Writing Place

Every once in a while on the radio station I listen to the question is raised as to where the borders of the North Shore begin and end. Some people allow for a wide sweep across the city from Hornsby to the Northern Beaches. Others vehemently disagree, drawing the boundaries of the North Shore around a few prestigious leafy suburbs. The question arises, why would a radio station dedicate its airtime to discussing such a (surely!?) petty topic? The simple fact that the issue is open to contestation at all indicates that it matters where borders lie – and hence what place in between can be called the North Shore and who can therefore claim to be a part of that place. There is power to be gained in claiming ownership of a place – even if it is only the imagined prestige bestowed by a name.

As I skimmed through the reading list for this week, one of the titles, so seemingly self-assured in its wording, jumped out at me – The Power of Place. Up until that point I don’t think I’d considered the notion that place may be powerful in some way. Yet as I did the readings it seemed to me that they all, in various ways, presented a relationship between place and power. The power that flows from being able to claim ownership of a place was just one of the ways in which this week’s readings presented the relationship between power and place. Some stated that place is the physical expression of power. Others saw place as powerful because it can act as a focal point for minority groups to resist the status quo.

Sivaramakrishnan and Cederlöf in Ecological Nationalisms look at the varying ways in which the nation-state and indigenous groups within the nation have sought to claim ownership of certain places and conclude that far more is at stake than ‘imagined prestige’. The authors show the ways in which nature is appealed to in order to legitimise claims to place. Behind the state’s attempt to appropriate nature for the good of the nation and the indigenous assertion of physical/historical attachment to nature are competing claims for power over territory, resources etc.

Dolores Hayden in The Power of Place suggests that we can see the results of such power struggles in the physical forms of places themselves. Hayden begins by quoting James Baldwin’s A Talk for Teachers. Having visited New York recently I found myself feeling ashamed that I hadn’t seen James Baldwin’s ‘dark and dirty’ Park Avenue in the Bronx. The Park Avenue of my very short visit was Tiffany’s and doormen and rich and white. Such clear physical differences between wealth and poverty brought home to me the concept, expressed so well in Space & Place, that, ‘the flows of power and the negotiations of social relations are rendered in the concrete form of architecture’. And, as Hayden explains, we then further cement these relations, these flows of power, through a tendency to preserve ‘major architectural monuments’ over neighbourhoods perceived as having little importance to public history. Hayden’s description of the obliteration of the collective memories of communities in the name of ‘urban renewal’ finds a lyrical counterpart in Salman Rushdie’s description of the modern city as a place in which ‘lives that have no business mingling with one another sit side by side upon the omnibus…And as long as that’s all…it’s not so bad. But if they meet! It’s uranium and plutonium…boom.’ In this case the ‘boom’ that can be heard is the bulldozing of places that are viewed by the ‘rich and white’ as somehow impinging on their space.

Thinking of our own city of Sydney, I couldn’t help but hear the ‘boom’ Rushdie referred to in the oft repeated calls to bulldoze Redfern. Since its beginnings in the early 1970s it has forced ‘lives that have no business mingling with one another’ to do far more than simply sit side by side. As Kay J. Anderson notes in Constructing Geographies: “race”, place and the making of Aboriginal Redfern, there was huge political significance in situating a ‘Black settlement’ in full view of passing White passengers to Sydney’s Central Station. In this way, ‘Aboriginal Redfern’ does demonstrate the ‘power of place’ – in the sense that a strategically located place can be used by minority groups to draw attention to gross injustices. While Anderson does see the potential of ‘place-based agitation’, she is also aware of the problems that arise when a group attempts to use a place to advance its own affairs. ‘Aboriginal Redfern’, as an idea, quickly became the centre of two opposing narratives (informed by impulses present in the Australian culture and politics of the 1970s) – it was either a ‘Black commune’ or a ‘Black ghetto’. Indeed, in order to lay claim to this place Aboriginals had to engage in ‘strategic essentialism’ – that is, subscribe to certain simplified ideas of Aboriginality in order to combat other negative (and equally simplified) constructs of Aboriginality. Ultimately, ‘Aboriginal Redfern’ is shown to be the product of uneven and conflicting power relations that find expression in the ‘place/race’ images described above.

Power, sitting alongside identity and memory, is another addition to the list of frustratingly-difficult- to- pin-down concepts that we have considered in relation to place throughout this course. Yet, I do think that grappling with ideas of how power and place intersect will enrich our understanding of place. A key question raised by this course is whether place is a useful tool of historical analysis. In answering this I would turn to Anderson, who states that, ‘localities open windows onto the complex interactions that connect spheres of politics, culture and economy’. Power can be a slippery term to pin down, but through ‘place-specific’ studies we can begin to trace the shape of its many manifestations.

Anderson, Kay, ‘Reflections on Redfern’ in Elaine Stratford, ed., Australian Cultural Geographies (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Carter, E., Donald, J., Squires, J., eds, ‘Introduction’ in Space & Place: Theories of Identity and Location (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993).

Hayden, Dolores, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).

Rushdie, Salman, The Satanic Verses: a novel (New York : Henry Holt, 1997).

Sivaramakrishnan K., Cederlöf G., eds, Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).