Editing the City: The (Dis)location of Socio-Spatial Subcultures in Contemporary Urban Space Robert Dutton (Plymouth University)
Introduction This paper is primarily concerned with the relationship between socio-spatial subcultures and the architectural spaces of the contemporary city.1 By developing an understanding of the nature of the interactions between the practitioners of these subcultures and the spaces of the cities in which they operate, I highlight the ways in which the practices concerned are located, dislocated and relocated within the city, and in doing so present these practices as a rich model of the relationships between (and production of) space and place. In contrast to the usual assumption within architectural culture that people (commonly referred to as users) are passive consumers of architectural space, I will make the argument that users can be active participants in the production of architectural space, and that consequently the relationship between architectural space and the people who occupy it can be described not as a process of ‘reading’ but as a process of ‘editing’. In order to make this argument, I will examine a group of subcultures which I call ‘socio-spatial’ subcultures. Sarah Thornton broadly defines a subculture as a social group organized around a shared interest or practice which distinguishes them against their wider culture (Gelder, 2007). I define a socio-spatial subculture as a subculture that distinguishes itself from a larger culture through its very different use of social space. The socio-spatial subcultures which I have selected to study in this paper – parkour,2 skateboarding, and graffiti – revolve around unconventional uses of conventional, everyday urban structures. They are interesting vehicles for exploring how people are not only subject to architectural space, but also participate in its production, for two reasons. Firstly, their explicitly different ways of moving within and using the spaces of the city provides a subject for research which is highly tangible and accessible. Secondly, as the architect and theorist Ian Borden notes in his introduction to Skateboarding, Space and the City (2001), the marginal status of socio-spatial subcultures enables them to act as a critique of the spaces they operate in: their status as subcultures means these practices are both located within contemporary urban space and dislocated from an everyday experience of it. 1
Elements of this paper were initially presented as a dissertation in partial fulfilment for the BA (Hons) Architecture degree at Plymouth University in 2009. Thanks must go to my supervisor, Adam Cowley-Evans, for the thoughtful advice on bibliography and structuring the dissertation which has greatly informed the paper presented here. 2 Parkour is a French physical discipline which shares its origins with obstacle courses. Practitioners use utilitarian athletic and gymnastic techniques to traverse the city using unconventional routes. Prominent examples in the media include the 2002 BBC ident ‘Rush Hour’ which featured one of the originators of Parkour, David Belle, making his way home from work over the rooftops of London by climbing up buildings, vaulting over railings and jumping between rooftops.
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In the course of preparing this research I contacted skateboarders, traceurs (people who do parkour), and graffiti artists from Plymouth. I received responses from a graffiti artist, and a traceur – they were all male, lived in Plymouth and in their mid to late twenties. A local skateboarder in his early twenties gave me some help with skating terminology but declined to be interviewed. In conjunction with the interviews, video documentaries, ethnographies, monographs and online forums were used as supporting evidence and to gain an understanding of each particular subculture as a whole. This research on the socio-spatial subcultures is analysed within an academic framework which includes seminal works on the body, space and the city by theorists such as the sociologists Henri Lefebvre and Michael de Certeau. These texts are used alongside critical accounts of their work by the architectural historian Simon Sadler and more contemporary research by the architectural theorist Ian Borden (author of Skateboarding, Space and the City) and others. Before exploring the processes by which these socio-spatial subcultures engage with the city in more detail, I will contextualise this research by explaining elements of architectural theory this research is intended to challenge. The first section ‘Reading Space’ explains the origins of using the act of ‘reading’ as an analogy within architecture to describe how people interact with space, buildings and cities, and how this leads to an understanding that the role of the architect is to choreograph stimuli which will have an effect upon the occupants. This way of practicing architecture is related to an understanding of space derived from Descartes and Newton, however more recent works on space, particularly those by Henri Lefebvre, challenge the traditional understanding by introducing the concept that space is socially produced. This in turn poses challenges to the traditional understanding of ‘reading’ as an analogy of how users relate to architecture, leading to my hypothesis that ‘editing’ is a more appropriate analogy to describe relationships between architecture and users. After establishing the disciplinary context and hypothesis for the paper, I begin to form my argument by exploring elements of the socio-spatial subcultures I am using as a vehicle to explore my hypothesis.
The second section, subtitled ‘Action, Perception and Spatial Production’
examines the specific spatial actions that define these socio-spatial practices. Drawing upon the works of Henri Lefebvre and Ian Borden, it explores the connection between perception and small scale spatial production, looking at how what may appear as seemingly generic actions are highly contextualised and located within the micro-scale of the immediate environments of the practitioners. The third section, ‘Consumption and Representation’ explores how these actions are a form of Michael de Certeau’s ‘Spatial Tactic’ against conventional forms of spatial convention. It is not only the , which is heavily influenced by the recorded using amateur and professional media and these representations of spatial action are then distributed worldwide, dislocating the spatial practices from their original context. The videos then inspire other members 2
of the subcultures to copy the actions recorded in the video, thereby relocating these practices within the environments local to them. The fourth section, subtitled ‘Rhythms, Identity and Place’ analyses the process of location, dislocation and relocation to investigate the implications of these actions on a broader spatial and temporal scale within the city. The socio-spatial subcultures studied operate on a broader spatial scale through the use of various locations through the city, and on a broader temporal scale through both their accelerated speed of movement and through the weekly or daily return to these locations which are favourable to the practice of their subcultures. This results in a process whereby these sites are identified and located as elements of these subcultures – in short, the spaces become places. In additions to these rhythms of occupation, the physical traces of these subcultures (such as scuff marks from trainers and skateboards, or paint and marker pen ink) reinforce the identities of place, and help form a relationship between physically disconnected areas of the city; for the practitioners of the socio-spatial subcultures the (sub)cultural connections between these locations creates a new spatial structure of the city to locate themselves and their subcultures within. In my conclusion ‘Editing the City’ I present these socio-spatial subcultures as practices which challenge traditional understandings of space and place in architecture. I argue that the practices not only function as a negative critique of existing understandings of space from an architectural perspective, but through the highly visible process of the location, dislocation and relocation of their practices offer a rich model for the relationship between space and place. In doing so, they demonstrate how users can be more than ‘readers’ of architecture and can become ‘editors’.
Reading Space Given the inclusion of this paper in a multi-disciplinary volume it is worthwhile to begin by taking a moment to locate this research within the perspective from which it originated. In architectural discourse and pedagogy, it is common to use the act of ‘reading’ as an analogy to describe how people interact with space, buildings and cities. Architects who work with this understanding will design the materials, the functions, and the form of the buildings they produce to be ‘read’ by occupants – spaces are designed to be understood a certain way and therefore affect the occupants in a certain way. Whilst this model is well intentioned and mainly used to emphasize the importance of functional accessibility and usability, spatial semiotics – the idea that ‘architectural’ space has a language that can be read – relies upon an assumption that there is only one possible way of ‘reading’ a space. As well as denying the possibility of differences, it was also argued by the Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre that considering space through the model of spatial semiotics
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diminishes the dynamic role of space as both the location for and product of social interaction, and reduces it to the status of a message to be consumed (1991). Despite these flaws in the use of ‘reading’ as a model for how people interact with architecture, it is still widely used by architects and results in a way of practicing architecture in which the architect designs, arranges and choreographs stimuli for the people who occupy their buildings to react to passively. According to the Brazilian architects Ana Paula Baltazar and Silke Kapp, this is the traditional method of practicing as an architect – what they term the ‘RenaissanceModern’ approach to practicing architecture (2010, p.133). In the renaissance-modern mode of practice, architecture is seen as a heroic endeavour in which the artistic genius of the architect enables them to be ‘the creators, form-givers and controllers of the human environment’ (Banham 1975, cited in Hill 2003, p.10). Jeremy Till (2009) states that the currency with which they do so is space – to most architects, space is something that they can manipulate, modify, mould and (most importantly to this discussion) create. The conceptualisation of space as something objective and material (and hence modifiable) is a descendent of Cartesian and Newtonian models of space. Descartes’ understanding of space is that it was physical, and consequently measurable, dividable and shape-able (Till 2009, p.120). Newton also considered there to be a type of space known as relative space which is measurable by the senses (Hensel et al. 2009, p.17). I argue that in the renaissance-modern perspective of the majority of architectural practice, this idea that people – ‘users’ of architecture – can sense space leads to the idea that space has an effect, and the role of the architect is to choreograph these effects;. This is a product of the combination of the Cartesian idea that space can be manipulated, moulded, created and controlled, with the Newtonian idea that space has an effect, resulting in a mindset in which it is possible to control the user through the manipulation of space. Jonathan Hill argues it is a perspective which assumes people are homogeneous and predictable (2010, p.10) and requires ‘the user’ to be passive and manageable: to be a person who is simply subject to their environment. Contrary to this widespread view of space, this paper explores the notion that ‘users’ are not simply subject to architecture, but rather participate actively in its production. Fundamental to this paper is Henri Lefebvre’s model of space (1991) as a social product, which is composed of three elements; representations of space (such as architectural drawings), conventions of spatial practice (such as queuing) and representational space (space as lived, which contains meanings for those living it). Space, for Henri Lefebvre, was both a product of society and a field which enabled society to happen. This paper uses Lefebvre’s model of space to make the argument that relationship between architecture and the user can be described through an analogy of editing, which places that user 4
within the role of producer of architecture and is contrasted against the usual assumption of the ‘user’ being a reader or consumer of architecture, which rely on a combination of Newtonian and Cartesian understandings of space. The analogy of editing is an understanding of the relationship between architecture and the user which acknowledges that architecture is not only realized by the architect, but exists as ‘a product of space, time and social being’ (Borden 2001, p.11).
Perception, Action and Spatial Production In contrast to the widespread view of public space as a place of consumption (Nolan 2003), Borden (2001) states that practitioners of socio-spatial subcultures reject exchange values in favour of use values. Bavington (2007) further argues that these practitioners visually critique their environment in terms of how well it allows for their activities. For example, graffiti writers will categorise trains according to the materials they are constructed from, which affect how easy it is to paint – some trains on the New York subway lines where graffiti originated would be clad in a corrugated stainless steel which is harder to paint on, while others would be made from flush panels which offer a much smoother canvas (Chalfant & Cooper 1984). Traceurs (practitioners of parkour) describe their particular process of analysing an environment to discern a potential route for their parkour as their ‘Parkour vision’ (Brown 2008). Johann Vigroux, a French traceur, explains in the television documentary Jump London (Mike Christie, 2003) that he sees the city as a playground. This allusion to viewing space from the point of view of a child is not limited to parkour, but can also be found in skateboarding. According to the American skateboarder Craig Steyck ‘two hundred years of American technology unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential. But it was the minds of 11 year olds that could see that potential’ (Borden 2001, p.173). It is apparent that seeing the world from a child’s point of view is a prevalent framework within these subcultures, but what differentiates a child’s point of view from an adult’s? According to Nolan (2003, p.315), ‘adult’ space is regarded as space for consumption. This is different from children, who do not want to consume objects but make and modify them, and as far as possible, remodel their environment too (Jones 2000, p.34). Given that children want to make and modify their environment, it can be claimed that children therefore analyse space in terms of how it allows for production, modification and appropriation. This explains the allusions to viewing space from the point of view of a child by members of these subcultures, as they are both viewpoints which are concerned not with conventional uses and consumption of their environment but with ways in which to analyse their environment for more original production. This viewpoint was also found in the attitudes towards objects and space related by those that were interviewed in the course of this research. As one respondent, Meek, stated,
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You look at things differently because of how you work. You see it as a potential canvas, whereas other people see it as just a wall... you’re just constantly looking everywhere you go, everywhere [has] a potential, you know, there’s always a potential spot... you’re always looking for a spot to get up and paint so that people can see it from miles around. In this statement, Meek implicitly associates his means of analysis with his actions. It is difficult to separate these two processes as they form a reciprocal process whereby his actions have informed his means of analysis and then the analysis leads to further action. This relationship between analysis and action is highly contextual and located in the immediate environment as a result of many years of practicing graffiti. At the same time, this raises the question of how and where the stimuli and inspirations for Meek’s first actions originate from. He elaborates that [We] used to just skate in all these skate parks which were just covered in graffiti... My friend Jeriah had been painting, well been [sic] tagging3 for a long time, well since he was about 9 or something, and we just went and got a load of paint...and just decided we would start painting. According to Lefebvre (1991), the influence of representation plays a substantial role in the production of space. In Meek’s case, the representations of the act of graffiti (the graffiti itself) inspired him to produce his own form of graffiti. Similar parallels can be drawn with other sociospatial subcultures. The documentary film Dogtown & Z-Boys (Stacey Peralta, 2001) suggests the early skateboarders of the 1970s drew heavily upon the practice of surfing for inspiration. Ian Borden (2001) elaborates that skaters would appropriate the topology of downtown Los Angeles, making use of the concrete banks of deserted school playgrounds to emulate the motions of surfing by turning, sliding and running their hands along the concrete as if it was water. By re-enacting the actions of surfing through body, board and terrain, the skater produces a space that can be likened to Lefebvre’s concept of ‘natural space’ (1991). Lefebvre refers to ‘natural’ space as that which is produced from the body and the gestures of the body, and differentiates it from his concept of ‘abstract’ space, which is analogous to Cartesian space. In short, for Lefebvre natural space is produced and related to by the body (left, right, high, low) whereas abstract space is described in terms of geometry (co-ordinates on x, y, z axes). In the case of skateboarding, the natural spaces made by the skateboarders are dialectical productions of space, an outcome of the skater’s re-enactment of surfing through the ‘dynamic intersection of body, board and terrain’ (Borden 2001, p.36) The terrain, or environment, plays a hugely important role in the ways in which these subcultures are enacted. The activities of members of these subcultures are related to the geographical location in which they occur; taking skateboarding as an example, whilst the earliest
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A simple graffiti form of the writers signature (usually a pseudonym) made using ink marker or spray paint
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skateboarders began by appropriating school playgrounds near the beach and emulating surfing. As the practice developed, skateboarders moved on to use drained swimming pools in back gardens, where the first aerial tricks were developed as skateboarders used the tight radius of the pools to propel themselves beyond the lip and into the air (Borden, 2001). In the same way that action and perception inform and modify each other, it is possible to form a similar model of the relationship between action and terrain: the terrain enables actions, which in turn expand the possibilities of the terrain for members of the subculture. An example of this can be found in the action of a traceur vaulting a rail, which I have drawn from the research of Andy Day, a photographer and traceur. Railings typically determine a division and border between spaces. Before going further with exploring the example, it is useful to reiterate Lefebvre’s distinction between abstract and natural space; an abstract space is a space which does not originate from occupation or action by a body. Abstract space is so named because it is ‘divorced from the lived’ (Elden 2004, p.189) – it is a product of an abstract way of thinking, the architectural plan. Returning to railings, spaces which have been divided by a railing (which will have been constructed using co-ordinates taken from an architectural plan) are abstract spaces. When a traceur vaults the rail which divides these abstract spaces, the gestures of the traceur create a natural space through the interaction of their body and the rail. Day (2003) argues that this natural space, located within the relationship between a body action and the terrain, erases the divisions and dislocations between previously abstract spaces.
Consumption and Representation The natural spaces produced from the intersections between the actions of the body, board and terrain, are a product of use value rather than exchange value, in which the practitioners address the city in terms of how it allows their subcultures to be enacted rather than consume the city as designed to be. According to Bavington (2007) the actions of these subcultures can be viewed as a form of what Michael de Certeau describes as a ‘spatial tactic’. De Certeau, a French sociologist, was interested in the everyday, and how individuals related to society. To this end, he distinguished between strategies and tactics, in which a strategy is a projection of power onto space by an institution, whereas tactics are the ways by which individuals who are subject to that strategy subvert it through exploiting the gaps in the strategy. In their unusual uses of the spaces of the city – an adult space, orientated towards consumption – the practitioners of these socio-spatial subcultures appropriate commoditised space for non-consumptive use, hence Bavington’s positioning of these subcultures as a form of spatial tactic: both the values of the subculture (rejecting consumptive practices) and the spatial practices themselves are dislocated from an ‘everyday’ experience of the city, which exploits the possibilities allowed for by everyday street furniture and urban architectural 7
features. The practitioners of these socio-spatial subcultures ‘know how to deny evidences; to keep a critical acumen’ (Belle, cited in Daskalaki 2008, p.58) which enables them to see the world differently and therefore act differently. Clearly, perception of opportunities plays a key role in enabling these subcultures, but the change in a practitioner’s perception does not instantly occur the moment that a person participates in the subculture for the first time, but is the outcome of numerous repetitions of actions in a variety of locations. As the French traceur Sebastien Foucan explains in Jump London (Mike Christie, 2003), ‘It’s all about experience. With practice the eye comes to analyse, here is a good location, here is a bad location. Here is a location which is rich in obstacles.’ For Sebastien Foucan, the repetition of actions has informed his means of determining which spaces are ideal for parkour; however, it is not only the experience of the practitioners which informs their perception. Representations of graffiti inspired ‘Meek’ to begin painting his own graffiti, just as the earliest skateboarders sought to represent their favoured pastime of surfing through their skateboards (Borden 2001). Therefore I argue that both the consumption and production of representation plays a key role in informing perceptions and actions within these socio-spatial subcultures. Practitioners often form associations with other members of their subculture based on their geographical proximity (practicing on the same street, borough, town, city or even country) and spend a great deal of time recording themselves and each other whilst enacting their subcultures. They also tend to film and photograph their own spatial practices to record themselves and others within a subculture. Amateur photographs and videos by these practitioners are then distributed to other members of the subculture through the internet and magazines, linking geographically disconnected members of a subculture together (Borden 2001).
This distributed media often
encourages and inspires these members to recreate the captured representations, through their own bodily actions and their search for architecturally similar locations. I argue then that representations dislocate the spatial practices from their original context, before becoming inspiration for others within the same subculture to relocate these practices within their own local environments. However, given that locations may be similar but not identical, modifications will be made in order to contextualise the actions for a given site, adjusting the movements to suit the terrain. This is a relocation of the representation within a local context, which in turn is recorded and shared again. Borden argues that the representations and practices of these socio-spatial subcultures combine to form a ‘lived image’ (2001, p.125). The participation in a global ‘lived image’ is the means by which the socio-spatial subcultures are both fundamentally located in local practice, yet are continuously participating in a communal process of (dis)location and relocation through the enactment and production of representation.
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Lefebvre (1991) states that conventionally, representations of space (such as the plans of architects and town planners) play the dominant role in the production of space. I argue that in contrast to this convention, the lived image of these socio-spatial subcultures offers a symbiotic relationship between the three elements of spatial production which Lefebvre identified (representations of space, spatial practice and representational (lived) space). The lived images is also the means by which the socio-spatial subcultures are simultaneously located locally and dislocated globally; although the actions which characterise the subcultures are enacted on the micro-scale of the street, the role played by representation within these subcultures means the actions are disseminated to and by a global network of practitioners (Borden 2001). According to Shahani (2008), the lived image of these socio-spatial subcultures (the interweaving of the analysis of space, representation of space and production of space) represents an evolution of the passivity of the nineteenth century flaneur and the twentieth century psychogeographer. Practitioners of sociospatial subcultures do not simply experience the spaces of the city but produce them too, participating in a practice which is continuously located and dislocated in a communal engagement with the city via both representation and action.
Rhythms, Identity and Place In the previous section this paper discussed the role of the urban environment in enabling the actions of the socio-spatial subcultures. It looked at how participants appropriate objects and terrains in order to produce space and enact their respective subcultures, and explored the role of representation in the dislocation and relocation of the practices on a global scale. The paper now turns to examine the how these practices are located and dislocated on a smaller scale, looking at how the seemingly brief actions of the socio-spatial subcultures affect the cities within which they are located. While the previous section was interested in the production of space, this section investigates the means by which these subcultures produce place and how in doing so, they can radically alter and even create new relationships between dislocated areas of the city. It is important to expand on the role of ‘experience’ in constructing the lived images of these subcultures. Crucial to this is Henri Lefebvre’s last book, Rhythmanalysis (2004), which examined the rhythms of everyday life. According to Lefebvre (2004), rhythms fall into two categories: cyclical and linear. A cyclical rhythm is a rhythm which is repeated in time, such as night following day, and a linear rhythm is a rhythm which is repeated in space, such as walking. The difference between the two is that cyclical rhythms are rhythms of events, whereas linear rhythms are rhythms of actions. I argue that experience within these subcultures is ultimately is about an accumulated experience of both these types of rhythms.
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An example of a linear (spatial) rhythm can be found in skateboarding, as skateboarders pumping their feet on the pavement to accelerate past slower pedestrians. At the same time as experiencing accelerated spatial rhythms, skateboarders also create and participate in cyclical (temporal) rhythms. Many skaters will have a local ‘spot’ which is favourable for their practice, which forms the focus of their local skating community, which they will visit on a daily or weekly basis. Practitioners can even revisit locations several times in a single day; according the London skateboarder Aaron Bleasedale (cited in Borden 2001, p.198) ‘[we would] meet up at Cantalowes [Camden skate spot] with some people, then head out to the city, skate around, find some new spots then head back to Camden’. The combination of accelerated movement and repeated visits to a location is a synthesis of cyclical rhythms and linear rhythms and creates a rhythm of occupation, what Lefebvre refers to as a social (natural) rhythm (2004, p.96). The accelerated speed which skateboarders experience the city is a dislocation from an everyday (pedestrian) experience, however this dislocation leads to a rhythm of occupation and hence the creation of location; it is the dislocation from everyday experiences which actually locates the subculture within the city. These rhythms of occupation are not limited to skateboarding and can be found within other subcultures. When graffiti writers who develop favourite locations to ‘bomb’, they return to them as many times as possible and spend as long as possible painting, as described by the graffiti writer Rebel in an interview with Paul 107 (2003, p.150): ‘plenty of nights we spent in [the train yard], sundown to sunrise, pulling all nighters...we wouldn’t leave ‘til every can was empty.’ The practice of graffiti is not limited to extended periods of painting; in contrast to spending an entire night in a train yard, a graffiti writer may spend only seconds writing their ‘tag’ (a signature) in marker pen on a piece of urban furniture before moving on to write it elsewhere, creating spatial rhythm which contrasts with the cyclical rhythms created by repeated visits to the same train yard. Both these rhythms play an important role within the graffiti subculture. The ultimate objective of graffiti for most writers is ‘Getting Up’, or writing your name over as large an area as possible (MacDonald 2001). Tags form the graffiti writer’s ‘identifying logo’ (Chalfant & Cooper 1984, p.68) and play a large role within the graffiti subculture, as they can be written quickly, enabling a writer to get their name ‘up’ in many locations within a short period of time. In addition to a tag, the graffiti writer will also produce ‘throw ups,’ a term referring to a quickly painted name that consists of an outline and optional fill (Chalfant & Cooper 1984, p.27). A step up from the ‘throw up’ is the ‘dub’, a signature that takes more time than a tag and it is characterised by the silver or gold fill-in (MacDonald 2001, p.77). A larger version of a ‘dub’ is a ‘blockbuster’, a signature that is characterised by larger, monotone letters designed to take up as much space as possible. Finally, taking longest of all is the ‘piece’ (an abbreviation of masterpiece), which is a
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larger, more elaborate, colourful and stylistically demanding depiction of a writer’s name (MacDonald 2001, p.78). As part of the struggle for respect from their peers and also due to competition for space, writers will often write over another writer’s work in order to ‘get up’ (Chalfant & Cooper 1984). This is frowned upon, unless a writer can produce a better or more complex piece of graffiti the work they are writing over (Paul 107 2003), such as by covering a tag with a piece. However, if this hierarchy of graffiti forms is ignored (such as if a multicolour and typographically elaborate piece is covered over by a single colour, bubble letter dub) or if someone ‘crosses out’ someone else, this causes confrontation between writers, where writers will continuously go over each other wherever they can find them (Paul 107 2003, p.87). MacDonald (2001, p.1) poetically describes this as a war on the wall: ‘assault meets assault and blow layers on blow, over and over and over until tensions reach their peak and then start to wind down’. I argue that these successive layers of individual works on a wall create a cyclical rhythm of material production. Graffiti writers, in the creation of their oeuvre, will be forced to defend their works against many others: their peers, whom them are attempting to exceed; against younger generations of writers (who will often ignorantly go over more experienced writers in order to ‘get up’); and also against municipal authorities who will chemically wash walls and trains to remove the works of the graffiti writers (Chalfant & Cooper 1984, p.100). Recorded within the graffiti writers oeuvre is the story of their life as a writer, including who they are, who they have been battling against and who they have been battling alongside (since writers often form crews with other writers). Although each writer has their own style, their relationship with other writers means they share stylistic elements with other writers in the same crew or geographic location. This locates the writer within their geographical as well as subcultural context. The paint from the graffiti writer’s spray can are not the only observable material (or physical) traces produced by these socio-spatial subcultures. Frequently, both skateboarding and parkour leave marks where their practitioners have been. When skateboarders grind their skateboards along the edges of walls and street furniture, they leave gouges and striations that ultimately lead to the rounding off or breaking up of edges and the urethane wheels and painted deck graphics leave technicolour streaks across walls, ledges and benches. Likewise, when traceurs jump onto or climb up walls during the course of practising parkour they can occasionally leave rubber footmarks or scuff clean previously dirty walls. These marks can tell their own story, as is highlighted in a statement made by interview respondent Dom: “You can tell where the more experienced traceurs have been, ‘cause they don’t try and vault over the wall so soon...they go up as far as they can before they vault across and you can see this at the top, where the footmarks are less dense” 11
In this quote, Dom has highlighted the way in which his knowledge of a spatial practice unique to his subculture has enabled him to form an understanding of actions in space and has resulted in a narrative of the location, revealing the means by which ‘place’ is constructed. In his discussions on place, de Certeau draws upon discussions of ‘palimpsest’ (1994, p.109), which is traditionally understood to be a page of a manuscript whose contents have been scraped off, only to be written over again. The marks left by these subcultures (whether as the product in the case of graffiti or by-product in the case of skateboarding and parkour) are layered upon each other like a palimpsest, which each successive layer overwriting the layer beneath without completely obscuring it. These palimpsests symbolise the rhythms of occupation and use of these subcultures which is legible to practitioners but ‘beyond comprehension for the average city dweller’ (MacDonald 2001, p.2). According to de Certeau, a place is ‘a fragmentary and inward turning history, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that...remain in an enigmatic state, symbolisations encrusted in the pains and pleasures of the body’ (1994, p.108). In the creation of rhythms of occupation and the marks which tell the stories of these occupations, the members of these subcultures, create places. These places are disconnected from each other, found in the areas of the city best suited to the practice of the subcultures, but through the actions and rhythms of occupation central to their respective subcultures, connections between previously disconnected areas of the city can be made through the production of similar identities of place. Similarities between places (articulated through rhythms) form a metaphysical connection, as programmatic similarities effectively negate the distances that separate two regions of the city. Hence areas which are geographically disconnected are connected to each other through their location within the sociospatial subcultures. It is also possible to connect disconnected areas of the city not only through a connection between identities but with new spatial connections. Perhaps the most literal representations of this are the routes constructed by traceurs as they undertake a parkour ‘run’ which is an unconventional route through or over an area, using jumps, vaults and climbs to get over or across any obstacles along the path. Sebastien Foucan gives this example of how to construct a parkour run in Jump London (Mike Christie, 2003): ‘Draw a straight line on a map of your home town. Start from point a, and go to point b.’ I argue that the creation of new routes is an experience of the city which is dislocated from a pedestrian experience which is dependent upon existing routes, roads and buildings: these conventions are completely disregarded in the construction of parkour runs. The route of a parkour run is a form of desire path, albeit a path which is dislocated from a conventional path making process: like most desire paths, they are a means of connecting spaces using the easiest or shortest possible route. In the case of parkour ‘runs’ the crucial difference being 12
that the route is selected not upon the principle of avoidance of obstacles but on the availability of the ‘obstacles’ along the path: As Foucan elaborates in the television documentary Jump London (Mike Christie, 2003), ‘Do not consider the elements (barriers, wall, wire fences, trees, houses, buildings) as obstacles. Hug them: climb, get over, jump: let your imagination flow.’ The routes of a parkour run can be connected to what Certeau (1994, p.119) referred to as a subjective tour type spatial orientation based upon actions, movements and itineraries, which is different from a traditional Cartesian map which is derived from objectively fixed reference points. The structure of these routes is three dimensional, producing natural spaces through the gestures of the body, joining vertical and horizontal planes of motion in the course of their runs. The actions which produce natural space are repeated through social rhythms producing a place, an identity. The combined annotations, rhythms, places and routes, produce a further geographic aspect of their subcultures, ‘constructing a city from their experiential reality’ (Atkinson 2009, p.12). Shahani (2008) argues when they go on a parkour run, traceurs present themselves as a form of psychogeographer. The discipline of psychogeography was invented by the Marxist theorist and artist Guy Debord as a way of studying both the subjective and objective elements of a pedestrian experience of the city (Sadler, 1999). In order to uncover the psychogeography of a terrain, Debord proposed the method of ‘derivé’ (in English, ‘drift’) in which a person or group of people would allow themselves to be drawn around the city by various elements which attracted them – essentially, it was a walk without a destination which treated the city as a ‘found object’ (Sadler 1999, p.117). This is where Shahani’s comparison between parkour and psychogeography arises: although the parkour run may be more directed than a psychogeographic derivé, with a route and a destination planned rather than spontaneously arrived at, they both appropriate the city as it is and explore it. Where parkour exceeds psychogeography, however, is that is it not simply a passive experience or recording of elements of the city, but in the creation of new routes and places plays a role in the production of elements of the city. It shares these qualities with skateboarding and graffiti; the dislocations and relocations of the rhythms of these subcultures – rhythms of actions, occupation and movement – create place, and in doing so produce what Sadler (1999, p.92) terms ‘a new social geography of the city’.
Editing the City This paper has explored the ways in which these socio-spatial subcultures are (dis)located in contemporary urban space. To conclude, I will summarize the previous sections to make explicit the ways in which these subcultures challenge conventional understandings of space and place within architectural discourse. 13
I have argued how the participants of these socio-spatial subcultures are not simply subject to architecture but produce it through their social production of space, rhythms and place, offering an engagement with the urban landscape which challenges and subverts our daily experience of the city. The spatial gestures – actions – of the subcultures are highly related to the geographical location in which they occur, and in the case of parkour often connecting sites which appear to be spatially unrelated to each other (such as adjacent rooftops or areas divided by walls and railings). Spatial perception and production are shown to be highly related, both through the experience of the practitioners themselves and the role of representation. The distribution of amateur film and video between members of the subcultures enables the spatial gestures of the subcultures to be dislocated from their original context, before being relocated within a new context (with appropriate modifications to suit local conditions) by practitioners re-enacting the representation through their bodies. The process of location, dislocation and relocation found in the ‘lived image’, is also found in the process which produces places. Rhythms of occupation, combined with the physical traces of these subcultures (such as scuff marks from trainers and skateboards, or paint and marker pen ink) reinforce the identities of place; the constant production of space and the stories associated with those productions form what de Certeau (1994, p,108) calls ‘an inwardly turning history’ to the members of these subcultures. Connections between these apparently unrelated sites form a relationship between physically disconnected areas of the city; the (sub)cultural connections between these locations creates a new spatial structure of the city for the practitioners to locate themselves and their subcultures within. Having explored the ways in which these subculture interact with the city and produce space and place, it is possible to further elaborate on the implicit critiques these socio-spatial subcultures pose towards contemporary approaches to producing architecture. This paper ultimately positions architecture as a process of producing space and place which architects should recognise they operate within rather than have absolute control over. The subcultures studied in this paper demonstrate the abilities for occupants of architecture to construct space and place, and show that an approach to architecture which attempts to artificially ‘write’ meaning into space is a tacit admission of failure to provide a space which enables meaning to be written (i.e. to construct ‘place’). The absence of socially produced rhythms (and any possibility to create them) ultimately – and possibly quite deliberately – produces ‘non-places’, such as supermarkets, shopping centres, motorways and airports (Auge 2001). These non-places can be conceived as mono-rhythmic spaces, organised entirely towards rhythms of consumption. In enacting the rhythms of their subcultures, practitioners appropriate both mono-rhythmic spaces (non-places), and arrhythmic spaces (nonspaces) – such as rooftops, or spatial detritus left behind by non-places such as underpasses or the
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verges of motorways. In doing so, they re-introduce polyrhythmic (contradictory) space (Lefebvre 2004, p.96) into the urban morphology. These rhythms of the subcultures elude categorisation within a ‘lived image’; although these rhythms may be traced through photographs and films, they require a memory in order to be lived (Lefebvre 2004, p.36). It has been noted in a critique of Ian Borden’s work (Spencer 2003) that presenting these subcultures as a ‘lived image’ positions them as the absolute form of the spectacle; a social practice mediated through images. Borden’s identification of the ‘lived image’ as a means of representation and inspiration for action is accurate; but it is the rhythms which are the ultimate producers of personal, physical, and social realities – the real, lived, means of mediation. By appropriating the terrains of the urban as an oeuvre, socio-spatial subcultures re-introduce the use values which Lefebvre says are ‘fundamental to urban reality’ (1996, p.67). The practitioners of these subcultures are not simply subject to the spaces of city and its architecture, but through the location, dislocation and relocation of their spatial and rhythmic engagements produce it; they are not readers, but editors.
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