25 Practice creates its place

25 Practice creates its place

One of the great frustrations of planners and architects is that the users of their plans and buildings often find ways to make these into something different than was originally intended. These later appropriations of spaces disregard what the planner assumed would be the appropriate uses of them. Such later, ad hoc uses may be only temporary or they may be more permanent. Goffman provides us with a useful example:

“The great modern case is President Grayson Kirk's office during the 1968 unpleasantness at Columbia:
‘One and a half hours after the President's suite had been cleared of student demonstrators, Grayson Kirk stood in the center of his private office looking at the blankets, cigarette butts and orange peels that covered his rug. Turning to A. M. Rosenthal of The New York Times and several other reporters who had come into the office with him he murmured, "My God, how could human beings do a thing like this?" It was the only time, Truman recalled later, that he had ever seen the President break down. Kirk's windows were crisscrossed with tape and on one hung a large sign reading, "Join Us." His lampshades were torn, his carpet was spotted, his furniture was displaced and scratched. But the most evident and disturbing aspect of the scene was not the minor damage inflicted by the students. The everything-in-its-place decor to which Kirk had grown accustomed was now in disarray—disarray that was the result of the transformation of an office into the living quarters of l50 students during the past six days’ (quoted from: Avorn, et al., 1969. p. 200).
The great sociological question, of course, is not how could it be that human beings would do a thing like this, but rather how is it that human beings do this sort of thing so rarely. How come persons in authority have been so overwhelmingly successful in conning those beneath them into keeping the hell out of their offices?” (Goffman 1971, 288).

For the larger majority of people who are neither architects nor university presidents, the occupation of space is a continual problem and opportunity. Living in spaces designed by others, often for uses that are no longer useful, coping with advances in technology, and aging infrastructure: people more or less make do.

Counter-domination

“But should a stranger or employer or a janitor or policeman approach the two players, it will usually be quite sufficient to know that the men are playing a board game. The gearing of the game into the immediately surrounding workaday world is largely in terms of this relatively abstract categorization, for what are involved are such matters as the electric light, the room space, the time needed, the right of others to openly watch and under certain circumstances to interrupt the men and ask them to postpone the game or shift its physical location, the right of the players to phone their wives to say they will be delayed because of a game to finish. These and a host of other detailed ways in which what is going on must find a place in the rest of the ongoing world are relatively independent of which game is being played. By and large it is the mode of transformation, not what is thus transformed, that is geared into the world. And yet, of course, this independence is not complete”
(Goffman 1974, 248).

This slipperiness of place, its vulnerability to practices, set the limit to the production of space as an act of domination. Practices of domination attempt to produce spaces of domination, which will allow domination to occur as the sole practice in the place. Prisons use panoptic availability to prevent prisoners from performing counter-practices. Cities use codes to prevent the homeless from using the streets as either work space (panhandling) or housing (sleeping or defecating).

Counter-dominant practices create counter-spaces by disattending to the spatial logic of the dominant order. Alternative rules and unofficial attitudes (such as cynicism) tactically retrieve a space for use by a local practice. More profound transformations of space by practice require pre-planning and an alternative logic. Jokes are a clear example of this, as are festivals.

Counter-domination opens up spaces within the dominant order. But the opposite is also true. The market/state has tremendous resources, and authority, as well as longevity. It can quickly reseal the openings that counter-events have made. The longer term answer is to reveal and remove the practices of domination within the market/state, to democratize democracy and capitalism. Only then will the practices of government and the market create places that are open and available to all.