Making Place

Description

Body, place, and culture in urban built environments

Space and place have become central to analysis of culture and history in the humanities and social sciences. Making Place examines how people engage the material and social worlds of the urban environment via the rhythms of everyday life and how bodily responses are implicated in the making and experiencing of place. The contributors introduce the concept of spatial ethnography, a new methodological approach that incorporates both material and abstract perspectives in the study of people and place, and encourages consideration of the various levels—from the personal to the planetary—at which spatial change occurs. The book's case studies come from Costa Rica, Colombia, India, Austria, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Introduction Embodied Placemaking: An Important Category of Critical Analysis
Arijit Sen and Lisa Silverman
1. Placemaking and Embodied Space
Setha Low
2. Visualizing the Body Politic
Swati Chattopadhyay
3. Inside the Magic Circle: Conjuring the Terrorist Enemy at the 2001 Group of Eight Summit
Emanuela Guano
4. Eating Ethnicity: Spatial Ethnography of Hyderabad House Restaurant on Devon Avenue, Chicago
Arijit Sen
5. Urban Boundaries, Religious Experience, and the North West London Eruv
Jennifer A. Cousineau
6. "Art, Memory, and the City" in Bogotá: Mapa Teatro's Artistic Encounters with Inhabited Places
Karen E. Till
7. Jewish Memory, Jewish Geography: Vienna before 1938
Lisa Silverman

Sujets

• Historical Geography
• architectural history
• HISTORY
• Sociology
• History of architecture
• General officer
• Anthropology
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Urban
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 13 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253011497
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Making Place is Volume 8 in the series
21ST CENTURY STUDIES
Center for 21st Century Studies
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Richard Grusin, General Editor
MAKING PLACE
S PACE AND E MBODIMENT IN THE C ITY
EDITED BY A RIJIT S EN AND L ISA S ILVERMAN
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu Telephone [phone] Fax [phone]
© 2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Making place : space and embodiment in the city / edited by Arijit Sen and Lisa Silverman.
     pages cm. — (21st century studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01142-8 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01143-5 (pb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01149-7 (eb) 1. Cities and towns—Psychological aspects. 2. Cities and towns—Social aspects. 3. Spatial behavior—Social aspects. 4. Place attachment—Social aspects. 5. Environmental psychology. I. Sen, Arijit, [date]- II. Silverman, Lisa.
HT153.M32 2014
307.76—dc23
2013024342
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Embodied Placemaking: An Important Category of Critical Analysis / A RIJIT S EN AND L ISA S ILVERMAN
1. Placemaking and Embodied Space / S ETHA L OW
2. Visualizing the Body Politic / S WATI C HATTOPADHYAY
3. Inside the Magic Circle: Conjuring the Terrorist Enemy at the 2001 Group of Eight Summit / E MANUELA G UANO
4. Eating Ethnicity: Spatial Ethnography of Hyderabad House Restaurant on Devon Avenue, Chicago / A RIJIT S EN
5. Urban Boundaries, Religious Experience, and the North West London Eruv / J ENNIFER A. C OUSINEAU
6. “Art, Memory, and the City” in Bogotá: Mapa Teatro's Artistic Encounters with Inhabited Places / K AREN E. T ILL
7. Jewish Memory, Jewish Geography: Vienna before 1938 / L ISA S ILVERMAN
Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many of the essays in this volume featured in two interdisciplinary symposia held at the at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in fall 2010 and spring 2011 titled “Embodied Placemaking in Urban Public Spaces.” We are grateful to the staff of the Center, especially director Richard Grusin, associate director John Blum, former interim director Merry Wiesner-Hanks, and former deputy director Kate Kramer for their support in the organization of the symposia and the publication of this volume. Many thanks are also due to the College of Letters and Science for the co-sponsorship of the symposia, as well as to the Graduate School, the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, the Center for Jewish Studies, the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures collaborative project, the Cultures and Communities Program, the Urban Studies Program, the Peck School of the Arts, and the Departments of Anthropology and Geography for their support.
At Indiana University Press, we thank Rebecca Tolen and Sarah Jacobi for their help and advice, and we thank two external reviewers for insightful comments that greatly improved the manuscript.
We also wish to thank the following colleagues, friends, and family for their assistance and encouragement: Cheryl Ajirotutu, Anna Andrzejewski, Caitlin Boyle, Simone Ferro, Robert Greenstreet, Marta Gutman, Ryan Holifield, Gregory Jay, Louis Nelson, Harry van Oudenallen, and Vaishali Wagh.
Both the symposia and the essays in this volume underscore the emerging scholarship on the built environment carried out under the aegis of Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures, a new collaborative area of research and doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and –Madison that focuses on the study of everyday cultural landscapes. This program focuses on the study of the built environment within a historical framework, seeking to understand the relationship between built form and culture as well as the complex relationship between cultural practices, material culture and human agency. Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures affiliates include students and faculty with diverse research and teaching interests, including art and architectural history, cultural landscapes, public history, urban history, and cultural geography.
Arijit Sen and Lisa Silverman
Introduction
Embodied Placemaking: An Important Category of Critical Analysis
ARIJIT SEN AND LISA SILVERMAN
Space, Place, and the Body
In 1943 British Parliamentarians engaged in heated debate about how to rebuild the House of Commons chamber, which had been destroyed in 1941. Some argued that its rebuilding should have been used as an opportunity for expansion to improve its formerly cramped conditions, reshaping it from a rectangle into a semicircle. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, however, sided with opponents by insisting that the new building should conform to the size and shape of the old. He knew that the chamber would be crowded and filled to capacity during critical votes and debates, and it was important that these activities proceed with members spilling out into the aisles, lending on great occasions “a sense of crowd and urgency.” On slow days the chamber was barely filled, but on others it became a throbbing center of civic debate. It continued to be both a symbolic center of state power as well as a vibrant democratic institution, but in its newly rebuilt form it would also trigger resurgent memories of a place bombed during the war and proudly reconstructed as a symbol of a nation's resilience. Churchill's understanding of the situation is best summed up in his now-famous declaration: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” 1
Churchill's astute observations suggest his deeper understanding of the complex relationship between place and how our bodies engage it. His “sense of place” of the House of Commons extended beyond the building's architectural form and its functional use to include its spatial ambience and the meaning produced when individuals and groups used the building. This understanding underscores the fact that changing physical modifications allows individuals to personalize and transform a location when they occupy it. Churchill's recognition of the building as more than a mere institutional setting for governance suggests its function as a stage that derived its meaning from the event, the audience, the performers, as well as the physical qualities of the setting. What he perceived—and what this volume seeks to address—is that the meaning of buildings, neighborhoods, and cities is not static, but variable in its personal, cultural, historical, social, economic, and political contexts. Churchill's stress on the importance of a crowded, and therefore urgent, ambience indicates his awareness of the role of the body in turning a government institution into a place of vibrant civic discourse. In other words, he understood the role of embodiment in the making of the built environment.
Recently the epistemological boundaries according to which we understand culture and history have shifted because of a so-called “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences. 2 This spatial turn, which puts space and place at the center of analysis of culture and history, is undoubtedly a result of fluctuations in social thought emerging from broader economic, social, political, and cultural transformations, including increasing globalization and its impact on media, migration, identity, and subjectivities, as Barney Warf and Santa Arias explain. 3 For other scholars the spatial turn refers to seeing the transformation of economies, emerging digital cultures, and ecological movements as global processes that prompt us to rethink the role of locality, space, and spatiality in understanding culture and history. 4 But despite these new considerations, the concept of placemaking—as well as how it can be used as a practical tool of analysis by scholars who do not traditionally study the built environment—remains difficult to comprehend and apply. In this volume we argue that using “embodied placemaking” as a category of analysis—that is, foregrounding not only place but also the body's role within it as mutually constituent elements of the built environment—can open up deeper and innovative ways of understanding the human experience across a variety of disciplines.
Place is a slippery concept. In the past when describing physical landscapes, scholars of the built environment carefully distinguished between their use of the terms “space” and “place.” Space has traditionally been considered more abstract; one common view defined space as a boundless, empty, thre