Space and Culture recent issues

The Geography of Virtual Worlds: An Introduction

Gordon, E. — 2008-07-30

Placeworlds: Using Virtual Worlds to Foster Civic Engagement

Gordon, E., Koo, G. — 2008-07-30

This article describes a pilot program in Boston, Massachusetts, that incorporates virtual worlds into the urban planning process. The authors argue that the immersive, playful, and social qualities of the virtual world Second Life are uniquely appropriate to engage people in dialogue about their communities. By sharing experiences of a planned space and having the opportunity to deliberate over, comment on, and alter that space, previously disempowered individuals are able to form politically powerful groups. This takes place through the formation of what the authors call placeworlds, a subgroup of the Habermasian lifeworld that is organized around the shared understanding of place. Second Life and similar virtual world platforms offer profound possibilities for how local communities can imagine themselves as political actors in the face of global and homogenizing political systems.

Datascape: A Synthesis of Digital and Embodied Worlds

Kabisch, E. — 2008-07-30

Digital and synthetic worlds are often conceived as self-contained entities that exist in abstracted and remote spaces. The author elaborates an approach to hybrid space that instead focuses on local contexts of digital information correlated with the embodied spaces people inhabit—an informational substrate that both describes and regulates human activity. The author presents a mobile interactive art installation as a way to bring geographically referenced information out of databases and into everyday experience of traveling through the world. Datascape enables a hybrid ecology whereby participants author dynamic geographic narratives that compose a digital world coextensive with the planet Earth. A vehicle-mounted digital periscope engenders action between passengers and a visual and sonic landscape that unfolds and emerges based on conversations between people, data, and dynamic representational entities that compose the landscape. By allowing people to view and interact with information descriptive of the location in which it is encountered, Datascape enables awareness of and engagement with the hybrid digital/physical spaces people traverse and inhabit in their everyday lives.

The Experience of Embodied Space in Virtual Worlds: An Ethnography of a Second Life Community

Bardzell, S., Odom, W. — 2008-07-30

The article examines the mutually constituted relations among avatars, space, and artifacts represented in a Gorean community in Second Life. Combining virtual ethnography (i.e., participant observations and in-depth interviews) with the growingly important concept of experience design in human—computer interaction, the authors explore and unpack the spatial experiences of participants in the community and, with them, the grammar and symbolism of power and submission, of private and public, and consider body as a place for social inscription. The spatial experiences of these participants shed light on the nature of this community (both social and computer-mediated interactions) and help explain why virtual simulation of Gorean fantasy is such a compelling form of play and source of intimacy and emotion for thousands of Second Life residents.

Spatial Regimes of the Digital Playground: Cultural Functions of Spatial Practices in Computer Games

Lammes, S. — 2008-07-30

In this article, the author investigates how computer games can be understood as sociospatial practices. Although spatiality has always been considered a central quality of any digital game, cultural and social functions of space have not been much theorized in relation to games. This article furthers a discussion on how they can be understood as spatial practices by proposing a first approach that makes an analysis of games as sociospatial practices possible. It introduces the concept of magic node as a manner to facilitate such a study of games. A case study of cartographical practices in real time strategy games exemplifies how games can be approached as such magic nodes.

The Case for Education in Virtual Worlds

Nesson, R., Nesson, C. — 2008-07-30

This article is a practical, often ethnographically based, argument for the current value and future potential of virtual worlds in education that attempts to specifically address the concerns and reservations of the many thoughtful educators and observers who are not yet convinced. It relates our experience teaching the course `CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion` at Harvard and in Second Life and the principles for successful teaching in a virtual environment that we derived from it: (a) use the technology for what it is good for and not for what it does not do well, (b) seek advantages in what appear to be limitations, and (c) where new capabilities are offered, find ways to use them.

Obliterating Informal Space: The London Olympics and the Lea Valley: A Photo Essay

Edensor, T., Christie, C., Lloyd, B. — 2008-07-30

Caroline Christie and Bobby Lloyd have regularly photographed the Lea Valley London Olympic site since 2003. In 2006, they were joined by Tim Edensor for a day of walking and exploring. This article has emerged from this event as well as reflections on the photographs featured here. The area is one of the few remaining informal spaces in London, and the variegated activities and experiences it offers are being replaced by the giant Olympic development. The authors particularly focus on forthcoming loss: of the sensual experience of space, of the numerous possibilities for often improvisatory spatial practices, of an immanent and playful engagement with materiality, of a nondesigned and alternative spatial aesthetics.

Editorial Introduction: Spaces of Hope

Anderson, B., Fenton, J. — 2008-04-23

Young People, Hope, and Childhood-Hope

Kraftl, P. — 2008-04-23

This article outlines a number of steps toward a more sensitive and affirmative conception of childhood and hope ("childhood-hope"). Throughout the article, the author explores how our understandings of hope might be extended via an examination of childhood-hope. First, it considers childhood as a universalizing, affective condition, which can be characterized by very simplistic, and problematic, notions of hope, logic, and futurity. The author connects this line of thought explicitly with what the author identifies as impulses of hopefulness and of "doing good" for children, exemplified by a selection of "high-profile" quotations about children. Second, the author extends the discussion to explore everyday articulations of hope by young people involved in a project concerning their interpretations and experiences of self-esteem. The author concludes by outlining how universal representations of childhood-hope may be extended and critiqued though young people's own articulations of hope, and draw attention to some of the positive political interventions that young people's modest forms of hoping might have.

Eschatology and Development: Embodying Messianic Spaces of Hope

Sanderson, E. — 2008-04-23

Based on participatory research with two community groups with a Christian spirituality, which are a Melanesian settlement and parish in Fiji and a women's church-based group in Tanzania, this article hopes to express particular embodied spaces of hope. The articulation of these spaces is drawn from our exploration of the interconnection between community development and Christian spirituality; both of which implicitly seek to engender and realize hope. The hopes expressed and the expressions of hopes realized within the communities, require an understanding of eschatology and embodied subjectivity within Christian spirituality to appreciate the embodied spaces of hope here articulated. Combining this theological contextualization of hope with the "visceral philosophy" of Irigaray and Deleuze provides a richer vision of these embodied spaces of hope. In particular, insight is given into the messianic character of both embodiment and hope and consequentially the way this messianic spatiality informs the character of the hoped for community development.

Experiencing Imminent Justice: The Presence of Hope in a Movement for Equitable Schooling

Lashaw, A. — 2008-04-23

Recent scholarship on the affective dimensions of social change has pointed toward hope as an ethically promising form of belonging. In this article, the articulation of hope in the context of a reform-oriented social movement provides the basis for interrogating the political promise of hope. The author examines the ascent of a movement for small, equitable schools in Oakland, California, to explore the hopes and aspirations of its most ardent advocates. To do this, the author contrasts the movement's assertion of its equity-centered strategy with the complex race and class hierarchies that grounded power relations within the movement. The question that emerges from this discontinuity is how reformers come to experience the movement as equitable and unequivocally progressive. The author finds that the gap between reformers' ideals and their material circumstances is bridged by the movement's ample production of hope.

Hope and Fear in Biotechnology: The Space-Times of Regulatory Affect

Shields, R. — 2008-04-23

This article draws out temporal and spatial affects such as hope and fear, trust and confidence, and assumptions of actors in plant biotechnology development and its regulation by the Federal Government of Canada. These underlie both insider developers' and regulators' hopes and trust, and outsider experts' and publics' anxiety and fear. Etymologically, hope is rooted in actual capacities or dunamis and in latent potency or potentia. Ethnographic interviews among researchers, producers, and regulators of plant biotechnologies in Canada conducted between 2001 and 2003 provide an empirical illustration of this argument. In the regulatory process for plants with novel traits (PNTs), different affective responses (hope, fear, trust) correlate with social insiders and outsiders around biotechnology generally and PNTs specifically. Insiders form a regulatory figuration in Elias's sense of the term. The spatiotemporal qualities of different affects—dunamis here and now versus the distant and future quality of potentia— "torque" discourse, risk-taking behavior, and calculations of standards of precaution.

Affective Urbanism and the Event of Hope

Anderson, B., Holden, A. — 2008-04-23

The article discusses how hope and hopefulness become part of the life of cities, drawing on a case study of cultural regeneration: the event of Liverpool receiving EU Capital of Culture status in June 2003. Through attention to the "eventness" of the event of "receiving Capital of Culture status" and the linked practices of urban regeneration, the article argues that the "European Capital of Culture" becomes part of the assemblages that compose Liverpool in three ways: as an advent, as a crystallization, and as a blank. Each of these registers involves the assembling of specific distributions of hope. Through this focus on the relation between the event and how hope takes place, the article explores an affective urbanism—that is, an urbanism animated by a conceptual vocabulary specific to the logics of affect and emotion.

Beach Crisis: Law and Love of Place

West-Newman, C. L. — 2008-04-23

Law making can be both a technical solution and an emotional event formed through social context and geopolitical location. When a decision in the New Zealand Court of Appeal raised the question of beach ownership, government rapidly legislated to "resolve" the issue. Events around the passing of the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 brought beaches to the forefront of public attention and showed how deeply they occupy national affections. In theory, this was law making to reconcile the different beliefs and values of two ethnicized groups—indigenous Maori and settler non-Maori. In practice, a common love of place was mediated through cultural differences to produce grief, fear, and nostalgia in public life.

The Social Optics of Space: Visibility and Invisibility in the Borderlands of Borneo

Amster, M. H. — 2008-04-23

The aim of this article is to show, through a detailed ethnographic case, how social space can be viewed as consisting of superimposed layers. Building on theoretical frameworks of Lefebvre and Foucault in terms of their approaches to space, power, and visibility, the article looks at the Kelabit people, a small, indigenous group whose homelands lie in the interior highlands of Borneo along an international frontier. Examining various facets of the Kelabit social life, and focusing on different forms of social optics that can be identified in Kelabit social spaces, the article shows how concerns about visibility, surveillance, privacy, and control are intimately linked in this community, both with regard to life in the rural borderlands—where transnational movement and migrants pose new dilemmas in terms of community belonging—and in terms of the relationships within and between rural and urban Kelabit.

Erratum

2008-04-23

Scenes from the Putsch

Siemens, E. — 2008-01-30

A personal account of a Moscow putsch, this short essay employs Michel De Certeau's distinction between the public and secret space of the city. In extending De Certeau, the article applies his work to the realm of photography and juxtaposes the official and private images of the putsch. "Scenes from the Putsch" is intended as a prologue to this themed issue that gather images and texts from around the world and pays tribute to De Certeau's notion of the "second, poetic geography" understood by the contributors as related to the secondary or unofficial connotations of spaces, as well as more literally to marginal destinations located outside of conventional tourist routes.

Wittgenstein at Ground Zero

Sayer, D. — 2008-01-30

Drawing on the work of Barthes and Wittgenstein, this article presents an argument for taking seriously the widespread sentiment, at the time, that the events of what we have since come to call "9-11" were unspeakable. Central to the article is an analysis of two sharply contrasting responses to the 9-11 events, the Here Is New York photographic exhibition and a symposium by prominent intellectuals in The London Review of Books. The widespread revulsion that greeted such intellectual attempts to make sense of 9-11, the article argues, is not evidence of sentiment clouding reason so much as a refusal to efface a profound otherness by assimilating it to the categories of our comprehension—much like Here Is New York's use of photographs to resist the translation of 9-11 into text.

The Auto Salvage: A Space of Second Chances

Soderman, B., Carter, R. — 2008-01-30

Using the auto salvage yard as its base of operations, this explorative essay—consisting of text and images—attempts to theorize a concept of salvaging. Generally, the authors ask what "salvaging" means within contemporary culture. What do the auto salvage yard and the act of salvaging teach us about the relation between subjects and objects? How can we "read" the signs that appear in the salvage yard? Overall, increasing the visibility of the salvage yard and the practices of salvage transmits the possibility of rethinking the position of the human subject in an increasingly automated environment. Instead of a future where human affect is ejected from rationalized systems, focusing attention of the concept of salvage offers a second chance to revitalize the human subject, rescuing the present from an oppressed past.

Residual Landscapes and the Everyday: An Interview With Edward Burtynsky

Campbell, C. — 2008-01-30

Reflexive Frames: Picturing Second Geography

Pontin, M. — 2008-01-30

Eye into Earth

2008-01-30

East, Left Behind: Picturing Second Geography

Sirin, B. — 2008-01-30

In almost every case, socialism left behind a neglected geography, ruined industrial landscapes, masses of unsustainable urban structures, and finally, the unnatural application of an ideology into the built environment. However, only after a dozen years did people realize it was not only the physical that had been neglected; it was also the individual efforts of the citizens that were being ignored. These two things together brought pessimistic side effects into these societies. Former German Democratic Republic lands still struggle with a seemingly physical crisis, but below the surface lies a mental crisis.

Two Muslim Communities: Two Disparate Ways of Islamizing Public Spaces

Kahera, A. I. — 2007-12-06

This article clarifies what Hayden has termed "space as a cultural product." The author discusses the Islamizing of public spaces in two urban Muslim communities. The Salafiyya, a proto-Islamic movement (Community A), is at the center of a heated debate over the control for the soul of the community—the mosque. Normally this would not be a problem, but the Salafiyya heavily rely on the past in interpretating religious texts. In contrast, "Community B" demonstrates how competing visions of public space and religious practice can coexist in urban America. Their goal is to invest the neighborhood with a bona fide religious virtue through activism and social change. More broadly, the worldview of these two communities forces an examination of two disparate ways of Islamizing public spaces. Islamizing exaggerates the problems that both A and B must confront and the kinds of uncertainties that accompany cultural identity, religious legitimacy, and valorization of the word community.

The Role of Local Strategies on a Globalizing Market: An Exploration of Two Service Industry Cases

Varlander, S. — 2007-12-06

Taking its stance in social embeddedness theory, this article questions the assumption that companies' adoption of the Internet implies a linear move from local embeddedness to placeless globalization. The aim of the article is to explore the role of local strategies in a multichannel service production context. In substantiating the argument, 20 in-depth interviews with managers representing the travel and banking industries are used. The article identifies six key roles of local strategies: developing a local market feel, exploiting employees' local explicit knowledge, exploiting employees' local implicit knowledge, developing relationships, using a local branding strategy, and applying a local branch design. This illustrates the way in which, in this context, the Internet has led to places being redefined and used for new strategic purposes, a process that, in the words of Lévy (1998), is referred to as a movement of reterritorialization.

Encapsulations: The Production of a Future Gaze at Montreal's Expo 67

Jansson, A. — 2007-12-06

This article outlines how the visual and spatial structure of Montreal's Expo 67, its texture, encapsulated a "future gaze" and how this encapsulation project was related to the overarching transformations of Montreal. Expo 67 was a sight, an experience-scape, and a mediator of Montreal as a future world metropolis. The article discusses how different "means of encapsulation," such as transit systems, multiscreen cinema, and surveillance systems, promoted new ways of seeing, which in different ways were to translate Montreal into a city of the future. It also introduces the concepts of texture and encapsulation as a general framework for understanding the ways in which urban planning, mediatization, and event production are interwoven in late modern societies.

The Materiality of Territorial Production: A Conceptual Discussion of Territoriality, Materiality, and the Everyday Life of Public Space

Karrholm, M. — 2007-12-06

This article brings together research on territoriality and actor-network theory to develop new ways of investigating the role of materiality and material design in the territorial power relations of urban public places. Using the public square as a main example, the author suggests new ways of conceptualizing the production and stabilization of territories in the everyday urban environment. Setting out from a brief outline of the history of territoriality research, the traditional approaches are reappropriated from the viewpoint of actants rather than persons or institutions, suggesting a distinction between four different forms of territorial production. Some material ways of stabilizing the effects of these territorial productions are then conceptualized. The author argues that public space can be seen as constituted by a territorial complexity, thus pointing to the relationship between materiality and public space, via territorial stabilization and production.