Becoming Places

Urbanism / Architecture / Identity / Power

Kim Dovey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134117352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

About the practices and politics of place and identity formation – the slippery ways in which who we are becomes wrapped up with where we are – this book exposes the relations of place to power. It links everyday aspects of place experience to the social theories of Deleuze and Bourdieu in a very readable manner. This is a book that takes the social critique of built form another step through detailed fieldwork and analysis in particular case studies.

Through a broad range of case studies from nationalist monuments and new urbanist suburbs to urban laneways and avant garde interiors, questions are explored such as: What is neighborhood character? How do squatter settlements work and does it matter what they look like? Can architecture liberate? How do monuments and public spaces shape or stabilize national identity?

Part I

Ideas

Chapter 1: Making Sense of Place

Introduction

This is a book about place formation, about places in states of becoming. One could say this does not exclude much because all places are in a state of continuous change. Yet so much of the thinking about ‘place’ treats it as a somewhat static concept. Places are identified with what does not change; their ‘sense of place’, ‘character’ or ‘identity’ is seen as relatively stable. Places are experienced primarily in terms of stabilized contexts of everyday life and they are a primary means by which we stabilize our identities in that world. Yet just as human identities are in a continuous process of change, I am interested here in the various ways in which places come into being. By this I do not mean what often passes for placemaking – the conscious attempts of designers to create a sense of place which so easily end up as manipulative corporate formulae or nostalgic ideologies written rather literally into space. And I do not mean a quest for an essence of place based in a primordial past. I am interested in an immanent theory of place that is not abstracted from its instances in everyday life, nor deferred to a presumed deeper or higher source.

The concept of place is a highly contested term, definitions of which show little consistency across the academic discourse. It is also a term with a significant role in design and planning practice where a presumed consensual understanding underwrites some dangerous practices. In everyday life we all know what place means, even if we do not experience particular places in the same ways. There is a crucial difference between the terms space and place in everyday language. To ask ‘what kind of place is New York?’ may generate a variety of answers but this question has a sense that ‘what kind of space is New York?’ does not. When we say ‘this is a great place’ we mean something more social and less formal than ‘this is a great space’. A large part of what distinguishes place from space is that place has an intensity that connects sociality to spatiality in everyday life. We can say ‘do you have enough space?’ but not ‘do you have enough place?’ While a space may have physical dimensions, it is intensity that gives place its potency and its primacy.

The ways that place makes sense in everyday life is the primary understanding of the sense of place. How we make academic sense of that sense of place is an entirely different matter. In academic literature space and place are often indistinguishable or are distinguished in ways that best suit the theory, abstracted from everyday life. To introduce the range of theory here with any rigour would result in a quite different book and Cresswell (2004) does a commendable job from a geographic perspective. Yet there is something of a conundrum at the heart of such theory that I will briefly sketch because it frames the field from which the rest of this work emerges. As Casey (1997) has shown, the philosophy of place emerges first (as ‘topos’) in early Greek philosophy (most notably Aristotle) where it was seen as a form of ontological ground, a view of place that is inseparable from being or existence – to exist is to exist in a place. Casey argues that this notion of place was repressed throughout most Western philosophy in favour of the idea of place as an abstract ‘location’ within spatial coordinates, the ‘site’ of something. This view can be traced to the rise of a scientific empiricism that privileges an objective and abstract conception of space as a framework for the particularities of place. Under the enlightenment and modernity, space became identified as the primary and abstract context within which place was seen as secondary and derivative (Casey 1997). The ontology of place was revived and developed in the twentieth century by Heidegger through his spatial ontology of being-in-the-world. Both of these conceptions of place – as ontological ground and as mere location – are abstractions in relation to the experience or sense of place in everyday life (Malpas 2008). Lived experience can be rationalized as based in an ontological ground or in an abstract location with meanings added, yet the everyday sense of place is precognitive – we nearly always take place for granted. So what is it that we take for granted? How are we to make sense of the sense of place?

For most structuralist and post-structuralist thinking, the meanings of place are a form of discourse without intrinsic meanings. For Barthes (1973), place is a form of mythology; for Foucault (1979) a form of constructed subjectivity; for Derrida (1974) a text. Such approaches seek to problematize the ways that conceptions of identity become enmeshed with place, naturalized and depoliticized. The conceptual unpacking of the social constructions of place is one of the most useful of research methods and a crucial part of this book (Fairclough 1995). However, discourse analysis will never be sufficient for an understanding of place. The effectiveness of deconstructive method generally relies upon a reduction of place to text that bypasses the question of ontology and strips the sense of place of some of its most fertile complications, most importantly its connection to ontological security.

There is, however, a more significant problem when the sense of place is interpreted in terms of deep and intrinsic meanings based in an ontological ground. This is the view that is generally accused of essentialism – to see the sense of place as deeply rooted in stabilized modes of dwelling (homeland and history) that cannot be changed. This is also what is often referred to by a ‘spirit’ of place or ‘genius loci’ and related to the Heideggerian view of place as a primordial ground of being (Norberg Schulz 1980). Such a view often conflates the sense and the ontology of place into one seamless whole, a reduction to essence that ignores social constructions of place identity.

Casey suggests we can recuperate the primacy of place as an ontological ground without the essentialism and cites many anti-essentialist approaches arising in the shadow of Heidegger (Casey 1997: chapter 12). However, his inclusion of everyone from Foucault and Derrida to the architects Tschumi and Eisenman in this field is unconvincing. The best case for an anti-essentialist theory of place is the avowedly anti-Heideggerian work of Massey in geography. This work centres on the notion of an open, global and progressive sense of place. For Massey all notions of place derived from Heidegger are problematic and regressive:

Such views of place have been evident in a whole range of settings – in the emergence of certain kinds of nationalisms, in the marketing of places … in the new urban enclosures and … by those defending their communities against yuppification … All of these have been attempts to fix the meaning of places, to enclose and defend them: they construct singular, fixed and static identities for places, and they interpret places as bounded enclosed spaces defined through counterposition against the Other who is outside.

(Massey 1992:12)

Against such views she proposes an open conception of place where place identity is provisional and unfixed. Massey’s progressive sense of place is outward-looking, defined by multiple identities and histories, its character comes from connections and interactions rather than original sources and enclosing boundaries. Her example is a local high street in London to which she ascribes character and identity without the Heideggerian primordiality:

while Kilburn may have a character of its own, it is absolutely not a seamless, coherent identity, a single sense of place which everyone shares … If it is now recognized that people have multiple identities, then the same point can be made in relation to places. Moreover, such multiple identities can be either, or both, a source of richness or a source of conflict.

(Massey 1993:65)

Such a sense of place is seen as primarily global rather than local, forged out of its connections with other places rather than local contingencies, privileging routes rather than roots.

There is little doubt that many Heideggerian approaches to place are regressive in the way Massey suggests, but such critiques can involve a shallow reading of Heidegger (Malpas 2006:18–20). There is an important distinction between Heidegger’s argument about the spatiality of being on the one hand, and a much more spurious argument about a primordial sense of place with a singular identity, authentic history and exclusion of difference. There is little doubt that Heidegger can be read in both these ways, but the one does not imply the other. The claim that place is wrapped up with ontology does not suggest that lived experience is primordial or fully given. If we sever place from ontology then we are left with a weak theory about the relations of place to power, we have robbed place of its potency to construct ontological security and seemingly naturalized identity. The socially constructionist position implicitly generates the illusion that with enough deconstruction we might all live a free life in a meaningless field of decentred space. The reality is that everyday life continues – here and now, in this body, in this space.

In the end the question of place hinges on the relation between spatiality and sociality. Lefebvre (1991:26) long ago pointed out the curious condition that space is both a means of production and a product of it. To put this recursiveness another way: while space is socially constructed, the social is spatially constructed (Massey 1993). Place is an inextricably intertwined knot of spatiality and sociality. In this context there is a clear need for approaches that cut across the sociality/spatiality divide. The spatial turn in social theory is very largely due to Heidegger and others deeply influenced by him; place matters to social theory because spatiality is so deeply implicated in sociality. This is the conundrum as I see it: how to move beyond a false choice between place as pre-given or as socially constructed. If place and space are socially constructed then where did this construction take place? If the social is spatially constructed then what evidence do we have of this pre-given place that is not socially constructed? One way through this conundrum is to explore theories that cut across the sociality–spatiality and subject–object divide. The chapters on Deleuze and Bourdieu in the first part of this book are intended to do this. I suggest we replace the Heideggerian ontology of being-in-the-world with a more Deleuzian notion of becoming-in-the-world. This implies a break with static, fixed, closed and dangerously essentialist notions of place, but preserves a provisional ontology of place-as-becoming: there is always, already and only becoming-in-the-world. I also suggest we replace the division of subjectivity–objectivity or people–environment with Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus as an embodied world.

***

The chapters of this book are not designed to be read in any particular order, although the case studies of Part II often utilize the concepts from Part I: a series of chapters sketching ideas and theories about place and becoming. Theories are both the beginning and the end of research; they are the conceptual tools and methods one uses, consciously or not, to analyse and understand the world. Theories are all too often critiqued according to their consistency with other theories. I judge concepts and ideas on the basis of what they enable us to do and see, and how they enable us to analyse and to think; as the saying goes ‘There is nothing so practical as a good theory’. My interests are in thinking sideways across the gaps between disciplinary paradigms and outside the confines of traditional formalist, spatial and social critique. Poor theory in turn can often be identified by a failure to breach traditional paradigms in their application to interdisciplinary research questions; all place research is interdisciplinary.

Chapter 2, ‘Place as Assemblage’, sketches a Deleuzian approach to place. While Deleuze never explicitly wrote about ‘place’, his work (with that of Guattari) represents a pre-eminent philosophy of becoming, of how identities are formed and changed. The framework adopted here is a conception of place as a territorialized assemblage, defined by connections rather than essences (DeLanda 2006). Place is a dynamic ensemble of people and environment that is at once material and experiential, spatial and social. While the language can be challenging, an understanding of assemblages has a great deal to offer to theories of place. Concepts of smooth and striated space enable new approaches to both buildings and settlements that encompass new conceptions of the relations of form to everyday life, and of formal to informal settlements. These are ways of understanding senses of place in experiential, material and representational dimensions without the closed, stabilized and essentialized concepts that have co-opted and paralysed other theories of place. The emergence of rhizomatic theory in urban design enables us to build upon the key but dated insights of Jacobs (‘The Self Destruction of Diversity’) and Alexander (‘A City is Not a Tree’) that have long congealed into design formulae (‘Mixed Use’, ‘New Urbanism’).

‘Silent Complicities’ is an account of Bourdieu’s conceptions of the ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ as keys to an understanding of place. If Deleuze gives us a sophisticated account of becoming, of how things change, Bourdieu provides a convincing account of why they do not and of how the appearance of change is often the cover for more of the same. From this view the rules and habitual practices and structures of the habitus lock us into a sense of place that is also a sense of one’s place in the world. The potency of place lies in the ways it becomes taken for granted as a neutral context for everyday life, its forgotten-ness. The neutrality of place can neutralize becoming. The design of built form involves the production and circulation of non-economic forms of capital. Social capital becomes embodied in places in the best and worst of ways, as mobilization towards a better future and as enclaves of class distinction. Symbolic capital circulates through places and fields of practice; its potency relies on being seen as a form of distinction rather than a form of capital. From such a view, places often camouflage practices of power; distinctions between people are camouflaged as distinctions between places.

Deleuze and Bourdieu provide two key conceptual frameworks for these investigations of place. These are simply conceptual toolkits; I find them useful to an understanding of the ways that places mediate practices of power. There are differences but also some consistencies between them: both begin from the view that spatiality and sociality are integrated, neither relies on a division between subject and object. Both assemblage and habitus are immanent to everyday life rather than transcendent abstractions. The rules of the habitus can be read as codes of the assemblage. The major contrast is that Bourdieu stresses the inertia and inhibition embodied in the habitus while Delueze and Guattari stress flow and change. The tendency to take sides may not be the most productive position.

Chapter 4, ‘Limits of Critical Architecture’, is an account of the ways critical theory has been applied in architecture, whereby the architecture becomes a critique of its conditions of production. It traces the ways in which an architecture that is meant to resist a dominant economic, political and social order becomes complicit with it. The conceptual oppositions of form/function and representation/action are seen as clues to understand the ways a supposedly ‘critical’ architecture is neutralized – contained as form and insulated from life. The illusion of a critical architecture becomes compatible with a specialization in the production and reproduction of symbolic and social capital. This critique is explored through the fields of practice, criticism, publishing and education. Architectural discourse produces a controlled critique that is funded, framed and subtly controlled by advertising. The delivery of ‘critique’ to architects is the means to deliver architects to advertisers, and the architectural academy often conflates such controlled critique with research.

Theory is the beginning of research and while the end may be better theory it is also a better form of placemaking practice. The second part of the book explores various kinds of research practice through a series...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and sources
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Part I: Ideas
• Part II: Places
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index