Placeness And The Performative Production Of Space

How can performance create and transform places of urban renewal and regeneration? What does performance contribute to the creation of community? These are some of the questions addressed in this study of the relationship of performance to urban space. Marrying theory with a series of international case studies of performance practice and interviews with practitioners, this interdisciplinary study examines how space is performatively produced to create a sense of 'placeness'. Offering multiple perspectives on space and place, this book investigates the connections between space and the construction of social and cultural narratives. It focuses on the multiple ways performative actions produce space, including theatre, installations, site-specific work, visual arts and digital performance. Combining interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary performance, architecture and digital media studies, this study builds on a clear theoretical framework that draws on the work of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefevre, Richard Schechner, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Lev Manovich and Slavoj Žižek. It offers themed sections comprising theory, studies of practice and interviews with practitioners. Case studies include site-specific work by Catalan collective La Fura Dels Baus, Barcelona, Spain, the Prague Quadrennial, community engagement in Praça Roosevelt in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Portland Inn Project in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, Campo de la Cebada in Madrid, Spain, and digital spaces created by artists in India and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

How can performance create and transform places of urban renewal and regeneration? What does performance contribute to the creation of community? These are some of the questions addressed in this study of the relationship of performance to urban space. Marrying theory with a series of international case studies of performance practice and interviews with practitioners, this interdisciplinary study examines how space is performatively produced to create a sense of 'placeness'. Offering multiple perspectives on space and place, this book investigates the connections between space and the construction of social and cultural narratives. It focuses on the multiple ways performative actions produce space, including theatre, installations, site-specific work, visual arts and digital performance. Combining interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary performance, architecture and digital media studies, this study builds on a clear theoretical framework that draws on the work of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefevre, Richard Schechner, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Lev Manovich and Slavoj Žižek. It offers themed sections comprising theory, studies of practice and interviews with practitioners. Case studies include site-specific work by Catalan collective La Fura Dels Baus, Barcelona, Spain, the Prague Quadrennial, community engagement in Praça Roosevelt in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Portland Inn Project in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, Campo de la Cebada in Madrid, Spain, and digital spaces created by artists in India and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Theories of performativity have garnered considerable attention within the social sciences and humanities over the past two decades. At the same time, there has also been a growing recognition that the social production of space is fundamental to assertions of political authority and the practices of everyday life. However, comparatively little scholarship has explored the full implications that arise from the confluence of these two streams of social and political thought. This is the first book-length, edited collection devoted explicitly to showcasing geographical scholarship on the spatial politics of performativity. It offers a timely intervention within the field of critical human geography by exploring the performativity of political spaces and the spatiality of performative politics. Through a series of geographical case studies, the contributors to this volume consider the ways in which a performative conception of the "political" might reshape our understanding of sovereignty, political subjectification, and the production of social space. Marking the 20th anniversary of the publication of Judith Butler’s classic, Bodies That Matter (1993), this edited volume brings together a range of contemporary geographical works that draw exciting new connections between performativity, space, and politics.

'Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues' is an inter-disciplinary study exploring the nature of how we conceive, construct, interpret, practice, perceive and represent space and place.

Surfing, Street Skateboarding, Performance, and Space: On Board Motility draws from critical cultural studies, political philosophy, postcolonial studies, urban sociology, and poststructuralist theory in the context of human communication and performance to construct an epistemology of riding boards. This book ponders why we move the way we do and examines the ways in which movements communicate, developing, as a result, a theoretical perspective or board motility that is gestural and fluid, moving in relation to shifting social and physical landscapes. By combining the discourses and practices of critical theory and physical movement, this text presents a sustained analysis of radical political philosophy. In the book the symbolic narratives associated with each physical practice are deconstructed as their theoretical counterparts are thoroughly established. Then, through performance, the author narrows the divide between these two forms of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, outlining and embodying an ontological and epistemological stoke in the process that emerges from riding boards, on both waves and streets.

Space, place and territory are concepts that lie at the core of geography and urban planning, environmental studies and sociology. Although space, place and territory are indeed polysemic and polemic, they have particular characteristics that distinguish them from each other. They are interdependent but not interchangeable, and the differences between them explain how we simultaneously perceive, conceive and design multiple spatialities. After drawing the conceptual framework of space, place and territory, the book initially explores how we sense space in the most visceral ways, and how the overlay of meanings attached to the sensorial characteristics of space change the way we perceive it – smell, spatial experiences using electroence phalography, and the changing meaning of darkness are discussed. The book continues exploring cartographic mapping not as a final outcome, but rather as an epistemological tool, an instrument of inquiry. It follows on how particular ideas of space, place and territory are embedded in specific urban proposals, from Brasília to the Berlin Wall, airports and infiltration of digital technologies in our daily life. The book concludes by focusing on spatial practices that challenge the status quo of how we perceive and understand urban spaces, from famous artists to anonymous interventions by traceurs and hackers of urban technologies. Combining space, place and territory as distinctive but interdependent concepts into an epistemological matrix may help us to understand contemporary phenomena and live them critically.

When designing, planning and building urban spaces, many contradictory and conflicting actors, practices and agendas coexist. This book propounds that, at present, this process is conducted in an artificial reality, 'Concept City', characterized by a simplified and outdated conception of space. It provides a constructive critique of the concepts, underlying the practices of planning and architecture and, in order to facilitate more dynamic, inclusive and subtle practices, it formulates a new theory about space in general and public urban space in particular. The central notions in this theory are temporality, experiment and conflict, which are grounded on empirical observations in Helsinki, Manchester and Berlin. While the book contextualizes Lefebvre's ideas on urban planning and architecture, it is in no way limited to Lefebvrean discourse, but allows insights to new theoretical work, including that of Finnish and Swedish authors. In doing so, it suggests and develops exciting new approaches and tools leading to 'experiential urbanism'.

Every time Annie sees a rainbow in the sky she runs to catch it - but always in vain. One day she pursues a rainbow deep into a mysterious garden.

Space-Body-Ritual emphasizes the need for careful design of public spaces by creating opportunities for 'performativities' in everyday spaces of the city-its streets and squares. Tiwari compels her readers to think the parameters of spatial design as cultural generator.