ABSTRACT
This chapter is about beginning differently, holding space, and wasting time. It acknowledges that placemaking is not always about physical space/place but can be thought of as intra-personal spatial care: a space being opened up for relationality in which radical care is practised. Historically, so-called public spaces of engagement have seen disenfranchisement and violence against people based on intersectional identities. Based on the ideas of Karen Barad, intra-personal spatial care works against such spatial violence (Barad, 2006, p. 151). The placemaking process becomes porous and shaped by the entanglement of a community of people. That intra-personal space is a place of resistance: not necessarily a remaking, but a wrestling with, and recognition of, the resistances to spatial violence by those gone before. As Lauren Berlant asserts, it is not about ‘being purposive but inhabiting agency differently’ (Berlant, 2011, p. 116). It is a humbling process of ally-ship, of lateral solidarity and a place of trust and co-dependency that can become only through time and entanglement.
