There are a number of ways in which we can identify the 'imaginary' as constituted in the space of the city. The particular example of the landscape in the northern part of Durban provides an opportunity to test these ideas.
Locating the 'Cultural'
Although this semioticology of culture seems to maintain culture at an abstract level, the cultural dimension of social life can never be completely autonomous from the forces of social life and its practices (Sewell 1999). Ray and Sayer (1999: 5) suggest that common to all notions of 'culture' is a concern with the relationships and practices for which meanings, symbols and representations are important.
Dissertation Structure
The intention is to locate substantial processes of 'real' urban transformation in the present. The intention is to identify transformation by locating change in both the 'real' and the 'imaginary' in the urban space through an empirical and textual reading of the landscape.
Towards a Critical Postmodernism
A central feature of the postmodern critique of modernity derives from what Lyotard calls "disbelief in meta-narratives" (Allmendinger 2001: 51). However, as Kumar suggests, much of the appeal of modern metanarratives is closely related to the role of science.
Foucault
Beyond the location of knowledge within specific temporal-spatial contexts, a more powerful critique emerges in his identification of "reciprocal strangleholds of power and. Power relations between people are best understood in terms of the relationship of these actors to a discourse that regulates interaction .
Postmodern Themes: Difference, Identity, and Everyday Life
The humanistic ideal is located in the ideal that the individual makes rational choices as a motivated, conscious and independent agent. Foucault's account of the development of the human sciences shows that 'man' as a scientific subject is an idea particularly situated in the emergence of modernity, rather than being a feature of Western thought in antiquity (Kumar.
Chapter Three
Theorising Contemporaneity
Introduction
This gives shape to the general idea of the fragmentation of social life in postmodernism. Centrally, the dissolution of the subject has its equivalent in the fragmentation of society and the loss of a central core.
Conclusion
Consequently, the cultural forces and effects of globalization are best understood as paradoxical and complex, rather than unidirectional emanations in accordance with the macrologic of the global economic and cultural order.
Chapter Four
Theorising Space and Social Practice
However, anthropological evidence shows that there is no universal concept of space and time; they are. Alternative conceptualizations of space and time are implicit in various forms of social organization, in their particular forms of production and consumption, and in their processes of social reproduction. Drawing on Lefebvre, Harvey suggests that we can identify the history of space as different societies, and even societies at different points in history, that are organized around specific conceptualizations of time and space.
Post-Harvey concepts of space and time are seemingly implicit in codes of social interaction and material practices of social production and reproduction. Real material practices are part of social life and contribute to how the existential categories of space and time are modified.
The Spaces of Social Theory
Lefebvre proposes a conceptual and analytical shift from 'things in space' to the actual 'production of space' (Keith and Pile 1993: 24). Representational spaces (or the spaces of representation) are the space most dominated by other moments of space. The challenge is to bring together the metaphorical and representational dimensions of the space with the material.
Following Smith and Katz's real space is the common sense understanding of space in society. But the 'real' space also stems from an absolute perception of space as the dominant space in Western society.
Contemporay Spatial Pract ice
As argued above, Western society has evolved through successive categories of space as a dimension implicit in the reproduction of society. Abstract space can arise from an absolute perception of space, but it is more specifically a product of capitalism, neo-capitalism, the power of money, the 'commodity world', the logic of capitalism and the global networks of finance, transport and information (Ibid: 53). For Lefebvre, abstract space tends towards homogeneity, the elimination of differences and peculiarities, but at the same time it entails the prospect of the emergence of a new kind of space (Ibid: 52).
In a clear echo of Habermas and the Frankfurt School, he suggests that the increasing production of space in accordance with the logic of instrumental rationalization opens up the 'lived spaces' of everyday life to these colonizing forces. While Lefebvre with the emphasis on the 'production of space' pointed to space as a dynamic feature of social life, the term also suggests in a material sense the increasing commodification of space as part of the capitalist mode of production.
Defining Place as a Site of Social Practise
It shows how these elements coincide and interact in the practical engagement of social life and in the production and reproduction of space and place. In an attempt to transcend this dualism, and as one of the first to attempt a systematic understanding of place and geography as a site of social practice, Thrift (1983) turned to structuralists. The idea of 'practical consciousness' suggests that subjects actively participate in the creation of social order through the routine of daily activity.
At the same time, the construction of place is implicated in the transformation of meaning, self and consciousness in place as a fundamental aspect of social life in a particular place. Subordinating the economic as a dynamic of social practice, Bourdieu integrates social practice and the economy within the cultural through the idea of symbolic capital used by people as markers of social location.
Chapter Five
The first attempt at a systematicspatial theorisation of the city lies with the Chicago School (Soja 2000: 93). This dominant conceptualisation and the representation of the city -through organic models was limited to the interpretation and explanation of the 'perceived' space of the city. On this point Harvey (1997) suggests we need to distinguish the category of the city as a 'thing', from the processes of urbanisation.
They contribute to the physical fragmentation of the city as well as the way it is experienced as a socially, culturally and historically constituted space. Soja suggests that the space of the city as a lived space has fundamentally changed.
Chapter Six Landscapes that Float
Reading the Landscape
Innon-traditionalcapitalist societies the language of the landscape may be more difficult to decode not being dependent on a cosmically ordered reality. The process of interpreting the landscape is based on the idea of the landscape as a discursive and textual terrain. Following poststructuralism we need to accept that there is no one single true reading of the landscape.
This applies equally to 'writing' the landscape, because there are always unintended consequences. Planning documents inform some of the rhetoric of the landscape and locate the sub-region within a particular 'imaginary'.
Background
The discourse has helped shape the relevance of the sub-region as a whole and is reflected in the planning vision for the Northern Municipality as a 'globally competitive' enterprise. While it represents perhaps the most important feature of the new residential landscape, it is also The general phenomenon of walling can be distinguished from the postmodern phenomenon of 'walled communities of the wealthy'.
Cocooning' represents the desire for home comfort away from the pressures of the new age (Ibid). The emergence of the La Lucia Ridge commercial estate as a dominant feature of the emerging landscape to the north suggests that this process took on a different dimension.
Landscapes of Consumption
This effectively involves a deconstruction of the mall as a typology of space, as it begins to show greater affinity with the Parisian arcades that are its precedent. In fact, the shopping center was designed to open and open with components of the future master-planned new town center (Moreland Today, November 2000: 3). This is evident in the formal articulation of spaces that break up the model of the shopping center as a closed and isolated experience.
Somehow, however, it is an urbanity based on the simulation of the urban rather than on reality. The coded simulation of the urban ideal is reflected in the treatment of the external spaces around the main access road and the main entrance to the complex.
Conclusion: A 'Total' Landscape
Chapter Seven
As a result, the new urban geography and landscape seem to indicate an extension of the processes of rationalization and commodification of lived experience, while offering a comprehensive solution to this apparent malaise. In many ways, "idealized" landscapes and representations of conventional and even traditional models such as "village", "rural", "community" and even "urban" only hide this. In many ways, symbolic and textual claims through the spaces themselves and marketing texts tend to present the new urban environment as a brave new model of urban living.
However, the apparent rationalization and commodification of space tends to maintain a mechanistic form of integration that perpetuates modernist codes of spatial practice but takes them to a new level. Differentiation is combined with commodification to create distinctive residential environments that claim some form of organic integration, 'village life' or 'community', but which above all promote the bourgeois ideal of the suburbs and the maintenance of the 'habitus' of discrete class factions can expand.
LEGEND
Giddens, A (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press Gottdiener and Alexander (1986) The City and the Sign: An Introduction to the Urban. Harvey, D (1997) Contested Cities: Social Process and SpatialForm.N Jewson and s MacGregor (eds) Transforming Cities, London: Routledge. 1991) Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London:. 1993) Place and the Politics of Identity, London: Routledge. Unpublished manuscript Pile, S (1996) The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity, London:. 1995) Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, London: Routledge.
Shields, R (1989) 'Social spacialization and the built environment: the West Edmonton Mall', Environment and Planning 0: Society andSpace 7:147-164. Shields, R (1991) Places on the Margin, Londen: Routledge. 1993) 'Heropbou van die beeld van 'n industriële stad', Annals of the Association of American Geographers.