Amy Lavender Harris

Today in the Public Space course we’ll explore the idea of the public sphere and consider what it means to belong to a ‘public’ or counter-public and to engage in public address.

Our discussion will begin with an introduction to German philosopher Jurgen Habermas’ notions of the public sphere and will go on to consider some criticisms of it, including Nancy Fraser’s discussion of what happens in “actually existing” democracies. 

Slides are available here: GEOG 4900 Public Space Summer 2012 Class 3 lecture slides Theorizing the Public Sphere

Theorizing the Public Sphere

Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere (Introduction; via Craig  Calhoun at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge)

Douglas Kellner, Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention

Public Space Interventions

“Go on, share your thoughts on a wall (Real, not Facebook);” Globe & Mail; 10 May 2012.

Before I Die

What’s that tent doing in the library? (YFile, 23 January 2012)

Piano Stairs (by The Fun Theory)

Phil Dancing on the Subway! (2011; via Youtube)

Goodbye Graffiti: A Short Story about Toronto’s Street Art Movement (produced by Char Loro, 2012; via Vimeo)

Billboards Converted to Swingsets (via MAKE blog) 

CCTV/Creative Control (Marcos Zotes, via Youtube)

EVOKE! 10 – “Public Art Space” Installation in Trafalgar Square, London by Contra (via Youtube)

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“In her final year at York University, Beth became obsessed  with the washroom graffiti on campus. She loved the private conversations, the political discourse. The different colours of pen and large angry letters. Sometimes it began with something like Men don’t protect women anymore. Then a series of responses. Often daily. A story in progress. Punctuated with fuck or bitch or dyke. Inevitably the dialogue ran out of space or patience or deteriorated into a rant. She loved that each washroom seemed to have a genre. Politics. Sex. Irony everywhere. She loved that the caretakers rarely washed the walls.” [Julie Booker, 2011. "Scratch." From Up Up Up! (Anansi; pp. 153-161.]

  This week we’ll explore public space and some of its complications (e.g., gender binaries, oppositions between ‘public’ and ‘private’) by talking about toilets. 

Why toilets? 

Well, for one thing, toilets exist precisely on the margin between public and private space. They are at once intensely intimate places and culturally laden, regulated, social spaces. Washrooms are one excellent entry point to many of the public space issues we’ll encounter in this course, ranging from the meaning of public (and private) space, to social and spatial constructions of race, class and (perhaps especially) gender, to notions of the public sphere (and ‘publics’ and counter-publics) as well as social movements fought in and over public space. 

 Slides for today’s class may be accessed by clicking here: 

GEOG 4900 Public Space Summer 2012 Class 2 lecture slides What is Public Space

Links:

10 Tips for Using Public Restrooms

Skip to the Loo: Why Public Toilets Matter (Michael Harris; The Walrus, March 2011).

How to Recognise a Furtive Practice: A User’s Guide (Kathleen Ritter, 2005)

New link [23 February 2012]: Why Portland’s Public Toilets Succeeded While Others Failed (The Atlantic Cities blog, January 2012)

Videos: 

Scene from The Pursuit of Happyness (via Youtube)

Scene from Trainspotting (via Youtube)

‘Bathroom’ segment from History of the Home (BBC series) (via Youtube): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

 [Image source: Public washroom attendant, Toronto, Ontario. City of Toronto Archives, Series 376, File 1, Item 90B.]

Welcome to GEOG 4900 (Public Space), offered during the Summer 2012 term in the Geography Department at York University! 

Important updates, overviews, announcements, handouts and slides will be posted to this website before each class: please check the space regularly. Click here to view the syllabus and reading list; click here to view slides, handouts and links organized by week. 

This week we’ll begin with a short overview of some ways of thinking about public space. We’ll also view a well-known film about public space: William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Places (1988). 

Slides for today’s class are accessible here: GEOG 4900 Public Space Summer 2012 Class 1 lecture slides Introduction and Overview

If you have any questions or would otherwise like to get in touch, you can contact me at alharris [at] yorku [dot] ca. 

This week in the Space/Place course we’ll be discussing Possible Worlds: Imaginary Places and Virtual Spaces. 

We’ll explore the spatiality of utopias (also eutopias and dystopias), metaphors of imagined places, and consider how virtual spaces mediate between the real and the possible. 

Slides for today’s class are available here: GEOG 3300 Week 12 Possible Worlds lecture slides 2011-2012

This week in the Space/Place class we’ll be discussing landscapes of fear and their counterpart, moral geographies. 

Among the subjects we’ll discuss: what makes a place frightening?’ To what extent may our fears of certain places be attributed to ‘natural’ (or ‘reasonable’) fears and to what extent are these ‘dangerous’ spaces socially produced? Can ‘morality’ be ascribed to place? What distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘bad’ places? 

Slides for today’s class are available here: GEOG 3300 Week 11 Landscapes of Fear Moral Geographies lecture slides 2011-2012

 Film:

 Full Metal Jacket (ending); Stanley Kubrick, 1987, via YouTube.

Recommended Reading:

Sack, Robert, 1999. A Sketch of a Geographic Theory of Morality. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 89(1): 26-44.

Sack, Robert, 2003. A Geographical Guide to the Real and the Good. Routledge. 

Just a reminder that, as announced via email, today’s Space/Place class will be set aside for individual consultations for students seeking feedback or research help on research paper topics (please remember that the essay outline and annotated bibliography are due next week). 

If you would like help with your essay, please met at the regular classroom location at 2:30 pm. I will return the midterm exam and second reading response assignment, and after that will be available to anyone wishing help or advice. I’ll be more than happy to help you do library researching using York’s online databases of scholarly journal articles and books.  

Next week in class we’ll consider Place of Fear and Moral Geographies at the same time. Given the overlap between the subjects, this should be a good fit. 

 Have you ever found a lost scarf and taken it home? Ever picked a piece of furniture discarded at curbside? Foraged fruits or nuts at the grocery store without paying for them? Picked wild berries? Bought anything at a garage sale? Adopted a shelter pet? Accepted hand-me-downs? 

Your willingness (or unwillingness) to do any of these things (or admit you have done them) reflects cultural notions about what is clean or dirty, as well as what belongs to ‘culture’ or ‘nature.’ 

So, too, do your responses to human homelessness, stray cats, raccoons, cockroaches, mice, even eyebrow mites. 

This week in the Space/Place course we’ll discuss the spatial implications of these attitudes. Our conversation will be informed, in part, by philosopher Bruno Latour’s observation in his playful ‘anthropology of science’ We Have Never Been Modern (1993) that we ‘purify’ ontological categories (such as nature and culture) by eliminating objects that call their separation into question.

Lecture slides for today’s class are available here: GEOG 3300 Week 9 lecture slides 2011-2012 Wild Places

Film:

Carts of Darkness (Murray Siple / NFB, 2008)

Cat City (Justine Pimlott / Red Queen Productions)

Links:

Nine Lives, But None to Spare (Excalibur, 7 September 2011)

The Phenomenology of Felines (Excalibur, 7 September 2011)

Toronto Cat Rescue, Annual Report 2011

Further Reading:

Harris, Amy Lavender and Peter Fruchter, 2007. Acts of Salvage. Eye Weekly, 8 November 2007.

Jerolmack, Colin, 2008. How Pigeons Became Rats : The Cultural-Spatial Logic of Problem Animals. Social Problems, 55(1): 72-94. 

Philo, Chris and Chris Wilbert, eds., 2000. Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations. London; New York: Routledge.

Smith, Nicholas, 1999. The howl and the pussy: Feral cats and wild dogs in the Australian imagination. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 10(3): 288-305. 

Tannent, Jaclyn K; Downs, Colleen T; Wald, Dara M; Watson, Helen K., 2010. Public Perceptions of Feral Cats within an Urban Conservancy on a Campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. South African Journal of Wildlife Research, 40(1): 16-26.

Wolch, Jennifer and Jody Emel, eds., 1998. Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands. London; New York: Verso.

Yufoff, Kathryn, 2011. The Valuation of Nature: The Natural Choice White Paper. Radical Philosophy, 170 (Nov/Dec 2011).

Today in the Space/Place course we’ll explore embodied places by looking a gender, corporeality and spatial representations of dis/ability. 

Lecture slides for today’s class are available here: GEOG 3300 Week 7 Embodied Places lecture slides 2011 2012

This week in the Space/Place course we will begin with Geographer Vinay Gidwani and Sharad Chari’s observation that “we inhabit the space-time of capital.”

What this can possibly mean will form the core of our explorations today: space-time as conceived by spatial theorists Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, the character of Marxian criticisms of contemporary capitalism, the nature of work and, ultimately, whether even a university should be understood as a kind of ‘factory of learning.’ We’ll also consider whether the ongoing Wall Street protests are the beginning of a revolution — or simply another spectacle of the sort derided by Debord in Society of the Spectacle. 

In The Production of Space, Lefebvre observes of cities, “everything here resembles everything else” and adds that “repetition has everywhere defeated uniqueness, that the artificial and contrived have driven all spontaneity and naturalness from the field, and, in short, that products have replaced works. Repetitious spaces are the outcome of repetitive gestures.” He goes on to ask, “[a]re these spaces interchangeable because they are homologous? Or are they homologous so that they can be exchanged, bought and sold …?”

Lecture slides for today’s class are accessible here: GEOG 3300 Week 5 Production and Consumption lecture slides 2011 2012

Film

Modern Times, 1936.

The Sopranos intro (via YouTube)

“Wall Street Protest Continues” (New York Post, via YouTube)

“Wall Street protest ‘could be big deal’” (Reuters, via YouTube)

Readings

 Zukin, Sharon, 2008. David Harvey on Cities. Chapter 6 in David Harvey: A Critical Reader. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Electronically accessiblehere.

Debord, Guy, 1983. Excerpt (“The Organization of Territory”) from Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Electronically accessible here.

Fleming, Peter and Andre Spicer, 2004. ‘You can checkout anytime, but you can never leave’: Spatial boundaries in a high commitment organization. Human Relations, 57(1): 75-94. Electronically accessible here.

 Additional Recommended Resources

Charles Marville’s photographs of nineteenth century Paris

Gidwani, Vinay and Sharad Chari, 2004. Geographies of Work. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22(4): 475-484. Electronically accessible here. 

Lefebvre, Henri [trans/ Donald Nicholson-SMith], 1974; 1991. The Production of Space. Blackwell.