Space and Culture

The colonization of social space by capitalism has engendered a New World Disorder, which has translated into a fear of Otherness. One response to this fear has been the withdrawal of the economic elites into gated communities that might evolve into fortified outposts of neo-imperialism predicated on the social, political, cultural, and economic exclusion of the Other. It is within this geopolitical terrain that J. G. Ballard's imaginative geography in Super-Cannes (2000)—Eden-Olympia—emerges as a commentary on such “Utopias of the New Right.” Driven by a geopolitical imaginary based on neoliberalism and neofascism, Eden-Olympia is a Utopia existing in a predacious relation to local Arab residents. Specifically, this article demonstrates that Utopias of the New Right threaten to extirpate public space, the global commons, and democratic civil society. Generally, this article argues that neofascist and neo-imperial geopolitical imaginaries threaten our ability to imagine alternative geopolitical imaginaries.

By comparing street skating and park skating, this article examines why skateboarders persist in their use of public space even in the face of extensive regulation and the provision of skate parks. The researcher conducted participant observation and interviews in four sites in New York City: Brooklyn Bridge Plaza, Union Square Park, Riverside Skate Park, and Hudson River Skate Park. A total of 16 semistructured interviews were conducted. Differences between street and park skating are presented by utilizing three dimensions: the social production of public space, the social control imposed on skaters, and the discursive construction of skateboarding. Street skateboarding represents a contesting spatial practice creating a mental, social, and body space, embodying a skater's self-identity and cultural expression. Findings suggest that the governance of public space needs to adapt to the changing needs of multiple users rather than excluding a few without any attempt at accommodating them.

The IKEA store has become one of the world's most recognized and reproduced archives of national culture in the global marketplace, necessitating a critical reading of its spatial narrative. This article engages in a historicized reading of the culturally encoded space of the IKEA store, of which they were 285 in nearly 40 countries by the end of 2008. It argues that the IKEA store helps construct, reproduce, and disseminate a narrative of Swedish exceptionalism worldwide. This narrative showcases Sweden's image as a peaceful, homogenous, and industrious little nation, exemplifying Enlightenment ideals of social and economic progress while avoiding implication in the Enlightenment's more violent aspects. This article engages Derrida's formulation of archival violence to demonstrate how these hidden histories disrupt this archive's dominant narrative. Recovering these histories is particularly important given recent renewed faith in an essential “Swedishness” that has emerged in response to non-Western immigration in Sweden.

The subcultural practices of urban explorers are studied through an analysis of the accomplishments of Canadian Jeff Chapman. Using his zine Infiltration as a resource, this essay considers his key sites of exploration, two active downtown Toronto hospitals, not only from the viewpoint of his experiences at both as a patient but also as ur-sites for exploration and an original rethinking of the city. Chapman's illness is metonymic, not metaphoric, and this informs his style of urban exploration. While situating Chapman's investigations in terms of driftworks, surrealist strolls, situationist perambulations, and De Certeau's counter-panoptic walks, the nontheoretical character of Chapman's ethico-aesthetic preoccupations is allowed to shine through in his homespun nonmastery of exploration and displays of personal courage as he rambled around closed hospital wings in his gown along with his intravenous pole.

Accounts of virtual organization have been couched in terms of concepts and metaphors that do not inherit from the features of a coherent theory of virtuality. Arguing that virtuality is inherent in modernity, this article focuses on three major drivers behind the current wave of virtualization of organizational work practices to explore the interplay of the virtual and the concrete. Using three vignettes as an illustration, the article discusses how organizations, through writing, make the presence of humans contingent; through technology, displace human action into artifacts, machines, or electronic devices; and through institutions, virtualize (conflicting and sometimes collaborative) human relations and proximal encounters. However, the process of virtualization does not only deterritorialize existing skills and relations, but it also generates new skills, which in their turn impose a reterritorialization process.

This article is about the unintentional placement of objects. Focusing on items of clothing that have been often accidentally displaced, this article explores the ephemeral, delicate, and often superficial materiality of these objects of rupture relative to a flow-optimized urban landscape. This article fits into wider debates on ownerless objects, unintentional memorialism, and events of corporeal severance. Focus is on both the physical movements of these objects as they fold through the surrounding environment and the affectual movements that emerge from their capacity to rupture bodily experience by circulating particular forms of feeling. This article considers how certain acts of intervention can transform these objects through movements of expectancy to create moments of delight through reunion. This article makes a useful contribution in considering how particular objects at the nexus of the human and nonhuman rise to prominence and through this how, contrary to the sublime or magnificent, small and intensely personal dislocated objects have the capacity to move.

This article is based on a study of dance floors of Whyte Avenue in the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. As extended cases, the life processes on the floors are interpreted as manifestations of Canada's emotional history in the form of multiculturalism. Building on observations combined with informal and casual conversations, the study focuses on arousal and expression of emotions through bodily movements on the dance floors. The readings of these spaces along with their life processes are informed by the theoretical concepts of the “carnival” and the “grotesque” (Bakhtin), “liminality” (Turner), and the “civilizing process” and “informalization” (Elias and Wouters). In this theoretical framework, the particular emotional life processes that occur on the dance floors are rendered orderable as historically contingent phenomena that incarnate the wave of multiculturalization that shaped and has continued to shape the cultural, geographic, political, social, and psychological (emotional) landscapes of Canada since the 1960s.

The Sarajevo Winter Festival (Sarajevska Zima) has been running continuously since 1984. Remarkably, even during the 1990s war and siege the festival continued, with patrons and artists ducking sniper fire to attend events. For the tourist or foreign artist visiting Sarajevo for Sarajevska Zima, the experience is a case study of Dark Tourism. Visitors certainly know about the genocide; they saw it on television. They learnt a new term, `ethnic cleansing'. In this city the citizens endured unimaginable nightmares; addressing issues of survival is an ongoing process. At the festival the artists work in galleries and on the streets. The city environs with the numerous sprawling cemeteries of gleaming gravestones is an ever-present reminder of events in recent memory. The foreign artists' re-appropriation of public spaces demonstrates their own compassionate responses to the war experiences of Bosnia-Herzegovina.