Moving Spaces and Places

There is a rich literary tradition of depicting human-dwelling places (usually houses) as living bodies, stretching from the Middle Ages to contemporary fiction. On several occasions, the interaction between the characters in these works and the house-body entity described has taken the form of a digestive journey. Rooms come to symbolise mouths, kitchens and even bowels, and sometimes the human body and mind are gradually incorporated into the external architectural space. This chapter examines two literary works in which this occurs – the ‘House of Temperance’ in Spencer's The Faerie Queene (1590) and Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959). These two examples, from two very different literary traditions (Renaissance allegorical and modern Gothic horror respectively) show the fine line between revelation and horror, how spatial materiality and meaning are flexible and how a building may transform the character within it both psychologically and physically.

This chapter suggests that the unsettling reconfiguration of ‘home’ in works of post-colonial literary adaptation has an affective impact on non-Indigenous readers, contributing, potentially, to processes of decolonisation. Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, in their book Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, argue that Australian texts which seek to disturb readers by pursuing modes of post-colonial ‘unsettlement’ can activate new discourses and, thereby, inspire social change (1998). Focussing upon undergraduate student responses to two works of Aboriginal Australian literary adaptation, Melissa Lukashenko's short story ‘Country: Being and Belonging on Aboriginal Land’ (2013) and Leah Purcell's stage play, The Drover's Wife (2016), this chapter draws upon ideas pertaining to ‘affect’ to reveal how, through the subversive reimagining of tropes and structures commonly associated with Western dwelling, works of Indigenous literary adaptation elicit emotional responses in non-Indigenous readers and, in so doing, open up new spaces for listening within existing frameworks of white possession.

Despite the apparent philanthropic concerns of the new imperialism and the rhetoric of the civilising mission, the Second Boer War (1899–1902) revealed British irrational ambition, military reverses, scandals and evidence of inadequate administration. In this context, the South African concentration camps where the Boers, mostly women and children whose houses and farms had been destroyed by the British forces, were concentrated, stand out as examples of a seemingly arbitrary power. The controversies over such camps, and over the War itself, were heightened after Emily Hobhouse's Report was made public. Emily Hobhouse, an active humanitarian, obtained permission to visit the camps in order to write a report on the living conditions there. Upon returning to England, she had a meeting with Campbell-Bannerman, the leader of the Liberal Party, who eventually denounced the methods of barbarism carried out in such places. The Report appeared soon after the meeting and waves of protest ensued. Both Emily Hobhouse and Campbell-Bannerman were under crossfire.

My intention in this paper is, firstly, to briefly address the social, political and economic context underlying British imperial expansion and struggle for space at the turn of the nineteenth century, as far as controversies over the Boer War are concerned; secondly, to study the characteristics and living conditions in South African ‘concentration camps’ relying, to a great extent, on Emily Hobhouse's account; and thirdly, to analyse the social and political impact of the denunciation of such camps as places of wholesale cruelty in Hobhouse's (in) famous Report.

Underpinned by Henri Lefebvre's notion of the production of space with its triad of spatial practice, lived space and conceived space, this project traces the history of East German urban modernism through its trajectory of change from an ambitious socialist project via market-driven failure, to its revival as creative space. The physical manifestations of East German urban modernism are its large-scale residential estates with their ubiquitous high-rise buildings, assembled from precast concrete elements, or plates, lending them the vernacular German name Plattenbauten. In terms of their design, planning, construction and scope, these buildings and their locations were once part of a large, government-driven experiment in urban modernism: in the reconstruction of the country after World War II, residential estates were designed from scratch to be proof of a new, progressive, idealistic and somehow ‘better’ post-war Germany and were one of the most visible manifestations of urban modernism in Germany. After the German unification, however, many of the housing estates from the 1970s to 1980s fell into disrepair: many buildings were demolished and the remaining ones frequently became social and economic trouble spots. In the latest and (almost) ironic twist, however, the history of urban modernism changed direction once more: after more than 20 years of neglect, the Plattenbau has been rediscovered as much needed affordable and, due to its unique engineering, easily adaptable creative living, working and commercial space.

In 1948, South Africa's Apartheid legislation imposed modernist spatial planning on its populations and created worlds Black people struggled to connect with. Crime, poverty and unemployment have emerged as legacies of Apartheid that continue to impact the lives of Black people living in the townships. In 1994, the new democratic government identified community engagement (CE) as a critical process that could help restore the values of Black people and the places they live in.

This chapter explores a CE process as storytelling to trace the spatiality of agency. As a researcher-architect living in a township, I examined the voluntary community organisation (VCO), Studiolight's CE process, and an exhibition entitled Who we are Macassar, which was conducted between 2016 and 2018 in the community of Macassar, a township in the Western Cape of South Africa. The VCO worked with local youth to produce story maps and a street photography project that reauthors (retells and rewrites) the stories of life in Macassar to critically engage the spatial legacies of Apartheid. Brazilian theorist Paulo Freire's writings on how neglected population groups can self-organise to create knowledge that can restore social narratives is useful to make sense of the CE process. I highlight the spaces of the CE process and use Freire's concepts of critical action, praxis and co-creation to structure the study. I then reflect on the nomadic and sporadic spatiality that emerges in Macassar to discuss how architects can think about forging places with a sense of community identity and belonging.

According to the critic Tom Lubbock, ‘Cloth is the universal free element. It doesn't have to explain itself. It performs’ (Lubbock, 2002). Cloth drapes and folds, becoming a membrane separating what is outside from what is inside. In this chapter, I draw on the writings of de Certeau, Rendell, Tschumi, etc. to develop ideas concerning the ways in which the use and understanding of textiles may move our perceptions of the boundaries of space, and the location of place. I argue that cloth may contain the identity of place, and that lace and lace net-works provide a starting point for the exploration of fluid space as described by Isozaki, Ishigami, etc. ¹ I also discuss those structures/mise-en-scène which frame our awareness and interpretation of place and space. Examples of work drawn from art, cinema and architecture are used to illuminate those ideas which question the materiality and purpose of form and enclosure.

Using oceanographer Rachel Carson's study The Edge of the Sea (1955) to contextualise tidal spaces, this chapter discusses how constantly shifting and eroding coastlines act as a site for writing, re-writing and performing acts of cultural and personal memory. It also considers the ecological impact of human activity on tidal spaces and their more-than-human inhabitants.

14-18 NOW's Pages of the Sea, directed by Danny Boyle, invited communities around the United Kingdom to meet on their local beach to commemorate those who were lost in World War I by marking portraits in the tidal sands. Choreographer Chloë Smith's Tidal, performed in Berwick-upon-Tweed in 2015, was commissioned as a commemorative work but became an act of personal memorialising when Smith's brother drowned prior to the event. Performance company Curious's Out of Water (2012–2014), invites participants on a dawn-walk to the shoreline exploring memory, time, genealogy and water through song and movement. My own collaborative site-responsive work, Tide Times (2018), created with electroacoustic composer Tim Cooper for the tidal island of Cramond, explores the multiple identities of place over time. Tide Times encouraged audiences to create their own tidal poems and artworks through a series of invitations in treasure chests hidden around the island.

In explicating these aforementioned artworks, which explore ideas of remembrance using tidal spaces, this chapter will also acknowledge the forgetting that is implicit in performing these actions. What can the legacy of commemorations traced in such a transient and precarious space as a tidal zone be? This chapter argues that while shorelines provide sites for large and small scale acts of public remembering, they are simultaneously acts of forgetting as the twice daily tides cause inevitable erasure.

Over the past 15 years, there has been a growing interest in the potential of movement-based artistic practices for exploring aspects of the urban experience. As a visual artist and a geographer, I have become increasingly interested in how the movement-based practice of performative walking might be used as an ‘inventive method’ for examining and understanding aspects of how we live in cities.

In this chapter, I draw upon the insights gained from four recent projects to explore performative walking's potential as a mode of enquiry. These projects were conducted in and around Edinburgh, Scotland, between 2016 and 2019. Each project was designed to create an affective ‘friction’ and enhance participants' sensitivity to space and place through practices such as hyper-slow walking, repetitive walks, walking in the dark and creating spaces for imaginary games. The projects demonstrated to me that performative walking can help uncover emotional and hidden geographies by combining, and bringing to bear upon these spaces, the visual, sensory, historical, mythical, remembered, personal, projected and, importantly, the imagined.

I conclude that performative walking is a valuable form of research which should be given parity with other forms of urban inquiry, such as public consultations, in dialogues about our future cities. Furthermore, I propose that attempts should be made by those interested in developing ‘inventive’ methods in urban inquiry, including those interested in developing creative geographies, to evaluate more systematically the contribution that performative walking might make to ways in which we understand, and develop, our cities.

The perception that a particular place is unsafe to live can significantly affect the quality of life of individuals who live there. In Brazil, crime rates in urban centres increase every year, which leads to a constant sense of fear shared by the population. Safety perception may affect the way people move in their neighbourhood and interact with the public environment. In the present study, we addressed the question of safety perception of residents of three areas of the Federal District, the capital of Brazil, and how this perception impacts walking behaviour. Seventeen residents participated in go-along ethnographic interviews, being accompanied in their daily journeys. Each interview recorded the interaction of the participants with the surroundings during their journey. The observations were submitted to content analysis to verify how perception of safety, insecurity and fear of crime affect the decision to walk. The results indicate that the decision to walk interacted with a more positive view of the neighbourhood, that is, perception of safety enhances walking. On the other hand, perception of insecurity and fear of crime discourage the occurrence of this behaviour. The more people fear crime and perceive a place as unsafe, the less they walk and the more they avoid walking in certain places. We conclude with a short note about the use of participatory mobile methods for the study of complex social phenomena such as perceptions and fear of crime.

The practice of ‘city-making’ – a civic-led form of urban development – is currently gaining attention from urban professionals and scholars across Europe. Whereas scholars have so far focused mostly on the conditions that make such civic-led urban development possible, little research has been dedicated to the skills and capacities of city-makers. This challenge is taken up in this chapter. Interviews with city-makers across Europe reveal that whereas knowledge of socio-spatial processes and process competences are important, city-makers also deploy a third set of skills, including the ability to act in the moment, adapt to contingencies and connect personal drivers to city-wide processes. This third set of skills is further conceptualised, by drawing out an analogy with Deleuzian-Guattarian lines of flight and modern dance improvisation techniques. Four dance improvisation techniques are discussed more in detail and compared with the practices described by the city-makers interviewed for this study. The concluding section of this chapter speculates on how the notion of improvisation could be adopted within wider practices of spatial planning and urban governance as well.