Cities around the globe are immersed in transnational projects of place reconfiguration and attraction. Urban places, intent on competing in the globalized experience-based economy, undertake identity projects—on-going, dynamic processes through which places are produced and reproduced by conscious strategies of place making and identity building (see, for example, Nyseth and Viken 2009). In this article, I employ Henri Lefebvre’s conceptions of a “right to the city” in order to explore the right to full participation in imagining and shaping urban futures. (...) Spatial practices, such as those I term civic tinkering, may offer one way to help enable such imagining.My discussion draws from scholarship on imaginaries and place identity, as well as on my own qualitative field studies conducted in Roanoke, Virginia, in the United States, and Belfast, Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. While my precise research questions differed in these two sites, I explored, in each instance, the processes of place identification and development centered on arts and culture, and the extent to which marginal groups and their concerns were engaged or considered in such processes. I also explore “tinkering” as a set of activities that hold potential for residents to more fully participate in the urban project byconstructing, altering, and disrupting spatial meanings. Tinkering may be any impermanent, unsanctioned, and informal activity endeavoring to positively alter a city’s identity. Henri Lefebvre described the relevance of such practices in his vision of the city as oeuvre, or ongoing project. (shrink)

Theories of the present have converged on changes in spatialization or the spatial order of societies. This article discusses the focus on borders and boundaries in programmatic statements on reflexive modernity or remodernization (RM) by Latour and Beck. It is insufficient to say that boundary-marking and border-making become simply more fraught or obvious. There is an historicity and dynamic quality which are central to these analyses which are best understood in terms of the intangible aspects, or virtuality, of borders and (...) boundaries. A dynamic, four-part ontology is advanced to elucidate the functioning of borders as interfaces and liminal zones with their own internal semiotics and emergent meanings and effects. This is the basis of a critique of RM. Further, a more diverse set of methods than might be supposed is required to research boundary phenomena, which social sciences are ill-equipped to undertake. (shrink)

Among the avant-garde organizations in Europe during the middle of the twentieth century, a few of them combined in 1957 to form the Situationist International (SI). This article locates relevant aspects of their theory in the increasingly visible constellation of Critical Geography and educational scholarship, both in the foundations of education and curriculum theory. After a brief introduction to the SI, a situated pedaogy is presented in past and present educational literature and is complemented with various theoretical constructs of the (...) SI. These considerations are presented to address and, perhaps, remedy a pedagogy of placelessness that appears to be prevalent in public schools today. A situated pedagogy connects the curriculum to the everyday lives of students and is interested in identity and self-formation, but also social-formation and the relationships between the two, and asks students to pay attention to their environment, and listening to what places have to tell us. It also asks students to read the world and to decode it politically, socially, historically, and aesthetically. A situated pedagogy attends to place, not only as the focus of student inquiry or academic study, but as the spaces for performative action, intervention, and perhaps transformation. As such, education moves beyond schools to their communities as students participate in remapping their material and curricular landscapes. (shrink)

At its core, the evolution of democratic civil society is a process of transcending existing, historical social space, a process that desires to dissolve "political society" into "civil society" and with it to reformulate space as more democratic, participatory public space, and global spheres of interaction. In this article, the author examines the implications of globalization and the evolution of democratic civil society. Drawing on the work of French theorists de Certeau and Lefebvre, the author examines the nature of space (...) as a social construct and the importance of understanding space as a practiced place in relation to the evolution of democratic civil society that makes transnational space a practiced place for global civil society. The author argues that as globalization spreads across nation-states, spatial forces produced by economic, cultural, and political discourses and practices give way to the potential for the evolution of democratic civil society. (shrink)

Although several writers have noted significant complementary features in the respective projects of Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and the French social thinker Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), to date there has not been a systematic comparison of them. This article seeks to redress this oversight, by exploring some of the more intriguing of these conceptual dovetailings: first, their relationship to the intellectual and cultural legacy of Romanticism; and second, their respective assessments of irony (including Romantic irony), and, more (...) specifically, of the ironic register as a potential vehicle for socio-cultural criticism. Although the positions Bakhtin and Lefebvre stake out vis-à-vis these issues reveal many similarities – such as extensive use of Socrates in the writings of each – there are also significant differences, not least because Lefebvre’s understanding of Romanticism is more fully developed than Bakhtin’s. Accordingly, the central argument advanced here is that Bakhtin’s fairly disparaging account of Romanticism, together with his scattered and often contradictory remarks on irony, can be subjected to re-envisioning and potential enrichment by reference to Lefebvre’s more considered thoughts, especially the latter’s notions of ‘Revolutionary romanticism’ and ‘Marxist irony’. (shrink)

The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its theorization. This lineage originates in the work of (...) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg Lukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as mediated by the important figure of Georg Simmel), and culminating most recently in the work of Agnes Heller. Such a Marxist theory is inseparable from a political project that seeks to unveil and critique what it takes to be the debased, routinized and ideological qualities of daily existence under the auspices of modern capitalist society, but also attempts to locate certain emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame terrain, an orientation that can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday utopianism’. Although there are occasional lapses into dualistic modes of thinking in the work of these writers, the key insight they present to us is the need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanent and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has bedevilled the work of many other theorists and intellectual traditions. (shrink)

Given that one of the defining elements of capitalist society is the ubiquity of forms of abstraction through which social relations are mediated, it is not surprising that a generalised ‘reproach of abstraction’ has taken on a critical orthodoxy within social theory and the humanities. Many of these attacks against a pervasive culture of abstraction have an obvious resonance with longstanding critiques of the abstractions inherent in law. This article explores the critique of the power of abstraction that is a (...) central theme in Henri Lefebvre’s depiction of the ‘abstract space’ of contemporary capitalism. In doing so, it will be emphasised that Lefebvre’s work is not primarily concerned with the rejection of abstraction per se, but with understanding the relationships between dominant forms of abstraction and concrete social practices. Of particular interest here is Lefebvre’s reformulation of the concept of concrete abstraction which extends his work beyond a polemical dismissal of the violence of abstraction into broader theoretical debates about the role of the abstract in the reproduction of social relations. Building on this aspect of Lefebvre’s work, I will argue that the concept of concrete abstraction can provide a means of understanding the relationships between the concrete and the abstract in existing juridico-political relations. (shrink)

Spatial representations, metaphors and imaginaries have been the mainstay of internet research for along time. Instead of repeating these themes, this paper seeks toanswer the question of how we might understand the conceptof time in relation to internet research. After a brief excursuson the general history of the concept, this paper proposes threedifferent approaches to the conceptualisation of internet time.The common thread underlying all the approaches is the notionof time as an assemblage of elements such as technical artefacts, social relations (...) and metaphors. By drawing out time in this way, the paper addresses the challenge of thinking of internet time as coexistence, a clash of fluxes, metaphors, lived experiences and assemblages. In other words, this paper proposes a way to articulate internet time as a multiplicity. (shrink)