School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemMaking places, making subjects: the representation and experience of Melbourne's laneways( 2014)The gridded structure of Melbourne’s city centre was laid in 1837. Soon after, however, as everyday use generated a need for more complex forms of movement and access not facilitated by the straight lines and large sections of the grid, small laneways began to develop within the lattice of main streets. Now numbering over two hundred within the main central grid, the laneways play a significant role in the everyday life and image of Melbourne. This thesis takes as its focus the laneways of Melbourne’s city centre. The laneways are the frame through which broader questions about experience, particularly experience in and of cities, are explored. In particular, I am interested in how processes of place- making and subject-making are inextricably enmeshed with physical and sensory experience. That is, how it is that laneways both effect and affect experience, while themselves being created by experience. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the places and subjects of the city are never fully determined or fixed, and the order of relations of the city is contingent. Divided into three parts, there are three main aspects to the argument that there is immanent potential for otherwise-ness in the present moment. Part One explores the way in which experience is comprised of excess rather than lack, subtraction, or negativity. Importantly, this excess is the excess of potential in the present moment – the present moment can never be lacking. Potential is always now. In Part Two, I explore two different aspects of laneways figured as an escape from the city. Through this, I argue that it is the promotion of this image of escape that generates the marketability of the laneways, allowing them to participate in and reinforce the city’s current configuration of social and economic relations – the very relations that are supposedly being escaped. Thus this Part argues that potential must be recognised as existing here and not as accessed via escape. Part Three takes the notion of address as a positioning of space and bodies to show that for both space and subjectivity, an address can never fully fix form or capability. This Part demonstrates that while forms of address striate bodies and space, an address is always incomplete and can never fully produce a subject or place. These arguments move by way of an analysis of minute details of experience in the laneways. All chapters are interested in showing how sensory experience works alongside cultural representations and legal regulations to perpetuate certain forms of place- and subject-making. Using empirical experience collected through observation and qualitative interviews, I couple this with analyses of cultural representations to show both the force, but also the contingency, of the current processes of subject and place formation in Melbourne’s CBD. In doing so, I point to the way in which we might imagine and enact other forms of inhabitation