#nonplaces

[fatehbaz]

The state intervenes in children’s use of the city, criminalising children’s uses of the streets [...]. Much of this age-segregation emerged in the so-called Progressive Era (1890-1918) in northern cities of the United States, particularly Chicago. Informed by turn-of-the-century science [...], [t]hese child-savers sought to transform delinquent urban children into upright citizens. In doing so, reformers changed the shape of America’s cities. [...] Only a handful of dedicated playgrounds existed in urban America in the 1890s. [...] Contrasting images of working-class, immigrant youth left unsupervised on the streets with children of their own class, who led increasingly sheltered lives, middle-class urbanites feared for the future of the country. The burgeoning reform class, led by Chicagoans such as Jane Addams, feared so-called “swarms” of children on the streets [...].

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A new theory of child-development known as recapitulation theory had recently emerged. Proponents of this theory, such as G. Stanley Hall, argued that children passed through (or recapitulated) all the stages of the evolution of the race before they achieved adulthood. [...] Advocates [...] idealised almost all of white boys’ misbehaviour as recapitulation of the race’s past [...]. Although recapitulation theory had room for the sons of European immigrants, [...] children of colour remained outside the narrative of idealised misbehaviour. [...] [W]hite Americans [...] sought to repress the misbehaviour or so-called childhood savagery of children of colour rather than encourage it. Thus, just as white children were encouraged to embrace their inner savage and hold mock powwows and “to play Indian”, Progressive reformers confined Native American children to “civilizing” boarding schools [...].

Growing concerns over masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century limited reforms that could be seen as “molly-coddling”. To completely crush the misbehaving instinct, many middle-class Americans believed, would be just as dangerous [...]. Drawing on recapitulation theory, reformers believed the key to anti-delinquency among [...] European [...] children was providing these children with supervised, orderly places where the misbehaving instinct could safely play out. Central to reformers’ attempts to save but not tame [...] children meant the development of the world’s first municipal playground system in Chicago [...]. By 1915, the city of Chicago ran sixty-six recreation centres [...]. President Teddy Roosevelt heralded it as “one of the most notable civic achievements of any American city.” From Chicago, the idea spread around the country. By 1921, almost 200 cities employed a total of over eleven thousand men and women as year-round playground workers. [...]

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But the state, too, struggled to control urban childhood. [..] [T]ruant officers [...] struggled with huge caseloads in the early twentieth century. [...] On the streets, escapees evaded police, probation and truant officers [...]. A study of reform schools in and near Chicago in the early twentieth century found two-fifths of detainees left in what was euphemistically called ‘informal departure’ [...]. Escape caused such an issue for reformatories that it was considered among the most serious offences and, as such, carried the heaviest punishments including beatings, being hung by the wrists, being shackled, wearing heavy iron studded shoes, being placed in a tub of ice water, and being caged.

Even as Progressive ideals ostensibly moved prisons and other reform institutions further from the punishment of the body to the treatment of the individual’s soul, in practice, reformatory officials often resorted to physical punishments for the treatment of runaways. [...] [T]he new juvenile institutions of the early twentieth-century differed so wildly in practice from their conception in theory. [...]

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By the 1930s, however, the concept of the dangerous but ultimately salvageable swarm which had shaped Progressive Era responses to the problems of children and the city was gradually replaced by the far more pessimistic idea of individual deviant personalities. Faith in the ability to transform children through transforming the city collapsed. [...] Juvenile Courts also faced increasing pessimism. In 1936, leading child-saver Grace Abbott asked rhetorically whether the Juvenile Court of Chicago had proved a success or a failure and concluded pessimistically [...].

Delinquency experts increasingly turned to psychiatry to explain and treat criminal behaviour; the psychiatrist supplanted the playground as the key to anti-delinquency.

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As reformers advocated individualised treatment of delinquent personalities, on the streets, changing priorities of policing increasingly and aggressively targeted children of colour. In addition, suburbanisation was changing the demographics of the inner city. Increasingly, white families were choosing to move out to the suburbs [...]. As inner-city youth became more and more synonymous with minority youth, the urban child seemed increasingly outside the realm of “saving” and middle-class white Americans responded to black youth’s corner culture with intense policing and urban flight, not playgrounds and child-saving. The pessimistic view [...] laid the foundation for the increasingly racialised and violent attempts to control poor urban children in the later twentieth century. [...]

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Most importantly, Progressive reformers criminalised and delegitimised much of children’s traditional use of the streets, ensuring that age became a crucial component of urban discipline. [...] When encounters with real children transformed institutions and regulations in unexpected ways, the result was increasingly coercive methods and policing.

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All text above by: Oenone Kubie. “Child’s Play: How Progressive Era Science Shaped America’s Playgrounds.” Oxford Urbanists. 15 September 2019. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[irrazabalblog]

Rolleiflex 6x6, A Coruña. No lugares by @andres-irrazabal

[archtheo-inntervals]

https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000036852096/exkursion-an-nicht-orte-damit-die-wirklichkeit-geiler-wirkt

[iamshipwrecked]

[visualratatosk]

Cartes postales de Saint-Non-lieu, 11

Non-lieu ("non-place" or "nonplace" in English) is a concept, introduced by French anthropologist Marc Augé. It describes transient spaces where people maintain anonymity and which lack the cultural or historical significance to be considered true "places" in anthropological terms. Augé contrasts this concept with "anthropological places," which are spaces that reinforce identity and facilitate meaningful social interactions among individuals with shared cultural references. Non-places, however, do not serve as meeting points or foster a sense of community. In essence, a non-place is an area we pass through rather than inhabit, where individuals remain detached, unnamed, and lonely.

[dustytrinkets]

In the quiet haze.

Taken December 27, 2022. 02:03 A.M.

- M.

[gabes-pixels]

where tf am i

[frankwaxman]

The Embassadors feat Michel Ongaru​ - ​Healing The Music (Nonplace, 2008)

[fatehbaz]

In the ruins, ‘master narratives of history as progress decompose into the tense confabulations of a continuously remembered past that hits the present like a nervous shock’ [...]. The ghosts of this past rear up in the ruin, they are the debris of unprecedented material destruction [...] ‘the “trash” of history’ [...]. Forgetting this carnage [would be to support] the myth of [...] progress [...]. But the ruins remember [...], revealing the fragility of the social order. [...] Hauntings rupture linear temporality, inconveniently bring forth energies, which have supposedly been extinguished and forgotten. [...] Cities [and places, generally] seem to becoming increasingly regulated. In the transformation towards a service economy during the 1980s [in Britain], [...] [o]ld industrial sites were turned into shopping centres, retails parks and leisure sites. [...] There is then, in the drive to market places, [...] an aesthetic imperative to smooth over the cracks [...], and to fix the past, so that it does not intrude into an imagined linear future. [...] In cahoots with [...] marketeers, they suggest that the past is a distant, romantic echo that resounds faintly in museums [...]. Yet the ruins shout back at the refurbished urban text. [...] [T]hey haunt the city, for the unofficial past cannot be exorcised [...]. Ruins are sites where we can construct alternative stories to decentre commodified, official [...] descriptions, and [...] keep the past opened [...]. Counter-memories can be articulated in ruins, narratives that talk back to the smoothing over of difference. Away from the commercial and bureaucratic spaces of the city, ghosts proliferate where order diminishes. Ruins are [...] especially important, because [...] it is ‘essential to see the things and the people who are primarily unseen and banished to the periphery of our social graciousness.’

Text above by: Tim Edensor. “Haunting in the ruins: matter and immateriality.” Space and Culture Issue 11, pages 42-50. January 2002. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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[T]he contemporary Western city [...] [is] the site of [...] regulatory regimes concerned with strategies of surveillance and aesthetic monitoring [...]. The modern city can never become a wholly Appollonian, seamlessly regulated realm for it continues to be haunted by the neglected, the disposed of, and the repressed [...]. Within the interstices of the city there are a host of other spaces, part of a “wild zone”, a “[…] site […] which avoids the objective processes of ordered territorialisation […]”.

Staged […] through the intensified mediatisation and commodification of popular sites, myths, and icons […], mediated imaginary geographies circulate through adverts, soap operas, ‘classic’ rock stations [...] typically drenched in […] ideologies. […] These exhibitions memorialise culture via ‘publicly sanctioned narratives’ and institutionalised rhetoric [...]. [I]n which people are encoded and contextualied, categorised and narrated.

Accordingly, ruins are places from which other memories can be articulated [...]. [T]he outmoded object can become charged [...] with a certain power, and "might spark a brief profane illumination of a past productive mode, social formation, and structure of feeling - an uncanny return of a historically repressed moment" [...]. Thus we might stumble across seemingly archaic decor or furniture, [...] toys, and mascots of yesteryear [...], the debris of discarded fashions [...]. Although such objects [may] seem [...] absurd or comical, they may bring back knowledge, tastes, and sensations [...]. This was debris which was enfolded into the mundaneity of a shared everyday [...].

Along with other places on the margins of regulated space, industrial ruins are “points of transition, passages [...], moments of magic that exist at the interstices of modernity” […]. Modern attempts to cleanse, banish ambiguity, and order the memory of space are always disturbed by such disorderly spaces and by the ghosts they contain, who refuse to rest quietly, [...] a “spectral [...] residue“ which haunts dominant ways of seeing and being [...].

In contradistinction to the fixed memories [...] and to the imaginary linearities proposed by hegemonic […] memories, these ghosts foreground ambiguity, polysemy, and multiplicity, enabling us to “disrupt the signifying chains of legitimacy [...].” Although it is often overcoded and regulated, the city nevertheless contains multitudinous scraps from which alternative stories might be assembled. […] In spaces such as industrial ruins, the excessive debris confronted constitutes material for multiple modes of narration about the past: “the debris of shipwrecked histories still today raise up the ruins of an unknown, strange city. They burst forth within the modernist, massive, homogenous city like slips of the tongue from an unknown, perhaps unconscious, language” [...].

This kind of remembering implies an ethics about confronting and understanding otherness (here, the alterity of the past) which is tactile, imaginative […].

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Text by: Tim Edensor. “The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Volume 23, pages 829-849. 2005. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[thoughtsofahouseplant]

travis in doomcoming saying “none of us are here” vs coach in doomcoming saying “love is everything, it’s the whole reason that we’re here”

if love is the whole reason that they’re there, but none of them are there, and love is everything, then are they . . . nowhere?

[radiophd]

nonplace urban field -- whimp

[burlveneer-music]

Burnt Friedman - Hexenschuss - new album of electronic polyrhythms, also available as extended versions

Hexenschuss (Extended Versions) by Burnt Friedman

The vocabulary of modern ‘Western’ music or of the so–called Global North has finally been spelled out. The ever more hasty striving to move forward led to a music that is ‘starving among this embarrassment of riches’. In those days, the music that was oscillating in a state of “permanent obsolescence” — often in short cycles of a few months — and preserved as a sign of the times in musical codes, has gone in the completely opposite direction, into a state of obsolete permanence.

In this drive forward towards refining and expanding a catalogue of superlatives, a never changing, underlying, but underdeveloped isometric schema has irreversibly and imperceptibly cemented in the body. The corresponding theory – the persisting phantom terms of academia – seek to break free of its phenomena. In contrast to this, in the music beyond the 'Global North', a nature of 'polyrhythms’ is detected, or, in other words, every beat that can not be grasped easily must therefor be a polyrhythm and African in essence. Now, shift the focus away from the contrafactual cultural connotations of the record sleeve towards the animating principle of the music, the phenomenological vectors of rhythm and view ‘groove‘ as the intrinsic attribute of regular harmonic motion patterns. This formulaic, animating principle is solely based on the law of the octave (doubling and halving). It appears repetitive, or circular in nature as opposed to linear and progressive. Such a formula is derived from a recurrent, balanced body movement from which every impulse originates as something sensed, as opposed to being subject to will or notation. What sounds merely technical or sophisticated in theory turns out to be basal in practice. It can also be grasped as an energy structure. In other words, a controlled regular movement yields stable interrelated time intervals with the least expenditure of energy.

In 'grooving', or 'composing a guiding path' all those involved (sequencer, drummer, dancer, etc.) become attuned to one another in a resistance against arbitrary dictates such as cultural appropriation, man–made aesthetic framework or notions of folklore. Such a 'guiding path' seeks to dispense with taste as much as possible, ultimately in favour of an experience of harmonic accordance, strangeness, displacement and not least, freedom. (Burnt Friedman) In regard to the people depicted on the cover: The Andamanese are the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, part of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands union territory in the southeastern part of the Bay of Bengal in Southeast Asia. They have lived in substantial isolation on the islands for thousands of years. Although the existence of the islands and their inhabitants was long known to maritime powers and traders of the South– and Southeast–Asia region, contact with these peoples was highly sporadic and very often hostile; as a result, almost nothing is recorded of them or their languages until the mid-18th century. Until this period, the Andamanese were preserved from outside influences by their fierce reaction to visitors, which included killing any shipwrecked foreigners, and by the remoteness of the islands. The various tribes and their mutually unintelligible languages thus are believed to have evolved on their own over millennia. Some of the tribe members were credited to having supernatural powers. They were called oko-pai-ad, which meant dreamer. They were thought to have an influence on the members of the tribe and would bring misfortune to those who did not believe in their abilities. When the British first established a colonial presence on the Andaman islands, there were an estimated 5,000 Great Andamanese living on Great Andaman and surrounding islands, comprising 10 distinct tribes with distinct but closely related languages. From the 1860s onwards, the British established a penal colony on the islands, which led to the subsequent arrival of mainland settlers and indentured labourers, mainly from the Indian subcontinent. This coincided with the massive population reduction of the Andamanese due to outside diseases, to a low of 19 individuals in 1961.

Music composed and produced by Burnt Friedman 2019 – 2022 Published by Freibank Cover photography – 1875, photographer unknown, group of Andamanese people, person in tropical suit presumably German ethnologist and explorer Fedor Jagor

[zef-zef]

Nonplace Urban Field (Bernd Friedmann) at Festival pomladi, Ljubljana, Slovenia 2008

source: wikimedia 📸: Špela Škulj  flikcr

[visualratatosk]

Cartes postales de Saint-Non-lieu, 14

Non-lieu ("non-place" or "nonplace" in English) is a concept, introduced by French anthropologist Marc Augé. It describes transient spaces where people maintain anonymity and which lack the cultural or historical significance to be considered true "places" in anthropological terms. Augé contrasts this concept with "anthropological places," which are spaces that reinforce identity and facilitate meaningful social interactions among individuals with shared cultural references. Non-places, however, do not serve as meeting points or foster a sense of community. In essence, a non-place is an area we pass through rather than inhabit, where individuals remain detached, unnamed, and lonely.

[a-alban-works]

[as-follas-da-maceira]

Atopar beleza nun parking grazas á luz irisada da Lúa.