Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City

1. Placemaking and Embodied Space

19 Within the field of space and culture there has been increasing interest in theories that include the body and walking as bodily movement as integral parts of spatial analysis. These concerns have been addressed partially through the historical analysis of the docile body to social structure and power in work of Michel Foucault, and sociologically in the notions of habitus by Pierre Bourdieu and “structuration” by Anthony Giddens, as well as the works of many others.1 Nonetheless, many researchers, architects, and landscape practitioners need theoretical formulations that provide an everyday material grounding and experiential, cognitive, and/or emotional understanding of the intersection and interpenetration of body, space, and culture.2 I call this material and experiential intersection “embodied space.” These understandings require theories of body and space that are experience -near and yet allow for linkages to be made to larger social and political processes. Spatial analyses in fields that deal with the built environment—for example, cultural landscape studies, architecture and vernacular architecture , material culture, and cultural anthropology and geography—often neglect the body because of difficulties in resolving the dualism of the subjective and objective body and distinctions between the material and representational aspects of body space. The concept of embodied space, however, draws these disparate notions together, underscoring the importance of the body as a physical and biological entity, as lived experience, and as a center of agency, a location for speaking and acting on the world. Embodied space actually allows these disparate disciplinary and methodological modes 1. Placemaking and Embodied Space Setha Low 20 SETHA LOW of practice and analysis to come together through a focus on bodies as they create space through mobility and movement. The term “body” refers to its biological and social characteristics, and “embodiment” as an “indeterminate methodological field defined by perceptual experience and mode of presence and engagement in the world.”3 “Embodied space” is the location where human experience and consciousness take on material and spatial form. In earlier publications I have discussed the theories of the body, proxemics, phenomenology, language and discourse, and spatial orientation that I employ to construct the concept of embodied space.4 Here, I would like to focus more on the “placemaking” potential of embodied space. To do so, I draw on one component of that conceptualization —spatial orientation—and add a second conceptual element, that of mobility and movement, particularly through walking.5 I define and briefly review the literature that I am drawing upon and then illustrate the spatial orientation and movement approach with an ethnographic description of everyday paths and routines from my research on the Costa Rican plaza. Based on this discussion, embodied space is posited as a foundational concept for understanding the creation of place through spatial orientation, movement, and action. Spatial Orientation Nancy Munn begins her analysis of spatial orientation of the body through the notion of spacetime “as a symbolic nexus of relations produced out of interactions between bodily actors and terrestrial spaces.” Drawing in part upon Lefebvre’s concepts of “field of action” and “basis of action,” and his insistence that space is produced and consumed actively through embodied practices and experiences, Munn constructs the notion of a “mobile spatial field.”6 I have found her notion useful for understanding how the body creates and makes its own space in that her spatiotemporal construct can be understood as a culturally defined, corporeal-sensual field stretching out from the body at a given locale or moving through locales. Munn illustrates this notion of the body as a mobile spatial field through an ethnographic example derived from the spatial interdiction that occurs when Australian Aborigines treat the land according to ancestral Aboriginal law. She is interested in the specific kind of spatial form being produced: “a space of deletions or of delimitations constraining one’s presence at particular locales” that creates a variable range of excluded or restricted regions for each person throughout their life.7 For instance, in 21 Placemaking and Embodied Space following their moral-religious law, Aborigines make detours that must be far enough away to avoid seeing an ancient place or hearing the ritual singing currently going on there. By detouring, actors carve out a “negative space” that extends beyond their spatial field of vision. “This act projects a signifier of limitation upon the land or place by forming transient but repeatable boundaries out of the moving body.”8 Munn applies...