ABSTRACT
To examine the ‘socially embedded aesthetics’ of places and to understand how they shape the politics of public life, one last aspect needs to be taken into account: the lived experience of place – in other words, the ways in which the senses define our direct experience in public life. I am following the lead of Soja (2000), who argues that to capture the complexity of real and imagined space – physical and representational space – and to examine space as the active arena of development and change, conflict and resistance, one needs to analyse lived space which is ‘a simultaneously real and imagined, actual and virtual, locus of structured individual and collective experience and agency’ (Soja 2000: 11). Let me briefly elaborate on this point. Lived space depends on the sensuous body to organize, mediate and ‘make sense’ of the spatial practices and mental constructs that produce space: ‘spatial practice is lived directly before it is conceptualised’ (Lefebvre 1991: 34). In Lefebvre’s conception of space the body is central in that it mediates between mental, individual and social realms. Hence it brings together the subjective and the social, the public and the personal, the abstract and the concrete, the global and the local (Amin and Thrift 2002). This is an active and dynamic process, directly lived and mostly not reflected upon, an ‘often untheorised understanding of space’ (Shields 1991: 54). It is in lived space that contestations around meanings and uses of public space are played out, where spatial conflicts erupt and become tangible, where living together is negotiated.
