Abstract
Young people's interaction with place is not only a cognitive process of identification but also an affective relation. There has been plenty of research on young people and/in public space but few of those studies have taken such an affective layer of analysis into account. In this paper we aim to shed some light on young people's affective geographies through the concept of ‘thick places’ as it was proposed by Edward Casey (2001), building upon ethnographic research undertaken between 2013 and 2016 in Brussels. We argue that such a concept is only useful if we consider thickness not only as a reference to ‘warm’, ‘authentic’ or ‘intimate’ places but also as a term that takes the ‘normative architecture’ of place into account. We embed this claim in a discussion of affects, atmospheres and Peter Sloterdijk's notion of nomotop.
Highlights
In the last few decades, quite some literature has focused on young people’s feelings of belonging, attachment to place and tactics of place-making in urban public spaces (e.g. Holloway & Valentine, 2004; Malone, 1999; Pickering et al, 2012; Vanderbeck & Johnson, 2000)
In this paper we aim to shed some light on young people’s affective geographies through the concept of ‘thick places’ as it was proposed by Edward Casey (2001), building upon research undertaken between 2013 and 2016 in Brussels
We build on the notion of ‘thick places’ as coined by Edward Casey (2001), which we criticise in two regards
Summary
In the last few decades, quite some literature has focused on young people’s feelings of belonging, attachment to place and tactics of place-making in urban public spaces (e.g. Holloway & Valentine, 2004; Malone, 1999; Pickering et al, 2012; Vanderbeck & Johnson, 2000). Joining theoretical elaboration with empirical data, we explore the way young people engage with the different degrees of spatial thickness of the atmospheres in which they live and with what outcomes. This exploration allows us to show the advantage of adding a complex affective and atmospheric framework to the study of youth geographies, whilst at the same time making explicit the advantage that studies on affect and atmosphere may obtain by looking more intensely at youth geographies, as well as the necessity for them to test their philosophical categories empirically, through the thick and thin of space
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