Session 3

Moderator

The blooming of our own thousand interpretations of place, as Sukhdev has it, over the last few days has taken us in several intriguing directions. It’s also complicated attempts at anything like a neat synthesis of our various approaches to the topic. But our last round did seem to contain a handful of potentially reliable through lines. I’d like now to push on one or two of these to see if they might be helpful as we gather up our positions into some kind of articulable theory and/or effective practice—the latter of which seems to have emerged as the discussion’s leading concern.

I’m sympathetic to Sukhdev’s repositioning of an impulse that perhaps looks superficially like “nostalgia,” but which instead of operating as a surrender to an irredeemable order, instead implies a spectrum of attitudes and practices that add up to something akin to care for or attend to. It argues for conditions that allow us to think about future-directed sociospatial methodologies. What kinds of activities—which social, political, or, indeed, artistic tactics and strategies—most effectively resist cultural, political, and spatial co-opting, the weird foreclosures that seem to be the price for our heightened “connectivity”?

I was surprised to discover that the word nostalgia as originally constructed isn’t so much about a longing for the past, but a sickness (-algia) for home (nostos-). Is there something in this that might prove useful to us? Home not so much in the sense of a geographically defined site, but rather a psycho-spatial construct that fosters meaningful connections with others in time and space—one that emerges from the real labor of place-making and place-sensitivity (per Bill), from lateral imagination (per Bani’s astute construction), and which in the breach produces precisely the kind of symptoms we all variously seem to have diagnosed. While we may have to agree to disagree about the word itself, it seems to me some of the impulses we have been trying to describe are starting to converge in interesting ways.

I feel like I have been maybe too focused on locational distinctions—and on a particular kind of scale—and not enough on the various localized behaviors and activities that provide that experience of place with its particularizing foci: cooking, say, or singing or dancing; or, as Perec had it, opening doors, going down staircases, sitting at a table to eat, lying down in a bed to sleep. In some sense, it’s in these intimate activities (to call these “spatial practices” now seems to wrongly privilege the space over the actors in it) in which the most tangible notions of place are caught. Bill rightly highlights the at once personal and interpersonal character of our place-making and place-use; it seems to echo Bani’s observation about the paralleling operations of negotiation in both its spatial and interpersonal contexts. Can we accept a certain level of atomization but instead understand ourselves as nevertheless having real agency? You may know the terrific exhibition (and book) that the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal produced a few years ago—Actions: What You Can Do With the City—or Nato Thompson’s exhibition (and catalogue) The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere. This subject has, as Sukhdev says, been in the air for a while now.

I also like Perec’s advice on a place to start: Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.