Reclaiming Place

The Association of Internet Researchers conference theme “Re-thinking community, re-thinking place” proved apt in Copenhagen October 15 – 18, with scores of papers and powerful keynotes reflecting in different ways on the complementarity of online and offline community. While once we might have considered space to be losing importance, as digital media freed us from the constraints of geography, the real world turns out to be crucial after all. The social web is reinforcing ideas of the territorial grounding of identity and the permeability of online and offline interactions. The Suburban Crossings project in Fairfield, Western Sydney, asks “How do maps work? What do they mean? What is ‘home’? What makes a place special? ...Welcome to Suburban Crossings, a project about migration, maps, home, territory and settlement”. This project uses social media to reclaim space through digital images with narrative authored by community members uploaded to maps using Flickr. In this way residents can re-animate community in a kind of democratic ‘place-making’ of their own, reinterpreting other people’s maps, “moving across territories, mapping different stories”.

Inspiring conference keynote, Professor of Human Geography Steve Graham, considers “technophiliac dreams” of technological omniscience to be cause for critical reflection on the politics of place. Urban surveillance is practically militarised “anticipatory risk management” in which everything has to be justified in advance of its presence for the purpose of control. I couldn’t help but agree as I submitted several times in two weeks to the dehumanising processes of airport border control in which the unpacking of identity is highly ritualised (such as, in the UK, through checking 53 variables for each person in transit) to locate, track, position, anticipate and know the (potential) enemy. Urban activism offers a challenge to the logic of militarised, corporate and commercial spaces, through participation in urban visualisations such as the Greenwich emotion map, the Murmur project in Kensington, Toronto, and the North 118 West project.

From IT University of Copenhagen

Hearing about the aesthetic difference between a photo and a picture, at a 'Digital Images & Photos Online' session at the Association of Internet Researchers conference...that a picture makes us focus on the affective character of everyday life, while a photo just gives us the object.

With this in mind, I'll spare you all the photos, and give you a picture representing the everyday for me this week. Last night on the way out of the UIT campus, I should say.

Autumn in Copenhagen

As a descendant of Danish immigrants to NZ, it was an odd but somehow happy experience to walk down into the departure lounge at Bangkok Airport about a day ago to board my flight to Copenhagen to find that most of the large gathering of waiting passengers - 90% of them fair-haired - actually looked as though they could be my cousins! All the conversation I could hear was Scandinavian and by something about people's physical appearance, I could have sworn they’d wandered in from a family gathering in my childhood. Head shapes, hair texture, height, build and colouring, all instantly reminded me of my brother, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, my grandparents. High Slavic cheekbones, strong brows. The women are small, and everywhere I see versions of my kindly aunts.

It’s the fulfilment of a long-held wish to see this place my grandparents and their parents left behind for a punishing life as farming pioneers in New Zealand; to see the people and the culture. A few hours walking Kobnhavn streets in the old quarter and the city seems gracious and civilised. The people clearly love fine things – design, art, furniture, fine craftsmanship; and their food and ale. Today they were out in happy droves in the Autumn sun, pushing strollers and big-wheeled prams, or sitting over long lunches of ‘fiske’ and beer.
And then there’s the Association of Internet Researchers conference at the IT University. I’ll keep you posted.