Changing Places

Chris Perkins

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

So what is place as against space?

1 minute

3 characteristics

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

c. The longer term large scale trend

• Kondratieff waves of technology driven economic cycles

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

Back to back slums, to Crescents, to dereliction, to regeneration

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)

Analysing images of place

Content

Style

Its production

Its reading

Its context

Manchester and the North

Where is the north?

What does ‘northern’ mean?

Is Manchester northern?

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

4. Gozitan Foodways: relationships, connections, meaning and representations

a. Appetisers

• Food systems approaches • Eg Gastroni and Atkins (1997)

• Piscopo (2004)

• Anthropological research • Eg Billiard (2006)

Assemblage thinking

Networks of situated everyday practice

So what would you expect island food to be like and why?

Placing the island

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)

Wood fired pizza ovens, potatoes, capers

Cheeselets

Pastizzeria street-food

Fruit n’ Veg

Rabbit stew (stuffat tal-fenek)

Elite food: Eco Gozo: reimagining the island

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

Elite rebranding

Prosaic global inroads McDonalds 1998- Lidl 2014-

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

What goes on around the food matters: music, sociality, drinking, research

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

Big and crowdsourced data

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

Be creative with place!

Playful methods Dérives Citizen science Smell mapping Mobile based games