Reading Socio-Spatial Interplay - Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i ...

R E A D I N G S O C I O - S P A T I A L I N T E R P L A Y P A R T 1an urban structure. These can, on the one hand, be studied as different groupsof practices (or urban landscape practitioners), and, on the other hand, asdifferent sets of places (with different qualities, possibilities and constraints)to practice (to produce social spaces in interaction, confrontation, and co-usewith others). And in this perspective, one essential difference between onespecific urban area and another urban area is how the spatial organization ofdifferent areas allows, or invites, different rhythms of practices to take place,related to the temporalities of different user group (patterns of dispositions)which affect the local composition of encounter situations. This also includeshow aspects of the spatial contextuality of an area (the composition ofarchitectural elements and the encounter situations they accommodate) maybe ascribed symbolic value of use in social transactions (as discussed byBourdieu). While both Augé and Mayol focus on a particular set oftemporalities in a particular set of spaces, Lefebvre focuses of different setsof combinations:Augé’s traveller – or tourist – doesn’t spend all his time in airport lounges, inhis car at the motorway or in shopping malls; he might just as well stay in aremote Provencal village for a while and appreciate the authentic andpicturesque everyday life he has expected to find there: A main point inAugé’s “anthropology of supermodernity” is that the traveler’s attitudetowards place, space and others keeps him from integrating. His fascinationfor authenticity is a paradox, as it is related to his distant role as a spectatorand how he stages himself as a consumer of it. The main value of visiting aplace is not to live in it, but to tell his friends back home afterwards. Thesocial transaction of the returning traveller’s Provencal holiday experiencescan be related to the symbolic values he ascribes his own practices in thespatial contextuality of his holiday destination, transformed into social capitalin the transactions of his encounters with those back home.Mayol’s neighbour also has a life outside Croix Rousse: he goes to work inthe city and the commuting brings him in contact with a world outside theneighbourhood (and there might even be some strangers passing by theneighbourhood now and then – at least some ethnologists obviously musthave spent some time there once). But the overall focus of the Croix Roussestudyis on the neighbouring: on the social transactions between theneighbours and the integrating practices producing the social space of thisparticular (rather homogenous working class) neighbourhood – dialecticallydefined as a contrast to the world outside.The rhythms of the Croix Rousse neighbourhood – as described in Mayol etal.’s study – are predominantly cyclic, while the rhythms of the99