Place as assemblage

Abstract

The concept of ‘place’ is a deeply ambiguous concept that embodies tensions between vastly different approaches in research and practice. Yet it is also a concept with a deep potency in everyday experience and in practices such as ‘placemaking’, ‘place marketing’ and ‘place management’. This chapter presents a conception of place based in assemblage thinking and the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Assemblage is an approach that is relational, multi-scalar and anti-reductionist; involving critiques of power and territory that connect multi-disciplinary approaches. From this view place is immanent rather than transcendent; grounded in the particularities and practices of everyday life. Place as assemblage is a conceptual framework that connects the ‘sense’ of a place to the urban morphology, the social to the material. The transformation we need most is from places that are closed, purified and static towards those that are open, multiple and dynamic; from places where identity formation is fixed to places of becoming.

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