Space and Culture

This theme section of Space and Culture, titled “CityCorps,” stages an encounter between performance studies and urban studies with an eye toward opening new axes of collaboration between these domains. Both share a concern with the capacities of publics to gather as critical and generative forces to bring together the social wealth of the built environment and the moving body.

Face City examines Bangkok through cinematic “close-ups” and meditative states, conjuring a new, nonorganic city body. The human face is a relatively immobile receptive surface for incoming sensations rather than outgoing action. Facialized, the body is understood as a stable sensory-motor apparatus rather than an assemblage of organs for action. In Thailand, Theravada Buddhist meditation practice has taught practitioners to still their bodies and minds to reach states of attentiveness to sensory-motor chains of stimulation and reaction. The cinematic close-up and meditative attentiveness facializes objects and space. The facialization of the city is staged here in a Vietnam War-era hotel in the heart of Bangkok. The Vietnam War era in Thailand introduced American mass cinema culture and new building types along with thousands of soldiers on rest and recreation. In this new transnational space, Face City became possible, one that intersects America and Thailand as states of mind.

This article is about the New York City circus company Circus Amok and its experiments in civic imaginings. The essay explores the relationship between the circus, civic belonging, urban citizenship, and the role of the moving body in public spaces such as park spaces. Circus Amok is an experimental theater group interested in bringing political critique to people in the city through free circus performances.

As ephemeral as the social effects of dance may be, still more elusive are the embodiments of a critical public. The publics so dear to democratic practice so often appear only metonymically in rules that govern speech. Or they may seem to be inchoate yearnings whose only possible realization lies in formal representation. To attend to actual circuits of participation, one needs to account for the practical capacities that allow bodies to gather in public and move toward desirable ends. The imbrication of state and daily life in Cuba makes study of the affinities between formal and informal political domains particularly robust. Contemporary Cuban dance in a variety of venues—proscenium stages, streets, clubs, and houses—is used to grasp how pleasure meets critique where a social economy for corporeal mobilization is in evidence.

Hybrid spaces arise when virtual communities (chats, multiuser domains, and massively multi-player online role-playing games), previously enacted in what was conceptualized as cyberspace, migrate to physical spaces because of the use of mobile technologies as interfaces. Mobile interfaces such as cell phones allow users to be constantly connected to the Internet while walking through urban spaces. This article defines hybrid spaces in the light of three major shifts in the interaction between mobile technology and spaces. First, it investigates how the use of mobile technologies as connection interfaces blurs the traditional borders between physical and digital spaces. Second, it argues that the shift from static to mobile interfaces brings social networks into physical spaces. Finally, it explores how urban spaces are reconfigured when they become hybrid spaces. For this purpose, hybrid spaces are conceptualized according to three distinct but overlapping trends: hybrid spaces as connected spaces, as mobile spaces, and as social spaces.

This article is concerned with the “removal” (the Canadian government policy word for deportation) of noncitizens rendered suspect in the climate of 9-1-1 Islamophobia, who are detained and/or deported without specific charges, and with the impact of removals on the landscape of a cosmopolitan city such as Montréal. When people are removed, their absence leaves an imprint; the intimates they have left behind restructure their everyday lives around that imprint. But how is the imprint of absence transposed into presence, and how does that presence affect the city as a site that lets flourish or prohibits radical difference and hybridization? The article focuses on the examples of family members of detainees or deportees and antideportation activist networks.

This article provides a brief history of the use of maps and fences in wildlife conservation. Analysis of the promotional materials of one of the main promoters of Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa, the Peace Parks Foundation, reveals the importance of mapping as a planning and promotion tool. These maps, however, appear to be quite silent about the communities that are supposed to benefit from the TFCAs. The fences around wildlife areas are resented by local communities because they prevent them from harvesting natural resources “on the other side.” Local communities also object to the fences because of their symbolic meaning and instrumentality, shown in warfare and policies “to control and divide.” Conservation organizations nowadays use the symbol of the fence to communicate their change in policy toward local communities: stressing the need to move “beyond the fences” by involving local communities in the management of protected areas and using these to promote economic development.

Despite the growing use and complexity of the virtual environments of video games, geographers have neglected investigation of the representation of video game spaces. Game spaces are entirely artificial, and whether they feature swords-and-sorcery fantasy worlds or gritty urban streets, video game environments are embedded with metaphors and ideas for political and mythological constructs. This article examines the virtual environments of four recent games, conducting visual and textual analysis of the representation of fantasy, realism, and othering.