Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City

Introduction: Embodied Placemaking: An Important Category of Critical Analysis

1 Space, Place, and the Body In 1943 British Parliamentarians engaged in heated debate about how to rebuild the House of Commons chamber, which had been destroyed in 1941. Some argued that its rebuilding should have been used as an opportunity for expansion to improve its formerly cramped conditions, reshaping it from a rectangle into a semicircle. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, however , sided with opponents by insisting that the new building should conform to the size and shape of the old. He knew that the chamber would be crowded and filled to capacity during critical votes and debates, and it was important that these activities proceed with members spilling out into the aisles, lending on great occasions “a sense of crowd and urgency.” On slow days the chamber was barely filled, but on others it became a throbbing center of civic debate. It continued to be both a symbolic center of state power as well as a vibrant democratic institution, but in its newly rebuilt form it would also trigger resurgent memories of a place bombed during the war and proudly reconstructed as a symbol of a nation’s resilience. Churchill’s understanding of the situation is best summed up in his now-famous declaration : “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”1 Churchill’s astute observations suggest his deeper understanding of the complex relationship between place and how our bodies engage it. His “sense of place” of the House of Commons extended beyond the building’s architectural form and its functional use to include its spatial ambience and the meaning produced when individuals and groups used the building. Introduction Embodied Placemaking: An Important Category of Critical Analysis Arijit Sen and Lisa Silverman 2 ARIJIT SEN AND LISA SILVERMAN This understanding underscores the fact that changing physical modifications allows individuals to personalize and transform a location when they occupy it. Churchill’s recognition of the building as more than a mere institutional setting for governance suggests its function as a stage that derived its meaning from the event, the audience, the performers, as well as the physical qualities of the setting. What he perceived—and what this volume seeks to address—is that the meaning of buildings, neighborhoods, and cities is not static, but variable in its personal, cultural, historical, social, economic, and political contexts. Churchill’s stress on the importance of a crowded, and therefore urgent, ambience indicates his awareness of the role of the body in turning a government institution into a place of vibrant civic discourse . In other words, he understood the role of embodiment in the making of the built environment. Recently the epistemological boundaries according to which we understand culture and history have shifted because of a so-called “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences.2 This spatial turn, which puts space and place at the center of analysis of culture and history, is undoubtedly a result of fluctuations in social thought emerging from broader economic, social, political, and cultural transformations, including increasing globalization and its impact on media, migration, identity, and subjectivities, as Barney Warf and Santa Arias explain.3 For other scholars the spatial turn refers to seeing the transformation of economies, emerging digital cultures, and ecological movements as global processes that prompt us to rethink the role of locality, space, and spatiality in understanding culture and history.4 But despite these new considerations, the concept of placemaking—as well as how it can be used as a practical tool of analysis by scholars who do not traditionally study the built environment—remains difficult to comprehend and apply. In this volume we argue that using “embodied placemaking” as a category of analysis—that is, foregrounding not only place but also the body’s role within it as mutually constituent elements of the built environment— can open up deeper and innovative ways of understanding the human experience across a variety of disciplines. Place is a slippery concept. In the past when describing physical landscapes , scholars of the built environment carefully distinguished between their use of the terms “space” and “place.” Space has traditionally been considered more abstract; one common view defined space as a boundless, empty, three-dimensional abstraction within which existed a set of interrelated events or objects. Others stressed the socially constructed nature of space, thus drawing attention to the material qualities that delimit its 3 Introduction bounds.5 Place, on the other hand, always...