Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the un/doing of place and everyday life through the prism of spatial anthropology and the social production of space. Arguing ‘against place’, the critical focus of the paper is the production of ‘dwellspace’ and the spatial phenomenology of ambience, spaciousness and slowness.

Paper Abstract:

The doing and undoing of place is epistemologically baked in to the very idea of ‘place’ as a geographical entity and locus of dwelling. Whether seen as an open or porous nexus of global relations (Massey 1991) or as a precarious bastion of identity, history and sociality that is buffeted and ‘emptied’ by the depthless flows of supermodernity (Augé 1995), processes of place-making cannot be readily disentangled from those that mobilise towards the negation of place and the inexorable threat of placelessness. Understood dialectically, the un/doing of place reflects tensions and contradictions that are critically bound up with the wider social and cultural production of space (Lefebvre 1991). Far from being ‘the most abstract, the most empty, the most detached from the realities of life and experience’ (Ingold 2011: 145), it is space not place that is the locus of everyday social practices and where spatial stories (Certeau 1984) are performatively rooted and routed. Exploring the merits of being ‘for space’ (Massey 1995) rather than ‘against space’, this paper questions the sustainability or efficacy of the very idea of place in a world where hybrid and digital spaces are proliferating and the embodied habitus of place (Hillier and Rooksby 2005) is no longer contingent on the proximate physicality of localised dwelling. Building on work in the interdisciplinary field of spatial anthropology (Roberts 2018), it is more specifically the production of ‘dwellspace’ (Roberts 2023) and the spatial phenomenology of ambience, spaciousness and slowness around which provocations ‘against place’ will be centred.