Space and Culture recent issues

Care and the Art of Dwelling: Bodies, Technologies, and Home

Schillmeier, M., Domenech, M. — 2009-08-06

Dwelling With the Fourfold

Harman, G. — 2009-08-06

This article explains Martin Heidegger's notorious fourfold (Geviert) as the intersection of two distinct dualisms in Heidegger's philosophy. The role of the fourfold in Heidegger's concept of "the thing" is discussed in especial detail.

When a "Home" Becomes a "House": Care and Caring in the Flood Recovery Process

Sims, R., Medd, W., Mort, M., Twigger-Ross, C. — 2009-08-06

This article focuses on the spatialities of care that are revealed, disrupted, and produced by the dependencies and vulnerabilities associated with flood recovery. It is based on a case study of the summer floods of June 2007 in Hull, Northeast England. The authors use a real-time, diary-based methodology to document and understand the everyday experiences of individuals following the floods. In contrast to the literature, which looks at the impact of care and caring on the home, they ask what we can learn about caring when the home is disrupted. Focusing on the diaries, the authors explore what flood reveals about the emotional and physical landscapes of caring in the context of recovery and illustrate the intimate connections that exist between ideas of dwelling and caring. In drawing on the accounts of carers (who are often also those displaced by flood), they explore the tensions and intersections between the spatialities of caring work as these are enacted between the routines of everyday "normal" life and the specific disruptions generated by flood.

Keeping & Dwelling: Relational Extension, the Idea of Home, and Otherness

Latimer, J., Munro, R. — 2009-08-06

This article explores the topic of home in terms of the art of dwelling. We set out to show that what people "keep" affects their experience of dwelling. Keeping, in this analysis, grants relational extension (Latimer 2009a, 2009b; Munro, 1996; Strathern, 1991; Latimer and Munro 2006), creating and reproducing worlds that bind. As we illustrate, the meaning of home for Euro-Americans can be understood as gravitating from feelings of belonging being anchored within specific locales to matters of identity being entangled in locutions that address the figure of self. In taking up Heidegger's (1978) argument that dwelling is thinking as much as it is "building," we go on to trouble how reflection, when conducted in the mode of comparison rather than contemplation, conflates keeping with issues of choice.

The Role of Domestic Architecture in the Structuring of Memory

Davidson, T. — 2009-08-06

In this article, through personal narratives of three houses she knows, the authors asks, Can houses remember? She suggests that through processes of inhabitation, houses become "second bodies" that remember in two ways. Houses remember and haunt as they animate the memories of previous inhabitants, memories that become embodied by the houses and the current dwellers. Houses also embody histories of design, reflective of broader social attitudes toward intimate places. Second, houses remember as they are imbued with the responsibilities of representing in material form the virtualities of childhood, acting as Bachelard's "land of Motionless Childhood." More broadly, houses become dwelling places through processes of inhabitation and appropriation. These processes involve the synthesis of memories of others animated by a house and one's own experiences of inhabitation.

Dwelling the Telecare Home: Place, Location and Habitability

Lopez, D., Sanchez-Criado, T. — 2009-08-06

Home has become a newly fostered place for care giving in what might be called an aging in place paradigm. As a result, thinking about how the home's spatialities are configured and how they might transform caring has become an important issue for the social sciences. This article is a contribution to this line of thought and looks at being-at-home from a non-anthropocentric point of view. By focusing on the telecare cases of an ongoing ethnographic project and drawing on Heideggerian insights on dwelling and place, we coin the term habitality. We think this term is useful for two purposes: (1) to think about the home as a materially heterogeneous set of spatialities and subjectivities and (2) to understand being-at-home not as a way of living in an enclosed and protected shelter of routine activities, but as a way of combining those spatialities and subjectivities and the differences (and oddities) they might bring.

Home Beyond Home: Dwelling With Threshold Devices

Michael, M., Gaver, W. — 2009-08-06

This article attempts to explore "dwelling" in the contemporary technonatural world through a series of novel interventions in the home. In particular, users' reactions to one of three "threshold devices"—the video window, the local barometer, and the plane tracker—are studied ethnographically. Drawing on Heidegger, the authors interpret the opaque functionality of these technologies as "poetical" insofar as they facilitate users' access to the heterogeneity, ambiguity, and complexity of the technonatural world within which the home is situated. Such access, the authors suggest, can resource a dwelling through which "care" can be enacted. Some of the methodological and political implications of such devices are discussed.

The Question of Movement in Dwelling: Three Displacements in the Care of Dementia

Tirado, F., Callen, B., Cassian, N. — 2009-08-06

The authors explore transformations in the surveillance and discipline framework proposed by Foucault (technologies that "allow to see," the panoptic as a completely closed space) by analyzing new Global Positioning System (GPS) care technologies. The authors contrast the antinomadic characteristics of traditional care practices for people with dementia with the new "in-movement" GPS care devices. They outline three main displacements: the definition of a new space that erases the distance between separated social and sanitary spaces; the lifting of the boundary between the home and the neighborhood; and finally, we point out the importance of movement in this process. These devices show the emergency of new micropractices of power and control: a new anatomy of surveillance. Grounded on movement, they transform physical barriers into risk alarms that do not block users' way; instead, they generate information that mobilizes others. The authors refer to the notion of kinevalue to explain how these devices turn living organisms' motility properties into a value that can be managed, as well as the central feature around which new exercises of patients' security and caregiving may be deployed. Through the analysis of a pilot project on GPS telecare devices carried out by the Spanish Red Cross, the authors suggest a new diagram of the control and management of subjects based on their movement, called "kinepolitics."

BooK Review: Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory, John Roberts (2006). London: Pluto. ISBN 0-745324-11-8. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices From Surrealism to the Present, Michael Sheringham (2006). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-199273-95-2

Gardiner, M. E. — 2009-08-06

Erratum

2009-08-06

Erratum

2009-08-06

Cultural Precincts, Creative Spaces: Giving the Local a Musical Spin

Baker, S., Bennett, A., Homan, S. — 2009-05-01

This article examines the role of three community-based music projects—in Newcastle (Australia), Thanet (United Kingdom), and the City of Playford (Australia)—in engendering notions of regionalism, locality, and identity. Through their involvement in these projects, young people are placed at the intersection of music program management, city mythologies, and national policy. Each of the three projects examined attempts to facilitate urban regeneration through supplying their target community with what one regional arts development officer has coined a "musical spin." However, within wider cultural frameworks, youth's lived experience is often at odds with grander ideals of community arts space. Thus, although the discourses of "creative" urban regeneration articulated by the facilitators of community-based music projects may appear credible at the level of cultural policy, their practical implementation is problematized by competing local narratives that are grounded in established local knowledges and often highly resistant to intervention by outside sources.

"Tits Out for the Boys and No Back Chat": Gendered Space on Holiday

Andrews, H. — 2009-05-01

This article explores the dynamics between the structure of overarching gendered social relations and the practice of gendered identities in the cultural space of one particular tourist destination, Magaluf on the Mediterranean Island of Mallorca. Although there have been many studies concerning constructions of gendered identity in tourism, these have tended to examine sexual relations rather than everyday touristic practice. The data are drawn from several months of ethnographic fieldwork, which involved the production of maps of the resort. The position of the researcher is used in a reflexive analysis of the maps postfieldwork. The article demonstrates how the resort is encoded in the assignation of place names with an idealized type of masculinity that excludes women from the public sphere and furthermore how elements of touristic practice serve to reinforce ideas of women as sexual objects and belonging to the domestic sphere.

How Courts Know: Comparing English Crown Court, U.S.--American State Court, and German District Court

Scheffer, T., Hannken-Illjes, K., Kozin, A. — 2009-05-01

To grasp criminal courts as truth spots, one needs to go beyond their symbolic applications to consider their interactional and epistemic implications. In this study, the authors compare the English Crown Court, German District Court, and U.S. State Court as "places on display" and as "places denied." These perspectives comment on the courts in light of their different interaction orders and their different positions in knowledge processes. For the latter, the authors utilize Knorr's taxonomy of laboratory—experiment relations. The article arrives at one basic distinction: the procedural replacement of trial hearings by deal-oriented plea bargaining in the U.S. context. In contrast, the English and the German courts involve a preference for trial hearings and for fully developed cases, which, however, does not forbid but encourage forms of trial-oriented plea bargain.

Enacting Traffic Spaces

Kullman, K. — 2009-05-01

Children's mobility in Euro-American settings is increasingly circumscribed by adult surveillance and escorting, reflecting broader cultural constructions of safety and risk, autonomy, and protection. This article explores the spatial limits and possibilities of childhood in relation to everyday traffic. It describes a series of pedagogical interventions in a traffic park, where young children are prepared for the events of daily traffic by staging traffic encounters during classes and exercises. Analyzing these enactments through four forms of relational space developed in science and technology studies, the article brings out and contrasts the normativities framing the relationship between children and traffic, some taking determinate, others more fluid and ambivalent shapes. Arguing that neither traffic nor childhood are unitary phenomena but emerge out of diverse ideals and experiences, the article suggests that "good" traffic spaces and agencies are made possible only through ongoing engagement between the different bodies, materials, and hopes of mundane settings.

Moving Homes: From House to Nursing Home and the (Un-)Canniness of Being at Home

Schillmeier, M., Heinlein, M. — 2009-05-01

This article argues that home relates not so much to a fixed and clearly bounded spatial "being" but can be understood as a "becoming," that is, a set of spatial and temporal practices and experiences that fabricate the (un-)canniness of what it means to be at home or not. The (un-)canniness of being at home refers to the mediating and altering relations of changing bodies, emotions, and things that enact the specificities that make up the very feelings and practices of being at home. By retracing the story of a male suffering from two strokes, the authors follow the process of moving from his private house to a nursing home. The ethnographic work presented here tries to highlight the very fragile contingency and normativity of such dynamics concerning the (un-)canniness of being at home.

Domesticating Prostitution: Study of an Interactional Web of Space and Gender

Low, M., Ruhne, R. — 2009-05-01

The authors explore the political and social changes in sex work in Germany from the 1950s to the present. The article uses a theoretical framework in which sociological reconstructions of events are analyzed as interactional webs conditioned by shifting relations of dominance and agency. The interpretation of events focuses on how public policy that moved prostitution from public space had implications not only for public space, but also contained gender and class-specific components. Prostitutes who were initially `unpleasantly' conspicuous in the streets of the city increasingly disappeared from the eyes of the public. This disappearance was the result of purposive and far-reaching spatial policy. In the context of `traditional localization' on the one hand and increasing public policy pressure on the other, prostitution concentrated more and more in a few, narrowly limited urban areas. This new spatial situation brought about shifts in power between the various groups involved.

Fundamental Ontology Versus Esse est percipi: Theorizing (Working Class) Being and Liberation

Gilfillan, P. — 2009-05-01

This article is of particular relevance to ethnographers and theorists of the working class and the concern to articulate a sociology of liberation. The article addresses the ontology of class and the central Western problematic of historicising reason, being and liberation/redemption first signalled in the twelfth century. From the standpoint of the author's ethnographic engagement with working class dasein in Scotland, the article emerges from an analysis of an exchange between two authors engaged in very different strategies of representing and understanding the reality of class. The article seeks to uncover some of the issues faced by social theorists who engage with the long durée task of modelling an ethnography of being and giving a sociological account of a radically emancipatory exercise of situated freedom from within class-based civilisation and societies.

The Space of Appearances: The Constitution of the Public Realm

Charlesworth, S. J. — 2009-05-01

This article examines processes taking place within public institutions and political and public life that produce social exclusion and examines the human costs of such processes that render people "invisible."

Utopias of the New Right in J. G. Ballard's Fiction

Ostrowidzki, E. A. — 2008-12-30

The colonization of social space by capitalism has engendered a New World Disorder, which has translated into a fear of Otherness. One response to this fear has been the withdrawal of the economic elites into gated communities that might evolve into fortified outposts of neo-imperialism predicated on the social, political, cultural, and economic exclusion of the Other. It is within this geopolitical terrain that J. G. Ballard's imaginative geography in Super-Cannes (2000)—Eden-Olympia—emerges as a commentary on such "Utopias of the New Right." Driven by a geopolitical imaginary based on neoliberalism and neofascism, Eden-Olympia is a Utopia existing in a predacious relation to local Arab residents. Specifically, this article demonstrates that Utopias of the New Right threaten to extirpate public space, the global commons, and democratic civil society. Generally, this article argues that neofascist and neo-imperial geopolitical imaginaries threaten our ability to imagine alternative geopolitical imaginaries.

Contestation and Conformity: Street and Park Skateboarding in New York City Public Space

Chiu, C. — 2008-12-30

By comparing street skating and park skating, this article examines why skateboarders persist in their use of public space even in the face of extensive regulation and the provision of skate parks. The researcher conducted participant observation and interviews in four sites in New York City: Brooklyn Bridge Plaza, Union Square Park, Riverside Skate Park, and Hudson River Skate Park. A total of 16 semistructured interviews were conducted. Differences between street and park skating are presented by utilizing three dimensions: the social production of public space, the social control imposed on skaters, and the discursive construction of skateboarding. Street skateboarding represents a contesting spatial practice creating a mental, social, and body space, embodying a skater's self-identity and cultural expression. Findings suggest that the governance of public space needs to adapt to the changing needs of multiple users rather than excluding a few without any attempt at accommodating them.

The Cultural Archive of the IKEA Store

Lindqvist, U. — 2008-12-30

The IKEA store has become one of the world's most recognized and reproduced archives of national culture in the global marketplace, necessitating a critical reading of its spatial narrative. This article engages in a historicized reading of the culturally encoded space of the IKEA store, of which they were 285 in nearly 40 countries by the end of 2008. It argues that the IKEA store helps construct, reproduce, and disseminate a narrative of Swedish exceptionalism worldwide. This narrative showcases Sweden's image as a peaceful, homogenous, and industrious little nation, exemplifying Enlightenment ideals of social and economic progress while avoiding implication in the Enlightenment's more violent aspects. This article engages Derrida's formulation of archival violence to demonstrate how these hidden histories disrupt this archive's dominant narrative. Recovering these histories is particularly important given recent renewed faith in an essential "Swedishness" that has emerged in response to non-Western immigration in Sweden.

Illness as Metonym: Writing Urban Exploration in Infiltration

Genosko, G. — 2008-12-30

The subcultural practices of urban explorers are studied through an analysis of the accomplishments of Canadian Jeff Chapman. Using his zine Infiltration as a resource, this essay considers his key sites of exploration, two active downtown Toronto hospitals, not only from the viewpoint of his experiences at both as a patient but also as ur-sites for exploration and an original rethinking of the city. Chapman's illness is metonymic, not metaphoric, and this informs his style of urban exploration. While situating Chapman's investigations in terms of driftworks, surrealist strolls, situationist perambulations, and De Certeau's counter-panoptic walks, the nontheoretical character of Chapman's ethico-aesthetic preoccupations is allowed to shine through in his homespun nonmastery of exploration and displays of personal courage as he rambled around closed hospital wings in his gown along with his intravenous pole.

We Have Always Been Virtual: Writing, Institutions, and Technology!

Yakhlef, A. — 2008-12-30

Accounts of virtual organization have been couched in terms of concepts and metaphors that do not inherit from the features of a coherent theory of virtuality. Arguing that virtuality is inherent in modernity, this article focuses on three major drivers behind the current wave of virtualization of organizational work practices to explore the interplay of the virtual and the concrete. Using three vignettes as an illustration, the article discusses how organizations, through writing, make the presence of humans contingent; through technology, displace human action into artifacts, machines, or electronic devices; and through institutions, virtualize (conflicting and sometimes collaborative) human relations and proximal encounters. However, the process of virtualization does not only deterritorialize existing skills and relations, but it also generates new skills, which in their turn impose a reterritorialization process.

Inconsequential Materialities: The Movements of Lost Effects

Bissell, D. — 2008-12-30

This article is about the unintentional placement of objects. Focusing on items of clothing that have been often accidentally displaced, this article explores the ephemeral, delicate, and often superficial materiality of these objects of rupture relative to a flow-optimized urban landscape. This article fits into wider debates on ownerless objects, unintentional memorialism, and events of corporeal severance. Focus is on both the physical movements of these objects as they fold through the surrounding environment and the affectual movements that emerge from their capacity to rupture bodily experience by circulating particular forms of feeling. This article considers how certain acts of intervention can transform these objects through movements of expectancy to create moments of delight through reunion. This article makes a useful contribution in considering how particular objects at the nexus of the human and nonhuman rise to prominence and through this how, contrary to the sublime or magnificent, small and intensely personal dislocated objects have the capacity to move.

The Dance Floor: Nightlife, Civilizing Process, and Multiculturalism in Canada

Matsinhe, D. M. — 2008-12-30

This article is based on a study of dance floors of Whyte Avenue in the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. As extended cases, the life processes on the floors are interpreted as manifestations of Canada's emotional history in the form of multiculturalism. Building on observations combined with informal and casual conversations, the study focuses on arousal and expression of emotions through bodily movements on the dance floors. The readings of these spaces along with their life processes are informed by the theoretical concepts of the "carnival" and the "grotesque" (Bakhtin), "liminality" (Turner), and the "civilizing process" and "informalization" (Elias and Wouters). In this theoretical framework, the particular emotional life processes that occur on the dance floors are rendered orderable as historically contingent phenomena that incarnate the wave of multiculturalization that shaped and has continued to shape the cultural, geographic, political, social, and psychological (emotional) landscapes of Canada since the 1960s.

Sarajevska Zima: A Festival Amid War Debris in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Bell, C. — 2008-12-30

The Sarajevo Winter Festival (Sarajevska Zima) has been running continuously since 1984. Remarkably, even during the 1990s war and siege the festival continued, with patrons and artists ducking sniper fire to attend events. For the tourist or foreign artist visiting Sarajevo for Sarajevska Zima, the experience is a case study of Dark Tourism. Visitors certainly know about the genocide; they saw it on television. They learnt a new term, `ethnic cleansing'. In this city the citizens endured unimaginable nightmares; addressing issues of survival is an ongoing process. At the festival the artists work in galleries and on the streets. The city environs with the numerous sprawling cemeteries of gleaming gravestones is an ever-present reminder of events in recent memory. The foreign artists' re-appropriation of public spaces demonstrates their own compassionate responses to the war experiences of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Erratum

2008-12-30

Cowboy Capitalism: The Art of Ping Pong Country in the New Berlin

Stahl, G. — 2008-11-06

This article draws on recent discussion regarding changes in city life by focusing on specific cultural spaces and social relations found in contemporary Berlin. "The Art of Ping Pong Country"—the union of ping pong and country music as a series of events bringing together artists, cultural entrepreneurs, and new media practitioners—highlights the temporal, social, spatial, and semiotic distinctions of the city's current scene, particularly as a manifestation of the overlapping contexts of work and play in a "culturalized economy." Ping Pong Country is made up of a complex set of relationships that reveals the way artists and entrepreneurs in Berlin construct individual, group, and urban identities; how a particular relationship to flexible work patterns and urban lifestyles is negotiated; and how the city acquires and maintains its specific character and semantic force by evoking a particularly attractive structure of feeling as manifest in its deliberate "playfulness."

Global Abode: Home and Mobility in Narratives of Round-the-World Travel

Germann Molz, J. — 2008-11-06

This article explores the way home is redefined within the context of new patterns of corporeal and mediated travel by examining the complex intersection of mobility, home, and belonging from the perspective of long-term world travelers. Through an examination of the stories these round-the-world travelers tell online and in interviews, the article suggests that travelers imagine themselves as world citizens who are able to feel at home anywhere and everywhere. The article proposes the notion of "global abode" to capture the interplay between mobility and home, as well as the particularly cosmopolitan attitude these travelers express in terms of feeling at home in the world. Contrary to descriptions of the cosmopolitan as a detached mobile subject, however, the findings suggest that these travelers make themselves at home in the world through embodied, embedded, and localized acts of habitability.

Performance Geographies from Slave Ship to Ghetto

Stanley Niaah, S. — 2008-11-06

Performance geography is an integral and unexplored dimension of cultural studies and cultural geography. it expands the definitions of cultural geography and performance studies to include the way people, living in particular locations, give those locations identity through performance practices. In explaining this concept, the paper expands data gathered over twelve years' participation and later, research on Jamaica's Dancehall performance, and analyzes its applicability to other Black Atlantic performance genres. Essentially, analyzing Dancehall's macro- and micro-spatialities, spatial categories, philosophies and systems were revealed, thereby delineating what this author identifies as performance geography. It is the explanation of performance geography within old and new Black performance practices such as the Blues, and especially in urban ghettoes, as in Kingston's Dancehall and South Africa's Kwaito that occupies this paper.

Space Theft or Space Transfer: The Nature of Crime-Induced Spatial Partitioning and Control in Enclosed Neighborhoods in Ibadan and Johannesburg

Fabiyi, O. O. — 2008-11-06

The article compares the typologies of road closures and the resulting enclosed neighborhoods in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Ibadan, Nigeria, and the nature of internal democracies behind the enclosures. It uses unstructured questionnaires administered to the neighborhood associations' executive members and the spatial analysis of road closures in geographic information system databases of the two cities to describe the differences in typologies of enclosures and nonstate spatial mechanisms. When gates or barriers are retrofitted on existing public roads, it implies that the legitimate authority of the state to control space and social lives in neighborhoods is either transferred to the nonstate actors by the state through constitutional provision or hijacked (stolen) if such provisions do not exist. The article observes that space transfer by state to the community in enclosed neighborhoods is ongoing in Johannesburg, yet enclosed communities largely lack social cohesion. Space theft is common in Ibadan, as no legal control is in place.

Public Road Signs as Intermediate Interaction

Juhlin, O., Normark, D. — 2008-11-06

This article reports a study of the abundant practice among people who live along roads to communicate with passing drivers by making and mounting public road signs. These signs can be seen as a complement, parallel, or second to official signs posted by road authorities. The article focuses specifically on how public road signs support different forms of communities, the practical work of enhancing readability for passing drivers, and the adoption to road inspectors' work of removing public road signs. The authors argue that public road signs are important, enabling intermediate interaction between communities. Furthermore, people posting signs adopt different tactics so that their messages are detected by passing drivers, while not being deleted by road authorities. However, road inspectors' work of removing signs is also vital for the success of public road signs, seeing their maintenance work as editing the road.

Toward a Morality of Materiality: Adorno and the Primacy of the Object

Wilford, J. — 2008-11-06

The growing interest in materiality in cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and geography, sometimes referred to as "new materialism," seems to have left little room for normative questions and concerns. Although such research has explored the role of materiality in normative projects, attention to the normative quality of the material itself is lacking. This article argues that Adorno's theory of the primacy of the object provides materiality research with a theoretical foundation for exploring the normative power of the material object itself. By incorporating the theory of the primacy of the object with the theoretical insights of new materialism, this article will demonstrate not only how Adorno's theory can benefit current research on materiality but also how this research expands the way Adorno's supposedly elitist theories can be applied.

The Meaning of Protestant-Calvinist Imagery in Urban America: An Interpretation of the City-Suburb Structure

Hardinghaus, M. — 2008-11-06

Inspired by Max Weber's Protestant Ethic, and applying a social-geographical framework, this discourse analysis inquires into the influence of religious imagery on a characteristic settlement structure in modern America. Cultural guiding images such as the Garden of Eden and the frontier, built in a tradition of Protestant, Calvinist Puritanism, are linked with a specifically Christian corpus of broadly biblical orientations. They are integral parts of the American way of life and had a lasting impact on modern urban development, particularly in America. Although the dispersed suburbs are supposed to carry on the political ideal of a decentralized society, the topologies of the centralized cities are the hubs of business activity, places of economic assertion. Calvinist imagery plays an important part in this: on one hand, it reflects the desire for a way of settlement that was originally agrarian motivated; on the other, the need for a centralized settlement for economic purposes.

The Knowledge Organization: Cultural Priorities and Workspace Design

Meerwarth, T. L., Trotter, R. T., Briody, E. K. — 2008-11-06

General Motors Research and Development (R&D) management is planning to renovate portions of the Warren, Michigan, research facility. The study's goal was to help organizational leaders and planners understand culturally endorsed workspace architecture and design elements. Researchers used a rapid ethnographic assessment research design grounded in cognitive anthropology and methods to capture impressions and cultural requirements for workspace. This study adds to the existing body of knowledge at the intersection of workspace, culture, and user-oriented design by analyzing employee comments and research observations to construct a cultural model of R&D workspace. All model components underscore the cultural values of productivity and pragmatism. The authors examine features associated with the workspace productivity model, behaviors associated with the workspace, and differences in workspace perceptions and behaviors by organizational role. Findings refine the definition of knowledge worker culture and suggest that an orientation to productivity reflects broader American cultural values including pragmatism, individualism, and effectiveness.

Sarigazi, Istanbul: Monuments of the Everyday

Moceri, T. — 2008-11-06

In Turkey, gecekondus (literally "set down by night") are illegally constructed settlements that oftentimes become formalized over time. Through a description of the gecekondu settlement of Sarigazi, this article draws a connection between the function that Istanbul's historical monuments served in the past and the function of the gecekondus today. Through the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires and most recently the Turkish Republic, these monuments were in a continuous process of change and necessarily flexible to respond to changes in religion, culture, and power. At one time, Istanbul's ruins were lived monuments and authorities on life in the ancient city. Today, the gecekondus assert a similar authority. They reflect the epic lineage and personality of Istanbul— contradictory, incomplete, ambiguous, and heterogeneous—on a human scale.

Lacan, the City, and the Utopian Symptom: An Analysis of Abject Urban Spaces

Nichols, J. — 2008-11-06

This article examines the concept of utopia by focusing on the distance between the utopian myths and the actual city they originate in. While the individual work of utopian fiction offers to the attentive reader a map of the neuroses of the author, when taken in general as a genre or type of social conception, it provides the reader with a map of the city as a neurotic social object. Utopia can thus be read as a type of neurotic psychological topography. From this analytic basis, a different mode of inquiry may be deployed, a mode of inquiry that begins with specific urban artifacts that are omitted from the utopian model. In this analysis, the author focuses on the cemetery and the sewer. These abject or pathological urban sites carry a form of contaminative excess within their structures and as such become at once the focal point of anxiety and irreducible fascination.

Skatepark as Neoliberal Playground: Urban Governance, Recreation Space, and the Cultivation of Personal Responsibility

Howell, O. — 2008-11-06

More than 2,000 skateboard parks have been built in the United States over the past decade. Although these parks are a response to community demand, many cities have provided these facilities on certain neoliberal conditions. As a review of parks management literature reveals, cities assume no liability for injuries and expect skateboarders to secure private funding; urban managers also expect skateboarders to display character traits of personal responsibility and entrepreneurial-ism. This is in contrast to Progressive Era playgrounds, where cities completely financed playgrounds and took responsibility for personal safety; urban managers also sought to inculcate values of loyalty, which they viewed as necessary in an increasingly bureaucratized society. The comparison highlights how the skatepark can be viewed as an instance in which neoliberal governance practices have reconfigured the citizen—state relationship from one of entitlement to one of contractualism.

Youth and Immigrants' Perspectives on Public Spaces

van Lieshout, M., Aarts, N. — 2008-11-06

This article reports on perceptions and practices of youth and immigrants concerning public spaces in the Netherlands. Policy formation does not necessarily incorporate their interests, even though they form large and growing demographic groups in Dutch society. Data were collected in semi-structured conversations and group discussions and were analyzed using a set of concepts involving frames and framing. It is concluded that, despite the current context characterized by a decreasing availability of public space and an increasing use of virtual spaces via new media, public spaces remain important for both groups, especially for fulfilling important social functions such as the construction of identities. Furthermore, the interlocutors do not influence the design and use of public space via formal channels but, nevertheless, do have an effect via informal ways, by making use of informal networks, on one hand, and simply by being around, on the other.

Night Spaces: Darkness, Deterritorialization, and Social Control

Williams, R. — 2008-11-06

Although spanning the same physical area, the spaces of night differ from the spaces of daylight. Crucially, the night impels society to establish mechanisms that take the darkness into account (e.g., via enhanced surveillance of vulnerable areas and the lighting of places of consumption). The night spaces created by government policies, business strategies, or social codes of conduct seek to direct, if not outright control, people's actions and desires. Yet such hegemonic night spaces are themselves contested by groups and individuals who use the darkness to pursue alternate goals, some socially transgressive and some illegal. Accordingly, night spaces can be multiple, overlapping, and contradictory, incorporating the myriad tensions of the social processes that constitute them.

Reviewer Acknowledgments

2008-11-06

Spaceandculture.org - Books Recently Reviewed

2008-11-06