Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
constructingworld-classcitiesandresidential developments (Murray2011).Theenergy
marshaled by these professionals in redesigning the material conditions of work, con-
sumption, leisure, and home bear witness to the fact that space is viewed as an integral
meansbywhichtorepresentrelationsandpracticesnotonlymaterially,butalsosocially,
politically,culturally,andpsychologically.However,Lefebvre'striadicframeworkchal-
lenges us to develop a more heterogeneous or even heterotopian perspective; one that
complicates the relations of power between planners, developers, and citizens, and rep-
resents space as simultaneously controlling and enabling (Foucault 1980).
What people do with and in space is not always what was intended. Pertinent here, is
the third aspect, the notion of representational space, which enables the conceptualiza-
tion of space as something imagined and discursively constructed by everyone through
symbols and language. It is thus not only planners and architects who have the power to
interpret space; we all do, whether this be through decorating our homes, managing our
plotsofland(or“stands”asthesearecalledinSouthAfrica),orselectingourneighbors.
Further, this aspect makes important connections with recent geographical work which
explores the relationships between space, place, and emotion (Sibley 1995; Davidson,
Bondi, and Smith 2005; Smith, Cameron, and Bondi 2009). This perspective highlights
how different environments can evoke complex emotions, and that attending to such
feelings as fear, anxiety, longing, anger, envy, and hatred may be essential if we are to
understandfullyhowspaceisintegraltoprocessesofracializedinclusionandexclusion.
White Spaces
We must be consistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences
from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently
innocent spatiality of social life. (Soja 1989, 6)
Taking a multiple analytic approach, which incorporates embodied and emotional re-
sponses as well as social and political action and imagination, is thus particularly im-
portant in contexts where space is highly racially segregated and emotionally charged,
such as South Africa. Space and place are integral to the production and performance
of white privilege here, and the Lefebvrian framework helps to reveal how this is con-
catenated through embodied activity, the management of space as well as language and
symbols. Part of learning to be white in South Africa is to learn the specific places of
whites, wherethese areandwhatthese looklike, aswell ashowtoperformwithin these
in ways that produce and maintain power, distance, and authority over other people in
other places (Frankenberg 1993; Kothari 2006).
