Landscapes of Leisure

Space, Place and Identities

S. Gammon, S. Elkington, S. Gammon, S. Elkington

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349682447, 9781137428523
• eBook ISBN: 9781137428530
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume aims to map out the complex relationships leisure has with notions of place and space in contemporary life. Illustrating the transdisciplinarity of this key feature of leisure studies, it explores how leisure places and spaces affect personal, social and collective identities.

1

Reading Landscapes: Articulating a Non-Essentialist Representation of Space, Place and Identity in Leisure

Sam Elkington and Sean Gammon

The decision to use the word landscape in the title of this volume was not taken lightly. It is, after all, a famously awkward term to pin down, and like place, space and location, has many interpretations and meanings. The primary reason it was chosen was that it illustrated the breadth and variety that particularly space and place play in our experiences of leisure. Of course the problem with taking this viewpoint is that many definitions of landscape imply that landscape can only be encountered from the outside and usually from a distance. But in order to gain some kind of perspective we need to step back and appreciate the complexity of the vista. In the same way that space and place can be understood and analysed from both subjective and objective stances – so too can landscape. Therefore, although the idea of landscape suggests distance, it also encourages reflection and exploration. ‘Landscape’ as Tuan so eloquently puts it, ‘allows and even encourages us to dream. It does function as a point of departure. Yet it can anchor our attention because it has components that we can see and touch’ (1977:101). Furthermore, we can travel through landscapes and encounter the many spaces and places they hold, whilst gazing back to the landscape from which we came. This interaction between leisure spaces and places and its consequent impact on identity acts as the primary focus of this text, but requires further discussion in order to reveal its many implications.

The notion that space and place are significant components of how and where leisure is experienced and enacted has gained much currency in the past two decades. Moreover, since questions of ‘who we are’ are often intimately related to questions of ‘where we are’, that leisure identities are discovered, affirmed and framed within specific places is also now accepted as a fundamental consideration in leisure studies. Social space has become explicitly operationalized at the service of leisure (Lonsway, 2009). Leisure patterns are necessarily spatial; their spatial structures settings for certain activities to take place. Leisure space has historically responded to the dominant demands of specific activities – that is recreation centres, theatres and shopping malls. However, the places in which modern leisure, in all its forms, takes place are no longer perceived as functional spaces that offer just opportunity for some form of engagement – but are now understood as being an integral and highly influential element of all leisure experiences and choices. The correlation between globalization and the lack of a persistent sense of locale, and the continual sense of upheaval and displacement that accompanies much of our contemporary lives need not mean there is an enduring sense of placelessness. Instead, the unmooring of social relations, production and consumption, and even one’s identity from particular places leads to an often uneasy freedom (through leisure) to contest the meanings people ascribe to both their immediate and more distant surroundings. The contemporary leisure landscape is a complex and diverse one that is both natural and built, dark and light, safe and dangerous, contained or without boundary, and profoundly influences the manner in which leisure is performed and experienced.

Space and place have been problematized through increasing attention to context and contingency, as well as through efforts to understand new social landscapes accompanying the ways in which places are tied to global flows of people, meanings and things. In addition, because of these changing relations with the surrounding world, spaces themselves are never isolated and bounded, and as such their places are never static. On the contrary, places are continually produced and reproduced in interaction with their spatial surroundings and thus may acquire new meanings over time. Places, from this perspective, are not essences or essential components of these spatial surroundings but processes, and, so conceived, will not mean the same thing to everybody. Critique becomes necessary when traditional concentric categories of space are employed, self-identically, as if referring to the ‘things themselves’, as fixed social identifications, reflecting modern society’s reliance on equivalence – the basis of exchange value; the one place or the only place for certain activities and experiences – instead of being understood as a meaningful representation of them. The recurrent emphasis on the condition of equivalence further enhances the power of space ‘as category’ to process social objectives, and their spaces, based on abstractions of certain core qualities fixed around nodal points where identity can be constructed and maintained.

To some theorists, specific spaces and places become increasingly irrelevant (Laclau, 2007). Here the argument is that personal relationships (to places as well as to other people) become less stable, and that more and more personal experience and social relations become mediated by information and communication technologies, and thus are disembedded from their local context. This view echoes, to some extent, earlier phenomenological perspectives on place, claiming that modernity and internationalization produce ‘placelessness’, lacking sense of place and inauthentic physical environments (Relph, 1976). To others, globalization brings about localization (Beck, 2000) and the ways in which people relate to places – mobility/cosmopolitanism, immobility/localism – become an important expression of the wider social geographic tapestry (Bauman, 1998). Such general theoretical arguments give rise to important questions about the role and meanings of space and place in the everyday landscape of contemporary life. They also raise questions about how everyday experiences of leisure are related to the conceptualization of space and place. Relph (1976), in his influential work on place and placelessness, identifies three components of place: physical setting, activities and meanings. He argues that of these three components, meanings are probably most difficult to grasp than the others, and yet it is crucial to any comprehensive understanding of place. Architects and planners in not considering the meanings that places have to individuals and groups, run the risk of destroying authentic place, and producing inauthentic ones (Seamon, 2002). From a phenomenological orientation, Relph (1976) values the particularity of specific places, and attempts to identify the ‘basic elements’ or ‘constituents’ of place, and so arriving at the essences of places, as lived. Agnew (2011) offers a different perspective of how the concepts of space and place have been used in the social sciences more broadly, defining three main elements: ‘locale’, the settings in which social relations are constructed (these can be informal or institutional); ‘location’, the geographical area encompassing the settings for social interaction as defined by social and economic processes; and ‘sense of place’, the local ‘structure of feeling’ in relation to specific places. In most research, argues Agnew, one of these elements tends to predominate. Yet in order to capture fully the particularity of place, the complementarity of all three elements should be taken into account. Thus, meaningful places emerge in a social context and through social relations; they are geographically located and at the same time related to their social, economic and cultural surroundings. Massey (2005) claims that much research regarding space and place is influenced by commonsensical notions of space and place that are built upon traditional concentric definitions. Thus, places are depicted as having singular, essential identities, based upon history and tradition, and the definition of a place all too often means drawing a boundary around it, separating the inside from the outside. Against these notions Massey sets out a more progressive conception of space and place, stressing that neither is isolated, but rather should always be regarded in relation to the outside world. What makes a place special, argues Massey, is not necessarily any intrinsic qualities of the space or locale itself – it may also be the particularity of the linkage to the ‘outside’ which is itself part of what constitutes the place. In this way, places are inherently part of spaces and spaces provide the resources and the frames of reference through which places are made. Places are not bounded, claims Sack (1997); rather they are usually and perhaps increasingly in a globalized world, located within a series of extensive socio-cultural, economic and political networks. Rather than being opposite to or disruptive of place, connectivity and mobility are an inherent part of how some places are defined and operate as they are woven together through space by the movements, commitments and practices of people.

By definition everything, leisure included, happens somewhere. Typically the definition adopted has been the view of space as location on a surface where things ‘just happen’, rather than the more holistic view of spaces as a geographical context for the mediation of physical, social and economic processes. The recent revival of interest in place in leisure focuses on the mediating role of place in both social relations and the acquisition of meaning rather than on some transcendental realization of place. This in turn leads us to an understanding of space and place that is never fixed and bounded but is open to interpretation, returning us to a core ontological debate, namely the nature of space/place relations, but now in the context of a non-essentialist perspective. This implies a reading of spatiality in non-linear terms, a readiness to accept geographies and temporalities as they are produced through experiences, practices and relations of different spatial stretch and duration. This is not a matter of assuming an amorphous geography of incessant fluidity and mobility, within which all that is solid has fallen away. It is not about claiming the modern condition represents the dematerialization of everyday life owing to the rise of the knowledge economy and information and communication technologies, or the displacement of a space of places by a space of flows. It is about claiming first, that the materiality of everyday life is constituted through a very large number of spaces – discursive, emotional, affiliational, physical, natural, organizational, technological and institutional. Second, that these spaces are also recursive spaces, that is, the conveyors of organization, stability, continuity and change. Third, the geography of these spaces is not reducible to single, multiple, or distance-based considerations. Fourth, space is also a doing that does not pre-exist its doing, which, in turn, is the articulation of relational practices. From this perspective, the challenge is as much epistemological (how we know) as ontological (what exists). We always look at the world from somewhere, from a place in space and time. Such a realization serves to reiterate that knowledge is always geographically contextual and inherently reflexive; that is, it is process-oriented not just a frame or category. This really knocks the idea of space and place as essentialized entities.

It is the aim of this chapter initially, and this volume more broadly, to dislodge recurrent essentialist forms of spatial thought. Such a re-articulation leads to an examination of the productive uncertainties, complexities and disturbances commensurate with a non-essential perspective. The tone of the offering is to signal the possibility of different insights (not a single superior one) to spatial thinking in leisure studies. The question then becomes: what is the relationship between established theoretical conceptualizations of place and peoples’ everyday experiences of leisure? A growing body of empirical research in leisure studies about the meanings of places employs notions such as place identity, place attachment and sense of place. However, much of this research investigates special or particular places, and will invariably emphasize one or possibly two of these areas and does not say enough about their inherent complexity – the multiple roles, norms, processes, internal spatial divisions and external links to other places. To open up to this kind of complexity means thinking about place and space together. You cannot hold spaces and their places still; since you cannot stop time. What you can do is meet up with them, catch up with where another’s history and development has got to ‘now’ and acknowledge that ‘now’ is constituted by that encounter. ‘Here’, in this sense, is not a place in space; rather, it is an intersection of trajectories, of movements from and to, through and past. Each encounter, in this way, is a ‘here’, and every ‘here’ a ‘here-and-now’. It is not space or time that takes the life out of place, but representation. The trouble is the traditional equation of representation with spatialization has taken the life out of place. The distinctiveness of societies, communities and cultures is based upon a seemingly unproblematic division of space, and the fact that they ‘naturally’ occupy discontinuous space. It is in this way that space functions as a central organizing category in the social sciences at the same time that it disappears from analytical purview. Representations of space are remarkably dependent on images of break, rupture and disjunction. The industrial production of space, entertainment and leisure has led, paradoxically, to the advent of new forms of imagining and animating notions of place, culture and community. It has also enabled the creation of new forms of solidarity and identity that do not rest on an appropriation of space where contiguity and face-to-face contact are paramount. In the compressed yet fractured space of postmodernity, space has not become irrelevant: it has been re-territorialized in a way that does not conform to traditional space norms. Places, from this perspective, are where social norms map out possibilities for action set against a spatial landscape. Physically, then, place is a space which is invested with understandings of behavioural appropriateness, cultural expectations and so on. We wouldn’t describe some behaviour as being ‘out-of-space’, but would certainly describe them as ‘out-of-place’. Place not space frames appropriate behaviour.

All spaces and places stand against a background. At the end of the hike the cabin appears within the forest. The sports stadium rises from the horizon as we drive along the highway. If a certain myopia accompanies this position, there is irony too, for places are arguably most highly charged and richly evocative in leisure. Because of their inseparable connection to specific localities, places may be used to summon an enormous range of mental and emotional associations – associations of time and space, of history and events, of people and social action, of oneself and stages of one’s life. Indirectly perhaps, but no less significantly, participants in these encounters put landscapes to work. Landscapes are available in symbolic as well as physical terms and so can be detached from their fixed spatial moorings and transformed into instruments of thought and vehicles of purposive behaviour. Thus transformed, landscapes and the places that fill them become tools for the imagination – expressive means for accomplishing human activities, and also, of course, eminently portable possessions to which individuals can maintain deep and abiding attachments regardless of where they are. We learn to appropriate our landscapes, to think and act within them, as well as about and upon them, and to weave them, through language and individual and collective action into the foundations of social life. People do read landscapes and landscape representations. Landscape images form part of the media flow today. From advertisements selling holiday destinations to rock music videos, all make efficient use of landscapes in conveying ideas and feelings, making use of our everyday experiences, understandings and subconscious readings of landscape sceneries. When reading images of real-world landscapes, we also make use of the fact that landscape is both context and process – the simultaneous manifestation of the past, as well as the reflection of ongoing processes (cultural, political etc.). In this way, landscapes and landscape elements may remain unfamiliar and unintelligible to some because the social and cultural context is unfamiliar, or because the context of representation is unknown. The concepts of space and place remain crucial parts of the reading of landscape – providing we have an understanding of the different ways and means they are manifest. We must be aware of the different contexts of leisure in order to understand the function of its many spatial forms, but it is the basic question of space/place relations that forms the starting point from which the inquiry is put into context. On the topics of landscape, space and place, the artist and architect Barrie Greenbie writes:

What we call the landscape is generally considered to be something “out there”. But, while some aspects of the landscape are clearly external to both our bodies and our minds, what actually each of us experience is selected, shaped and coloured by what we know.

There are many different kinds of places associated with modern leisure and many different dimensions along which these places might be examined. A blunt contrast between space and place or place and non-place is not helpful. These leisurescapes are increasingly becoming significant sites for the construction of individual and shared frameworks in which people orientate themselves and act in wider society, emphasizing the significance of collective practices and language through which specific places and place identities are formed, reproduced and modified. Language becomes the force that binds people to places in the modern age – it is through language that everyday experiences of self-in-place form and re-form; moreover, it is through language that places themselves are imaginatively constructed in ways that carry implications for who we are (and who we want to be). Relatedly, the impact of globalization on contemporary societies in the production and consumption of leisure place has profound implications for understanding modern identity and the social self. Identity is widely understood as lived and imagined in ways that break down its contiguousness with a geographically bounded locality. Much has been written about the modern globalized public sphere as a new space for socio-cultural, economic, technological and political exchange – the paradigmatic representation of which resembles that of an increasingly nomadic existence. The modern condition has made possible rapidly accelerating rates of exchange, movement and communication across spaces, creating a tension within local places between searching out ever wider spheres of exchange and movement, while simultaneously provoking an inward and deliberate search for authenticity, through a conscious effort to evoke a sense of place and cultivate meaningful connections. The question is how to hold on to that notion of spatial difference, of uniqueness, even of rootedness if that is what people want without being reactionary and retreating into, and so perpetuating, essentialized conceptions of space, place and identity.

Set against a non-essentialist backdrop, discussions in this collection offer a timely transdisciplinary reading of the changeable landscapes of leisure, and in doing so examine critically the praxi of place-making and identity construction in leisure through a spatial language to unveil the growth and evolution of altogether new notions of space in leisure. What is depicted hereafter is less a narrative of decline or loss of place-based meaning as it is often interpreted, but of transformation in how such meaning is created, constituted, and mediated in and through the multivalent spaces of modern leisure. The following chapters offer invaluable insights from a wide range of contexts and theoretical positions of what part leisure places and spaces have upon those who encounter them. They illustrate dramatically the many and varied landscapes that leisure produces, and in doing so, reveal the extraordinary influences they have upon us.

References

Agnew, J. (2011) ‘Space and Place’. In Agnew, J. and Livingstone, D. (eds) Handbook of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Reading Landscapes: Articulating a Non-Essentialist Representation of Space, Place and Identity in Leisure
• 2  Unravelling Space and Landscape in Leisures Identities
• 3  Disturbance and Complexity in Urban Places: The Everyday Aesthetics of Leisure
• 4  The Social Dynamics of Space Constructions and Leisure Lifestyles
• 5  Zombie Places? Pop Up Leisure and Re-Animated Urban Landscapes
• 6  Last Resting Places? Recreational Spaces or Thanatourism Attractions the Future of Historic Cemeteries and Churchyards in Europe
• 7  Animating Public Space
• 8  Sport Tourism Finding Its Place?
• 9  Youth Leisure, Places, Spaces and Identity
• 10  Phenomenology and Extreme Sports in Natural Landscapes
• 11  Seasideness: Sense of Place at a Seaside Resort
• 12  Savouring Leisure Spaces
• 13  Weaving Place Meanings into Outdoor Recreation Sustainability: The Case of the Niagara Glen
• 14  Distant at Your Leisure: Consuming Distance as a Leisure Experience
• 15  The Lure of the Countryside: The Spiritual Dimension of Rural Spaces of Leisure
• 16  Performing Leisure, Making Place: Wilderness Identity and Representation in Online Trip Reports
• Index