The cities we need: essential stories of everyday places

This work looks at everyday places in order to understand how boundaries are enacted and re-employed, shifted and displaced in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina. Post-Dayton boundaries correspond to practices of demarcation that may or may not entail geographic delimitations and that have been reorganized by the Dayton Peace Agreement in ways that have assured them a more prominent role in sociopolitical life in BiH. While engaging in an effort to conceptualize borders and boundaries, this thesis argues that boundaries are dependent on practices, which confers upon them a precarious status and indicates that they might be changed. Boundaries may thus be re-employed (in the sense of diverting its original meaning and employing a different one); shifted and displaced, but also much more, as it will be exposed here: crossed, minimized, subverted, dismissed, disdained, but also reinforced, reaffirmed and celebrated. It is thus looking at the everyday that this work makes sense of those boundaries, knowing, however, that they are permeated with contradictions and may be enacted in different ways by different people. The everyday, which usually receives our 'daily inattention', will be considered here a relevant analytical category through which undertake this research. Indeed, the everyday cannot be reduced to the unimportant or the banal, as mere residual or the remnants of the political. Rather, it is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground" (Lefebvre, 1991: 97), and it thus provides for connection and mediation between categories often presented as dichotomies such as public and private, the exceptional and the routine (Lefebvre, 2008: 16). It is in and through the everyday that those tensions are played, the disputes are fought and appropriations and even transformation take place. The research was undertaken in Sarajevo and Mostar, PUC-Rio -Certificao Digital N 1211358/CA two of the main cities in BiH. More specifically, this research looks at 'everyday places' within these cities, such as schools, streets, squares, cafs, coach station and shopping malls, which might be enacted as the very (ethnonational, local/international) boundaries or the arena in which those boundaries are diverted and displaced. This thesis, therefore, provides for an alternative account to more official narratives about ethnonational divisions, as well as questions clear-cut distinctions between the local and the international in post-Dayton BiH.

‘The Place(s) of Everyday and Everyday Places’, provides a contribution to the study of the everyday in order to understand international politics. It offers an invitation to look at the everyday, while explaining this onto-epistemo-methodological choice. After a broad examination of literature that analyses the everyday, this chapter provides a working concept of the everyday. It, then, discusses the methodological implications of taking seriously the everyday as a field of analysis and presents the concept of ‘everyday places’ which are crucial to this work. It also discusses methods such as estrangement, displacement and curiosity as ways to denaturalize and problematize the everyday.

Engaging with the concept of borderzones, this article critically analyses the irregularisation of refugee claimants residing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Specifically, attention is placed on the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP), a federal health insurance program provided to refugee populations, and how it was experienced in everyday healthcare places. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with doctors, lawyers, social workers, and refugee claimants, this article empirically demonstrates irregularising bordering practices within these everyday places, and how refugee claimants and allies challenged such practices through, what I term, acts of liberating irregularity. Overall, this article sheds new light on the role of borders in the processes and politics of irregularisation within the Canadian asylum context.

This article explores the pedestrian bridges in Hong Kong and the idea of pedestrian bridges as everyday places in a high-density city. On the basis of a physical survey of pedestrian bridges and intensive observations of people’s everyday use of such bridges, this study reveals people’s everyday bridge use, the multiple roles of pedestrian bridges in high-density cities and the process of everyday placemaking. More importantly, taking the concept of ‘pedestrian bridge as everyday place’, the frameworks of necessity and sufficiency for placemaking, and then for place-led development, are summarised and discussed. This article contributes to generate an elaborative framework of everyday placemaking with respect to the dynamic relationship between micro-scale spatial characteristics and people’s everyday behaviour. Built on the framework of placemaking, a performance-based actionable placemaking strategy is then proposed, to clarify the roles of designer, planner, regulator and ordinary everyday users in the process of placemaking.

In ‘a world that has been built to accommodate only some’ (Ahmed 2019: 221), how do those engaging in public protest or experiencing housing insecurity make use of the material environment? In this article, we examine adaptation of the built environment in four sites in Melbourne, Australia. Everyday urban places are composed of myriad ‘small things’ acted upon as affordances for survival within structures of silencing and dispossession for the urban undercommons. We draw from cultural, spatial and atmospheric criminology to inform an ethnographic method focusing on materiality, use, adaptability and sensory composition. In so doing, our research contributes to criminological understanding of the significance of ‘minor’ events, activities and encounters in everyday life by proposing that ‘small things in everyday places’ constitute potentialities for defiance and resistance.

Social inclusion for people with disability is bound up with experiences of place in everyday life. In Australia, the inclusion agenda has been recently propelled by the National Disability Insurance Scheme which promotes – and funds – the full inclusion of people with disability so that their lives are conducted in everyday settings. This article addresses what lies between the aspirational policy principles of full inclusion and the experience of family life with a young child who has Down syndrome. Through auto-ethnographic inquiry, a series of vignettes describe my own encounters in everyday places such as shops, childcare centres and public swimming pools. I focus on ‘sense of place’ which is generated through everyday practices and can shape individual identity and belonging. Using ideas from feminist poststructuralism and critical disability studies, I argue that ableist discourses on disability are produced by people in everyday places through their attitudes, actions and expectations, disrupting regular family life and imposing oppressive modes of subjectivity upon children with intellectual disability and their parent-carers. In response, parents of children with intellectual disability are challenged to undertake the political labour of everyday disability advocacy. It is important for social work to recognise that this labour can become a significant part of the contemporary parent-carer role.

Cities are growing vertically, so are the streets. This qualitative study employs narrative city walk, spatial survey, field observation, and interview to develop and speculate on the notion of the “vertical street as everyday place” through examining its spatial formation, ordinary individuals’ everyday practices, and people’s conceptions. The article finds that the type-form of vertical street is a network of multilevel, segmented spaces that vertically extend within urban volumes. The vertical street is the city’s everyday place, which significantly accommodates a varied urban social life. The study thus provides a novel angle for urban designers and planners to rethink the streets and to promote urban livability in vertical.

The institutionalization of heterosexuality in, for example, the law, religion and marriage, regulates the expression of emotions and feelings between men and women. Based on sex and gender, it provides guidelines about emotional behaviour in everyday interactions in everyday places. Adherence to these guidelines supports and maintains the dominance and ‘naturalness’ of heterosexuality. In this paper I utilize the concepts of socially constructed emotions, feeling rules, emotion work, performativity and space to argue that the institutionalization of heterosexuality and its regulation of emotional behaviour creates and perpetuates spatial inequalities between sexualized groups at an emotional level. My argument is illustrated by drawing on my doctoral research based on a sample of lesbian and bisexual women who lived, worked/studied and socialized in London, England, and on an examination of their emotional experiences of sexualized spaces. I argue that the ‘spatial supremacy of heterosexuality’ (Valentine 1993a) is supported by the performance of emotion work by sexual minority groups including lesbian and bisexual women in everyday places to the extent that this supremacy is naturalized. In other words, the performance of emotion work is a key feature of performing sexuality and crucial to the construction of sexualized spaces, but paradoxically contributes to the invisibility of minority sexualities in everyday places. By considering women's emotional experiences of places on London's lesbian, gay and bisexual social scene, I also highlight how emotion work is performed while asserting sexual diversity in alternatively sexualized spaces, and is central to the performance of racialized sexualities in racially sexualized spaces.

Domestic Gardening: Gabrielle Roy’s Bower of Innocence in Enchantment and Sorrow Shelley Boyd (bio) “A Chinese proverb says, ‘If you want a day of happiness, buy a bottle of wine and get drunk; if you want a week of happiness, get married; if you want a whole life of happiness, plant a garden.’ There’s some truth in that, don’t you think?” Roy, Letters Gabrielle roy’s description of a garden as integral to “a whole life of happiness” resonates with the very form and content of her autobiography Enchantment and Sorrow, in which a garden motif traces Roy’s maturation as a young woman and the cultivation of her artistic expression. Throughout Roy’s fiction and particularly her autobiography, gardens are extraordinary, readily visible terrains. Within these green, flower-filled spaces, Roy’s characters and Roy herself as protagonist experience security, innocence, happiness, and a lasting enchantment with their worlds. The idyllic innocence of Roy’s gardens does not preclude these spaces, however, from reflecting the complexities and evolutions of adult experience, particularly when it comes to Roy’s female artist figures. Within the safety and beauty of her gardens in Enchantment and Sorrow, Roy experiences moments of profound self-reflection and transformation—indeed, her gardens [End Page 189] are not simply cultivated earth, but pivotal bowers that construct and validate her role as a woman artist. But as much as Roy’s gardens provide vital space for her expression, these gardens also work to contain and to limit, revealing the problematic demands of femininity and, in Roy’s case, its rootedness in the domestic. Within her writing, Roy’s gardens are clearly domestic in nature, existing as familiar, family-oriented environments that provide safe, conventional enclosures for her female characters and for Roy as the protagonist of her autobiography. Garden terrains associated with the “domestic” are “of the household” or “at home” and directly related to “what concerns oneself” (“domestic”). As Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester note in The Meaning of Gardens: Idea, Place, and Action, “The garden is [...] a source of action requiring intimate and direct involvement. We cannot dig, plant, trim, water, or harvest with detached passivity” (6). A site associated with daily work, living, and dwelling, then, a domestic garden is “an everyday place[...]. We experience it through the kitchen window or on a fall Saturday morning raking leaves” (Francis and Hester 4). The comfort of a domestic garden also lies in the fact that it is highly portable in terms of both time and space; its dynamic can be dismantled, remade, substituted, or interchanged with other locales. These features of comfort, portability, intimacy, and daily routine both align and distinguish a domestic garden from one’s original maternal home, which is fixed in time and a specific place. But despite the malleability of domestic gardens, the gendered aspects of these terrains remain decidedly persistent. Because domestic gardens are “an everyday place” of the quotidian, family, and delicate nurturing, they create a veritable “natural” domain for women. One only has to think of Virginia Woolf’s angel of the house—the selfless, ever-nurturing domestic goddess—and John Ruskin’s queen of the garden—the beautifying force in the private sphere—in order to see how the home, the garden, and related paradigms of femininity have contained and denned women’s social roles and identities. According to French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, inhabiting space is “how we take root, day after day, in a ‘corner of the world’” and domestic space provides meaning and structure to the human subject: “For our house [...] is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word” (4). In the context of Roy’s writing, domestic gardens carry the same cosmos-creating energy for her female characters and for herself as a protagonist, as these women subjects and their very expression spring from their homes and their related domestic roles and activities. In The Road Past Altamont, Christine’s declining Grandmother associates her independence and value [End Page 190] through her domestic abilities, such as making “plenty [flowers] grow” (14). Similarly, Marta Yaramko’s prairie garden in “Garden in the...

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the implications of the efforts to promote a quality-oriented economy that incorporates a vision of environmental sustainability and equitable social development. Design/methodology/approach – The analysis builds on a case study of food procurement in Brazil, which intended to improve the quality of food used in public schools. The case study follows ways that the promotion of quality food has localised the procurement operation, connecting smallholders to citizen-consumers. Findings – The efforts to promote quality food procurement worked to shape reflexive governance in a decentralised political environment and create an institutional device based on cooperative civic participation and state engagement. However, this process highlighted socioeconomic inequality within the country due to uneven local capacities to connect good-quality services to the citizens' everyday places. The study identifies the following paths to tackle this unevenness: improvement of place-based infrastructure; promotion of trans-local cooperation; and building on the existing informal institutional arrangements. Originality/value – The focus on quality and sustainability in general has been blind to the inequality in local capacities to define and promote the quality-oriented economy in the first place. Recognising inequality through a case study, the paper outlines specific ways for the author to link quality to trans-local equality.

Recent developments in cultural geography have brought forth everyday life and emotions as critical categories for understanding place. Yet, the focus on everyday emotional geographies also presents methodological challenges. This paper argues that auto‐photography is a particularly well‐suited method to explore the intricate relations between everyday practices, emotions and the formation of places. Auto‐photography combines participant‐generated photographs and participants’ interpretative narrations of these photographs. Our argument is based on auto‐photographic research we conducted with 38 young women in Czechia in 2016. We asked participants to photograph everyday places that they associate with positive or negative emotions, or religious meanings, and to discuss their emotions in a following interview. We analysed participants’ photographs together with their narrations. This analysis reveals the emotions and meanings participants attached to photographed places. We argue that the method of auto‐photography helps understand the complexity of everyday emotional geographies that may not be possible through other geographical methods. The strength of auto‐photography is its combination of visual representations and narratives, which help identify how ordinary everyday places without any apparent significance, such as a door or a staircase, might be sites of strong emotional intensity. The insights gained by analysing photographs and narratives together and in relation to one another produce an understanding of emotional bordering practices, anxieties and desires of place‐making. Auto‐photography thus provides multiple layers of visual and textual data that help understand the complexity of emotional geographies in mundane everyday places.

This article poses a methodological argument for the use of expressive photographs in fostering more mindful discussions of the experience of everyday places. The article builds on the author’s ‘guided tours’ methodology of walk/make/talk, which involves asking inhabitants to take the researcher on tours of their everyday places, the researcher making creative visual representations of those places and then, bringing those images back to residents to talk about how the photographs are similar, or in contrast, to lived experience. The article uses examples from research in Brooklyn, NY, and Oakland, CA, to specifically explore the ‘making’ and ‘talking’ part of the process, and to argue for the critical distance gained when a participant has the opportunity to see their most commonplace and often unremarked worlds brought back to them through another pair of eyes. The paper considers distinctions with other photo-elicitation methods and discusses how this model of bringing people’s worlds back to them often allowed the jolt of a new perspective to suspend the taken-for-grantedness of the world, creating a time and opportunity to consider the everyday in more depth. It further discusses how the method enabled people to clarify three aspects of everydayness that are hard to pin down: the feel of place, emotional responses, and seeing past time. The paper challenges conceptions of photographs as ‘data’, champions expressive work in research, and proposes that photographs made by a range of authors can enable new ways of seeing, challenging and discussing the everyday urban environment.

Landscapes at the edge of the city comprise vast areas that ‘lie fallow’, awaiting future urban development. During this time new landscape values evolve. It is argued that the complexity of urban fringe landscapes is not adequately considered either within landscape research or in the practice of spatial planning. A key to understanding landscapes at the inner urban fringe is to focus on landscape dynamics, and on the interactions between spatial plans and everyday activities. The study is divided into three parts. First, theoretical considerations about landscape dynamics and the character of the inner urban fringe are presented. Thereafter, the relationship between spatial planning and everyday places is analysed in a case-study area at the edge of the city of Malmö in southernmost Sweden. The case study demonstrates the complexity of landscape dynamics at the inner urban fringe, as well as problems regarding the handling of ephemeral and transitory aspects within spatial planning. The study concludes with a discussion concerning the importance of studies of landscape dynamics within landscape research.

An expressive book of prose and photographs that reveals the powerful ways our everyday places support our shared belonging. Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In The Cities We Need, photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personable stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal stories and Bendiner-Viani's evocative images illuminate what's at stake in our everyday places—from diners to churches to donut shops. In this culmination of two decades of research and art practice, Bendiner-Viani intertwines the personal, historical, and photographic to present us with placework, the way that unassuming places foster a sense of belonging and, in fact, do the essential work of helping us become communities. In this unique book, Bendiner-Viani makes visible how seemingly unimportant places can lay the foundation for a functional interconnected society, so necessary for both public health and social justice. The Cities We Need explores both what we gain in these spaces and what we risk losing as they are threatened by gentrification, large-scale development, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, Bendiner-Viani shows us how to understand ourselves as part of a shared society, with a shared fate; she shows us that everyday places can be the spaces of liberation in which we can build the cities we need.

PERSONAL PROJECTS IN EVERYDAY PLACES: PERCEIVED SUPPORTIVENESS OF THE ENVIRONMENT AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING