Atmospheres, Sound and Memory

Question 1

How did Guy Debord distinguish the city?

Answer 1

“The city is a locus of history because it embodies at once a concentration of social power … and the consciousness of the past”

Debord 1967

Question 2

When did atmospheres become prominent in urban theory?

Answer 2

After the “atmospheric turn” - a move towards affect and non-representation theory

Thrift 2007

Question 3

What are two interesting considerations re atmospheres?

Answer 3

1. When is there an atmosphere (boring places? Always exciting?)
2. When do urban atmospheres become rural ones?

Question 4

What is Heidegger’s main point in “Being and time” (1927)?

Answer 4

• Humans are in the world
• (unlike animals) we have a CONCEPTION of the world
• People die, animals perish
  .

Question 5

What is a critique of Heidegger (1927)?

Answer 5

We might conceptualise the world, but other actants (and structures) shape it (Latour 2006)

Question 6

Is post-phenomenology really new?

Answer 6

Not really - it exaggerates phenomenology and focusses too much on the self

Question 7

What does post-phenomenology all about?

Answer 7

Decentring humans from interpretations of the world

(Ash 2020)

Question 8

What was the trouble with New Cultural Geography?

Answer 8

Too focussed on the visual and social constructivism

How do those without a sense understand the landscape and environment? Different forms of atmospheres?

Question 9

Why are discussions of being in the “landscape” problematic in phenomenology/

Answer 9

“landscape implies separation” (Williams 1973)’

• Much of phenomenology against NCG, so landscape is being critiqued
• Yet really ENVIRONMENT WOULD BE BETTER!

Question 10

What is an atmosphere?

Answer 10

The mood of a place

• Individual and collective
  (Gandy 2017 - also Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1945)

Question 11

What is interesting about Marx’ discussion of a “Revolutionary atmosphere”?

Answer 11

Marx 1852 (in Berman 1982)

You wouldn’t have a ‘revolutionary landscape’!

Question 12

Who has criticised the focus on semiotics and ideology in NCG by focussing on atmospheres?

Answer 12

Stewart 2007

“ordinary affects are more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meaning”

Question 13

What does Stewart (2007) not consider in her criticism of NCG?

Answer 13

Surely affective atmospheres are themselves influenced by expectations and symbolism

Are we predisposed to enjoy wilderness because of Romanticism??

Question 14

What might be a good way of politicising affect?

Answer 14

Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967)

Could extend “images” to include other sensory experiences mediating and changing the experience of life in the city

Question 15

How could Jenny Robinson’s (2002, 2022) intervention disrupt the conceptualisation of atmospheres?

Answer 15

• If atmospheres are used to consider the intrinsic qualities of cities (Scott & Storper 2011)
• Then what about atmospheres in the South
• Does it romanticise life which is dependent more on material relations?
• Are atmospheres really the solution to the “urban question” (cf. Hasse 2012)

Question 16

What has Hasse 2012 suggested about atmospheres?

Answer 16

“It is through atmospheres that the complexity and dynamics of urban space become perceptible”

Hasse 2012 - a possible answer to the Urban Question??

Question 17

What two ontological questions does affect theory and atmospheres help solve?

Answer 17

1. What is a landscape (and what distinguishes it from an environment?)
2. Where does a city end? (cf. Gandy 2014)

Question 18

What is a good way of considering structures, semiotics and ideologies influencing affect (contra Stewart 2007)?

Answer 18

Williams’ “Structures of feeling” 1973

Question 19

What do phenomenologists often refer to?

Answer 19

A “life-world”

Question 20

Who has suggested that affect is transmitted?

Answer 20

Brennan 2004

There is a “transmission of affect”

Question 21

Who devised the “Sound Score”, linking musicology to sound?

Answer 21

Merijn Royaards ‘Score of a sound’ (2012)

Question 22

What is important to remember about atmospheres?

Answer 22

DEFINE and justify focus on phenomenology/ post-p/ politics of atmospheres…

Question 23

On my own experiences, what is the importance of atmospheres?

Answer 23

Transect out of the city
- realise how large the city really is
- Changes to atmospheres
- Acclimatisation towards atmospheres.

.

Question 24

Why is sound significant to urban studies?

Answer 24

It decentres the visual (too much focus on this in geography and cognate disciplines)

Incorporates the physics of sound with the intricacies of the human subject

(e.g., Ihde 2007)

Question 25

Why is sound more peculiar than vision in space?

Answer 25

It is not as fixed as vision and light

Jean-Luc Nancy 2007

Question 26

Is light really always fixed in space?

Answer 26

• Shadows?
• What about diffraction of light?

Question 27

Where did Murray Schafer study soundscapes?

Answer 27

In British Columbia, where it was thought that there were ‘authentic’, natural sounds.

Question 28

Who has considered the symbolic qualities of sound according to socially constructed ideals?

Answer 28

Revill 2014 (to some extent)

John Urry (1995) “aural regulation” and “quiet enjoyment” in the Lake District
- Yet to be applied to the urban context

Question 29

What is the essence of Lefebvre’s ‘Rhythmanalysis’?

Answer 29

That the city is constructed out of rhythms (involving many senses)

Question 30

Why is “ecologies” used in “acoustic ecologies”?

Answer 30

Because of the webs of relations involved between different actants (cf. Latour 2006)

Question 31

What is important to consider with memory?

Answer 31

Other-than-human memories.

Question 32

Who studied the “one square inch of silence”?

Where did the study take place

What is the issue with it?

Answer 32

“One square inch of silence” by Gordon Hempton 2009

In Hoh Rainforest, Olympic National Park

Assumed that there was a pure, authentic form of silence worth preserving

Question 33

What is a mnemonic?

Answer 33

A device that helps us to remember

Question 34

How does Elizabeth Wilson’s “Invisible flaneur” deconstruct atmospheres and phenomemology?

Answer 34

STRUCTURED BY GENDERED EXPERIENCES OF URBAN SPACE (Wilson 1992)

(The most glaringly obvious form of experiences being shaped by structures! Experience is situational)

Question 35

What does Wall (2015) caution about considering atmospheres?

Answer 35

“The danger, however, of valourising atmospheres is that we begin to lose sight of the relation between the material political action and the atmosphere produced”

• Becomes an object of analysis, and not a impetus for change

Question 36

What is a major issue with atmospheres?

Answer 36

• Makes the city sound more exciting that it actually is
• more often a mundane place
• e.g., Lefebvre (1970) highlighted that the street has become a “passageway”

(cf. Amin 2006)

Question 37

Who has provided a critical take on “assemblage urbanism”? What are 3 take aways?

Answer 37

Brenner et al 2011

• Urban increasingly understood as an assemblage of things (including non-human actants)
• Overlooks the political economy of urban capitalism
• Suggests that assemblages can compliment political economic approaches