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Chapter 4

The social construction of space

Introduction

A social construction conceptual frame assumes that space and place are abstractions – not a set of physical properties – made up of shared under- standings and social structural differences such as race, class and gender. Thus they cannot be used as “place-as-matter” to explain the world (Brown 2005: 9).Yet changes in the physical environment, its interpretation and its forms of representation also influence the social construction of space and with it people’s sense of inclusion and the ability to appropriate space for their needs. In this sense, then, a social constructivist methodology requires an ethnographic sensitivity to the unstable relationship between the many forms of social abstractions that make up space and place meanings and the materiality of the environments that make up the everyday world.

A working definition of the social construction of space and place includes the transformations and contestations that occur through peoples’ social interactions, memories, feelings, imaginings and daily use – or lack thereof – that are made into places, scenes and actions that convey particu- lar meanings (Low 1996). Studies of space and place that employ a social constructionist approach often examine differentially distributed meanings, experiences, local knowledge and individual, as well as collective, under- standings of place, spatial relations and representations. It is one of the most useful and certainly the most ubiquitous of the conceptual lenses presented, yet in many ways it is difficult to characterize because it is made up of a variety of approaches and has many qualities that require further unpack- ing. Ironically, social scientists often take social constructivist conceptions of space and place for granted and fail to go far enough in interrogating underlying assumptions and social processes or clarifying how a constructiv- ist explanation can lend a critical edge to a spatial analysis.

For example, visitors to Orchard Beach in the Bronx, New York, socially construct and communicate local meanings through symbolic forms and practices such as music, dance, food, decoration and recreational activi- ties. The spatial appropriation, routine practices and park experience nar- ratives of “Latinos,” “seniors” and “naturalists” – three groups that are

Low, Setha. Spatializing Culture : The Ethnography of Space and Place, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utoronto/detail.action?docID=4644268. Created from utoronto on 2023-02-01 07:28:07.

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The social construction of space 69

often marginalized elsewhere in the city – create unexpected forms of place- making and inscriptions of meaning. The seniors have found an abandoned concession stand where they meet each day to talk, have coffee and remem- ber friends whose pictures are pinned to the wall. They call this place their “clubhouse” and consider it a home away from home. For the Latinos, dur- ing the summer there are salsa concerts and families celebrate birthdays and family reunions under tents on the beach or under shade trees in the picnic areas. Friends and family bring hammocks for siestas , card tables for dominos and cookout grills for making chicken and chorizo . The naturalists, on the other hand, do not mark their presence by playing music or altering the environment as a means of place-making. Instead, daily walks along the beach, forays into the forest and “hunting and gathering” activities are the way naturalists inscribe and appropriate park space. These different strate- gies of meaning-making underscore the multiplicity of ways that individuals and groups socially construct space and give it meaning.

Power relations always underlie the social construction of space and are embedded in race, class and gender inequality; disputed claims to history, heritage and collective memory; limited access to territory and resources; and other contested social processes. Space and its arrangement and allocation are assumed to be transparent, but they rarely are. Instead, when critically examined, the social construction of space and resulting spatial formations and relationships yield insights into unacknowledged biases, prejudices and inequalities in a particularly forceful way.

Michael Peter Smith’s assertion, “social theories are largely constitutive of the reality we see, tell stories about, and act upon” (2001: 8), succinctly sum- marizes the social constructionist approach. Structures as well as the makers of these structures are also “socially constructed understandings of how the world works . . . produced by historically specific discourses and practices situated in different ‘subject positions’ ” (2001: 8–9). Therefore, a social con- struction of space analysis uncovers explicit as well as implicit assumptions about the world through the careful observation of the material and discur- sive practices of social actors (Lussault 2007). Ethnographies of the social construction of space decode and deconstruct the struggles, contestations and power dynamics underlying existing social and spatial relations.

In the following sections, a number of theoretical approaches to the social construction of space are presented. Diverse perspectives and ethnographic methodologies are illustrated by focusing on three areas of research: contesta- tion and conflict; memory, heritage and attachment; and the social construc- tion of race, class and gender. The chapter concludes with two ethnographic examples. The first is an engaged anthropology project of the African Ameri- can experience and sense of historical erasure at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia (Low, Taplin and Scheld 2005, Fanelli 2014) that illustrates the importance of symbolic representation for the continued use and meaning of space. The second is the ethnography of the Solidere

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70 The social construction of space

redevelopment of downtown Beirut, Lebanon and local residents’ attempt to resist the destruction of historically important buildings and places based on the research of Aseel Sawalha (2010), Deen Sharp (Sharp and Panetta 2016) and Kristin Monroe (2016).

Theoretical approaches to social construction

Constructivism and social construction

In reaction to the positivism and scientism of the 1950s in which reality was assumed to be objective and entirely “out there,” constructivists pos- ited that reality might be better understood as a product of human prac- tices and intentions, and thus subjective and dependent on language and symbols for its communication. Beginning with the 1960s and expanding during the 1980s into the 1990s, this epistemological perspective became a dominant paradigm such that any cultural expression learned by socializa- tion or acculturation was considered inherently constructionist. This system of explanation remains ubiquitous within the social sciences.

Lester Ward (1905), an American botanist, paleontologist and sociologist, was the first to use the concept in his discussion of the evolution of a social structure as “something that has been constructed, and a study of social structure is the study of a process and a product. Our task therefore, is . . . to inquire into the methods of social construction” (as cited in Best 2008: 41). This early articulation of social constructivism was remarkably prescient – not least because it recognized that social structure, as a phenomenon cre- ated by processes of social construction, required sociological analysis to uncover its underlying form and meaning (Best 2008).

James Faubion and George Marcus describe anthropological construc- tionism as made up of four kinds of analysis: 1) the functionalist inquiry into practical consequences, 2) the semiological constitution of meanings, 3) the rhetorical use of speech and 4) the hermeneutical process of interpretation (2008). They then apply these methodological approaches to three distinct categories of constructivist theorization. The first category begins with the work of Emile Durkheim (1982), who considered the form and content of social organization responsible for the moral and cognitive patterns of orga- nized interaction and “particular habits of heart and mind” (2008:73). In the work by Durkheim (1982), as well as in Victor Turner’s (1968) and Mary Douglas’s (1970) writings, meaning is constructed through ritual sym- bols and events. The second category of constructionism centers on Bour- dieu’s (1977, 1984) studies of power and sociocultural reproduction and the construction of meaning through everyday practices. Faubion and Marcus (2008) then attempt to untangle the many strands of structural semiology, their third category that includes the microanalysis of communicative inter- action, symbolic anthropology and the anthropology of performance. Two

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well-known, but opposing, theories of constructionism in anthropology are highlighted in their discussion of semiology: the binary opposition of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism in which the biological mind imposes social categories on experience and the cultural relativism of Geertz in which “man [sic] is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (1973: 5).

There are, of course, other ways of understanding the pervasiveness of social construction theory. In Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1967) model of the social construction of reality, face-to-face interaction is the basis by which the subjectivity of the other person is easily perceived through expressive acts. In this intimate situation, people share and apprehend the reality of everyday life as a continuum of “typifications,” which are standard social constructions that become general knowledge and a way to know something other than through direct experience. Typifications become more abstract the farther one moves from one’s communication group or com- munity. They are subject to “objectivation” – that is, the externalization of the social construction process in which ideas, objects and other forms of “reality” are assumed to be stable and objective – rather than based on the subjective processes of their producers (Berger and Luckmann 1967).

Social structure is the sum total of these typifications and shared objec- tivations that serve as enduring indices of subjective meanings. The most important case of objectivation is found in language, as it is able to be detached from face-to-face interaction and convey signification at a distance. Language can typify experience and build up “semantic fields and zones of meaning that are linguistically circumscribed” (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 41), such as “gender” or “class” that shape everyday life and play a criti- cal role in the social construction of space. John Searle (1995) calls these objectivations “institutional facts” that are matters of culture and society as distinct from the “brute facts” of physics and biology and distinguishes facts that can exist independently from language from those that “require special human institutions for their very existence” (Searle 1995: 27, also see Mounin 1980).

The work of Bruno Latour (2005), however, challenges this assumed dis- tinction between biological and physical facts from socially constructed or institutional ones. For Latour (2005), there is no a priori divide between the human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic; instead, he treats all enti- ties equally and in the same terms. Differences and categories are gener- ated through networks of relations and are not presumed, while previous divisions and distinctions that constitute the “social” should be ignored (Latour 2005: 76). The term “construction” or “social construction” in this scheme requires visiting the site – such as a building construction site – where the process of construction is occurring and then tracking how the assem- bling of disparate elements creates something (a place, a building, a kind of sociability) (Latour 2005: 88–89). Latour is interested in tracing how

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the “construction” is made regardless of whether it is an architectural or sociological project. From this point of view, social construction processes emerge from a collection or grouping – an assemblage – of interrelated facts and phenomena.

Social construction of space

These conceptualizations of social constructivism have been utilized by social scientists and particularly anthropologists and sociologists interested in explaining how space and sites communicate and encode social meaning. Ethnographic studies have been especially helpful in this regard in that long- term fieldwork and in-depth accounts of the creation of spaces, their uses and their subsequent social and symbolic meanings can provide important insights into the social construction process.

Early examples of ethnographic work exploring space as a socially con- structed phenomenon include the work of Hilda Kuper (1972) and Miles Richardson (1982). For Hilda Kuper (1972), the power of space lies in its capacity to communicate meanings articulated through a complex system of social and ideational associations. She develops a spatial analysis of the interaction of territorial units and ideational elements and employs the term “social construction of space” to define sites as “a particular piece of social space, a place socially and ideologically demarcated and separated from other places” (1972: 420). Some sites have more power and significance than others, but these qualities have no fixed relationship to the physical environment and are only activated during political events such as chal- lenges to the political hierarchy. Her ethnography, in which sites make up a flexible spatial and symbolic language activated by human intervention, takes the ideas of structural semiology and applies them to a spatial analysis in which the ideational and classificatory aspects take on more importance than the physical setting.

Miles Richardson (1982) employs a different theoretical framework to reveal the social construction of space by drawing upon a more individual- istic and phenomenological perspective to consider how people transform experience into symbols, including artifacts, gestures and words. These sym- bolic transformations, he argues, give space its meaning, and the spatial realities created communicate the basic dynamics of culture. Richardson proposes that the construction of social reality occurs through the symbolic processes by which human experience and feelings become anchored to ele- ments of the material environment. This anchoring process is more experi- ential than linguistic and highlights how human perception and the senses play a role in constructing space as culturally meaningful, which is a model of social construction based on a person-centered world (Richardson 1984a and b). I will return to similar phenomenological and sensory approaches to space and place in Chapter 5 .

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The social construction of space 73

During the late 1980s and into the beginning of the 1990s, the social construction of space perspective became ubiquitous. Social scientists and design professionals began to refer to socially constructed spaces as “places” and the social construction process as “place-making” (Rodman 1992, Feld and Basso 1996, Sen and Silverman 2014). A major proponent, Margaret Rodman (1992), argues that places are socially constructed by the people who live there and include “politicized, culturally relative, historically spe- cific, and local and multiple constructions” (Rodman 1992: 15). For Rod- man, place is a unique reality for each person so that any place is made up of all the social constructions of spatial meanings enacted and embedded at the site.

The concept of place-making is expanded by processes of land-marking, place-naming, soundscaping and imagining, ways that a sense of place can be restored when “emptied” of place attachment by violence, terror and fear (Riaño-Alcalá 2002). It is also expressed through the ritual inscription and the design of space. John Gray (2006) employs the semiological systems of Douglas (1970) and Turner (1968) in his exploration of place-making through the ritual inscription of the Nepalese house. He argues that domes- tic architecture is inhabited space intentionally constructed with designs and layouts that symbolically represent the ideal life, the social order and the cosmos through habitation.

Some researchers have moved beyond place-making to integrate both the social construction and production of the built environment in their analy- ses. Examples of such integration can be found in the work of Pellow (2002), Limbert (2008) and Fennell (2011) who link the sociospatial meanings of Hausa compounds (Pellow 2002), Oman ruins (Limbert 2008) and Chi- cago public housing (Fennell 2011) with the histories and ideologies of their social production. Recent anthropological work on infrastructure has been particularly illustrative in this regard.

Infrastructure refers to the basic material and ideological structures that underlie the operation of the physical, social and sensory environment. Brian Larkin maintains that

Infrastructures are built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space. As physical forms they shape the nature of a network, the speed and direction of its movement, its temporalities, and its vulnerability to breakdown. They comprise the architecture for circulation, literally providing the under- girding of modern societies and they generate the ambient environment of everyday life.

(2013: 328)

In his study of media technologies in urban Nigeria, Larkin (2008) looks at how the radio, audio cassette and mobile cinema have facilitated changes

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in both the physical shape of the city and the circulation and meaning of cultural goods. He is particularly concerned with the representational quali- ties of these infrastructures and their early ideological roles in educating and developing Nigerians into “modern colonial citizens” (Larkin 2008: 3). But he also points out that these technologies are vulnerable to failure or subver- sion, frequently spinning off in unexpected directions with intended and/or unintended outcomes. As he explains, this vulnerability is a function of the fundamental instability of the relationship between the technologies, their social uses and their attributed meanings (Larkin 2008).

In her analysis of architecture and the Soviet imagination, Caroline Humphrey (2005) draws a similar conclusion about the fraught relation- ship between ideology and infrastructure. She argues that while the Marxist materialist perspective suggested that the task of Soviet construction was to build the material foundations that would create a socialist society, in prac- tice, the relationship was far less straightforward. In fact, rather than acting as a template, Soviet architecture acted as a “prism,” deflecting ideas embed- ded in its design (Humphrey 2005: 39). Humphrey’s contention that the architecture “gathered meanings and scattered them” (Humphrey 2005: 55) resonates with Larkin’s claim that infrastructural forms are highly unstable and vulnerable to all kinds of practical and ideological intervention that subvert their intended uses and meanings.

In her ethnography of East German built infrastructure in post-war Vinh, Vietnam, Christina Schwenkel (2013) also looks at the representational qualities of infrastructural forms – albeit from a different perspective. She shows how bricks have figured prominently both in building construction and in the ideological and social meaning of urban reconstruction for local residents. Her explanation for this congruence is that during the colonial era, bricks were an elite construction technology, usually reserved for elite buildings and housing, as well as a form of material production. Through their political meaning and elite materiality transferred to post-revolution public housing, bricks “harnessed political passions and utopian sentiments, [that] over time came to signify [the] unfulfilled promises of the social state and dystopic ruins [that] today stand in the way of capitalist redevelopment” (Schwenkel 2013: 252). Similarly, the urban water systems and water-related facilities that are decaying and inadequate for a housing complex in Vinh City signify both the promise of the socialist state and its systemic neglect (Schwenkel 2015). In tracing the evolving relationship of Vinh’s residents to the bricks and urban water systems, Schwenkel also underscores the instabil- ity of infrastructural forms. In so doing, she, along with Larkin and Hum- phrey, highlight how the analysis of infrastructure is a particularly good way of examining how the social production and social construction of space come together.

Thus the social construction of space is made up of a wide range of per- spectives that explain how meaning is inscribed in the landscape and built

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The social construction of space 75

environment, as well as the role that politics, unstable meanings and cul- ture play in place-making. These different approaches coexist as alternative strategies, and in a few cases, as competing points of view. Some research- ers privilege a language-based methodology to reveal underlying social con- struction processes, and these ethnographies are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 6 . Others employ phenomenological, affective and infrastructural approaches that are explored further in Chapters 5 and 7 .

Social construction of space methodologies

Contestation and conflict

One of the most effective ways to investigate the social construction of space is through an analysis of “contested spaces,” those “sites where conflicts in the form of opposition, confrontation, subversion, and resistance engage actors” – often with differential access to power and resources (Low and Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003: 18). These conflicts frequently center on the control of the construction of local meanings, but they also reveal broader social struggles over deeply held beliefs and practices as well as political and eco- nomic realities that shape everyday life. Many of the ethnographic examples and research vignettes found in this book are about contestation because they expose the social, political, economic and cultural schisms embedded in spatial relations at multiple geographical scales

Urban public space provides frequent opportunities for spatial contesta- tion because the complex structures and differentiated social institutions often collide and compete for control over material and symbolic resources. For example, conflicts over the cultural meanings of the Parque Central for users, the media and middle-class citizens in San José, Costa Rica, ultimately resulted in the closing and redesign of this iconic urban space as discussed in Chapter 3 . Spaces of political struggle, from Cathedral Square in São Paulo (Arantes 1996), Zuccotti Park in New York City (Maharawal 2012, Shiff- man et.al. 2012), Syntagma Square in Athens (Dalakoglou 2013) to Tahrir Square in Cairo (Ghannam 2012,Winegar 2012) are examples of how urban space takes on conflicting ideological meanings that provide a forum for dis- sent and protest, including violence and fighting.

Conflict between the exchange and use value of land is one of the main points of contention in struggles over urban space (Cooper and Rodman 1990). Redevelopment and renovation practices bring into stark contrast the needs and attachments of local residents with the profit goals of land developers and the political goals of city officials as discussed in Chapters 3 and 6 . These conflicts often take on a moral dimension, as in the case of bars in Barcelona’s Barrio Chino where conflictive systems of categoriza- tion of space, class and gender affirm hegemonic ideas of a place as “good” or “bad” (McDonogh 1992). British and Australian politicians and policy

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76 The social construction of space

makers mobilize similar urban moral geographies to secure social norms through legal graffiti walls that become contested sites of respect and inclu- sion for street artists (McAuliffe n.d.). Even the simple act of cleaning up the sidewalk in post-Katrina New Orleans, takes on moral and conflicting meanings when redefined in terms of the maintenance of the commons and shared space (Ehrenfeucht 2012).

Another kind of moral geography is produced by conflicting colonial con- structions of space that marginalize indigenous “sited identity,” defined as a collective concept of self located within a specific landscape (Thomas 2002: 372). Place-making, Philip Thomas (2002) argues, should be understood in terms of sited identity, but also in relation to the difference and marginality of the system of signs bequeathed by the colonial encounter. In southeast Madagascar, colonial symbols construct a moral geography of “native” mar- ginality within the post-colonial present that helps to explain local peoples’ ambivalence toward modernity. Moral geographies are also created through religious practices and post-colonial narratives of diaspora, where religious processions and performances transform the streets of Manchester, U.K., into sacred and moral ground (Werbner 2002).

The post-apartheid cities of South Africa offer some of the most jarring examples of how multiple and overlapping layers of socially constructed meanings carve conflict onto a racialized urban landscape. Leslie Bank’s (2011) ethnography of East London reveals how these disarticulated spaces create a new type of urbanization, one he calls “fractured urbanism.” But he uses this term in a positive way by demonstrating how women struggle to reintegrate these segregated spaces and reinscribe them with their own meanings through ritual and everyday practices.

Ethnographies of spatial contestation and conflict provide one method- ological framework for uncovering how space and place are constructed, often for hegemonic purposes. These same processes of social construction, however, are equally available to those who are resisting spatial control and change. In this way, contested spaces give material expression to and act as loci for creating and promulgating, countering and negotiating dominant cultural themes and political practices. Space is contested precisely because it concretizes the fundamental and recurring, but otherwise unexamined, ideo- logical and social frameworks that structure social life (Low and Lawrence- Zuñiga 2003).

Memory, heritage and place attachment

Studies of place-making and the social construction of space frequently draw upon memory and memory-making as a dominant mode of inscribing meaning at various scales from the most intimate to the national and trans- national. Edward Said (2000) asserts that the overlapping areas of memory and geography and “specifically, the study of human space” (2000: 175),

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has actually created a new field of inquiry that touches upon significant questions of identity, nationalism, power and authority. Memories and their representations, he argues, are never neutral recitations of facts, but to some considerable extent always underlie what he defines as a nationalist or elite effort. Thus memories construct and substantiate, as well as repudiate received notions of territoriality and sense of place.

The ethnography of collective memory and place offers a way to study what Gastón Gordillo describes as the “experiential dimensions of place- making with the political economy that makes it possible by examining the materiality of memory, its embodiment in practice, and its constitution as a social force in the production of places” (2004: 4). He argues that “every memory is a memory of a place” (2004: 4) such that the spatiality of memory is part of the dynamic process of space production. The underlying ten- sions between memory and the places it constructs reflect the structural constraints of place-making for the people and territory in question. For example, Gordillo (2004) attempts to unravel the historical experiences, tensions and places of the Toba people in the Argentina Chaco by examin- ing Toba memories and historical practices that created the “bush” physi- cally, politically and culturally through the opposition of wage labor to Toba foraging.

Hegemonic constructions of histories that justify the political and eco- nomic control of wealthy elites and transnational corporations are infamous for excluding the memory and local history of residents facing neighbor- hood gentrification and urban redevelopment. Struggles over the right to live in a historic neighborhood such as the center of Rome, Beirut or Cairo are fraught with conflicting narratives and memories that poor and marginalized residents recruit to support their land claims (Herzfeld 2009, Sawalha 2010, Ghannam 2002). But powerful government officials and capitalist interests elide these claims by asserting their own histories in the name of the nation and discrediting local evidence so that residents are eventually evicted and the land expropriated (Herzfeld 2009, 2003, Ghannam 2011, Harms 2012). Christa Salamandra (2004) makes the point that debates about representa- tion, preservation and the restoration of the Old City of Damascus, Syria, are always about status competition and identity construction by the ruling elites. Even heritage projects with the imprint of UNESCO and ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites of UNESCO) often face highly conflictive discussions of whether or not a place or object should be designated as part of a society’s or group’s “heritage” depending on the rul- ing elites (Schmitt 2005).

Memory and place-making also figure prominently in diaspora studies where associations of people, culture and place are historically and socially constructed (Brun 2001). Researchers working with refugees, forced reloca- tion victims and diasporic populations often write about places as “symbolic anchors” of community and how constructions of homeland – as territories

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and imagined places – are part of a politics of memory (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). For example, Alyssa Howe (2001) discusses the social construction of San Francisco as a queer homeland that has become a pilgrimage site, offer- ing a symbolic refuge for the elaboration of queer identity. Andrea Smith (2003) and William Bissell (2005) study the colonial nostalgia of people who remember and idealize the past in ways that coexist, combine or conflict to restructure urban space in the case of Zanzibar (Bissell 2005) or to explain Maltese pilgrimage (Smith 2003).

Archival and ethnographic work on Liberty Island (where the Statue of Liberty stands) draws upon similar constructions of history, memory, nos- talgia and forms of place-making to explain peoples’ deep attachment to the site (Low, Bendiner-Viani and Hung 2005). Place attachment, briefly discussed in Chapter 2 , refers to the emotional and affective relationship of people to a space or piece of land and the associated symbolic meanings and modes of attachment (Low and Altman 1992). In this case, place attachment is expressed through competing social constructions of what the statue and island represent – from an image of a freed Black slave to a Native Ameri- can princess – based on the different experiences, conflicting memories and multiple constructions of history elicited from interviewees. Pilgrimage to Liberty Island, replicas of the Statue of Liberty and stories, recordings and songs of the people who have resided, visited or worked there illustrate the intensity of the connection and the sense of belonging and national myth- making that characterizes this kind of nationalist constructed space.

Nationalist social constructions are also embedded in personal life trajec- tories that draw upon multiple inscribed meanings. Based on the life stories of Israeli veterans of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Edna Lomsky-Feder con- tends that memory is “embedded within, designed by, and derives its meaning from, a memory field that offers different interpretations” (2004: 82). She finds that this memory field is not an open space in that the “remembering subject is not free to choose any interpretation that he wishes” (2004: 82). Instead, access to collective memories is differentially distributed accord- ing to cultural criteria that dictate who is entitled to remember and what should be remembered. This provocative finding also applies to memories of place when social and cultural entitlements such as access to knowledge and control of space shape people’s memories, as portrayed in the ethno- graphic examples of Independence National History Park in Philadelphia and the destruction and rebuilding of downtown Beirut. Erased landscapes and memories of exclusion create what has been called “dissonant heritage” (Meskell 1999), the negative relationship of people to a place or a place forcibly stripped of meaning and attachment. These ethnographies provide examples of how space and memory are based on multiple intersecting, con- flicting and inherently unstable social constructions that are continuously shaped and reshaped by the power dynamics of historical, political, eco- nomic and social forces.

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The social construction of race, class and gender

Contemporary research on the social construction of space often focuses on the inscription, contestation and politics of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability and other social categories. These national, neigh- borhood/community and local constructions reinforce structural constraints, inequality and exclusion as well as offer opportunities for group and place attachment (Bank 2011, Carter 2014, Hoffman 2002).

Ethnographic studies of gendered spaces illuminate how patterns of everyday behaviors, symbolic representations and spatial allocations distin- guish gendered places, as well as how particular locales are invested with gendered meanings or are sites where gender-differentiated practices occur. Ethnographies of spatially differentiated gendered practices as diverse as Patty Kelly’s (2008) ethnography of the Zona Glactica, a state-run brothel in Chiapas, Mexico; Henrietta Moore’s (1986) interpretation of Marakwet space in Kenya; and Deborah Pellow’s (2002) analysis of the historical con- struction of gender and space through “socio-spatial practices within the Hausa zongo in Accra, Ghana, discussed previously, illustrate the centrality of gender in all forms of place-making.”

The investigation of the racialization of space has its roots in early groundbreaking studies of race, place and exclusion (Drake and Cayton 1970 [1945]) challenging the social and spatial construction of the “Black ghetto.” Steven Gregory’s (1998) social history of Corona, Queens, New York provides an in-depth critique of the micropolitics of Black activists and city officials involved in “the racialization of place” and the negative impact of racial and class power dynamics on the neighborhood. In a South- ern U.S. context, Mieka Polanco (2014) explores the consequences of the federal recognition of Union, Virginia, as a historically Black district that racializes and homogenizes residents by erasing old-timer White and new- comer Black residents’ sense of homeplace, identity and community. And Jacqueline Brown’s ethnography of the racialization of Black Liverpool in the United Kingdom concludes with the assertion that “place is an axis of power in its own right” (2005: 8) in her historical analysis of the association of Liverpool with its Black residents and the consequences of this racialized urban identity.

The social construction of “whiteness” in gated communities provides another example of how intersecting constructions of race and class per- meate the suburbs to constitute a purified and privileged social space (Low 2009, 2003). Whiteness is not only about race, but it is also a historical and cultural construct actively produced and reproduced to further and/or improve an individual or social group’s position. It refers to the systematic advantage of one group over others where whiteness becomes the loca- tion of advantage in societies structured by racial dominance (Frankenberg 1996, 2001).

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The power dynamics of whiteness for suburban residents in the United States are hidden and rarely challenged because White socialization occurs in largely racially segregated housing. The mechanisms associated with race privilege vary with socioeconomic status and gender, but are salient across most individuals. They include distancing, denial, superiority, belonging and solidarity. These mechanisms for defending whiteness can be observed in gated communities as justifications for living in a White, secured enclave. Thus the physical space of the neighborhood and its racial composition become synonymous. This racialized spatial ordering and the identification of a space with a group of people is a fundamental aspect of how suburban landscapes reinforce racial prejudice and discrimination. In these communi- ties, “whiteness has the social power to define itself as the normal, as the point where normality can be produced and elided with the orderliness of the social order” (Fiske 1998: 86). Thus whiteness becomes both the foun- dation for and the practice of normalization. Gated communities enhance residents’ visual surveillance of boundaries and therefore spatially promote its maintenance.

An analysis of U.S. middle-class insecurity is similarly explored in Rachel Heiman’s (2015) ethnography of how suburban residents living in New Jer- sey struggle to maintain their class affiliation by gating their communities and driving large SUVs. She documents how families that escape to the sub- urbs to buy more affordable houses and a middle-class White lifestyle are increasingly finding it difficult to keep up with the pressures of class-related consumerism and local deficits due to economic restructuring. Residents’ fragile claims to middle-class status and financial security are increasingly exposed by their inability to support better schools, open space and other amenities, as well as their escalating sense of insecurity and anxiety. Driving SUVs and a sense of “rugged entitlement” are reflections of the economic constraints faced by residents and their failure to achieve the trappings of the American Dream.

These ethnographies of how the social constructions of race, class and gender are inscribed in space and given material form offer another tem- plate for understanding the way that space and place can obscure underlying exclusionary practices and racial prejudices. Place can be used as the basis for the construction of many kinds of difference, hierarchy and identity and effectively rationalizes economic and political inequality, but its effects are not limited to the spatial domain. Spatial inequalities also have an impact on individual and group health, well-being and life chances of those whose neighborhoods and communities are bypassed by social services and access to financial, education and legal resources.

The following ethnographic examples provide a more detailed examina- tion of how a social construction of space and place frame was employed in two cultural contexts. Both ethnographies highlight some of the ways that memory, erased landscapes, racialization of space and struggles over access

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and use occurred over a twenty-year period at Independence National His- torical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States and during the post-war renovation of downtown Beirut in Lebanon.

Ethnographic examples

Representation and exclusion of African Americans at Independence National Historical Park (INDE), Philadelphia

Introduction and methodology

This first ethnographic example addresses the racialization of space through the gentrification of downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that accompa- nied the designation of Independence National Historical Park (INDE) and explores the park’s subsequent social construction as a White space for tourists and visitors. It also documents how an ethnography of space and place, in this case, a rapid ethnographic assessment procedure (REAP), can become the impetus and blueprint for attempts by the National Park Service and local Black communities to redress this history by reinstating African American spaces and representations at the park to increase inclusion and sense of belonging. The ethnographic description is based on a REAP 1 com- pleted 1994–1995 (Low, Taplin and Scheld 2005) and an assessment of the impact of these findings for African Americans and other local residents twenty years later (Fanelli 2014). It included a litany of qualitative methods, including participant observation, interviewing, focus groups and archival research, as well as the more specialized collection of cultural resource use maps for the groups studied (see Low, Taplin and Scheld 2005 for a full dis- cussion of the methodology). It is an example of how ethnographies of space and place can be a kind of engaged anthropology because they are based on community collaboration with the potential of revealing exclusionary and racist processes encoded in spatial relations and the built environment.

History and urban setting

The idea of a national historical park in Philadelphia originated with the Fed- eral Historic Sites Act of 1935. Planning and site acquisition began in the late 1940s and demolition, site preparation and building took place throughout the 1950s. The major controversy during this period was how much of the existing city fabric was to be removed to create a setting for the eighteenth- century structures associated with American Independence. The blocks both east and north of Independence Square were dense with commercial struc- tures of granite, marble and brownstone that were anywhere from forty to one hundred years old, with the bulk having been built between 1860 and 1890. In the 1950s climate of slum clearance and urban renewal, such blocks

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of buildings were regarded as symbols of decline and threats to the continued prosperity of the central city. Others, particularly architects and historians, were advocating an architecturally sensitive approach to renewal, one that would leave some of the more distinguished structures intact.

The INDE project became part of a larger effort to renew Society Hill, an area east of Eighth Street and south of Walnut, adjacent to the new national park ( Figure 4.1 Map of downtown Philadelphia and Independence National Historical Park). The neighborhood, close to the Philadelphia immigration center on the Delaware at Washington Avenue, originally housed a multieth- nic population, which included African Americans, Eastern European Jews, Italians, Polish, Irish and Ukrainians. By the 1940s, the neighborhood had become increasingly poor, as well as African American, although pockets of immigrant populations remained.

Because of the proximity of this neighborhood to the projected park area and the high quality of much of its building stock, the city saw the INDE process as an opportunity to restore the neighborhood. Whole sections of Society Hill were designated as redevelopment areas and homeowners were given the choice to restore their properties according to strict historic preservation guidelines or to sell them to the redevelopment authority. Since few could afford the costly restoration, most sold. The city then offered the properties for a nominal price to buyers who could prove that they had the financial resources to obtain a mortgage and complete the restoration. The banks, the real estate industry and the news media cooper- ated with the city to project a favorable image of the redevelopment area, thereby creating a market of affluent, mostly White buyers. Thus, over a period of roughly fifteen years, a new community of predominantly White professionals dispersed and replaced the predominantly poor, heteroge- neous and African American community of long standing.

The social and physical upheaval involved in the creation of Independence National Historical Park was exacerbated by an absence of communication with local communities and the extensive demolition that removed the set- tings of life, play and work that had any special meaning. The national park became a new, artificially produced built environment from which most signs of the city’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history were care- fully scrubbed away.

African American experience and perception of INDE

Interviews and focus groups with African Americans living in Southwark, a housing project a few blocks south of the park reflect this legacy of social and physical uprooting. One man reported, “I don’t visit [the park] because it has nothing to do for or with me . . . it doesn’t show Black history or cul- ture. It doesn’t represent us and we helped build this country.”

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A woman added, “Yes, it’s history . . . a part of teaching about history and some people have lived here all of their lives and haven’t visited. There’s lots of history here that people don’t know about . . . Black history.” Charles Blockson, a local historian, felt that African Americans could have a strong cultural identification with the park if there were some physical marking or interpretation of Black history and participation:

African Americans were involved from the inception of the park . . . although we were considered three-fifths of a person, most of them,

Figure 4.1 (Continued, this map courtesy of Independence National Historical Park)

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slave labor, and free African Americans – carpenters and laborers – helped to build, create Independence Hall. We must tell their history.

He went on to explain that Washington Square, on the southeastern cor- ner of the park was the original burying ground for African Americans and later was used as a gathering place, referred to as “Congo Square.” This grassy square, part of William Penn’s plan for Philadelphia, holds great significance for African American residents, but at the time of the 1995 interviews, the city had not commemorated or officially included it in the park.

Most African Americans, however, said that the park had no particu- lar meaning for them. One elderly woman commented, “No special feel- ing . . . I’m not gonna tell no lies . . . when the kids were small [it was more important].” A middle-aged woman said, “no special feeling . . . the Bell is cracked . . . What’s to see, it’s cracked . . . We all know that.” A younger woman asserts,

The Liberty Bell, I don’t care. We won’t benefit at all . . . It’s not beneficial to the people, we don’t have any money. When something up there needs fixing up they come down here to ask about it. What about fixing up something down here [in Southwark]? The park ain’t done nothing for the people here. This part of town is in isolation. This is not a location on the map. I took my kin to Penn’s Landing, and we were looking at the map. We’re not on the map. This place is no place.

A man commented that the area had no meaning for him because it was not designed for local Black visitors:

The area is for tourists. It is a White area. The intention is for White people to see the Bell. It is not important for African Americans visiting. It’s not for African Americans. The only thing Black at the park is the ink used.

Another interviewee added, “it’s [the park] not important for African Ameri- cans, that’s why there are no African Americans visiting.” A third interviewee stated that, “most people who go there go to look at their own people. It’s a showcase for White people.”

The feeling that African Americans are not welcome appears to have a long history. One woman in a focus group recounted that, in the past,

not everyone was welcome, not everyone was allowed in the park. Now it’s different [but back then] some of our children were not allowed to go into the park . . . they knew they lived on the wrong side of the

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neighborhood and that they could not go in. They couldn’t have picnics there [so] we didn’t go.

The focus group leader then asked, “Was there something in particular that made you feel you couldn’t go there?” The woman responded, “No, not really. You just knew you weren’t allowed. If you were there you weren’t there for the right reason.”

Pastor Leath of Mother Bethel Church adjacent to the park added that

there is not a clear message presented in the park . . . diversity is not displayed . . . one could walk through the park and not know that there were African Americans in colonial Philadelphia.

Members of the Nazareth Baptist Church remarked on the need for differ- ent cultures to be able to identify with the park: “Different cultures need something to grab, the children need something to grasp at.” The speaker, a churchgoing man, felt that there is not a solid identity expressed by the park for African Americans to relate to. Cultural history starts here, he added, “with the church and the committee . . . the church is the root for us as African Americans.” But many others in the focus group felt that the park should be relevant as well and agreed with another interviewee who opined that, “every child should learn about how we got our freedom.”

The ethnographic research at INDE revealed how important cultural rep- resentation is for a sense of identification and a meaningful relationship with a place. The erasure of historical buildings and resulting amnesia about historically significant places as well as the everyday racist practices of some park employees, uncovered how people, especially African Americans, read and responded to exclusionary cues in the built environment. These cues and erasures are part of the social construction of the park as a colonial White space that marginalized other racial, gender, ethnic and class claims to this iconic American heritage site.

Reprise

But the story does not end in 1995. Dr. Doris Fanelli (2014), who directed the National Park Service side of the project in 1995, commissioned Dr. Tony Whitehead (2002) to undertake an in-depth study that confirmed the findings that African Americans did not see a connection with the park. Since that time, the National Park Service has emphasized inclusion in its recruitment and promotion practices and in its interpretive and cultural resource programs. In 2000, INDE wrote an amendment to its National Register nomination to include sites related to the Underground Railroad and anti-slavery movement and an exhibit was added to the visitor’s cen- ter in 2007.

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An important opportunity for African American interpretation of and presence at INDE occurred in 2002. An independent scholar, Edward Lawler, published an article in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography about the house that Washington occupied while he was presi- dent. The article was about the architecture of the property, but Lawler mentioned that the Washingtons had nine of their slaves living at the house. This reawakened public memory and rallied local community groups in the African American community to demand that the story of the first president as a slave owner be told at the site.

Today the President’s House, located at Sixth and Market Streets imme- diately before entering the Liberty Bell Center, incorporates text and videos of the life of the Washington slaves. All of these buildings are on the new Independence Mall, which is the outgrowth of the planning for the General Management Plan that included the original ethnographic study. The Presi- dent’s House has increased the audience in the African American community and spawned a cottage industry of publications, artistic expressions and opinions.

In addition to the President’s House project, when Independence Mall was developed for the new National Constitution Center, documentary research revealed that the founding meetings of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas were held in the home of James Dexter, a former slave, located within the boundaries of the new Constitution Center. The church still exists and is, with Mother Bethel, one of the two oldest Black churches in the coun- try. Both churches asked the National Park Service to conduct an archaeo- logical dig to see if anything survived from Dexter’s occupancy. Four plaques at the National Constitution Center currently mark the site and St. Thomas Church is now a “traditionally associated group” to the park and consulted regarding relevant projects.

INDE also assumed stewardship of Washington Square, including an area known for its use by the congregation of free and enslaved Blacks during the eighteenth century and served as a burying ground. Today, African American groups hold special libation ceremonies there.

As part of the original research findings concerning the community’s desire for more representation and recognition, INDE also rewrote the exhibit script for the new Liberty Bell Center that opened in 2003. The script now explains the history of the Bell and its growth as a symbol for human rights beginning with its adoption by the Anti-Slavery Society in the early nineteenth century. The Martin Luther King Center for the Study of Nonviolence holds a ceremony at the Liberty Bell every Martin Luther King Day. The National Freedom Day Association also holds an annual ceremony to commemorate the date (February 1) that Lincoln signed the resolution proposing the thirteenth amendment. Interpretive tours incorporate the his- tory of freedom for enslaved Africans and discussions of race and slavery as much as possible into the story of the creation of the U.S. government.

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In many ways, INDE has expanded its audience and developed tours that draw other marginalized groups not covered in our initial research. For example, a ranger developed a tour about gay rights that has been well received. The park also actively consults with federally recognized tribes who consider land within the park’s boundaries as part of their ancestral homeland and are now involved in any deep excavation in the park because that is where indigenous artifacts are likely to be found. In addition, there continue to be discussions about undertaking Spanish translations of inter- pretive writings and to initiate tours about Spanish American relations in the past.

Returning to INDE today to interview African American residents would yield different perceptions and problems than those elicited twenty years ago. The original rapid ethnography played a part in increasing the repre- sentation of African American history and sacred sites, and the local African American churches and history centers are integrated into the interpretive fabric of the park. These changes have created a series of sites that are socially constructed now as Black by the park and its visitors and resident users.

Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and space in a post-war Arab city

Introduction and methodology

The second example is drawn from Aseel Sawalha’s (2010) ethnography of the reconstruction of Beirut after the sixteen-year civil war that formally ended in 1991 ( Figure 4.2 Map of downtown Beirut, Solidere and Ayn el-Mreisse neighborhood). Her fieldwork began in 1995 and was made up of field visits to Beirut through 2005. During that time, she examined the work of Solidere (the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruc- tion of the Beirut Central District), which was founded by then prime min- ister Rafik Hariri to implement a massive inner city and waterfront renewal project. Working in various neighborhoods to explore the project’s impact on the city’s residents and its urban fabric, she met with intellectual leaders, religious leaders, politicians, property owners and residents who had squat- ted in abandoned buildings during the war. She used multisited ethnography and other methodological techniques, including discourse analysis of news- papers, expert and local interviews, participant observation through living in one of the neighborhoods and becoming a part of it, as well as work- ing with locals to try to save the historic environment. By analyzing their debates, struggles, and narratives pertaining to the urban renewal project, she found that memories of old Beirut played a dominant role in residents’ anxieties about the future of their neighborhoods and communities. More- over, she discovered that these memories played a central role in the various efforts of local groups to resist Solidere’s spatial incursions.

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History and urban setting

A government-sponsored joint stock offering that excluded the participation of all but the wealthiest citizens and international development companies lead to the creation of Solidere. At the time of its inauguration in 1994, Solidere was one of the largest urban renewal projects in the world, turn- ing 1.8 million square meters and an additional 608,000 square meters of reclaimed land into a corporate-directed redevelopment project. The osten- sible goal of the project was to refashion the landscape to create “Beirut an Ancient City of the Future” (Sawalha 2010: 23). To that end, Solidere’s promotional material claimed it was interested in preserving Beirut’s heri- tage; however, in practice, the reconstruction company began by destroying what remained of the war-ravaged city center and obliterating many of the most sacred and historic places in the downtown area. What quickly became clear is that the power to determine “in whose image and to whose benefit” (Sawalha 2010:23) the new downtown would be rebuilt was in the hands of Solidere and Rafik Hariri and his government.

Beirut residents were shocked and saddened by the disappearance of many of the city’s landmarks and religious structures. For residents and community groups living in the destroyed and decaying neighborhoods, it seemed that all vestiges of the past, in particular a culturally and religiously diverse past and the historic buildings that represented that past, were torn down to make room for Hariri’s version of a modern future. Moreover, the destruction of large swaths of the urban fabric – and particularly traditional places for socializing – had a major impact on their daily life. The removal of spaces such as the hairdresser, the tailor, relatives’ homes, local shops and, especially, Western cafés changed forms of sociality for Beirutis – especially among middle-class women. In response, residents filled the daily newspa- pers with personal narratives of their memories of the city. While they could not stop the destruction, city residents wrote about these erased landscapes, while historic preservation professionals urged Solidere to protect histori- cally valuable buildings (Sawalha 2010). In addition, religious parties issued fatwas , religious decrees, against the company, its employees and sharehold- ers, and they harbored the suspicion that the project intended to exploit the poor for the benefit of the rich. However, despite their various calls to stop the destruction, valuable historical sites continued to be demolished without proper documentation or archaeological assessment.

Resistance, redevelopment and cultural identity

At the same time, internationally based commercial establishments were being built on the newly cleared sites. Protests from local neighborhood groups such as the Mosque Committee of Ayn el-Mreisse , a neighborhood adjacent to downtown where Sawalha spent much of her time, fought to

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stop the building of a Hard Rock Cafe a few feet away from the old Otto- man mosque. But despite their struggle, the café was opened in 1997 and loud Western music competed with the mosque’s call to prayer (Sawalha 2010). Residents felt alienated from these international incursions and simi- larly to the previous example of African American residents who lived near Independence Historical National Park, Ayn el-Mreisse residents explained, “These foreign businesses are not built for us [the local residents]; they are for the rich and the tourists” (Sawalha 2010: 74). Very few residents ever visited the Hard Rock Cafe, but when a visit was attempted, the neighbors felt insulted by the short skirt and rudeness of the waitress (Sawalha 2010).

The Association for the Revival of the Heritage of Ayn el-Mreisse orga- nized another act of resistance to the destruction of their spatial and mate- rial history. This local organization headed by Najem, a middle-aged retired fireman, was composed of members of three ethnoreligious groups – Druze, Sunni and Christian – who banded together to record their memories in a local museum. Najem transformed his house into what he called the Museum of Ayn el-Mreisse and preserved anything “old, authentic, and used by the people of Ayn el-Mreisse” (Sawalha 2010: 78). This flexible definition of heritage was successful in filling three rooms of Najem’s house with memo- rabilia and was seen by the community as a way to protect the threatened past and guarantee its existence in the future.

In Sawalha’s analysis of Beirut, urban space was socially constructed in multiple ways to accommodate and represent conflicting political, social, class and religious beliefs and practices. These social constructions, in many cases, were quite specific as to the cultural assumptions embedded in the built environment and were disturbed and manipulated as part of the rebuilding process. Sawalha emphasizes how residents’ images of what the city should look like were often in conflict with the government, real estate and financial objectives of Solidere that were represented by an image of a modern city produced by creative destruction. Many local residents, women, religious and political groups contested this modernist image in an attempt to protect their sense of cultural identity previously encoded in historic buildings and intimate public/private spaces.

At the same time, Sawalha is careful not to reduce the spatial conflicts to a simple contrast of the state/Solidere versus the local residents. On the contrary, she is attentive to the nuances of shifting power hierarchies in the city, recognizing that Soldiere was not the only culprit in creating dramatic changes in the historic urban landscape. In Ayn el-Mreisse , for example, decision-making power was also shared by the political parties that had evolved out of wartime sects and militia and revived governmental institu- tions such as the Municipality of Beirut and the newly formed Ministry of the Displaced, as well as international and national financial investors (Saw- alha 2010). Thus to understand the urban transformation of Beirut required an analysis of the role of each of these institutions in reforming the city.

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Unfortunately, in contrast to the Independence National Historical Site case, the poor and middle-class residents of Beirut were not successful. Their social constructions of urban space were erased through the recon- struction process. Solidere itself, which had been at the center of Beirut’s fragile post-war experience in the 1990s and early 2000s, has been only partly successful and marred by assassination of its principal sponsor, Rafik Hariri, in 2005 and a “sit-in” by opponents of the government in 2006. Following these events was a war with Israel and Hezbollah, further fighting between Lebanese factions in 2009 and greater instability with Syria following the protests in 2011. However, by 2014, celebrating its twentieth anniversary, Solidere had radically changed the arrangement of both space and political power in Lebanon (Sharp and Panetta 2016). Yet many of the contemporary urban problems facing neighborhoods in Beirut, from a lack of effective planning and management of public space to an unpredictable transportation system of roadblocks, holdups and rundown roads, stem from the priority of rebuilding high-profile and high-end areas like downtown to attract international capital rather than attending to the basic infrastructure of housing, schools and services in local neighborhoods (Monroe 2016).

Conclusion

The national and city decision makers, urban designers and planners involved in the redevelopment of both downtown Philadelphia and the cen- tral city of Beirut intended to produce internationally acclaimed cities and tourist sites with limited consideration for the people who historically lived there. It is certainly no surprise that in Philadelphia contemporary African American residents saw INDE as not holding any meaning or significance for them since they were designed out in the beginning. The dialogic rela- tionship of social production and social construction helps to explain how the political and economic intentions of the National Park Service and the city of Philadelphia were retained in the landscape and understood through its spatial vocabulary and also points to ways that sites can be physically changed, spatially reconfigured and reinterpreted to create new social and racial meanings.

Even though the Beirut example is not a tale of local community success in the face of dominant state constructions of the city as “modern and interna- tional,” Sawalha’s ethnography captures the intricacies and complex inter- actions of how the social construction space and place plays a decisive role in determining the shape of the future urban landscape. The various groups she studied mobilized different urban discourses of the past in an attempt to fight the transformation of the urban landscape – and, in particular, what were perceived as immoral commercial enterprises within their community space. It offers a useful ethnographic model for similar studies. The next

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chapter on embodied space integrates elements of the social construction and social production approaches to the ethnographic study of space and place by focusing on how bodies make space through movement, trajectories and intentions.

Note 1 The REAP methodology for the study of space and place is presented as part of the

Moore Street ethnographic example presented in Chapter 8.

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