‘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.

Politics of place: The meaningfulness of resisting places

“…Second, the study confirms that places are meaningful locations (Cresswell 2004, Shortt 2015, Munro and Jordan 2013; however spatial scholarship should include more than the social and personal experiences permitted by the use of liminal or secluded "dwelling" spaces (Casey 1993). Places are also presented in this paper as important sites for the autonomous construction of efficacious processes of overt resistance.…”

O Organizar da Estética Espacial: Uma História Táctil da Praça dos Leões

“…Baldry (1999 p. 548) observou que as organizações são feitas de fronteiras territoriais que geram "conflitos espaciais". Nesta linha, Fleming e Spice (2004) discutiram sobre uma "indefinição espacial" (spatial blurring) nestes novos processos organizacionais, com o surgimento de "espaços híbridos" (Halford, 2005;Wapshott;Mallett, 2012;Munro;Jordan, 2013), onde as pontes e fronteiras organizacionais são ambíguas e objeto de negociação contínua (Ipiranga;. Terdiman (2001) ao discutir a questão das margens em Certeau, enfatiza a importância das fronteiras para a sensibilidade histórica e interpretativa.…”

“…Nesse percurso se reestabelecem e se ultrapassam limites, conotando uma "indefinição espacial", onde as pontes e fronteiras são ambíguas e objeto de negociação contínua (Fleming;Spice, 2004;Halford, 2005;Wapshott;Mallett, 2012;Munro;Jordan, 2013;Ipiranga; Irmandade, 2015).…”

Integrating Organization Studies and Community Psychology: A Process Model of an Organizing Sense of Place in Working Lives

“…What this research uniquely emphasizes is the symbolic capacity of places, real and imagined, and corresponding built environments, to both influence and be influenced by the actions and ideas of managers and employees operating over space and time, shaping what an organization can or should be in practice. This critical approach is geared to fill in some of the gaps described above; gaps in our understanding of macro–micro influences, situational effects, and interactionist dynamics between organizational actors, ideologies, places, and spaces, as well as bringing some important contextual variation back into focus, in terms of creative, entrepreneurial, bureaucratic, and even utopian community organizational forms (Gill & Larson, ; Hjorth, ; Munro & Jordan, ; Parker, ; Zhang & Spicer, ).…”