Moving Spaces and Places: Interdisciplinary Essays on Transformative Movements Through Space, Place, and Time 1800712278, 9781800712270

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Moving Spaces and Places

Emerald Interdisciplinary Connexions Series Editors Rob Fisher, Director of Progressive Connexions Susanne Schotanus

Editorial Board Ann-Marie Cook, Principal Policy and Legislation Officer, Queensland Department of Justice and Attorney General, Australia Teresa Cutler-Broyles, Director of Programmes, Progressive Connexions John Parry, Edward Brunet Professor of Law, Lewis and Clark Law School, USA Karl Spracklen, Professor of Music, Leisure and Culture, Leeds Beckett University, UK

About the Series Emerald Interdisciplinary Connexions promotes innovative research and encourages exemplary interdisciplinary practice, thinking and living. Books in the series focus on developing dialogues between disciplines and among disciplines, professions, practices and vocations in which the interaction of chapters and authors is of paramount importance. They bring cognate topics and ideas into orbit with each other whilst simultaneously alerting readers to new questions, issues and problems. The series encourages interdisciplinary interaction and knowledge sharing and, to this end, promotes imaginative collaborative projects which foster inclusive pathways to global understandings.

Moving Spaces and Places: Interdisciplinary Essays on Transformative Movements Through Space, Place, and Time EDITED BY BEITSKE BOONSTRA Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

TERESA CUTLER-BROYLES University of New Mexico, USA

And STEFANO ROZZONI University of Bergamo, Italy

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2022 Editorial matter and selection © 2022 Beitske Boonstra, Teresa Cutler-Broyles and Stefano Rozzoni. Individual chapters © 2022 The authors. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited. Reprints and permissions service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-80071-227-0 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-80071-226-3 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-80071-228-7 (Epub)

Table of Contents

List of Figures

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About the Contributors

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Preface

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction: Moving Spaces and Places Beitske Boonstra, Teresa Cutler-Broyles and Stefano Rozzoni

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Part I Moving Homes Chapter 1 Swallowing Castles and Houses With Stomachs: Dwelling as a Digestive Movement in Literature Elizabeth Batchelor Chapter 2 Reshaping Spaces of Home: Reading Post-colonial Literary Adaptations as Affective Pedagogies Demelza Hall Chapter 3 Barbarism in the Age of Progress: Emily Hobhouse’s Report on the South African Concentration Camps and the Liberal Divide Over the Boer War Carla Larouco Gomes Chapter 4 Urban Modernism in East Germany: From Socialist Model to Creative Appropriation Martin Blum

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Chapter 5 Reauthoring Macassar: Storytelling as Community Engagement (CE) and a Spatial Practice in a South African PostApartheid Community Clint Abrahams

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Part II Moving Bodies Chapter 6 Framed by Textiles Lesley Millar

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Chapter 7 Shorelines: Choreographies of Remembrance and Forgetting Laura Bissell

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Chapter 8 ‘Excuse Me… Are You Lost?’ What Can Performative Walking Practices Contribute to Knowledge About Public Space? Deirdre Macleod

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Chapter 9 This Place Is Not Safe for Walking Caroline Cardoso Machado, Hartmut G¨unther, Ingrid Luiza Neto and Lucas Heiki Matsunaga

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Chapter 10 Dancing Your Way Through: An Explorative Study of City-Making Skills 167 Beitske Boonstra Conclusion: Moving Homes – Moving Bodies – Moving Minds Beitske Boonstra, Teresa Cutler-Broyles and Stefano Rozzoni

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Index

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List of Figures

Chapter 5 Figure 1.

Figure Figure Figure Figure

2. 3. 4. 5.

Figure 6.

Figure 7. Figure 8. Chapter 7 Figure 1.

Studiolight’s Reauthoring Process. A Community Action Process That Engages the Social, Spatial and Institutional Domains for Transformation. Youth Meetings Held in Macassar Living Rooms. Story Maps Made by Youth. Youth Making Display in Backyard Shack. Community Meetings Held in Shack at Bong’s Place. Emergent Campus With CE Activities and the 2018 Who We Macassar Exhibition Sites Alongside Everyday Activities of Macassar Spaces. Shack at Bong’s Place With Installation of Project Seminars and Workshops. Exhibition in Macassar Library.

Figure 3.

Pages of the Sea: The Tide Coming in Erasing the Figures in the Sand on Ayr Beach. Tide Times – Cramond Island Causeway Viewed from Island. Tide Times: Objects Left in Pilot Box.

Chapter 8 Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3.

New Housing on Old Industrial Site, Portobello. Tenement Flats, Central Portobello. Festoon Walk to Telferton Allotments.

Figure 2.

81 86 86 87 88

88 89 90

118 124 125

136 136 138

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Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Chapter 9 Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5.

Figure 6.

Festoon Walk via High Street to the Beach. Red Ground Drawing, Portobello Prom. Yellow Ground Drawing, Portobello Prom. Blue Ground Drawing, Portobello Prom. Green Ground Drawing, Portobello Prom. Project Postcard Inviting People to Visit and Play in the Ground Drawings.

138 139 140 140 141

Image of the Varjão Police Station. Central Square of Vila Planalto. Image of the Green Area of SQS 409/410 Where There is Little Natural Surveillance. Underground Passageway at SQS 409/410. Image of the Place Where There is a Higher Incidence of Attempted Thefts, Assaults and Kidnappings. Image of the Square in Varjão Where Substance Users Are Present.

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About the Contributors

Clint Abrahams is an Architect and Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Planning & Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His research in emergent architectural tectonic culture, social engagement and design-build critically engages the postcolonial portraits of post-Apartheid South Africa. His doctoral studies explore the tectonics of empathy and document self-made constructions in the community of Macassar to map the material contributions of Macassar’s makers to the South African transformation project. Elizabeth Batchelor studied undergraduate English Literature at UCL, and is now a Masters student at the Freie Universit¨at Berlin, writing primarily on poetic space in English Renaissance poetry. Her research interests include metaphors, the early modern stage and dispersed emotional affects. She is also an avid writer of fantasy novels. Dr Laura Bissell is Interim Head of Contemporary Performance Practice and Lecturer in Research at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She has taught on the MRes in Creative Practices programme at Glasgow School of Art and the Transart Institute MFA in Berlin. Laura’s research interests include: technology and performance; feminist performance; ecology and performance; and performance and journeys. Laura has presented her research nationally and internationally and has been published in the International Journal of Performance Art and Digital Media, The Body, Space and Technology, Studies in Theatre and Performance, The Scottish Journal of Performance and Contemporary Theatre Review. Laura is Coeditor of Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010–2020 (Triarchy, 2021) and Performance in a Pandemic (Routledge, 2021). Dr Martin Blum is Associate Professor and teaches in the Department of Languages and World Literatures at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, Canada. His research focuses on the challenges of pre- and post-unification East Germany, and he has published on the oppositional movements, ecological issues, identity and the material culture of the GDR. Dr Ir Beitske Boonstra is Assistant Professor in Urban Governance, at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences (ESSB), Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her research focusses on the interaction between (local) governments and community initiatives in urban development, as well as on skills and capacities of city-makers and boundary spanners. Her theoretical

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background is derived from complexity theory, self-organisation, resilience and post-structuralist ontology. She is academic lead on city challenges in the Resilient Delta Initiative – a collaboration between Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus Medical Centre and Delft University of Technology, and academic coordinator of the Knowledge Centre Liveable Neighbourhoods Rotterdam – a collaboration between Erasmus University Rotterdam and Municipality of Rotterdam. Beitske holds a PhD in Regional and Urban Planning from Utrecht University (2015) and a Master’s degree in Urbanism from Delft University of Technology (2005). Carla Larouco Gomes is a Researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES), where she has been involved in several research projects, and an Adjunct Lecturer of English Language and Culture at Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel Studies. She holds a PhD in Culture and Literature Studies, with a specialisation in the New Liberalism and in L. T. Hobhouse’s political thought. She is a member of the Political Studies Association British Idealism Specialist Group, devoted to the study of British Idealism and New Liberalism. Her main areas of interest include Culture Studies, English Culture, Reformation Studies, History of Ideas, History of Political Thought, and Liberalism. Hartmut G¨unther obtained a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of California at Davis in 1975. Since then, he has worked in Brazil, and has been affiliated with the University of Brasilia since 1988. While there, he started the Environmental Psychology Research Group and was significantly responsible for the growth of Environmental Psychology in Brazil. Dr Demelza Hall is an early career academic in the field of literary studies at Deakin University (Australia). Her research – which examines relationships between spatialised depictions of home, identity and pedagogy in contemporary literary works – has been widely published both in Australia and overseas, and her most recent study, The Drover’s Wife Reading Project, was awarded an ‘ECR Seed Funding’ grant from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) in 2019. In 2022, Demelza will commence an academic leadership role at Guilford Young College in Hobart, Tasmania. Caroline Machado has a degree in Architecture and Urban Planning from the University of Bras´ılia (2017), an MA in Environmental Psychology (2019) and currently is a PhD student in Architecture and Urbanism. Since 2014 she has been affiliated with the Environmental Psychology Research Group, where she conducted multidisciplinary and cross-cultural research about Healthy Urban Mobility. Her research interests include Environmental Criminology, Public Security, Criminal Profile, Environmental Psychology, Urbanism Production Process, Urban Mobility and Post-Occupation Analysis. Deirdre Macleod explores material and other related aspects of towns and cities, including the more or less hidden patterns, regulations and strictures that operate within them. Her practice is informed by the discipline of Human Geography, and

About the Contributors

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it draws upon a range of fieldwork methods and contemporary drawing strategies. She is a Lecturer in Art at the Centre of Open Learning, University of Edinburgh. She is also a PhD candidate in Human Geography in the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. For more information on her work: deirdremacleod.com. Lucas Heiki Matsunaga has a Psychology degree from the University of Brasilia (Brazil) and currently is a graduate student at Tohoku University (Japan) with a scholarship from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan. Lesley Millar is Professor of Textile Culture and Director of the International Textile Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts, UK. She is a Curator specialising in textiles, with major international touring exhibitions including: ‘Textural Space’ (2001), ‘Through the Surface’ (2003–2005), ‘21:21 – the textile vision of Reiko Sudo and NUNO’ (2005–2007), ‘Cloth & Culture. NOW’ (2008), ‘Lost in Lace’ (2011–2012.), ‘Cloth & Memory’ {2} (2013), ‘Here & Now: contemporary tapestry’ (2016–2017) and most recently ‘Fabric: Identity and Touch’ (2020–2021). She was Principal Investigator for the EU project ‘Transparent Boundaries’ (2012–2014) with partners in Denmark, Greece, Italy and Poland. She writes regularly about textile practice in Britain and Japan, including The Erotic Cloth (Bloomsbury 2018) and Reading The Thread: cloth and communication (Bloomsbury 2023). In 2008, she received the Japan Society Award for significant contribution to Anglo-Japanese relationships, and in 2011 was appointed MBE for her contribution to Higher Education. Ingrid Luiza Neto obtained a PhD in Environmental Psychology from the University of Bras´ılia in 2014. Currently, she is a Full Professor at the University Center of the Federal District, where she coordinates the Traffic Psychology Laboratory.

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Preface

When Progressive Connexions opened the floor for the theme of spaces and places, a gathering of scholars and professionals took place that reached across an overwhelming variety of disciplines and touched upon a wide array of topics related to spaces and places. The topic of movement stood out, among others. Movement in a literal sense of moving bodies through space and place, and movement in a more figurative way, of shifting perceptions and affects for spaces and places, affect in the meaning of a transitional product of an encounter through the senses. After a first conference on spaces and places, in Bruges, Belgium, in April 2019, the collaboration for this book was started. But then, the project got intercepted by the pandemic, causing serious delays. Luckily, both Emerald Publishers Ltd and Progressive Connexions allowed us to suspend and seek new contributions during a second event on spaces and places, which took place online in March 2021. We were thrilled to find, again, refreshing and cross-cutting perspectives on movement in relation to space and place. Again, however, the road through the pandemic remained bumpy, and new shuffles in the composition of contributions occurred over the course of 2021. But here we are, and we are thrilled with the outcome. This edited volume, Moving Spaces and Places: Interdisciplinary Essays on Transformative Movements through Space, Place, and Time, presents a collection of 10 contributions which all approach the relationship between movement and spaces and places in surprising ways. We are aware that the relationship between movement and space and place is not a new topic, already addressed by many – predominantly spatial scholars – in multiple ways. But the diversity of these current contributions, as well as their multi- and cross-disciplinarity approaches, reveals a depth to the theme that none of us had anticipated. Each of the contributions tells its own unique story of how movement is both an act of physical moving bodies and objects, as well as a way in which perceptions and affects can be unsettled and shifted. The contributions also illustrate how physical and psychological movements are often intertwined, creating new relationships between people and the spaces and places they inhabit, as well as new relationships with their own selves. The contributions illustrate how aesthetic experience, the study of culture and art, artistic and participatory practices play a crucial role in bringing the physical and psychological experience of movement into symbiosis. Moreover, the book reveals how physical duration and agency as a psychological act create a potential for healing and reconciling the often broken, interrupted or disturbed relationships between people and places and spaces.

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The creation of this book has been an exhilarating journey. The suspense and forced reorientations due to pandemic challenges, granted us time to think and to reflect and revealed to us the intertwining of physical and psychological movement, and the transformative potential that emerges from this intertwinement. As such, this book does not only speak of transformative movements across real, physical spaces and places, but also is the result of a transformative experience itself.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, our gratitude goes to Emerald Publishing Ltd for giving us the opportunity to develop this project on movement and spaces and places, and let it materialise as the project itself and the pandemic dictated. The support of the publishing assistants and copy editors has been great. Special thanks go to Susanne Schotanus for her enthusiastic and critical reading of the chapters and her invaluable suggestions for bringing the chapters into more consistency and bringing to the fore the running threads throughout the book. Our thanks also go to Ramya Murali, Katy Mathers and Sumitha Selvamani for their support and understanding for our process, as well as all the people of Emerald Publishing Ltd involved in the publication of this book. Your support has been fundamental to its successful completion. Secondly, our thanks goes to Progressive Connexions for the organisation of two inspiring events: the first conference on spaces and places in Bruges, April 2019, and the second (online) conference on spaces and places in March 2021. Their call for interdisciplinary perspectives on spaces and places has given ground to the truly enriching experience of putting this book together. Our special thanks go out to Teresa Cutler-Broyles, the soul and creator of these events, and our lightning beacon through pandemic disturbances. You always kept faith and never let us take our eyes off the content and the creation of the book. And you were always there to delve into the even deeper levels of meaning that connected the chapters in the book. Stefano Rozzoni, thank you for your ever lasting optimism, your critical observations, supportive thinking and inspiration, as well as your pioneering efforts in creating the other Progressive Connexions book on space and place: Re-imagining Spaces and Places: Essays on Identity, Spaces, and Places (2022). Beitske Boonstra, your always kind reminders and constant work to keep this volume on track has resulted in our meeting all the deadlines, and your communications with the authors has been exemplary in sometimes difficult circumstances. Your vision and dedication are inspiring: thank you for all that you have done. Thirdly and lastly, we would like to thank all the contributors to the book. Many of you were there at our very start in Bruges; some of you joined the project at a later stage. For all of you, we are very thankful that you have stood with us through these challenging years and most of all, to remain adaptive to the transformations in the thematic focus of the book. Changes in the lineup of authors (mostly due to the pandemic) first forced us to shift focus, and at the very

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end of putting the book together, we as editors noticed an emerging consistency, a new connecting line throughout the book which we could not let go unnoticed. We thank you all sincerely for your latest efforts in making this connecting line even more explicit in your works. We deeply feel this book has been a collective journey that has transformed and enriched us all.

Introduction: Moving Spaces and Places Beitske Boonstra, Teresa Cutler-Broyles and Stefano Rozzoni When discussing spaces and places from multidisciplinary perspectives, the concept of movement soon comes to the fore. According to Oxford English Dictionary, ‘movement’ relates to ‘the action or process of moving; change of position or posture; passage from place to place, or from one situation to another’ (OED Online, September 2021). Movement thus has a dual meaning: it is both a (physical) act of moving, as well as a change or development which can be physical but does not have to be so. This dual meaning of movement has been a leading thread through this book project from the start. In her seminal work For Space (2005), the geographer Doreen Massey theorised this dual meaning of movement in relation to space and place. Massey argued that when a person moves through space, this is not only a physical act of movement, but also an act of alteration of space and place. Space is made of social relations, Massey argued, and the movement of people shapes these relationships. Reciprocally, space also constitutes people, and the movement of people across space is part of the ‘constant process of the making and breaking of links which is an element in the constitution of you yourself’ (Massey, 2005, p. 118). The example Massey deployed in her book to explain this dual meaning of movement is a commuter on a morning train, moving from one city to the other. The place the commuter left that morning will no longer be the same as when the commuter boarded the train, and the place of destination, will be inevitably altered by the future presence of the commuter, as will the commuter be changed as well. With this metaphor, Massey used space in the context of movement, and place in the context of destination. With this understanding of space and place, Massey followed a comparable line of reasoning as renowned scholars on space and place Henri Lefebvre (1991) and Michel De Certeau (1984). According to their combined reasoning, the difference between space and place lies in confinement and multiplicity. Space is to be understood as the spatial dimension of the world where relationships are wide open, where multiplicity, simultaneity of stories and relationships, inter-subjectivity, and flow reign. Space is abstract, without substantial meaning. Place, on the other hand, can be understood as more or less static; defined and confined by settled relationships, a momentary suspension of flows into meaning. Space, then, is practised place (De Certeau, 1988). How the Moving Spaces and Places, 1–6 Copyright © 2022 Beitske Boonstra, Teresa Cutler-Broyles and Stefano Rozzoni Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221001

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divergent meaning of space and place touches upon the multi-layered meaning of movement is, again, illustrated by the train scene staged by Massey. The train travelling through the landscape is not only a physical movement through the open and abstract multiplicity of space, but a simultaneous transformative movement of the commuter, the confined and meaningful place the commuter left, and the new meanings and relationships the commuter heads towards in the place of destination. This book addresses the dual meaning of movement and spaces and places in various ways. In a literal sense, moving and movement can be analytical tools for reading and understanding the meaning and values associated with space and place. In a more figurative sense, movement can thus also relate to unsettling perceptions and readings of spaces and places, which makes movement a psychological experience. Combining the physical and psychological experience of movement is nicely captured in the philosophical concept of duration. According to philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1966/1991), who builds upon the philosophical work of Henri Bergson, movement through space is a duration, which combines the physical experience of movement as a composite of space traversed by moving objects – in all their multiplicity – with the psychological experience of movement as a qualitative change, an alteration, a becoming-other, again, in all its multiplicities. Duration is a dual, continual and heterogenous psychological and physical transformation of objects, spaces and places, and the relationships and meanings they constitute and are constituted by. Movement – conceptualised as physical moving and psychological duration – enables us to see and experience space and place as multiplicities of simultaneousness, of juxtaposition, of order – either static in place or fluid in space – and time as the heterogeneous determinant of the potential transformations of those fluidities and non-fluidities. The notion of duration, for example, the combined physical and psychological experience of movement through time and space, runs as an important theme through the 10 chapters that constitute this book. Remarkably however, when assembling this collection of chapters, a consistency occurred that neither the organisers of the original events nor the editors of this volume had anticipated. This consistency concerned the acknowledgement of aesthetic experiences and artistic practices, as a way to bring to consciousness the duality of physical and psychological movement through and of space and place. Looking in hindsight at the process of bringing this book together, this should not have come as a surprise. Already centuries ago, poet and philosopher Friedrich Von Schiller (1795/2010) coined the aesthetic experience as a means to reveal identities and meanings that usually lie half hidden for conscious perceptions. This emerging consistency in these chapters thus opened up the opportunity to study these artistic practices in relation to movement, space, and place, in much more depth. Indeed, according to Jacques Ranci`ere (2004), who follows a Deleuzian notion of aesthetics, aesthetics is not about works of art themselves but rather about the subjective feeling and transformation that occurs when one is put into relation with a work of art. When that work of art is then deployed for questioning the sensible – as in perceivable through the senses – , an aesthetic experience may

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occur that causes a transformation of the percept and the affects belonging to the receiver or spectator (Ranci`ere, 2004) – affects in the meaning of new becomings (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2008), as transitional products of sensible encounters (Colman, 2010, pp. 11–12). Gilles Deleuze conceptualises art as an allegory, an act of representation, whereas the artistic practice is a way to turn chaos into a sensation, a sensation that then brings new affects and percepts to the consciousness (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994; Van Tuinen, Schuilenburg, & Romein, 2009). In relation to space and place, aesthetic experiences and artistic practices thus reveal notions and meanings of space and place that until then were unthought, unknown or subconscious. Moreover, these artistic practices – in Deleuzian terms – combine notions of the past with a creative process of renewal. These practices can be seen as events or happenings that create and generate ‘senses’, relive old ones and generate new, bringing to bear affect (new relations) and effect (new outcomes). When aesthetic experiences created by artistic practices are vibrant enough, they create movement in the exact dual meaning as in duration: both a physical and a psychological sensation of transformation. Noteworthily, most of the aesthetic experiences and artistic practices discussed in the contributions of this collection have a bodily, corporeal, embodied dimension. This resonates with the bodily experience of movement and interweaves spaces and places together as addressed by Massey and underlined by the concepts of duration and aesthetic experience/artistic practice in a non-representational way by geographer Nigel Thrift (1996). Movement, in this sense, concerns the thought-in-the-act, the multidimensional relationship between body and environment, the embodied and situated nature of human practice, and the corporeality of psychological transformation. Again, movement is both a bodily experience and a transformative one, which creates new percepts and affects and thus relationships between people, places, and spaces – opening up places and providing ever-new meanings to space.

Moving Homes The book is structured in two sections. The first section, ‘Moving Homes’, discusses movements as physical and psychological experiences through time related to the home environment, and the act of storytelling, literary practices and allegories that transform percepts and affects of that home environment. In ‘Swallowing Castles and Houses with Stomachs: Dwelling as a Digestive Movement in Literature’, Elizabeth Batchelor takes us on an unnerving travel through castles and houses as allegories of digesting bodies; the people move through them as nutrients slowly transformed into an enlightened state of self-knowledge or a nightmarish state of self-annihilation. The allegory of the dwelling place as a digesting body reveals how places we regard as safe and sheltering can lead us through a subconscious transformation processes that enable us to better understand ourselves and the world. ‘Reshaping Spaces of Home: Reading Postcolonial Literary Adaptations as Affective Pedagogies’ by Demelza Hall also unsettles the notion of the home as a

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safe space. Hall elaborates on her experiences teaching Australian literature, and the way Australian literature conceptualises settler colonialism in Australia, and the Indigenous appropriation of that literary tradition. Her teaching experiences give insight into how unnerving and affecting the unsettling of this literary tradition can be for students – and others – who never questioned their home narratives, but also how spaces for collective storytelling can mediate these psychological impacts. Another account on unsettling home narratives comes from Carla Larouco Gomes, who in her chapter ‘Barbarism in the Age of Progress: Emily Hobhouse’s Report on the South African Concentration Camps and the Liberal Divide over the Boer War’ discusses a dark episode of British Imperialism. While many British at the turn of the twentieth century in the United Kingdom itself did not question the cultivating intentions of the British over the Boers in South Africa, this chapter tells how Emily Hobbs took on the brave enterprise of critiquing the displacement of Boer Women to concentration camps. By discussing the way in which these temporary living environments aimed at disaffecting women from their home environments, she was able to – slowly but steadily – unsettle the perception of the British in the United Kingdom of their Imperialist assimilating intentions. Shifting perceptions of what a home can be is again a topic in ‘Urban Modernism in East Germany: From Socialist Model to Creative Appropriation’ by Martin Blum. In this chapter, the typical East German architecture of the Plattenbau is discussed, and the role time played in changing perceptions on this typical architecture. Blum illustrates how the functionalist and industrial approach of the Plattenbau initially depersonalised people according to pre-scripted and collectively narrated socialist ideals, but at the same time allowed for a creative and individual appropriation of place. The last chapter discussing movement in relation to the home environment is ‘Reauthoring Macassar: Storytelling as Community Engagement (EG) and a Spatial Practice in South Africa’s Neglected Post-Apartheid Communities’ by Clint Abrahams. Taking another dark chapter of South Africa’s discriminatory history, Abrahams elaborates on the re-appropriation of a township after the Apartheid era. He describes a design-led process of engaging and involving the local community through collective spatial storytelling, expressively appropriating places and revealing the affects and changing the percepts of the community members for these places.

Moving Bodies The second section of the book, ‘Moving Bodies’, discusses the way in which moving bodies create physical and psychological transformations in relation to space and place through embodied practices and aesthetic allegories that relate the body directly to its environment, for example, the spaces and places it inhabits.

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The section starts with a contribution by Lesley Millar, ‘Framed by Textiles’. In her elaborations on various works of art that involve textiles, and predominantly lace, Millar shows us the permeability of space, place and bodies, and how textiles represent hidden, subconscious meanings and experiences of space and place as both intellectual and sensual. ‘Shorelines: Choreographies of Remembrance and Forgetting’ by Laura Bissell is also situated in permeable space, namely in the constantly eroding and shifting coastlines of Britain. Through the description of various participatory artistic, choreographic practices, the author interweaves space, place, time, movement and performing agents, questioning processes of presence and disappearance, remembering and commemoration. How an artistic practice contributes to an increased understanding of space and place is also illustrated in ‘“Excuse me…are you lost?” What Can Performative Walking Practices Contribute to Knowledge About Public Space?’ by Deirdre Macleod. The author discusses – in the same style of Millar and Bissell – various projects of performative walking in urban neighbourhoods, designed to create an affective friction and enhance participants’ sensitivity to space and place. Performative walking is a valuable form of research. As such, both Bissel and Macleod, together with Abrahams in the section ‘Moving Homes’, no longer just give us an analogy between spaces and places and the arts, but actively address a participatory artistic experience as a means to understand spaces and places in a different way. This practical, participatory dimension of transformative movement as a means of researching space and place is a challenge further taken up by Caroline ¨ Cardoso Machado, Hartmut Gunther, Ingrid Luiza Neto and Lucas Heiki Matsunaga in ‘This Place is Not Safe for Walking’. This chapter elaborates on a research method that involved participatory walks with go-along interviews, which not only reveals hidden perceptions on spatial safety and affects (or disaffects) for places in unsafe neighbourhoods, but also creates new percepts and affects along the way. The last chapter of this section combines an allegory of artistic practice with a practical approach for changing cities. In ‘Dancing Your Way Through: An Explorative Study of City-making Skills’, Beitske Boonstra describes how the allegory of improvisation dance can help in understanding how the skills of community leaders contribute to collective processes of city-making and urban transformation processes, and how this allegory creates a new repertoire for governance of spaces and places. Moving Spaces and Places: Interdisciplinary Essays on Transformative Movements through Space, Place and Time illustrates how movement generates both physical as well as psychological transformations in affect for and percept of space and place in three interlinked ways. First, the book takes art, and specifically art consisting of fluids, permeability and movement, as an allegory through which spaces and places can acquire new meanings or reveal the meanings that had so far laid in the unconsciousness. Secondly, the book introduces and discusses artistic-based practices, deliberately executed (often in participatory ways) to alter percepts and affects for space and place. And thirdly, this volume reveals

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forgotten or unknown aesthetic values that had lain hidden in certain spaces and places, and by taking up or discussing agency for these values. In the majority of the contributions to this book, the ways in which movement contributes to new understandings of space and place are interwoven. In multi-layered investigations of movement, taking temporal, physical and psychological transformation as its conceptual core, the book discusses the transformations in affect and percept of spaces and places – solidifying space into meaningful places, as well as opening confined places into places of heterogeneity. All the chapters in Moving Spaces and Places: Interdisciplinary Essays on Transformative Movements through Space, Place and Time offer rich and multi-layered experiences of transformational movement. Putting them into a sequence has therefore been a difficult and fraught decision, as each sequence again revealed new connectivity and new readings. We therefore encourage the readers to not only follow the interpretation of the relationships between the various contributions as suggested by us, the editors, but to think themselves about all the interwovenness, multiplicity and interconnectivity of the various chapters. The book might then not only be about movement as a transformative experience but may offer a transformative experience in itself.

References Colman, F. J. (2010). Affect. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuzian dictionary (Revised Edition, pp. 11–12). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Certeau, M. (1988). The writing of history. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1966/1991). Bergsonism. New York, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987/2008). A thousand plateaus. London and New York, NY: Continuum Books. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? London and New York, NY: Verso. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Massey, D. (2005). For space. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Washington, DC: SAGE publications. OED Online. (2021, September). movement, n. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.uni-giessen.de/view/Entry/123031?redirected From5movement. Accessed on November 26, 2021. Ranci`ere, J. (2004). Is there a Deleuzian aesthetics? Qui Parle, 14(2), 1–14. Thrift, N. (1996). Spatial formations. London: SAGE publications. Van Tuinen, S., Schuilenburg, M., & Romein, E. (2009). Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? – De voorwaarden van het denken volgens Deleuze and Guattari. In E. Romein, M. Schuilenberg, & S. van Tuinen (Eds.), Deleuze compendium (pp. 21–46). Amsterdam: Boom. Von Schiller, F. J. C. (1795/2010). Letters upon the aesthetic education of men. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing.

Part I Moving Homes

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Chapter 1

Swallowing Castles and Houses With Stomachs: Dwelling as a Digestive Movement in Literature Elizabeth Batchelor

Abstract 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. Keywords: Gothic; renaissance; digestion; food; The Faerie Queene; hill house

Introduction English literature is full of fantastical versions of human-made space, many of which seek to understand the hidden dynamics and processes at play in the realworld spaces we experience on a daily basis. A story, particularly a fantastical story, is perfectly suited to examine how bodies move through space (and time), and how space is something that can both shape the characters within it and be shaped by them. One such metaphorical treatment of space, which surfaces Moving Spaces and Places, 9–26 Copyright © 2022 Elizabeth Batchelor Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221002

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repeatedly across different time periods and literary movements, positions the domestic dwelling space as a reflection of the biological bodies of the human characters that dwell within. In the Netflix adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (Flanagan, 2018), one of the characters states: ‘Mom says that a house is like a body. And every house has eyes and bones and skin. A face. This room is like the heart of the house. No, not a heart, a stomach’ (Se 1, episode 10 – Silence Lay Steadily). In this adaptation, the haunted house is not simply a neutral space which happens to be occupied by ghosts, but instead a living entity which bears a great deal of the responsibility for the events occurring during the series. Additionally, the house’s occupants move through the interior space in a very specific way – being ‘digested’ by the place in which they live. Space takes on the characteristics of the beings that inhabit it, with rooms literally becoming organs, and the act of inhabiting coming to resemble the biological processes that take place within the human body. I shall be looking at two literary examples of the house as a digesting body, written more than 350 years apart, and in doing so hope to examine the ways in which domestic space and the self have been understood across cultures and times. Although these two different texts are produced by two very different literary traditions – the Renaissance allegorical and the modern Gothic respectively – they are remarkably similar in the way they view the interaction between the housebody and the human body (and mind). Fundamentally, both emphasise the interactive and transformative nature of the dwelling space, focussing on how the external can act on the internal as well as the other way around. The first case is Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590) – specifically an incident in Book 2, Canto 9 – which follows two knights on an educational tour of an allegorical castle as the ideal body. This house, and their digestive movement through it, follows the Renaissance convention that the resemblance between the individual and the world can indicate a powerful ideological link between the two.1 By exploring analogies between the external and internal world, people were thought to become better equipped to understand both the world and themselves. However, Spenser’s use of allegory seems to complicate rather than clarify the readers’ understanding of space, as his two protagonists calmly pass through the mouth (castle entrance) and move down slowly towards the stomach (kitchen), simultaneously visitors and food. Whilst Spenser’s version of the house as digesting body has been rendered partially uncanny by its allegorical framework, in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the relationship between the individual and the house becomes something overtly sinister, and the increased agency of space acts as a threat or challenge to the agency of the person within it. The house taking on human properties challenges the humanness of its occupants. What Spenser depicts in his poem as an ideal configuration – the greater body of the house and the smaller body of the human visitor mirroring and supporting one another – is in Hill House the opposite. In Jackson’s novel, materiality spills out of control, and the digestive movement is one of disorder and nightmare instead of enlightenment and harmony.

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Before commencing a close reading of these two texts, however, it is important to define a few key terms. It should be noted that the ‘House of Temperance’ visited by two wandering knights in one of the adventures described in The Faerie Queene is described as having all the conventional material details of an expansive medieval castle with multiple towers, a portcullis, a small army standing guard and much more. Hill House, on the other hand, is a sprawling Victorian mansion. But despite their varied architectural and social functions, both are still primarily designated as ‘House’ in their official names. I would argue that this is because they both share the same essential function, that of being a home and a dwelling place.2 In both texts the buildings are visited and stayed within for a substantial amount of time, for the length of several meals in Spenser, and for at least a week in Jackson. They are sites of domestic function, experienced primarily from the interior. Thus, I will be treating both of these two literary locations as ‘houses’, according to the definition provided, and my examination will focus on this shared aspect, that is, on the way that they are primarily places to be dwelt in, or inhabited. The process of digestion itself, particularly when it is undertaken by a building rather than a conventional organic body, also requires examination. Digestion is often associated with organs such as the stomach and intestines; however, in its most basic aspect it is simply the breaking down and absorption of food and nutrients. Merlin Sheldrake in his book on mycelial biology Entangled Life (2020) describes digestion as, at its most fundamental level, ‘the art of chemical transformation’ (p. 14). Whilst the act of selecting food and eating may take a certain amount of conscious agency for a human subject, digestion itself is a primarily sub-conscious background process that can take part in brainless organisms including plants, fungi and bacteria. Digestion can be seen, in these later examples, as an interaction between two subjects or configurations of material, rather than a specific choice or act made by a conscious individual. Indeed, even in the human body, digestion is a complex and even collaborative process. Sheldrake writes of the human body: ‘we are ecosystems, composed of – and decomposed by – an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light. The 40 trillion-odd microbes that live in and on our bodies allow us to digest food and produce key minerals that nourish us’ (p. 25). He points out that there are more microbes in the human body than there are in our own cells. The individual act of digestion is questioned, becoming not only an unconscious process but one that does not necessarily involve a single controlling entity. Although Sheldrake’s more complex view of digestion and metabolism still involves the digesting entity to also be a living biological organism, it is perhaps not such a big leap to imagine this process – of chemically breaking down, altering and interacting – happening inside a home or built environment, rather than a typical biological gut. Indeed, the house is in some ways an artificial prosthesis, an extension of the human body built to aid in core biological functions such as sleep, shelter from the elements and digestive processes. Kitchens and cooking are ways of fostering the breakdown of foods, or delaying it in case of modern refrigeration equipment. Similarly, toilets,

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drains and rubbish receptacles are means of waste disposal which continue the voiding movements begun in the lower intestines. This view of the house as digestion aid plays wonderfully with Spenser’s kitchen as stomach; moreover, the idea of life as diffuse rather than contained within the human body takes on menacing overtones in The Haunting of Hill House. It should also be highlighted that the idea of the digesting house is subtly but crucially different from the house as trap, another classic Gothic motif. The castle of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), or indeed the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, is a place which lures the subject in with the goal of their digestion, but this digestion is a process undertaken by a human (or humanmonster) that dwells inside rather than by the house itself. The properties of the houses here are those of a lure, or facilitator, rather than a digesting entity in its own right. However, although a distinct and subtly distinguished concept, this trope has no doubt contributed to the modern imagining of the house as a digestive body. The malevolent house in Shirley Jackson’s novel could essentially be seen as an innovative merging of two previously separate entities (the den and the predator that dwells within). This merging has the effect of creating a unique type of space, and a unique way of envisioning human interactions and movements in this space, which is not present in the image of the house as a trap. It is also notable that many examples of the house as body found in modern Gothic literature involve travellers or explorers, people on quests for knowledge.3 The characters of The Haunting of Hill House are loosely engaged in a scientific enquiry into the paranormal, whilst the intrepid knights of The Faerie Queene are travelling to fulfil various quests, as well as to prove their allegorical merit. In both cases, the house as body is not the home of the character, but rather a place visited for knowledge, challenge or adventure. In other words, the house in these literary works represents an ‘other’ place, one that allows for the usually familiar (the house) to be viewed in a new light (the digesting house). Both texts, ultimately, can be seen as centred around the concept of self-knowledge. The Faerie Queene makes the invisible (internal organs and processes) visible, and in doing so supposedly enlightens its characters as well as the reader. The Haunting of Hill House also externalises the main character’s body for the purposes of self-exploration, though in this case the body is a traumatised pseudo-Freudian place: its exploration, therefore, leads to self-annihilation rather than enlightenment. Consequently, the digestive process, in both texts, becomes a literary-biological metaphor for how selfknowledge can alter the self.

The Allegorical House as Body To understand Spenser’s ‘House of Temperance’, and what sets it apart from other Middle English and early modern fantasy locations, it is helpful to examine his

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textual source for the ‘House of Temperance’. In Piers Plowman, a late medieval poem (c.1370-90), the protagonist (Will) has a series of revelatory dreams, one of which includes a description of the house of a woman named ‘Anima’, which Spenser will reimagine as the house of ‘Alma’. This castle is very similar to Spenser’s ‘House of Temperance’, and yet different in one key way: it does not digest. "Sire Dowel dwelleth,’ quod Wit, "noght a day hennes In a castel that Kynde made of foure kynnes thynges. Of erthe and eyr is it maad, medled togideres, With wynd and with water wittily enjoyned. Kynde hath closed therinne craftily withalle A lemman that he loveth lik to hymselve. Anima she hatte; [to hir hath envye]. "Ac the Constable of that castel, that kepeth [hem alle], Is a wis knyght withal1e–Sire 1nwit he hatte, And hath fyve faire sones by his firste wyve: Sire Se-wel, and Sey-wel, and Here-wel the hende, Sire Werch-wel-with-thyn-hand, a wight man of strengthe, And Sire Godefray Go-wel–grete lordes [alle]. Thise sixe ben set to save this lady Anima Til Kynde come or sende to kepen hire hymselve.’ And that is the castel that Kynde made, Caro it hatte, And is as muche to mene as "man with a soule." (10.9, B Text) This is a clear example of the allegorical house as a body. The building is made of the co-mingled elements found in the human body, although the poem is unusual because it diverges from the classical four elements (linked to the humours) of medieval medical theory.4 Possibly to better fit the poem’s alliterative scheme, the elements here are earth, air, wind (rather than fire) and water. The castle is occupied by Sir Inwit and his five sons, who are a mixture of senses (Sirs See-well, Say-well and Hear-well) and virtuous actions (Sir Work-Well-WithYour-Hand and Sir God-Fearing-Go-Well). These men all serve the lady of the castle, named ‘Anima’ after the Latin for soul. Everything in this textual space is arranged along allegorical lines. The description is even interrupted by an explanation of the allegorical scheme: ‘and is as muche to mene as “man with a soule”’. This phrase reduces the castle to its allegorical function, making it clear to the reader that the castle only exists within the poem in so far as it signifies something different than its mere physical self. The material space of the castle is secondary to its meaning. This allegorical framework follows the ‘Episteme of Resemblance’ described by Michel Foucault in ‘The Order of Things’. He writes:

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Elizabeth Batchelor Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organised the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man. (2002, p. 19)

Following this view, the castle and the body in Piers Plowman thus reflect each other whilst remaining separate, and by exploring their similar features and using analogical rather than linear thinking, the reader can theoretically enhance their understanding of the two separate subjects, as well as how they relate.5 Further, the metaphors that link the body and the castle should not be seen as artificial or arbitrary connections, but as aiming to suggest a fundamental similarity or relationship between the two. Ultimately, the purpose of this type of analogical thinking is the gaining of understanding. This type of ordering through resemblance, however, does not account for the complication of metaphor in language. As the philosopher Max Black argues in his influential study Models and Metaphors (1962), the act of linking two separate concepts together in a metaphor has not only a comparison and a substation effect, but also that of ‘interaction’.6 For example, Black examines the metaphor ‘man is a wolf’; ‘If to call a man a wolf is to put him in a special light, we must not forget that the metaphor makes the wolf seem more human than he otherwise would’ (1962, p. 44). Similarly, by combining the castle and the body in an extended allegorical metaphor, the two individual elementals act upon one another on both a conceptual and linguistic level, and the material and ontological separation of the original entities is compromised. For example, this complication through interaction can be seen within the text of Piers Plowman. By associating the castle with the body, its materiality is altered. In fact, the castle is no longer constructed from purely solid building materials, but now also of wind, water and air – fluid moving elements that seem to reconfigure its space – drawing attention to empty areas, cavities. The castle, therefore, in an extended allegory, is not just a symbol of the body, or similar to the body, but also a fusion of the two. However, the castle in Piers Plowman lacks the crucial innovations that Spenser later brings to the image – that of being enterable and interactive, and ultimately, of being something that not only lives but also digests. The castle in Piers Plowman is only described, never visited. The poem’s protagonist, and by extension the reader, hears only another character’s report of the castle, which provides an interpretive filter through which the space is experienced. Whilst the reader can gain a vague sense of its inhabitants and their domestic relations, the

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poem does not provide a real view of the castle’s interior. Further, the allegorical figures who inhabit the place – the soul (Anima) and figures such as Sir See-Well and Sir God-Fearing-Go-Well – fulfil primarily cognitive or spiritual functions rather than biological ones, being primarily either sensory or moralistic in nature. The castle ultimately appears as a static concept, an image to explain the idea of the body and its component sensory parts, rather than something that acts on or transforms the characters of the poem. And whilst the plot of Piers Plowman constitutes a transformative journey as a whole, this allegorical castle is only a single unmoving point within that trajectory. In contrast, the ‘House of Temperance’ – Spenser’s hugely elaborated version of the allegorical castle in Piers Plowman – is discovered by the reader entirely through the external and internal movement of the poem’s protagonists. And this movement takes on a very distinct – and viscerally biological – trajectory. The castle is introduced through the experiences of two questing knights (Arthur and Guyon) who, in this canto of the Faerie Queene, arrive at a castle in the wilderness. After fighting off an army of enemies (‘a thousand villeins’ (v. 13) like a ‘swarme of Gnats’ (v. 16) representing the sensory distractions of the world), the two knights are welcomed by the lady of the castle, and then request a tour of. After initially examining the outer walls, they enter the castle through the porch, which symbolises the mouth as the point of entrance of the castle-body. The porch is decorated with an ivy moustache (v. 24) and the porter seems to fulfil the function of a carefully controlled tongue, ‘keeping watch and ward,/Nor wight, nor word mote passe out of the gate./But with good order, and with dew regarde’ (v. 25) and see 32 warders (teeth) who guard it (v. 26). Next they arrive in a dining hall, managed by the steward ‘Diet’ (v. 27), and paced by the ‘Marshall Appetite’ (v. 28). Finally, the knights are led into the kitchen in which numerous biological and domestic tasks take place. The space is ventilated by ‘an huge great paire of bellowes, which did styre,/Continually, and cooling breath inspyre’ (v. 30) which represent the lungs of the castle-body entity. Various foods are cooked in an enormous cauldron, and the room is overseen by a ‘kitchin Clerke,/that hight Digestion’. Finally, the scum left on top of the cooked/digested foods is then skimmed off (v. 31) and, …all the liquour, which was fowle and wast, Not good nor seruiceable else for ought, They in another great round vessell plast, Till by a conduit pipe it thence were brought: And all the rest, that noyous was, and nought, By secret wayes, that none might it espy, Was close conuaid, and to the back-gate brought, That cleped was Port Esquiline, whereby It was auoided quite, and throwne out priuily. (v. 32)

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Thus, considering the lexical properties of this passage, the knights’ entry into the castle can be seen also as the journey of food in the body. They begin at the mouth, encounter tongue and teeth, go through the upper digestive portions of the throat and down into the stomach. Although Spenser’s graphic description stops short of the two men journeying through the ‘secret wayes’ of the lower intestines, the readers are told of the ‘back-gate’ where waste is ‘throwne out priuily’ (privately). This strange turn of the human becoming food on the symbolic level is partly due to the extended and intimate nature of Spenser’s metaphor. In Piers Plowman, the allegory of the house as body does not have any direct impact on the poem’s characters because they do not directly visit or enter the castle. Though the metaphoric description of the castle provides a schema by which the character may view his own body (as a group of separate sensory functions in service to a female soul), there is no juxtaposition of bodies, no encounter between materialities. It is only when the fictional human body is brought into direct contact with the house-body – brought inside the building itself – that the full implication of the allegory is realised. Later in their journey, the two knights travel up to a ‘goodly chamber’ occupied by Cupid and a group of courting ladies, who represent various emotions including ‘Prays-desire’ (v. 39) and ‘Shamefastnesse’ (v. 43), which can be seen as analogous to the house’s heart. Finally, the knights travel upwards again, visiting three towers housing three male scholars who represent different mental faculties. Whilst the castle-house is essentially genderless, lacking any sex organs, it nevertheless contains specifically gendered elements in Spenser’s telling, which enforce the classic divide between emotions as female and rational thought as male.7 However, it is significant that the knights’ progress through the castle begins with their digestion and that they only reach the ‘higher’ organs of heart and brain later. Their journey of self-discovery is one that must begin in Spenser’s scheme with food, the stomach and even excretions, before any other aspects of the body can be accessed. It is only after they have been digested on the metaphorical level that they are able to travel more freely around the body, thus visiting the heart and brain and gaining a full understanding of the corporeal self. In his essay ‘The Construction of Inwardness in The Faerie Queene (2000)’, Michael Schoenfeldte writes of this digestive journey: If the alimentary path traversed by Spenser’s knights seems to us a particularly grotesque and inappropriate route to knowledge of self, as I think it still does, perhaps the fault lies not so much in Spenser’s aesthetic as in our own historically contingent and severely attenuated conceptions of what areas of knowledge pertain to the

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comprehension of self. Our own inability to apprehend and appreciate the controlled corporeality that is at the core of Spenserian temperance measures our distance from Spenser and from the early modern regime of the self he helped to shape. Whilst this argument for an understanding of the self, which upends the traditional privilege that the mind and heart have had over less polite organs, might seem like reason enough for explaining Spenser’s trajectory, it does not take into account the role that the knights themselves play in the bodily system which they have entered. By walking through the door (mouth) they become a part of the larger system of the castle-body. They are not merely observers as they journey through the body, but become participants in the biological process. They become food. However, the way in which they participate in the digestive process is not immediately clear to the reader. When the two knights later visit the heart and brain, they are clearly affected by these organs. In fact, when they are exploring the chamber which is the heart of the castle, both knights are matched with a woman who reflects their primary emotional trait, and their reactions to these women are specifically shown as being emotional in nature. When Arthur meets the Lady ‘Prays-desire’ he is ‘inly moued at her speech’ (v. 39) while Guyon is frustrated by his partner and ‘meruayld at her vncouth cace’ before being gently rebuked by Alma, who explains the mirroring between the knight and the emotion he meets: ‘You shamefast are, but Shamefastnesse it selfe is shee’ (v. 43). Later, in the tower representing memory, both knights find books which describe the histories of their respective nations: ‘Briton Moniments’ and ‘Antiquitie of Faerie Lond’ respectively (v. 59, 60). The tales of these two books take up the following canto in its entirety, as the text is transmitted through the fictional reader to the actual one. Thus, the experiences in the organs/rooms reflect the symbolic function of those organs. In the heart they find reflections of their own emotional tendencies, and experience emotion in return. In the mind they find their own histories, and become conduits for them. However, the effects on the knights during the initial digestive passage are harder to ascertain. In contrast to the later sections of the poem, in the digestive organs both visitors are strangely quiet, and completely passive. They do not eat in the kitchens, or feel hunger, and the description does not dwell on the individual qualities of any food – the substances are continually generic rather than specific. There is also a dearth of sensory descriptors – no smells, no tastes, few colours are mentioned. The first specific food essence we hear about is the ‘fowle’ after products of the kitchen. Moreover, it is only after the fowle has been disposed of and the digestive journey effectively finished with a description of the ‘secret passages’ that the knights react: Whenas those knights beheld, with rare delight, And gazing wonder they their minds did fill; For neuer had they seene so straunge a sight. (v. 33)

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Their main interaction with the digestive organs, then, is purely the movement through them, and the witnessing of something that is usually hidden to the human eye. Otherwise, the knights are as passive as the food that they symbolically represent. This relation is further emphasised by the fact that they do not eat, or even practise, any sensory appreciation of food during this section – either in the dining rooms or kitchen. The two men do not interact with the castle by mirroring its digestive functions, as they will later mirror its emotional and cognitive functions. Instead, here, they remain, within themselves, biologically inert and play only the role of food (passive, digested) in this scene. The knights emotional reaction to the stomach – when it eventually comes at the very end of the kitchen section – emphasises the strangeness of their experience, rather than understanding. They have ‘rare delight’ and the castle’s digestive system is, the text tells us, the strangest sight either has seen. It is important to note that whilst The Faerie Queene is always operating within an allegorical framework, this allegory is not always directly visible to the characters themselves. Whereas the characters of Piers Plowman recognise the castle-body as a metaphor, there is no sense here that the knights possess similar knowledge. They are not seeing an allegorical map of the body while moving in the building but only an unusual building, which they seem to receive as a purely material, and distinctly unusual, structure. And as the reader follows the knights on their tour, they cannot help but occasionally view the poem’s events from the characters’ odd perspective. While the main purpose of this episode is to reveal the workings of a body (particularly its hidden internal functions) to the reader, the knights do not share in this knowledge. They are unable to see the bigger picture presented to the reader. Like food in the body they are unaware of, and unable to affect, the larger processes at work. However, the role of the knights as food within the house’s digestive system is limited within the text. They – unlike food in a real digestion process – do not undergo any type of physical or chemical alteration. The act of digestion does not diminish or harm them in any way. Ultimately, Spenser’s house is governed by the laws of temperance, and, following Foucault’s system of resemblance, what happens on the outside (in the house) is reflected inside the knights themselves. The two elements within the house – the human subjects and the living building – are not opposed but instead linked. They mirror or reflect one another while moving in unison. And as long as the house remains a well-ordered (‘temperate’) place, the knights themselves are in no danger. However, a tantalising glimpse of an alternate journey through a very different body – one rather less benign – is offered right at the beginning of the canto, in Spenser’s introduction to the house: Of all Gods workes, which do this world adorne, There is no one more faire and excellent, Then is mans body both for powre and forme,

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Whiles it is kept in sober gouernment; But none then it, more fowle and indecent, Distempred through misrule and passions bace: It growes a Monster, and incontinent Doth loose his dignitie and natiue grace. Behold, who list, both one and other in this place. (v. 1) The house-building, as a benevolent entity, is given to us as only one possibility. The body, according to Spenser, also has the ability to be monstrous, ‘fowle and indecent’, when not managed correctly. And thus, the building as a body also contains the possibility for harm, disruption and ultimately monstrosity. The relationship of resemblance between the larger house and the bodies it contains (and in turn symbolises) is not inherently positive. There is nothing stopping either the internal body or the external house-body from developing negative traits, of becoming intemperate. The amicable relationships between the house’s various occupants, as well as the managerial force of Alma as the soul, are not something to be taken for granted. Just as a body may become disordered – either on a physical, emotional or spiritual level – so the house as body has the potential for sickness, and even insanity.

The Haunted House It is precisely this uncontrolled side to the human temperament which underpins the modern Gothic idea of the digesting house. Shirley Jackson’s Hill House – from its first appearance on the page to its last – is defiantly and categorically not ordered. The house is introduced to the reader as follows: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. (1959, p. 3) There is an implicit understanding, right from this outset, that Hill House is considered to be a living organism (of sorts) in the text. The building ‘holds’ darkness within itself and is positioned in this description as the owner of the hills that lie behind it. And, importantly, Hill House is a living space that is ‘not sane’. This insanity refers partially to the disordered physicality of the house – ‘every angle is slightly wrong’ (p. 105) but mostly to the living subjectivity which it claims. And it is this disordered – insane – subjectivity, rather than any specific

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ghost or supernatural demon, that can be considered the main antagonist of the novel. Dr Montague concludes his account of the house’s haunted history by stating that ‘Essentially… the evil is the house itself, I think. It has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, it is a place of contained ill will’. (p. 82) The house has no allegorical inhabitants, no intermediaries such as a human soul or representatives of emotion and appetite, and no humanised conduit for communication. All of its emotions, agencies and biological processes are located right within the material of the building itself. When the house, which is always referred to within the novel by its ‘proper’ name of Hill House, is first described from the perspective of the main character, Eleanor Vance, the reader is told: No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. (p. 34) Here, again, a face is visible in the architecture of the house; however, unlike the benign house-face imagined in the Fairy Queene, in the case of Hill House, the face has a maniac disposition which evokes despair and fear. It is also awake, and gleeful. Eleanor, echoing the knights’ journey in The Faerie Queene, enters through the front door after viewing the face. This part of the house is not overtly aligned with the mouth, but the presence of a connection is implied based on the usage of the frontage-as-face motif. However, unlike Spenser’s knights, Eleanor is almost immediately aware of the biological processes connected to the house, and her role within them: ‘I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny movements inside’. (p. 42). Whilst the allegory of the house as digesting body lies outside the text of The Faerie Queene, and is not fully legible to the characters within, the guests of Hill House are constantly aware of the living materiality of the house, of its dual nature as dwelling and organism. Spatially, there is no specific ‘stomach’ located in the novel version of Hill House – though the recent television adaptation quoted above does notably choose to locate the house’s active centre as a ‘stomach’. In Jackson’s original novel this room is instead a nursery which the Professor claims is ‘the heart of the house’ (p. 119) on account of its mysterious cold spot, and there is also a dining room in which the characters eat strictly regimented meals together. The tower/ library is also a climactic and loaded section of the property – the rumoured site of a suicide – and the place which Eleanor has the strongest emotional reaction to: ‘I can’t go in there,’ Eleanor said, surprising herself, but she could not. She backed away, overwhelmed with the cold air of mould

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and earth which rushed at her. ‘My mother-’ she said, not knowing what she wanted to tell them, and pressed herself against the wall. (p. 103) The tower here is clearly associated with a maternal theme – as in the quote above – and it is often interpreted in psychoanalytic reading of the text as a womb. Lynne Evans’ essay ‘Help Eleanor Come Home’ (2020), which is influenced by Julia Kristeva’s theory of ‘the abject’, contends that: ‘Situated in the tower of the “mother house” with its “fondly warm” temperatures and circular staircase, the library operates symbolically as a womb. And so, Eleanor’s entrance into this space enacts a return to the “primal and engulfing morass of the maternal” that is a defining feature of “abject monster figures” in Gothic fiction’ (Evans, 2020). The tower is the epicentre of Eleanor’s psychodrama, the final part of the house-body which she has to confront. However, the lack of a specific stomach in the house is easily explained within the text; the digestive action of Hill House seems to be a constant background action – effectively the entire house acts as a stomach. Eleanor, for example, after the first significant night-time haunting activity says, ‘the sense was that it wanted to consume us, take us into itself, make us a part of the house’. (Flanagan, Season 1, episode10 – Silence Lay Steadily) Digestion, here, seems to be not one biological process amongst many, but rather the primary aim of the house. The representation of movement is multi-layered within the text. The characters constantly move around the property – often trying to map or explore it, and only partially succeeding. They also move through the day and night cycle, with each night forming a new ritual test, and each morning a temporary relief (‘they had come through the darkness of one night, they had met morning in Hill House, and they were a family’ p. 97). Mealtimes also follow a set ritual movement pattern, with meals at strict times dictated by the housekeepers comically unwavering routine. However, in the background of all of these comings and goings, the movement of digestion is constant. The characters move towards – or away from – being digested all the time that they are inside the property. Everything in the house tests the sanity and identity of the individual guests, and also the group dynamic. As the Professor, one of the main characters, says, ‘an atmosphere like this one can find out the flaws and faults and weaknesses in all of us, and break us apart in a matter of days. We have only one defence, and that is running away’. (p. 124) All movements within the house are dictated by its atmosphere, and the only way to escape its influence – to leave the digestive process – is to move entirely out of its space. As in human digestion, the house must first break Eleanor down before she can be incorporated into the larger body. This breaking down takes the form of a battle over the psychological self. Evans writes, ‘in Jackson’s text, the central horror is most certainly the threat posed to Eleanor’s subjectivity through her experience with the monstrously abject “mother house”’. (2020) The agency of the house challenges the idea of space as a neutral container, and the traditional understanding of the individual human conscious subject defined against an unconscious world.

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The conflict of The Haunting of Hill House is Eleanor’s struggle to come to terms with, or assert, her individual self.: ‘What a complete and separate thing I am, she thought, going from my red toes to the top of my head, individually am I, possessed of attributes belonging only to me’. (p. 83). The house – as monstrously alive, dominating subject – challenges this persistently, until eventually Eleanor is subsumed within its form. In this regard, her death at the end of the novel can be seen as the final digestive act; the consumption of her material body (through the final ritual of death) and the ultimate incorporation of her subjectivity into the house. Thus, the living body of the house and of the individual within it, in Jackson’s telling, can be seen as incompatible with one another, with the result being a battle for dominance with only one winner. The digestive relationship between house and dweller seems here to be not a reciprocal process, as in Spenser’s poem, but a one-way, destructive movement. However, it is possible to read this movement instead as a type of return to a larger whole, particularly if the linear time that the novel at first seems to present is questioned. Towards the end of the novel, we begin to see a different relationship between Eleanor and the house. By the second to last night, Eleanor’s consciousness and sense of individual self seem to have reached a critical collapsing point: ‘I am disappearing inch by inch into this house, I am going apart a little bit at a time’ (p. 2). ‘No; it is over for me. It is too much, she thought, I will relinquish my possession of this self of mine, abdicate, give over willingly what I never wanted at all’ (p. 204). Following this ‘abdication’ after which Eleanor ceases completely to try and assert her own individual subjectivity, whilst her body or specific sense of self has not vanished as such, she is shown to have achieved a certain oneness with the materiality of the house. Her senses have been expanded, and she, as an isolated individual point in space, has subtly ceased to exist: Eleanor sat, looking down at her hands, and listened to the sounds of the house. Somewhere upstairs a door swung quietly shut; a bird touched the tower briefly and flew off. In the kitchen the stove was settling and cooling, with little soft creakings. An animal – a rabbit? – moved through the bushes by the summerhouse. She could even hear, with her new awareness of the house, the dust drifting gently in the attics, the wood ageing. (p. 223) Eleanor’s final evening in the house is spent essentially spying on the other guests, overhearing conversations from behind doors or structures: ‘Eleanor, hidden deep in the shadows of the summer house’, (p. 218), ‘Eleanor, pressed against the dining room door’ (p. 221). While Eleanor as a physical individual is still present in these passages, in each of these instances she is also pressed into the material of the house, which she uses as cover. Eleanor also experiences the conversations as the house does – passively and invisible. She has become the watching presence which Dr Montague notes early on in the novel: ‘The house. It watches every move you make’. (p. 85)

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The novel’s opening and concluding paragraphs mirror each other, reusing very similar lines to describe Hill House: Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eight years and might stand for eight more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. (p. 1)

Hill house itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eight more. Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. (p. 246) This recurring passage can be read as a sign of the terrible persistence of the house, of how the events of the story have reinforced its presence rather than diminishing them. However, it is also possible to see this symmetry between the novel’s beginning and ending as a comment on the nature of time within the house. The symmetry in the phrase ‘it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more’ (pp. 3, 246) suggests an equal weighting between time and future, and the repetition at the beginning and end of the book suggests that time within the novel might be circular, rather than linear. In fact, it is possible to read the events of the novel as travelling from the end to the beginning as well as from beginning to end. In this reading, ultimately the consciousness that does the ‘Haunting’ in The Haunting of Hill House is Eleanor herself. In what can be seen as foreshadowing for this reading of the text, Eleanor is accused of writing her own name on the wall during both instances of it appearing, and when Mrs Montague contacts a spirit through planchette, asking ‘Who are you?’ the answer comes back, ‘Nell’,. The characters interpret this statement to be a message to Eleanor from the house, but it can also be seen – in a time-reversed reading in which she is the haunting presence – as a message from her. During the loud noise sequence in which she finally relinquishes her subjectivity to the house, Eleanor questions the source of the noise. ‘Am I doing it? She wondered quickly, is that me? And heard the tiny laughter beyond the door mocking her’. (p. 202) And, indeed, on her final night, she is the one who runs along the corridors, banging and rattling on the doors and laughing: Dancing, the carpet soft under her feet, she came to the door behind which Theodora slept; faithless Theo, she thought, cruel, laughing Theo, wake up, wake up, wake up, and pounded and

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The digestive process that the house enacts on Eleanor, then, can be seen as one that works both forwards and backwards in time: this is a non-linear process in which the woman and the house have always been linked. Eleanor is present in the novel both as the agency within the house, and simultaneously as a person confronting that agency. This non-linear/reversed-time reading of the novel is also reflected in the 2018 TV adaptation (Flanagan, Se.1, episode 5 ‘The Bent-Neck Lady’). Here it is revealed that the figure of ‘the bent-neck lady’ which haunts Eleanor through the majority of her life is in fact a vision of her future herself. During a death by hanging, she is shown a vision in which she travels backwards through her own life. The scenes of the ‘bent-neck lady’ visiting the living Eleanor are now shown again in reverse, from the perspective of the now dead Eleanor as the ghost that visits her former self. In both the television series and the novel, then, there is a sense that the characters are ultimately haunted by, and in the process of confronting, a version of themselves. As in The Faerie Queene, the house-body and the characters that visit it are fundamentally linked. Digestion in Hill House also has the kind of reciprocal, reflective aspect that one can see in the Renaissance versions of the castle-body. The house is not an alien malevolent other, but rather a version of the self in space. Hence, digestion can be read either as a version of self-incorporation or self-sabotage, depending on the context of this process. The house’s refrain of ‘Help Eleanor come home’ (pp. 146, 155) takes on a very different potential meaning within this light.

Conclusion Both the Renaissance model of the house as a digestive body and the modern Gothic one offered by Shirley Jackson can be seen as explorations of the relation between space and the self – how living spaces change the identities or physical states of the people within them. In both of these examples, the intertwining between external and internal spaces serves for the house to affect the lives and physical bodies of the characters moving within it. The way in which humans interact with the living-house – that is the process of the house’s digestion – goes from being an educational movement in The Faerie Queene to a hostile one in The Haunting of Hill House. However, both visions of the digesting house (though separated by time and genre) are at their core about understanding how the house and the body are linked. By depicting the experience of space as an interaction between different organic bodies, the ways in which space can transform and be transformed are explored in new and dynamic ways. The individual character transforms space as

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they move through it, and the physicality of the human body – our organs, our biological processes, our rituals and maybe even our madness – comes to be reflected in the spaces that we create for ourselves. Both Hill House and the House of Temperance are, after all, journeys to understand the individual self through an interaction with our external ‘self’. Digestion is both the metaphor for how clearly viewing our own selves can alter our psyches, and a way of conceiving the relationship between the intimate domestic space and the bodies that move, change and exist within it.

Notes 1. ‘Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man. Painting imitated space. And representation - whether in the service of pleasure or of knowledge - was posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of formulating its right of speech.’ Foucault, The Order of Things (2002, p. 19). 2. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a dwelling place is defined as ‘a building for habitation, and related senses. A building for human habitation, typically and historically one that is the ordinary place of residence of a family’. Sometimes (with capital initial) in the names of individual residences, esp. large mansions or country houses. ‘house, n.1 and int’. Oxford English Dictionary (June 2021). Retrieved from https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/185414?result51&rskey5 KgfZ0p& 3. Other Middle English or Renaissance examples include Piers Plowman (discussed later in this chapter) and 1.6 of Du Bartas’ Divine Weeks. Other modern examples include the houses in Steven King novels, particularly ‘The Mansion’ in The Wasteland (1991), and ‘The Overlook Hotel’ in The Shining (1977). 4. E. Ruth Harvey writes in The Inward Wits – Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (1975), ‘Nemesius [Bishop of Emesa] begins his account with a description of man the microcosm. Man is made of an intellectual soul joined to a body made of the four elements, the basic units of matter.’ 5. Weemans and Pr´evost in The Anthropomorphic Lens (2014) write, ‘After all, to publish a map of a continent produces one kind of knowledge; to anthropomorphize that map, e.g., by overlaying a human figure upon it, produces an entirely different sort of knowledge’ p. 2. 6. ‘The view that a metaphorical expression has a meaning that is some transform of its normal literal meaning is a special case of a more general view about “figurative” language. This holds that any figure of speech involving semantic change (and not merely syntactic change, like inversion of normal word order) consists in some transformation of a literal meaning’ (Black, 1962, p. 35).

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7. The Chapter Alma’s Nought in The Poem’s Two Bodies (1988) by David Lee Miller provides a thorough examination of the absence of sex organs in The House of Temperance.

References Black, M. (1962). Models and metaphors—Studies in language and philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Evans, L. (2020). ‘Help Eleanor come home’: Monstrous maternity in Shirley Jackon’s the haunting of hill house. Canadian Review of American Studies, 50(1), 102–120. doi:10.3138/cras.2018.015 Flanagan, M. (Creator). (2018). The haunting of hill house [TV mini series]. Flanagan Film, Amblin Television, Paramount Television. Foucault, M. (2002). The order of things: An archeology of the human sciences. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Jackson, S. (2009). The haunting of hill house. London: Penguin Modern Classics. Langland, W. ([1330–1400 approx] 1992). The vision of Piers Plowman: A critical edition of the B-text. Oxford text archive. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/20. 500.12024/3261 Melion, W., Rothstein, B., & Weemans, M. (2014). The anthropomorphic Lens: Anthropomorphism, microcosmism and analogy in early modern though. Leiden: Brill. Miller, D. L. (1988). The poem’s two bodies; the poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene. Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9781400859672 OED Online. Oxford University Press. June 2021. Retrieved from www.oed.com Ruth Harvey, E. (1975). The inward wits—Psychological theory in the middle ages and renaissance. Warburg Institute Surveys (Vol. 4). London: Warburg Institute. Schoenfeldt, M. (2000). The construction of inwardness in The Faerie Queene, book 2. In P. Cheney & L. Silberman (Eds.), Worldmaking spenser. Explorations in the early modern age (pp. 234–243). Lexington: The Univ. Press of Kentucky. Sheldrake, M. (2020). Entangled life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures. London: The Bodley Head. Spenser, E., & Hamilton, A. C. (Eds.). (2006). The Faerie Queene – Longman (Annotated Edition (2nd ed.)). London: Routledge. Stoker, B. (2004). Dracula. London: Penguin Modern Classic.

Chapter 2

Reshaping Spaces of Home: Reading Post-colonial Literary Adaptations as Affective Pedagogies Demelza Hall

Abstract 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. Keywords: Post-colonial; Australia; Indigenous; home; unsettlement; adaptation

Introduction The field of post-colonial studies is particularly fraught within the Australian context because Indigenous sovereignty has never been ceded, the invaders/ colonisers have never left, officially sanctioned reconciliation processes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians have been unsuccessful and formal Moving Spaces and Places, 27–42 Copyright © 2022 Demelza Hall Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221003

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treaties with First Nations peoples are yet to be negotiated. I would, therefore, like to begin this chapter by acknowledging the work of Indigenous Australian writers, artists, scholars, students and activists and recognise, formally, their ongoing contributions to processes of decolonisation within the University sector and beyond. As I am a non-Indigenous academic researching and teaching in the field of Australian literary studies, I am utterly indebted to the intellectual insights, interventions and generosity of First Nations storytellers. I would like to give particular thanks to Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri writer Leah Purcell and Goorie and European author Melissa Lucashenko, who both agreed to my use of their narratives when I first presented an iteration of this study as a conference paper at the ‘Spaces and Places: Interdisciplinary Conference’ held in Bruges in 2019. Indigenous Australian literature, as Alice Healy-Ingram (2011) acknowledges, is not just another category of the ‘literary’, but ‘a complex set of functions in the spiritual and cultural life in the many nations of Indigenous Australia’ (p. 75). Hence, while I am myself a product of post-structuralist tertiary education and, thereby, accustomed to de-centring the author when working closely with literary texts, I believe that processes of author consultation should, where appropriate and/or possible, be sought when pursuing a sustained engagement with narratives by First Nations authors. My research is inspired by narratives which unsettle readers and inspire movement away from habitual ways of thinking about spaces of home and dwelling. I am driven, particularly, by the idea that textual practice within settler/ invader societies can stimulate creative, and intersubjective, spatial reconfigurations and, thereby, have broader social ramifications. This chapter focuses specifically upon undergraduate settler student responses to two works of literary adaptation by Indigenous Australian writers – Lukashenko’s short story ‘Country: Being and Belonging on Aboriginal Land’ (2013), which rewrites the ‘fairy tale’ of British settlement from the perspective of a dispossessed Indigenous family and Purcell’s stage play, The Drover’s Wife (2016), which reimagines Henry Lawson’s classic nineteenth-century narrative of the Australian bush from the perspective of an Aboriginal protagonist – and reflects critically upon my journey towards developing a teaching methodology that contributes to decolonisation through foregrounding processes of unsettlement. Any attempt to decolonise knowledge in the tertiary sector needs to be committed to challenging ‘colonial forms of knowledge, pedagogical strategies, and research methodologies’ (McLaughlin & Whatman, 2008, p. 124). Since commencing teaching within the field of Australian Literature in 2013, I have experienced varying degrees of resistance to my attempts to decolonise approaches to learning and teaching, from both faculty and students alike. This chapter is framed, however, around a challenging incident of ‘white fragility’ – a state in which ‘even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves’ (DiAngelo, 2011, p. 54) – that I experienced while teaching my second Australian Literature course as a casual lecturer at Federation University Australia in 2015. The ensuing discussion outlines the strategies and teaching methodologies I have deployed since this incident to support students with their reading of post-colonial literary works, principally

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texts which prompt these non-Indigenous readers to reconsider the tenets upon which they base their own sense of home and belonging.1 In their book, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs (1998) suggest that the sense of unsettlement or disturbance characteristic to (post)colonial narratives can be activating for readers because it ‘incites discourses and counter-discourses’ and ‘produces alignments and re-alignments’ (p. xvi). For literary unsettlement to be an effective tool of decolonisation within the context of the tertiary classroom, however, this chapter argues that recognition of how this process affects readers’ personal conceptions of what it means to be ‘at home’ in Australia needs to be considered and accounted for pedagogically.

Australian Homemaking While ‘home’ can be conceived generally as ‘a place/site, a set of feelings/cultural meanings, and the relation between the two’ (Blunt & Dowling, 2006, p. 2), in Australia, like all settler/invader societies, narratives of home, and the meanings attached to them, are innately contested. In her seminal essay, ‘I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a White Postcolonizing Society’, Aileen Moreton-Robinson – a revered Australian academic and Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people – argues that the ontology underpinning Aboriginal Australian belonging is incommensurable with the homemaking processes that inform the belonging of migrant, or settler, Australians (2003, p. 23).2 For Aboriginal Australians, ideas pertaining to being ‘at home’ are traditionally linked to conceptions of ‘Country’, a term which not only describes ‘family origins and continued relationships to a particular place’ but also modes of storytelling and custodianship (Leane, 2016, p. vii).3 As Wiradjuri writer, poet, and academic Jeanine Leane states, Country is: […] a state of mind in that it includes the memories of a people in a particular place past and present, but it also connects to tangibles such as lands, waters, and the lives they sustain. Each Aboriginal country has its own stories of Dreaming (creation) and continuance. (2016, p. vii) While processes of colonisation have disrupted this ontological relationship, Country still figures as a key constituent of ‘home’ for many First Nations peoples in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2013, sub-section 4). Indigenous ontologies of Country also remain significant in contemporary Indigenous literary works, many of which, irrespective of genre, continue to include and/or develop Dreaming stories, motifs and symbols. This is evidenced by Purcell herself, who claims that her writing contributes directly to her own ‘contemporary Dreaming’ (cited in Hall, 2019, n.p.). Despite the remarkable endurance of Indigenous Australian homemaking practices, white hegemony has meant that Western systems of dwelling and settler

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stories pertaining to being ‘at home’ have dominated Australia’s national discourse. As Moreton-Robinson (2003) contends, in Australia, home tends to be mediated via the discourses of white possession, ‘a sense of belonging derived from ownership as understood in the logic of capital, enabled through the dispossession of the original owners’ and sustained through the celebration of the ‘legend of the pioneer’ (p. 23). Reinforcing colonial power structures and values, home, within the Australian context, is typically predicated upon terms such as ‘building’ and ‘cultivation’. In Jeannie Gunn’s celebrated pioneer narrative, We of the Never Never (1908), for example, the remote Elsey cattle station on the Roper River in the Northern Territory is presented as an emerging space of settler Australian home, identity, and profit. Described as an ‘orderly little array of one-roomed buildings, mostly built of sawn slabs, and ranged round a broad oblong space with a precision that suggested the idea of a section of a street cut from some neat compact village’, the Elsey cattle station represents the settlers’ explicit desire to cultivate what they viewed as wilderness into a productive European pastoral landscape (Gunn, 1908, p. 56). Yet beneath these officially lauded representations of settler homemaking, an undercurrent of unacknowledged frontier violence perseveres, unsettling the spaces and language of white dwelling. Catriona Elder (2007) argues that ‘a sense of anxiety’ – which stems, firstly, from the profound sense of displacement felt by early settlers and, secondly, as a result of the ongoing repression of the fact that white Australia is living on stolen land – undermines Australia’s national discourses (p. 17). Gaps, silences and unarticulated spaces of trauma run like fault-lines through settler Australian literary works, destabilising the discursive processes of homemaking which seek to clean up/cover over Australia’s history of frontier violence. Despite its apparent orderliness, the Elsey cattle station in We of the Never Never, for example, can be read as a space which, through its very structure and maintenance, gestures to the violent theft of the Manarayi and Yanman peoples’ Country. Insidious processes of Indigenous dispossession, or ‘clearing’ the land, are unconsciously evoked in Gunn’s text when shots are fired at a tree full of roosting birds so that more feathers could be gathered for pillows: At sundown Sam fired into a colony of martins that Mac considered the luck of the homestead. Right into their midst he fired, as they slept in long, graceful garlands one beside the other along the branches of a gum-tree, each with its head snugly tucked away out of sight. (Gunn, 1908, pp. 63–64) Sam’s shooting at the sleeping birds – which, like the Indigenous people of the region, ‘formed the undercurrent to life at the homestead’ (Gunn, 1908, pp. 63–64) – demonstrates, explicitly, how the land has been exploited for settler resources. But this passage also echoes, implicitly, the horrific massacres of First Nations peoples that were common in the Northern Territory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where entire tribal groups were ambushed

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and killed as they slept so that pastoral expansion could proceed unchecked (Roberts, 2009, para. 18). Recent decades have seen a proliferation of Australian literary works which seek to repurpose Australia’s colonial history and engage with what has become known as the ‘great Australian silence’ (Stanner, 2009, p. 189). Coined by W. E. H Stanner in 1968 (in recognition of what he saw to be Australia’s propensity for ‘forgetfulness’), ‘the great Australian silence’ describes how the perspectives and experiences of Aboriginal Australians have been routinely ignored in the production of Australian discourses (2009, p. 189). Drawing on a domestic analogy, Stanner suggests that the whiting out of Australia’s history is ‘a structural matter’ wherein which ‘a view from a window […] has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape’ (2009, pp. 188–189). In contemporary literary works that revise Australia’s cultural history (or explore the previously neglected views from other ‘windows’), this structural matter is readdressed effectively, through an emotive retooling of language and the intimate environs typically associated with being at home in Australia. In post-colonial texts by celebrated settler Australian writers, such as Kate Grenville, Alex Miller and the late Andrew McGahan, for example, the space of the colonial homestead – a once-celebrated symbol of British expansion and a marker of colonial settlement – is now being routinely deconstructed and subjected to rigorous (and presumably cathartic) processes of undoing so that frontier violence and Indigenous dispossession can be both affectively uncovered and acknowledged. By rendering the colonial homestead unhomely, contemporary Australian writers are actively trying to dismantle the pioneer ethic (or the settler desire for uncontested possession) and frame the ongoing impact this destructive legacy has upon contemporary race relations in Australia. Sara Upstone, in her book Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel (2009), highlights the affectivity of post-colonial literary works which seek to dismantle colonial home spaces, claiming that ‘the multiple meanings repressed in colonial writings of homes’ are ‘released’ in post-colonial literary works, ‘opening up the potential for alternative meanings, and ways of living that corrupt – on the small, personal scale – public ideologies’ (p. 131). Upstone’s use of the terms ‘release’ and ‘corrupt’ are particularly useful here, signalling both the sense of emotional catharsis that can follow in the wake of corrective historical reimaging but also the lingering notion that disturbing the foundations of settler homemaking can be somehow harmful to the national (white) collective. This sense of corruption, however, is carefully nurtured in post-colonial literary adaptations which speak back to white hegemony. Works of creative adaptation, as Linda Hutcheon suggests, forcibly shift focus or perspective through superimposing the vision of a new creator upon a pre-existing text, disturbing readers’ prior associations (2007, n.p.). In post-colonial, or transcultural, adaptations, this parasitic process functions as a subversion of imperial forms and a means via which processes of decolonisation can be initiated. According to Hutcheon, transcultural literary adaptations utilise the cultural power that has been accrued by an original text and transform it into something new (2012, p. 151). In literary adaptations by First Nations Australian

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writers, this process is driven, overtly, by a desire to re-educate readers and decolonise the Australian literary canon through the subversion of tropes pertaining to white settlement. For example, the rough pioneer dwelling that is both centralised and celebrated as a symbol of white settlement in Henry Lawson’s original short story, ‘The Drover’s Wife’, is abandoned in Purcell’s contemporary stage adaptation of the same name and rendered ‘just a material thing […] stuck together with mud and old journals’ (Purcell cited in Hall, 2019, n.p.). As the play’s director, Leticia C´aceres, elaborates, the notion of home as property is rejected for something bigger, like Country, in Purcell’s play as the characters are given the chance to pursue ‘the true possibility of what “home” means, the relationship to kinship, to clan, to children, to survival’ (cited in Hall, 2019, n.p.). Seminal sites of home, predominantly white dwellings, are carefully and persistently dismantled in works of literary adaptation by First Nation Australian writers. These processes of resetting – which often manipulate modes of ‘the uncanny’ to elicit a particular affect in readers – address settler Australian readers and the ways in which they imagine themselves to be at home, in specific ways. As C´aceres suggests, for example, Purcell’s version of The Drover’s Wife is radical because it foregrounds an ‘Indigenous notion of “home” that is anti-capitalist’ and driven to undo ‘Western ideologies and values based on accumulation of property and appropriation of women and children’ (cited in Hall, 2019). The creative re-contextualization of home enacted in works of adaptation such as Purcell’s is related, intrinsically, to a prospective audience (or readership). Hutcheon claims that when considering works of transcultural adaptation, ‘the context of reception is just as important as the context of creation’ (2012, p. 149). By speaking to ‘the pain of colonisation’, post-colonial literary adaptations often educate readers by implicating them within complex processes of witnessing (C´aceres, cited in Hall, 2019). The visceral depiction of frontier violence in Purcell’s play has impacted audiences and readers alike, forcing an acknowledgement of a very different version of Australia’s frontier history. As Fiona Morrison (2018) contends: Purcell points our attention directly at the kinds of profound representational absences that have enabled and supported our received versions of colonial experience. Purcell explicitly re-imagines Lawson’s settler experience at the frontier in a time of systemic and violent conflict […] The controlled but explosive force of Purcell’s intervention into time, space and narrative detonates at the heart of the canon of Australian and antipodean nineteenth-century realism and settler invader nationalism. (p. 174) While, as C´aceres suggests, this process of witnessing can be empowering to First Nations audiences; for non-Indigenous audiences and readers, the confrontation with these long denied truths can be distinctly unsettling, especially when they occur within the parameters of a familiar textual space (cited in Hall, 2019).

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Teaching Indigenous Australian Literary Adaptations I first became interested in how works of literary adaptation by Aboriginal Australian writers might affect non-Indigenous tertiary students’ perceptions of home and belonging after I took over the coordination of an undergraduate Australian Literature course at Federation University Australia in 2015. The course had not been updated for many years and did not account for the enormous contributions Indigenous writers have made to Australia’s national literature. Although I was unable to change the course content officially, it was agreed that I could address the lack of diversity by inviting a speaker from the Aboriginal Education Centre on campus to give a presentation about Indigenous Australian storytelling and include Indigenous literary works and critical readings on the course informally, as supplementary texts and points of counterbalance. Overall, my students responded positively to this, with some requesting more Indigenous perspectives to be included next time the course was offered, in the course’s formal evaluation. One student, however, was unhappy with the additions I had made and offered this feedback in the course’s centrally administered student evaluation: It felt as if the subject had turned into Aboriginal studies early in the course and the focus drifted away from Australian literature. Sometimes it felt as if we were only there to feel bad about ‘white Australians’ and the damage ‘we’ had done to Aboriginals. Personally, I feel that this bad-whites-victimised Aboriginals view is the most damaging view we can possibly have if we truly want to make Australia a place of just unity (anonymous student evaluation). Several things struck me with this response. Firstly, I was indignant. While some Indigenous Australian writers would prefer their literary works to be seen as representative of their own nation, or Country, the implied suggestion that Aboriginal literature is not ‘Australian’ is problematic because it occludes literary works by Indigenous writers from formal courses and studies of Australia’s national literature. Furthermore, the course had been, predominantly, an examination of settler Australian literature. Aside from one week focussing upon experiences of migration, and another dedicated to examining Aboriginal poetry, every other text we had examined, formally, over the twelve-week teaching period was composed by a settler Australian writer. Once I had put my indignation aside, however, I considered how my own attempts to apply decolonising teaching methodologies to an innately ethnocentric course may have been problematic. Sandra R. Phillips and Clare Archer-Lean (2019) suggest that ‘First Nations writing, as it is studied with English literary studies, risks contemporary colonisation if encountered as a literary object for close reading without context or reflection on the role of the reader’ (p. 24). While I had included several works of

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Indigenous Australian literature on the course informally, I had failed to fully contextualise them. This was, principally, because many of the texts were works of literary adaptation and were, therefore, offering what I thought to be obvious responses, or rebuttals, to texts students had been previously working with. However, as Hutcheon (2012) aptly claims, even ‘an adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context – a time and a place, a society and a culture; it does not exist in a vacuum’ (p. 142). Aside from some cursory remarks about how these narratives function as counter hegemonies, I had, for the most part, treated these texts as supplementary course materials, leaving them, problematically, to try and speak for themselves. In hindsight, I also failed to make adequate room for the students to reflect critically upon how their own subject positions may inform their responses to the supplementary literary works I had included. I believe that this omission was notably problematic because several texts that I included as extra readings sought, explicitly, to revise, disrupt and demythify what it typically means, or looks like, to be at home in Australia. According to Peter Read (2000), there is a tendency amongst settler Australians to keep stories that contest white belonging at a distance because recognising that sites of white belonging were in fact ‘wrested from the Indigenous people who loved them, lost them and [thus] grieve for them still’ is too painful and can provoke a return to ‘emotional impasse’ (pp. 1–3). Drawing on the geographical imagery of blocked (or impassable) space, ‘impasse’ is a French term which is commonly used in psychoanalytic discourse to articulate the point where a person becomes emotionally ‘stuck’ (Etchegoyen, 2005, p. 792). All the texts by Indigenous Australian writers that I included, informally, on the course sought to bridge this space of emotional distance – inspire a psychological shift or movement – by speaking back, critically, to enduring stories, tropes, and symbols of Australia’s colonial history. One of the most explicitly affective narratives I had added to the course was Lucashenko’s short fable ‘Country: Being and Belonging on Aboriginal Lands’. I read this story aloud to my students to conclude a module that examined the use of fairy tale tropes, such as that of the ‘lost child’, in a range of settler Australian narratives. I had included Lucashenko’s story under the assumption that students would see it as a text that adopts a powerful and convincing posture of critique towards national discourses that refuse to acknowledge how white settlement is premised, innately, upon both histories and spaces of Indigenous dispossession. Upon revisiting this text, however, I have realised that the sociocultural critique embedded in ‘Country: Being and Belonging on Aboriginal Lands’ can prompt distinctly personal reactions from readers. Beginning with the line ‘Once upon a time, to coin a phrase’, Lucashenko’s narrative both instantly appropriates and subverts the grand ‘fairy tale’ of British ‘settlement’ (2006, p. 10). In this moment, however, the text also specifically welcomes readers/listeners in by creating a familiar space of listening, one which, potentially, harks back to stories told during childhood. Ellen Handler Spitz claims that the fairy tale is a particularly powerful narrative form because it

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‘carries us back to this primordial kind of attention, the attention we gave the world when everything was “for the first time”’ (2015, n.p.). I have wondered – since receiving the aforementioned student evaluation – whether the opening line of Lucashenko’s fable creates, for some listeners, a false sense of security, making them particularly vulnerable to the revelations of genocide and dispossession they were then compelled to listen to. Yet, while Lukashenko’s manipulation of European and Indigenous storytelling conventions sets the tone of the text, I have come to recognise that it is her retooling of western symbols of dwelling that really forces a radical reconsideration of home beyond the confines of the narrative. In ‘Country: Being and Belonging on Aboriginal Lands’, the space of the house is (re)appropriated and rendered a symbol of Indigenous homemaking through the deployment of westernised tropes and symbols of home and dwelling: […] a family lived in the forest in a house they had built themselves. They had lived there for as long as anyone could remember. The father worked as a scientist and was mostly in the woods. The mother worked as an artist and was mostly in the house. Although they worked alone for long hours every day, together they ate their meals and in front of a roaring log fire at night they had long conversations and in this way the two of them made sense of one world. (p. 10) By utilising these familiar domestic conventions, rather than those typically associated with representations of Indigenous homemaking, Lucashenko is able to deconstruct the convenient settler fallacy that Indigenous peoples did not make themselves at home on the land whilst, at the same time, conveying the trauma upon which settler home spaces are premised. When, later in the narrative, the son of the original inhabitants of the land returns home, he discovers his parents and siblings have been murdered and their house has been ‘burned to the ground’ by a group of strangers (a.k.a. settler Australians), who have built their own profane dwelling in its place. In this scene, readers cannot help but empathise with the plight of the son who tries, despite his trauma, to articulate his profound sense of loss: The doctor looked into the new house. The body of his mother lay dusty and unmourned in a corner of the main room. He shrieked with rage and sorrow, asking them why his mother was a corpse, where were his brothers and sister, what on earth had happened in this wretched place? ‘What corpse?’ the strangers said in puzzlement. The doctor ran to his mother’s remains, and kneeled by them, sobbing. But no matter how hard the doctor tried, he couldn’t make them see his mother’s body lying in their new house. (Lucashenko, 2006, p. 12)

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Lucashenko adapts the structures and rhetoric commonly associated with the fairy tale of British settlement to demonstrate, affectively, how the valorisation of these texts/sites overshadows Indigenous ontologies of home. Although, at the level of narrative, the strangers refuse to acknowledge what they have done – an allegorical indictment of settler Australia at the time the story was composed – this powerful moment of thwarted reckoning opens a space of listening beyond the text, and prompts readers to consider their own personal narratives of home and belonging. Contemporary narratives by Aboriginal authors often create a ‘space of sharing, where telling stories and listening to them co-exist in a changed power relationship’ both within and beyond the world of the text (Kossew, 2013, p. 173). The space of the house in Lucashenko’s fable is presented as a space of ‘wilful forgetting’, a structure that symbolises the stranger’s inability to see or listen to the point of view of the original inhabitants. Yet while the house foregrounds scenes of failed reconciliatory reckoning at a textual level, at a metalevel this domestic space encourages non-Indigenous readers to share in the intimate and ongoing pain that continues to be wrought by colonisation and, even, acknowledge the ‘corpses’ that may be lying in their own new living rooms. When I read this story aloud to students at the end of a lecture back in 2015, I finished with a moment of silence. I felt, at the time, that this silence was significant that it functioned as a respectful acknowledgement of the trauma conveyed in the text. What I should have done, however, was follow this silence with extended discussion and reflection. Without making space for guided reflection – thus giving students room to consider how the text might be addressing their own subjective experiences and ways of being in the world – the space of listening constructed by Lucashenko beyond the narrative frame can be rendered a site of confusion, shame or even anger. In subsequent years, I have ensured that processes of group discussion and personal reflection follow in the wake of post-colonial texts. Inspired by Louise Rosenblatt’s (1978) framework of the reader’s transactional relationship to the text, one of the assessment tasks I included in a later course – one I was able to personally design and that focussed solely on the work of Indigenous Australian writers – asked that students keep a journal of personal responses to the narratives they read. In 2018, I formalised my interest in measuring the affect that works of post-colonial literary adaptation have upon students’ perceptions of home, nation and belonging through the establishment of ‘The Drover’s Wife Reading Group’.

The Drover’s Wife Reading Group While decolonising teaching methodologies within the field of literary studies must be attuned to the emotional impact stories can have upon different readerships, the space of the lecture, seminar, or tutorial is not always the appropriate environment for sustained reflection. Moreover, it does not necessarily account for how knowledge is experienced and disseminated beyond the tertiary sphere. In recognition of these limitations, in 2018 I invited the undergraduate students

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enrolled in all of my literary studies courses to join a pilot reading group, which would give them the chance to engage more closely with Purcell’s script of The Drover’s Wife stage play.4 A dozen students initially signed up to join the reading group, but, in the end, the group consisted of three non-Indigenous women, referred to here as Participant 1, Participant 2 and Participant 3. Unlike a more informal ‘Book Club’, I envisioned ‘The Drover’s Wife Reading Group’ to be an academic working group that would support students in the development of deep reading practices, create spaces for sustained reflection and assist in the composition of a reflective response to a work of post-colonial literature. The project was underpinned by a range of qualitative research practices, each designed to assist the participants in becoming attuned to the affective properties of the text they were engaging with. For all the participants, Purcell’s visceral depiction of colonial violence, and how it relates to identity determinants of gender and race, forced a reconsideration of withstanding colonial paradigms. By carefully unpacking their subjective responses to the play, particularly the impact of witnessing the violence of frontier ‘settlement’, the participants were positioned to grapple, meaningfully, with the hegemonic narratives of home and nation disrupted by the text.5 In each of their responses, the members of the reading group revealed that the play inspired a sense of what Dominick LaCapra (1999) terms ‘empathetic unsettlement’ (p. 699). Participant 1 claimed, for example, that for her Purcell’s play suggests that ‘what we take as white is probably black – that the success and prosperity we [settler Australians] enjoy is probably black success and prosperity which has been confiscated and denied via colonisation and violence, silence and erasure’ (2019, recorded focus group discussion). This initial statement was unpacked further in the formal written response Participant 1 developed wherein which she states that: The comfort I have with feeling at home in Australia is something I have always taken for granted. I was born here and although I am descended from settlers (from different places across Europe), I identify as ‘Australian.’ My Irish ancestors were land ‘selectors’ in the Wimmera area of Victoria. I grew up in Melbourne, close to the areas famously painted by the ‘Heidelberg School’ of Impressionist painters who depicted a bountiful landscape ostensibly unexplored and uncultivated. What these artists do not depict – what my family records do not reveal, and perhaps most tellingly, what was not taught to me at school – is that there were already people living in these places. (cited in Hall, Storey, Benney, & Bourke, 2021, p. 258) Participant 2 makes a similar claim in her informal response, linking her response back to her own place-based conceptions of home and dwelling:

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Demelza Hall The play definitely unsettled the way I think about the landscape that I’m living in. As someone who has always appreciated the Australian wilderness, Lawson’s original story encouraged me to consider the hardships faced by colonial settlers in an outback setting. Purcell’s play went a step further, however, prompting me to consider more broadly and take pride in the cultural significance of my ‘home’ (Ballarat) to its original owners—the Wathawurrung people. (‘The Drover’s Wife Reading Group’, focus group discussion, February 13, 2019)

The kind of intercultural grafting evidenced in this response from Participant 2 is significant as it not only draws attention to the real-world impact that affective reading pedagogies have upon processes of decolonisation; it also highlights the achievability of some of the goals of Aboriginal Reconciliation in Australia, which typically emphasises the importance of settler Australians reconnecting with the Indigenous cultural history and heritage of their specific place or region. While the responses from Participant 1 and Participant 2 centre upon a recognition of Aboriginal nationhood and sovereignty, the tentative proposition put forward by Participant 3 – that ‘just because you have a home, it does not mean that it is the home you belong to, and sometimes it can take an individual a while before they figure that out’ – is indicative of the ways in which Purcell’s narrative foregrounds, metaphorically, the importance of suspending hegemonic discourses of settlement to pursue the possibility of a shared sense of home (‘The Drover’s Wife Reading Group’, focus group discussion, February 13, 2019). The results of ‘The Drover’s Wife Reading Group’ pilot study have revealed the benefits of taking a deep reading approach to works of literary adaptation and giving students adequate space, beyond the traditional confines of the classroom, to reflect upon the modalities of affect that are at play in post-colonial literary adaptations by First Nations writers. But what is perhaps less obvious is the ways in which the project has had an ongoing affect upon the reading group participants’ personal perceptions of home and how this has since been disseminated into the wider community. Participant 2 sums up the transformative potential of the project in her formal written response, poignantly, when she writes that: […] rather than relying on a sense of belonging manufactured through a white, masculine lens, Purcell’s play encouraged me to begin factoring in the complex politics of gender and Indigeneity into my renegotiation of my Australian identity, in order to cultivate a more authentic sense of belonging. It is this transformative experience that I hope to share, as a teacher, with the students of my future classroom. (cited in Hall et al., 2021, p. 261)

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Conclusion Furthering processes of critical decolonisation, as Alex Broadbent (2017) rightly claims, ‘means accepting risk of error’ (n.p.). By actively addressing my past errors, I have had the opportunity to develop more mindful and critically informed teaching methodologies, methodologies that are attuned to the multiple ways in which post-colonial narratives intersect with readers’ preconceptions of home, nation and identity. I now believe that for Australian Literature courses to participate in processes of decolonisation – to celebrate the outstanding and diverse range of literary works being created by First Nation Australian storytellers and critically dismantle the ingrained systems of racism that are prevalent in the texts which constitute the Australian literary canon – it is crucial that educators be attuned to the psychological impacts these revelations might have upon students. Adequate space needs to be made for both listening and responding to works of historical reimagining, especially when the set texts are calling, explicitly, for readers to demythify their own conceptions of home and identity. In the Australian Literature unit I have recently designed and am currently teaching at Deakin University in Victoria, I have formalised a number of the practices that were piloted in ‘The Drover’s Wife Reading Group’. As a result of this productive student–teacher partnership, I have now included, for example, an interactive story repository on my unit learning platform. Inspired initially by the work undertaken by Clint Abrahams (see Chapter 5), the story repository is a virtual space where students are encouraged to work through their subjective responses to the texts; to unpack how the required reading intersects, specifically, with their own spatialised conceptions of home and notions of belonging/ unbelonging.6 Processes of decolonisation and real-world grappling are encouraged by the non-prescriptive and reflective nature of the space. Students can upload their responses anonymously to the story repository, they can work in any medium, they can interact directly with the ideas of their peers and, perhaps most importantly, they can revisit and edit their work throughout the trimester so that their initial responses can be unpacked and developed as their learning progresses. Instances of white fragility still occur in my units, especially when students are confronted with narratives that seek to unsettle the hegemonic conceptions of home and nation they identify closely with; however, one of the most inspiring aspects of the story repository is how the space shelters dialogues between students, enabling people from diverse backgrounds to work through their sense of unsettlement together.

Notes 1. Although this chapter focuses predominantly on addressing white fragility in a constructive manner, I wish to emphasise that I am also attuned to the needs of First Nations students, and that I am committed to supporting their wellbeing. While teaching at Federation University Australia, for example, I worked closely with the Aboriginal Education Centre on campus to ensure that the individual

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2.

3.

4.

5.

Demelza Hall needs of the Aboriginal students enrolled in my classes were being met. This was particularly important when teaching courses like Australian Literature wherein students are required to work closely with texts that deal directly with the trauma of colonisation. I also have my courses audited regularly to ensure that I am following appropriate cultural protocols. While Aboriginal homemaking practices are, traditionally, linked to ideas pertaining to Country and custodianship, in recent years they have also been increasingly linked to Western dwelling practices, such as building and land cultivation. As Yuin, Bunerong and Tasmanian writer and researcher, Bruce Pascoe, states in his ground-breaking book Dark Emu, along with ‘the exclusion of unpalatable parts of’ Australian history—such as ‘the illegal occupation of land and the slaughter of the occupants’—crucial elements have been overlooked and lost, including the facts that Aboriginal Australians planted and tended to crops, created complex irrigation systems and fisheries, and frequently resided in villages with permanent houses and other dwelling structures (2014, p. 224). Terms such as ‘Country’ and ‘Dreamings’ are capitalised as a sign of respect, for more details about appropriate terminology and conventions when referring to First Nations Australians and perspectives please see: https://www.narragunnawali.org.au/about/terminology-guide. I chose Purcell’s play as the first text for the reading group to focus on because, as discussed in section two, it is a literary adaptation which offers a distinct reimagining of a celebrated site of settler belonging, the bush dwelling of the Australian pioneer. ‘The Drover’s Wife’ was first published as a short story by Henry Lawson in 1892 and centred, originally, upon the trials and tribulations of a settler woman caring for her children in an isolated bush hut while her husband is away. Lawson’s text has been widely recognised for how it contributes to, and helps to strengthen, white Australia’s sense of national identity. The character of the drover’s wife, for example, displays attributes that settler Australians have tended to pride themselves on, such as stoicism, adaptability, and independence. Similarly, Lawson’s depiction of the bush – which positions the environment as one to be battled with and eventually tamed – encodes enduring settler attitudes towards the Australian land. While there have been countless adaptations of Lawson’s text, none have sought to interrogate the story’s racist representations of interracial contact. Purcell’s adaptation of Lawson’s short story, however, re-purposes seminal scenes of cross-cultural contact and exchange by foregrounding the perspectives and experiences of Aboriginal characters within spaces that have been associated, predominantly, with settler homemaking practices. The intimate and conversational nature of the sessions led participants to explain how these scenes intersected with their own personal feelings in more detail than they would have in a more formal classroom environment. Furthermore, working beyond the limits of the tertiary classroom allowed extended time to be given to ‘safety in’ ’ and ‘safety out’ procedures. For specific details about assisting students to enter and exit this text safely, see Nirvana Watkins teaching guide for Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife stage play on the Copyright Agency’s Reading Australia website: https://readingaustralia.com.au/lesson/the-drovers-wife/.

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6. Clint Abrahams, Nishevita Jayendran, and myself formed a working group following the 2019 ‘Spaces and Places’ conference in Bruges and have met regularly since then to discuss a number of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural projects. We are currently working on a project which seeks to bring together the experiences of a range of academicians to reflect on the place of the humanities in multidisciplinary university spaces.

References Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2013). Discussion paper: Aboriginal and Torres strait Islander peoples perspectives on homelessness. Retrieved from https://www.abs.gov. au/ausstats/[email protected]/mf/4735.0 Blunt, A., & Dowling, R. (2006). Home. Abingdon: Routledge. Broadbent, A. (2017). It will take critical, thorough scrutiny to truly decolonise knowledge. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/it-willtake-critical-thorough-scrutiny-to-truly-decolonise-knowledge-78477 DiAngelo, R. (2011). White fragility. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3(3), 54–70. Retrieved from https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/11 Elder, C. (2007). Being Australian: Narratives of national identity. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Etchegoyen, R. H. (2005). Fundamentals of psychoanalytic Technique. London: H. Karnac Books Ltd. Gelder, K., & Jacobs, J. M. (1998). Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and identity in a postcolonial nation. Melbourne: Melbourne UP. Gunn, J. (1908). We of the never-never. London, New York, NY, Melbourne: Hutchinson and CO. 1964. Hall, D. (2019). Woodheaps and chopping blocks: Talking to Leah Purcell, Leticia C´aceres and Stephen Curtis about the Drover’s wife. Overland Literary Journal. Retrieved from https://overland.org.au/2019/10/woodheaps-and-chopping-blockstalking-to-leah-purcell-leticia-caceres-stephen-curtis-about-the-drovers-wife/ Hall, D., Storey, K., Benney, L., & Bourke, M. (2021). Adapting the Australian Canon and decolonising the tertiary classroom: Settler students respond to Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife. English: Journal of the English Association, 70(270), 253–263. Handler Spitz, E. (2015). The irresistible psychology of fairy tales. New Republic. Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/126582/irresistible-psychologyfairy-tales Healy-Ingram, A. (2011). Teaching Indigenous literature: An ethics of voice. In B. Doecke, L. McLean-Davies, & P. Mead (Eds.), Teaching Australian literature: From classroom conversations to national imaginings (pp. 70–94). Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press. Hutcheon, L. (2007). In Defence of literary adaptation as cultural production. M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved from http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01hutcheon.php Hutcheon, L. (2012). A theory of adaptation. London and New York, NY: Routledge.

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Kossew, S. (2013). Recovering the past: Entangled histories in Kim Scott’s that Deadman Dance. In B. Neumaier & K. Schaffer (Eds.), Decolonizing the landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia (pp. 169–182). Amsterdam and New York, NY: Rodopi Press. LaCapra, D. (1999). Trauma, absence, loss. Critical Inquiry, 25(4), 696–727. Lawson, H. (1976). The Drover’s wife. In Kiernan (Ed.), The portable Henry Lawson (pp. 96–103). St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Leane, J. (2016). Forward. In Wheeler (Ed.), A companion to the works of Kim Scott (pp. vii–viii). Rochester, NY: Camden House. Lucashenko, M. (2006). Country: Being and belonging. Journal of Australian Studies, 86, 9–12. McLaughlin, J. M., & Whatman, S. L. (2008). Embedding university perspectives in university teaching and learning: Lessons learnt and possibilities for reforming/ decolonising curriculum. First Nations University of Canada. In R. Wesley Herbert (Ed.), Indigenous education: Asia/Pacific. Indigenous studies research centre (pp. 123–146). Canada, Regina: Saskatchewan. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2003). ‘I still Call Australia home’: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonizing society. In S. Ahmed, C. Castada, A. Fortier, & M. Sheller (Eds.), Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration (pp. 23–40). Oxford and New York, NY: Berg. Morrison, F. (2018). The antiphonal time of violence in Leah Purcell’s the Drover’s wife. Southerly, 78(3), 173–191. Pascoe, B. (2014). Dark Emu. Broome, WA: Magabala Books. Phillips, S. R., & Archer-Lean, C. (2019). Decolonising the reading of aboriginal and Torres strait Islander writing: Reflection as transformative practice. Higher Education Research and Development, 38(1), 24–37. Purcell, L. (2016). The Drover’s wife. Strawberry Hills: Currency Press. Read, P. (2000). Belonging: Australians, place and aboriginal ownership. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Roberts, T. (2009). The Brutal truth: What happened in the Gulf Country. The Monthly. Retrieved from https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2009/november/ 1330478364/tony-roberts/brutal-truth#mtr Rosenblatt, L. M. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois UP. Stanner, W. E. H. (2009). The Boyer lectures: After the dreaming. In W. E. H. Stanner (Ed.), The dreaming and other essays (pp. 172–224). Collingwood, VIC: Black Inc. Agenda. Upstone, S. (2009). Spatial politics in the postcolonial Novel. London and Burlington VT: Ashgate. Watkins, N. (2020). ‘The Drover’s wife’ teaching resource. Reading Australia: Copyright Agency. Retrieved from https://readingaustralia.com.au/lesson/the-droverswife/.

Chapter 3

Barbarism in the Age of Progress: Emily Hobhouse’s Report on the South African Concentration Camps and the Liberal Divide Over the Boer War Carla Larouco Gomes

Abstract 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.

Moving Spaces and Places, 43–58 Copyright © 2022 Carla Larouco Gomes Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221004

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Carla Larouco Gomes Keywords: Imperial expansion; Second Boer War; concentration camps; politics; power; conflict

Introduction The relationship between liberal politicians and thinkers and the British Empire is rather complex and far from linear, especially from the late eighteenth century on (Mehta, 1999, pp. 4, 81–82, 111). The difficulty in defining this relationship lies in the fact that, depending on the circumstances and historical contexts, liberals were at times enthusiastic defenders of the imperial project and, at other times, its severest critics. In fact, it was common for liberals to have diverging opinions regarding the Empire and imperialism even when they shared the same historical context. The Second Boer War, also known as Boer War, South African War, Anglo-Boer War or, to the Afrikaners, Second War of Independence (1899–1902), between Great Britain and two Boer, or Afrikaner, Republics – The South African Republic of Transvaal and the Orange Free State – was only one of the moments in which such disagreement was evident. Moreover, the course of the war was also of a complex nature and the Boers sometimes seemed to hold some advantage, despite the reduced number of troops compared to the British military forces. The Boers resisted and may have, indeed, hoped for official foreign military support. However, as Van Heyningen (2015, p. 1006) notes: ‘No country wanted to alienate Britain too much, and many were engaged in their own colonial conflicts’. Thus, after having rejected an offer of peace from the British early in 1901, the Boers would finally resign and the Peace of Vereeniging marked the end of the conflict in May 1902. In the context of this war, in 1901, Emily Hobhouse, a reformer and social worker on her own merits and also the sister of L. T. Hobhouse, a prominent new liberal who severely criticised imperial expansion, obtained permission to visit the concentration camps in South Africa, where Boers, mostly women and children whose houses and farms had been destroyed by the British forces, were allocated. From January to May, she visited seven of those camps as a delegate of the Distress Fund for the South African Women and Children, in order to write a report on the living conditions in the camps. In June, she had a meeting with the then leader of the Liberal Party, Campbell-Bannerman, in England. After Emily’s accounts, Bannerman denounced British military practices carried out in the Boer concentration camps as methods of barbarism.1 The Report was published a week later, and the controversy over the war further escalated, as the document provided information on the inhuman living conditions in the camps. Both Emily and the leader of the Liberal Party were now at the epicentre of a turmoil that they had not anticipated. Indeed, Emily Hobhouse’s agency over space and place, namely the concentration camps, further emphasised the controversy over imperialism and imperial expansion, and the Report instigated new perceptions about British military action in South Africa, as the concentration camps were now increasingly regarded as cruel spaces of confinement rather than a charitable shelter option to those who had lost their homes. In fact, Boer women and

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children had not ‘lost’ their homes. These were in fact destroyed, and, with them, the sense of comfort and security associated with such spaces. They were now confined in unsettling places, mostly associated with loss, pain, hunger, disease and death.

Liberals, Empire and Imperial Expansion In order to understand the complexity and ambiguity of the liberal views on the Boer War, it is important to elaborate on the historical and political context in which this particular war emerged. By the middle of the nineteenth century, considerable extensions had been made to British national territory. However, during the 1850s, the pinnacle of Britain’s commercial supremacy, further territorial expansion did not seem to be a priority anymore. In fact, some defended that it was not even desirable. Cobden and Bright, two prominent thinkers in the British Liberal Party of that time, for example, believed that Free Trade was not dependent on colonial expansion and it would rather promote equitable relations throughout the world.2 Critics of the Empire questioned its materialistic ethos and its disregard for relevant ethical considerations, emphasised the menace it represented to reform and peace and identified the colonies as a burden for the English. Victorian morality, rather than imperial superiority, should stand out as the utmost example of British greatness (Porter, 2008, pp. 10–14). Retrench arguments, or the defence of a less aggressive approach towards the colonies, seemed to gain renewed relevance, and policies of pacification by annexation and settlement in South Africa were temporarily abandoned (Hoppen, 1998, pp. 153–158, 221–222). In the 1870s, imperialism was still far from widely accepted and, in the political sphere, liberals recurrently criticised conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s foreign policy and authoritarian practices (Koebner & Schmidt, 2010, pp. 147–148). However, a decade later, the new imperialism seemed to be characterised by a renewed outlook imbued with a liberal, nationalistic and democratic tone. When compared to earlier periods, a pacific and tolerant Empire had apparently taken the place of a formerly more hostile imperialism, which led many liberals to believe in the truly philanthropic and emancipatory spirit of imperialism. Moreover, the British pioneering and leading position in the context of industrialisation and trade was progressively weakened, and economic uncertainty started to step in. South Africa was considered a potential solution for the increasing economic instability; imperial initiatives and practices were now equated with Britainʾs civilising duty towards the natives of the developing world. In the 1880s and 1890s, imperialism was attracting widespread public interest and, despite the fact that the various views and debates on the Empire were controversial and differed enormously from one another, the general feeling was that it might achieve the objective of working towards the spread of civilisation. This was one of the reasons why, according to L. T. Hobhouse, many liberals had been persuaded to believe in the promise of imperialism:

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Carla Larouco Gomes As it now [before the South African War] stood the Empire was a guarantee of peace, freedom and equality between races and religions, and a force making for righteousness and civilization throughout the world, while Imperialism meant nothing but loyalty and devotion to an Empire so constituted. (1904, p. 28)

Together with the endorsement of the imperial sentiment in schools, several other activities, such as those held in music halls, the publication of imperialist-biased articles in newspapers and the imperialist tone in pieces of literature, amongst others, celebrated imperialism and/or supported the instigation of an imperial sentiment – promoted, to a large extent, by imperial propagandist agencies. The influence of such agencies was relevant, comprehensive and undeniably present in different areas of society, more than that of the government (James, 1994, pp. 184, 202–203; Mackenzie, 1984, pp. 2, 11; 1986, p. 10). As Mackenzie (1984, p. 35) noted, a certain kind of press and popular activities, namely the music halls, rapidly became of service to the dominant ideology of the age, which celebrated imperial practices and militaristic accomplishments. Moreover, the period of the fabulous fifties – characterised by the unrivalled British supremacy in industrial developments and, consequently, economic dominance – was long gone and, with it, the unwavering belief in Britainʼs undefeated prosperity. In the 1880s and 1890s, the country was undergoing a profound crisis of confidence, and the certainties of the great ‘Victorian prosperity’ had vanished. Moreover, the cyclical depressions of 1879, 1885 and 1894, the slowing down of economic growth, the impact of competition, the wide gulf between rich and poor, the escalation of poverty and unemployment, the outbreaks of violence and the rise of emigration and indigence shattered hopes and expectations about the positive effects of industrialisation and the opportunities it would bring about for the population in general (B´edarida, 1979, p. 103; Harvie & Matthew, 2000, p. 82).3 The slowing down of economic development and the consequent loss of Britainʼs leadership were also caused by increasing foreign competition, which was somehow disguised by the successful exploitation of some colonial markets. The change of scenario called for urgent measures, and liberalism seemed to have been betrayed by the very values, proposals and innovations it had fostered. New solutions were needed for the British Empire to maintain its established dominant position. Once again, the Boer Republics became attractive for the Empire, as gold deposits had been discovered on the Witwatersrand which soon led to the Witwatersrand Gold Rush and its uncontrollable social and political consequences (Van Heyningen, 2015, p. 1004).4 Nevertheless, the economic reasons behind the incorporation of South Africa into the imperial idea and the conflict between the European powers in the ‘Scramble for Africa’, or the partition and conquest of Africa, were generally overlooked and the spirit of the civilising mission was proclaimed instead. The British Empire and the expansionism based on civilisation was then regarded as a just and beneficent one, with a very clear moral obligation to fulfil (Koebner & Schmidt, 2010, pp. 196, 204–205, 216–220, 243). The new theories of evolution,

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mainly due to Darwinʼs contribution, further vindicated belief in the British civilising mission and scientifically backed the defence of imperial expansion at the turn of the twentieth century. Social Darwinism was not restricted to pointing out the worth of individuals; it was also used in analysing the relationship between races and communities and subsequently determining a kind of hierarchical order, depending on the stage of development that races and communities had achieved so far.5 This theory mandate that the more developed people – Britain, as it saw itself – could, or rather should, work towards the emancipation of more backward people. This was, after all, the ‘white man’s burden’.6 However, despite the alleged humanitarian rationale of the new imperialism, influential imperialists such as Joseph Chamberlain believed that the survival of the British Empire implied national efficiency, with the objective of transforming Britain into a proper imperial nation, and the British into an undisputed governing race (Porter, 2004, pp. 133–139; 2008, pp. 2–3). The connection established between efficiency and Empire by the liberal imperialists, whose leader was Lord Rosebery, was in part also due to their belief in the superiority of certain models of conduct, namely those of Japan and Germany. Moreover, the belief in the superiority of the British race was undoubtedly also fostered by the theories propounded by social Darwinism. The ‘survival of the fittest’ thesis, and its application to the analysis of the relationship between communities and races, seemed to scientifically sanction the belief in the existence of superior and inferior sorts of people. Imperial enthusiasm was soon to be shattered in the wake of the controversies over the Boer War, which shook the nation’s confidence in the moral character of the new imperialism, split the British in their attitude towards the Empire and earned the country a general condemnation by Europeans who associated imperialism with an inflated and arrogant form of English nationalism.

The Boer War and the Concentration Camps The contemporary reader would generally make an immediate association between the expression ‘concentration camps’ and the Second World War and the Nazi Regime. However, even though this was not the first time in history such places were used for contested war practices, establishing extensive similarities between the Nazi concentration camps and the Boer ones does seem to be a farfetched attempt, as Helen Dampier remarked: the Nazi camps deliberately sought to exterminate inmates, whereas the South African Camps aimed at: ‘(…) controlling, regulating and institutionalising everyday life as it sought to organise several thousand women and children who populated each camp, and was not aimed at the destruction of the Boer people’. (2005, p. 188). The reasons why Boer women and children were forced to populate such camps, though, derived from British military attacks, as will be clarified in the following paragraphs. Moreover, references to the British as the inventors of such places stemmed from German Nazi politicians themselves, as these two examples show:

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Carla Larouco Gomes I once did my best to persuade Goering to use his influence with a view to their abolition. His answer was typical. After listening to all I had to say, he got up without a word and went to a bookcase from which he took a volume of the German Encyclopaedia.7 Opening it at Konzentratinslager (concentration camps) he read out, ‘First used by the British, in the South African War’. He was pleased with his own retort (…) (Henderson, 1940, p. 21)

On 3 September last year, two hours after English plutocracy declared war on the German Reich, the British Prime Minister Chamberlain gave a radio speech to the German people in the most broken German (…) Its best and most eloquent publicists have long since made it clear that the goal of British plutocracy is to destroy the German people of the German Reich. They wish to return it to its state after the Peace of Westphalia in the year 1648. At the beginning of the war, however, they sang the same old song. It was a bit too familiar to our ears to be effective. Its melody was dull and worn out. British plutocracy had tried to persuade the Boers during the South African war of the same thing. Britain was only fighting Krugerism. (Goebbels, 1940)8 The crucial events in South Africa, which culminated in the Boer War, can be summarised as follows: the British intended to extend their imperial rule in South Africa, while the two Boer Republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal wanted to maintain their independence; there was permanent political tension, which was well represented by the apprehension between Paul Kruger, a supporter of Boer independence and the President of Transvaal, and Cecil Rhodes, the Premier of Cape Colony and a supporter of British initiatives; and the discovery of gold on the Witwaterstrand. Such events clearly unmasked the real reasons and rationale behind British new imperialism. Whereas it was endorsed by the majority of liberals, L. T. Hobhouse considered the kind of liberalism associated with new imperialism as disrespected the freedom of the individual and the community, the notion of consent, the aim of universal peace, tolerance and equality and would, therefore, never endorse it. Moreover, Hobhouse criticised its claims for racial and national superiority, aggression, militarism and war. Moreover, the popular and political polemic developing in England during the Boer War was, to a great extent, fuelled by the emergence of Boer concentration camps. The different interpretations of the reasons for the creation of such camps, as well as diverging accounts of their characteristics and conditions, further contributed to the complexity of the matter: Studies of the British camps often evoke emotions of anger, denial and sorrow. Early historical descriptions of the camps are

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polarized at opposite ends of a spectrum, ranging from beneficial ‘refugee camps’ complete with hospitals and schools, to ‘death camps’ aimed at the genocide of the boer ‘volk’. (Scott, 2007, p. 2) At the turn of the nineteenth century, though, especially after Emily Hobhouse’s accounts of the living conditions in the camps, there was a growing belief that imperial expansion was morally wrong and had to be reversed. In fact, Emily Hobhouse’s Report brought to light certain hidden practices carried out in South Africa and created a spatial discourse which instigated discussion about the nature of such places and their effect on precepts of humanity and fairness, consequently further distressing the political sphere and debates. It can hardly be stated that the British were the inventors of war atrocities such as those described in the accounts of the Boer War, as some of its characteristics were previously observed in the Crimean War (1853–1856), the American Civil War (1861–1865), the Franco Prussian War (1870), the Spanish-American War (1896) and the Philippine-American War (1899) (Van Heyningen, 2015, p. 1002). Nevertheless, the Hague Conventions of 1899, which the British also signed, clearly defined restrictions on war-related practices, with a clear reference to the defence of individual rights, lives and private property, in article 46: ‘Family honours and rights, individual lives and private property, as well as religious convictions and liberty must be respected. Private property cannot be confiscated.’ The Second Boer War was supported by liberal imperialists and revealed irrational ambition, military reverses, scandals and evidence of inadequate administration. Moreover, it emphasised the problems arising in terms of Britain’s economic status, on which national pride rested, as the previous supremacy of the 1850s could no longer stand as evidence of national strength. The US, Germany, France and Russia were now all important industrial powers, and the first two were actually superior to Britain in some sectors (Harvie & Matthew, 2000, pp. 109, 125). The Liberal Party led by Campbell-Bannerman was the main opposition group to Salisbury’s Imperialist Unionist government of the late 1890s. Yet, liberals tended either to ignore important problems or to deal with them inefficiently. There was no agreement within the party, and, despite the fact that some liberals attacked imperial expansion, they did so without any conviction or coherence. However, the position of the Liberal leader on the imperial policies carried out in South Africa, especially after the meeting with Emily Hobhouse, was clear.

Emily Hobhouse’s Report Emily Hobhouse had been a critic of British Policy in South Africa from the outbreak of the Boer War and was appointed the secretary of the South African Conciliation Committee – a group which opposed British Government Policies regarding expansion in South Africa. In 1900, aware as she was of the high mortality rate of Boer women and children in the concentration camps, she

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organised a mass meeting in London where women protested against British policies in South Africa, and then funded the distress fund for the South African women and children. She eventually visited the concentration camps as a delegate of this fund and wrote her impacting Report. The fact that Emily Hobhouse had, indeed, travelled to such places and been close to the Boer women and children, rather than merely providing her informed, but otherwise ‘distant’ opinion on the camps, certainly contributed to the impact of the Report, which represented, eventually, a literary practice that brought to light realistic accounts of the destruction of safe spaces, Boer homes, and the rationale behind the construction of unsettling places, the camps. In her 15-page Report entitled Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies, Emily Hobhouse described her experience in South Africa and reported the appalling living conditions in the camps. In the introductory paragraphs, she warned the reader that the changing conditions of the camps did not allow her to draw up ‘an ordinary conventional report’, but rather, ‘what was written day by day’ (1901, p. 3). Through her extremely vivid portrayal and intelligent comments and remarks, the reader clearly understands that she was profoundly affected by the circumstances she found, and that she was totally against the way these camps were organised. However, her descriptions and criticism were rather objective and rational; anger and revolt did not seem to deviate her from the intention of providing an accurate and realistic account of the situation. The camps were overcrowded and did not have minimum sanitary conditions. There were no trees and no shade, she said. The heat was terrible. There was little and unsuitable food, sickness spread rapidly, and the death rate, especially in children, was striking. The number of tents was increasingly higher, they were infested with insects and they did not shelter from rain and were too small for whole families. Moreover, there was lack of fuel, no wood, little coal, lack of beds and mattresses, lack of soap, lack of water, lack of shoes, clothes and blankets, and insufficient hospitals, and only some children in some camps could have access to education. Forced movement to the concentration camps had caused disruptive physical and psychological effects on Boer women and children whose reality was now transformed into a living nightmare. However, despite their displacement, the loss of their homes, and a forced confinement to such unsettling places, their despair about the future and their fear for their childrenʼs lives, Boer women were, according to Emily Hobhouse, wonderful. She stated: They cry very little and never complain. The very magnitude of their sufferings, indignities, loss and anxiety seems to lift them beyond tears. These people who have had comfortable, even luxurious homes, just set themselves to quiet endurance and to make the best of their bare terrible lot; only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out. (1901, p. 4)

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The heat, the difficulties in transport, the incompetence of some superintendents and the over-centralised system made it difficult to fight against scarcity of supply. Yet, Emily Hobhouse (1901, p. 10) emphasised that the camps were very different from one another and the amount of discomfort depended on five factors: firstly, on the commandant; secondly, on the natural conditions and proximity to food and water; thirdly, on the distance from a base and shops; fourthly, on the presence of public opinion and lastly, on the date of commencement, as the earliest camps had conditions which, unfortunately, became increasingly scarce and were eventually no longer available, such as access to clothes, food and water, as well as shelter from cold and rain. However, Hobhouse was not a mere spectator of this system of ‘wholesale cruelty’ (1901, p. 4), as she defined it. She spent most of the time talking to the women in the camps in an attempt to understand their feelings and offer some comfort. Moreover, she also distributed clothes which frequently arrived from England, as well as other necessary goods, and constantly tried to mitigate the pain of those women who could neither maintain themselves nor provide for their children in the camps and lived a demoralising and purposeless life. Some of them, she said, had means and would be better off on their own. Others still had their houses, as not all had been burnt by the British military, and could go back and live in better conditions if only they were allowed to leave the camps. But they were not. In a rare ironic tone she stated: Will you try, somehow, to make the British public understand the position, and force it to ask itself what is going to be done with these people? […] If the people at home want to save their purses (you see, I appeal to low motives), why not allow those who can maintain themselves to go to friends and relatives in the colony? Many wish ardently to do so. That would be some relief. If only the English people would try to exercise a little imagination – picture the whole miserable scene. Entire villages and districts rooted up and dumped in a strange, bare place. (1901, p. 4) But the English people could hardly picture it. In several articles her brother, L. T. Hobhouse, wrote for the Speaker in 1901 and 1902, and in one of his major works, Democracy and Reaction, published in 1904, he expressed his severe criticism of the behaviour of the middle class and its unrestrained, enthusiastic and ill-informed support of imperialism. The ‘man-in-the-street’ knew everything and questioned nothing, which resulted both in a depressing ‘slang of ideas’, and in a ‘moral slang’. However, even though this reality was more strikingly personified by the middle class, for Hobhouse (1904, p. 64) ‘[…] whole classes have been won over definitely to the side of the established order’. Hobson (1901, pp. 1–5, 9) who was also an influential new liberal, expressed similar views. He, too, stated that not only the middle but also the working class seemed to have been overtaken by brutish and ignorant imperialist sentiments, stimulated, to a large extent, by the music halls and propagated by a fallacious press which easily influenced the minds

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of those unaccustomed to logical reasoning and with a total lack of intellectual curiosity.

The Impact of the Report Emily Hobhouse returned to England in June, and a fast succession of events followed. She had requested a meeting with Campbell-Bannerman to discuss the conclusions of her Report, confident that he would sympathise with the Boer women and children and, consequently, state his position against the South African concentration camps. About that meeting she would later write: The interview […] remains vivid in my mind. All of whom I saw at the time, deeply interested as they were, he alone, greatly occupied as he was, seemed to have the leisure and the determination to hear and understand everything. For nearly two hours he listened with rapt attention, now and then putting a question to elucidate a point. He left the impression of a man who spared no time or pains to arrive at truth, and in whom wisdom and humanity were paramount. (Spender, 1923, p. 335) In fact, Campbell-Bannerman was not hostile to the Empire and described himself as ‘a Liberal and an imperialist enough for any decent man’ (Sharpe, 2000, p. 3). He had adopted, as Alfred Havighurst stated: ‘a middle-of-the-road position’ and sought to keep harmony in the party. Nevertheless, he objected to the methods employed in the Boer war and believed that such methods, including the concentration camps, would cause long-lasting resentment and make reconciliation impossible after the war. Still the Imperialist Unionist government alleged that everything had been done to minimise the problems in the South African concentration camps and blamed Boer women for their inexperience and ignorance (Spender, 1923, pp. 334–335). Later that month, Campbell-Bannerman was the main guest at a dinner given by the National Reform Union and, in a speech which came to be considered one of the most significant of his career, denounced farm burning and concentration camps as ‘methods of barbarism’ (Havighurst, 1985, p. 57). ‘A phrase often used’, he said, ‘is that “war is war”, but when one comes to ask about it one is told that no war is going on, that it is not war. When is war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa’ (Sharpe, 2000, p. 6). These words and Emilyʾs Report, which was published four days after the Liberal leader’s speech, generated an immediate response from the press and polemical political debates. Actually, as Havighurst stated, ‘the concentration camps became a chief war issue of 1901 in England’ (1985, p. 55). As a result, the crisis already extant at the time in the oppositional Liberal party was accentuated, as liberal imperialists, moderates and pro-Boers fervently voiced their opinions. They accused Campbell-Bannerman of offending the

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British army, of defaming British people, of being pro-Boer and a traitor. He was permanently attacked, he received anonymous letters and was by many rendered incapable of leading one of the greatest British parties (Spender, 1923, pp. 336, 350). Three days after Campbell-Bannerman’s famous speech, Lloyd George presented a motion to the House of Commons proposing a parliamentary discussion on the Hobhouse Report. Not only did Campbell-Bannerman support the motion but also restated his opinion on the concentration camps and, though he made it clear that it had not been his intention to offend the British Army, he also restated the idea that the whole system was barbarous. After this, anger directed at him escalated even more (Havighurst, 1985, p. 58; Spender, 1923, p. 337). In a speech in Sterling in October, he restated his position, and again in November when he addressed the liberal association at Chesterfield in Derbyshire (Havighurst, 1985, p. 59). In the Sterling speech he stated: The farms are burnt, the country is wasted; the flocks and herds are either butchered or driven off; the mills are destroyed; furniture and implements of agriculture are smashed. These things are what I have termed methods of barbarism. I adhere to the phrase. I cannot improve upon it. If these are not the methods of barbarism, what methods does barbarism employ? (Campbell-Bannerman, 1901, p. 236) Despite the permanent attacks and criticism, the liberal press was as divided as the party itself and some were on Campbell-Bannerman’s side. L. T. Hobhouse, for example, also made use of the expression ‘methods of barbarism’ in some of the Speaker articles, and denounced the barbarism of the British policy of burning farms and building concentration camps, of which he could provide an accurate account precisely due to his sisterʾs findings. His determination to fight for justice and against the abuses of imperialism was not limited to the theoretical field; in 1898 he had been involved in the protection of native races and asserted that justice had to be done in South Africa. In one of those articles, ‘Some Shattered Illusions’ (1901), he actually identified the aggressiveness associated with war as one of the shattered illusions of the time. Despite the fact that war, he explained, was not something new, this recourse to barbaric methods in a period when some civility and moral progress was thought to have been achieved, represented ‘a renewal of the dark forces’. He went further and added: ‘They [the enemies] are shot, hanged, flogged, imprisoned, or banished; their houses are looted or burnt; their wives and families are turned out to die; their property is confiscated’ (Hobhouse, 1901, p. 300). British political and military insidious action towards the natives of South Africa and the growing criticism from other European nations were not the only negative consequences of such an abhorrent war, though. Obsession with imperial domination and expansion had deviated attention from much needed internal initiatives aimed at fighting the negative consequences of the process of industrialisation in society and the fast-changing reality that came with it. Internal democracy seemed to be weakened, legislation

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regulating industry was insufficient and unfair, sickness, poverty and crime escalated and public recreation, education, as well as a sound development of working-class organisations were mostly overlooked (Hobhouse, 1904, pp. 50–55). According to Hobhouse, the ‘democratic imperialist’, in his blindness and his obsession with the expansion of territory, as well as his ambition for power, had not only overthrown democracy and contributed to the regression of civilisation in South Africa, but had also severely affected his own country’s democracy. For Hobhouse, ‘The absorption of public attention in foreign affairs paralysed democratic effort at home’ and ‘[a]ggrandisement, war, compulsory enlistment, lavish expenditure, protection, arbitrary government, class legislation, follow naturally one upon the other’ (1904, pp. 49, 55). The determination to rule others and to expand the Empire had diverted both popular and government attention from what should have been their main priority, that is, the ‘democratic effort at home’, and had consequently weakened the national constitution (Hobhouse, 1904, pp. 50–55). Hobson (1902), too, opposed the Boer War and believed that imperialism and democracy were totally opposing principles. Moreover, even though he acknowledged the good examples of Canada and Australia, he also alerted people to the fact that these two countries were the exception, not the rule, as far as the benefits of imperial expansion were concerned. Just like Hobhouse, Hobson also accused the new imperialism, largely fostered by the new wealthy and governing classes looking for new markets and areas of investment, of representing a return to barbarism. For Hobson, it was clear that a choice had to be made between democracy and the new conception of Empire. In December 1901 Lord Rosebery, the liberal imperialist leader, attacked Campbell-Bannerman for the use of the expression ‘barbarism’, despite acknowledging the problems identified in the camps, which had already been admitted by the National Liberal Federation. Public polemical discussions between the two leaders ensued, resulting in Roseberyʼs announcement of his complete separation from Campbell-Bannerman and the Liberal party and in the creation of the imperialist Liberal League in 1902. After the meeting with Campbell-Bannerman, Emily Hobhouse continued her campaign against the conditions in the concentration camps and held dozens of public meetings in an attempt to gather support. In July 1901 a ladies commission (Fawcett Commission) was appointed by the British Colonial Office to investigate the conditions in the camps. The Commission report was completed in December, but it was only published in February 1902 and discussed in Parliament a month later. It corroborated the conclusions in Emily’s Report. In 1902 Emily Hobhouse published The Brunt of the War, and Where it Fell and, denying the accusation made against her of having slandered the British troops, she further developed her descriptions of the conditions in the camps and dedicated the book to the women in South Africa (Hobhouse, 1902, p. XV). She made a vigorous appeal for the practices in the camps to be unequivocally condemned, so as to avoid the resort to similar practices in the future:

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As a whole, the great body of Boer women have come finely out of the ordeal to which we have subjected them. But that is no justification of their having been so subjected. Never before have women and children been so warranted against. England, by the hands of Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener, adopted the policy of Spain, while improving upon her methods. She has placed her seal upon an odious system. It is to be a precedent for future wars, or is it to be denounced not merely by one party, but by every humane person of every creed and every tongue, denounced as a ‘method of barbarism’ which must never be resorted to again (…) (Hobhouse, 1902, p. 317) Moreover, even though the main objective had not been that of slandering the British troops, her criticism of some officials and their methods was clear in the Report and she actually stated that the conditions in the camps depended first and foremost on the commandant (Hobhouse, 1901, p. 10). Despite the complexity of the subject and the diverging opinions on the Boer War, both at the time and in subsequent decades, innuendos of exaggeration of the negative description of the concentration camps persist. In this regard, Dampier (2005, p. 191) stated that: While these things – trauma, death, hardship – certainly made part of daily life for some women in some camps at certain times, their ubiquitous appearance in the testimonies suggests that the official nationalist campaign to ‘remember’ led to a distorted emphasis on only certain types of experiences. We may agree that experiences may have differed from camp to camp and from woman to woman, amongst other factors, as Emily herself acknowledged. Indeed, for some women and children, the camps may have been the only places where they found some assistance and comfort. Nevertheless, one can hardly imagine that the days spent there would have been filled with pacific or pleasant experiences, if we think about the reasons why those children and women were there in the first place. Moreover, the numbers are revealing: about 26,000 Boer women and children lost their lives during the wars and it is estimated that between 13,000 to 20,000 of these occurred in the concentration camps (Britannica).

Conclusion The Boer War period was marked by controversy. A sound approach to its social and political contexts can never be of a linear nature, as I have shown in my chapter. Despite the fact that the importance of the British Empire was generally acknowledged, feelings and opinions about imperial expansion and practices were far from unanimous; this is particularly true in the political sphere, which caused

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multiple reactions to contested initiatives and practices. The leader of the Liberal Party himself was a kind of imperialist who strongly criticised the Boer War. The British won the Second Boer War, but it was a far-from-glorious or widely celebrated victory. The British’s lack of military expertise was disguised by the far superior number of military agents in the field – 500,000 against 88,000 Boers. Their triumph was, to a great extent, made possible due to the implementation of highly contested practices which eventually led to the resignation of PM Lord Salisbury, in 1902. When the first prime minister of the Union of South Africa, Louis Botha, visited England, he would say that Campbell-Bannerman had made a great impression upon men fighting a losing battle. He had ‘touched their hearts and made them seriously think about the possibility of future reconciliation’, adding that ‘After all, three words made peace and union in South Africa: “methods of barbarism”’ (Spender, 1923, p. 351). Such an impression resulted from, to a great extent, Emily Hobhouseʼs action. Emily Hobhouseʼs Report and the crude, yet real, description she made of the concentration camps as cruel and inhuman places of confinement had a social and political impact which she had not anticipated and helped reshape the political discourse on the Boer war. Emily, attacked by some and praised by others, managed to influence the leader of the Liberal party to very clearly take a stand against the concentration camps and, consequently, against that kind of imperialism: irrational, ambitious, aggressive, inhuman or, in a word, barbaric.

Notes 1. Emily Hobhouse’s first name will be used in this report to distinguish her from her brother, L. T. Hobhouse. 2. Richard Cobden (1804–1865) and John Bright (1811–1889) were the leaders of the Manchester School and represented invariable two sides of the same coin when addressing the defence of Free Trade which, besides its economic benefits, would also contribute towards the reduction of armaments and the promotion of international peace. This school of thought dominated the British Liberal Party in the mid nineteenth century. 3. The words ‘unemployed’ and ‘unemployment’ appeared in the OED for the first time in 1882 and 1888, respectively. 4. The First Boer War was fought in 1880–1881 between the British and the Boers, who hoped to regain their independence after Britain had taken over the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in 1877. Eventually, the British were defeated and the Republics regained their independence. 5. Social Darwinism defended that the laws of natural selection applied to plants and animals also applied to individuals and meant that the weakest would not survive in the process of evolution. Such theory was very popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 6. ‘The White Man’s Burden: the United States and the Philippine Islands’ was a poem written by the famous British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling in 1899 and urged the United States to acknowledge their duty: that of civilising backward

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peoples. The use of the word ‘burden’, ironically or not, denotes a negative perspective on such a mission which was, nevertheless, a glorious one. The expression was frequently used in the context of imperial expansion both by opponents and defenders of imperialism, though with a naturally different perspective and interpretation. 7. Hermann Goering (1893–1946) was a leader of the Nazi Party and had a prominent role in the creation of German concentration camps. 8. Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) was the minister of propaganda for the German Third Rich.

References B´edarida, F. (1979). A social history of England 1851–1975. London and New York, NY: Methuen. Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. (2021, October 4). South African war. In Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/event/SouthAfrican-War Campbell, B. (1901). Speech at sterling. In A. Bullock & M. Shock (Eds.), The liberal tradition from Fox to Keynes (pp. 235–237). New York, NY: New York University Press. Dampier, H. (2005). The ‘Treatment of “everyday life” in memory and narrative of the concentration camps of the South African War, 1899–1902’. In Narrative, memory & everyday life (pp. 187–198). Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield. Goebbels, J. (1940). Our Hitler. Goebbel’s 1940 speech on Hitler’s birthday. Retrieved from https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/unser40.htm Harvie, C., & Matthew, H. C. G. (2000). Nineteenth-century Britain. A very short introduction. Oxford: OUP. Havighurst, A. F. (1985). Britain in transition. The twentieth century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henderson, N. (1940). Failure of a mission: Berlin 1937–1939. New York: G.P. Putnam´ıs Sons. Hobhouse, E. (1901). Report of a visit to the camps of women and children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies. London: Committee of the South African Distress Fund. Hobhouse, E. (1902). The brunt of war and where it fell. London: Methuen and Co. Accessed on January 13, 2022. Hobhouse, L. T. (1901). Some shattered illusions. The Speaker, 5(115), 300–301. Hobhouse, L. T. (1904). Democracy and reaction. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Hobson, J. A. (1901). The psychology of Jingoism. London: Grant Richards. Open Library. Retrieved from http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7110496M/The_ psychology_of_jingoism Hobson, J. A. (1902). Imperialism: A study. New York, NY: James Pott & Co. The Online Library of Liberty. Accessed on January 13, 2022. Hoppen, T. K. (1998). The Mid-Victorian generation 1846-1886. Oxford: Clarendon Press. James, L. (1994). The rise and fall of the British Empire. London: Abacus.

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Koebner, R., & Schmidt, H. (2010). Imperialism: The story and significance of a political word 1840–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mackenzie, J. M. (1984). Propaganda and Empire: The manipulation of British public opinion, 1880–1960. Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press. Mackenzie, J. M. (Ed.). (1986). Imperialism and popular culture. Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press. Mehta, U. S. (1999). Liberalism and Empire: A Study in nineteenth-century British liberal thought. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Porter, B. (2004). The Lion’s share: A short History of British imperialism, 1850–2004. Harlow: Longman. Porter, B. (2008). Critics of Empire: British radicals and the imperial challenge. London and New York, NY: I. B. Tauris & Co. Scott, J. L. (2007). British concentration camps of the second South African War (the Transvaal 1900–1902). Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Library. Sharpe, I. (2000). The liberal party and the South African War 1899–1902. Journal of Liberal Democrat History, 99, 3–8. Spender, J. A. (1923). The life of the right Hon. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, G. C. B. London: Hodder & Stoughton. The Hague Convention. (1899). Retrieved from https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ ihl/ihl.nsf/ART/150-110052?OpenDocument Van Heyningen, E. (2015). The South African War as humanitarian crisis. International Review of the Red Cross, 97(900), 999–1028.

Chapter 4

Urban Modernism in East Germany: From Socialist Model to Creative Appropriation Martin Blum

Abstract 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. Keywords: GDR; furniture design; housing policy; modernism; modular construction; Plattenbau; urban planning

Moving Spaces and Places, 59–78 Copyright © 2022 Martin Blum Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221005

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Introduction Movement is probably not the first thought that comes to mind when one imagines the typical large high-rise apartment blocks that are found all over the former East Germany. A closer look, however, reveals that movement in a literal and metaphorical sense played a significant role in the buildings’ concept and in their ongoing history. The ease of physical movement of the residents in their individual apartments and in their neighbourhoods was one of the most important considerations in their design. Equally important demands were affordability and social mobility, which were in the brief given by the East German government to the architects, builders and planners. However, physical and social movement were not the only factors that had a deep impact on the buildings and their quarters. Since their primary purpose was to address a need for housing and at the same time legitimise the socialist state of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the buildings represented ideological spaces right from the outset. Understanding space as ideological space reflects the political and social development in Germany from the late 1960s to the present day: while these large residential developments were initially positive manifestations of the state that created them, their fate changed dramatically when the state itself ceased to exist. Moving on from a model of socialist planning and universal care for the citizens, the buildings became the unwanted and highly visible remains of a perished state and its ideology. However, after a 30 year hiatus, the buildings have finally emerged from their ideological space. Recently, they have been rediscovered as affordable housing and, in a nod to their original design and building methods, as spaces that can easily be modified. This inherent design quality now allows the old buildings to progress to a third life: this time as creative spaces and highly adaptable living spaces. Thirty years of dismissing the architecture of the GDR on ideological grounds also meant dismissing interesting experiments and thoughtful solutions to the universal issue of designing and providing affordable and appropriate living spaces for the people. The preface to a recent collection of East German modernist architecture notes the public and official ambivalence towards the GDR’s architectural heritage: ‘Even thirty years after German unification, however, on many sides there is still no consensus about the architectural value of buildings in the style of GDR modernism’ (Engels, J¨ager, & Kaden, 2019, p. 5). The authors do, however, confirm that a new generation ‘of architects and planners […] approach these buildings with less prejudice’ (Engels et al., 2019, p. 5), which is a sign that the critical perception of the GDR’s architectural legacy is beginning to change. In a similar manner, a recent documentary by the German TV station MDR with the poignant title To Demolish or to Preserve? (Abreißen oder erhalten, 2020) advocates for the preservation of the GDR’s threatened architectural heritage. Indeed, a close look at the buildings and their neighbourhoods reveals a remarkable and unique aspect of German urbanism: as part of the East German urban modernist experiment, Plattenbauten and their entire city quarters are

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expressions of a revolutionary concept of urban residential planning at the time. The modernist principles of residential development and construction are not only obvious in the construction methods that were employed; in fact, several handbooks were published at the same time to explain to the new residents the fundamental concept that informed the design of their new apartments in order to help them make the most of their new living spaces. Titles, such as Neue Wohnung – modern gestaltet (Lembcke, Lehmann, Rau¨ tenberg, Walk, & Schone, 1983), which can be translated as New Apartment – Designed the Modern Way, are a clear indication that the focus of modernist design was first and foremost on the needs of the residents. The objective was to improve the residents’ lives by providing affordable, easy-to-maintain and practical living spaces. To accomplish this goal, not only were the individual buildings carefully planned to meet the residents’ needs, but a holistic and multi-disciplinary concept was developed that encompassed all levels of planning. These ranged from the entire housing estate and its infrastructure, to the engineering of the buildings themselves, to the interior of the new apartments, and even included suitable furnishings for the new living spaces. Particular emphasis was placed on identifying the residents’ patterns of movement within the apartment and also in the entire neighbourhood to create a practical and liveable environment. While urban modernism has been discussed widely in Western Europe (cf. Gold, 2007), its eastern variant has largely escaped scholarly attention despite representing one of its most consequent translations into reality. Supported by a national housing programme and due to the state ownership of all land – and thus easy access to large tracts – the urban development in the GDR was one of the most consequent realizations of the concepts of modernism and functionalism in residential construction.

Theoretical Framework A productive way to discuss urban modernism is through the critical lens of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991/1973). Lefebvre develops the notion that space is not a static concept, but instead ‘produced’, which means it is defined by a number of social practices. These practices comprise the different ways in which space is shaped, used and conceptualised. In Lefebvre’s understanding this means that space is not a fixed term, but rather a concept that is open to different interpretations, which in turn determine a diverse understanding of space and its multiple aspects. While Lefebvre does not specifically comment on architectural modernism, his analysis of space makes particular sense in the context of modernism: he redefines the understanding of space (‘habitat’) from a purely capitalist notion of exchange-value to a more differentiated view of space as dwelling (‘habitation’). This notion of dwelling is rooted in understanding space in a dynamic sense ‘as a set of everyday practices that are not limited to a single apartment, but extended to commercial, health, educational, and administrative services’ (Stanek, 2011, p. 83). In the modernist understanding of space, this concept ties in with

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functionalism and urbanism. The concept of functionalism is a key aspect of modernist design as it ‘rejects ornamentation unrelated to an item’s function, resulting in design that emphasizes a utilitarian purpose. The style was summed up in architect Louis Sullivan’s (1856–1924) popular slogan “form [ever] follows function”’ (Parsons, 2016, n.p.). In practical terms this means that functionalism privileges a minimalistic design and aesthetics that dispense with any elements that are deemed unnecessary for the function of an object or of a building. Instead, it advocates for design choices that deliberately showcase an object’s or a building’s functional and structural components. The focus on use-value and practicality means that the actual users of a product or the residents of a building are able to take true ownership of it through their daily practice – an ownership that goes beyond the mere possession of it. In Lefebvre’s sense, to produce space means to appropriate it, which is a highly individual process and involves first and foremost those who inhabit and use the space. ‘For an individual, for a group to inhabit is to appropriate something. Not in the sense of possessing it, but as making it an oeuvre, making it one’s own, shaping it’ (as cited in Stanek, 2011, p. 87). Following this assertion of the fluidity of space, Lefebvre then develops ‘a conceptual triad of spatial practices that allow for its critical analysis. The conceptual triad is that of the perceived-, conceived-, and lived space and its translation into spatial theory, spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of representations’ (Stanek, 2011, p. 119). Defining these three key concepts, Lefebvre writes: ‘Spatial practice of a society is revealed through deciphering of its space’ (1991/1973, p. 38), by which he means the actual development of the physical space as evidenced by the original plans, designs and construction methods. The next category of investigation, the representational space, describes ‘space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols […]. This is the dominated […] space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate’ (Lefebvre, 1991/1973, p. 38). This concept focuses on the lived or private space and has a decidedly phenomenological component. In this sense, it examines the individual lived practices of the space’s inhabitants or users and is an essential aspect of any social space. The third part of the triad, the concept of the conceived space, is ‘tied to the relations of production and to the order which these relations impose […] towards a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs’ (Lefebvre, 1991/1973, pp. 37–38). The conceived space thus denotes the discourses surrounding the space, which can be highly unstable and reflect the changes in social attitudes, power relations and political climate throughout the space’s history. For a discussion of East German urban modernism, Lefebvre’s triad of physical space, lived space and discursive space is helpful when examining the changing history of large residential developments in the GDR. This chapter is structured around these three theoretical concepts. This first part examines the policy decisions that led to the GDR’s massive national residential construction programme in order to fulfil the promise made in the country’s constitution to provide ‘apartments for all’. Of particular importance are the planning processes of the new estates and the sociological studies

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underpinning these, as well as the technical aspects of the industrial production of residential high-rise buildings themselves. The second part of the chapter focuses on the lived experience of the new inhabitants. Drawing on contemporary educational handbooks, particular attention will be paid to the use of the private spaces and, in particular, to suggestions on how to furnish the apartments with specially designed lines of furniture that reflect the modernist spirit of the enterprise. The third part will examine the changing history and cultural perception of the modernist urban experiment by its planners, politicians and its inhabitants. It will trace the continuities and discontinuities of the mentalities in German society surrounding large-scale residential buildings and developments. The focus will be on their changing – but always highly symbolic – nature as signs of the achievements of socialism, as failures of said social experiment and on their very recent rediscovery as practical, flexible and creative spaces.

Spatial Practice: Planning, Design and Construction ¨ Article 37 of the Constitution of the GDR states: ‘Jeder Burger der Deutschen ¨ sich und seine Demokratischen Republik hat das Recht auf Wohnraum fur ¨ ¨ Familie entsprechend den volkswirtschaftlichen Moglichkeiten und ortlichen Bedingungen’ [every citizen of the German Democratic Republic has the right to a dwelling for themselves and their family according to the economic and local possibilities] (Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1974/1980, p. 32, translation by author). The right to a place to live for every citizen of the country is further inscribed in the constitution by the state’s obligation to provide ¨ it: ‘Der Staat ist verpflichtet, dieses Recht durch die Forderung des Wohnungs¨ baus, die Werterhaltung vorhandenen Wohnraumes und die offentliche Kontrolle ¨ uber die gerechte Verteilung des Wohnraumes zu verwirklichen’ [The state is obligated to realize this right by supporting the creation of living space, the maintenance of existing living space, and the control over the just distribution of living space] (1974/1980, pp. 32–33, translation by author). The importance of adequate living spaces for citizens has a long history in Germany. In 1873 Friedrich Engels posed The Housing Question since the working class faced a huge shortage of housing in the years of the Industrial Revolution. At this time, large parts of the population moved to the new industrial centres, and land for affordable residential space became scarce: ‘The growth of the modern cities leads, especially in the centrally located areas, to extremely high and artificial prices of land […] and since the rent cannot keep up with the values of the land, the workers’ quarters are being torn down’ (Marx & Engels, 1873/1973, p. 213). In the years following World War II, exacerbated by the destruction of housing stock during the war and the influx of refugees, the need for housing became one of the top priorities for the new workers’ state. After initially prioritising the reconstruction of the destroyed industry, housing moved into the focus of the GDR’s social policy. Addressing the lack of adequate and sufficient housing was the most pressing problem (Wolle, 2009, p. 252), and the government of East

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Germany made it one of its social and economic priorities to construct a large number of affordable and modern apartments for its citizens in the shortest possible time. The directive of the Central Committee of the GDR’s ruling party (SED) at the 8th Party Congress in June 1971 decreed that the highest priority of its social and economic policy for the next decades was to be the improvement of the living conditions of the population: ‘We are aware that we need more apartments to satisfy the demands of the families […]. With our comrades in the construction industry we estimated […] how we could achieve a higher increase [in units] than we presently have. We are now planning to hand over half a million apartments between 1971 and 1975’ (Honecker, 1971, pp. 39–40). Following this decision, the government proposed an enormous investment in housing. ‘From 1976 to 1990 more than 200 billion Marks’ (Junker, 1973, p. 16) were to be invested in the construction and modernisation of housing. The goal was ‘to build or renovate between 2.8 and 3 million apartments’ (Junker, 1973, p. 16). The most efficient way to put this plan into action as quickly as possible was to manufacture entire buildings by using industrial production processes, thereby leveraging significant economies of scale. Hence, the majority of apartment buildings constructed in the 1960s–1980s in East Germany made use of such an industrial prefabrication process, whereby large elements of the building, made out of poured concrete, were manufactured off-site in an assembly line process. The walls, floors and ceiling elements, all completed in the factory, consisted of variable precast concrete panels or ‘plates’ with a size of up to 6 m 3 6 m, with 6 m 3 3 m the most common ones (Lembcke et al., 1983, p. 12). These were preinstalled with functional and mechanical items, such as pipes, electrical conduits, door hinges, flooring, tiles, windows, etc. The prefabricated elements were then transported to the construction site, where final assembly and finishing happened on-site with the help of large rotary cranes that could support loads of up to 6300 kg and had a reach of 25 m (Lembcke et al., 1983, p. 12). This industrial process made the production as efficient as possible, saving costs as well as time to ensure that enough apartments could be supplied to a rapidly growing population (Hannemann, 2005, p. 26). The industrial production of apartments, however, is not an East German invention. In fact, this process was used in many European countries to address the post-war shortage of housing. The concept of industrially produced housing can be traced back to significant modernist architects, such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, who found that the industrial materials and processes were ideal to transform their design philosophy into reality (Hatherley, 2015, loc. 1457). In particular, Walter Gropius embraced the industrial process of construction and ‘once said his ambition was to be “the Ford of housing”, creating an object as useful as a Model T’ (Hatherley, 2015, loc. 1462). Not surprisingly, a particular trademark of modernist designs was the use of concrete. Unlike traditional building methods that use wood, clay bricks or breeze blocks, for instance, steel-reinforced concrete is almost infinitely adaptable to any shape, easy to use and widely available as construction material; it is durable; and not least it has a modest cost.

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The smart use of a limited number of prefabricated functional elements allowed the architects an almost Tetris-like number of combinations. The industrial construction methods made it possible to build one to four room apartments at a reasonable cost and at the same time to vary the footprint of the entire building in order to create a multitude of unusual shapes. Most notable examples are the star-shaped, so-called ‘twelve-corner’ building (Zw¨olfeckhaus) in Ottendorf-Okrilla near Dresden, or the butterfly-shaped building (Schmetterlingshaus) with two wings and a connecting access in the middle in Berlin’s Th¨almann Park, both designed by Manfred Zumpe. The idea was to build family-friendly apartments that provided lots of daylight and fresh air and frequently had balconies as outside spaces (Zumpe, 2016). In a multi-disciplinary approach, the planners and architects worked with sociologists to identify what the residents needed when creating entire new neighbourhoods: ‘Applied sociological research […] has informed urban planners and architects to design the new neighbourhoods in a more flexible and practical manner in order to address the diverse needs of the residents. […] In the future much will depend on the recognition of new factors, which will have to be addressed in the design of the residential units’ (Lembcke et al., 1983, p. 42). Consequently, a crucial part of the integrated planning process of the buildings was to design the infrastructure of new neighbourhoods at the same time with their residential buildings. An important consideration in the planning process was the pattern of movements in the new quarters. This was to ensure that all amenities were present and within easy reach of the residents. Noted are transportation, clinics, pharmacies, supermarkets, restaurants, pubs and a special emphasis on educational buildings, such as schools, kindergartens, day care centres, sport and cultural centres, libraries and youth centres, as well as opportunities to participate in leisure and cultural activities for the new residents ¨ (Hohne, 2014, p. 10; Krenz, 1974, pp. 23–24). A contemporary TV programme on Halle-Neustadt picked up on the infrastructure in the centres of the new developments and in particular on the ‘walkability’ of the neighbourhood. The programme states: ‘The centres of the new quarters can be reached by foot in 6-8 minutes. This adds to the quality of the living environment and through their arrangement and functions allow for more leisure time for the inhabitants. […] In addition to supermarkets, each individual centre has access to cultural institutions, schools and pre-schools, health-care, services, and restaurants’ (Halle Neustadt: Die Stadt der Chemiearbeiter, 1975). Another aspect of the programme is the ideal of a socially just, classless society. All the rents were affordable, and there were no privileged areas: ‘The general manager lives next to the worker in the chemical industry’ (Halle Neustadt: Die Stadt der Chemiearbeiter, 1975). It is remarkable that many of the factors that informed the planning of the neighbourhoods are surprisingly current and still conform with the criteria for a contemporary, liveable city, which can be defined by four socio-economic qualities: ‘accessibility, social diversity, affordability, economic vitality’ (Martino, Girling, & Lu, 2021, p. 221).

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The spatial practice involving the planning, development and the construction methods of the new quarters illustrated the modernist understanding of urban housing at the time. The focus was first and foremost on attainable living space for everyone as well as on the neighbourhood’s liveability and the accessibility of all amenities. The industrial and sociological approach to housing was also foregrounded by Lefebvre’s understanding of modern construction: ‘The focus on dwelling as a set of practices led to a critique of the concepts of “need” and “function” associated by the researchers […] with modern architecture [and] functional urbanism’ (Stanek, 2011, p. 83). Lefebvre’s emphasis on need and function was reflected in the multi-disciplinary planning process described above. With the everyday needs of the residents and their patterns of movement – both inside and outside of the apartment – identified, they became the central focus in the planning process of the new residential estates: practicality of the floor plan of the individual units, accessibility of frequently used amenities and services, connection to existing transport infrastructure and social attainability of the new apartments were the key elements of the design of these new neighbourhoods.

The Lived Space: The User as the Designer In his discussion of the discourse on space, Lefebvre examines the individual and their direct engagement with their space as the individual appropriates the space and makes it their own. Lefebvre interprets this appropriation as ‘space directly lived through its associated images and symbols […]. This is the dominated space, which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate’ (Lefebvre, 1991/1973, p. 38). In Lefebvre’s understanding this notion of ‘appropriation of space is the closest approximation of his understanding of dwelling’ (Stanek, 2011, p. 87). In very practical terms, this appropriation of space can be translated into the moment when the application for the newly constructed apartment had been approved and the proud new residents could take possession of it. So, what could the lucky new residents expect once the new apartment was ready to move in? All apartments featured for the time very comprehensive standard equipment: elevator access, central heating, hot water supply, garbage chutes, a bathroom with full size tub (and integrated shower connection), hand wash-basin, light switches, electrical outlets, doorbells, intercom, TV and phone jacks (with actual phone connections being extremely rare), a complete kitchen with sink, stove and counter tops, linoleum flooring and even a choice of wallpaper (Lembcke et al., 1983, pp. 24–25). Considering that in 1971 only 39% of apartments in the GDR had indoor baths or showers, 36% had indoor toilets and only 26% of all apartments had running hot water (Wolle, 2009, p. 253), this was indeed very desirable standard equipment. To maximise the space and to group the installation walls together, kitchens and bathrooms were inside rooms, connected to a passive venting system. The kitchen was small and often had a pass-through to the dining area for added convenience. Much like the outside design of the buildings, the inside was also supposed to be informed by the new, modernist design principles. To this purpose,

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handbooks and brochures were published or distributed to help the new residents understand the concept of their homes and to make the most of their prized new place. Brochures, like a car’s owner’s manual, were given to new residents providing advice on how to care for the new apartment and what to do in case of problems. For example, ‘in case of leaking water pipes, immediately shut off the main valve in the basement and contact the resident caretaker and your neigh¨ bours’ (Hohne, 2014, p. 173). More significantly these publications built a metaphorical bridge between the abstract notion of modernism and the lived experience by placing its design principles in a context of social values. One such popular handbook, called Wohnraumfibel (Autorenkollektiv, 1969), which could be translated as ‘Primer for Living Spaces’, goes to great lengths to define a modern style in functional terms. The handbook’s educational stance becomes clear in the preface: in a critique of the typical bourgeois apartment from the turn of the century, the authors explain how a focus on representation and social status comes at the cost of practicality, comfort and efficient use of space. The preface concludes with the recommendation to question old-fashioned attitudes and instead to make a plan that prioritises one’s own expectations and needs over notions of status and representation. The idea was to furnish the new apartment in order to express oneself in a place of one’s own (Autorenkollektiv, 1969, pp. 15–16). The first chapter of the handbook – titled ‘we make the apartment our apartment’ (Autorenkollektiv, 1969, p. 25) – starts out with a discussion of the conventional criteria in furnishing one’s space that were commonly guided by traditional notions of representation in order to denote the resident’s social status as owner. In contrast, the book advocates for a new, functionalist relationship between resident and space. In the somewhat idealistic view of the author-collective, ownership and its associated privilege have become irrelevant in a socialist society, and the needs of the individuals inhabiting the space take precedence over demonstrations of social rank. In the modernist understanding taught by the handbook, status symbols and any superfluous ornamentation are considered wasteful and outdated: the socialist society has largely overcome the need to signal one’s status to the outside world. In this alignment, the handbook specifies: ‘the “better people” are no longer the better classes, but the people who work better. And the necessity and willingness to be the best we can be is reflected in the appearance and the interior design of our living spaces’ (Autorenkollektiv, 1969, p. 26). Therefore, the completed apartment would reflect the residents’ authentic personalities and ‘their interests, and tastes. It is also a reflection of the society in which they live, and which has formed them’ (Autorenkollektiv, 1969, p. 114). According to the handbook another aspect of urban modernism is to overcome the contradiction between the perceived hostile outside world and the inside of the apartment as refuge from it: ‘We no longer have to seclude ourselves from the outside world, since what happens outside, happens for us and with us, and no longer against us. We are the masters of our country, of our enterprises, and of our lives’ (Autorenkollektiv, 1969, p. 26). The ideological dissolution of the boundary between outside and inside space links the personal, lived space to the

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community as planned by the designers and architects. To conclude its philosophical and ideological introduction, the handbook also provides a clear and easily understandable definition of modernism for its readers: ‘What is the meaning of modern? Modern is what meets our requirements. And these are to minimise the amount of unnecessary work our apartment creates, to have as much space as possible for ourselves, and to be able to do the things we like without infringing on those who live with us. Basically, all the things a family does in their daily life’ (Autorenkollektiv, 1969, p. 31). Having established the parameters of a modern understanding of the lived space, the handbook now offers the reader practical advice on how to furnish their new apartment in the most efficient way. Following this pragmatic approach, the most important criteria for the design of an apartment are its many functions during the course of the day. In this sense, the handbook explains: ‘Our apartment should first and foremost serve the needs of our daily life. Our daily routine is the central issue and the design and furnishings in the apartment need to support it’ (Autorenkollektiv, 1969, p. 27). The typical everyday activities of the residents are then enumerated, such as cooking, eating, sleeping, doing homework, bathing, doing laundry, playing, socialising, entertaining, etc. The point of all this is that ‘the apartment and its furnishings have to do justice to all these various activities and […] a ranking of them will allow us to prioritize our needs’ (Autorenkollektiv, 1969, p. 27). The practical advice to modern living is an entirely functional approach. Once the daily activities of the residents and their traffic patterns within the apartment are identified, the appropriate furnishings can be chosen. The emphasis on traffic patterns and movements inside the apartment is another link between the apartment design and the modernist design philosophy. Influenced by the scientific approach to industrial work processes in the mid-1920s, studies were also conducted in the home to identify efficient traffic and movement patterns. Lillian Moller Gilbreth, the American psychologist and inventor of the kitchen ‘work-triangle […] began to carry out her own sophisticated motion study experiments on household tasks, such as making a bed, setting a table, washing dishes and baking’ (Graham, 1999, pp. 651–652). Credited with bringing a scientific foundation to home economics, Gilbreth’s approach was extremely productive and influenced modern home design for decades. The application of motion studies and the division of the living space into different activity zones is also clearly visible in the East German handbook of the late 1960s when it explains how to create a functional, comfortable apartment with a good flow. Even the key strategy of asking questions to help the residents understand the concept of a dynamic, motion-oriented design is similar to the original method devised by Gilbreth in the 1920s. To create a comfortable and well-laid-out apartment, the new residents are encouraged to ask the following questions of themselves in order to identify and prioritise their needs: ‘How do I save work and avoid unnecessary trips in the apartment? How do I keep as much space of the apartment as possible for myself? And what is the best way to organize all day-today processes in the available space in the apartment?’ (Autorenkollektiv, 1969,

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p. 31). Once these questions were answered and the residents’ needs were articulated, suitable furniture and materials could be selected. Having established traffic and activity patterns in the apartment the handbook goes on and recommends easy-to-care-for materials and bright colours that reflect the natural light in the new apartments. The handbook, in fact, informs us as follows: The use of new surface materials on furniture is increasing. Furniture is being covered with colourful layers of synthetic materials that complement the shade of wood. Table surfaces consist of tough Sprelacart [which is a laminate-like material similar to Formica or Resopal in western countries]. These synthetic materials from our chemical industry are not a substitute for wood, but have properties that are superior to those of wood; they meet our desire for a colourful living environment. (Autorenkollektiv, 1969, p. 31) To implement the Central Committee’s demand for improved living conditions, in the late 1960s, the students and academics at the department of architecture at the University of Dresden began to study the most efficient use of space in the newly planned and constructed apartments. Older types of furniture were often designed for representation rather than for functionality and were thus too bulky and inflexible to fit the new spaces. As a result of the study, in 1967, the ¨ designers Rudolf Horn and Eberhard Wustner came up with an entirely new line of furniture that was light and, most importantly, modular. Following the Bau¨ haus and Werkbund tradition, Horn and Wustner devised the concept of the ‘living apartment’ and designed elements of furniture that could be used on their own, or combined with other elements in many different ways; at some point in the future, the elements could be supplemented with additional units (Horn, 2009). The furniture elements did not present one complete, final piece of furniture, such as a wardrobe or a desk. Instead, each piece of furniture consisted of side pieces, fronts, and various storage or other options, such as desk spaces (Horn, 2009). Unlike the furniture from previous decades, which was heavy, bulky, and expensive, the new lines embraced modernist principles, such as lightness, sparing use of raw materials, infinite flexibility, timeless design and most importantly, the individual assembly of the finished product. In particular, Horn and the designers of the furniture line MDW 60 (M¨obelprogramm Deutsche Werkst¨atten 60) used modular, standardised flat pieces of composite wood. These allowed for an almost ¨ unlimited number of combinations and could be configured on-site (Hohne, 2014, p. 56). It is no coincidence that the design principle of the furniture mirrored that of modernist architecture. In particular, the storage units included a large number of functional elements, such as open and closed shelves with doors or drawers, spaces for stereos and TVs, or integrated desks. The most significant characteristic was that the choice of modules or elements allowed the owners to design, build

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and modify their own wall units: in the words of the designer, ‘the user is the ¨ finalist’ (Hohne, 2014, p. 56), which meant that the purchasers had endless possibilities to combine a finite number of elements and thus create their own, individual pieces of furniture. In a TV documentary, Rudolf Horn, the lead designer, explains the principles behind his approach to designing modern furniture: The sustainable use of the material substance […] was not only due to the scarcity of suitable material and technologies at the time, but it was an ethical principle. Nothing more than what was needed, no senseless waste of material, no waste due to a design that is subject to trends that are rapidly outdated. (as cited in Schmidt & Fugmann, 2016) In particular, Horn emphasised the serial production of furniture and furniture elements where the ‘series and not the individual piece’ (Horn, 2009) mattered. In the mid-1960s, the radical design by Horn and the Deutsche Werkst¨atten challenged more than a few assumptions about furniture design and construction. Most famously, Walter Ulbricht, General Secretary and Head of State at the time, did not have much good to say about the concept when the furniture’s prototypes were presented at a trade fair in 1966. He dismissed them as ‘just a bunch of boards’ (Horn, 2011). Despite the General Secretary’s harsh criticism, the line of modular furniture proved to be extremely popular and to this day is the most produced line of furniture in Europe (Horn, 2009). Another indication of the soundness of its design is that its presentation to the public in 1968 (Ludwig, 2006) actually predates the core concept of IKEA (Horn, 2009) that made the Swedish furniture giant a global leader by delivering on the same design premises of simplicity, variability and affordability. The fact that the philosophy of IKEA can be traced back to the Swedish social-democratic period of the 1960s and 1970s is no coincidence: the Swedish ‘reform movement’ (Garvey, 2018, pp. 63–68), in fact, embraced many modernist ideals. A crucial part of the social-democratic reform of the Swedish state was its large investment into affordable, public housing, ‘which had the later unintended side effect of making its private capitalist concerns very rich; IKEA […] owed its success to providing furniture for housing built under the famous “Million Programme”’ (Hatherley, 2015, p. 23). Although officially unacknowledged, the principles of the Swedish social-democratic housing policy are also clearly visible in the East German design philosophy and vice versa. However, due to the Cold War mentality at the time, the ideological differences between Sweden’s Western-style social-democracy and the GDR’s Soviet-derived socialism were probably too large to officially acknowledge these similarities. There was, however, a dark side to the connection between the GDR and IKEA: according to the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany, in the 1970s and 1980s, IKEA contracted the manufacturing of some of its products to the GDR to take advantage of the country’s low labour costs. However, the companies contracted by IKEA also

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used prison-labour, including political prisoners, in the production of some items (Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung, 2012). While the exploitation of prisoners by the East German government and the Swedish corporation is a shameful chapter in the history of both, it should be noted that the original GDR designs were produced by the highly reputable Deutsche Werkst¨atten Hellerau, near Dresden, which did not resort to using forced labour. In this case, the genuine GDR product, the modular furniture line MDW 60, is the one that was produced adhering to ethical standards. Perhaps the thoughts of furniture designer Rudolf Horn – when he identifies the user of his products as the finalist and where he elevates the user from a mere passive consumer to an active creator of their own space – illustrate best the notion of representational space as lived space. In Lefebvre’s words, the individual user appropriates their space, ‘making it an oeuvre, making it one’s own, shaping it’ (as cited in Stanek, 2011, p. 87). While some of the suggestions made by contemporary East German handbooks may indeed seem somewhat idealistic and driven by ideology, it is worth noting that they assert the user’s autonomy and independence. The most significant underlying assumption is the emancipation of the user from mere passive consumer to active participant in the design process. In this context the ideological foundation begins to make sense: once notions of social status are left behind, more important criteria, such as practicality and personal well-being can take precedence in the planning of one’s own space. In this understanding the space does not define the user, but the user gets to define their space.

The Plattenbau Becomes the Platte: From Model Development to Urban Problem to Creative Space The third part of Lefebvre’s analysis centres on space as conceived, or conceptualised space. In the tradition of structuralism, the conceived space is perceived as a system of signs, and thus as a discursive construct. The conceived space is ‘conceptualized space […] This is the dominant space in any society […] Conceptions of space tend […] towards a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs’ (Lefebvre, 1991/1973, p. 38). This means that there exists a discourse around space that is independent of its physical properties; the conceived space ‘is a mental construct and an imagined space’ (Stanek, 2011, p. 129). Understood in the tradition of the production of knowledge, this discourse describes the changing meanings and interpretations of the same space over time. The history of the modern, urban high-rise developments of East Germany, is a prime example that reflects the political, social and economic changes in East Germany before and after the end of the GDR. As outlined above, the policy decision that initiated one of the most ambitious nation-wide residential construction campaigns reflects the importance that was given to the new developments to improve citizens’ lives. The national dimension of the housing programme is evident in the media attention that was lavished on the various milestones that were accomplished. The televised hand-over of the one-millionth

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apartment in 1978 to its new residents by Erich Honecker, General Secretary and Head of State, marks such an occasion (Honecker, The Estate Agent of Berlin 1978, 2016). This event was repeated in October 1988 when Erich Honecker, again accompanied by much media fanfare, handed over the three-millionth apartment to its new residents (Liebscher, 2009, p. 87). As reflected by the high political and social priority, obtaining a new apartment was very desirable and expressed the implied prestige of its new residents (notwithstanding the contradiction of the classless ideal!). This prestige was also expressed in pride of ownership. The educational handbook Neue Wohnung – modern gestaltet (Lembcke et al., 1983) [New Apartment – Designed the Modern Way], mentioned above, made the new residents familiar with the technical and architectural properties of the new apartments and pointed out the significant investment made by the state: ‘For more than a decade the improvement of the living conditions for all citizens with its increasing complexity has been the focus of the social policies of the SED [the leading Socialist Party] and the GDR. The residential construction programme has become one of the largest investments in our country’ (Lembcke et al., 1983, p. 10). The excitement of taking possession of the brand-new apartment is even related in the book’s preface: ‘Moving day! This happens hundreds of times every day in our Republic … and the joy is always immense!’ (Lembcke et al., 1983, flyleaf). The various contemporary publications on how to furnish one’s new apartment and the media attention directed towards the residential construction programme reflect the positive sentiments of the new occupants. A common feeling among those who were assigned one of the newly built apartments was that it was akin to winning the lottery (Krohn, 1978). However, with the German unification and the subsequent demise of the GDR as an independent state, the fate of the high-rise buildings and their neighbourhoods took an abrupt turn for the worse. The end of the GDR also immediately spelt the end of the government-sponsored national residential construction programme. ‘With the end of the GDR, the standardized high-rise developments lost their relevance’ (Liebscher, 2009, p. 107). This became particularly serious for those developments that were attached to large industrial complexes, which themselves were dismantled as the result of the GDR’s deindustrialisation in its rapid transition from a planned economy to a market economy (Liebscher, 2009, p. 108). Together with the political and cultural devaluation of the former GDR, the high-rise complexes are probably the most striking examples of this loss of social status and cultural capital. What had once been highly desirable, bright, modern and convenient apartments and thoughtfully planned neighbourhoods fell out of favour. They were literally abandoned or became problem neighbourhoods in a remarkably short time. After 1989, East Germany saw enormous demographic changes with the collapse of its economy and the disappearance of much of its industrial base. What had once been an industrial society became one of the least industrialised regions. As a result, between 1990 and 1994, the former GDR lost 1.4 million people (Martens, 2020), which was a loss of 8.5% of its pre-unification population. The result of this particular type of economic and social flight was that the former high-rise developments were left behind and many apartments

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remained unoccupied. Mass unemployment in the 1990s among those who stayed behind led to a dramatic shift in the demographic of the high-rises’ inhabitants. Coupled with the demographic shifts, the ideological reason for the sudden devaluation of the high-rise buildings after 1990 was without doubt their close association with similar – albeit on a much smaller scale and less well developed – affordable housing developments in West Germany (Liebscher, 2009, p. 109). Surrounded by a discourse of failure in the conservative 1980s, the decade of small government and austerity cuts to social programmes, the West German social housing projects had already received their negative stigma. They became a reminder of ‘that embarrassing past, the “interregnum” of Socialism or Social Democracy that we’re constantly reminded ended in late-70s chaos’ (Hatherley, 2008, loc. 139). In a migration of negative stereotypes from west to east, the high-rise neighbourhoods of the former GDR experienced the same type of cultural downgrading that their western equivalents had faced 10 years prior. The previously respected developments quickly became known as notorious trouble spots and social flashpoints, similar to the British ‘sink estates’ (Watt, 2020, p. 21). As sociologist Steffen Mau describes in his recent study of the East German ¨ high-rise estate in Rostock Lutten Klein, these areas were practically overnight relegated to second class status. He explains that the experience of the transformation from the GDR to the Federal Republic did not result in an increase of experience, and hence cultural capital that could overcome the stigma and create self-worth. In fact, according to Mau, the discursive wholesale devaluation of the GDR prevented the former citizens from reflecting positively on their own history. In the same way, the East German high-rise building became stigmatised as Platte, short for Plattenbau, which is a colloquialism that was coined in West Germany after the unification in order to describe the buildings’ supposed inferior method of construction and by extension to reflect the inferior nature of everything associated with the former country (Mau, 2019, p. 210). An urban planner from the beginning of the project articulates the loss of status and identity: After 1990 the recognition was gone […]. There was a lot of badmouthing of the [high-rise] neighbourhoods. Then it was said that they all have to be demolished; nobody wants to live there, […] yuk. Then everybody wanted to leave these neighbourhoods. The young and the ambitious said: nobody wants to live in the high-rise. (Mau, 2019, p. 167) This lack of desirability led to a rapid decline of residents and apartments became unoccupied. One estimate is that around 3 million industrially built apartments were constructed since 1958 and approximately 360,000 have been demolished so far (Mau, 2019, p. 30). This is a loss of around 12% of all industrially constructed apartments in what is the former East Germany. To visualise the dimension of the demolitions, one has to be aware that it represents the largest annihilation of residential space since World War II.

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And yet, despite all appearances, East Germany’s great modernist experiment was not ready to be discarded on the scrap-heap of history. Due to a rapidly rising demand for apartments in Germany in the past 10 years, the old Plattenbau has found favour again as it still provides affordable living space. The modest rents, the proximity to urban centres and to public transit have made them alternatives to newer market housing. In particular, the ease with which the structures can be renovated and updated makes their reuse much more efficient than demolitions and new construction. Another unexpected quality of the old high-rise buildings lies in their modular construction. This key feature of the high-rises comes into play once more and is evidence of the soundness of their functionalist concept: it was found that ‘hardly any type of building is as flexible as the Plattenbau. The solid structure and the non-loadbearing walls allow for [the creation of] individual spaces’ (Plattenbau-Wandlung, n.d.). Unintentionally, but in the spirit of their modernist designers, the prefabricated units are relatively easy to modify and several small units can be knocked together into bigger ones or separate floors can be connected by stairs to be turned into maisonettes. This built-in variability now serves the buildings in new and unexpected ways. ¨ As an example, a guest-house in Berlin Hohenschonhausen, once owned by the former notorious secret service, the Stasi, was found to be structurally sound and easy enough to be transformed into urban villas. The condition was such that the lead architect recommended against its demolition and instead decided to renovate it. ‘The interior spaces could easily be adapted to the demands of the new residents’ (Stadtvilla am Obersee, n.d.). The development of the old structure with its problematic past demonstrated that the principles of the design and construction were sound enough to be competitive even at the upper end of the real estate market. Other encouraging examples of the creative reuse of the old Plattenbauten are easy to find. Discarding the baggage of the ideological or negative discourse surrounding the buildings, a younger generation has discovered modernist architecture from the last century for itself and now applies creative solutions to make the old apartments work for them. In addition to the reconfiguration of the residential units, the old retail spaces on the ground floor have been discovered by design-conscious entrepreneurs. The repurposed old stores are now homes to artisans, shops for designer goods, galleries and coffee houses (Plattenbau-L¨aden, n.d.). All these creative transformations of the old buildings are not only encouraging as they preserve the buildings themselves, but they prove that urban modernism still has a place in the everyday lives of the people. This latest twist in the history of the high-rise buildings underscores the endurance of the modernist concept as it was employed in the East German high-rise construction. The discourse surrounding the buildings and their place in German society is also a powerful diagnostic of the political and cultural climate of the country. The revaluation could not be more radical: it ranges from the idealistic and heavily propagandistic utilisation of the GDR’s national construction programme to legitimise the socialist state to its absolute disavowal after the German unification in order to validate the supposed political, economic and cultural superiority of the capitalist, Federal Republic. Ironically, it took another

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30 years to move on from this dichotomy and to discard the superimposed, antagonistic Cold War ideologies, such as the GDR’s socialism or the Federal Republic’s antisocialism, to discover the true potential of East Germany’s modernist legacy. The repurposing of spaces is explicitly mentioned by Lefevbre when discussing the new uses of old spaces, such as Les Halles, in Paris, which is the large-scale redevelopment of a former wholesale-market and surrounding neighbourhood in the city centre (Zetter, 1975, p. 272). Lefebvre points out: ‘The diversion and reappropriation of space are of significance for they tell us much about the production of new spaces. […] It may even be that such techniques of diversion have greater import than attempts at creation’ (as cited in Stanek, 2011, pp. 167–68). The latest examples of the reconfiguration of the Plattenbauten, their innovative uses and their new-found appreciation as creative and affordable living spaces may give an inkling that the modernist concept, once freed from its ideological constraints, can be a viable and productive contribution to urban development. It is almost as if these transformations that ensure the survival of the buildings had been planned into their manufacturing process by their long-forgotten original architects, engineers, designers, planners and builders.

Conclusion The history of the East German high-rise buildings, the Plattenbauten and their neighbourhoods is an underappreciated and neglected chapter of the history of urban modernism in the past century. Tainted by the negative stereotypes about social housing projects in West Germany, their Eastern counterparts often received short shrift after the German unification. Coupled with the vast demographic change in the former East, the buildings came to represent the baggage of a perished state and a lack of investment and a consequent loss of attractiveness led to the demolition of a considerable number of them. However, what is frequently overlooked – mainly due to a narrow ideological perspective influenced by Cold War mentalities – is that these developments represent one of the largest and most consequent implementations of urban modernism in all of Germany. The application of functionalist principles in the engineering, construction and planning processes, which even included the design of appropriate furniture to fit the flow and footprint of the apartments, are testimony to a unique, well-thoughtout and holistic design process. A crucial part of this design process was the attention paid to the patterns of movement inside the apartment and in the entire neighbourhood. Ease of movement and accessibility are two key aspects of modernist design that have endured and are once again recognised in the buildings’ new life. The recent rediscovery of the old Plattenbau is in no small measure due to the soundness of its engineering and design. Moving on from its ideologically burdened past, the Plattenbau is finally being recognised for its innovative construction method that used prefabricated concrete elements, making it easy to modify and update to meet the demands and needs of the people of today. The

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Plattenbau has demonstrated that it can move with the times and is now home to apartments, maisonettes, work-live spaces, or commercial and creative spaces. Perhaps the most ringing endorsement of the East German urban modernist design philosophy is that it can finally show off its functionality and versatility as it allows the residents to become its designers.

Acknowledgements A short version of this paper was presented at the Second International Conference Spaces and Places, organized by Progressive Connexions on March 27 and 28, 2021, and held online. I would like to thank the conference participants for their insights and comments on the paper and the organizers and editors, Beitske Boonstra, Teresa Cutler-Broyles, and Stefano Rozzoni, for making this conference possible during the 2020/2021 pandemic.

References Abreißen oder erhalten? Umgang mit der DDR-Architektur. (2020). [Television broadcast]. Leipzig: MDR. Retrieved from https://www.mdr.de/video/mdr-videos/ c/video-454034.html ¨ Bauwesen Berlin. Autorenkollektiv. (1969). Wohnraumfibel. Berlin: VEB Verlag fur Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung der SED Diktatur. (2012). Studie zur DDR-Zwangsarbeit in der Produktion von Ikea pr¨asentiert. Retrieved from https://www.bundesstiftungaufarbeitung.de/de/stiftung/aktuelles/studie-zur-ddr-zwangsarbeit-der-produktionvon-ikea-praesentiert Engels, H., J¨ager, F. P., & Kaden, B. (2019). East German modern. Munich: Prestel. Garvey, P. (2018). Unpacking IKEA: Swedish design for the purchasing masses. London: Routledge. Gold, J. R. (2007). The practice of modernism: Modern architects and urban transformation 1954–1972. London: Routledge. Graham, L. D. (1999). Domesticating efficiency: Lillian Gilbreth’s scientific management of homemakers, 1924–1930. Signs, 24(3), 633–675. Halle Neustadt: Die Stadt der Chemiearbeiter. (1975). [Television broadcast]. Berlin: Deutscher Fernsehfunk. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/benTyKBwg6c Hannemann, C. (2005). Die Platte. Industrieller Wohnungsbau in der DDR. Berlin: Hans Schiler Verlag. Hatherley, O. (2008). Militant modernism (Kindle ed.). Winchester: O Books. Hatherley, O. (2015). Landscapes of communism: A history through buildings (Kindle ed.). London: Penguin. ¨ ¨ Hohne, G. (2014). Wohnungen f¨ur Alle: Vom Leben im Plattenbau. Koln: Komet Verlag. Honecker, E. (1971). Bericht des Zentralkomitees an den VIII. Parteitag der SED. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Honecker: The Estate Agent in East Berlin 1978. (2016). Footage Berlin. [Television broadcast]. Berlin: RBB. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/cF9fvvlzia4

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Horn, R. (2009). Der Formgestalter Rudolf Horn: Volksbedarf statt Luxusbedarf [Television broadcast] MDR Zeitreise. Leipzig: MDR. Retrieved from https:// www.mdr.de/zeitreise/stoebern/damals/artikel84792.html Horn, R. (2011). Rudolf Horn: Designpapst der DDR. Retrieved from https://www. jeder-qm-du.de/ueber-die-platte/plattenbau-experten/rudolf-horn/ Junker, W. (1973). Das Wohnungsbauprogramm der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik f¨ur die Jahre 1976–1990. Referat auf der 10.Tagung des Zentralkomitees der SED am 2.Oktober 1973. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Krenz, G. (1974). Architektur zwischen gestern und morgen. Ein Vierteljahrhundert Architekturentwicklung in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Berlin (DDR): VEB Bauwesen Verlag. ¨ ¨ Krohn, H. (1978, July 19). Wir sind glucklich, dass wir so eine schone Wohnung erhalten haben. BWF: Organ der SED-Betriebsorganisation des VEB Werkzeugmaschinenkombinat ‘7. Oktober’ Berlin (DDR), 28(14), n.p. Retrieved from https:// www.bwf-marzahn.de/images/doku/zeitung/1978-07-19-Arbeiterstandpunkt_1Millionste_Wohnung.pdf Lefebvre, H. (1991/1973). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. ¨ Lembcke, K., Lehmann, G., Rautenberg, I., Walk, W., & Schone, K. (1983). Neue Wohnung, modern gestaltet: Zweckm¨aßige Einrichtungsvarianten f¨ur die Wohnungsbauserie 70. Leipzig: VEB Fachbuchverlag Leipzig. Liebscher, R. (2009). Wohnen f¨ur alle: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Plattenbaus. Berlin: Vergangenheitsverlag. Ludwig, A. (2006). Hunderte von Varianten. Das M¨obelprogramm Deutsche Werkst¨atten (MDW) in der DDR, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online Ed. Ausgabe, 3. Retrieved from https://zeithistorische-forschungen. de/3-2006/4592 Martens, B. (2020). Der Zug nach Westen – Jahrzehntelange Abwanderung, die allm¨ahlich nachl¨asst. Bundeszentrale Politische Bildung. Retrieved from https:// www.bpb.de/geschichte/deutsche-einheit/lange-wege-der-deutschen-einheit/47253/ zug-nach-westen Martino, N., Girling, C., & Lu, Y. (2021). Urban form and livability: Socioeconomic and built environment indicators. Buildings and Cities, 2(1), 220–243. https:// journal-buildingscities.org/articles/10.5334/bc.82/ Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1973/1873). Werke (5th ed., Vol. 18). Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Mau, S. (2019). L¨utten Klein: Leben in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Parsons, G. (2016). Functionalism. In The Routledge encyclopedia of modernism. Taylor & Francis. Retrieved from https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/ functionalism Plattenbau-L¨aden. (n.d). Der Plattenbau: Das Portal f¨ur Plattenbauliebhaber. Retrieved from https://www.jeder-qm-du.de/zu-besuch-bei/plattenbau-laeden/ Plattenbau-Wandlung. (n.d.). Der Plattenbau: Das Portal f¨ur Plattenbauliebhaber. Retrieved from https://www.jeder-qm-du.de/ueber-die-platte/plattenbau-wandlung/ Schmidt, A., & Fugmann, T. (2016). Schwalbe und Plastesch¨ussel: Alltagsdesign in der DDR [Television broadcast]. Leipzig: MDR. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/_ bYCRcL7-6Y

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Stadtvilla am Obersee: Betons¨age statt Abrissbirne. (n.d.). Der Plattenbau: Das Portal fu¨ r Plattenbauliebhaber. Retrieved from https://www.jeder-qm-du.de/ueber-dieplatte/plattenbau-experimente/stadtvilla-am-obersee/ Stanek, L. (2011). Henri Lefebvre on space: Architecture, urban research, and the production of theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik vom 7. Oktober 1974. (5t ed.). (1980/1974). Berlin: Staatsverlag der DDR. Watt, P. (2020). Territorial stigmatization and poor housing at a London ‘sink estate’. Cogitatio, 8(1), 20–33. Retrieved from https://www.cogitatiopress.com/social inclusion/article/view/2395 Wolle, S. (2009). Die Heile Welt der Diktatur: Herrschaft und Alltag in der DDR 1971–1989. Berlin: Links Verlag. Zetter, R. (1975). Les Halles: A case study of large scale redevelopments in central Paris. Town Planning Review, 46(2). Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 40103118?seq510#metadata_info_tab_contents Zumpe, M. (2016). Platte mit Ecken und Kanten. Der Plattenbau: Das Portal f¨ur Plattenbauliebhaber. Retrieved from https://www.jeder-qm-du.de/ueber-die-platte/ plattenbau-experten/manfred-zumpe/#true

Chapter 5

Reauthoring Macassar: Storytelling as Community Engagement (CE) and a Spatial Practice in a South African Post-Apartheid Community Clint Abrahams

Abstract 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. Keywords: Agency; community; engagement; storytelling; spatiality; praxis

Moving Spaces and Places, 79–95 Copyright © 2022 Clint Abrahams Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221006

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Introduction In 1948, the government of South Africa set out to establish Apartheid legislation to separate the development of the different racial groups in South Africa. Under the Groups Area Act of 1950, people of colour were forcibly removed to live in townships (urban settlements that were designed by the Apartheid government to house non-whites). The townships were built as reductionist built environments that prioritised technical considerations (Mills, 1989, p. 66) over Black culture. Consequently, the townships had no positive public spaces and lacked aesthetics that could adequately reflect Black values and aspirations. Apartheid design has since continued to hinder the ability of people living in the townships (Pieterse, 2011, p. 18) to develop perceptions of their communities that can counter the preconceived notions that the townships can only be represented by scenes of helplessness, overcrowding, poverty, crime and unemployment. Understanding how people and the places they create are perceived, versus actually experiencing their worlds, is critical for thinking about forging places that can restore people’s histories, values and aspirations. Twenty-seven years after establishing a democratic country (1994), the South Africa government continues to neglect many black communities that were displaced by the former Apartheid government. Despite the fading opportunities for change and political power, in Black townships creative local leaders and activists are rebuilding their communities (Gumede, 2017). People in the townships are looking at their neighbours (Kretzmann & Mcknightly, 1993, pp. 1–11) and working together against the Apartheid legacies that have been fostered in the townships (Low, 2018, pp. 381–382) and have worsened because of present-day government neglect. Much has been written about architecture and social engagement driven by professionals that focus on community building, development, consultation and decision-making (Low, 2018, p. 381) to remedy the situation. It is less common to read scholarly articles that examine architecture and social engagement driven by voluntary community organisations (VCOs) and how their spatial practices can offer new insights for professionals of community engagement (CE) and architects working with neglected (disenfranchised, disadvantaged, less fortunate and poor) populations. This chapter contributes to the discussion of social engagement in architecture, a topic which was investigated from 2016 to 2018 through a storytelling CE process conducted by the VCO Studiolight in the township of Macassar (built in 1972) in the Western Cape of South Africa. In 2018, Studiolight’s CE storytelling led up to an exhibition project entitled Who we are Macassar. In 2020 the project was awarded the University of Cape Town’s Creative works award for its critical engagement with colonial narratives in post-Apartheid South Africa. The success of the project stemmed from the efforts of 17 young people of Macassar, who under my direction came together in June 2016 to decide how to change the narrative of townships as poor, idle and lacking the capacity to create change from inside. We were all between the ages of 14 and 35 and living in Macassar. At the time, I was completing my Master’s degree in Architecture after taking a break from working at an architectural firm in Cape Town. In July 2016 we

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Fig. 1. Studiolight’s Reauthoring Process. A Community Action Process That Engages the Social, Spatial and Institutional Domains for Transformation.

established Studiolight as a non-profit organisation to explore how retelling the stories of Macassar could inspire its residents to practice responsible citizenship (SABC News, 2019). Studiolight was conceptualised with a framework that could (1) center local youth as experts of their community, (2) bring forth taking action and (3) identify the spatial requirements for a sustainable CE process in a community where access to public buildings is restricted. Fig. 1 illustrates how our CE process adopted a participatory action research method that was re-iterative and focused on identifying CE processes that could help re-configure the social, spatial and institutional settings of Macassar. For Studiolight this meant that a critical engagement with people, with the spaces they use and with how relationships are forged between communities, the local government and other organisations were important to transform perceptions of life in the township. In this chapter, I will focus on the local spaces (living rooms and backyard spaces) used by Studiolight from 2016 until 2018 to conduct its storytelling CE and to organise the Who we Macassar exhibition hosted in the Macassar Public Library in August 2018. The study of these reconfigured spaces serves the exploration of this self-driven CE in Macassar. My focus on space is grounded in my work as a practicing architect, my involvement as a director of Studiolight, and my interest in the spatiality of agency. The spatiality of agency refers to spatial patterns that emerge as people take action to improve the world in which they live (Awan, Schneider, & Till, 2011, p. 97). The concept of spatial agency critically discusses the role of architects in the production of architectural knowledge. Spatial agency puts forward that other producers of architecture must be considered through inclusionary and participatory processes (Awan et al., 2011, p. 43). This concept is useful to understand the spatiality of agency in the context of Macassar. My observations of spatial patterns created by people in Macassar are that it is not predetermined but undetermined, and the product of ‘. . . people’s restless, [and], hopeful inquiry (Freire, 1972, p. 45) . . .’ to learn how to live better. Studying this spatiality can therefore make visible subjugated knowledge I believe can make transforming South African cities a more inclusive enterprise.

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Community Engagement in a Democratic South Africa After 1994 the South African government recognized that CE in constructing places and buildings for previously disadvantaged communities was a crucial component for positive social outcomes, where both actual community needs and the legacies of Apartheid might be addressed together (Low, 2018, p. 381). However, ‘a narrow interpretation of participative practices’ (Low, 2018) has perpetuated a culture of dependency on politicians and experts to drive change instead of instilling a culture of self-reliance within local communities. Furthermore, participation processes facilitated by local government and professionals of CE continue to be done as tick-box exercises, thus no deep and meaningful engagements with people of poorer communities are forged (Low, 2018). The result is that the design of many public spaces and buildings in poorer townships do not represent the values and aspirations of the residents, whom these spaces are intended to serve. In addition, local politics and the gatekeeping of state-built public facilities by self-serving individuals and groups limit access to these buildings and make them unusable for community activities that can help foster constructive shared experiences. In these contexts, it is left up to residents to create public places (often making available their private properties) where locals can come together to exercise agency that can build community identity and pride. Agency and empowerment are the driving principles in CE to transform our world into equal and just societies (Van der Riet, 2008, p. 546). This is because CE aims to work with local people to access local knowledge and to share knowledge within communities by ‘build[ing] on to what local people already know’ (Van der Riet, 2008, p. 551) about their own communities. Hence professionals of CE who choose to work in neglected communities must have empathy, respect and ‘trust … in people’s ability to think for themselves’ (Freire, 1972, p. 34). Unfortunately, CE is often still associated with ‘[…] trained professionals [who] exchange knowledge with untrained populations’ (Karim, 2018, p. xxxiii). To counter the dependency on professionals to drive initiatives for change, interdisciplinary approaches in CE are encouraged in order to instil a culture of self-reliance. This is because interdisciplinary approaches can ‘explore the potential for democratic renewal through public cultural interventions that seek to engage and enrol citizens in more creative ways’ (Pieterse, 2011, p. 20). Over and above the spoken word and writing, several other creative techniques such as drawing, photography and field trips within a place can be used to present people’s ideas in CE (Van der Riet, 2008, p. 551). An example of an interdisciplinary approach that can produce new architectural knowledge is that of combining social anthropology and ethnographic methods (Low, 2018, p. 394) with architectural drawing, photography and model making. The emerging field of architectural ethnography – with its strong focus on drawing as a means of describing architecture not as a static result, but about what people do in, around, and for it (Kaijima, Stalder, Iseki, & International Architectural Exhibition, 2018, pp. 12–14) – offers a good methodological context that can represent alternative forms of cultural and spatial production with a bottom-up approach. These creative methodologies can allow

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professionals of CE to accurately capture the lived experiences of a particular site. In this way, the stories of the people in a particular community, their local knowledge and their dignity can be restored. Storytelling as a CE process can help South Africans to retell and rewrite stories that can counter the colonial portraits of black communities as being helpless. Furthermore, storytelling offers professionals of CE the possibility to make a deeper and more meaningful connection with local people and to produce local knowledge creatively. This is because storytelling has the power to shape the way people think about themselves and their worlds, and how to interact within them, and can therefore be used for social change (Prasetyo, 2017, p. 1). Furthermore, sharing stories can build trust and create an opportunity for people to express their views and creative ideas (Prasetyo, 2017). Psychologist Alice Morgan (2000) recalls the effectiveness of storytelling in narrative therapy (a form of psychotherapy), in that it helps individuals and groups to identify and reconstruct alternative stories that not only can help them live with the effects of the past (in the case of South Africa the histories of social injustices caused by Apartheid) but also help them to emerge as the creators of their futures (p. 4). In narrative therapy, we also find the making of story maps allows people to create roadmaps of past events and to identify actions they need to take in order to make changes in their lives. Narrative therapy uses storytelling to center people as experts of their own stories. This re-positioning of people as experts is a notion that resonates with the aims of CE in that in both instances building people’s agency is an important precursor to changing their realities.

Conceptual Framework: Agency (Critical Discovery) Understanding agency in CE is critical as it lies at the heart of transforming the realities of people (Eversole, 2011, p. 51). The philosophical writings of Brazilian educator and theorist Paulo Freire is particularly ‘relevan[t] to all those seeking to tackle social injustice’ (Magee & Pherali, 2019, p. 44) in neglected populations. During the 1940s, Freire developed his liberatory ideas while working with illiterate adults in poorer Brazilian communities. These ideas would later help Friere to develop his critical pedagogy teaching philosophy. Today Freire’s teaching philosophy continues to ‘transcend … disciplines and speaks beyond questions of pedagogy in a manner that is useful for the study of Africa’s post-colonial conditions’ (Thomas, 2009, p. 253). As a form of social justice, critical pedagogy resonates with many of the re-building challenges of troubled communities in the Global South. At the same time, Freire’s views provide a strong argument for practices that are reality-based, such as having an impact on the social, political and economic realities of people (Allen, 1972, p. 22). This is also true for me as a resident of Macassar searching for opportunities to work in that context to overcome the present-day legacies of Apartheid with members of my local community. Freire’s concepts of critical action, praxis and co-creation have been useful to position myself as an architect and researcher in Macassar. Because Freire’s theories prioritise the humanisation of people, they allow me, as a researcher, to understand space from a perspective in which social narratives are

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foregrounded as opposed to traditional western architectural theories that prioritise space and technical innovation. His concepts are also useful to unpack agency and its spatial implications. Following Friere, in this chapter, agency is in fact understood as people’s critical discovery (awareness or consciousness), and it is elaborated in more detail together with critical action, praxis and co-creation in the following paragraphs. Critical discovery – Freire (1972) writes that critical discovery is people’s realization that they have the power to change their circumstances (p. 22). Critical discovery is the process of increasing a person or a group’s ‘…awareness of the socioeconomic and cultural circumstances that shape their lives as well as their capacity to transform that reality’ (Jemal, 2017, p. 604). Critical action – According to Freire (1972), in order to overcome the harsh realities people face, they must ‘critically recognise’ the causes of their harsh circumstances and then create new conditions through transformative action (p. 21). Following Freire, being critical allows us to become creative. Furthermore, when we critically recognise problems in the places they occur, we also create an opportunity to gain a better understanding of how the community functions and, therefore, learn how to improve it. Freire (1972) further explains that transforming realities requires a critical intervention by people in their reality through praxis (p. 27). Praxis – Freire (1972) defines praxis as a form of critical thinking which comprises a combination of reflection and action (p. 25). Praxis can also be considered as a development of cognitive and physical actions (Freire, 1986, p. 36) through a recurring process where identified problems are followed by thoughtful actions. The impacts of these actions are then reflected on to refine subsequent actions for more long-lasting change of people’s social, political, gender, race and class conditions. Co-creation – According to Freire (1972), better conditions for upliftment and empowerment must be created by people themselves and should not be built together with those who ‘imagine a well-behaved present’ or those who imagine a ‘predetermined future’ (p. 24). This means that professionals who collaborate with communities have to be willing to step into the uncomfortable world of the less fortunate, build together with locals and make use of local knowledge. Trust, respect and dignity must be the basis of relationships between communities and professionals of CE; together this will encourage critical discovery (Freire, 1972, p. 38). Furthermore, when working together in conditions of unequal power, those with power must show vulnerability in order to encourage those with less power to develop critical judgement. Freire’s work has continued to influence CE interventions across the globe (Huschke, 2019, p. 2) to inspire local people to take responsible action and to work together to create change. In the townships of South Africa, developing agency (critical discovery) can be challenging where many locals have accepted a difficult life exacerbated by poverty, crime, unemployment and state neglect as a fait accompli. The state’s failure to provide services has created public mistrust. Against this backdrop, Freire’s definitions are important to answer questions about how neglected groups can participate in creating knowledge that can help

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restore their social narratives and develop self-reliance. One might argue that a truly sustainable CE process should address these concepts, as the project of Studiolight has sought to do. In the following section, I introduce the local context in which Studiolight conducted their storytelling CE.

Studiolight’s Who We Are Macassar Community Exhibition Project In 2015, gang violence in Macassar took the lives of several young people causing an escalation of passions and emotions in the affected neighbourhoods. There was a strong motivation for change shared by a limited number of community groups, which spurred several peaceful protests to create awareness of the issues of crime and poverty impacting the lives of residents. In December 2015, the Macassar Police Forum reported in a local meeting that the street protests proved unsuccessful at soliciting a broader community interest. The lack of community interest revealed the loss of faith in elected officials who many residents believed had failed to address the concerns of the community in the past. Many residents considered the peaceful protests as a waste of time. In these conditions, 17 local youth from Macassar, myself included, established the VCO Studiolight to find out how young people living in Macassar would imagine a more impactful and sustainable form of CE to inspire more community involvement. We also hoped that we could somehow restore the tarnished image of Macassar by changing the perception that our community was home only to crime, poverty and other social ills. My interactions with the participating young people of Studiolight took place less formally than an architect would normally work, focusing more on how to go about creatively retelling stories of Macassar rather than setting out to design space in which to conduct our projects. We first had to establish how we could use the spaces, resources and knowledge available to us in our community to make the all-important first step towards an ongoing process. We identified and worked across several local spaces starting in the living rooms and backyards of our parents’ homes (see Fig. 2). Here we brainstormed our ideas and adopted a non-linear and re-iterative process, involving meetings, workshops, training events, street photography and the design and building of a community exhibition. Our process was recorded using photos, videos, story maps and drawings.

Story Maps, Street Photography and Making Exhibition Displays As a group we looked at narrative therapy storytelling techniques to learn how to draw story maps. Our maps depicted several significant places in Macassar and depicted urban scenes of people and places that shaped our daily experience as young people growing up in Macassar (see Fig. 3). The story maps led to further discussions and evolved into a street photography project. In June 2016, we attended photography lessons in the local sports clubhouse given by a local

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Fig. 2.

Youth Meetings Held in Macassar Living Rooms.

Fig. 3.

Story Maps Made by Youth.

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Youth Making Display in Backyard Shack.

photographer. We then took to the street using the story maps as a roadmap and used our cell phones to document life in Macassar. In July 2017, we attended a frame-making workshop at the University of Cape Town’s School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics to learn how to use reclaimed timber pallets to make photo frames which we used to better showcase our photographs. We then designed and built a display that re-configured an existing informal shack (used for selling firewood) known by locals as Bong’s Place to display our photographic project to the broader community. To make the display, we collected old pallets and stored these in three different backyards in Macassar. The old pallets were sanded down and painted (see Fig. 4). Then we designed and made metal connectors with help from a local boilermaker. With the connectors, the display could be used to create multiple spatial layouts that would allow the photographic project to be displayed next to the daily activities of the shack. Together with the timber photo frames, the display allowed the photographic project to become visible in a respectful way.

Community Engagement With the Broader Community In April 2018, we held community meetings at Bong’s Place to plan the photographic exhibition with the broader community (see Fig. 5). With input from the community members, it was decided to spread the exhibition across three locations to include more participating residents and to reach a larger audience (see Fig. 6).The shack at Bong’s Place was converted into a temporary gallery, exhibiting a display installation with images from the workshops and seminars we

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Fig. 5.

Community Meetings Held in Shack at Bong’s Place.

Fig. 6. Emergent Campus With CE Activities and the 2018 Who We Macassar Exhibition Sites Alongside Everyday Activities of Macassar Spaces.

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Shack at Bong’s Place With Installation of Project Seminars and Workshops.

conducted over two years (see Fig. 7). In the home of Paul Swartz, a local television repairman and sculptor, other forms of community activism were on display. Here visitors could see how Swartz used sculptures to create a positive public space and contest the Apartheid-designed government house. In the Macassar Public Library, we joined forces with 10 second-year architecture students from the University of Cape Town to assemble a temporary exhibition space using part of the display that the youth had made for the shack (see Fig. 8). Other second-hand items such as old curtains, copper plumbing pipes and loose furniture were also used to complete the exhibition. Reports from visiting members of the community were overall positive. At the library the manager reported an increase of 1,200 visitors over the two-week duration of the exhibition. Many elders came to share their stories of life in Macassar in response to the photographs on display. These stories were recorded, collated and incorporated as part of the exhibitions, allowing many theretofore unheard voices of residents to be heard audibly, and their unseen efforts to be seen publicly. A quote from resident Anita Constable sums up the impact of the exhibition: ‘Those who have been forgotten are at long last brought into the warmth of the sun (Abrahams, 2022, np.)’ These words echo the longing of neglected people to be seen and recognised for who they are and what they do in their communities. After the exhibition, I set out to make sense of how the agency of Studiolight’s two-year storytelling CE process has impacted the social, spatial and institutional settings in Macassar.

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Fig. 8.

Exhibition in Macassar Library.

Critical Action: Nomadic and Sporadic Spatiality Studiolight’s project activities were critical in two ways (socially and spatially). Firstly, they helped form the participating youth’s identity through building their confidence and through instilling a critical awareness of their surroundings through discussions. The photography and frame-making workshops empowered the youth to combat idleness and to focus energies on a shared vision. Secondly, by thinking about the spaces needed to conduct their project activities the youth were able to negotiate with Macassar homeowners to work in several living rooms and backyard spaces. Fig. 6 shows a map of all the spaces used by Studiolight and shows the beginnings of an emergent campus made up of several living rooms, backyards and informal structures in the township. This spatial practice is critical as it changes the perception of informal space from poverty-stricken spaces to functional and versatile spaces that are better suited to support the practices of community groups than state-built public facilities. Fig. 6 also illustrates the project’s activities in comparison with the everyday activities of a typical council house and an informal shack. These local spaces were re-configured by re-arranging fixed and moveable spatial elements, and thus were made suitable for the youth to host seminars, the reviewing of work and the construction of an exhibition display. The young people learned how to use walls for storage and display, floors as surfaces to plan events and loose furniture to help organise the moving of people through an exhibition space. These lessons were valuable to allow the youth to sustain their activities. Fig. 6 shows a spatiality that is characteristically nomadic and sporadic that emerged in Macassar because of the Studiolight CE. Nomadic in the sense that activities move from one available property to another when required. Sporadic in the sense that the activities take place periodically and alongside the everyday activities of several homes, accommodating multiple participants.

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Praxis: Changing Perceptions The unfolding of Studiolight’s CE techniques and activities is particularly interesting in that it matches Freire’s definition of praxis. The group’s critical discussions (about customary and ineffective street protests) develop into the making of story maps, and then into a street photography project, followed by the design and organization of an exhibition. What emerges is a re-iterative process that is reflective and followed up by multiple ways of taking action, especially through the making of things. These artefacts (story maps, photographs and displays) become important references that are useful to affirm the group’s ongoing efforts but also to reflect on. The group’s reflections on these artefacts instil an awareness of how to reconfigure space as well as the image connected to it. These lessons are then tested in how the group re-arranges the interior spaces of the informal shack and the public library for the Who we are Macassar exhibition. Here the group can get the broader community to engage with the exhibition installation by reconfiguring the way people occupy and move through the shack and the library. For example, in the library, the installation creates a new perspective and awareness in visitors about their normal activities (such as looking for a book or doing homework) by becoming a meeting place (a space for public engagement) within an institutional space. At the shack, people are made aware of the functionality of the shack. The shack becomes more than an aesthetic backdrop to the everyday happenings that take place in the township. In both the shack and the library, moving differently through these familiar spaces together with the images and stories on display engages the visitor’s preconceived ideas of Macassar. This link between experiencing an alternative spatial re-arrangement together with an alternative visual representation is an interesting one, since it stresses how connecting an image to a place can develop new perceptions of that particular place. Understanding how people construct images of places is important when one aims to create places that can change perceptions and instil dignity within a local community.

Co-Creation: Building Trust Co-creating knowledge or collaborating with other partners can be a risky business for disenfranchised communities who are trying to improve the living standards of their neighbourhoods. External partners, in fact, often prioritize entrepreneurial opportunities over the concerns of poorer communities. For example, community efforts and involvement can be exploited to solicit funding which is often then used elsewhere. Stories of such exploitation are too common in poorer communities. In Macassar, several incomplete projects are signs of community initiatives that have been taken over by local government or organizations, window dressing them as upliftment projects. Because of the scepticism that these incomplete projects and takeovers have created in neglected communities, professionals working on CE have a hard time winning the trust and support of residents. Therefore, instilling the awareness and the responsibility of being an agent of change is an important starting point to create trust

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among residents. It is also important to recognise that taking part in CE processes where an active interest is directed towards actual problems of communities is an act of responsible individual citizenship. When this responsibility leads to working together as a community, shared goals can be identified and solutions co-created. Studiolight addresses this challenge by hosting a series of meetings in a well-known local space that was and is accessible to residents. These meetings are used to build trust with residents by discussing the notions of a shared responsibility to create safe public spaces. The Who we are Macassar exhibition is used as a public event to exercise this collective responsibility by hosting the event in places that are familiar and accessible to locals. During the event residents living in the vicinity observed the exhibition activities from the fronts of their homes while unemployed youth agreed to patrol the streets to ensure the safety of all visitors.

Summary: Spaces That Build Community Identity The storytelling CE of Studiolight is not only an identity formation project but also a spatial project. In Macassar, we see the VCO’s CE unfolding as a series of spatial expeditions in and with the community. This type of spatial practice is not unique to the project of Studiolight. Many political, church and other community-building groups move from location to location and operate periodically to conduct their meetings and activities in the townships. Making use of a private property that is owned by residents keeps these initiatives going in contexts where access to state-built public facilities is limited. Consequently, a nomadic and sporadic spatiality emerges where people use what they have to test what is spatially possible to meet their community needs instead of using space as-is, which they have to do when using a state-built public facility. The ownership and accessibility of local spaces, and the creation of a subversive public domain through the connection of several of these spaces, offer interesting lessons that can help professionals of CE to think about forging positive community identities in contexts with histories of social injustices. Ownership is an important concept professionals of CE need to take into account when thinking about the sustainability of CE interventions because owning property and the right to own property are the biggest assets people in poorer communities have to get out of poverty (Lemanski, 2011, p. 58). Having assets instils self-worth and the confidence to act in the interest of growing the value of one’s assets as well as acting in the interest of the broader community where the property is located. Furthermore, ownership and access are important because people are more likely to make their homes fit for community uses where shared experiences can shape cultural production and community identity. For example, in Black and coloured townships informal taverns, barbershops and tuck shops are the quintessential archetypes of the dialectical relationship between private and public use. These local spaces are connected by people and create a subversive public domain that is collectively owned by the community.

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The notion of a subversive public domain posits the idea that designers should think about how public buildings can be distributed in smaller constituent parts across a much larger urban area instead of single stand-alone public buildings. In Macassar the public domain is created by a network of self-constructed front and backyard structures from where many people operate small businesses. These informal structures connect to the Apartheid-built government houses in such a way that a coherent urban edge, forms to frame the street. These structures are not central or static but dispersed and dynamic and represent the energies of the people who create them. The interrelationship between these spaces and how they are made have become the antithesis of Apartheid design. In these contexts, private and public spaces are not separated but connected and used interchangeably. While the use of found materials to make informal structures juxtaposes the abstract features of the modernist-inspired apartheid-built government houses. As a whole, an aesthetic emerges that reflects the complex everyday life in the township; this will be worth exploring as a future research project. In conclusion, as professionals of CE we first have to recognise that people in neglected communities are already working together to turn their neighbourhoods into more viable places for purposeful living. In conditions where local governments have failed to deliver services, people share their homes and backyard spaces (often informal shacks) to gather as a community and tackle some of the most serious issues threatening their futures. As in the case of Studiolight’s storytelling CE, the community-driven projects that emerge from such collaborations focus on community strengths, capabilities and assets rather than on deficits and problems. By focusing on what they have, communities frame themselves more positively and create the necessary impetus for change. By taking action as responsible citizens in their communities, they uphold a widely held shared vision of a good society. Contrary to popular belief, poorer populations do support social change, and this makes it more difficult for the government, and professionals of CE, to ignore the knowledge that their efforts produce (Stuart, 2017, np). To access the local knowledge in these functioning contexts, interdisciplinary approaches such as combining social anthropology and ethnographic methods with architectural research can build our capacity, as architects, to understand and work with neglected communities. Furthermore, allowing us to engage more closely with locals and act with a greater commitment by stepping into their worlds favours the discovery of resilient patterns that can help transform their realities. The resilience of communities such as Macassar is a timely reminder to take CE more seriously and value its ability to reveal local knowledge that can refashion space and aesthetics to better represent people’s values, histories and aspirations.

Acknowledgements A shorter version of this chapter was first presented at the International Conference on ‘Spaces and Places’ at Bruges, Belgium, organised by Progressive Connexions from 13 to 14 April 2019. Following the presentation, I was able to modify and restructure the

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draft to its present form. To this end, I would like to acknowledge the organisers of the conference, Dr Rob Fisher and Teresa Cutler-Broyles, MA, for giving me the opportunity to participate in the event. Many thanks to Demelza Hall and Nishevita Jayendran for discussions on the theme, and to Beitske Boonstra and Stefano Rozzoni for the comprehensive reviewing of the paper. I’m also grateful to my colleagues, Prof. Toma Berlanda and Dr Philippa Tumubweinee, for their critical insights and constructive suggestions on making it sharp and focused. I would like to thank the entire staff and administration of my organisation for supporting travel and creating a space to share ideas. Finally to Charlton Abrahams, Elton Abrahams, Giovanni Alexander, Stephanie Alexander, Elcardo Samuels, the youth participants of Studiolight, and the community of Macassar for their commitment to being the change in our community.

References Abrahams, C. (2022). Macassar, who we are. Exhibition booklet. In press. Allen, G. (1972, November). Paulo Freire pedagogy of the oppressed review. Science for the People, 4, 22–24. Awan, N., Schneider, T., & Till, J. (2011). Spatial agency: Other ways of doing architecture. Abingdon, OX: Routledge. Eversole, R. (2011). Community agency and community engagement: Re-theorising participating in governance. Journal of Public Policy, 31(1), 51–71. doi:10.1017/ S0143814X10000206 Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Freire, P. (1986). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving the pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Gumede, W. (2017, September 17). SA’s future in the hands of activist. IOL. Retrieved from https://www.iol.co.za/news/opinion/sas-future-is-in-the-hands-ofactivists-11245797. Accessed on June 22, 2021. Huschke, S. (2019). Empowering sex workers? Critical reflections on peer led risk-reduction workshops in Soweto, South Africa. Global Health Action, 12(1), 1–9. doi:10.1080/16549716.2018.1522149 Jemal, A. (2017). Critical awareness: A critique and critical analysis of the literature. The Urban Review, 49(4), 602–626. doi:10.1007/s11256-017-0411-3 Kaijima, M., Stalder, L., Iseki, Y., & International Architectural Exhibition. (2018). Architectural ethnography. Tokyo: TOTO Publishing. Karim, F. (2018). Introduction: Architecture and social engagement. In F. Karim (Ed.), The Routledge companion to architecture and social engagement (pp. xxxiii). New York, NY: Routledge. Kretzmann, J. P., & McKnight, J. (1993). Building communities from the inside out: A path toward finding and mobilizing a community’s assets. Chicago, IL: ACTA Publications. Lemanski, C. (2011). Moving up the ladder or stuck on the bottom rung? Homeownership as a solution to poverty in urban South Africa. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(1), 57–77. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00945.x Low, I. (2018). Transforming the spatial legacies of colonialism and apartheid: Participatory practice and design agency in southern Africa. In F. Karim (Ed.),

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The Routledge companion to architecture and social engagement (pp. 380–395). New York, NY: Routledge. Magee, A., & Pherali, T. (2019). Paulo Freire and critical consciousness in conflict-affected contexts. Education and Conflict Review, 2, 44–48. Retrieved from https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10081479/1/Paulo%20Freire%20and% 20critical%20consciousness%20in%20conflict-affected%20contexts.pdf. Accessed on June 21, 2021. Mills, G. (1989). Space and power in South Africa: The township as a mechanism of control. Ekistics, 56(334/335), 65–74. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 43622104 Morgan, A. (2000). What is narrative therapy?: An easy-to-read introduction. Adelaide, SA: Dulwich Centre Publications. Pieterse, E. (2011). Grasping the unknowable: Coming to grips with African urbanisms. Social Dynamics, 37(1), 5–23. doi:10.1080/02533952.2011.569994 Prasetyo, Y. (2017). Storytelling to social change: The power of story in the community building. SSRN Electronic Journal, Community development academy, 3, 1–11. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3094947 SABC News. (2019, September 20). An exhibition to celebrate the Macassar community launched [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch? v5pRXwGxheNV4. Accessed on September 24, 2019. Stuart, G. (2017, February 14). What is community engagement. Retrieved from https://sustainingcommunity.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/what-is-communityengagement. Accessed on April 15, 2022. Thomas, D. (2009). Revisiting “pedagogy of the oppressed”: Paulo Freire and contemporary African studies. Review of African Political Economy, 36(120), 253–269. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27756265. Accessed on December 18, 2020. Van der Riet, M. (2008). Participatory research and the philosophy of social science: Beyond the moral imperative. Qualitative Inquiry, 14(4), 546–565. doi:10.1177/ 1077800408314350

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Part II Moving Bodies

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Chapter 6

Framed by Textiles Lesley Millar

Abstract 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-sc`ene 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. Keywords: Place; space; textiles; lace; mise-en-sc`ene; permeability

Textiles, Space and Place: An Experiential View What are textiles? Such a straightforward question with so very many answers. Textiles are variously described and understood as: cloth, fabric, material, clothing, stuff, etc. Certainly they are three dimensional constructions that drape and fold, that keep us warm and that keep us cool, sometimes opaque and sometimes transparent. The great Japanese designer Reiko Sudo said, in an interview with Blair Brownell, that ‘Fabric is like water. It constantly responds to different forces – it is never static. Fabric isn’t a rigid thing’ (Brownell, 2011, p. 191). Textiles are our second skin, holding our lives and documenting our passing – so familiar we stop seeing that they are always with us, like the walls that surround us as we move through our life. As textile is the mediating membrane between our body and what it encounters, so are walls, being the

Moving Spaces and Places, 99–111 Copyright © 2022 Lesley Millar Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221007

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mediating membrane between the spaces in which we live and what is beyond. What if, as we contemplate the fixed place, its threshold moves, the walls fragment, the space begins to breathe and we discover a different mode of spatial understanding? Places are not fixed, spaces become fluid and boundaries become permeable? All this is possible through the use of textiles and textile thinking. Walking through the Itabishi neighbourhood in Tokyo, one might look up and see a house with walls made from swathes of cloth blowing in the wind, revealing the spaces within, open to the exterior spaces. This is the Curtain Wall House designed by architect Shigeru Ban (1994–1995), who has used textiles to question the role of the wall through a radical interpretation of the shoji (paper) walls of traditional Japanese houses. Such an imaginative shift of thinking and resolution opens up the possibility for further questioning. Space and place when viewed through textile narratives provide a fertile ground for flexibility of understanding, which may result in different ways of experiencing space, place, and textiles. When thinking about textiles, space and place and the differences and connections between them, I found it useful to begin with Michel de Certeau’s definitions of place and space as argued in The Practice of Everyday Life. For de Certeau, place is the order with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. Place excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location, a location is defined by being there. Place implies an indication of stability (De Certeau, 1988, p. 117). Historically, cloth may be a locator of place through local materials, techniques or patterns. It may also be a confounder of traditional cultural specificity of place, evidencing hidden or forgotten trading links between one place and another, sometimes long forgotten. In 2004/2005, I undertook a research project to determine the importance of cloth in people’s lives. I interviewed 42 members of the public from all walks of life and different nationalities which were filmed and edited into a video titled What Is Cloth to Me? (Becker & Millar, 2005). This video has been shown at various venues in the UK, Germany and US. For example, one of the interviewees, from Iran, told me that in Afghanistan, despite the fact that the country is land-locked, some of the textile patterns are evocative of the sea and hold the narrative of unremembered connections to other places (Becker & Millar, 2005). This kind of embedded historical narrative is demon¨ Wendel’s Universal Pattern strated in the research carried out by Yvonne Droge project (1992; Ongoing). In this, she documented the red and white check fabric which is found in many different countries throughout the world, each claiming to have invented and having its own name for it. For example, in English, the cloth is called gingham, and in Dutch, it is brabants bont. Its place is defined by the fact of it being there. Space, again according to de Certeau, is not static, located. It exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities and time variables. The architect Bernard Tschumi claimed that ‘there is no space without event’ (Tschumi, 1990, p. 88), and he also establishes space as being actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. If we accept that space is active, the idea may be developed through textiles: cloth moves, cloth flows, cloth negotiates,

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cloth performs, etc. – in the making and in the using. Textiles allow for ideas of transience of form and those ‘blurred spatial transitions’ (Brownell, 2011, p. 146) inherent in modern urban environments.

Articulation of Space The contribution of lace to the discussion about space, place and textile is firstly its traditional patterning which speaks directly of place and secondly its dynamic edge, offering the glimpsed spaces. There is nothing passive about lace, either for the wearer/user or the viewer. The whole point of lace is to perform, to be active, to direct our gaze and draw us into the narrative and encourage us to find our own way. Outer garments made from lace, or containing lace elements, allow for the body glimpsed but not wholly revealed – an intimate space between two surfaces: that of the cloth and the body. It is also an ‘active’ space, changing with the movement of the body. The use of lace in lingerie denotes a boundary which could become a borderline: the edge of the garment and the beginning of the (untouchable) space beyond. Used as contours of space, lace net-works, through their association with the body, can act as the threshold for that magical, symbolic interior associated with darkness. They can also, through structure and pattern, configure abstract, multidimensional spaces associated with emptiness and light (Isozaki, 2006). Lace structures create fluidity of space, provide contours which are porous, and are always in process. The Japanese architect Arata Isozaki has written that ‘Space appears only in the time that humans perceive, therefore it is always (both) specific, concrete, (and) flickering(…) never fixed’ (Isozaki, 2006, p. 89). It then follows that the space and its edge are in a relational state of incompleteness, constantly becoming, both clear and in flux. If the walls that surround us are to be perceived as the morphological elements that mark an urban edge within the built environment, moving from the static to the dynamic, then the articulation of space is crucial. As a starting point for this exploration of fluid space and textiles, we need look no further than the spider’s web. Its delicate construction of lines and spaces has a spatial and visual permeability. It is also an active and fluid space, a lace net-work arcing through the air between one point and another. This is not passive space, it is active. In recognition of its active nature, the traditional lace makers in Burano describe their lace as punto in aria, ‘stitching in the air’, and in doing so move the activity from pattern-making to the configuring of space. This brings us back to the spider’s web which is never static, lines of connection changing in response to environmental and creature needs. In his book Lines: A Brief History, Tim Ingold writes of a line that ‘is more visionary or metaphysical…. Infinitely thin, drawn upon a plane that is both transparent and without substance… a kind of “ghost” of the line’ (Ingold, 2008, p. 47) which could be a description of Dutch artist Tamar Frank’s room-sized installations using phosphorescent threads forming parabolic articulations of the

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air, representing emblematic traces of the movement of her body in space. The shapes and boundaries are in a constant state of redefinition, appearing and disappearing, slowly moving from being ‘in’ space to ‘holding’ the space, depending on the light and the fine tuning of the viewer’s eye. For Frank, the thread is a line in space stretching out like a line of light, dividing the space and continuing, in our minds eye, beyond the borders. Where Frank’s lines emerge from the darkness, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota uses lines to create darkness. Inside the church of Saint Marie-Madeleine, Lille, Shiota lies asleep on what looks like a hospital bed, trapped within her black web of knotted threads. This installation, ‘During Sleep’, suggests the space between life and death, or the moments between waking and sleeping. As she says: ‘I wove black thread around the bed, and the result looks as though I’m protecting that space (…) but it also looks like a cocoon’ (Kataoka, 2011, p. 212). The work allows ingress to the dream/nightmare world of an artist working on ‘the edge of life or the verge of death’ (Kasuya, 2008, p. 51). Her complex webs occupy space, creating dense black calligraphic networks that are not only three dimensional drawings of space but also threads of memory and connection, entrapment and claustrophobia, leading the audience into those areas of the mind where darkness illuminates recollected images. And the mind, once on an exploratory path, ‘creates large and complex spatial schemata that exceed by far what an individual can encompass through direct experience’ (Tuan, 1977, p. 67).

Permeable Space Our experience of space is both intellectual and sensual. We know it and we feel it, from cosmic space reaching and spreading beyond our comprehension, to the nano space present in the intimacy between two surfaces pressed together. Space is out there, it is in here, and it is always with us. It surrounds us and we move through it. We portion it off with structures to form a place that protects us from the undefined space out there, shaping manageable interiors, controlled spaces. People build walls delineating the barrier between one space and another, measuring the interval between your space and my space. We feel inviolable inside our demarcated space, behind our solid walls, holding our place: to remove boundary markers or to trespass are legally punishable acts. Yet the wall is an arbitrary thing, a nominated threshold. What would happen if the walls began to leak and somehow the space flowed out and in, the borderline redefined by interrelationships? The architect Terry Riley (1995) likens the glass façades of modern buildings to an interposed veil, triggering a subjective relationship by distancing the viewer of the building from the space or forms within, and isolating the viewer within from the outside world. This thought was further developed by architect Jun Aoki, who linked it to textiles thus: ‘See-through textiles change how the world and things on their far side look, in ways that vary with the nature of their transparency… textiles stand between people and architecture acting as mediator’ (Aoki, 2015, p. 19). In 1985, the Japanese architect Toyo Ito

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exhibited a new design titled Pao: A dwelling for Tokyo Nomadic Women. This installation comprised a dome-shaped tent supported by steel tubing and perforated metal panels covered with several layers of transparent and richly patterned translucent textiles: a soft and invisible veil which served as ‘a semipermeable membrane between its occupant and the media-saturated environment in which she lived’ (Reynolds, 2015, pp. 2012–2013). Ito was proposing this dwelling for a new phenomenon, the Tokyo Nomadic Women, who had emerged into Tokyo sub-culture at that time. These were young Japanese women who had achieved much more independence than had been allowed for previous generations of women, as well as reasonably well-paid jobs, good education, freedom to leave home and freedom not to marry. Their life was spent in a fast cycle of working, shopping, playing and sleeping; needing no permanent home, their needs could be satisfied as they moved through temporary spaces. As Ito described it: They live alone and are unrestricted by the old conventions of family life. [They work] during the daytime, and wander into the urban stage-set of night life after work with their boyfriends […] For them, cafe bars and movie theatres are an extension of their living room, restaurants replace their dining room […] the boutiques are their walk-in closet. (Reynolds, 2015, p. 215) In less extreme ways than described above, most people play out their lives within or against the built environment, using their senses, experiencing the light, shadow, sound, silence, smell, heat and cold, reading the signs. The urban spaces in which we live and move have changed dramatically in character since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Today we experience a ‘decline of the solid city’ (Lambertucci, 2010, p. 41) and the emergence of the ‘Infra-mall’ (Lambertucci, 2010, p. 41) – an overarching interior space, an ever-expanding container in which we may pass our lives – living, working, travelling, shopping, eating and taking our entertainment. These multi-functional spaces are essentially about mobility, moving us seamlessly from one place to another, aspiring to a fluidity of boundary between one threshold and another. We flow with the space, the space flows with us, so that ‘We no longer see it. It no longer limits us’ (Bachelard, 1969, p. 226). We note it and we feel it. We feel its volume.

Felt Space Felt space is a sensory apprehension of space, which sometimes coincides with visual perception and sometimes unfolds as a counterpoint to the logic of the visual revealing of the space. Tschumi talks of the experience of space as where the body tries to discover its lost unity, its energies and impulses, its rhythms and its flux, much like the German expression: Raumenpfindung (Tschumi, 1990, p. 13). This is a subjective spatial understanding with respect to a felt volume, rather

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than a precise description of height, breadth, length and temperature, although it would include these factors. It is the relationship of the body within the surrounding space: a feeling of well-being related to the good proportions and a sense of harmony engendered by the space, which operates at a level of spatial cognition that cannot be put into words. The environment is experienced, understood and communicated, through the use of all senses. The writer and geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes about such spatial knowledge occurring when ‘movements and changes of location can be envisaged’ (Tuan, 1977, pp. 67, 68). In the film House of Flying Daggers (Yimou, 2004) there is an imaginary example of the employment of felt volume during the Echo Game Dance by the heroine. She enters the hall wearing an enveloping robe with highly exaggerated long sleeves. She stands encircled by drums and must strike precisely each drum hit by hard pebble-like beans, thrown by her male challenger, the beans thrown increasing in number each time she succeeds. For reasons of the plot she has assumed the role of a blind woman and therefore she must not use her eyes. She takes her position in the centre of the room, in ‘the very ultimate depth of its repose’ (Bachelard, 1969, p. 226) not seeing it, not limited by vision. Instead, by listening to the sound, and feeling the vibration in the air, she senses, in the architect Arato Isozaki’s words: ‘an undifferentiated, intuitive space going well beyond any mere mechanistic articulation’ (Isozaki, 2006, p. 68). Having ‘felt’ the space, then the woman moves gracefully, precisely, and at speed around the room, using the edges of her extended sleeves, curling through the air, to accurately hit the surface of drum after drum. The sensory relationship between textile and felt volume of space, unfolding as a counterpoint to the logic of the visual, can be found in the chain-link works of the German artist Katharina Hinsberg. In one installation, Hinsberg covered the floor with red cloth, then cut it precisely into one long strip which was hung to fill the space. The single strip was then cut into many smaller ones and dropped from on high, through the space, so that they accumulated in a pile. The cloth had transitioned from enveloping the place, to occupying the space, to becoming an autonomous distillation of both place and space. This work exemplifies a specific element of de Certeau’s definition of place as an instantaneous configuration of position. It also relates to his definition of space as intersections of mobile elements actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Hinsberg’s work is an embodiment of space and place through the active/ performative textile, each iteration holding the memory of the pre-existing structure. Staying with the work of Katharina Hinsberg, a piece she created in response to the unrestored spinning room in the World Heritage Site of Salts Mill in Yorkshire, UK, again develops the relationship between textiles, space and place, and that of memory. Salts Mill and the spinning room themselves represent an extraordinary marriage of place and space. The Mill was built in 1853 as the central hub of a new village in the Yorkshire Dales, created by visionary industrialist Titus Salt as a healthy environment for the workers of the nearby industrial city of Bradford. The 168 m-long spinning room was, at that time, the

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longest industrial space in the world (UNESCO World Heritage Committee Nomination, 2001, p. 38). Hinsberg took this history into account as she measured out the length and width of the floor space of the room with a single long red thread which she cut once it was done. The thread took the measure of the room and held the room in its length. The single thread was used as both warp and weft on a weaving frame. Her intention is that this memory is communicated and visualised when the line of thread becomes a (woven) surface that stems from the dimensions of the room, in exact correspondence to it. In this manner, the actual floor measurements are translated into a model of the floor, in a scale of 1: 100. The place, the space and the textile have become one and the same.

In Place and Out of Place A textile is a wondrous thing – created and understood through complex intersections of contemporary and historical perspectives, cultural and geo-political parallels, and divergences of different localities: places. And where there is place, there is also ‘out of place’ which sometimes is, as Edward Said profoundly articulated in the introduction to his book Out of Place: A Memoir, a ‘record of a lost or forgotten world’ (Said, 1999, p. ix). Out of place can also be a material disjunction. For example, when we discover something is out of place we look for a reason why this should be so. Traditionally woven and printed textiles have patterns which are locally particular, specific to a place and recognised to be so by its citizens. Therefore, if a patterned fabric from one place is found in another, those who find it will be inspired to discover why the cloth is out of place. Perhaps who has brought it there and, ultimately, to wonder whether there is a message or meaning carried by its being out of place. This inherited knowledge and understanding of the relationship between cloth and place was used by artists living in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as a means of subversive communication during the Soviet occupation. Textiles were considered a decorative craft and therefore pattern was not recognized by the authorities as a means of artistic expression. As a result, artists began to work with textiles, using traditional patterns with specific cultural associations as a political tool of identification with forbidden place/ nationhood, hidden in plain view (Millar, 2007). A contemporary example of the social and political impact of placing textiles out of place would be the Wounds work of Norwegian artist Mari Meen Halsøy in which she makes tapestries in the context of the war-shattered Beirut cityscape. As Halsøy writes in her internet blog: The city of Beirut is strongly affected by several wars, in terms of bombed out buildings and other traces of warfare. Most parts of central Beirut have still not been rebuilt after the civil war and bombed buildings have been left as monuments of the war for decades. (Halsøy, 2010)

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These marks of violence convey the stories and experiences of Beirut’s residents during and after the Civil War, which lasted from 1975 to 1990. In 2010 Halsøy was asked by the organisers of the Beirut arts festival to ‘patch all waking moments’ (Halsøy, 2010). And that is what she began to do, taking her loom into the buildings, sitting, looking, feeling, drawing around bomb and bullet holes, weaving tapestries to the exact shape, then placing them in the holes but not covering them, not hiding them, so that the ravaged edges could still be seen. Colours were chosen to be close to the colour of the wall, not as camouflage but in order to empathise with the broken surface and structure. This is, as she describes it, a site-specific and relational project that has been in continuous development since that time. Her textiles convey intimacy in their placement and compassion through their soft materiality, and speak to us of absence and presence. Such incongruity between expected and actual form and use of textiles creates an unease – who would expect to find a beautifully woven tapestry placed within a bomb crater in an abandoned building? Such a discontinuity, a fracture, makes pause for intervention. They are textiles of place and out of place. Unexpected locations and actual boundaries are also the sites for another Norwegian artist Lise Bjørne Linnert, who performs acts of intrusion by embroidering red thread around a single hole in wire-net fences and barriers. The fence traditionally signifies the limit of access – in or out; the act of embroidery is an interrogation of that limit, the performance itself a challenge to the invisible boundary between performer and onlooker. When completed, the embroidery is left in place, an anonymous, quiet intrusion which, once discovered by the passer-by, focuses the gaze as they experience the permeability of the boundary. Photographs of each intrusion are catalogued to form a record of the act but they also serve as images of permeability as the photographs capture both the boundary and what is beyond. It is an ongoing project, undertaken wherever the artist happens to be. It could be a significant site such as the fence surrounding the American Embassy in Oslo or the fence between the Left Bank and Israel in Tel Aviv, or an everyday street in Berlin or London. Both the projects and Lise Bjørne Linnert’s personal parameters/edges are in a state of adaptation, responding to a particular place by delineating the space. It is here, in this visual and temporal interruption, that the inherent qualities of lace net-works create fluidity of space, providing contours which are porous and resonate with Jun Aoki’s exploration of flow through the use of perforated surfaces. The net-work repeats and reconfigures endlessly, offering the possibility that the structure may be continuously evolving, revealing and concealing the unfolding and fragmented narratives of our lives, and may be used ‘to move as closely as possible to a flexibility and overall constructivity by which the entire building adapts in this flowing manner to subtle shifts in the environment’ (Ishigami, 2010, p. 43). I will take two concepts as outlined by the architect Richard Reid (Reid, 2006, p. 26), high definition and low definition, as my way-markers to the relationship between lace and mise-en-sc`ene as framing devices. As Reid describes it, high definition is associated with the grand design, open spaces, which could also be characterised as the void, for example, piazzas and continuous facades, spaces that are clearly structured and ordered. Low definition

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is associated with the vernacular, the chaotic streets and the arcades around a piazza, non-linear and involving. Both high and low definition direct our looking, while the narrative flows between the spaces and the structure, offering us ways in which we may transform space from an absolute framework of activity into more adaptable, relative and relational aspects of social life. I would like to return specifically to the arcades – those very permeable, lace-like links between the main, high-definition piazza space and the chaotic low-definition rooms to the rear. Traders and passers-by move from the outside to the inside, through the half-light, half-dark, transition space, travelling through, and yet, as with the lace edge of lingerie, aware of crossing a threshold. As noted by Walter Benjamin: ‘the ambiguity of the arcades is the ambiguity of space… double edged’ (Benjamin, 1999, pp. 8–9), one space/place leading to another. Richard Sennett writes of the necessity for a ‘living edge’ (Sennett, 2011, p. 326), a borderline acting as a porous membrane in urban design, facilitating exchange between communities. The arcade slows down the passage of the walker; arcades are not a place to hurry; like lace, they invite a fragmented view, apertures glimpsed, offering both intrigue and adventure, providing a frame within which the narrative may take place.

Mise-en-sc`ene Mise-en-sc`ene: a theatrical and cinematic expression that describes the arrangement of everything that appears in the framing, which in turn forms the context created by the author/director/auteur within which the story is told. Once we take in the mise-en-sc`ene, it is possible to understand the narrative being presented from the framing of the place and the content of the space. Mise-en-sc`ene offers us multiple, changing and sometimes conflicting ways of experiencing or understanding what we are seeing (Rendell, 2006). If lace is used to frame the mise-en-scene, it can draw on, as outlined above, many references. These references will both support and lead our understanding of what we are experiencing. For example, there is an image of Marlene Dietrich from the film The Devil is a Woman (von Sternberg, 1935), the last in which she was directed by her mentor and sometime lover, Josef von Sternberg. The woman (Dietrich) is dressed in black lace/forbidden, as she picks her way down the steps through the architecture of the city, which is covered with white streamers creating a lace net-work. She has the presence, the aspect, of a black spider spinning her web. There are certainly multiple, and conflicting, ways of experiencing or understanding what we are seeing, all through the medium of lace: space, place, architecture, the body, sex and the city – the perfect high-definition, low-definition lace as mise-en-sc`ene. Lace contains so many possible narratives, those of purity and eroticism, light and shadow, structure and space, the body and the building. The film Midnight Lace (Miller, 1960) has it all, as the posters for the film claim: ‘The woman in the midnight lace, target for temptation or terror’ and ‘Silken suspense, half revealing, half concealing’. The contradictions of lace would have been even stronger for the

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audience at the time as the woman in midnight (black) lace was played by the actress Doris Day, who at that time was closely identified with clean living, girl next door characters, more associated with the narratives of pure white lace. Throughout the film the lace motif is ever present: lace and the body, lace and architecture, place and space, light and shadow, and purity and eroticism. In fact, lace net-works are at the heart of the narrative. Doris Day plays a wealthy American woman living in London with her English husband. In readiness for a romantic trip to Venice, she buys some black lace pyjamas. Already the viewer may sense a contradiction between the erotic connotation of the black lace and the inaccessibility of the body dressed not in a nightgown but enclosed in pyjamas. The woman begins to receive threatening phone calls, but only when she is alone, never when anyone is present and the veracity of her experience is doubted. The publicity stills for the film show her through a black lace veil – the veil of truth or lies, what is she concealing? At times during the film, the viewer can see the imprint of the lace on her face and shoulder, and on the side of her husband’s face, telling us that he is not without implication. In their apartment building there is an old-fashioned lift with a lace-like metal grill, the pattern of which, as we see her in the shadow, covers her face and neck. The building seems to be taking her over, suffocating her and finally trapping her by the lace-like structure of the lift doors, which won’t open. Porous walls they might be, but she can’t get out. At all times, it is the lace driving our interpretation of the narrative, the lace motif that serves to isolate her within its spaces and connect her through its structure to the other players in the drama, including the building itself. According to Junya Ishigami: ‘Spaces are born out of the relationship between architecture and non-architectural elements, and the relationship with the people who perceive these’ (Ishigami, 2010, p. 81), and there are many buildings using textiles, lace and lace net-works to craft spaces that question the nature of the relationship described by Ishigami. I began this chapter with Shigeru Ban’s revolutionary Curtain Wall House, and I would like to end with two other of my favourite examples. The first is the beautiful Leaf Chapel, Kobuchizawa, Yamanashi, Japan (Klein Dytham, 2004). The retractable steel dome is covered with a leaf pattern created by 4,700 tiny holes, each with an acrylic lens, forming the delicate image of a bridal veil. The light filtering through these holes creates an almost mystical scene during a wedding ceremony day or night. It is a building using lace, lace prickings and the cultural associations of lace: veiling, preciousness, revealing, concealing – the perfect mise-en-sc`ene for a wedding. The second example is the Museum of Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean in Marseille (Ricotti, 2013), which is encased by a lace structure, the sea on one side and interior spaces on the other. The whole area is ‘saturated with dappled shadows from a lacy screen in dark concrete. This has been compared to a mashrabiya, and a mantilla’ (Moor, 2013). People sit at tables, read, walk around, look at art, crossing and re-crossing the fluid boundaries of the building. Some years ago I wrote this as an introduction to the exhibition Lost in Lace: Picture a street at night, a light shining from a window, through a lace curtain, casting a shadow pattern on the pavement. As you

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walk towards it another shadow interrupts the pattern, that of a person inside the room and then you too disturb the pattern as you cross the borderline from the dark street into the capricious light; your presence and the presence of the other, together, in the ambiguous mutability of the boundaries between one space and another, created by the lace curtain. (Millar, 2011, p. 6) This visual and sensory narrative is an accumulation of lace, space and architecture. The light, shadow, movement and fragmented views, draw us in, making us all participants. The fluidity of lace as a structure requires a constant process of mediation and negotiation of differences in order to discern what is accessible and what is not, both visually and physically. I set out in this paper to explore and question the materiality and purpose of form and enclosure. Bernard Tschumi has said that ‘in the age of modernity architectural spaces can have an autonomy and logic of their own’. Therefore, why should we not take those ruptures, cracks, holes and fragmentations that ‘are inherent in the manipulation of form’ (Tschumi, 1990, p. 99) as a starting point to discover means by which we may ‘forge relations between otherwise walled-off spaces’ (Ito, 1997, p. 22). Textile, in particular lace net-works, their structure and cultural associations, provide both ambiguity and focus, moving and leading our perception of space and place and challenging our interpretation and measuring of the public and the private spheres. Finally asking: where does my space end and your space begin?

Note 1. I am indebted to my former PhD student, Dr Gail Baxter, for her definition of the term ‘lace’ as referring to ‘constructed patterns of absence and presence in a random or pre-ordained sequence, formed by materials appropriate for the particular outcomes.’ For the purposes of this chapter, I have taken this one stage further and created the category ‘lace net-works’ with a hyphen to differentiate between networks. It is something that is dependent on lace and net yet is also a connecting network.

References Aoki, J. (2015). Atmospheric living things that convey atmosphere. In J. Aoki (Ed.), The textiles of Yoko Ando: Weaving spaces and structures (pp. 12–21). Tokyo: LIXIL Publishing. Bachelard, G. (1969). La Po´etique de l’espace 1958 (M. Jolas, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Benjamin, W. (1999). The arcades project (H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin, Trans.). Boston, MA: Belknap Harvard. Brownell, B. (2011). Matter in the floating world. Conversations with Japanese architects. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press.

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De Certeau, M. (1988). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press. ¨ Wendel, Y. (1992; Ongoing). Universal pattern project. Retrieved from https:// Droge endlesslowlands.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/universal-pattern/. Accessed on May 20, 2020. Halsøy, M. M. (2009; Ongoing). Retrieved from marimeenhalsoy.blogspot.com/2010/ 09/. Accessed on September 27, 2020. Ingold, T. (2008). Lines: A brief history. London: Routledge. Ishigami, J. (2010). Another scale of architecture. Tokyo: Municipal Museum of Art. Isozaki, A. (2006). Japan-ness in architecture (p. 89). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Ito, T. (1997). Three transparencies (A. Birnbaum, Trans.). In Suk´eSuk´e (pp. 19–23). Tokyo: Nuno Corp. Kasuya, A. (2008). Chiharu Shiota: The breath of the spirit. Osaka: The National Museum of Art Osaka. Kataoka, M. (2011). Eloquent silence. In C. Stummel (Ed.), Chiharu Shiota (pp. 210–213). Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Lambertucci, F. (2010). InfraMalls. In L. Basso Peressut, I. Forino, G. Postiglione, & R. Rizzi (Eds.), Interior wor(l)ds (pp. 137–142). Turin: U. Allemandi & C. Lubbock, T. (2002, June 18). The secret life of cloth. The Independent. Millar, L. (2007). Cloth & culture now. Epsom: University for the Creative Arts. Millar, L. (2011). Lost in lace. Birmingham: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Moor, R. (2013, June 9). Marseille’s new museum on the Med makes a dazzling statement, but the exhibitions are something of a muddle. The Observer. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jun/09/museumcivilisations-europe-mediterranean-mucem-review. Accessed on June 6, 2020. Reid, R. (2006). Are the artistic principles of city planning dead and buried? In Keynote address to 5th Annual Architectural Review Conference “Masterplanning and the European City” held at RIBA London 31st February 2006. Direct Design Tunbridge Wells. Rendell, J. (2006). Art and architecture: A place between. London: I.B Tauris. Reynolds, J. M. (2015). Allegories of time and space. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Riley, T. (1995). Light construction. New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art. Said, E. W. (1999). Out of place. London: Granta. Sennett, R. (2011). Boundaries and borders. In R. Burdett & D. Sudjic (Eds.), Living in the endless city (pp. 324–332). London: Phaidon. Tschumi, B. (1990). Questions of space. London: Architectural Association. Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. Minneapolis, MT: University of Minnesota Press. World Heritage Committee UNESCO Nomination Document. Retrieved from https:// whc.unesco.org/uploads/nominations/1028.pdf. Accessed on September 19, 2020.

Film and Video Becker, L. (Director), & Millar, L. (Producer). (2005). What Is Cloth to Me? Video. Farnham: University for the Creative Arts.

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Miller, D. (Director), Hunter, R., & Melcher, M. (Producers). (1960). Midnight Lace. Motion Picture. New York, NY: Studio Universal. von Sternberg, J. (Director), von Sternberg, J., & Cohen, E. (Producers). (1935). The Devil Is a Woman. Motion Picture. New York, NY: Studio Universal. Zhang, Y. (Director), Kong, W., & Zhang, Y. (Producers). (2004). House of the Flying Daggers. Motion Picture. China/Hong Kong: Elite Group.

Poster Reference Midnight Lace. Retrieved from https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-doris-day-filmposter-midnight-lace-1960-30961777.html

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Chapter 7

Shorelines: Choreographies of Remembrance and Forgetting Laura Bissell

Abstract 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 Chlo¨e 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.

Moving Spaces and Places, 113–128 Copyright © 2022 Laura Bissell Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221008

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Keywords: Shorelines; contemporary performance; memory; tidal spaces; history; choreographies

Marking Time A funeral is held for an Icelandic glacier. A century old soldier is washed away by the tide. A single shoe lies abandoned on the shore. A flock of Siberian geese flies overhead. A stranger leaves a memento in a treasure chest. Performance is live, ephemeral and of the moment. Tidal spaces are transitional places, in constant flux with each incoming and outgoing tide. Memorials or sites of remembrance, on the other hand, are frequently public, prominent and permanent. The juxtaposition of the notion of memorials as permanent markers and tidal spaces as liminal, in-between spaces, being hidden and revealed by twice daily tides are particularly relevant to analyse at this moment of climate crisis and coastal erosion. Some contemporary site-responsive performances have used the tidal zone, and the movement of the incoming and outgoing sea, as an actant within the work. How can choreographies (by which I mean patterns of movement) of remembrance be performed in tidal spaces? Any imprint on a beach will prove impermanent when it vanishes with the incoming tides.1 How does that knowledge of transience impact on performances that take place on shorelines? Can actions and commemorations traced in such a transient and precarious space as a tidal zone ever leave a form of legacy? How can these live actions perform the function of a memorial? By framing shorelines as sites of remembering and the sea as a space of forgetting, I argue that tidal spaces provide the site for choreographed and performed acts of remembrance.2 The focus of this discussion is shorelines, what Carson refers to as the meeting place of the land and sea (2015, p. 8). This chapter will explore a range of case studies to explicate common themes in contemporary performances sited on tidal spaces. In all of these works, acts of writing and rewriting cultural and personal memory are performed. 14–18 NOW Pages of the Sea (2018), Chlo¨e Smith’s Tidal (2015), Curious’s Out of Water (2012–2014) and my collaborative work Tide Times created with Tim Cooper (2018) are considered in relation to the conceptual frames of tidal movement and related temporalities (tides and time), the specific place or site (space and place) and ideas of memory or memorialising (remembrance and forgetting). While some of the analysis focuses on what Augusto Corrieri (2017) refers to as minor dramaturgies (the performers undertaking [human] actions on a specific shoreline), the major dramaturgy – including actions of the sea, sea life, planets, sky, moon and stars – is particularly relevant in relation to these works due to the role of the moon in choreographing the twice daily tides. Human/human relationships as presented in theatre are no longer as pertinent as they once were. As the field of performance studies has developed conceptions of what live

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performance can be, traditional theatrical modes have been challenged and critiqued and the anthropocentric nature of the theatrical canon has been expanded to consider the possibility of engaging with ‘more-than-human’ actants (Abram, 1997). The major dramaturgy now inhabits the minor (blurring the boundaries between living/non-living, human/non-human), ‘dissolving theatre’s “here and now” into an infinity of sites and extended temporalities’ (Corrieri, 2017, p. 235). By analysing contemporary performances through their specific sites, temporalities and relationship with memory, this chapter argues that shorelines are uniquely placed to enact both memorialising and forgetting on a personal and cultural scale, acknowledging different readings and interpretations of these tidal works. Memorials often mark the legacy of human achievement and frequently take the form of statues, plinths or plaques which explicitly reference and celebrate historical figures and events for posterity. However, in August 2019, scientists and ¨ climate activists gathered in Borgarfjorður to hold a funeral for the first Icelandic glacier lost to climate change. Okjokull (known as Ok) lost its status as a glacier in 2014 and five years later was commemorated with a ceremony and inscription titled ‘A Letter to the Future’.3 The plaque reads in English and Icelandic: Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. This dedication, written by Icelandic author Andri Snaer Magnason, ends with the date of the ceremony and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air globally – 415 parts per million (ppm).4 The memorial was conceived by anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer from Rice University in Texas, who made a documentary about the demise of the glacier called Not Ok in 2018. Boyer said, People felt this was a real loss, and that it deserved some kind of memorial … Plaques recognise things that humans have done, accomplishments, great events. The passing of a glacier is also a human accomplishment – if a very dubious one – in that it is anthropogenic climate change that drove this glacier to melt.5 As well as memorialising the tragic result of human activity, the letter also marks time between now and 200 years in the future, creating a conversation with a different temporality. The ‘you’ addressed is a future community of people, descendants of people who are alive now. We are aware of what needs to be done, but this has not yet made much difference to the actions of political leaders on climate issues.6 This challenge, marking this moment for future generations to witness, draws attention to the complex intersections of time, place and memory. It acknowledges human culpability and what Haraway refers to as ‘response-

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ability’, the need to respond to what she frames as ‘the trouble’ (2016, p. 115; see also Haraway, 2008). These issues of time, space and memory, what Katherine Johnson calls the ‘interconnected relationships between temporality, embodiment, culture, performance and history, and the ways through which we know them’ (2015, p. 36) are the focus of this chapter. In a time of multi-species crises ecological memorialising can become a memento mori – a reminder of death and the extinctions that are to come. Shorelines may not have a plaque as a signifier of a memorial, but the intertidal zones can act as sites for acts of remembrance to be performed. Memory is a process which is contingent on forgetting. This is what Joseph Roach describes in Cities of the Dead (1996) as the ‘the paradox of collective perpetuation’ (Roach, 1996, p. 2). French historian Pierre Nora explores the idea of ‘places of memory’ (lieux de memoire) as artificial sites in contrast to ‘environments of memory’ (mileux de memoire), the largely oral and corporeal retentions of traditional cultures (1989, p. 12). Shorelines provide interesting, contrasting elements: on one hand, the constancy and repetition of the waves and the tides; on the other, the shifting sands, shingle, weeds and creatures in constant flux. Similarly Carson states in the second book of her sea trilogy: ‘The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. For no two successive days is the shoreline precisely the same. The tides advance and retreat in their eternal rhythms, the sea is never at rest’ (2015, p. 7). In Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire (1989), Nora argues that modernity is characterised as the replacement of ‘environments of memory’ by ‘places of memory’, such as archives, monuments and theme parks, using the metaphor of tidal spaces in relation to ideas of memory. He states: ‘moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded’ (Nora, 1989, p. 26). Shells on the shore provide the comparison for this transitional space, living memory of a wave that has receded. Not only are the shells moved by the tides, they are gradually altered, eroded and broken down by the waves over time. This sense of shifting sands can also be applied to Fischer-Lichte’s definition of performance as an event between actors and spectators: ‘that is, not fixed or transferable but ephemeral and transient’ (2008, p. 33). But performance works on shorelines can be viewed as even more ephemeral and transient than traditional theatre-based works due to their siting. In History, Memory, Performance (2015), David Dean states ‘memory acts as a shared crucible of discovery and a distorting lens through which history and theatre engage with the past’ (p. 1). However, performance does not only depict the ‘real’ but has a role in actualising it too (Taylor, 2003). Performance on specific shorelines also adds to the identity of that place, a palimpsest of writings already traced and retraced in the sands. Hence, the performance becomes part of the real of that site, the identity of the place determined and defined by its usage over time.

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Pages of the Sea 14–18 NOW’s site-responsive performance 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. I attended the National Theatre of Scotland’s iteration of this performance on Ayr Beach on the West Coast of Scotland on Remembrance Sunday, the 11th November 2018. From 8:30 a.m. (when the tide was out) people were invited to gather on the beach to commemorate loved ones lost in the war. This act of remembering on a particular date at a particular time (Remembrance Sunday in the United Kingdom, when silence is performed at 11 a.m. on the 11th of the 11th) takes a traditional annual act of commemoration further, inviting people all around the country to physically visit a beach to remember those who left to fight in World War I and who did not return to these shores. Life-sized stencils of soldiers were laid on the sand and rakes were used to mark the shape of the body in the tidal zone. Many people inscribed on the sand the name of their family member. Some stood next to the figure to speak about the person and tell their individual story. As the morning progressed, the stencilled bodies were washed away by the incoming tide. Further up the beach, there was a large-scale sand drawing of the portrait of Second Lieutenant Walter Tull (28 April 1888–25 March 1918), the British Army’s first Black officer who was killed in March 1918 at Arras. A different portrait was marked on each beach around the United Kingdom, from Folkstone to Londonderry. Just as Nora describes the erasure of memory by history as a revelation (1989, p. 8), in Pages of the Sea the portraits are described as ‘revealed’.7 Not drawn or marked but revealed, implying that the memories are there already to be discovered.8 Nora claims that ‘modern memory relies on the visibility of the image’ (1989, p. 13), taking this concept further, images created through live performance activate processes of remembering. In Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1966) he discusses how ‘man’ (humankind) is a recent invention: If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the 18th century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. (p. 422) Accusations that Foucault was being anti-humanist are valid, as he is critiquing here the idea of the humanist subject, the anthropomorphism that is implied in humanism, and the idea that humankind is the end point of evolution. If the Anthropocene claims a paradigm shift and the erasure of the figure of man (humankind), there is an opportunity to recognise and develop alternative

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Fig. 1.

Pages of the Sea: The Tide Coming in Erasing the Figures in the Sand on Ayr Beach.

relationships with more-than-human species, scales and temporalities. Corrieri asks: ‘The question, therefore, is whether we can now imagine a non-anthropocentric theatre – and if this sounds like a contradiction in terms, then it is precisely a matter of refiguring the terms themselves’ (2017, p. 236). Foucault’s expression ‘face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’ being erased by the tides is precisely what Pages of the Sea enacts, signalling, as Foucault did, humankind’s vulnerability in terms of our perception of our own exceptionalism. While Pages of the Sea enacts cultural memory and forgetting, as the human figures are washed away, it is hard not also to be reminded of some of the major biospherical alterations signalling the advent of the Anthropocene including climate change, rising sea levels, and the vulnerability of humans’ future on Earth. As well as acknowledging the individual life span of one human and losses suffered through war 100 years ago, the potential fate of all humankind on an increasingly volatile planet is present in this moment of performance. The sea enacts the normal, perpetual state of forgetting through its tidal motions. The image of Lieutenant Tull’s portrait is completely obliterated as the tide comes in. The erasure of the image by the sea could also be interpreted as an enactment of a process of healing, of acknowledging the repetition of life cycles and the ongoing nature of the sea. The people who attended the event to mark the sand with the figures of their loved one and who stayed to tell their story were participating in acts of remembering. In Pages of the Sea only a select few of those who were lost are memorialised in this specific action; what about those whose portraits were not rendered in sand? Nora argues that we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left (1989, p. 7). Part of the ritual of

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Remembrance Sunday can be considered as a reminder of the transience of memory; people engage in a cultural moment remembering people they never knew. Pages of the Sea tries to anchor these memories to specific individuals, to ask for a more detailed remembering. Is it better to be remembered then forgotten, rather than not to be remembered at all? In this instance, the acts of remembrance are being performed at a significant temporal distance; the sea enacts the forgetting at the end of the performance but time also acts as ‘the great vanisher’ for those who are lost. The shores from which British troops departed 100 years ago remain largely unchanged (with the exception of areas of tidal erosion), the sea which performs in Pages of the Sea is the same which lapped on these shores a century previously (although warmer and more acidic), but millions of human lives (and marine lives) have since begun and ended. The temporality of our existence compared to the rest of the planet is apparent. The sea performs the role of time; it connotes the forgetting of those who have died as much as the sketching of their figures in the sand activates their memory (Fig. 1). Choreographer Chlo¨e Smith’s Tidal performed in Berwick-upon-Tweed in 2015 was originally commissioned as a commemorative work to celebrate 900 years of the town’s history but also became an act of personal memorialising when Smith’s brother drowned off the cliffs of the beach, mere weeks before she began making the work. Tidal was a community-based, site-specific, participatory performance which involved intergenerational participants aged from 6 to over 60. Smith wanted a large cast that would represent the vastness of the sea (so that in the performance audiences would have to turn their heads to see everyone, like scanning the horizon line of the sea). The dance performance took place at low tide so that at the end, when the performers moved towards the sea and entered it, audiences on the boardwalk would see the performers at a distance, tiny against the panoramic view of the water. Smith worked with the local community, inviting primary schools to gather participants interested in making a performance about the sea. In a series of workshops with these people of all ages and a range of dance experience, both able-bodied and disabled, Smith asked how they felt about the sea, and ‘what does it look like when we move like water?’ From these experiments the group began to devise a fluid choreography, a series of movements where they used their bodies to represent waves. Smith has been keen to stress that all of the participants have ownership over the piece. It is their piece, about the sea and community, and she was careful not to impose the story of her brother’s death onto the work.9 Tidal took place on the boardwalk and beach in Berwick as Smith felt it was important that it was an event that people could chance upon, both a celebration of the sea and one which acknowledged it as a powerful force which can take a life. Through the choreography of Tidal, performers attempt to embody the sea’s movements. At one point some of the performers roll down the beach like they are waves receding back towards the sea. Other participants jump over them as though they are children leaping over the waves at the seashore. The performers’ costumes, T-shirts and tunics in blues, teals and white also convey the image of a wave. The designs incorporate salt to create a crusty, beach-like texture. Both the

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costumes and the choreography attempt an embodiment of the sea, a way of understanding it through mimesis. There is a moment in Tidal when the dancers are about to go in the sea and they take off their shoes and go barefoot. Smith has spoken about how when they lined their shoes up at the shore and started walking towards the sea, she had a moment of realisation of what this action implied. One of her brother’s shoes was never found after he drowned. Despite not intending to make the work autobiographical, and being devised collaboratively, this action provides a moment of remembrance for Smith’s brother who died at this site. The shoreline performance in the tidal zone simultaneously evokes an act of cultural remembering (a celebration of 900 years of Berwick-upon-Tweed) as well as memorialising Smith’s personal grief. The legacy of commemorations in transient and precarious spaces vanished, the shoreline appearing as it did before it was filled with dancing bodies moving as waves on the beach.

Out of Water Out of Water (2012–2014), created by Helen Paris (from performance company Curious) and Caroline Wright, is ‘a journey from the shore to the sea’ (Hill & Paris, 2014, p. 98).10 The audience meets to board the bus at 5:45 a.m. to ensure they are on the shoreline for dawn.11 Hill and Paris claim that ‘dawn and dusk are liminal, in-between space, “this is a secret part of the day, hidden almost”’ (2014, p. 110) and the idea of congregating at a liminal time (dawn – between dark and light) in a liminal space (the seashore – between land and sea) creates a specific environment and atmosphere for the work which invokes a sense of being between states.12 Audience members start the journey at a distance from the performers, listening to a score of music and voice recordings on headphones.13 At first they are not able to see the performers, but experience the place through sound. The performers soon appear as tiny dots on the seashore. As the audience approaches, it becomes apparent that the dots are people wearing nautical blue baggy trousers and white shirts that billow in the wind. Once the audience arrives, the performers begin to move, raising their arms to point to something in the distance, out to sea. A golden rope lies at their feet, 100 metres of it, and the performers slowly pick it up then begin a choreography of moving backwards and forwards (a heave-ho motion) as the rope becomes coiled. The voice on the audio track references her mother and children and offers a sense of a pushing motion through time (forward and backwards) as the rope is heaved. The rope is a timeline, a golden thread between past and future conveyed through the combination of voice and action. I am the age my mother was when she had me, My aging pushes her backwards, older. My children again pushes me forward, older Heave ho my dears, heave ho my darling.

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Paris breaks from the line of performers, takes the hand of an audience member and leads them to the sea. She pulls a handful of salt from her pocket, gives some to the audience member, then together they throw the salt into the sea. This action implicates the viewers in the performance – they are now performers too – as Fischer-Lichte argues: ‘the spectators do not merely witness these situations; [as] participants in the performance they are made to physically experience them’ (2008, p. 40). This physical experience – the tactile feeling of salt in the hand subsequently thrust into the sea, the wind and the smell of the sea air – all immerse the audience member into the environment and the performance. This ritual is repeated with each participant and upon return to the shore the performers arrange them into a V formation, the open part of the V pointing towards the sea. In the text of the soundtrack participants are informed of Brent geese from Siberia who have flown from Northern Russia in such a formation: ‘Birds flying in V-formation can fly 70% further than one bird flying alone’. The collective experience of the birds and the strength in community reminds audiences they are also in this formation; they are told that the birds leave at sunset, mirroring their experience of this place at dusk (or dawn). Audiences are put in the place of the birds (although grounded) and invited to consider how these creatures which are part of the more-than-human world might experience this place. One participant reflected on the work afterwards: ‘This small flock walks to the water’s edge, pauses for a moment, and then continues into the ocean … We watch until we are called by the singer’s voice, her call gathers us up and leads us away from the others in the ocean; our flight path is not the same as theirs’ (2014, p. 119). As they stand in formation looking out to the sea, spectators are invited to have a sense of affinity with the birds as well as a sense of affinity between audience and performer. Paris reflects that: There is no separation now between audience and performers, sailors or life-savers, we are one V-formation, shoulder to chest, like the birds who migrate the thousands of miles across oceans. Within these encounters there are moments of kinship and connection moving between both audience and performer, a feeling into and a feeling out toward. ‘Heave ho my dears, heave ho my darling’. (2014, p. 118, my emphasis) This feeling into and feeling out toward suggests a reciprocal engagement between both audience members and performers, and the environment and its inhabitants. In Smith’s Tidal, performers were mimetic of the sea, while in Out of Water the mimesis is of seabirds. Both attempt to embody a more-thanhuman element, but the experience changes depending on whether it is the sea or an inhabitant of it that is performed. In both, the replication of these experiences is incomplete. In Tidal the performers are dry and on land, not of the deep, wet

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sea, while the participants in Out of Water lack flight, pinned by gravity to the shoreline. Although a transformation into bird or sea is impossible, these attempts invite an imaginative leap in order to try to embody something morethan-human. The performers walk slowly into the sea and return carrying armfuls of golden threads. Soprano Laura Wright starts to sing, joined by the rest of the company. As the song finishes, the performers move into another V shape, this time facing the sea, walking into the water as a soprano voice sings: ‘The swimmers are out of their depth/The singers are out of breath’. As they swim out to sea, the audience is slowly led back up the shore. Hill and Paris acknowledge the ‘telescoping’ of perspective in the performance – from the birds in the sky to the people on the ground, from the sea at a distance and then close enough to touch, smell and feel, ‘the tug between the distant and the near, the long shot to close up, is also enacted between the soundtrack and the setting’ (2014, p. 108). One participant, Rebecca Chaleff (2013), reflects on the experience of hearing the woman’s voice via headphones: ‘There was no way of knowing whether she was on land or at sea, above or under water, speaking to us from the present, past, or future. She blurred our temporalities, secluded us further within the personal inflections of our imaginations’ (2014, p. 109). This shift in temporalities is emphasised by the spoken text, the sung text and also the actions of the performers. As Chaleff affirmed: These constant connections and reconnections called to attention this moment in life that we share, ‘This timeline we are on. This action locates each of us in this moment of time where we collide, this hour, this performance, this shoreline, this continent, we exist together in this universe, this propinquity, strange collisions of time and space wherein we are one flock’. (2014, p. 116) The specificity of place and time is felt as a point of collision. The formation of humans as birds, the golden rope and golden thread, the first view of the performers as specks in the landscape to the tactile experience of holding their hands; this all suggests a shifting between the micro and the macro, from ‘long shot to close-up’ (2014, p. 121). The vast seascape provides an environment for intimate encounters. Out of Water physically engages the audience through both the exertion of walking and their actions at the shore, while also providing a sonic journey exploring memory, time, family and water. What it also offers is the concept of generational memory, of the passing down of stories from mother to daughter. The rope and threads symbolise a timeline between generations; I would argue that this type of passing on and down of memory is necessary on an ecological scale – for us to begin to conceptualise the varying temporalities that are experienced in the more-than-human world.

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Tide Times My own collaborative site-responsive work, Tide Times (2018), created with electroacoustic composer Tim Cooper for the tidal island of Cramond in the Firth of Forth, explores the multiple identities of place over time and invites creative subjective responses from participants. The work comprises 10 audio tracks of poetic writing and sounds recorded on Cramond (listened to via a mobile device and headphones), which correlate with invitations for interactions with the island found in treasure chests hidden in various locations, and a map to navigate. As one of 17 tidal islands in Scotland (out of 43 in the United Kingdom), Cramond is only accessible by a causeway which is exposed twice daily when the tide is out, and can therefore be reached by foot from the mainland at specific times of the day. The influence of the ‘tide times’ on our ability to access the island informed the project greatly and gave the piece its title – the place choreographed when we were permitted to visit it. Neither Tim nor I had been to the island before so the experience of exploring it together was an important part of our collaborative process. After visiting five times to make the work, we held two invited sharings in August and September of 2018 (Fig. 2).14 The aim of Tide Times was to heighten an experience of the place through site-responsive audio works and texts. Considering Minty Donald’s claim that people ‘can invest in a “sense of place” while concurrently recognising the temporality, porosity and interconnectedness of that place’ (2012, p. 223), we avoided references to Cramond’s military past (it was used defensively in both World War I and World War II) and its proposed touristic future (plans to extensively develop the foreshore as an attraction have been put forward), but instead acknowledge the various identities of the site. The multiplicity of identities and usages by visitors and locals became part of the palimpsest of different types of texts and sounds used in the final work. On our first visit to the island in April 2018 we located a geocache (a global treasure hunt using GPS) and were encouraged by the idea of encountering something physical on the island which connected disparate visitors in a shared experience and provided the impetus for a response from those who found it. We decided to experiment by leaving a ‘treasure chest’, a small box with some shells in it secreted in a crevice by a concrete bunker at the far end of the island as a playful gesture, reminiscent of islands as mythologised as holding buried treasure. There was no note or instruction, just the box hidden in a nook on the island. We returned two weeks later and found the box full of trinkets and gifts. Inside was a scrap of paper with a Polish stamp on the back and a handwritten message in biro: ‘Please leave something from you and put it back’. Someone had written underneath in pencil ‘What a lovely idea!’ The box now contained (amongst other things): a hairband, a small white and pink toy pony, a selection of coins in a range of currencies, a fragment of green glass and a picture of a botanical drawing. The people visiting Cramond took ownership of this box and shaped its purpose. This encouraged us to develop nine treasure chests each with their own invitations to creatively engage with the island (Fig. 3).

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Fig. 2.

Tide Times – Cramond Island Causeway Viewed from Island.

The making of Tide Times was informed by Tim Ingold’s ideas of atmosphere and place (Ingold, 2015), theories of soundwalking (Westerkamp, 2007) and acoustic ecology (Clarke, 2005). I undertook explorations of text within the landscape throughout the process of making Tide Times, which became integral to some of the invitations to play on the island which we secreted in more treasure chests to encourage engagement from visitors to Cramond. The invitations along with audio tracks Grain of Sand, Stone Poems and Beach Speech all ask visitors to temporarily mark the island using materials found there. All of these encouraged creative interventions on the tidal space of the beach. Audio texts from Tim and me accompanied the invitations, asking that people engage in performative writing within the landscape to write words and poems on the sand. These spoken texts include excerpts from Carson’s The Edge of the Sea (2015) and were intended to expand perceptions of this specific tidal island to the vast lunar processes that choreograph the tides.15 The more-than-human life forms which inhabit tidal zones are considered within Beach Speech, asking visitors to Cramond not just to notice the environment and its inhabitants but to care for them too.

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Tide Times: Objects Left in Pilot Box.16

When we returned to the box months afterwards, participants had left responses to our invitations. In Out to Sea people left messages in a bottle of what they wanted to say to this place. One message read ‘don’t disappear’ – acknowledging the precariousness of this environment, and also its tidalness, and the fact that the path to the island literally disappears at high tide. While the markings on the sand were obliterated with each tide, the invitations in the boxes on the island allowed for a sense of continuity between participants. One person’s interaction with the place was communicated to another person in the same place at a different time. The boxes offered invitations for creative interventions and reciprocal interactions with other visitors to the island over time. Using treasure chests meant that the invitations existed even after the tides had washed away what the previous participant had written in sand. Because we stored the boxes inland, beyond the tideline, the sea was unable to fully enact the function of forgetting, thus allowing for a sense of connection and collaboration between those who encountered them. This is not to say that the boxes which were out of reach of the sea all survived; many went missing, succumbed to the elements or removed by visitors (perhaps enacting their own remembrance of the place by taking a memento away). While the tidalness of this place was imperative to the work and the creation of a collective memory of place, what Tide Times revealed was the multitude of identities and meanings of a place over time and the possibilities of reciprocal remembering and collaboration between visitors.

The Face in the Sand The various artworks which investigate remembrance using tidal spaces act as reminders of the shifting, transient nature of memory: the act of remembering

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irrevocably bound with that of forgetting. In Pages of the Sea the markings in the sand are washed away even before the event is over. In Tidal, community groups that participated in the performance disperse after the shows. In Out of Water the participants return to their usual lives once they leave the shoreline. In Tide Times, the artworks and detritus left as part of the work are eroded by the elements or disappear from the island. Can actions and commemorations traced in such a transient and precarious space as a tidal zone ever leave a form of legacy? This chapter has argued that while shorelines provide sites for large- and small-scale acts of public remembering, they are simultaneously acts of forgetting. In order to approach ecological crises, we must try to remember what has gone before, beyond our own human experience. What Roach describes as ‘the paradox of collective perpetuation: [that] memory is a process that depends crucially on forgetting’ (1996, p. 2) can be witnessed through the actions of marking the sand through tracing motion or dance (iterating the memory) with the knowledge that the tide will wash it away (the inevitable forgetting). Like the moment of performance itself, the tidal space enacts and encourages a transience. Through these tidal choreographies, where the shoreline is a site of memory and the sea enacts forgetting, audiences witness the subjective made public for as long as the tidal sands are exposed. The physical act of marking the tidal space with human bodies is important because the marks will be erased; the transient moment of performance immediately assigned to the past. This remembering may have different functions, the marking of time passing, an attempt to heal or to accept a loss, or a way of connecting with other people who have shared a similar experience. The ephemerality of these moments of iteration, performativity acknowledging impermanence, commemorates in order to both remember and forget while creating another layer in the palimpsest of these shorelines. Tidal spaces are evocative sites in which to create performance work due to their liminality and the presence of more-than-human life within tidal zones exposed at low tide. The specific temporal boundaries of shorelines mean that tidal zones as performance spaces are already drawing attention to the way in which time functions. Works on shorelines also frequently ask participants to move, to have an embodied experience of place: ‘asking people to walk, to make a journey, physically engages them’ (Wilson, as cited in Machon, 2013, p. 229). This condition creates an ‘extra-live’ performance – all aspects of the environment are part of the experience (Hill & Paris, 2014, p. 98). Shorelines as ‘meeting places’ between the land and the sea, on which the tidal choreographies of the earth are played out continually, are unique sites for rituals of remembrance and forgetting; of enacting, re-enacting then erasing acts of personal and cultural memory. Mengel argues that living systems build the present ‘based on the dynamic and distributed patterns of structural interdependence formed through histories of interaction’ (2017, p. 113). How we construct the present (and the future) depends on how we interact with places and more-than-human environments. These strategies require a re-evaluation of our anthropocentric understanding of the world, demanding a remembering beyond ourselves, our species and our lifetimes. Perhaps by moving towards an ecology of memory where we consider our collective memory as inclusive of more-than-human temporalities and experiences of

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environment, we can take action to avoid the erasure of the human face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea that Foucault describes. This face connotes humanity, but the interconnectedness of systems means that the erasure is not confined to humans, but instead encompasses the entire ecosystem that our actions are defining and damaging. As the Scottish poet Iain Crichton Smith says: ‘Only the sea remains, all monuments subside’, and shorelines provide a reminder of the transience of both human and more-than-human life forms, a space for remembering and forgetting.17 Tidal spaces: choreographies of remembrance and forgetting. First Published in Cultural Geographies May 11, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474020918909.

Notes 1. Burrows, J. (2010). The Choreographer’s Handbook. Oxon: Routledge. 2. An earlier version of this chapter was published in Cultural Geographies in May 2020. 3. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared that 2014–2018 were the five hottest years on record https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/2019/ 02/last-five-years-were-hottest-ever-nasa-and-noaa-declare Retrieved 19/09/19. 4. Daniel Rothbart states: ‘If all the ice melted, oceans of the world could rise three hundred feet’. ‘Cross-Currents in Water-based Performance’, 2015, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Volume 37, Number 3. p. 3. 5. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49345912 Retrieved 20/08/19. 6. The Paris Agreement was signed by political leaders in 2016 as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Its aim was to create a global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In June 2017 Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement and according to David Wallace-Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth (2019), in 2017 carbon emissions grew by 1.4% and not a single major industrial nation is on track to fulfil the commitments of the Paris treaty (44). 7. https://www.pagesofthesea.org.uk/beaches/ayr-beach/ Retrieved 20/11/18. 8. https://www.pagesofthesea.org.uk/beaches/ayr-beach/ Retrieved 20/11/18. 9. There were two performances over two days, and after the first day the press reported on the performance along with details of her brother’s drowning so audiences attending the second performance could have had this additional context to the performance. 10. Out of Water was first commissioned as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and has been performed in Holkham in Norfolk, Fort Funston in San Francisco and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. 11. Some performances happened at dawn, others at dusk. 12. ‘The tides create a shifting boundary between sea and land. Their effect is to emphasise the liminality of the beach as parts of it are successively revealed and then swamped by tidal action. The boundary between sea and land alters on a daily basis. It is a neutral space, neither properly terrestrial nor yet thoroughly maritime, awaiting a metamorphic role’ (Mack, 2011, p. 165).

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13. The Out of Water audio track has a soundscore by BAFTA-winning composer Jocelyn Pook. 14. Documentation of Tide Times and the audio tracks can be found at https:// tidetimescramond.wordpress.com/. 15. The telescoping of near and far that Hill and Paris refer to in Out of Water. 16. These images are the authors own. An early version of this chapter was published in Cultural Geographies in May 2020. 17. This quote from Iain Crichton Smith is engraved into the stone steps to the sands of Irvine beach, on the West Coast of Scotland.

References Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-thanhuman world. London: Vintage Books. Carson, R. (2015/1955). The edge of the sea. London: Unicorn Press. Clarke, E. F. (2005). Ways of listening: An ecological approach to the perception of musical meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corrieri, A. (2017). The Rock, the Butterfly, the Moon, and the Cloud: Notes on dramaturgy in an ecological age. In K. Georgelou, D. Theodoridou, & E. Protopapa (Eds.), The practice of dramaturgy: Working on actions in performance (pp. 239–256). Amsterdam: Valiz. Donald, M. (2012). The urban river and site-specific performance. Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(2), 213–223. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). The transformative power of performance: A new Aesthetics [Trans, Iris Jain and Saskya]. Oxon: Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hill, L., & Paris, H. (2014). Performing proximity: Curious intimacies. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan. Ingold, T. (2015). The life of lines. London: Routledge. Katherine, J. (2015). Performing pasts for present purposes: Reenactment as embodied, performative history. In D. Dean, Y. Meerzon, & K. Prince (Eds.), History, memory, performance. London: Palgrave McMillan. Machon, J. (2013). Immersive theatres: Intimacy and immediacy in contemporary performance. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan. Mack, J. (2011). The sea: A cultural history. London: Reaktion Books. Mengel, G. (2017). The incarnation of lived time: Towards an ecology of memory. World Futures, 73(2), 104–115. Nora, P. (1989). Between Memory and history: Les Lieux de M´emoire. Representations, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, 26, 7–24. Roach, J. (1996). Cities of the dead: Circum-Atlantic performance: The social foundations of Aesthetic forms. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Taylor, D. (2003). The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Westerkamp, H. (2007). Soundwalking. In A. Carlyle (Ed.), Autumn leaves, sound and the environment in artistic practice (p. 49). Paris: Double Entendre.

Chapter 8

‘Excuse Me… Are You Lost?’ What Can Performative Walking Practices Contribute to Knowledge About Public Space? Deirdre Macleod

Abstract 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.

Moving Spaces and Places, 129–148 Copyright © 2022 Deirdre Macleod Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221009

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Keywords: Performative walking; site-specific; cities; creative geographies; art walks; inventive methods

Introduction 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. Much of this interest has been cross-disciplinary, bringing together practitioners of disciplines including, but not limited to, contemporary art, contemporary dance, architecture and human geography (Pinder, 2005, p. 387) and, specifically, in the development of the human geography sub-discipline of creative geographies (Hawkins, 2020, p. 2). Increasingly, these artistic practices have taken on a self-reflexive quality; practitioners are not only interested in making visible hidden characteristics of the urban landscape but also in exploring how the methods that they practise might form the basis for new relationships with spaces and places, and new ways of being in them (Scott & Swenson, 2015, p. 9). As a visual artist and a geographer, I have become increasingly interested in how the artistic practice of performative walking might be used as an ‘inventive method’ for examining aspects of the way we live within cities. Sociologists Les Back and Nirmal Puwar argue for the importance of paying attention to how people ‘do’ their life. They call for methods which embody, as well as observe, social life, arguing that this enables researchers to bring to bear their ‘critical imagination’ upon an issue, encouraging a fuller grasp of the ‘whole’ of life (Back & Puwar, 2012, p. 11). I believe that the movement-based, embodied nature of performative walking fits with these calls. Walking practices within contemporary art take a number of different forms. Blake Morrison quotes Cynthia Morrison-Bell’s distinction between ‘walking as art’ and ‘art walks’ (Morrison, 2018). This distinguishes between two broad sets of walking practices. The first set includes walks in which the evidence of the walk is regarded as an artistic output, such as artist Richard Long’s walks which are recorded as photographs or are documented as lines on maps. The second set includes walks which are somehow performative, creating an experience for a viewer, or participant, or changing their experience of a place, such as the art walks of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. My walking practice is particularly concerned with this second category of performative ‘art walks’. In writing about ‘the experiential turn’ in contemporary art, Dorothea von Hantelmann argues that the term ‘performative’ in relation to art emphasises the extent to which an artwork creates an experience for the viewer rather than simply offering an image or a representation of something. Hantelmann argues that the term ‘performative’ emphasises a shift from what an artwork ‘says’ to what it ‘does’ (Hantelmann, 2014). Thus, a performative walk might be regarded as being more concerned with affecting how a viewer, or participant, relates to their environment during, or after, their walk, rather than the aesthetic qualities created by the walk in, and of, itself.

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Performative walking practices draw upon a range of influences which are well documented. These include urban theorist Henri Lefebvre’s ideas that space is actively produced, not passively consumed (Lefebvre, 1991). Performative walking practices also draw upon ideas associated with the Situationist International, such as d´erive, through which the emotional or ambient qualities of urban spaces are revealed by unstructured walking, and d´etournement, in which the conventional meanings of a particular space are disrupted in order to reveal other aspects and qualities of that space (Lavery, 2010, p. 92; Scott & Swenson, 2015, p. 2). Performative walks frequently use sets of rules, constraints or parameters devised by the artist-originator in order to create a critical and psychological distance from the space being walked through. Simone Hancox argues that this enables someone on an art walk to ‘cognitively position’ the walking activity differently from everyday acts of walking (Hancox, 2012, p. 244). I interpret ‘cognitive positioning’ as being the way in which someone chooses to situate, or contextualise, a belief or activity, which is different from the way in which another person might situate or contextualise the same belief or activity. Hancox argues that this awareness allows individuals to actively re-frame their relationship to place and to become more sensitive to how it feels, rather than moving through it in a passive way. Artist Francis Al¨ys talks convincingly of the way in which walking enables him to ‘function at different levels simultaneously’. He notes that: …when you are walking, you are aware of, or awake to, everything that happens in your peripheral vision: the little incidents, smells, images, sounds. Walking brings a rich state of consciousness… (Al¨ys & Lingwood, 2006, p. 140) Thus, performative walks can offer a way of disrupting habitual, introspective forms of walking. They can form a physical and mental ‘viewfinder’ through which participants see and sense things about the world that might not otherwise be in focus. Moreover, we all recognize and share similar bodily movements and gestures ¨ that occur during walking. Choreographer Petra Kuppers argues that bodily movement enables us to create ‘markers of meaning’ through which we ¨ communicate with others (Kuppers, 2010, p. 64). Thus, the movements associated with walking, as well as the act of walking itself, might be employed as part of a visual and emotional language in order to express what we experience as we move through space and place as part of a performative walk. Quoted in Scott and Swenson, geographer Jessica Dubow describes how landscape can often ‘absorb the “events played out on its surface” and thereby […] “outlive history”’ (Scott & Swenson, 2015, p. 6). By this she means that, over time, the physical matter of buildings, street layouts and objects as well as immaterial events, conflicts and memories can disappear and may be lost as towns and cities change. As David Pinder notes in his discussion of Francis Al¨ys’

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practice, it is the potential of performative walking to ‘summon shadows and spirits’ of these lost spaces and to tell stories from multiple perspectives that make the practice so attractive to artists (Pinder, 2011, p. 684). By drawing out forgotten narratives, retracing street layouts, acknowledging events and combining these artefacts in new ways, perhaps through the movements and gestures associated with walking in urban spaces, we might see more clearly that the city we thought we knew is more layered and complex, and constructed through ongoing and interwoven spatial practices. Therefore, performative walking might allow us to speak differently, and plurally, about space and place. In an essay on his site-responsive work, Raindogs – a performance piece made for the city of Cardiff in the United Kingdom with Ed Brooks and Mike Thomas, and described as a ‘meditation on the unhomely nature of the contemporary city’ – Mike Pearson argues that performance can be a way of better understanding contemporary urban experience, including how people use public spaces and what they want and need from them (Pearson, 2012, pp. 60 and 68). Raindogs involved 10 individual actors who were recorded alone in a variety of locations across Cardiff; some as if they had been caught on CCTV, others as they travelled in taxis or buses as if unaware of the camera. They were asked to stay mute and to behave anonymously, expressing as little as possible. Combined with direct-to-camera scripted pieces, the footage was transmitted and shown to an audience in an empty black box studio. In Pearson’s view, it is ordinary and everyday bodily interactions and gestures which reflect, and tell us, much about our experience of cities. Echoing David Pinder’s analysis of Francis Al¨ys’ practice, Mike Pearson argues that performance has the potential to: …record and represent the substance, grain and patina of a particular place, through juxtapositions and inter-weavings of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the factual and the fictional, the academic and aesthetic. (Pearson, 2012, p. 68) Furthermore, as Pearson notes, Raindogs evokes: …a city awash with rain and litter, lost loves and disappeared locations. (Pearson, 2012, p. 67) Thus, site-specific performance can be regarded as a reflexive ‘mode of enquiry’ which foregrounds invisible, emotional and forgotten geographies by layering and weaving together disparate memories, human experiences and changing urban topographies. Critical reflection, such as Pearson’s, upon the potential for site-specific performance as a mode of enquiry is essential in helping to understand the precise role that creative practices might have in generating alternative forms of knowledge about the urban experience. However, a great deal of performative walking practices go unreported and are not analysed, partly because many such

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projects are small scale – unlike Raindogs – and are, therefore, below the radar of researchers working in either contemporary art or urban studies. A further reason for under-reporting of performative walking projects might also be that lack of presence after-the-fact is often designed into the projects, with project originators expressly choosing performative rather than material methods of working, as a way of leaving little trace of their work after it has been performed. Although practitioners do often document their work themselves through photographs, video or other creative methods, the outputs of these projects are rarely gathered for review and analysis. As a result, performative walking’s potential as a ‘mode of enquiry’ has neither been fully considered, nor documented within academic disciplines such as creative geographies. In this chapter, I draw upon the insights gained from four recent projects to explore performative walking’s potential as a mode of enquiry. Each project employed a durational, spatial or visual framework as a way of drawing attention to qualities of those spaces which are not visible, or readily available, to everyday observers. The first project Scale Walks used the durational framework of repeated walks (which became slower and slower each time they were made) to explore the effect of walking pace on the social relations of encounter with other pedestrians and other city-dwellers. The second project, Cul-de-sac, explored feelings about urban and suburban territory and ownership of space through the spatial device of walking as a group through closed and semi-private residential spaces. The third project, Festoon, encouraged participants to experiment with their own identities in space by walking as a group in the dark, with visual props. The final project, Playing Up, encouraged members of the public to project their own ideas and possibilities for using space as they played, in ways of their own making, within linear ground drawings.

Performative Walks in Portobello, Edinburgh The four projects that I discuss here were created for specific parts of the City of Edinburgh, particularly the eastern suburbs of Portobello and Newcraighall, and also Musselburgh, which is in the neighbouring county of East Lothian. The projects were performed between 2016 and 2019. Although geographically close to each other, I would argue that the places chosen for each piece of work have distinct physical and social characteristics and ambiences. I sought to explore some of these qualities through my performative walking projects, without trying to predetermine what I might find. Portobello is a coastal suburb of Edinburgh which became popular as a seaside town in the early to mid-twentieth century. Like many British seaside towns it became run down and neglected as its popularity waned. However, this began to change again around 20 years ago as property prices in Edinburgh city centre began to rise and people rediscovered the attractions of the urban seaside. Land which was once the site of fairgrounds and amusements, or which was used for light-industry or space-intensive Council services such as parking for cleansing

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vehicles, has been sold and re-developed into relatively high density private residential housing. Many older residents and visitors to the town remember Portobello when it was a thriving seaside resort, but little physical evidence of the old fun fair, the outdoor swimming pool or the seaside amusements remains. Not all areas of Portobello have been regenerated; some spaces retain their original uses and undeveloped appearance. At the eastern end of the town, the houses and tenements stop abruptly and the seaside promenade is fringed instead by a strip of bus garages, car showrooms and warehouses, which stretch for two kilometres towards a sewage works. This area has an ‘edgeland’ feel to it, which Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts describe as being ‘a backdrop to our most routine and mundane activities’ (Farley & Symmons Roberts, 2012, p. 5). Similarly, the pedestrian path, known as Christian Path, runs around the back of the town and is enclosed by high residential walls and squeezed between railways, electricity pylons and a dual carriageway. It feels as if it is on the edge of the town both physically and psychologically, and can feel oppressive because it is narrow and enclosed. I chose to work in these spaces because they appeared ripe for summoning the ‘shadows and spirits’ of lost experiences, memories and spaces that might hide there. Although much of Portobello’s residential housing was constructed before the mid-twentieth century, the town is surrounded by public and private housing estates which have been built in the last 40 years. Demand for housing in Edinburgh has grown so much recently that there has been significant new build on the edges of the city over the last five years. Although residential suburban estates rarely seem to spark artistic interest, they contain their own histories, dynamics and spatial practices in terms of how the estates have been laid out, who lives there and how their residents choose to live. In my view, they offer as much potential for engagement through performative walking as any other area of the city. All of the spaces in which I have made my projects might be regarded as having a ‘liminal’ quality about them because of their physical characteristics, but also because they are places in which people make journeys that are both physical and, possibly, also psychological. ‘Liminal’ is defined as relating to a threshold, such as a boundary which individuals might pass through during a rite of passage or a pilgrimage (Morris, 2012). Therefore, liminal spaces might be regarded as being in a middle place or state, or as being in transition between one state and another. The eastern part of the Promenade feels to me like an in-between space, belonging neither fully to the land nor to the sea. Christian Path, placed between town and railway embankment, is at the physical edge of the town and is a space through which people journey; a temporal in-between space. The beach might also be regarded as liminal; it sits between land and sea and, over the course of a day, it is submerged twice by water and then, as each tide falls, it is recovered as land. Even suburban residential estates which might at first seem solid in their physicality and identity are neither town nor country; they sit between the edge of each, their identities coloured by both. It is the liminal qualities of these places

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which attracted me to them; qualities which I think may be interrogated effectively through movement-based research practices such as performative walking.

Four Performative Walking Projects in Edinburgh I conducted four performative walking projects: Scale Walks, Cul-de-Sac, Festoon and Playing-up. Although different from each other in visual and spatial form, and in the way in which walking is used within each project, each walk used the practices and structures of d´erive to generate an out-of-placeness, even a psychological unease, in order to create an affective ‘friction’ and enhance participants’ sensitivity to space and place. However, none of these projects were conceived as a ‘disinterested meander’ suggested by the original idea of d´erive; that is, open-ended journeys, without a predetermined destination in which the walker chooses the route (Pope, 2014, p. 17). Neither could the participants in each project be considered flˆaneurs in the tradition of Walter Benjamin – keeping apart from, but still walking amongst, city-dwellers (Coverley, 2006). Participants in each of the walks had a purposeful and active engagement with the place and, at times, with the people whom they encountered. I begin this section by describing the methods used in each of the four walks. I then draw out some insights and reflections from each of the projects in the context of other relevant published work on walking within cities. The discussion below does not seek to offer a comprehensive overview of performative walking practices, nor is it an exhaustive account of all the insights that might be gleaned from such projects. Rather, it suggests how performative walking methods might contribute to what David Pinder describes as a ‘more nuanced’ sense of what we know about cities (Pinder, 2011, p. 672). In doing so, it hints at the existence of forms of creative knowledge which could contribute to dialogues about, and better understanding of, our cities.

‘Scale Walks’ Created as a work for a single performer, the performer of Scale Walks follows a route four times, each time twice as slowly as the time before, so reducing the ‘scale’ of the walk. The physical distance of each walk is the same; it is the pace of the walk that reduces by half each time. Walk one is made at normal walking pace (1:1 scale). Walk two takes twice as long as the first walk (1:2 scale). Walk three takes four times as long as the first walk (1:4 scale) and walk four takes eight times as long as the first walk (1:8 scale). I made an initial set of walks over a period of several weeks in May and June 2017, with a fellow artist-geographer. We made these walks on our own in Edinburgh, each choosing a route that we knew very well: our respective walks to work. The routes followed in Scale Walks were, for the most part, unprepossessing residential streets in which people lived, walked and/or drove, such as those shown in Figs. 1 and 2. Our journeys had a beginning and an end and an ‘inbetween’ space which we traversed increasingly slowly.

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Fig. 1.

New Housing on Old Industrial Site, Portobello.

Fig. 2.

Tenement Flats, Central Portobello.

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‘Cul-de-sac’ Commissioned by Artwalk Projects as part of an artists’ walking project, Cul-desac was a set of artist-led walks in which people walked as a group around the pavements of suburban housing estates surrounding Edinburgh. Each walk could be performed by people walking on their own, but the walks were designed to be made by groups. I organised three walks around three different housing estates and issued invitations to join the walks on social media. The walks were performed on Sundays in September and October 2019 by small groups of participants (around seven in each group), some of whom joined more than one walk. Several of the participants were residents of the estates and most of the others had some interest in art walks and psychogeography. Most of the participants did not know each other prior to joining the walk. Although we lived relatively near to these housing estates, few of us were familiar with their streets and rarely had a reason to walk through them. The routes followed by the Cul-de-sac walks were determined by the layout of the estate’s pavements. Where possible, we tried to follow the pavement continuously so that we limited the extent to which we made decisions about our route, prioritising chance over choice. The estates differed according to their age, physical layout and plan. Each estate was located near bus stops and had been chosen partly for its accessibility by public transport (some very new housing estates have yet to be served well by buses). The walks were designed to be manageable to a range of ages and physical abilities. The walking pace was slow and the walks were relatively short, each one lasting no more than an hour. We walked without maps, depending instead on the layout of the pavement to lead us through the walk. Occasionally, we became disoriented and found ourselves returning on a loop that we could not explain. At one point on one of the walks, we felt a bit lost, although this was disconcerting rather than alarming. As we walked, we talked, pointing things out that interested us, stopping where something seemed worth talking about. Throughout our walks, we encountered people walking, gardening and washing cars, as well as a few, but not many, children playing on bikes.

‘Festoon’ Festoon was a series of hour-long performative group walks with light-covered props in darkness which I led across Portobello, Edinburgh. Festoon was performed at Artwalk Porty 2019, an annual event with a focus on contemporary art in the public realm. Festoon was performed twice, with two different groups of 12 performers, each of whom carried a lighted frame, shown in Figs. 3 and 4. The route of the first walk was from the coastal promenade in the centre of the town into nearby community allotments. The second walk was from the promenade to the beach

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Fig. 3.

Fig. 4.

Festoon Walk to Telferton Allotments.

Festoon Walk via High Street to the Beach.

via Christian Path. The routes of both of these walks included spaces with a range of physical, social and psychological complexions, including: residential streets; light industrial areas; poorly lit, isolated paths; a playground; and the town’s beach. The objects carried by participants were made of ‘festoon’ lights wrapped around hoops and were meant as visual references to the fairgrounds and fun fairs

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that operated during Portobello’s heyday as a seaside resort. The lights were a kind of after-image of something that was no longer alive in the places where the walks took place. We walked in darkness, in a procession with the festoon lights from the beach promenade, where the fairgrounds once stood, around the darkened edges of the town onto the beach where the lights became spectre-like and separate from the land on which they had once shone.

‘Playing Up’ Choreographed movement or semi-structured play can also enable creative responses to space and place. Playing Up took place on a section of the seaside promenade in Portobello, Edinburgh. It is an underdeveloped and isolated ‘noncar’ route, used mainly by dog walkers, runners and cyclists avoiding the busy coast road from Edinburgh. The project consisted of four large, linear ground drawings made of temporary spray-marking paint which is used for roadworks, shown below in Figs. 5, 6, 7 and 8. The drawings were formed of simple shapes that alluded to other spatial practices, including garden allotment beds, construction plans, digital games and electrical circuits. People were invited to play or otherwise move around in the

Fig. 5.

Red Ground Drawing, Portobello Prom.

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Fig. 6.

Fig. 7.

Yellow Ground Drawing, Portobello Prom.

Blue Ground Drawing, Portobello Prom.

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Green Ground Drawing, Portobello Prom.

drawings via social media and project postcards, an example of which is shown in Fig. 9.

Familiarity: The Value of Repetitive Walking Practices Both Cul-de-sac and Scale Walks involved becoming increasingly familiar with areas of Edinburgh that participants and I thought we ‘knew’ in some sense. In Scale Walks, our increasing familiarity occurred through repeated walking. We were forced to notice things almost as a way of absorbing the increasingly long time that was available for each walk. We began to notice things that appeared or disappeared, from hour to hour, or day to day, as we repeated our walks, including ephemeral and immaterial aspects of the city: sound and wind, light and shadows. This might be described as an ‘infra-familiarity’, that is, a fractal-like knowledge that emerged as we walked ever more slowly and became more able to absorb our surroundings. Although the Cul-de-sac walks took place in different local housing estates, similarities and differences between each estate became apparent, including how they felt and how they looked. The ‘sameness’ that is often assumed about housing estates became increasingly differentiated as we were able to gather and compare our experience between walks. Thus, the spatial practice of repetition within one place, or within similar places, made us aware of what walking artist Cathy Turner calls the ‘fragment’

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Fig. 9.

Project Postcard Inviting People to Visit and Play in the Ground Drawings.

and ‘detail’ of the local; the fleeting or seemingly minor things that texture and colour our urban experience (Turner, 2018, p. 36).

Performative Conventions: Walking in ‘Odd’ Ways Tim Edensor remarks on the ‘performative conventions’ that we endure in contemporary cities without necessarily realising that they are there. These performative conventions govern the way we behave, making us act in ways that we believe are acceptable or normal and which do not draw attention to ourselves. We do this partly because we are aware that others may be watching and judging us (Edensor, 2008, p. 125). These conventions might also govern where we choose to walk.

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Both the Scale Walks and Cul-de-sac projects involved walking in ways that were at odds with expected behaviour. As I walked my first Scale Walk at normal pace, I felt as if I blended in with the everyday pace and flow of the city. However, as my pace decreased, particularly as I made the quarter-paced and the eighth-paced walks, I felt increasingly exposed because it became more and more obvious to those who passed me, on foot and in cars, that I was not walking ‘normally’. While people do walk around suburban housing estates, it is generally those who live there who might do so, walking to and from their car, bus stops or to the corner shop. Often there will be more car traffic than foot and it is unusual to see groups of people strolling for leisure. Walking as a group through these housing estates exaggerated my sense of doing something unconventional. More than once on our walks, particularly as we reached the end of a cul-de-sac, we were watched curiously and then asked politely, ‘Excuse me…are you lost?’ My feelings of exposure occurred because I was not adhering to implicit social norms. Therefore my behaviour might be considered, at best, odd and, at worst, suspicious. Simone Hancox talks of the way in which rule-based walking can ‘generate different degrees of ease and unease’ which can help alert us to how ‘place identity’ interacts with ‘personal identity’ (Hancox, 2012, p. 241). Walking very slowly alone and walking in semi-private spaces as a group provided me with a concrete experience of the discomfiting interaction of place and personal identities in these particular urban spaces.

Brief Encounters: Walking as a Way of Making Contact The sense of friction engendered by these increasingly slow and suburban walks also occurred during moments of encounter with residents, pedestrians and motorists. With Scale Walks, these encounters were invariably silent, involving fleeting eye contact with those on the other side of windows and garden hedges. Indeed, Scale Walks encouraged these connections because I was moving so slowly. In Edinburgh, tenement buildings are common and, as Fig. 2 shows, the front windows of ground floor flats often look directly onto public space without much more than a railing to separate them from the pavement. As I walked increasingly slowly past some of these tenement flats, I came across individuals looking directly at me, one in the middle of ironing clothes, another sitting with a cup of tea. Although these encounters were rarely more than momentary, they involved unexpected eye contact and, therefore, were often awkward. Frequently, I felt as if I had intruded into someone’s life simply as a result of having slowed down. The avoidance of direct eye contact is a common experience in cities, whether passing in the street or sitting on buses. Through this performative convention, we protect our privacy and keep separate lives which are lived close together. However, I had not realised the extent to which the pace at which we walk play a role in this separation. The hyper-slow pace of the later slow walks enabled me to feel space more keenly and to appreciate some of the socio-spatial conventions which regulate and constrain our behaviour as citizens. Scale Walks enabled me

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to enter spaces within urban spaces, constituted awkward moments, sidelong glances and unexpected human connections. In Cul-de-sac, the atmosphere of the encounters was quite different. While the group received reserved nods from some who were washing cars or cutting grass, others were more forthcoming. After reassuring them that we were not lost, we responded to friendly questions about why we were walking there, in particular. Many of those whom we met seemed to appreciate, and approve of, our decision to take a leisurely stroll around their estate and some fell into conversation about how they found living there. Part of the reason for these relatively open encounters might have been our presence as a walking group, rather than as individuals. In the age of ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ schemes which have been set up within residential estates in the United Kingdom since the 1980s, with local Council support, the unfamiliar individual can seem a threat. Indeed, one of the estates had a residents’ social media page which seemed to be used mainly to warn other residents of attempted break-ins, thefts and suspicious-looking visitors. Although we were walking in an unconventional way, and felt exposed as unknown faces in a place that was simultaneously private and public, our group identity protected us perhaps because it exaggerated our visibility in that space and made it obvious that we were not trying to hide from view.

Imagination: The Role of Place David Pinder notes that artist Francis Al¨ys seeks to ‘insert stories into places, putting ideas into motion and affecting those places in a temporally and spatially specific way without adding to them physically’ (Pinder, 2011, p. 682). Festoon showed how performative walking indeed seems to offer the potential for participants and observers to experiment with stories of their making, imagining as they do other possibilities for these places without leaving visible traces. I asked Festoon participants for their reflections on the walk. One said that he felt that the meaning of the procession had changed according to the different places that we had passed through. At one moment he had felt playful and childlike, then as if he was making a pilgrimage, and then as if he was part of ‘an alien-worshipping cult’. One participant said that she had also felt part of a purposeful, but undisclosed, ritual. Another explained that, at different points on the walk, he had felt exuberant and joyful, and then, later, serious and contemplative.

Protection and Deflection: Walking as a Group Simon Pope argues that ‘walking alongside becomes a means to negotiate a flow, of conversation, of movement’ and that ‘moving together, shoulder-to-shoulder, conveys the potential for mutuality […]’ (Pope, 2014). Although I had occasionally asked participants to change the way in which they were holding their light-covered hoops (primarily for comfort or practical reasons), they were given no further instruction on their demeanour or how they should behave.

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The group fell silent from time to time and, as they did, I became aware of a change of mood and a sense that people were not only walking but also ‘doing something’, although I couldn’t precisely say what. The act of walking together as a group with these rather theatrical props in a purposeful, but open, way seemed to embolden some of the group to try on characters and conjure up imaginary scenarios. Walking as a group, as opposed to individually, also seems to have had an impact upon how the participants felt about space. Several said that walking in a procession with the lighted frames had provided them with a sense of protection, and that doing so had given them confidence to be led through the dark and unwelcoming space of Christian Path. Some others noted that the rather joyful, playful appearance of the festoon lights had deflected what might have been negative attention from passers-by. Indeed, the procession was met, for the most part, with quiet curiosity by those who had come to watch it, and by those who happened to come upon it.

Projecting Possibilities: The Role of Visual Devices Sitting on the sea wall a short distance from the linear ground drawings, I looked on as locals took their Sunday strolls along the prom. Some people gave the drawings a glance or a frown, and kept walking. Most people walked across the drawings without looking, which was as valid a response as any to something which did not make any obvious sense and was not usually there. Occasionally, however, people stopped to look more closely. A few tentatively hopped between lines or stood in sections of the drawings. I watched as one or two people began to organise more formally into teams, making up rules and chasing each other. Once they had finished looking at the drawings, or playing with them, people were invited to respond to the drawings and to write something on the back of the project postcard that would be collected and presented in an exhibition alongside scale models of the ground drawings. Here are some of the responses:

Red: Play table tennis with a friend. Take turns deciding where the centre line should be.

Green: Stake a claim on the land. Plant a flag. Mark your territory and defend your borders. Blue: Five blue coffins. The generals Yellow: A space for two people to are waiting for corpses. have a conversation and one person to feel left out.

The responses here conjure up a variety of spatial practices such as sports, war and exploration, but they also make allusions to the way we, as humans, relate to each other in space and the effects upon others of the way in which we choose to construct spatial and interpersonal relationships. Each of the responses described above seems to me to have a different emotional atmosphere, by turns: playful, in that the response evokes a mischievous game (red); exclusionary, in that the response suggests that someone might be left out of a conversation (yellow);

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melancholy, in the evocation of death (blue); and territorial, through its descriptions of defence, claiming space and planting flags (green). None of these atmospheres is explicit or predominant on the promenade where the drawings were made. It is possible, however, that people experienced some of these states in relation to those that they encountered on the promenade, or brought these feelings with them as they walked.

Conclusion When I first started making performative walks, I thought that some urban spaces were more sympathetic to the practice by virtue of appearing particularly ambiguous or because they seemed to hold some latent dramatic quality linked to their apparent liminality. These spaces, it seemed to me, might be particularly yielding of hidden histories or other meanings. However, as I have made my walks and have extended the range and types of places and spaces in which I have worked, I have come to realise that it is not the space, per se, that makes it particularly susceptible, but, rather, it is the effect of bringing to bear particular practices upon spaces and their particular place identities. I believe that the particular practice of performative walking can help many different sorts of everyday urban places yield their invisible, emotional and forgotten personal geographies because of the way in which the practice can bring together, and reflect back into these spaces, disparate experiences that are at once visual, sensory, historical, mythical, remembered, personal, projected and, importantly, imagined. This makes it a powerful set of practices for both the participant in, and the viewer of, performative walks. The practice of performative walking seems to have gained ground at a time when many are asking questions about the purpose and structure of the city. Beliefs that local citizens should have more of a say about how places and spaces should be designed and used has given rise to community groups specifically interested in considering alternative ways of using public space. In Portobello, the community group ‘Friends of Porty Prom’ brings local people together to discuss how the promenade is used and how it might be used in future. Other community groups have also emerged to consider alternative uses for decommissioned public buildings within the town, such as the former George Cinema and Portobello Town Hall, both of which have been earmarked for residential or commercial development (Friends of Porty Prom, 2020). I have felt for some time that performative walking can and should be seen as a valid way of generating knowledge which might feed into discussions about alternative ways of using and being in our public spaces. In their recent book, Seeing Like A City (2017), geographers Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue for the importance of allowing a much wider range of forms of knowledge and perspectives within dialogues about urban development, which they describe as ‘plural methods, intelligences and sensibilities’. They propose that ‘…the sciences and the arts and designated and lay experts [should be] allowed equal opportunity to narrate the facts and stories of the city’ (Amin & Thrift, 2017, p. 5).

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Amin and Thrift’s call comes at a time when practitioners of d´erive-influenced practices have begun to consider whether these practices might have a more critical focus and might contribute to ‘constructive proposals’ for urban change (quoted in Pinder, 2018, p. 27). I am encouraged by Amin and Thrift’s call for parity between art and science and their desire to broaden the definition of urban expertise. A re-evaluation of the critical contribution that d´erive-based practices might make to urban transformation, referred to by David Pinder, seems extremely timely. In my view, contemporary artistic practices, including performative walking practices, may contribute knowledge to the dialogue about our cities’ futures from their particular epistemological standpoints. Aesthetic aspects of everyday life are subjective and can be difficult to capture, but, within urban sociology and human geography, experimental and inventive methods have begun to emerge which seek to capture the fine-grained and open-ended quality of everyday life (Back & Puwar, 2012; Holmes & Hall, 2020). I believe that performative walking, which connects so easily to everyday practices of making journeys, encountering others, playing and imagining, has much to offer here. The practice of performative walking can undercut and help unpick spatial prejudices we might hold and dig down into places with which we are overfamiliar, revealing unexpected spaces of affect within them. It can open up spaces for projection, play and imagination. We now need to know more about what the considerable body of small-scale, fine-grained performative walking practice can tell us by collecting and analysing it. These methods might generate temporary revelations and insights, and leave no material trace, but that is part of their attraction. Performative walking is powerful precisely because it is not an expert methodology, but is instead a set of disparate and disobedient minor practices which are drawn from the everyday, practised every day and open to everyone. We might not have a map, but we are certainly not lost. We are only just beginning.

Acknowledgements My sincere thanks to everyone who took part in these projects. The projects referred to in this chapter were made possible through funded commissions from Artwalk Porty 2017 (Playing Up), Artwalk Porty 2018 (Festoon), Artwalk Projects 2019 (Cul-de-sac), a Research into the Lived Environment Grant from the Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh 2016 (Scale Walks) and a Professional Development Award from the Centre for Open Learning, University of Edinburgh. The author is grateful for the support of these organisations.

References Al¨ys, F., & Lingwood, J. (2006). Interview extract from Seven Walks, reproduced in Johnstone, S. (2008). The everyday: Documents of contemporary art. London: Whitechapel Gallery. Amin, A., & Thrift, N. (2017). Seeing like a city. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Back, L., & Puwar, N. (2012). A manifesto for live methods. In L. Back & N. Puwar (Eds.), Live methods (pp. 6–17). Oxford: Blackwell. Coverley, M. (2006). Psychogeography. London: Harpenden. Edensor, T. (2008). Walking through ruins. In T. Ingold & J. L. Vergunst (Eds.), Ways of walking: Ethnography and practice on foot (pp. 123–141). Aldershot: Ashgate. Farley, P., & Symmons Roberts, M. (2012). Edgelands: Journeys into England’s true wilderness. London: Vintage. Friends of Porty Prom. (2020). Retrieved from http//www.portobellocc.org/pccpn/ 2018/02/22/friends-of-porty-prom-sat-10-march/onSaturday27June2020 Hancox, S. (2012). Contemporary walking practices and the Situationist International: The politics of perambulating the boundaries between art and life. Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(2), 237–250. Hantelmann, D. (2014). The experiential turn. On performativity. Walker living collections, walker art center online, digital document. Retrieved from http://walkerart.org/ collections/publications/performativity/experiential-turn/onSunday19September2021 Hawkins, H. (2020). Geography, art, research: Artistic research in the GeoHumanities. Milton: Taylor & Francis. Holmes, H., & Hall, S. M. (2020). Mundane methods. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ¨ Kuppers, P. (2010). Moving in the cityscape: Performance and the embodied experience of the flˆaneur. In N. Whybrow (Ed.), Performance and the contemporary city (pp. 54–68). Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan. Lavery, C. (2010). Situationism. In N. Whybrow (Ed.), Performance and the contemporary city (pp. 92–94). Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Morris, M. (2012). Concise dictionary of social and cultural anthropology (1st ed.). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Morrison, B. (2018). The artistic medium of walking (In defence of medium specificity). In Interartive. Retrieved from https://walkingart.interartive.org/2018/12/walkingmedium-specifityonSunday19September2021 Pearson, M. (2012). Raindogs: Performing the city. Cultural Geographies, 19(1), 55–69. Pinder, D. (2005). Arts of urban exploration. Cultural Geographies, 12, 383–411. Pinder, D. (2011). Errant paths: The poetics and politics of walking. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29, 672–692. Pinder, D. (2018). Transforming cities. Performance Research, 23(7), 8–28. Pope, S. (2014). Walking transformed: The dialogics of art and walking. C Magazine, 121, 14–19. Scott, E. E., & Swenson, K. (2015). Critical landscapes: Art, space and politics. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Turner, C. (2018). Drawing, adrift. Performance Research, 23(7), 36–44.

Chapter 9

This Place Is Not Safe for Walking Caroline Cardoso Machado, Hartmut G¨unther, Ingrid Luiza Neto and Lucas Heiki Matsunaga

Abstract 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. Keywords: Safety perception; fear of crime; urban life; urban mobility; walkability; mobile methods

Moving Spaces and Places, 149–165 Copyright © 2022 Caroline Cardoso Machado, Hartmut G¨unther, Ingrid Luiza Neto and Lucas Heiki Matsunaga Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221010

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This Place Is Not Safe for Walking The growth of urban crime rates in Brazil contributes to increasing the feeling of fear and instability (Lira, 2017). When inhabitants perceive the environment as unsafe, they adopt preventive practices, such as choosing alternative routes, avoiding, or being more cautious in public spaces. However, the reduction of residents’ involvement and interaction with their neighbourhood can increase criminality, resulting in a vicious circle: the perception of insecurity enhances the abandonment of public space, which in turn increases crime rates (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1981; Felson & Clarke, 1998; Milgram, 1970). When safety perception is positive, city inhabitants expand their natural vigilance in public spaces, being protagonists in the use and occupation of their neighbourhood (Jacobs, 1961). Some ways to increase safety perception are improving land-use diversity, maintaining public equipment, and encouraging the performance of different kinds of activities in public spaces. Thus, instead of performing individual actions against criminality, such as building high walls or fences and patrolling residential areas, which creates a false sense of security, a better strategy for crime prevention would be the encouragement of natural vigilance by promoting the use of public spaces (Gehl, 2013). Studies in the field of Situational Crime Prevention (Clarke, 1997), Criminal Prevention for Environmental Design (CPTED) (Cozens & Love, 2015) and Environmental Criminology (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1981) have led researchers to analyse the influence of socio-environmental factors in crime events, and to propose effective urban interventions. Investing structurally and socially in developing environments that reduce the opportunities and attractiveness for the occurrence of crimes may discourage the criminal behaviour and encourage the construction of support and bonds among the inhabitants of a given community (Matsunaga, 2016).

Crime and Safety Perception Saelens and Sallis (2002) define safety perception as the feeling that a given public environment can be used. This perception occurs whether people are alone or accompanied, regardless of the time of the day. Another term commonly used is ‘perception of insecurity’, which refers to negative sensations regarding the environment. It is usually a result of violence, crime, disorder, or the presence of symbolic events that the population associates with a possible criminal occurrence (Bursik & Grasmick, 1993; Wilson & Kelling, 1982). The perception of insecurity does not manifest itself in the same way in different social groups, since it can vary according to socioeconomic factors such as wealth, gender and age (Gabriel & Greve, 2003; Greve, Leipold, & Kappes, 2018; Silva & Beato, 2013). Residents with higher income tend to report more feelings of insecurity as compared to those with lower income (Bauman, 2009). Fear of crime can be understood as feelings, cognitive or emotional judgements, and behavioural aspects related to crime (McCrea, Shyy, Western, &

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Stimson, 2005). Fear of crime can be dispositional or situational. Dispositional fear is associated with stable traits of feeling insecure, either because of previous information of crimes that have been occurring in the region or because an individual maintains previously held negative attitudes regarding the criminality in the place. Situational fear, on the other hand, is related to the momentary perception of insecurity due to physical and social characteristics perceived in the environment. Thus, environmental cues will evoke fear of a specific circumstance of threat and alertness: for example, when individuals feel that they are at risk while being followed or when they are under imminent danger (Gabriel & Greve, 2003). To understand the fear of crime, it is necessary to investigate the antecedent events that can influence the perception that a given place is safe or not.

Safety Perception and Walkability An important factor that affects safety perception among residents is walkability, that is, when residents perceive their environment as walkable by identifying possibilities to get around, such as the strength of social contacts, local economy and opportunities to perform healthier mobility (Netto, 2013; Rodrigues, 1992; Siebert & Lorenzini, 1998). Overall security, absence of garbage on the streets and maintenance of sidewalks enhance the perception of the quality of the environment, thus stimulating the use of non-motorised, environmentally friendly transport modes (Brown & Werner, 2012; Donovan & Prestemon, 2012; Hoehner, Brennan, Brownson, Handy, & Killingsworth, 2003; Pikora, Giles-Corti, Bull, Jamrozik, & Donovan, 2003; Saelens, Salles & Frank, 2003). Jane Jacobs (1961) suggests that the diversity of land use in the city and walkability are essential for the development of public life, since they promote the attraction of a greater and more diverse number of people, thus reinforcing the maintenance of public safety. The presence of people on the streets keeps a natural surveillance of urban public spaces, valuing the human scale as the main protagonist of the use and occupation of spaces. (Jacobs, 1961). The specific characteristics of modern urbanism found in the Federal District of Brazil provide a unique possibility of understanding the reciprocal relationship between space and environment and people’s perception and behaviour with regard to crime. As in many developing countries, crime is a serious problem in Brazil. Thus, this study contributes insights regarding people’s beliefs, attitudes and worries about safety and criminality, contributing to the promotion of safety and active mobility interventions. Considering the academic publications on this topic, it can be assumed that environmental and individual aspects interfere in the residents’ perception, both about security and walkability. Although there are several studies that deal with the fear of crime in urban areas, there is a lack of studies that investigate the interaction of perceived insecurity and walking behaviour. In this study, we set out to investigate the interaction among those variables and address the following questions: (1) How do residents perceive their neighbourhoods, in terms of security? (2) What contributes to the perception of (in)security, fear of crime and walkability among residents?

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Method Contextualisation of the Study Areas and Research Scope The study was undertaken in three areas of the Federal District (DF) of Brazil: (1) a low-income area with formal urban fabric – Varjão; (2) a low-income area with informal urban fabric – Vila Planalto and (3) a lower middle-income area with formal urban fabric – Super Square 409/410 South (SQS 409/410) of the original pilot plan of Bras´ılia. Varjão is a low-income community located next to Lago Norte, one of the highest-income regions of DF. The first buildings were constructed in Varjão in the 1970s. The neighbourhood has low residential density and little horizontal occupation, with small residential lots. Vila Planalto was created as a campsite in 1958 for engineers and workers who came to build the new capital. Since then, the area has become a permanent neighbourhood and is now considered a historic heritage site. SQS 409/410 are located in the southern wing of the central region of Bras´ılia, with uniform and linear buildings set in a green area. Compared to the other Super Squares of Bras´ılia, the buildings in SQS 409/410 are low cost, three-floor walk-ups, without stilts, nor underground garages. The study was part of a larger project dealing with Healthy Urban Mobility (Jones et al., 2019), which was undertaken in three steps: In step 1, we conducted face-to-face interviews with residents randomly chosen from the three areas. In step 2, we used biographical interviews with residents who had already participated in step 1. Finally, in step 3, we conducted ethnographic go-along interviews with participants of step 2. This chapter focuses on the findings of step 3.

Participants Seventeen residents participated in the study, with ages ranging between 21 and 71 years (M 5 42.35; SD 5 15.45); most were female (65%) and married (53%). Concerning educational status, the majority of the participants reported having concluded secondary school (53%). Eight participants lived in Vila Planalto (47%), six in SQS 409/410 (35%) and three in Varjão (18%).

Instruments During the interviews, participant’s behaviours and reactions to the environment were recorded with an action video camera (GoProÒ Black Hero 5), which captured both video and audio. Furthermore, this camera registered geographic location data as well as the routes chosen by participants in each trip.

Procedure Residents who had participated in step 2 of the study were contacted by telephone, in order to schedule the interview. During this initial contact, the participants talked about a usual route taken during their daily routine. On the

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agreed-upon day, the researcher met the participant at the starting point of the route indicated. When starting the trip, the participants were instructed to follow the path as if they were not being accompanied, in an attempt to minimise the influence of the interviewer. While both were travelling, a mobile micro ethnographic interview was carried out using the go-along approach, allowing researchers to capture a more complete experience of the participant in the urban space. This type of mobile method interview facilitates the capture of the locomotion of people in their daily activities, based on the participants’ lifestyle and routine ¨ (Buscher & Veloso, 2018). In this methodological approach, the researcher accompanies the participants on their daily journey in order to observe their behaviour while immersed in, and their interaction with, their natural environment. During the interview, it is possible to ask questions about the interviewee’s perceptions regarding the environmental stimuli and observe their interaction with the environment through which they pass, or opt to avoid. The interview was unstructured, where the observed behaviours are determined without a previous categorical definition, since it will depend on the experience of each participant (Jensen, 2013; Zhang & Wildemuth, 2009). Data were collected following standard ethical procedures. The respondents were informed of their rights and signed a consent form prior to the beginning of the study.

Data Analysis The content analysis technique was used with a thematic approach by defining categories and the frequencies in each interview (Bardin, 1977). Literal transcriptions of the participants’ verbalisations were carried out, obtained from the files recorded in the camera. The categorisation of the content was performed using the software N-Vivo. Once processed, the results from the participants’ report were translated to English for presentation in this chapter.

Results In the following, we address two questions in this chapter: (1) how do residents perceive their neighbourhoods in terms of (in)security and crime, and (2) what contributes to these perceptions? In the course of the 17 mobile interviews, there were some 42 observations regarding public security: 14 could be classified as perceptions of safety, 18 as perceptions of insecurity, and another 10 as fear of crime.

Safety Perception Perceptions of safety include showing positive feelings about the public environment and how it can be used, regardless of the time of the day (Saelens & Sallis, 2002). For instance, one resident of Varjão reported a decrease of

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Fig. 1.

Image of the Varjão Police Station. Source: Photo by author.

criminality, especially in the area indicated in Fig. 1. She talked about how the installation of new public equipment and a police station in the area allowed for more outdoor activities due to fewer shootings that were common in these surroundings. This police station was a blessing for us, because there were a lot of ‘good-for-nothings’ around here, you know? Before, when we went to sleep, there was some strange kind of shooting … not any more, now it’s over. (Marina, age 65, Varjão) In Vila Planalto, participants also expressed very positive perceptions of the environment, especially the central square (Fig. 2) where different activities are

Fig. 2.

Central Square of Vila Planalto. Source: Photo by author.

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possible throughout the day. For residents of the neighbourhood, the area provides a greater sense of security as they walk through the square, including opportunities for natural vigilance. Six interviewees in Vila Planalto talked about how they felt secure in the vicinity of where they lived, no matter what the time of day. As one of them remarked: It’s very peaceful here, thank God, even during night time. My youngest son, 17 years old, is the one who walks the most. Until now, there has never been an incident, never a theft. The cars are parked outside the houses, but there was never a problem with that. (Leon, 51 years, Vila Planalto) Respondents in the Vila Planalto neighbourhood expressed more positive sentiments about security as well as the strong bonds among local people, that is, the sense of attachment to the area. As to contacts and involvement with other residents, more positive views appeared among those who reported knowing neighbours and other residents. Because this here is a small place, everyone knows us and sees that we are from here. I don’t worry about my children coming home later. (Olivia, 45 years, Vila Planalto) These results suggest that the presence of the police and public well-maintained equipment enhance safety perception. Places that offer different kinds of activities, with opportunities for natural vigilance and social contact, are associated with more positive perception of safety. Walking appears to be present in places perceived as positive, regardless of the time of the day. There was a report about children walking at night in the neighbourhood, showing that safety perception stimulates walkability.

Perception of Insecurity Perceptions of insecurity are based on interviewees’ negative statements of the environment, usually including violence, occurrence of criminal activities or disorder (Bursik & Grasmick, 1993; Wilson & Kelling, 1982). Spaces with garbage and lack of adequate lighting are also environmental traits that corroborate perception of insecurity (Silva, 2019). Two interviewees of Varjão pointed to insecurity in different areas of their neighbourhood, such as the presence of homeless individuals and drug users. The presence of homeless people was also observed by one of the interviewees of SQS 409/410.

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Caroline Cardoso Machado et al. Some homeless people usually sleep here and I’m kind of … I check it out before I go out, because they already shouted at me. Some of them are lovely, but some are not … They start shouting at you and are aggressive… Those who stay here are usually aggressive. (Cabral, 30 years, SQS 409/410)

In Vila Planalto, despite the overall sense of security, the issue of illegal substances used by youths was pointed out by residents as a matter of concern and distress. It’s safe here, but it’s not entirely safe, because there is a gang of the ‘smoke squadron’ (slang for drug users) there… But if you don’t mess with them, they won’t mess with you. (Carvalho, 53 years, Vila Planalto) From observations such as the above, it is possible to note the discomfort of the residents as concerns about the presence of drug users; however, they also appear to show some conformity in regard to this social problem. In other words, even though they feel unsafe in the presence of ‘unwanted people’, they do not avoid walking in the neighbourhood because of them. Furthermore, interviewees reported a considerable increase of the number of drug users in Vila Planalto over the previous five years, speculating that the demolition of the only local public school – due to structural problems – may have contributed to the increase of illegal substances in the area. They observed that some of the students who should have enrolled in schools located in distant neighbourhoods did not do so, but instead hung out in the area and got involved with drugs. SQS 409/410 residents that we accompanied mainly revealed having heard about criminal occurrences in the vicinity. They also mentioned the specific characteristics of these Super Squares as a problem: buildings without stilts, the first-floor apartments with windows at street level, hence less separation between private and public spheres. Furthermore, no private underground garages and no doormen influence residents’ perception of insecurity. Residents are compelled to use public parking lots and to be extra careful before entering or when leaving the building. I like living here… But the neighbourhood is not so good because of the lack of security, right? I think this one here is one of the most dangerous areas… There is no garage, no doormen. So that makes it a little difficult. But it’s great to live here… I like it. (Nina, 21 years, SQS 409/410) As mentioned by the interviewees and illustrated in Fig. 3, there was concern regarding insecurity especially during night time, due to the lack of public

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Image of the Green Area of SQS 409/410 Where There is Little Natural Surveillance. Source: Photo by author.

illuminations and visibility; furthermore, they also expressed concerns about the nightlife in commercial areas near the residential buildings. Important observations by SQS 409/410 residents concerned the underground walkways (Fig. 4). While constituting an important connection between super squares on the eastern and the western side of a major thoroughfare, this underpass ends up being underutilised due to the perception of insecurity by potential users, who frequently prefer to risk their lives by crossing first a four-lane road (60 km/h speed limit), next seven lanes (80 km/h) and another four

Fig. 4.

Underground Passageway at SQS 409/410. Source: Photo by author.

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lanes (60 km/h). These underpasses have received frequent complaints, being dirty, not well kept, poorly lit, with all kinds of crimes, as well as occasional shelter for the homeless or drug users. I don’t usually go this way, because it’s dangerous to walk here, especially at night time. Some people sleep here and it’s a mess… Today it looks good. (Cabral, 30 years, SQS 409/410)

It is okay here; the problem is all the way down there. I do not go there alone. Some days, the police are here in pairs, two in the middle and two at the exit. If it weren’t for the juveniles who are here under the underground passageway, I think it would be a lot better, right? (Marina, 65 years, Varjão) People from the neighbourhoods avoid walking in insalubrious places, with trash, poor lighting and lack of maintenance, changing their routes to stay away from places perceived negatively. The presence of police officers provides a feeling of safety, especially in places with ‘unwanted people’. In sum, the sense of insecurity reported by participants in the mobile interviews frequently involve the presence of ‘unwanted people’, such as the homeless and drug dealers. Hearing about criminal situations in the past impacts the perception of insecurity. The form and structure of the neighbourhood also play an important role, especially in SQS 409/410 where there is an insufficient distance between private and public areas. The perception of insecurity is more intense at night, when it is harder to be seen by others, and when there is nightlife in commercial areas close by. Women expressed more negative perceptions of insecurity than men. This sense of insecurity directly impacts perceptions of the area’s walkability, with respondents reporting less walking through such unpleasant places.

Fear of Crime Concerns, feelings, judgements and behavioural responses to crime are defined by McCrea et al. (2005) as fear of crime. Thus, residents of SQS 409/410 that we accompanied reported feelings of fear, mainly because they had heard about attempts and occurrences of crimes in the vicinity of their buildings. In other words, such fear of crime was frequently related to past reports of criminal activities, that is, constituting a form of dispositional fear: they feel afraid because they have heard from others that the place is unsafe. One SQS 409/410 interviewee reported that due to an attempted robbery in her building, the intercoms and entry locks had been replaced by an automated system with passwords, fortifying access control and suggesting that protective measures have been adopted by building managers or residents’ associations to

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increase (perceived) security in the neighbourhood. Dispositional fear was more frequently reported by women than by men, indicating that they are more impacted by knowing about the occurrence of a crime in a certain location. In SQS 409/410, the participants reported criminality more directly, with episodes that had happened with friends or neighbours. For example, they reported the occurrence of kidnappings, armed robberies, car thefts and attempts at break-ins. This explains why several observations could be categorised as dispositional fear among interviewees of the neighbourhood. Furthermore, the absence of doormen or private underground garages, which we mentioned in the context of a sense of insecurity above, can also be associated with the fear of crime, with residents being even more apprehensive when entering or exiting their cars and buildings, especially at night (Fig. 5). Examples of situational fear were also mentioned by the participants. Thus, one SQS 409/410 interviewee reported having seen a robbery near the building where she lives. Since then, she has adopted certain protective behaviours, such as going to the gym by car instead of walking or avoiding staying too long around the building when she gets home at night, in order to prevent opportunities for potential criminals. When robberies happen here, you can hear it from the apartment… So, we call the police and usually they arrive quickly. They usually stop by here, at night to check it out, you know? But it’s not very useful, because we usually see situations here. One day, someone had a car stolen here … the girl was inside

Fig. 5. Image of the Place Where There is a Higher Incidence of Attempted Thefts, Assaults and Kidnappings. Source: Photo by author.

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Caroline Cardoso Machado et al. of the car that was robbed! When my father saw it, he thought it was me because I had gone out to get my sister. (Nina, 21 years, SQS 409/410)

Three residents of Varjão reported adopting precautionary behaviours to avoid occasions of possible crimes during night time in a local square (Fig. 6). Oh, the square is empty now, but in the late afternoon … it’s full of people using drugs. This worries me about criminality. (Eduarda, 50 years, Varjão) In sum, notably dispositional fear was reported, suggesting that hearing about the occurrence of crimes in the surroundings increases worries about criminality. Only one example of situational fear was reported by a girl, whose father actually saw a car robbery. Both dispositional and situational fear stimulate the adoption of preventive behaviours, such as the use of access control automated systems or the avoidance of staying around a building at night. Fear of crime is strongly associated with the decision to walk or not, as well the route to be used. The more people fear criminality, the less they walk and the more they avoid walking in certain places. Thus, one respondent mentioned preferring to use the car instead of walking, due to the fear of criminality – a clear example of how perceptions of the environment influence choosing or not such active mobility modes as walking in daily travels.

Fig. 6.

Image of the Square in Varjão Where Substance Users Are Present. Source: Photo by author.

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Summary of Results In general, SQS 409/410 residents that we interviewed showed a stronger perception of insecurity and fear of crime, while those of Vila Planalto reported strongest perceptions of security and the lowest fear of crime. As for differences of gender, the perception of insecurity and fear of crime was more frequent among women than men. Fear of crime was strongly associated with the perception of insecurity, showing that those who feel concerns about criminality in the neighbourhood usually perceive insecurity as well. Dispositional fear was more frequently reported than situational crime, but both stimulate the adoption of avoidance behaviour. Walking was more frequent among residents who indicated a more positive view of safety in their neighbourhood, which leads us to conclude that safety perception enhances walking, while perception of insecurity and fear of crime discourage the occurrence of such behaviour.

Discussion There have been frequent reports in the literature of the reciprocal relation between physical characteristics of the environment and the occurrence of crime (Matsunaga, 2016; Vivan & Saboya, 2012). Likewise, we observed that the participants of these mobile interviews pointed out the association between the poor maintenance of public areas and the perception of insecurity. In degraded, dirty underground walkways, without maintenance, near the Super Squares, there was a greater perception of insecurity. On the other hand, places with a better quality of maintenance, that is, neat and clean, are perceived as safer and not vulnerable, and residents tend to use them more frequently (Newman, 1996). There were reports of dispositional fear, that is, the recurrence of crimes in the neighbourhood. The belief that a particular place is unsafe leads people to avoid using it, instead walking around it, making the space empty and lifeless (Milgram, 1970). In addition, direct or indirect contact of residents with the occurrence of criminal actions impacts their quality of life (Machado, 2008; Teixeira, Lourenço, & Piçarra, 2006), encouraging the adoption of preventive measures such as avoiding walking at night or installing automated alarm systems. The presence of ‘unwanted people’, such as drug dealers and the homeless, was a frequently mentioned factor in all the three study areas, reinforcing other findings regarding Brazil as suffering from problems related to drug trafficking (Costa & de Medeiros, 2019) and homelessness (Sicari & Zanella, 2018). The presence of events in the neighbourhood decreases the perception of security, leaving participants in a constant state of alert, especially when events are more recurrent. However, it is known that the presence of both the drug users and homeless people must be treated not only as a safety issue but also as a wider social problem that must be addressed with appropriate public policies. The interviewees of Varjão did not report a perception of insecurity as intense as the participants in SQS 409/410. However, it is worth mentioning that the three

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interviewees were women. Besides, the very use of the active mobility method of interviewing while moving about the neighbourhood provoked observations not only on the part of the participants. As researchers we faced some security issues in that neighbourhood during data collection, felt observed and even stalked. This episode led us to interrupt the mobile interview method in Varjão in order to preserve the physical integrity of the interviewer. Thus, while it would have been desirable to be able to count on more interviews, this very interruption of the participatory mobile method confirmed the observations of the Varjão residents regarding their perception of security and crime in their neighbourhood. No doubt, it was an opportunity for the researcher to feel the insecurity that the residents are commonly exposed to, while observing their natural environment. Furthermore, this manner of data collection via participatory mobile method provided us, the researchers, with invaluable first-hand data hardly available through traditional paper-and-pencil interviews. Vila Planalto interviewees reported a higher perception of security, mentioning that the presence of drug users did not reduce the feeling of protection, corroborating the indications of Santos (2019). It were these interviewees who most reported seeing and talking to other people while walking in the neighbourhood. This finding further emphasises the importance of social contact for less perception of insecurity and walking (Gainey, Alper, & Chappell, 2011; Jacobs, 1961; Moser, Huppert, Foa, & Simons, 2012). It is through the creation of social bonds and social support networks that residents take care of each other and produce natural vigilance. Women reported a greater perception of insecurity and fear of crime than men, especially in SQS 409/410, corroborating findings as summarised by Franck (2002). Residents showed more fear of walking during the night, especially in SQS 409/410 and Varjão. This perception of insecurity at night was associated with the poor quality of urban maintenance, the lack of adequate lighting, and the presence of drug users. The findings from this study reinforce the need for research on criminality and walkability that investigate citizens’ safety perception. Furthermore, exploratory qualitative studies, especially those using participatory mobile methods which register observations while passing through the environment to which participants react and about which they talk, can contribute to additional perceptions of the reciprocal relation between space and behaviour. By thus providing a more profound and broad understanding of complex social phenomena, it may strengthen both applications of results to the execution of public policies, as well as highlight variables that need to be investigated in further research, using both quantitative or qualitative methods.

Author Note The present paper is based on data from the international collaborative project ¨ between the University of Bras´ılia, Prof. Hartmut Gunther, principal investigator, with funds from FAP-DF, [44/2015], and Oxford Brookes University, Prof. Tim

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Jones, principal investigator, with funds from ESRC, [ES/NO1314X/1]. The research was conducted at the Environmental Psychology Research Group at the University of Bras´ılia.

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Chapter 10

Dancing Your Way Through: An Explorative Study of City-Making Skills Beitske Boonstra

Abstract 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. Keywords: City-making; improvisation; modern dance; Deleuze; urban planning; governance skills

Introduction Currently, the practice of ‘city-making’ is gaining attention within the domain of city planning and urban development. City-making is understood as a practice which is arts-led, creative and community- and place-based, meant to improve existing cities from within (Grodach, 2017; Landry, 2006). Closely linked to practices of creative placemaking, Do-It-Yourself urbanism, and tactical urbanism Moving Spaces and Places, 167–181 Copyright © 2022 Beitske Boonstra Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221011

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(Grodach, 2017; Lydon & Garcia, 2015; Markusen & Gadwa, 2010), city-making is initiated by civil society, including networks of residents, local entrepreneurs, artists and activists. Within city-making practices, such actors deploy their professional skills without commercial interest, driven by idealism and curiosity for finding a professional conduit that concerns their own living and working environments, while engaging the local communities they are part of (Franke, Niemans, & Soeterbroek, 2015). City-makers thus act relatively independently from governmental or market-led spatial planning (Boonstra, 2015; Deslandes, 2013; Douglas, 2013; Finn, 2014; Iveson, 2013; Talen, 2015), and frame their practices as an alternative to conventional comprehensive governmental-led spatial planning, arguing that unilateral governmental-led planning has ceased to answer contemporary complex urban challenges in concrete, effective and inclusive ways (Deslandes, 2013; Douglas, 2013; Finn, 2014; Lydon & Garcia, 2015; Talen, 2015). City-making practices can be found across Europe in countries such as Greece (Pantazidou, 2013), the United Kingdom (Architecture 00, 2011), Italy (Rabbiosi, 2017), Hungary (Patti & Polyak, 2016) and the Netherlands (Franke et al., 2015) among others. Examples are multiple and include the renovation and revivification of derelict urban areas and empty buildings (Deslandes, 2013), guerrilla and community gardening, co-housing and retail cooperatives, street art, etc. (Iveson, 2013). In practical terms, the uptake of such civic-led actions is different across countries and cities. From a theoretical perspective, these approaches to spatial development are generally applauded since, as scholars argue, these civically induced practices of ‘many changes by many hands’ (Talen, 2015) foster more diversified, resilient and community-based urban fabrics (Boonstra, 2015; Igalla, Edelenbos, & Van Meerkerk, 2019). Interestingly, academic scholarship on civic initiatives in spatial development is mainly dedicated to studying their institutional and spatial environment. Research has, for instance, been conducted on the conditions under which these initiatives emerge (Baxter, 2019), what kind of urban patterns and outcomes they generate (Portugali, 2000; Savini, 2016), how spatial planning should relate to these kinds of initiatives (Boonstra, 2015; Rauws, 2016) and how governments can offer support to them, for instance, with networking agents (Nederhand, Van der Steen, & Van Twist, 2019; Van Meerkerk & Edelenbos, 2018). Other studies focus on the practices of these initiatives, hinting at their civic-mindedness, anti-professionalism, amateurism, informality and self-expression (Deslandes, 2013; Douglas, 2013; Finn, 2014; Talen, 2015), but as such, these studies frame civic initiatives outside of the professional environment of spatial development. Limited academic attention has been paid to civic-led spatial initiatives as an actual professional practice of urban development in itself. This paper aims to expand the awareness of civic-led practices (e.g. city-making) from a professional perspective, by building an argument towards improvisation as a professional city-making skill. Firstly, the skills and capacities city-makers deploy within their practices are explored, and how these can be gained through professional education and work experiences (Section ‘City-Making Skills in Practice’). Section ‘Deploying Lines of Flight’ draws out an analogy between these skills and capacities and modern dance improvisation

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skills, supported by the Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Section ‘Dance Improvisation Techniques’ explores four dance improvisation skills in more detail and compares these with activities found in the cases. The last Section ‘Conclusions’ speculates (cf. Manning & Massumi, 2014) how the notion of improvisation could be adopted in spatial planning and urban governance.

City-Making Skills in Practice To explore the skills and capacities that city-makers deploy in their practices, and how initiators gained these skills and capacities through professional education and work experiences, I conducted and qualitatively compared a range of semi-structured interviews with city-makers across Europe. For this specific study, I turned towards the European network called re:Kreators. This network aims to connect, inspire and multiply civic-led practices within European cities, strengthen the position of these practices throughout Europe and create dialogue with stakeholders of urban development and decision-makers (re:Kreators, 2020: online). The members of re:Kreators define themselves as the ‘people and initiatives who want to enable sustainable, social and participative urban area development following fair principles’; ‘create value’ and ‘increase of mental, physical and emotional usability of quality urban space’; and perhaps most importantly ‘see urban development in the interest of the people who live there and work in community-based, participative and inclusive ways’ (re:Kreators, 2020: online). Eight members of the re:Kreator network, for example, practitioners that frame themselves as city-makers, participated in this round of interviews, representing six city-making initiatives. These were: ‘Make-a-Point’ in Bucharest, Romania, a cultural centre in a former industrial building located on the outskirts of Bucharest, with a water tower as art gallery and observation point over the city; ‘Wij kopen samen den Oudaan’, a never-realised civic initiative in Antwerp, Belgium, focused on purchasing a former policy tower in the city centre and reusing it for cultural, creative and community purposes, instead of merely speculative redevelopment; ‘Open Jazdow’, a community offering a social, cultural and ecological public programme in the settlement of wooden Finnish-style houses in the city centre of Warsaw, Poland, built for the post-war reconstruction of the city and currently under threat of demolishment; ‘La Cartoucherie’, a hybrid private-people initiative to redevelop former military barracks in the city of Toulouse, France, for commercial and community purposes; ‘Paradocks’, a temporarily used building and start-up hub in a 1970s mixed-use (office and residential) building in Vienna, Austria; and ‘Largo Residˆencias’, a hostel, hotel, artist-in-residence space and caf´e in a deprived and gentrifying neighbourhood in Lisbon, Portugal, functioning as a community hub for the area’s residents and initiatives (Re:Kreators, 2020: online; Cooperative City, 2019: online; Patti & Poly´ak, 2017).

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The interviews focused on the skills and capacities these city-makers considered as a requirement to start and manage projects such as theirs, as well as the general emergence, content, focus and ‘process of becoming’ (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) of the initiatives they engaged in. On the question of what professional education the initiators of these initiatives had, answers were diverse, which included architecture, geography, sociology, law, economy, urban design, spatial planning, history, political science and anthropology. Since most of these professional training programmes are related to (some aspects of) socio-spatial processes, it can be assumed that the initiators had at least some content-based knowledge on socio-spatial processes they could benefit from. However, professional knowledge was not the only aspect the respondents valued about their education while practising city-making; skills such as ‘being able to think critically’ (resp. 5/6), or ‘creative thinking’ were also considered (resp. 2). Moreover, the respondents indicated that, when they experienced a knowledge gap or lack of experience in a certain issue, they simply addressed their personal and professional networks and added new people with specific expertise or knowledge to the team (often on a voluntary basis). Such activities suggest that being able to ask for advice and having a wide network of expertise and good will is as much a requisite for starting an initiative as basic knowledge is a requisite on socio-spatial transformation processes. Respondents also mentioned less socio-spatial professional education as valuable in their practices, such as political journalism, information technology, communication and educational science. In addition, respondents emphasised the importance of work experiences after education. Some respondents underwent their first work experience with their first city-making project; others had already had extensive career paths before turning to spatial regeneration. Experiences that initiators considered crucial were the ability to establish and maintain relationships, the ability to interact with the media, being politically oriented, and a connective person. In addition to asking straightforwardly about the skills and capacities acquired through professional education and work experience, I also enquired about the practices involved in these city-making projects, for instance, how projects were started and how the respondents became involved, how content was generated, how the projects gained support and evolved over time, and what the eventual results were (at the time of interviewing). Answers to these questions revealed an additional view on city-making skills. Firstly, respondents explained their involvement in city-making through personal drivers. To quote several initiators: it ‘started as just a hobby’ (resp. 1); it started with ‘a few friends, just making fun and starting this Facebook group’ (resp. 3). Respondent 4: ‘my involvement started [on a] personal [level], only later my NGO […] became involved’. And respondent 5 claimed that, after a career in international business and diplomacy, he wanted to ‘work on a project that would make more sense from an ecological and social point of view’ in his hometown. Secondly, the respondents emphasised how coincidences, unexpected events and continuous probing led them in their practices. ‘When we started the project, no-one had the knowledge. We all played a role we never had before. We had to

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rely on personal skills’, said respondent 8. ‘In practice you have to deal with unexpected things. You need to be able to respond quickly’ (resp. 7). ‘There are so many variables and interests in the area that are crossing this place that it is very hard to say which direction it is going. […] We are constantly growing—or rather evolving—because there are always some new people, institutions and organizations coming with new ideas, and some organizations disappear and come back after a while’ (resp. 4). ‘We just found a way of putting things together’, said respondent 5. And respondent 3 explained how an important trigger was a coincidental meeting on a train, which got the national government on board as a partner in the project. Thirdly, the respondents described how they eventually ended up doing things or generated a spatial impact beyond their initial plans or intentions for their initiative. For instance, La Cartoucherie not only gave a new function to an abandoned building complex, but also became the urban centre for the adjacent newly built neighbourhood. The Oudaan initiative was never realised but raised awareness to the involvement of communities in the procurement of public buildings throughout the city of Antwerp, and in fact all Flanders. Open Jazdow organised temporary use of and saved the historic wooden houses from demolition. Largo Residencias reprogrammed a building and its adjacent square and became an important actor against the gentrification of its neighbourhood. Paradocks organised temporary use and connected to the neighbourhood by making the ground floor spaces available for community uses. Make-a-Point regenerated a derelict industrial site and raised attention to the cultural reprogramming of urban fringe areas city-wide. As such, from this round of interviews, I realised that next to basic knowledge on socio-spatial transformation processes and experience in process skills, a third set of skills is required as well, which is perhaps as crucial. This is the ability to act in the moment and adapt to contingencies, as well as to connect personal drivers to city-wide processes.

Deploying Lines of Flight Descriptions of how the project initiators deployed personal drivers, coincidences and opportunities and semi-intentionally moved towards an unforeseen collective outcome show some remarkable resonances to a psycho-philosophy of becoming, as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987). According to that philosophy, becoming does not relate to being and identity (as a stable, immutable end state), but to a continual becoming-other, becoming different. Becoming is the very dynamism of change, tending towards no particular goal or end-state (Stagoll, 2010, pp. 25–27). According to Deleuze and Guattari, this becoming-other happens in three ways. First, there is measurable and identifiable change. This change can be

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measured along the lines of rigid sedimentary, official organisation of institutions, structures, masses and territories. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this becoming-other as change along ‘molar lines’ (Conley, 2010, pp. 175–177). Secondly, there is a becoming-other along subtle and incremental but still goal-oriented modifications, individual responses to complex interactions and connectivity in processes of creation. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this as change along ‘molecular lines’ (Conley, 2010, pp. 177–178). Thirdly, becoming-other happens along ruptures, the sudden arousal of resistance, desire, anxiety, imperceptible metamorphoses, creative thoughts and striking insights that make transformations happen. Deleuze and Guattari conceptualise this becoming-other as change along ‘lines of flight’ (Lorraine, 2010, pp. 147–148; Parr, 2010, p. 149; Hillier, 2007). When looking back at the skills elaborated by the respondents on their city-making practices, we see that many of these, and the knowledge acquired during their professional education and training as well as during previous work experiences, relate to either the molar or the molecular lines of change. Molar lines of change relate to knowing about spatial transformations, public administrations, urban socio-economic processes etc. Molecular lines of change relate to being able to interact with stakeholders, communities, the media and politicians. But in addition to that, the initiators were also able to deploy their personal drivers to empathise with coincidences, unexpected events and probing. Moreover, they were open to having a spatial impact beyond their initial plans or intentions. To follow the analogy of the lines of flight, and the interpretation of lines of flight by philosopher Isabelle Stengers, the initiators were able to find answers to problems that appeared ‘in the very process of creation of concepts answering other problems’, to open up to the ‘production of new unknowns’ (Stengers, 2016: online). Furthermore, respondents elaborated on how they could effectuate and act upon a line that belonged neither to themselves as initiator nor to other stakeholders, but which occurred between them (Stengers, 2005). Stengers, who continues the Deleuzian-Guattarian comparison between lines of flight and a witch’s flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), claims: ‘The witch is an interesting figure if we remember that her broom had no motor, that it was flying because of forces that she was able to invoke and convoke, but not define as her own, as her property’ (Stengers, 2016: online). Similarly, I argue that respondents, that is, the city-makers interviewed for this paper were able to not only invoke and convoke forces, but also to deploy these forces in order to get their projects going. They were able to act in response to the lines of flight that occurred to them. Skills to act upon ‘lines of flight’ are hardly taught in spatial planning education, and are hardly acknowledged in spatial planning research, apart from general creative thinking. The story of one respondent stands out, when she explained how her training as a professional dancer enabled her to make sense and act upon the complexities and interactions with other actors in developing her initiative:

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I am a professional dancer. […] When people ask me: are you still dancing? I say: yes, but in a different way! The ways in which I have to communicate with citizens and politicians are always a contact improvisation process. Dancing with my brain, dancing with my organs, with my body, in the way I communicate with different levels of society. (resp. 8) This quote resonates strongly with my own experience as an amateur dance improviser, as well as with the work of Manning and Massumi (2014), who draw a direct line from the Deleuzian-Guattarian-Stengerian lines of flights, philosophies of becoming and modern dance. In their work Thought in the Act (2014), Manning and Massumi describe how dance is an act of thinking in movement, of paying attention and of relationally and creatively co-moving as part of emergent collectives. What is more, Manning and Massumi focus on ‘bringing into relief techniques’ that dancers can use as springboards to set into motion new becoming, new modalities of thought, new rhythms, etc. (2014, p. ix). Respondent 8 noted that the skill that was the most crucial in her initiative, which she gained as a professional dancer, was the ability to read non-verbal communication and to learn about the intentions of other people from merely looking at their body language. Following this notion, the next section of this paper explores techniques that modern dancers are taught in order to become professional improvisors. I build upon the work of Manning and Massumi (2014), who elaborate on the work of choreographer William Forsythe, as well as on modern dance scholars who have based their studies of modern dance improvisation skills on Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophies of becoming. This exploration will then be mirrored with the experiences of the respondents, in order to gain more insight into city-making skills that have so far remained largely unnoticed in studies on community- and civic-led spatial developments.

Dance Improvisation Techniques Modern (or contemporary) dance originated in the early twentieth century as an opposition to classical ballet in which perfection of form and discipline were the supreme ideals and choreographies were fully scripted (Utrecht, 1988). Founders of modern dance sought inspiration in nature, indigenous and agricultural societies, and the natural movements of human bodies; they assumed that every movement is potentially dance, and every individual is potentially a dancer. Improvisation became a method to generate new creative processes in which associations from the subconscious and the individuality of each dancer could be fully deployed. Individual and collective improvisations, as well as improvisation-based choreographies, thus became important elements within modern dance (Utrecht, 1988).

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Improvisation in the context of modern dance is defined as the ability to create new gestures and movements on the spur of the moment, acting on the unexpected and unknown with novel physical responses (Batson, Hugenschmidt, & Soriano, 2016). Improvisation does not imply a lack of structure or that people just act randomly. While improvisation may be unplanned or unexpected, it is not random. Instead, improvisation allows movers to make empowering choices within a structured environment of enabling constraints (Batson et al., 2016, see also; Manning & Massumi, 2014). Improvisation-based choreographies consist of a few organisational parameters, in which dancers bring controlled and unintentional, individual and collective movements to a diverse and harmonious whole. As such, in order to improvise, dancers need highly developed physical skills, as well as highly raised cognitive and perceptual capacities that ‘imply awareness, knowledge, and decision-making in the act’ (Krasnow, 1994, pp. 16–23). Four of these skills are discussed in this section. Building upon the work of Manning and Massumi (2014) and several scholars who describe dance improvisation techniques from a Deleuzian-Guattarian perspective (Batson et al., 2016; Ehrenberg, 2012; Krasnow, 1994; Roche, 2009), four skills are here elaborated: kinaesthesia, embodiment, cueing and attunement.

Kinaesthesia Kinaesthesia is the ability to sense movement in muscles, tendons and joints, the bodily position and movement in space. The term is a modern compound of the Greek kinein, ‘to set in motion; to move’ and aesthesis, ‘perception’ (Krasnow, 1994). Kinesthesia is thus a physical and cognitive experience, in which dancers are trained in order to deploy this ‘sixth sense’ for their own authentic perception and style as an intuitive source of innovation (Sirotkina & Smith, 2016). The term ‘kinaesthetic mode of attention’ refers to a mode of intentional consciousness that occurs when dancing, which includes a number of abilities such as: listening to the body’s movements, problem-solving with the body, a curiosity about bodily feelings in conversation with different choreographic and performative contexts, and maintaining a particular awareness of the ways the body moves and responds to movement – a sort of listening and openness to the body and its movements in a mode of discovery. Contemporary dancers attribute descriptive verbs to this mode of attention, such as navigating, curiosity, problem-solving, experimenting, exploring and self-reflection (Ehrenberg, 2012). Ehrenberg (2015) illustrates the value of kinaesthetic awareness with the example of crash-to-create. She derives this term from interviews with modern dancers on their improvisation skills. Instead of focussing on perfection of form, improvising dancers focus on the ability to deal with mistakes: the moment a dancer goes off balance ‘is actually the creatively interesting point’ (Ehrenberg, 2015, p. 50). In these moments, when dancers find themselves in positions that are awkward and where they cannot get out with routine movement habits, dancers should be able to consciously reflect on these bodily habits and be open to new, surprising and creative movements. For this crash-to-create, kinaesthetic awareness is crucial.

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Embodiment The term embodiment is closely related to kinaesthesia, but instead of relating to an awareness (like kinaesthesia does), it relates to an ability to express a quality of movement or an idea exactly. In other words, embodiment refers to a clear articulation of the body. According to Isadora Duncan, one of the founders of modern dance, dance is the embodiment of emotion, which should be researched, explored and expressed (Utrecht, 1988). However, embodiment does not only stand for being connected to one’s own particular body, intricacies, sensitivities and limitations (Fraleigh, 1987). At the same time, embodiment stands for the ability of a dancer to adapt quickly to new styles without losing their own authenticity (Roche, 2009). Following a Deleuzian-Guattarian reading of contemporary dance, Roche (2009) describes dancers as possessing a ‘moving identity’, namely a ‘composite of past dance experience, anatomical structures and conditioned human movement’ (Roche, 2009, p. ii). This identity resonates both with an ‘individual way of moving and a process of incorporating different movement experiences in training and in professional practice’ (Roche, 2009, p. viii) and a sort of creative mesh between the individual approach to movement and the encounters with many distinct choreographic processes (Roche, 2009). This understanding of embodiment – not as a mere expression of a specific style, but as a mesh between individual style and style encountered – turns the dancer from a passive body within dance-making into an active agent who is capable of being self-representational (Roche, 2009).

Cueing The plain interpretation of cueing is getting directions for movements to make – either voiced cues by an instructor, or cues within music – that make a dancer, for instance, commence or stop a certain movement. Within improvisation, such cueing does not instruct explicit movement but rather suggests certain shapes of movement, spatial usage and time that the participants translate themselves into particular expressions (Batson et al., 2016). Following the work of William Forsythe, Manning and Massumi (2014) translate this further into a cueing to movement-in-motion. This skill, therefore, is to be understood as the ability to read and pick-up on the movements of other dances or of the dance as a collective, and to take these as cues for a repeatable tendency (Manning & Massumi, 2014). This skill is not merely the ability to synch of movements, but rather the ability to actively speculate on where the movement might go and to turn that speculation into movement itself: ‘Go slower, be in the other’s past (right before they catch up to you), then move past them to their future – look for the moment – aim at it rather than going directly to is […] then shift’ (Forsythe in Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 44). Movements are not just replicated, or followed, but rather continued by other means and gazing ‘forward, away or around lines of movement’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 48). In other words, cueing-in-movement is to ‘Be ahead of yourself. Don’t be adaptive, be predictive. That is, be speculative’. (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 41). As a result, cueing to movement-in-motion,

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for example, cueing to a movement which is changing and transforming itself as well (in-motion) is a way to strengthen emergent collectives while concurrently turning these emergent collectives into continuous innovative speculations themselves.

Attunement Cueing is closely related to attunement. Attunement is a term derived from psychotherapy that explains how individuals come into harmonious and responsive relationships. Dance theorists have adopted the term attunement to describe how mutual kinaesthetic empathy can encourage a synchronisation of needs, attention to the present moment, individual spontaneity, creativity, interchange, co-creation and oneness within an improvising group (Jerak, Vidrih, & ˇ Zvelc, 2018). This attunement is emergent and creative. Through cueing-inmovement, the dancers bring in their individual movements and interpretations of the emergent collective of the dance. Attunement enables dancers to build cueing-in-movement into a polyrhythm harmony of coming-together. It is the creation of complex patterns of resonant emphasis and contrapuntal divergence, which is not done through imitation or mimicry (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 118). Through attunement, dancers are able to let their and each other’s individual movement co-evolve with a diverse, polyrhythmic and transformative collective harmony. Through attunement, everything that is ‘seen, heard, sounded, spoken, gestured, and evoked’ collects in the ‘rhythmic milieu’, and a ‘milieu of mutual envelopment is activated’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014, pp. 48–49). A spatial and rhythmic harmony evolves in which a multitude of independent-yetrelated rhythms comes together, without losing their individual expressions (cf. Kwa, 2002).

Mirroring City-Making Skills Translating and applying the four dance improvisation skills discussed here (kinaesthesia, embodiment, cueing to movement-in-motion and attunement) to the practices of city-making would not only require a more in-depth theoretical elaboration of these techniques, but also close – ethnographic and embedded – observations of the actions, interactions and activities within city-making practices, as well as mapping the perceptions, cognitive or subconscious experiences of these actions through reflective interviews and focus groups. Although the interviews conducted for this research project did not meet such methodological demands, they do provide an impression of how kinaesthesia, embodiment, cueing to movement-in-motion and attunement are to be recognised in city-making practices. This is useful for understanding how city-makers act in the moment, adapt to contingencies and connect personal drivers to city-wide processes, as well as to reflect academically and professionally on what skills and capacities they deploy in such practices.

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Kinaesthesia can be translated to the ability to recognise and self-reflect on the internal and individual tendencies (personal drivers) of city-making practitioners, as well as forces (e.g., political, economic) pulling their projects in all kinds of directions. This is especially voiced by respondent 8, the one possessing a professional dancing background: ‘When people come to me, […] I always try to feel their energy […]. Instead of listening to words, I look at a person and by non-verbal communication I can feel whether it is a real intention or not’. This quote illustrates how kinaesthetic attention might enable a person to estimate or subjectively judge trustworthiness and willingness to cooperate. The example of crash-to-create can be aligned to this perspective in relation to the ability to use mistakes and tensions for experimentation and probing. As respondent 6 puts it, ‘we like to experiment, try new things. And of course, you fail sometimes, but without failure you never grow’. This quote shows how these city-makers do not fear risk or failure but, oppositely, they see failure as an essential element in their practice. This aspect is strongly in line with Charles Landry’s notion that city-making happens in between pursuing creativity and encouraging risk (Landry, 2006). Embodiment can be translated as the ability to be self-representational, as well as to form a mesh with other stakeholders, ideas and spatialities, becoming indeed a ‘moving identity’ as a city-maker. As respondent 2 says: ‘you have to learn to think like a shark developer to be able to rethink the system [of city developing]’. This quote illustrates how this specific city-maker is temporarily willing to embody a different style of thinking, in order to bring the project into a new phase. Cueing can be translated as a phased process, in which the city-maker is able to: first recognise trends, emergences and potentials in their own city-making practice, the interests and intentions of the stakeholders they interact with – and in – the wider urban or societal context; secondly to extrapolate these emergences as cues to movement-in-motion and thirdly, by cueing to these emergences, to strengthen and innovate the collective between places, spaces, actors and initiative. In this alignment, respondent 6 says: ‘it is important to give good examples of what can be done, for instance we mentioned the yoga or a photo studio… If you give such clear ideas, you can much easier come up with effective solutions and use’. As respondent 4 puts it, an initiative itself can function as such a cue to movement-in-motion as well, as ‘first signs that things are changing, and that a developer or the municipality can’t do things without the involvement of citizens who will be affected by their decisions’. These quotes illustrate how elements within a city-making project provide cues for other stakeholders and motivate them to become aligned with the initiative, and how city-making practices in general can be seen as cues showing that civic-led urban development is becoming more accepted by public and market stakeholders. Finally, attunement can be translated as the ability to see, recognise, and synchronise to the movements, rhythms, and developments of other places and actors, forming a spatial and rhythmic harmony with this multitude of independent-yet-related rhythms. As respondent 2 put it: ‘for me, an insight was that by making a collective project it will not be a burden, like “now we have to listen to all these people”. It is the opposite, you get a lot more value, people can

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relate to your project, you can do a match making’. This quote shows how these city-makers see how different rhythms of different places and actors can increase the value and meaning of their project.

Conclusions So far, little academic research has specifically focused on the practices and ways-of-working of civic-led spatial development and city-making. By interviewing several such initiators, this explorative study has illustrated that knowledge of socio-spatial transformation processes and process skills are handy, yet not the only important skills in city-making practices. Equally important are the ability to deploy personal drivers, to empathise with coincidences, unexpected events and questioning, and to be open to unforeseen spatial impacts. By using the Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of the lines of flight and Stengers’ witches’ flight, this paper linked these capacities to dance improvisation skills, in order to ‘bring into relief techniques’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. viii) through which to act upon these lines of flight. Four techniques were discussed. Although more in-depth research should be done on those skills and how to recognise and activate them in practices, this study offered first insights into how these skills can be translated to practices of city-making. The notions of kinaesthesia (awareness of personal, authentic perception and style as well as movement potential) and crash-to-create (deploy mistakes for new creative development), embodiment (clear articulation of personal style as well as adopting imposed movement into a personal articulation) and moving-identities, cueing to movement-in-motion and attunement (co-motion and co-evolving movement into polyrhythmic harmonies) explain and illustrate how the city-making project initiators acted in the moment, were able to connect personal drivers to city-wide processes and how they became adaptive to the unexpected and the contingent. City-making does not stand alone: it is part of a much wider trend towards civic-led and multi-actor forms of spatial development. Moreover, within the larger context of spatial planning and urban governance, practitioners and scholars alike have been searching for ways in which urban governance and planning processes can become more receptive to complexity, uncertainty, multiplicity and dynamics (Teisman, Van Buuren, & Gerrits, 2009). However, despite extensive scholarship on complexity, complexity-informed urban practices remain ‘thin on the ground’ (Boelens & De Roo, 2016). From that perspective, learning from the skills required in city-making practices, which are inherent to urban complexity, is even more interesting. Studies addressing similar issues could reveal skills that are currently overlooked in education and undervalued in practice, but that actors in urban development can – and should – learn to deploy. Hence, deriving skills and capacities from modern dance improvisation techniques provides a rich repertoire to ‘adaptive governance’ (e.g., Eshuis & Gerrits, 2019), which is a key concept in the field of planning in complexity. By linking spatial planning and urban governance to a somatic practice like dancing, the body, the mind and the heart of the practitioner are to be seen as an ear, an organ

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for listening, while the practitioner her/himself is made into a tidal process, subsiding into ongoing movements (Manning & Massumi, 2014). The notions described in this paper enable practitioners to become aware of their uniqueness, differences and variations, and to form a complex dance in the interaction with their environments (Teisman & Edelenbos, 2011). Planning then becomes performance-based rather than performance-measured (Hillier, 2007, p. 321). The vocabulary used in improvisational dancing actually allows one to talk about the creative and resilient practices and attitudes of city-makers, bringing to light what makes these practices productive. In this way, modern dance and improvisation offer new and rich perspectives on the skills and capacities that practitioners need within the complexity of the challenges posed by city-making practices.

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Conclusion: Moving Homes – Moving Bodies – Moving Minds Beitske Boonstra, Teresa Cutler-Broyles and Stefano Rozzoni People, spaces and places constitute one another through movement. This has been the leading thread throughout the chapters presented in Moving Spaces and Places: Interdisciplinary Essays on Transformative Movements through Space, Place, and Time. The various ways in which the chapters have discussed spaces and places in relation to movement make the dual meaning of movement again explicit. Movement can refer to the physical act of moving, as well as to the psychological experience of duration. Moreover, the chapters have all illustrated how this physical act of movement and the psychological experience of duration are inextricably interwoven. Movement can be an analytical tool for reading and understanding the meaning associated with space and place and, at the same time, unsettle the perceptions of and affects for spaces and places. Movement is both a bodily experience and a psychological transformative one, continuously altering the relationships between people, places and spaces. Crossing the knowledge domains and practices of culture, art, pedagogy, geography, architecture and city planning, the chapters of this book together reveal two major potentials for the study of movement in relation to space and place: the first related to reconciliation of relationships; the second related to the healing power of agency. Firstly, movement seems to have the paradoxical meaning of making duration physical. In other words, movement does not necessarily have to be a physical act of moving but could as well hold the psychological meaning of contemplation – movement as a way of distancing, of even standing still and reflecting. When in such a way duration becomes physical, it holds the potential of better understanding and critically reflecting on the worlds we live in, of transformation or change of percepts, of new affects, of reconciliation. This movement away from one percept into new affective relations and reconciliations might happen between houses and their dwellers (Batchelor, Blum), inhabitants and their neighborhoods (Abrahams, Boonstra, Machado et al.), between social groups differently situated in place and time but entangled in struggles over spatial meanings (Hall, Gomes), or between feelings of loss, alienation and belonging (Bissel, Macleod, Millar). Reconciliations can occur even between our subconscious and conscious readings Moving Spaces and Places, 183–185 Copyright © 2022 Beitske Boonstra, Teresa Cutler-Broyles and Stefano Rozzoni Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221012

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of spaces and places, restoring our human relationships with overly socially constructed space. Movement holds the potential to observe and distance, to reveal hidden or so-far-unconscious meanings, to shift percepts and affects. The various contributions in this book make clear that together with time, movement as duration holds the potential of restorative transformation, a reconciliation between people and the places and spaces they inhabit, and a healing of those relationships. Secondly, this transformative movement, this healing power, does not come out of the blue. The chapters in this book reveal another potential for the study of movement in relation to space and place, namely how the critical perspective that movement generates leads the way towards agency. Agency related to movement allows us to set new spatial becoming-others into motion. Movement as a psychological act of setting in motion. The chapters in this book show how an aesthetic experience, artistic and/or embodied practices, as well as participatory action-research, are instrumental in bringing people and spaces and place together, not only mentally, but corporeally as well. The chapters in this book give a rich repertoire of tools and methods to perform such agency. Think about the improvisation techniques discussed by Boonstra, the potential that architecture offers for spatial appropriation as discussed by Blum, the participatory walking discussed by Machado et al., the participatory choreographies discussed by Macleod, the performative walking discussed by Bissel, the participatory storytelling instigated by Abrahams. All of these are research and activation methods, and Hall complements this even with collective storytelling as an educational method. In these chapters, the agency of the protagonists is exemplary of the healing capacity for spaces and places. The story of Emily Hobhouse and her attempts to change the perception of Imperialism as discussed by Gomes, and the story of Eleanor who turns into a multiplicity with the house, as discussed by Batchelor, hold a warning as well, as they illustrate how such agency over space and place can as well evolve into self-annihilation or out-casting. Let’s hope that the dancers, choreographers, artists, city-makers, architects, walkers and narrators that took the leading role in the narratives of this book, and those who will be inspired by their work and practices, will indeed face a better fate. This book, of course, offers a collection of tangible approaches that ensure their, and all of our, success. Having discussed movement related to the home as place of affect and transformation, and moving bodies as agents of transformation, the chapters of this book together form a composition of transformative allegories and practices. The two opening chapters of Moving Homes and Moving Bodies (Batchelor on castles and Millar on textiles) illustrate the power of such allegories. The two closing chapters of Moving Homes and Moving Bodies (Abrahams on collective storytelling and Boonstra on improvisation as a city-making skill) offer examples of the power of such practices. All the chapters in between wonderfully interweave space, place, time, psychology, movement, affect, percepts each in their own unique, multi-layered, and meaningful way. All talk about the qualitative change that movement might produce.

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Together, the chapters in Moving Spaces and Places: Interdisciplinary Essays on Transformative Movements through Space, Place and Time offer a rich and multi-layered experience of transformational movement, which hopefully will unfold new percepts and affects among its readership. The image by Millar in her chapter on textiles forms an allegory for this: a textile may consist of several layers of woven fabric, and each layer you position yourself on reveals another perspective and creates new meanings.

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Index Aboriginal Reconciliation in Australia, 38 Accessibility, 65 Aesthetic experiences, 2 Aesthetics, 2–3 Affordability, 65 Age of modernity architectural spaces, 109 Agency, 82–83, 85, 184 Allegorical house as body, 12–19 Allegory, 184 of artistic practice, 5 American Civil War, 49 Anglo-Boer War or, to the Afrikaners. See Second Boer War Apartheid design, 80 Applied sociological research, 65 Appropriation of space, 66 Architectural legacy, 60 Art, 2–3 Art walks, 130 Articulation of space, 101–102 Artistic practices, 2–3 Attunement, 176 Australian homemaking, 29–32 Barbarism, 52 Boer War and concentration camps, 47–49 Emily Hobhouse’s Report, 49–51 liberals, Empire and imperial expansion, 45–47 impact of Report, 52–55 Bauhaus, 69 Becoming-other, 171–172 Black communities, 80 Black townships, 80 Boer War. See Second Boer War Bong’s Place, 87–89

Butterfly-shaped building (Schmetterlingshaus), 65 Choreographies, 114, 126 Cities of the Dead (Roach), 116 City-makers, 167–168 City-making, 167–168 attunement, 176 cueing, 175–176 dance improvisation techniques, 173–178 deploying lines of flight, 171–173 embodiment, 175 mirroring city-making skills, 176–178 practices, 168 skills in practice, 169–171 Civic-led practices, 168–169 Climate crisis, 114 Co-creation, 83–84, 91–92 Coastal erosion, 114 Colonial violence, 37 Colonisation, 29 Communication and educational science, 170 Community engagement (CE), 80 with broader community, 87–89 in democratic South Africa, 82–83 storytelling as, 83 Concentration camps, Boer War and, 47–49 Contemplation, 183–184 Contemporary art ‘experiential turn’ in, 130 walking practices within, 130 Contemporary dance. See Modern dance Contemporary site-responsive performances, 114

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Content analysis technique, 153 Contextualisation of study areas and research scope, 152 Creative geographies, 130, 132–133 Creative placemaking, 167–168 Creative space, 71–75 ‘Creative thinking’, 170 Crime and safety perception, 150–151 Crimean War, 49 Criminal Prevention for Environmental Design (CPTED), 150 Critical action, 83–84 Critical discovery, 83–85 ‘Critical imagination’, 130 Cueing, 175–176 to movement-in-motion, 176–177 Cul-de-sac project, 133, 135, 137 Cultural remembering, 120 Dance improvisation Kinaesthesia, 174 skills, 176 techniques, 173–178 Data analysis, 153 Decolonisation, 31–32 Deflection, 144–145 Deleuzian notion of aesthetics, 2–3 Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of ‘lines of flight’, 168–169 Democratic South Africa, community engagement in, 82–83 D´erive, 131 D´etournement, 131 Devil is a Woman, The (film), 107 Digestion as process, 11–12 Digestive process, 24 Dispositional fear, 150–151, 158–159, 161 Do-It-Yourself urbanism, 167–168 Drover’s Wife, The, 28, 31–32 reading group, 36–38 Duration, 2 Dwelling, 61–62 allegorical house as body, 12–19 digestive process, 24

haunted house, 19–24 Ecological memorialising, 115–116 Ecology of memory, 126–127 Economic vitality, 65 Embodiment, 175–176 Emily Hobhouse’s Report, 49–51 ‘Empathetic unsettlement’, 37 Empire and imperial expansion, 45–47 Empowerment, 82–83 English literature, 9–10 Environmental Criminology, 150 ‘Environments of memory’ (mileux de memoire), 116 Exhibition displays, making, 85–87 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 10–12, 18, 20 Familiarity, 141–142 Fear of crime, 150–151, 158, 160 Federal District (DF), 152 Felt space, 103–105 Festoon project, 133, 135, 137, 139 Franco Prussian War, 49 Functionalism, 61–62 Furniture design, 70–71 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 60, 63 Gilbreth’s approach, 68–69 Groups Area Act (1950), 80 Hansel and Gretel, 12 Haunting of Hill House, The (Jackson), 10–12, 19 History, Memory, Performance (Dean), 116 Home, reshaping spaces of Australian homemaking, 29–32 teaching indigenous Australian literary adaptations, 33–36 The Drover’s Wife reading group, 36–38 House of Flying Daggers (film), 103 ‘House of Temperance’ (Spenser), 12–13

Index Housing policy, Swedish socialdemocratic, 70 Human/human relationships, 114–115 IKEA (Swedish furniture giant), 70 connection between GDR and, 70–71 Imagination, 144 Imperial enthusiasm, 47 Imperial expansion, 45–47 Imperialism, 44–45, 47, 184 Improvisation, 168–169 Indigenous Australian homemaking practices, 29–30 Indigenous sovereignty, 27–28 Industrially produced housing, 64 Information technology, 170 ‘Infra-mall’, 103 Insecurity perception, 155–158 Instigation of imperial sentiment, 46 Integrated planning process of buildings, 65 Intercultural grafting, 38 Interdisciplinary approach, 82–83 ‘Inventive method’, 130 Kinaesthesia, 174, 176–177 Lace structures, 101 Les Mots et les choses (Foucault), 117 Liberal Party, 44–45 Liberals, 45–47 ‘Liminal’, 134–135 ‘Lines of flight’, 168–169 Lines: A Brief History (Ingold), 101–102 Lived space, 66–71 Lost in Lace exhibition, 108–109 Macassar township, 80–81 Making duration physical, 183–184 MDW 60 (M¨obelprogramm Deutsche Werkst¨atten 60), 69–70 Memorials, 115 Memory, 116 Midnight Lace (film), 107–108

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“Million Programme”, 70 Minor dramaturgies, 114–115 Mirroring city-making skills, 176–178 Mise-en-sc`ene, 107–109 Mobile method interview, 153 Modern dance, 173 improvisation in, 174 improvisation skills, 173 Modern urbanism, 151 Modernity, 116 architectural spaces, 109 Modular construction, 74 Movement, 1–2, 60, 183 movement-based artistic practices, 130 as psychological act of setting in motion, 184 Multi-disciplinary approach, 65 N-Vivo software, 153 Narrative therapy, storytelling in, 83 Neue Wohnung–modern gestaltet, 61, 72 New Apartment–Designed the Modern Way. See Neue Wohnung–modern gestaltet Nomadic spatiality, 90 Okjokull (OK), 115 ‘Order of Things, The’ (Foucault), 13–14 Out of Place: A Memoir, 105 Out of Water, 114, 120, 122 Pages of the Sea, 114 Pages of the Sea (Boyle), 116–120 Pao: A dwelling for Tokyo Nomadic Women (Ito), 102–103 Participatory mobile methods, 162 Participatory storytelling, 184 Party Congress, 64 People, 183 agency, 83 depersonalised, 4 humanisation of, 83–84 locomotion of, 153

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movement of, 1 relationships between people, places, and spaces, 3 Perception of insecurity, 150, 155, 158 Performance, 114 Performative ‘art walks’, 130 Performative conventions, 142–143 Performative walking, 5, 184 ‘Cul-de-sac’, 137 familiarity, 141–142 ‘Festoon’’, 137–139 imagination, 144 performative conventions, 142–143 performative walking projects in Edinburgh, 135–146 ‘Playing Up’, 139 Portobello, Edinburgh, in, 133–134 practices, 131–133 projecting possibilities, 145–146 protection and deflection, 144–145 ‘Scale Walks’, 135 walking as way of making contact, 143–144 Permeability, 101, 106 Permeable space, 102–103 Personal well-being, 71 Philippine-American War, 49 Piers Plowman, 12–16, 18 Place, 1, 183 in place and out of place, 105–107 role, 144 textiles and, 99–101 ‘Places of memory’ (lieux de memoire), 116 Plattenbau becomes the Platte, 71–75 Plattenbauten, 60–61 Playing Up project, 133, 135, 139 Political journalism, 170 Post-colonial studies, 27–28 Practicality, 71 Practices, 184 Pragmatic approach, 68 Praxis, 83–84, 91 Production of Space, The (Lefebvre), 61

Professional practice of urban development, 168 Protection, 144–145 Raindogs, 132 re:Kreator network, 169 Reconciliation process, 27–28, 183–184 Repetitive walking practices, value of, 141–142 Report (Hobhouse), 49–51 impact of, 52–55 Safety perception, 150, 153, 155 contextualisation of study areas and research scope, 152 crime and, 150–151 data analysis, 153 dispositional fear, 161 exploratory qualitative studies, 162 fear of crime, 158–160 instruments, 152 method, 152–153 participants, 152 perception of insecurity, 155–158 procedure, 152–153 results, 153–161 results, 161 and walkability, 151 Scale Walks project, 133, 135 Second Boer War, 44 and concentration camps, 47–49 Second War of Independence. See Second Boer War Self-reflexive quality, 130 ‘Sense of anxiety’, 30 Shorelines, 114, 126–127 face in sand, 126–127 marking time, 114–125 Pages of the Sea, 116–120 Tide Times, 122, 124–125 Out of Water, 120–122 Site-specific performance, 132 Situational Crime Prevention, 150 Situational fear, 150–151 Situationist International, 131 Social Darwinism, 46–47

Index Social-democratic reform, 70 Socio-economic qualities, 65 Socio-spatial processes, 170 Socioeconomic factors, 150 South African War. See Second Boer War Space, 1–2, 183 articulation of, 101–102 build community identity, 92–93 felt, 103–105 lived, 66–71 metaphorical treatment of, 9–10 model development to urban problem to creative space, 71–75 modernist understanding of, 61–62 permeable, 102–103 textiles and, 99–101 Spanish-American War, 49 Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel (Upstone), 31 Spatial practice, 63–66 Sporadic spatiality, 90 Sprelacart, 69 Story maps, 85–87 Storytelling as CE process, 83 co-creation, 91–92 community engagement in democratic South Africa, 82–83 community engagement with broader community, 87–89 conceptual framework, 83–85 critical action, 90 Praxis, 91 Spaces build community identity, 92–93 story maps, street photography and making exhibition displays, 85–87 Studiolight’s reauthoring process, 81 Studiolight’s Who We Are Macassar Community Exhibition Project, 85 Street photography, 85–87

191

Studiolight, 80–81, 84–85 reauthoring process, 81 Who We Are Macassar Community Exhibition Project, 85 ‘Survival of the fittest’ thesis, 47 Swedish social-democratic housing policy, 70 Tactical urbanism, 167–168 Teaching indigenous Australian literary adaptations, 33–36 Textiles articulation of space, 101–102 felt space, 103–105 Mise-en-sc`ene, 107–109 permeable space, 102–103 in place and out of place, 105–107 space, place and, 99–101 Thought in the Act, 173 Tidal (Smith), 114, 119-122 Tidal spaces, 114, 126–127 Tide Times, 114, 122, 124–125 Transcultural literary adaptations, 31–32 Transformational movement, 185 Transformative movement, 5 ‘Twelve-corner’ building (Zw¨olfeckhaus), 65 Unsettlement, 28 Urban crime rates in Brazil, 150 Urban modernism, 67–68 Urban modernism in East Germany lived space, 66–71 Plattenbau becomes the Platte, 71–75 spatial practice, 63–66 theoretical framework, 61–63 Urbanism, 61–62 User as designer, 66–71 Value of repetitive walking practices, 141–142 ‘Victorian prosperity’, 46 Visual devices role, 145–146

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Index

Voluntary community organisations (VCOs), 80 Walkability, safety perception and, 151 Walking in ‘odd’ ways, 142–143 as a group, 144–145 practices within contemporary art, 130

as way of making contact, 143–144 ‘Walking as art’, 130 We of the Never Never (Gunn), 29–30 Werkbund, 69 Who We Are Macassar Community Exhibition Project, 85 Witnessing, 32–33