Changing Places - University of Manchester · • Resistance and pleasure – Organics, Fairtrade...
Transcript of Changing Places - University of Manchester · • Resistance and pleasure – Organics, Fairtrade...
Introductions
• Key concepts and approaches
• Manchester as place: – Scaled and linked – Mobile – Imagined
• Example of social practice in place
– Gozitan foodways
• Doing place: the potential of new methods in the local field
Why does it matter?
• Major shift away from a case oriented approach
• Re-orientation and engagement with changed focus at research frontier – Meaning and representation
– Relationship and connections
• Great practical and local opportunities for challenge and engagement with the field
The nature of place: diversity
– Real / archetype / imagined? • Place or placeless?
– Scaled
• North / south • First world / third world • Household / street / community / town
– Urban / rural
– Inside / outside
– Unique or ubiquitous
Location locale and sense of place
– Location • Geographical area
– Locale • Immediate social setting e.g. pub
– Sense of place • Local feeling
• Emotional geographies reflect but also construct that sense
Social
Places are created, space is a social product in time and culture (Henri Lefebvre)
Lefebvrian spatial triad
– Spatial practices e.g. • commodification, • bureaucratization
– Spaces of representation eg • technologies like GIS, mapping
– Representations of space e.g. • adverts, • art • film • novels etc
1. Manchester as scaled static
place? • Natural Environment
• Built fabric: – Infrastructure, housing, industry, recreation
• Society • Institutions • Culture
• Each is scaled but each works through different
processes – Movement, change – Increasing research focus on mobilities (see Sheller and Urry
2006)
The local and the global: Manchester as scaled place
• Global and local? – Time space compression
But….
• so many more!
– Body – Family – Household – Street – Community – Town - MANCHESTER – County – Region – Nation
Working through scales via one commodity in Manchester
A banana is grown
History Distant strangers Plantations Multinational control 5 companies own 80% of global production Low wage exploitation Fairtrade Challenge: Windward Islands
Produced, picked, sold, transported
Women in Belize sorting bananas and slicing them from bunches
Table
Plate
Body
Toilet
Sewage outlet
Sludge: fertiliser
Imported, distributed to Manchester
Trade at first via Ship Canal
Moves through different sites in the city
Wholesaler
Retailer
Supermarket shelf
Trolly
Car
Kitchen
“Bananas are the single most profitable item passing through the check-outs in British supermarkets, accounting for 1% of all sales.“ http://www.bananalink.org.uk/content/view/69/29/lang,en/
75% of UK bananas are sold in supermarkets
Banana: illusion of stasis and nature
• Nature commodified: – 1 variety only The Cavedish
• Recycling
• Multiple sites
– Complex interrelationships between places
• Entropic inevitability – Decay, Peeling
• Legitimating and regulating forces
• Power
• Identity
• Resistance and pleasure
– Organics, Fairtrade – BananaMan, Man City
Some issues with scales
• Manchester is at once global but also local and many different scales at once
• One scale is always working/playing through another – Bananas and the Ship Canal from opening till
commercial closure
• Reciprocally interrelated
• Scales constantly morph into one another
• Change and rhythms of change characterise the scaled city
• Commodities and their material social work matter in this process (see Ian Cook et al 2004. Follow the thing: Papaya, Antipode, 36(4), 642-664)
2. Mobilities of place
• 4 cuts
– Movement
– Daily cyclical change
– Longer scale cyclical processes
– Dramatic one off events
a. Movement through the city: Arup Virtual Manchester
Covering 4562 buildings and 15 spatial zones detail is limited to the core areas with the majority of buildings lacking roof structure
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfz5qHnlPZE
Why animate like this?
Moving commodities and people
• Commute • Logistics • Work
• Tourism • Migration • Shop • Leisure • Protest • Escape • Health • Compete
Multiple
scales
motivations
geographies
speeds and format
impacts
experiences
affordances
The commute
From home to work
Timed, routine, dominant cultural necessity
Most use a car: post war hegemony of car culture
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
Car Bus Bike Walk Motorbike Train
Popularity of different modes of commuting travel Greater Manchester 2009
http://www.gmtu.gov.uk/reports/transport2009/GMTU%20Report%201580%20-%20Transport%20Statistics%20Greater%20Manchester%202009%20-%20Full%20Report.pdf
LS Lowry Going to the Match 1953
Changed modes but Slow as it ever was…
2010: M60 traffic jam and jam hot spots
In 2010 Manchester commuters spend on average 72 hours in traffic a year
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/manchester/hi/people_and_places/newsid_9155000/9155405.stm
Bike commute through Rusholme • Road conditions: potholes
• How busy?
• Route choice
• Segregation
• Time of day
• Weather
Economic rationality
Cultural capital
• Experience called into being through embodied action
• “Felt” geographies – The affect of moving through the city
• Quotidian everyday geographies – The routine
– Taken for granted
– Individual: variations on a theme
– Infrastructural implications
• Mobilities like this commute are an increasing focus for geographers: they have a powerful affect on forms and processes of being Mancunian
b. Daily cyclical social construction of place
• We only see limited places in the city and at limited times
• Manchester as 24 hour city? – Time space diaries – Materialities e.g buildings – People
• Female Student Fallowfield • Unemployed 24 year old male
from Burnage • Full time mother with 3 kids
Cheadle Hulme • Sales Manager software firm
from Didsbury
The derelict, the private, the secret, the unsafe
–Governance
–Safety
–Moving subversion
–urban exploration
–protest
Prohibited places and spaces
Social role dictates geography – Age
– Class
– Ethnicity
– Gender
– Ability
– Sexuality
Economy matters and limits urban engagement
Temporal and spatial variation
Manchester: – Cotton – Railways steel – Electrical engineering, chemistry – Petrochemics, automobiles – Information technology
Uneven spatial response to these drivers
Mapped out in the cyclical responses national, regional and local economies
Building cycles
Shock Global City
Post-industrial regional centre
The building cycle
Is the built form fixed or is it always becoming?
Open land
Development
Decay
Dereliction
Redevelopment
e.g Hulme
d. The catastrophic event The IRA Bomb 15 June 1996
• One off external extreme event
• Van bomb warning Corporation Street near Royal Exchange
• Evacuated: controlled explosion
• Devastating impact
http://www.rebuildingmanchester.co.uk/
• Geopolitical struggle over identity and governance in northern Ireland. One of many terrorist impacts of the Troubles
• Local impact – Short term
• Devastation • M and S Arndale and Northern
end of City Centre destroyed
– Medium term • development opportunities
• Competition to redesign City Centre
• Public-private partnership
The Leading Rebuilding Manchester Online Resource
•Home •Welcome •15 June 1996 •The Story •Photos •Videos •News
•1996 •1997 •1998 •1999 •2000 •2001 •2002 •2003 •2004 •2005 •2006 •2007 •2008 •2009
•Maps •Aerial •Author •Donate •Search
Maps
Copyright Notice
Long term: rebranding of the city reconfiguration of capital transformation of city centre The quartered themed entrepreneurial city
Recap….
Manchester interacts
Changes are themselves scaled
The city is in constant motion
Four rhythms illustrate this dynamism
Geographers are increasingly recognising the potential of focusing on this kind of dynamism across and between places and of exploring the everyday geographies that are brought into being by these processes
3. Imagined place: role of representation • Imaginative geographies (Said 1978)
– perceptual as well as representational – act to legitimize and produce identities and places – part of apparatus of governance: power
• Imagined communities (Anderson 1991)
– Places are made through cultural work around shared symbols and identities deployed though common social feelings
• Emotional geographies (Anderson and Smith 2001) – Dynamic and recursive relations between place and
feeling
Representing place
We understand the world, and form our identities through other peoples' interpretations and representations of it We use different senses to interpret and create these representations
– Sight: • seeing, looking, observing, gazing, reading, watching
– Hearing: • hearing, listening
– Smell – Touch, feeling and kinaesthetics – Taste
Sight and hearing are social, and amenable to control, the others much more personal
Mediated place
Different media are understood using different senses
Media constitute discourse: they frame our worldview
Technological, cultural, social and economic change have resulted in – Profusion of media – Increasing numbers of competing interpretations – Mixing of media – Less and less time to consider these
also Most of our media are 'polysemic‘
– carry multiple meanings
• "A depiction is never just an illustration. It is the material representation, the apparently stabilised product of a process of work. And it is the site for the construction and depiction of social differences. To understand a visualisation is thus to inquire into its provenance, and into the social work that it does. It is to note its principles of exclusion and inclusion, to detect the roles that it makes available, to understand the way in which they are distributed, and to decode the hierarchies and differences that it naturalises. And it is also to analyze the ways in which authorship is constructed or concealed and how the sense of audience is realised" (Fyfe and Law, 1988 p1)
Conventional views of the north
Of southerners
Of northerners
North as relative notion defined in relation to the south
South view of North Character
– Chip on shoulder – Rude – Hardworking – Over-competitive – Philistine/musical – Mean – Homely – Parochial – Working class – Prejudiced – Humerous / crude
Landscape
– Urban/bleak/wild – Wet /cold/bracing – Industrial
production
Self image Character
– Independent – Blunt – Hardworking – Competitive – Practical – Careful with money – Friendly – Proud of roots – Meritocratic – Hold strong views – Humerous/ witty
Landscape
– Varied – Harsh but varied – Industrial but
varied
North view of South
Character – Subservient
– Evasive/duplicitous
– Effete / wasteful
– Dilettante
– Snobbish
– Wasteful
– Unsociable
– Cosmopolitan/rootless
– Nepotistic / elitist
– Equivocal
– Quick witted
Landscape – Soft country + London
– Warm pleasant
– Financial + consumption
After Russell (2004: 37)
Manchester as ‘Northern’: situating changing cultural representations
– 1960s Kitchen sink dramas like Taste of Honey
(Tony Richardson) Manchester as place for working class youth to escape from
– 1970s punk and northern soul: emerging local cultural revival
– 1980s Factory Records, Smiths, Hacienda, Rave in face of dereliction
– Now continuing nostalgia for conservative kitchen-sink drama gentrification and cosmopolitanisation of city centre: creative class goes north?
Conservative nostalgia but also subversion
• The tradition
– L S Lowry, Coronation Street, Shameless
• The subversion
– Queer as Folk, The Smiths
The tradition
• Social realist fiction of the 1950s and 1960s
– Grim
– Male
– Industrial
– Cloth cap, terraces, chimneys, dereliction
– Real, gritty
Soaps: Coronation Street comedy and everyday emotional geographies
• Weatherfield as tight-knit northern working class community punctuated by soap crises
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e54gzq5Xr0Y
• Comedic clichés: withering one-liners and put-downs
• The ‘battleaxe’ updated
Shameless as aestheticised poverty 7 series 2004-2010 Paul Abbott Chatsworth as West Gorton or Wythenshawe warehouse studio? Gallaghers and McGuires Humour? Comedy or tragedy? Themes Sexuality Violence Family relations Crime Alcohol and drugs Scams Entertainment or prurience? Life imitating art: Shannon Matthews' mother 'may have copied TV kidnap plot‘ Daily Telegraph 8 April 2008
Complex Anti establishment values
– Negotiated power • Arrogance: Noel and Liam as clichéd Mancs
• Can-do productive pragmatism
– Soaps consumed and read as genre vis a vis other genres • Placed humour
• Gendering
• Domestic but social spaces
– Rise of cultural class and clustering of cultural industries: northern quarter and media city
– Occasional hegemony. e.g. in music Joy Division,
Smiths, Madchester, Britpop
– The establishment ‘roughin it’?
Recap….
Places are constructed through mediated culture
Manchester conforms to an extent to the northern stereotype but this stereotype itself constantly morphs and changes
Changing imaginaries around the city and its representation create tensions over accepted cultural norms and place identities
a. Appetisers
• Food systems approaches • Eg Gastroni and Atkins (1997)
• Piscopo (2004)
• Anthropological research • Eg Billiard (2006)
Assemblage thinking
Networks of situated everyday practice
b. Main course
The ingredients…..
Mediterranean?
North African?
Western European?
“The Maltese kitchen is a very complex entity being a mixture of the Mediterranean, Western European and African way of nutrition. From a biological aspect of the food value, it seems that the Maltese took over from their neighbours the most disadvantageous nutritional habits: pasta, pizza and sweets from Southern Italy; spices and sugar for food preparation from North Africa; and saturated fats, soft drinks and small amount of fibre rich food from the Western civilization.” (Savona-Ventura [online])
Malta (Baldacchino 2009: 150)
• Malta island state but limited ‘national’ identity, perhaps typical of many post colonial islands?
• “while the Maltese share a common language and have no readily perceptible racial, ethnic or rural/urban cleavages, the partisan political mobilisation of both state and civil society effectively erodes ‘unifying elements’ or transforms them (at least perceptively) to partisan appropriation and symbolic use”
And in foodways….Genealogy of food system in this context
Production characterised by import culture, colonial history and from 2004 EU membership
Consumption characterised by a changing diet and sets of practices reflecting this change
Catholic hegemony
Tourism dominated practice: second homes and farmhouse lets
20% empty tax scam property,
Rural island (Gozo)in urban state (Malta)
“Shimmering familiarity yet obdurate closure of Maltese society” (Baldacchino pers com 2012)
Part time farming landscape
By 2010 only 185 fulltime farmers in Gozo and Comino, a decrease of 15% over the number of full-time farmers registered in 2001 Over the same decade, part-time registered farmers in Gozo increased by 44% from 2624 in 2001 to 3792 in 2010. (Census of Agriculture (NSO, 2010))
The Gozo Table: inventing the foodways
Recipes from a Mediterranean Island Over 80 recipes that capture the heart of Gozo's cuisine and the essence of what Mediterranean produce and cooking has to offer. Well-known Gozitan chef, George Borg, brings together a traditional and modern range of dishes from simple tried and trusted soups, salads, bruschetta, pastizzi, ftira and rabbit to watermelon, peppered cheese and mint salad, aubergine caviar, lemon cappuccino cups, tomato ice-cream and sheep's cheese with thyme, honey and ground coffee.
The traditional stereotypes: ftira
Island! Doubly islanded Colonial history Cultural history Language Religion Eco Gozo Bradjolena Power “Shimmering familiarity yet obdurate closure” Baldacchino (pers comm 2012)
Links to podcasts from local suppliers
• http://www.responsibletravel.com/holidays/gozo/travel-guide/food-drink-on-gozo
Vineyard owner Farmer Salt pan man Bar owner Restaurant owner Chef Baker Bee keeper
Space and place for food…
Geography matters much more than just context consumption setting Inspite of rebranding, banal everyday foodways of Maltese kids consumption and preferences reveals very different story (Piscopo 2004) Desire and satisfaction: gendered and classed
c. Afters…
Tourist Street food Elite tradition
Home Eat out Snack Beach
Food practices are placed: many different Gozitan foodways
Authenticity is constructed as a marker of identity
“A traditionalist food culture movement has been used to make a claim for the specificity of Maltese culture: a bridge between Europe and the Mediterranean. The defenders of traditional Maltese food, who more often than not belong to the higher society and educated elite, are using eating habits as a social marker”. (Billiard 2006: 124)
Food practice is mutable and contested
Anti McDonalds protests but ambiguous assimilation (Melaragno 2010)
Pro health lobbying (Piscopo 2006)
Discursive rebranding of a mythic rural tradition (Billiard 2006)
Foodways: placed and hybrid
Assemblage thinking perhaps the most useful way of apprehending the ephemeral embodied yet grounded experience of eating and doing food (Levkoe and Wakefield 2014) Brings together the power of production and context, and genealogy, with the banal taken for granted practices of consumption
National stereotypes and places are always made and remade
Conclusions: place, method and the field
New curricular focus offers great possibilities for local field work beyond the artificial domination of the clipboard and questionnaire
What might method address?
• The world as data: science
• Representation and discourse: political approaches to textuality
• Things in the world: material semiotics
• Practices: ethnography and more than representational approaches
• Meanings: hermeneutics
Scientific methodologies
• Inductive and deductive approaches
• Validation
• Experiment
• Measurement
• Quantities
• Objectivity • Universal
• Repeatable
• Visualization as reificatory practice
Useful knowledge
Statistical inference
• Populations and samples
• Descriptive stats
• Inferential stats
• Cross tabulation
• Testing
• Significance levels
Social scientific and humanistic methodologies
What difference might studying people and society make to methodologies?
• The point is to change it…..
• Critical knowledge
What difference might artistic approaches bring? • Hermeneutic canons
• Deconstruction
• Genealogies
Interpretive knowledge
Role of researcher and teacher
• Ethics
• Positionality and reflexivity – Situated knowledge
• Co-production
• How can you incorporate yourself as part of the research?
Method as processual and partial….
• What is it for
– Before: strategizing
– During: data collection, field encounters, research subjects
– After: analysis, interpretation, writing
Ethnography
• Participant observation
• Field diaries • Immersion but critical distance
• Interviews and focus groups
– Static or mobile
– Open ended or constrained
– Qualitative or quantitative analysis?
– Focus?
Textual analysis: what is a text anyway?
“A set of signifying practices commonly associated with the written page, but over the past several decades increasingly broadened to include other types of cultural production” (Johnston et al 2000)
• Words – Novels – Annual reports – Journalism – Archives – Letters – Diaries
• Art • Photographs • Cartoons • Adverts
– Printed – Web – TV
• Music
• Maps • Films • TV
– Soap – Reality – Drama – Documentary
• Multi-media • Radio
• People
– Fashion – Practices
• Objects • Landscapes
Visual methodologies: key techniques
• Content analysis • Grounded theory • Critical discourse
analysis: policy science
• Semiotic approaches
• Audiencing
• Visual ethnography