. Local communities want to preserve their neighbourhood and way of living. Fashionable slow food restaurants want to promote time and distinction at the opposite of ubiquitous fast-food chains. They are all part of a ‘militant particularism’ movement that fights a time-space compression often associated with capitalistic interests. It is in that sense a progressive movement. Another example is libraries. Here is a talk illustrating the values and relations of power at play.

On the other hand, militant particularism could be seen as a reactionary strategy to exclude outsiders. “Sentimentalized recovering of sanitized heritage sites” can marginalize people who are not part of that heritage. It can justify segregation by the “construction of a unproblematic identity” (Doreen Massey). This is what happens in gentrification that ‘restores’ old districts, houses, ‘historic’ canals and churches. It ‘rehabilitates’ a neighbourhood and its identity that former, poorer inhabitants didn’t appreciate enough. It is a justification for their necessary exile.

“Accompanying this production of sense of history and authenticity is a process of exclusion based on the identification of a threatening other beyond the walls of the town” (Source: “Place, a short introduction” by Tim Cresswell).

Conclusion

I have shown how much non-places are useful for the nomads we are and how easily we can produce a disposable sense of place for them. Non-places are not totally blank however and feature evocative elements designed by narrative architects. These evocative elements mediate the appropriation of space and our daily life. Whether or not places are more desirable than non-places is a question of values between nomadism and sedentism. The superiority of places over non-places is advocated for opposite reasons in progressive and reactionary rhetoric. For this reason, I don’t think it is wise to draw a conclusion using this dichotomy. I would for the time being just note how much the status of the place is controversial in contemporary culture.

References

• Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche, 2008
• Place, a short introduction, Tim Cresswell, 2004
• Non-places – An introduction to supermodernity, Marc Augé, 1995
• La poétique de l’espace, Gaston Bachelard, 1957
• In praise of shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki, 1933

An article summarising the Heterotopia of Walt Disney World presentation that I gave in October 2009 is now published in the February edition of the Philosophy Now magazine. The article is part of a series of papers about ‘continental tales’ and the concept of narrative in Continental philosophy.