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Perin Gurel, AMST 191, Section Handout

SPACE, POWER, and CULTURE

Why Study Space?

Space is another way in which humans organize and signify power relations. Places, spaces, and buildings

throughout the world have culture-specific meanings and functions. Our lived environment is saturated withassumptions about race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, and ethnicity. Consider the difficulty Paul and his

family had entering and navigating certain spaces like the priests dining room and the supposedly public statebuildings in Christ in Concrete. Consider how Big Steel emanated inhuman power and danger: it straddled the

city block and its metal skeleton shot up fifty floors to the sky (170).

Buildings are, indeed, like works of art, testifying to the nature of the society that produced them.1Q: So,

what does the contrast between affluent, private new growth and abandoned public infrastructure testify about

the nature of post-Industrial American society?2

1. The built environment is the result of continuing cooperation and friction among actors. It is not static.

According to Don Mitchell, landscape is thus best understood as a kind of produced, lived, andrepresented space constructed out of the struggles, compromises, and temporarily settled relations of

competing and cooperating social actors; it is both a thing (or a suite of things) and a social process, atonce solidly material and ever changing.

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2. Individuals interact with the built environment, giving it new shared and private meanings.

Peoples sense of place, experience, and use of the built environment are all essential to unlocking its

meanings. Architect Louise A. Mozingo has shown that fences, front yards, driveways and other spacesaround homes work to isolate residents in predominantly white neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Mexican

American families in East Los Angeles however, use these places to interact with their neighbors,

conversing at gates and turning front porches into semi-public spaces.4

3. The cultural environment, in turn, influences individuals.

As William Churchill put it, We shape our buildings, and then they shape us.5

The built environment interpellates individuals as subjects and outfits them to act in certain ways. Considerhow Mary Anne in The Things They Carriedends up assimilating to the wilderness of Vietnam. While this is an

extreme example, our built environment does exert an active influence on our identities as an often-unconsciouspart of culture (remember hegemony?).

4. Landscapes do not just magically appear. Political economy plays an important role inconstructing and maintaining space.

1Machel Danesi and Paul Perron,Analyzing Cultures: An Introduction and Handbook(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999),

199.2 Dolores Hayden,A Field Guide to Sprawl(New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 11.3 Don Mitchell, California: The Beautiful and the Damned, Reprinted in Cultural Geography Reader, edited by Tim Oakes andParticia L. Price (Routledge, 2008), 163.4 Louise A. Mozingo, The Enacted Environment: Examining the Streets and Yards of East Los Angeles, in Everyday America:

Cultural Landscape Studies After J.B. Jackson, edited by Chris Wilson and Paul Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2003),5 Quoted in Edward T. Hall,Beyond Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 100.

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Perin Gurel, AMST 191, Section Handout

Why does America have highways? What are ball porks? What do these structures imply about thepolitical and economic organization of power in the United States?

How to Read Space

Places have three kinds ofspatial codes: public, private, and sacred. Like all codes these regulate behavior.

Humans act differently depending on the environment and their social position within that environment. Allcultural spaces are policed in certain ways:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;

Sign was painted, it said private property;But on the back side it didn't say nothing;

That side was made for you and me.

How a building is constructed signifies assumptions about access and privacy. Compare the snout houses onpage 92-3 with the duck on page 36.

Building styles and practices are also influenced by architectural codes. Beyond shelter, buildings areconstructed with certain broad purposes in mind as signs of identity, status, power, security, community etc.Consider what the height, size, shape, and location of a building signifies. For example, in the medieval period,

the tallest building noticeable along the skyline of a town was the church. What are the tallest buildings,symbolizing wealth and power in our cities today?

A WOMAN IN FRONT OF A BANK

by W.C. Williams, 1948

The bank is a matter of columns,

like. convention,

unlike invention; but the pediments

sit there in the sun

to convince the doubting of

investments solid

as rock upon which the world

stands, the world of finance,

the only world: Just there,

talking with another woman while

rocking a baby carriage

back and forth stands a woman in

a pink cotton dress, bare legged

and headed whose legs

are two columns to hold up

her face, like Lenins (her loosely

arranged hair profusely blond) or

Darwins and there you

have it:A woman in front of a bank.

Q: According to W.C. Williams, why do banks have columns? What do these columns signify?