mapping localness

I am interested in the ideas about places written by a contemporary British social scientist and geographer Doreen Massey.  At the beginning of my research, I problematize local informal places in the city, questioning how can they progress to be developed and still carry on the ‘local’ qualities that they possess.  Then questions regarding what are their qualities, identities, and how can people experience these layers started to unravel.  I have chosen street market in the city as a subject to be researched because it represents an informal social space that exists within the context of a modern and developing urban setting.  My case studies are based on the street markets in Kuala Lumpur.  The streetmarkets in KL posits to be at the right stage for intervention and proposal of new ideas as they are not yet fully tranformed in any drastic way.

I had positioned my research to experiment ways that ‘local’ places as such can be taken forward together with the development of the city, without blindly preserving ‘imposed traditions’, or ‘pastiche of selected cultural representations’.  KL is a dynamic city and it’s multiculturalness have gone beyond just of three dominant races-cultures.  Just like any other capital cities or metropolis, migrations, tourisms, and trades have added new layers to this city and its places.  This is globalization.

Massey’s writings resonate with my current position.  A position that starts with understanding that places change.  Places go through processes, just like people accummulate experiences, stories and characters in their lives.  Places have layers added to them and these layers have connection with places beyond.  And it is because of these that we can start to see places as being unique - because of these layers that it has accummulate and because of the connections that it has with other places, other people, other cultures.

Massey (1993) writes, “Places are still unique assemblages of global and local processes, even under modern, globalizing conditions…. Because what gives a place its specificity is not its long internalized history, but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of relations articulated together at a particular locus.”  Massey related places as points with trajectories.  By imagining a place as having trajectories, we can see that places do relate with other places, and can be seen as open rather than enclosed and essential.

Designers and planners often discuss the search for the ‘real’ meaning of place.  Massey argues how “the desire for ‘fixity’ and for security of identity in the middle of the movement and change” can be problematic because it would require places to have ‘boundaries’, and places to be distinguished between the inside and outside.  Places would revert back to having single and essential identities, where its sense of place is constructed of its introverted history while dimissing its relation with its crossing trajectories.  This idea brings me to the approach of mapping by Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha in their study of the Mississippi River and Bangalore’s Terrain.  Mathur and da Cunha approached the sites to be open rather than restricted within its ‘boundaries’.  In this way, the events and occurrences of the sites are allowed to be suspended outwards, creating connections and links to other places, rather that ‘contained’.

Massey proposes a ‘progressive sense of place’ to fit the current global-local times, or a ‘global sense of place’ to bring into play its history and cultural influences.  Thinking about places as being progressive gives us an understanding that changes in a place is inevitable.  This is a summary of the concept of ‘progressive sense of place’ that I had extracted from her paper:

1. Place is absolutely not static.  Place is processes, that ties together various social interactions.  It is not motionless, and not frozen in time.

2. Places do not have boundaries which frame simple enclosures.  (On my other reading, Massey explains her views of how boundaries are socially constructed.  Although places have boundaries around them to demarcate a country, state, administrative power, boundaries do not reflect places. (Ch. 2: Conceptualization of Place, in A Place in the World, 1996)

3. Places do not have single, unique identity. (Places have multiple layers)

4. The specificity of place is continually reproduced. (Because of the new layers and how the new layers change the older layers and what layers are then created)

5. Sources of uniqueness and specificity:

• Wide social relations
• Globalization which produces uneven development
• Distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations, producing effects that would not have happened otherwise.
• The accummulated history -> products of layer upon layer of different sets of linkages, both local and wider world.

From this readings, I can summarize that our notions of places need to be expanded.  And once we regard place as being permeable to changes as part of its growth, we look forward to how to work with these changes rather than rejecting it.  The street markets in Kuala Lumpur and the city of Melbourne are both susceptible to these changes and growth.  It is just an inevitable process of growing the world.  Eventually for the street markets in the future, it may need to be approached and designed differently because of hygienic, climatic, transportation and other concerns.  But even with these changes, how do we ensure the qualities that it has is brought forward too, to progress with these other changes? This is at the moment the most challenging part of my research, which is extracting those ‘qualities’ and foreseeing the possible changes that a humble night market would have to negotiate in the future.

One of my other projects in curating different experiences of a city is through putting together a guidebook based on the experience and needs of a Malaysian Muslims in Melbourne.  With relevance to the critique on guidebooks currently in the market and how majority of the guidebooks are created for a vast majority of the Western visitors and non-Muslim visitors, this guidebook will represent a window to the other layers of Melbourne.  The choice of doing the guidebook based on Malaysian Muslims in Melbourne is a personal choice because it is a very familiar territory to myself as a Malaysian and a Muslim currently residing temporarily in Melbourne.  However, the bigger representation of the guidebook to the tourism industry and the city itself, is that many more layers of the cities can be opened up to be shared and experienced by locals, migrants and tourists – making the city more plural than before.  Other potential guidebooks can simply be based on a Malaysian Chinese take of Melbourne, or an Indonesian’s experience of Melbourne, or even a British way of getting around Melbourne, and so forth.  Through exposing layers of how other groups of people or other individuals operate the city, the richness and diversity of the city becomes more visible, and we could possibly read how different places and different cultures actually have some similar links and connections through their trajectories – which essentially becomes the uniqueness of that place.

I drafted the table of contents for my guidebook.  At the moment, I have chosen these chapters to be included in the guidebook: (1) Muslim Prayer Facilities, (2) Halal Eateries, (3) Malaysian Nasi Lemak, (4) Malaysian Teh Tarik, (5) Grocery Shopping, (6) Things to do on Weekends, (7) Headscarves & Traditional Wear, (8) Festivals & Events.

I had started with the first part, which is to look for prayer facilities available in and around Melbourne.  From the Islamic Council of Victoria website, I found a long list of Muslim prayer facilities around Melbourne.  From the long list, apparently I had only known maybe 20% of the places.  There are suburbs which I have never heard of or been to, that had prayer facilities, which reflect the presence of a Muslim community there.  This initial first step of gathering the list of prayer facilities has yet added another layer to my mental map of Melbourne.  There are indeed all these other new places that I could visit.  And I could imagine if these list of prayer facilities were to be present in a guidebook, how good it would be to guide visitors and even locals looking for a prayer room during their visits or drive.

This is the start, and more to come.

Travel guidebooks in the market found at shelves of bookshops today are predominantly produced by people from UK, US, Australia, NZ or Europe.  Likewise, they provide information deemed necessary by those types of travellers or tourists.  With a very small collection guidebooks that I have, ranging from Lonely Planet, Frommer’s, Explore Australia, maps and cards, and based on the guide books sold at the book shops, I can generally point out that most of these documents or travelling products are by the west and seem to be made for westerners.  Firstly, this reveals a gap, which is rather an opportunity, for more niche travel products to be created, such as for traveling for Muslims, or traveling for Malaysians, Chinese, etc. where travel guides can be more tuned to the cultural needs of its markets.  In a critique to this, it means that the how, what and where of travel can be opened up to a lot more diversity, where people could experience how other people would experience that journey. A single place can be experienced different ways and through this, we may understand and read that place through another lense, and additionally, we may also understand and read another culture through another lense.  Traveling can be more open.

My second critique is on how guidebooks are word-dominated, rather than visual.  I have no objection that we do need all the information we can get from one guidebook (maps, price, time, hints, etc.).  Now that they are already there, maybe now, what we need is to rip a page from each of those guidebooks, and try to open up more layers of those places.  Yesterday I was attracted to a pictoral travel book titled “Andiamo!: Capturing My Italy” by Kelly Barber.  The whole book was filled with photos of places and with only minimal writing by the author.  The book would have been better if it had a little map of where those places are.  But what is interesting about this book is that, it allows potential visitors to see the place before they go.  Giving out visuals in print does not give away what the place look like, as people would still be able to find them on the internet or from others’ travel photos.  But looking at these photos, makes me wonder what the place feels like.  And because there are empty spaces around the photos, I would imagine that if I were to follow those visual journeys, when I am there, I am allowed to write my own experience in that book… like the date and time, who I was with, what the weather was like, what we talked or laughed about, and so on.  And from doing so, I would have rewritten Kelly Barber’s travel, and could have added my own pages of photo in them.  In a way, the travel book allows the traveler to recreate the journey and document them.  At the same time, the travel book allows the place to be more open to personal experience and intepretation.

Localness is often treated as a singular entity, having authenticity, and treating itself with exclusiveness from the others.  But localness is rarely singular; and with migration and mobility happening ever since human existed on earth, places too change.  So if place changes, and if place is a process, wouldn’t that make what is local also change with that process?  How do we know which layer to extract as the local quality of that place with the so many layers already present there?  Whose definition of localness do we pull out to surface?

Through the Nasi Lemak cards project, I am proposing that different layers of localness can be extracted from any city, which essentially suspend the boundary of localness of a city.  Nasi Lemak is a Malaysian meal from multi-cultural Malaysia, while Melbourne is a multi-cultural city located on a different continent.  But what these two have in common is the cultural assimilation that Malaysia has towards Melbourne, as the by-product of migration and globalization.  Nasi Lemak is undoubtedly one of the very local dish to any Malaysian’s heart.  For visitors, students, workers and migrants from Malaysia, Nasi Lemak brings a feel of home.  While for the local Melbournians and people of other cultures, Nasi Lemak may open up another layer of Melbourne.

Monocle has an article called Good Hood, in which Tyler Brûlé & Thomas Calvocoressi attempt to build the perfect neighborhood by aggregating the very best shops from around the world into a few blocks of this, their new favorite living quarters. But the key to the success of this cosmopolitan version of your favorite city corner is not the quality of the stores, as they position the article, but the variety: fashion, deli, bookshop, café, restaurants, banks, bycycle shops, consulting shops, studios, galleries, florists, technology, shoes, wine, laundry. They all work in tandem to cater to every single need you may have.

Just the same, the traveler doesn’t need a guide to the 100 best restaurants in a city but a list of the few areas that provide a good balance of restaurants with shops, galleries and entertainment venues to enable a memorable experience. This could be finding the perfect patio after enjoying a good meal, buying an almost out-of-print book at a specialized stored, sipping an espresso right in front of a lively street full of beautiful people hunting for fashion bargains. It doesn’t take much. It takes variety.

Source: http://global-culture.org/memorable-experiences/

A memorable experience become memorable because it captures your senses.  When we are more tuned in to ‘being where we are’, we may begin to absorb the little things around us as specific places.  Those combinations of ordinary occurences - the images, smells, sounds, textures - tend to stay in our memory longer, perhaps, compared to the journey as a whole.

i have been collecting melbourne tram tickets for just over one year now. i realized that as much as they validate my being here for the past one year, they also symbolize something that is actually very local to melbourne, which is the tram. it’s a public transportation, and used by locals and tourists daily to get to the city from the suburbs. it is modern, with ticket machines, digital tram arrival schedule, and tram tracker from the web. although there is still the refurbished older trams (more traditional looking) such as the city circle and the tram that goes through Chapel St., the more modern tram that i usually commute with is still something very local to me; in the sense that it is what the locals themselves commute with, and that it is what it is - a public transportation of the city. and this reinstate my understanding and current position that, localness does not have to come in a traditional suit.

so this had lead to me to an initiation of the idea for a project - on finding those other places that are also another form of local melbourne. four places that i have pulled out from my photo collections of melbourne so far consist of an asian grocery shop, a plate of nasi lemak, an art market, and a sunday market. in this very raw idea, they are supposed to be a collection of little cards, with pictures and map.  and the places are just a collection of places that i have been to.  although they are a personal experience of mine, they are a part of melbourne.

my proposition in this project is that: if we have a box of these cards of other local places, people would have the opportunity to experience the city differently, whether they are tourists or locals. they may go to places or sides of the city that they have never been to.  and from that, they could get a different experience of their city.  they could begin to read the city differently and see the many layers and sides of the city. and thus, a local experience does not necessarily have to take shape of the past. local can be about the present and the future.

The Remaking of Shanghai Local Places by Pan Lu

Through examples  of places in Shanghai, the article discussed how localness can still exist despite the changes.  As Shanghai continues to develop, Lu observes that there are local places that have been overlooked, which essentially contribute to Shanghai’s urbanity.  Nostalgic memories of what the city was many years ago may not be present anymore in the temporal sense, but the experience of Shanghai as divided and multilayered as it was has always been valid, albeit in a different sense: what overlaps and intermingles now are the imaginary layers of space that overlap and intermingle in the form of a palimpsest that blurs the identities of space in spaces of identity.

Lu brought to the attention that these local spaces have a role in the making of an emerging identity of Chinese urban consciousness and a local culture of consumption and, from another perspective, how local people have influenced the making of these spaces.

It is through the making and remaking of local cultural spaces that Shanghai has involved itself deeply in the re-visioning of local value systems vis-à-vis those of the global. Moreover, the complexity of the production of Shanghai’s cultural spaces does not only lie in whether those spaces exist in the previously unequivocal centre of Chinese urban culture but also in the ways local spaces are to be re-cognized and reintegrated into the present.

Examples referred:

1. Duolun Road

Historically the road was an intellectual gathering space during the Republican period (1912-1949) - of masters of literature, politicians, entrepreneurs.  In 1998, it was renovated into a pedestrian street market, 550-meter long, and displayed as a place of the golden times of Shanghai, namely of the 1920s and 1930s.  Duolun Road became ‘Duolun Road Cultural Celebrities Street’, with new museums, art galleries and antique shops.  But being too much concerned with exhibiting every inch of cultural relics possible, Duolun Road loses in some way its charm by musealizing itself instead of enlivening its history as a part of its ongoing life. The gentrification and investments done onto Duolun Road has reduced it to an unsuccessful simulacrum of an old Shanghai that is simply no longer to be found.

2. Shaoxin Road

(to be continued soon)