Celebrations in Cities— space at stake

---

“I start by imagining.
I imagine a street, lined with buildings, buildings filled with businesses, and in back and above, apartments filled with people and consumer electronics. The street is also peopled. Apartment dwellers depart for the day, enter the street, produce a flow. Retail shops open and receive customers, offices fill their desks, small factories clatter with machinery. Machinery.”
Deleuzions

We are looking closely at spatial practices—at practices where space is not simply a “container” of a practice, but rather, one of its “stakes.” Much of the discussion that follows will focus on how the practices express personal and group identities. But from the beginning I want to look at their sites: at the city, the streets, and the ways that these spaces are transformed through various events.

Above, we talked about the Public Body, and about the everyday coding of bodies and places. This coding is also accomplished through punctuating events that can either reinforce or disrupt the everyday coding of the street: or do both, as with the festival. The festival’s disruption of the everyday street reinforces the public body as a festival body.

“...To speak of ‘producing space’ sounds bizarre, so great is the sway still held by the idea that empty space is prior to whatever ends up filling it. Questions immediately arise here: what spaces? and what does it mean to speak of ‘producing space’? We are confronted by the problem how to bring concepts that have already been worked out and formalized into conjunction with this new content without falling back on mere illustration and example—notorious occasions for sophistry....”
(Lefevbre 1991, 15)

In order to bring into perspective some of the transformative effects that urban festival practices lend to places, we need to know how places are made, and how this making can be refashioned. And one focus for our study of this refashioning is on how a place might be remade as the property of those whose lives are most intimately connected to it.

And today, the peoples who have the greatest need to acquire a hold on the spaces to where their lives have taken them are those people who are furthest from the places they once made claims over—the peoples whose former places, in other nations, are now forbidden to them. These diasporic populations are refugees from a variety of dangers, from genocide and war, from social oppression and from economic marginality.

margins move to centers

“The street is a conducting machine. It conducts electricity, relays messages, brings water, carries away shit. The street codes linear interactions. A code for the sidewalks: nods of the head, ritual greetings, facework among neighbors. A code for the gutter: spittings and hosings and the rakings of dust, the night vomitorium, logjams of cigarette butts. A code for the vehicles: keep to the left, keep moving, do not interrupt the flow.
Parking is not permitted.”
Deleuzions

The circumstances that generate global migrations will be an increasingly central topic for the social sciences in the coming years. In the space of this work, I will concentrate on the circumstances not of leaving—of expulsion from, or nostalgic attraction to former homelands. I will focus on the circumstances of arrival—of access to local social/cultural/spatial resources: of homecomings. For even where their leaving, their expulsion, has been physically accomplished, and with some emotional closure, the issue of their arrival, and of the means for them to fully enter into their new places, also begs our attention. So too, their struggle to make a claim for space in their new homes brings into relief the spatial circumstances that affect every resident in this space. And what these newcomers learn about the public sphere and the public spaces they encounter can become a civics lesson for us all.

“ It occurred to me that here was another moment to the day's festival, a moment not less significant by its intimate scale—the entire year of festival preparation and then today's festival performance were also rehearsals for this moment. This party was not the end of this year's event, but the budding communion that would assure the next. Here was fecund moment drenched in body sweat, and sweetened by a heady abandon.”Madang night

We need to explore how these strangers create the links to their new homes, and how these new places (through state institutions or by attitudes within the public sphere) attempt to manage this homecoming. The formalities of becoming recognized by local institutions (schools, banks, employers, the police) represent only one level of access to resources. There are other levels where this access must also be negotiated before the newcomer, the stranger, is no longer marked as being “strange.”