Reconfigurations
Abandoned Building Becoming Collective Memory: Radical Transformation as Catalyst for the Immaterial Preservation of the Rural Built Environment in Denmark
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag
At the moment most of the countries in the western world are experiencing severe demographic changes. The population in the rural areas abandon their home villages and move into the cities. Thus, the rural villages in Denmark face abandonment and decay. Despite the good intentions, today’s widespread strategic demolition projects, undertaken in the Danish rural villages, generally emphasize the fast eradication of local identity under the guise of state-authorized clean-up projects. Therefore, there is urgent reason to enable the public discourse with a more nuanced view on abandoned rural houses and in particular, on their bearing on the community cohesion. An attempt is made to establish a counter-practice of radical preservation in cooperation with rural municipalities and residents, as an alternative to strategic demolition. This paper reports on the latest of six generations of building transformations prototyped at full scale in rural villages and the local discussions it triggered. This prototype was implemented in summer 2016 as an event-based transformation of an abandoned confectionary into a theatre installation. It constituted a temporary catalyst for a local exchange of memories of the building and the place. In short, the building was immaterially preserved as part of the collective memory before its demolition.
Designing Places to Be Alone (or Together?): A Look at Minneapolis Coffeehouses
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Broadway, Olivia Engelhardt
Coffeehouses, since their inception in western society, have served as informal public gathering places. Habermas traces the creation of the so-called public sphere, where people openly discussed and attempted to influence political action, to London’s seventeenth century coffeehouses. This tradition echoed in the United States. Oldenburg in "The Great Good Place" emphasizes the role of coffeehouses as a third place, where people meet, engage in conversation, and form a community. In "The Great Good Place", Oldenburg was concerned about the demise of such third places; thirty years later his fears appear misplaced. Increasing interest in gourmet coffee mean that coffeehouses are ubiquitous features of the urban landscape. Between 1991 and 2015, the number of US specialty coffeehouses exploded in an eighteen-fold increase. Yet, despite this upsurge in numbers, Bar-Tura suggests that coffeehouses no longer perform as third places for social interaction. Instead, they have become "pseudo-libraries, taken over by the laptop generation" and "places of common isolation. A place to be alone together." This research attempts to reconcile Oldenburg and Bar Tura’s competing coffeehouse visions by analyzing the design and social interactions in independently-owned coffeehouses in Minneapolis’s Uptown. Individual coffeehouses were evaluated on the degree to which social isolation is encouraged by seating layouts and the provision of office amenities; social interaction is facilitated via the presence of home amenities such as couches, and soft furnishings. The level of patron social interaction within coffeehouses is measured by the provision of home or office amenities influences patron behavior.
Physical Places in Times of Digitalization: The Importance of Socio-spatial Dimensions for Knowledge Creation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Madeleine Wagner, Anna Growe
In times of increasing globalization and digitalization, new challenges rise for knowledge-based activities. Previous scientific research in the field of relational economic geography has focused on enterprises, networks and economical actors. However, recent activities carried out by globally active enterprises like Apple Inc. or Deutsche Bank – e.g. creating “fancy” headquarters or install creative rooms – indicate that also the physical environment plays a role in processes of knowledge generation. We advance the hypothesis, that not only people and networks are important for the process of knowledge creation, but also the quality of place is a necessary condition to trigger these communication processes and to break up habitual thinking structures. We presume that different problems and questions need different material places to be solved more easily. Therefore, the “fancy” design and architecture of the physical place influence interaction processes and lead to new ideas for difficult or ill-defined problems. On the basis of an ethnographic guideline-based expert study (mainly covering the AppHaus in Heidelberg, but also including other examples) this paper discusses how these places become “anchors in space” for local innovation processes and development and which role these material places do play in the interactive process of knowledge creation and creativity.
Spaces of Openness in the Neoliberal City: Independent Cultural Organisations in Istanbul
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session R. Gökçe Sanul
Recently, there has been a remarkable interest to scrutinize the artistic/activist practices which put forward the appropriation of the urban space. These experimental practices have been analysed in terms of the publicness that they create, their spatio-temporal organisation, and the question of visibility. This paper contributes to this debate with a case study from Istanbul. Focusing on alternative theatres and two cultural centres, this research investigates the ways in which these independent cultural organisations open up new spaces in the city. Accordingly, this paper develops the notion of spaces of openness by questioning the temporariness, autonomy and publicness that those cultural organisations form. In addition, drawing on a detailed empirical analysis, it discusses the actual organisation of these new cultural formations through their funding sources, aesthetic and socio-political content, relation to other urban actors etc. The dataset consists of interview transcripts, the texts in their websites, social media accounts of the cultural organisations as well as fieldwork notes and photos. This data set has been analysed by combining narrative analysis, qualitative content analysis with social network analysis and participant observation. The findings show that these spaces of openness are formed in three ways: 1) the provision of spaces of co-existence, 2) the excavation and making visible of undocumented histories 3) the creation of translocal spaces of engagement. However, the questions of temporariness, autonomy and publicness need a deeper elaboration to reflect on the limitations to sustain these spaces of openness.
