‘Living Space’ at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Spatial tactics and the politics of smooth space

Abstract

Space has become a key analytic concept for the study of organization. While much emphasis has been placed upon the role of designed spaces within the existing literature, as yet there has been little attention paid to the sociality of space and the spatial practices that people employ to enact workspaces. This inquiry provides an ethnographic study of the work of street artists at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. We investigate the spatial tactics that artists employ to create hybrid workspaces within public spaces. We reveal how these spatial tactics are linked to the politics of space by investigating how the artists negotiate the use of public spaces with other users of the space. The study finds that artists employ a distinctive set of spatial tactics to create ‘smooth spaces’ to appropriate and socialize a hybrid workspace. The conceptual contribution of this article develops a processualist account of how hybrid workspaces are created by artists through embodied spatial tactics and how these tactics exploit ambiguities in the spatial boundaries of the existing urban landscape.

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