Bennett, L. and Crawley Jackson, A. (2017) Making common ground with strangers at Furnace Park. Social and Cultural Geography, 18 (1). pp. 92-108. ISSN 1470-1197
Abstract
In this article, we seek to widen the debate about the sites and processes of encounter with strangers by examining the ways in which ‘strangeness’ necessarily fades within the familiarisation processes at play in any sustained and situated place-making. Our analysis draws upon our experiences of encountering strangers – and of our familiarisation with them – in the initial, year-long, site acquisition and preparation phase of a project to create Furnace Park, an experimental urban space in a run-down backwater of central Sheffield. We show the tensions between a project commitment to the formation of a loose, open place and the pressures (which arose from our encounters with the urban development system) to render both the project and the site certain, bounded and less-than-strange. Furthermore, at Furnace Park the site itself presented to us as a non-human stranger, which we were urged to render familiar but which kept eluding that capture. We therefore show how the geographies of strange encounters could productively be widened to embrace both recent scholarship on the material-affective strangeness of ground itself, and a greater attentiveness to the familiarisation effects born of the intersection of diverse communities of practices within place-making projects.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Social and Cultural Geography. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of Languages and Cultures (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 22 Sep 2016 08:49 |
Last Modified: | 14 Nov 2017 09:52 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1231835 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/14649365.2016.1231835 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:105054 |