week 3 30 september 2010 geog 3300 | space, place & scale copyright © amy lavender harris, 2010...

Week 330 September 2010

GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & ScaleCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris, 2010

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GEOG 3300Space, Place & Scale

Week 3Geographies of Dwelling and Home

Department of GeographyYork University

Fall Term 2010-2011

First reading response assignment

• Reminder that the first reading response assignment will be due in class next week (7 October 2010)

• Handout distributed in class last week



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Approach Associated Schools Preoccupations with Place

Descriptive

-Regional Geography (Richard Hartshorne)-Early cultural geographers (Carl Sauer)-Spatial Science (1970s)

-‘ideographic’-‘chorology’-Regions and cultures-Place as a thing: ontologically given-Environmental determinism (although Sauer held that culture transforms nature)-‘Place’ remains largely undefined

Phenomenological

Phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard)-Humanistic geographers (Yi-Fu Tuan, Anne Buttimer, David Seamon, Ted Relph, Edward Casey)

-experienced, ‘embodied’ or lived place--’topophilia’ (Tuan)-Home and dwelling-belonging and attachment-‘authenticity’Place as primordial or Place as “mutually constituted” by environment and culture-‘romantic’? Naïve?

Social Constructionist

-‘Radical’ Geography-Marxism (David Harvey-Feminism (Gillian Rose, Doreen Massey)-Poststructuralism and postcolonialism (Edward Soja, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said)

-Social determinism: places as socially constructed-Spatial ‘turn’ in the cultural and social sciences-Class, gender and race-Transgression and resistance; power and privilege-Postcolonial legacies-‘ungrounded? Incoherent?-What happens to ontology?



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At the Threshold of Place

“’A threshold,’ wrote the third-century philosopher Porphyrus, ‘is a sacred thing.’ Thresholds, though wider than the idea of doors, share their role as repositories of desire and temptation. What is opened at a door? Onto what landscape of the imagination does a threshold gaze? Gaston Bachelard has written that a door is an entire cosmos of the half-open. A threshold is perhaps, by extension, a cosmos of the already half-understood.” (Gary Michael Dault, Cells of Ourselves, 1989)

Early encounters with place

• What is the first place you remember “being?”• How old were you?• What is so significant about this first spatial

experience that you have remembered it? • Has this early spatial experience informed your

later encounters with place? If so, how?



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The House• “Before he is “cast into the world” … man is laid in the cradle of the

house. … Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.” (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, [1964] 1994: 7)

• “…our house is our corner of the world … it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.” (ibid.: 4; also quoted in Stefanovic, 1998: 41)

• Architect Witold Rybczynski muses in Home: A Short History of an Idea (1986) that ‘home’ conveys ideas about nostalgia, intimacy and privacy, domesticity, commodity and delight, ease, light and air, efficiency, style and substance, and comfort and well-being as well as chosen austerity. Perhaps a romanticized history of the idea of home?

• Other meanings? The home as keep? Its thresholds as separations? Boundaries, barriers? Prisons, even?

• Not all encounters with home are happy (e.g., domestic violence, war, displacement)

• What if one has no place to call home? (e.g., Tuan on migrant workers’ children; displaced peoples)

The Body• In Topophilia (1974) Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (a humanistic geographer)

suggests that people measure objects in space against the scale of our own bodies.

• In Space and Place (1977) Tuan claims that infants have no “world” and cannot distinguish between self and the external environment.

• Tuan’s developmental approach is borrowed from famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who argued that learning is inherently spatial.

• Spatial experience begins with simple coordinates: ahead, behind, sideways, up, down, horizontal, vertical.

• Spatial language: home, away, here, there, street names, etc. • Spatial fantasies• Learning about space by exploring it• Technological impacts on spatial learning (e.g., aerial photography, fast-

moving vehicles).• Geopolitics also affects spatial learning in individuals (e.g., warm, travel,

migration); so too does gender (in many places boys enjoy greater mobility)• The point here is that experience matters when we encounter place.• This is at the heart of the phenomenological approach to space/place.



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What makes a place ‘home’?

• Operative words: “place” and “home”.• The idea that there is something about the experience

of a particular place that makes it home:– Intimacy, privacy, security, separation between

‘inside’ and ‘outside’, the present of a threshold.– The idea of retreat or return.– The idea of origin. – There is something corporeal about home. Room

womb.



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What does it mean to be ‘homeless’?

• Opposite of ‘home’? Intersection with dwelling? A continuum?• Note that we are forced beyond the literal, ideographic,

material almost immediately. • Can you live in a house and still be homeless? [soulless

condos, empty suburban houses, etc.• Are all unhoused people ‘homeless?’ (e.g., Shauneesy Bishop-

Stall’s Toronto book, Down to This (2004); Maggie Helwig’s Toronto novel, Girls Fall Down (2008).

• At risk of becoming homeless: “The City of Toronto defines homelessness as a condition of people who live outside, stay in emergency shelters, spend most of their income on rent, or live in overcrowded, substandard conditions and are therefore at serious risk of becoming homeless.” (City of Toronto, 2003. Toronto Report Card on Housing and Homelessness. )

Spatial Dualities• Dualities: inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion, past/future,

prison/sanctuary, building/destruction, joining/rupture, arrival/departure, peace/war, home/homelessness

• The most prominent duality? Self [as a subject] / Other [as an object]; also mind/body

• Dualities as a main legacy of the Enlightenment approach to science [knowledge] in which the world was catalogued and categorized into discrete parts.

• Dualities are tremendously useful in science, but they can also conceal the reality that nature does not divide itself so easily into rigid categories.

• Philosopher Bruno Latour argues that we stern culture “purifies” ontological categories by eliminating objects (e.g., the homeless) that call their separation into question.



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Transcending Dualism

• Moving beyond “either/or” categories: culture/nature, Self/Other, subject/object [the biggest dualities]

• The phenomenological subject• Subjectivity and intersubjectivity• The meaning of Being: moving beyond

Descartes “cogito ergo sum.”



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Home as a Phenomenological Object: Understanding

Phenomenology• Phenomenology: the study of phenomena (anything that

appears or presents itself to experience; appearances and essences)

• Experience: the senses (sight, sound, touch, belief, memory, imagination, excitement, anger, loss, judgment, movement

• Consciousness is intentional (that is, always directed toward phenomena)

• History of phenomenology as a response to Enlightenment empiricism and the fixation on mathematically derived ‘laws of nature’

• ‘Reality’ must include not only measurable, quantifiable objects but also subjective properties of the ‘lifeworld’; normative (evaluative) questions also deserve answers.

• Phenomenologists reject Cartesian dualities between ‘inner experience’ (subjective) and the ‘outer world’ (objective)



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Home as a Phenomenological Object: The Phenomenological

Approach• Philosopher Edmund Husserl (the first phenomenologist):

science is also ontological (concerned with various ways of experiencing reality) and epistemological (concerned with various ways of knowing)

• Husserl: we begin by suspending [bracketing] our assumptions about what is ‘real’ or ‘natural’

• Through a process of phenomenological reduction [epoche] we bring to light the “essential intentional contact between consciousness and the world” (Peet, 1998: 38)

• The epoche reveals the I (the cogito, the self, consciousness), the world (the phenomenon) and the conjunction between the two.

• For Husserl, this is how we come to understand the lifeworld. (the moving, historical field of lived experience)

• The ‘real’ is not simply ‘given’. There is no meaningful a priori ‘reality’ separate from consciousness.



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More on the Phenomenological Approach

• German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology focuses on the ultimate existential question: what is the meaning of being?

• Heidegger focuses on uncovering the forgotten fundamental structures of being

• For Heidegger, Being = Dasein = “being there”• Dasein is always “thrown” into a concrete situation: the everyday

world; the core phenomenological project is making sense of this everyday world (H. rejects the idea that space is merely a container)

• Other phenomenologists: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (perception and embodiment), Gaston Bachelard (the poetics of space), Alfred Schultz (phenomenological sociology)

• Phenomenological geographers: Edward Casey, Ted Relph, Robert Mugerauer, Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, [Tuan?], David Seamon, Joseph Grange, Michael Zimmerman, Anne Buttimer, Tim Cresswell



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‘Doing’ Phenomenology• “… the phenomenologist does not seek to derive

categorical evidence of universal truth claims. As with all phenomenological projects, this reading cannot be a conclusive, systematized product, but rather, a step along the way in our investigations of places. Hermeneutic deconstructions of interviews with residents; phenomenological interpretations of literary or artistic moments in the history of each settlement; phenomenological descriptions of key landmarks or essential pathways; further interior reflection …” (Stefanovic, 1998: 32)



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What does it mean to Dwell?

• A central concern of phenomenology in geography.• Heidegger: “the plight of dwelling lies in this, that mortals ever

search anew for the essence of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.” (Building Dwelling Thinking)

• Dwelling and building: “the build is in itself already to dwell”• Building (bauen) means “to dwell”: to remain, to stay in a place, to

cherish and protect, to care for, to preserve, to cultivate (gardens and edifices), to spare, to set free

• We dwell in the fourfold (earth, sky, gods, mortals)• Building as gathering (gathering the fourfold into a locale):

consider a bridge• “To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to

await the divinities, to initiate mortals – this fourfold preserving is the simple essence of dwelling. In this way, then, do genuine buildings give form to dwelling in its essence, and house this essential unfolding.”

• Genuine building is to bring [rather than challenge] forth, to let appear, to unfold. Techne / technology.

Raymond Koukal on Dwelling

• Thinking philosophically, we still begin with the everyday environment of home

• Elevating dwelling to questions of meaning: To reside; to be accustomed to; to be familiar with; to cherish where one is; to care; to “build through cultivation and construction”; to be at peace; preserving or sparing from harm or danger; to dwell is to be mortal (?)

• According to philosopher Raymond Koukal, “I dwell” because “I have an environment to which I belong … within this space I am involved in a doing … I am also involved with others.”

• Dwelling as building, as engaging, as using our space and the tools in it• Dwelling as familiarity• Dwelling as connected to Being (or, to the concept of self and identity:

we are where and how we dwell?)• Koukal: Buildings themselves have little to do with dwelling, but

building does.” (64). What does this mean?• Koukal: “buildings built as homes carry no guarantee that dwelling will

occur in them”



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Raymond Koukal on Homelessness

• Koukal’s definition of homelessness:“Those which do not dwell belong neither to Others, nor the “they.” They do not belong because they have no location within our environment. Since they do not belong in this manner they do not exist in familiarity. Their sole involvement is with their own “mere” existence in a place to which they do not belong, and so they can hardly be said to be cultivating pf constructing anything. In this sense, they cannot be said to be “doing” anything, to be “building” anything, and so they do not dwell. Yet they exist.” (Koukal, 67)

• When familiarity, cultivation, building, or sparing are ruptured, we become homeless.

• Our indifference – or, our paternal condescension – to others (or ‘Others’) makes us all homeless. How? (encountering others as if they were equipment or distant objects)

• A problem is that we cannot help fibrillating between modes of care (“leaping in” vs. “leaping ahead”)



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Koukal continued …

• Because of the recognition that it is our own failure to fully dwell or care or preserve; that is, we fail to recognize the homeless as fellow beings [as fellow mortals]

• It is important that the homeless stand out to us so that we may recognize our responsibility to liberate them from their discrete environments.

• We cannot truly dwell until we truly have care that others dwell, too.

• Their homelessness is also our homelessness• “It remains to be seen whether or not the discrete

dissonance of the homeless among us will bring us into an authentically poetic reckoning, or to a time so destitute that even the efforts of the poets will be rendered futile.”



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Phenomenological Encounters with Place: (I) Cavtat and

Mississauga• Ingrid Stefanovic’s phenomenological encounters with Cavtat (a

town in Croatia near Dubrovnik)) and Mississauga’s Square One• Sense of place in Cavtat: (1) interplay of

insideness/outsideness; (2) anchorage in a clear centre; (3) reflective of time and human finitude; (4) the grace of the earth; (5) the interplay of mystery and disclosure; (6) dwelling within spontaneity and possibility … But … effects of the war in the former Yugoslavia (ethnic hatred, bombings)

• Sense of place at Square One: (1) anchorage in a commercial centre; (2) point-oriented relation of inside to outside community; (3) the rural ideal preserved (or caricatured … City Hall silo); (4) privacy and enclosure; (5) reflective of time as the present; (6) freedom as autonomy … But …requires an idealized, romantic view of place/home/dwelling and concealment of the unsustainability of suburban places … flight(?)

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• Note focus on specific settings; “description”. • But “description” means something unusual here. • Note also emphasis on process, becoming, “learning”

to dwell (and to understand dwelling). • Personal journey: being-at-home.

• Note that Stefanovic suggests that “place” cannot be defined using conventional language; perhaps we require phenomenology to understand place. (see page 32)



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Phenomenological Encounters with Place (II):

Vari Hall• Meaningful encounters with Vari Hall: looking beyond the

material• Movement, encounters, temporality, sensory elements,

emotions, reflection, narration• Vari as:

- a place of meeting- A transitive place- Proximity, distance, immersive, interpretive, sensing,

responsive- Emotional connection; memory, fear, longing- Power? Control? Belonging?- What of the new benches? Laptop outlets? Music, dance,

meeting, protest? - [How] can a person ‘dwell’ in Vari Hall?



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Encounters with Place (III): The Social Production

of Scale• Neil Smith’s analysis of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s the

Homeless Vehicle project (New York City)• Shopping cart as home?: shelter and mobility (see also

‘poliscar’, Wodiczko’s subsequent version)• “Not a home but illegal real estate … an architecture

provoked by poverty, a missile, the indication of flight, of retreat, or invasion and attack.”(commentator)

• Designed to expose and express relations of power and disempowerment: a visibly contested space; a resistance to erasure

• Smith’s views are informed by Marxist geographers including David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre

• Smith suggests homeless vehicles use scale as a political strategy of resistance: scale in this case is socially constructed.



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• Scale at the level of: body, home, community, urban, region, nation, global

• Aspects of scale: (1) identity (of scale and people within a particular scale); (2) internal differences; (3) borders with other scales; and (4) political possibilities for resistance within and between scales

• Smith says all of these scales are socially constructed. Do you agree? How/why?

• What are some of the limitations to this approach? Some of the insights?

week 3 30 september 2010 geog 3300 | space, place & scale copyright © amy lavender harris, 2010...

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