ABSTRACT
This chapter examines urban places, and discusses different ways of thinking about their role in structuring urban belonging and everyday experiences of the city. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between processes of physical construction and meaning-making, to understand how people make a home in the city. The process of transforming abstract space into concrete, meaningful place is often referred to as place-making (see Box 2.1 on the relationship between space andplace). Space and place
Starting in the late twentieth century, urban anthropology has been inspired and transformed by concepts of space and place, tying into a broader ‘spatial turn’ within the social sciences and the humanities. Anthropology – along with other fields such as sociology, political science history, visual culture studies and literary criticism – began to draw on theories and concepts from geography. One main discussion in this regard has concentrated on the distinction between space and place.
Space is generally seen as a more abstract phenomenon. Place, in contrast, is commonly understood as a bounded form of space that has concrete physical features, is shaped by human experience and imbued with meaning. Places are bounded in the sense that they can usually be located in space, either on a map or by using geographical coordinates. Places tend to have concrete material characteristics, for instance in the form of architecture or natural features. In addition, space becomes place when it is lived in. It is made meaningful in different ways: first, through our everyday embodied experiences and the attachments and connections we form to places, and second, through the often politicized discourses that also define the meaning of a place (Cresswell 2004).
Place has often been associated with rootedness, authenticity and the ‘local’. As late twentieth-century scholarship began to focus on globalization, this understanding of place shifted. In his influential work The Information Age, the urban sociologist Manuel Castells (1996) argued that new information and communication technology had resulted in a distinction between the ‘space of flows’ and the ‘space of places’. The space of flows refers to ‘the technological and organizational possibility of practicing simultaneity without contiguity’ (Castells 2013: 34). This is a more abstract, partly digital space, where infrastructural and social networks and nodes facilitate the global movement of money, goods and information. In contrast, the space of places is based on meaningful locality and experience.
Castells’ concept of the space of flows connects to what French anthropologist Marc Augé (1995) has termed ‘non-places’: places that are characterized by transience and uniformity rather than by rootedness and unique features. He focuses on spaces of circulation, consumption and communication, such as airports, hotels, shopping malls. However, Augé’s characterization of such spaces as bland, standardized non-places can be critiqued. For people whose passports do not allow for easy travel, airports can be very anxious places. In addition, airports, hotels and shopping malls increasingly incorporate design features intended to make them stand out rather than be anonymous and identical.
Another recent perspective on urban places has come from assemblage theory and actor-network theory (Farías and Bender 2012). Anthropologists, sociologists and geographers drawing on this perspective see urban places as inherently dynamic and heterogeneous. They understand places as made up of networked human and non-human elements (such as buildings, water, trees, garbage).
