Beitske Boonstra - Böcker

Moving Spaces and Places is about movement as a transformative experience, showing how movement changes affect and percept of spaces and place and solidifies space into meaningful places. The cross-disciplinary contributions in this collection – brought together by aesthetics and artistic practices and embodied and participatory research approaches – illustrate how the physical act of moving and the psychological experience of movement are inextricably interwoven.Traversing the knowledge domains and practices of culture, art, pedagogy, geography, architecture, and city planning, the chapters reveal the diversity of the study of movement in relation to space and place; as a way of setting things in motion, as a psychological act of agency, and as a way to reflect, instantiate, and eventually reconcile—and even heal—relationships between people, spaces, and places. This multi-layered investigation of movement takes temporal, physical, and psychological transformation as its conceptual core, and appeals to a myriad of readers ranging from architectural practitioners and urban planners to activists, artists and geographers.

While 'space' and 'place' appear as key concepts in the study of culture, their complexity and mutability require ever-new frameworks when approaching them critically. Including chapters by authors from different fields, career stages, and geopolitical backgrounds, the contributors in this edited collection scrutinize the changing dynamics of space and place in relation to current political, social, and environmental urgencies across the globe.With chapters investigating both real and imaginary spaces and places, the diversified discussions included in this collection provide a cohesive study for disclosing latent understandings of multiple phenomena characterizing the world in which we live. From the protests in Egyptian and Turkish squares, to the power-related narratives embedded in institutional buildings, from the development of the commercial arena in Victorian and Edwardian London, to the effects of current environmental concerns on the evaluation of urban and rural locations, the volume ultimately serves as a progressive connection of fields, minds, and outlooks through an innovative, pluralistic vision.This interdisciplinary focus not only emphasizes the centrality of spaces and places when disentangling the complexities comprising our past and present, but also suggests a more pluralistic approach for exploring fundamental concepts in future spaces and places studies.