The prefigurative politics of place-making: Analysis of a neighbourhood-based campaign for a social centre

This article analyses the production of meaning embedded in places through prefigurative practices. Although the use of space by activist groups is widely studied in the sociology of social movements and urban geography, this article extends the body of literature on place-making by analysing the prefigurative dimension between militant practices and living spaces. Drawing on walking interviews with Montreal's activists that campaigned for a social centre in Canada, this article argues that the strategies inform place-making of local grassroots mobilisations that aimed to develop urban alternatives, and that the meaning attributed to places depends on the individual and collective experience of activists engaging in prefigurative politics. In this sense, place-making derives from the lived collective experience therein and the individual's treatment of these spaces. The results show that the repetition of the action, as well as its emotional and symbolic intensity, are factors that favour the contribution of prefigurative practices to the place-making process.     

The ethical potential of sound in public space: Migrant pan flute music and its potential to create moments of conviviality in a ‘failed’ public square

In this paper we examine the notion that music in public space could be understood in terms of ethical potential, where new sensibilities for thinking, feeling, seeing and being with others might be imagined and practiced. We do this by considering how musical performances by migrants impact on inclusive forms of place (re-)making, affective enactments of public space and emotional accounts of belonging and ‘the other’. The paper draws on an ethnographic exploration of South American pan flute musicians, performing music at Sergels torg, a central square in Stockholm, Sweden. Through fieldwork with a combination of qualitative techniques, including observation, interviews and sensory methods such as photography, video and recorded ‘sound walks’ we trace the affective aspects of encounters with busking and the impact of music on place. We highlight the ethical potential of music in the experience of urban moments and its capacity to reconfigure space. We find that encounters with sound can produce new spaces of conviviality and inclusion; it can soothe, animate and soften urban spaces. However, a positive encounter with difference through sound depends on a favourable social, physical and temporal context, and because busking serves to make marginalised voices heard (both literally and metaphorically), it can be experienced as troubling for precisely this reason. Thus, we need to take into account the full complexity of the dynamics between sound and place, in considering this relationship as a novel window to the ethical potential of the urban encounter.     

Seeing movement: Dancing bodies and the sensuality of place

This paper investigates how the study of dance and the visibility of the moving body can be used to rethink the conceptualisation of place. Examining the dancing body reveals an unspoken corporeal knowledge that subsists in our engagement with the everyday world, and exceeds our ways of talking or writing about dance as an art form. The body inscribes the space it moves across, leaving trajectories and choreographic lines and, due to its tangibility, also comes to corporeally fill or occupy a place. It is about understanding the movement of bodies in terms of the physical expression of the performer but also from the perspective of an audience, which serves as a third person perspective on corporeal expression. When watching a body move, the observer becomes attentive to the gestures, rhythm, intentionality, and the crowd of virtual movements that accompany it. Through the work of dance theorists such as Rudolf Laban, we examine how the dancing body oscillates between the intentional and the observed in the constitution of the sensual dimensions of space. Most importantly we explore how dance shifts the point of focus away from place as a locale to place as a site of corporeal witnessing.