Spatial Culture – A Humanities Perspective

Abstract of introductory essay by Henrik Reeh

Secured by alliances between socio-political development and cultural practices, a new field of humanistic studies in spatial culture has developed since the 1990s. To focus on links between urban culture and modern society is, however, an intellectual practice which has a much longer history. Already in the 1980s, the debate on the modern and the postmodern cited Paris and Los Angeles as spatio-cultural illustrations of these major philosophical concepts. Earlier, in the history of critical studies, the work by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, Berlin intellectuals from the interwar period, should be mentioned, too, along with Georges Perec and Michel de Certeau from Paris of the 1970s. They all are eminent representatives of a general intellectual concern for spatial matters – a concern that Michel Foucault considered a constitutive feature of 20th-century thinking and one that continues to occupy intellectual and cultural debates in the third millennium.
A conceptual framework is, nevertheless, necessary, if the humanities are to adequa-tely address city and space – themes that have long been colonised by architecture, planning, and various harder sciences (social or natural). In the 1990s, the Center for Urba-nity and Aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, responded to this epi-stemological challenge by promoting humanistic urban studies and the concept of urbanity. In addition, the notion of aesthetics (taken in the original signification of aisthesis: sensory perception) helped to map the relations between city, human experience, and various forms of art and culture.
Delving into our simultaneously optical and tactical reception of space (a dialectics pointed out by Walter Benjamin), studies in urbanity and aesthetics may highlight mul-tisensory everyday practices that pass unnoticed in the current era of visual domination. A humanistic approach to urban and spatial cultures should also learn from German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel’s hypothesis of a modern need for re-subjectivization. By developing a dialogue with other disciplines, such as the conception of architecture outlined by Alberto Pérez-Gómez, humanistic urban studies may even contribute to reappropriations of objective culture.
During the first decade of the 2000s, graduate students at the Faculty of Humani-ties, University of Copenhagen, have been exploring urbanity and aesthetics from the viewpoint of their own generation. Some twenty graduates contribute to the present volume which has been entitled Spatial Culture in order to indicate a common denominator of their MA theses from the years 2002 – 2006. The essays published here allow us to subdivide the field of spatial culture into five major domains, summarized in the titles of chapters in the book: ”Perception and Strategies: Architecture”, ”Politics and Poetics: Urban Spaces”, ”Movements and Cityscape: Textuality”, ”Crisis and Construction: Memory”, and ”Staging and Interpretation: Places”.