Intercultural interaction and "situational places": a perspective for urban cultural geography within and beyond the performative turn

Abstract

With the performative in social sciences and the humanities the concept of performance has arrived in human geography. Performance denotes an understanding of social actions and practices as consti- tutive for non-representational realities. This paper looks at the relationship between and performance especially in urban geography and develops the new term situational place to grasp the increasing phe- nomenon of (intercultural) encounters in the cities of modern world society. Situational places are situated performances of these (intercultural) interactions between strangers in cities of the contemporary world so- ciety. With the aid of performance theory the influence of the omnipresent interactions between strangers in cities on urban space is conceptualized. Therewith, we hope to present some fruitful theoretical and empirical possibilities for a cultural urban geography within and beyond the performative turn. In contemporary human geography many di erent theoreti- cal turns are discussed. The spectrum ranges from the lin- guistic to the somatic, from the spatial to the performative turn. Most of these theoretical turnarounds could be sub- sumed under the broader umbrella of the cultural turn. In this paper we understand turn as a metaphor for a move- ment because it signals and is a sign for the eternal motion contained in human geography. A scholastic fixing of theo- retical concepts in human geography is in many accounts im- possible because of its openness and conceptual complexity. It may well be argued that it is exactly this conceptual flexi- bility and openness, the constant ability to transgress bound- aries, that characterizes human(e) geography as a discipline beyond disciplination. The di erent turns which are dis- cussed in recent human geography could be considered as empirical evidence of sorts for this theoretical thesis. Within this broad field of di erent turns the argument of this paper focuses on one very specific problem: the implications of the performative for urban geography or cultural urban geography. Because the performative gives space for