Micro-Infrastructures and A Progressive Sense Of Place: micro-conflicts on a London council estate
Topics:
Keywords: progressive sense of place, open city, micro-spatialities, micro-conflicts, social housing, garden cities
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Steve Pile, The Open University
Eda Yazici, University of Warwick
Susannah Cramer-Greenbaum, University of Warwick
Michael Keith, University of Oxford
Karim Murji, University of West London
John Solomos, University of Warwick
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Abstract
Doreen Massey’s progressive sense of place (2005) and Richard Sennett’s ethical case for the open city (2018) rely on seeing space as open. It is openness that guarantees an open future, an openness to others, and the possibility of a progressive politics. For Massey, her lived experience of growing up in Wythenshawe reveals both the possibility of, and also the undermining of, the possibility of creating a progressive sense of place. In contrast, Sennett sees the Garden Cities such as Wythenshawe, for all its progressive elements, as ultimately blocking new ways of dwelling in the city. The Garden City, for him, is too closed to provide a progressive sense of place. In north London, we discover a hidden Garden City, with secret gardens. The estate is, effectively, an infrastructure of the social (Latham and Layton, 2019), comprised of imbricated micro-infrastructures. These micro-infrastructures – and micro-conflicts over them – enable us to rethink these accounts of a progressive sense of place. Rather than seeing openness in a physical ontology of space and place, we wish to emphasize the openness and closedness that emerges from the ways the people negotiate the micro-infra-structures, and micro-conflicts, of everyday life on a social housing estate.
Micro-Infrastructures and A Progressive Sense Of Place: micro-conflicts on a London council estate
Category
Paper Abstract