Lecture 15/16: Geography of the High Street Flashcards
Dates
1862 Brixton & South Stockwell station 1877 Bon Marche 1903 Marks & Spencer 1928 Market Row 1935 Granville Arcade
Key tings
Electric avenue: first street in London to be lit up with electricity
Bon marche: first purpose built department store in Britain
1841 Brixton was semi-rural
During the 19th century- a train line opened, birth of commuter culture and created the birth of suburbs.
Idea of going to a shop and walking round it
was very new to the people of the 19th century.
Department store shift towards
modern retail
Women
Employment for women
Acceptable places for women to spend their leisure time
Public but inside
Acceptable spaces for women leisure time
A condition of modernity
Became possible to build with cast iron
Large spaces
Paris Capital of modernity (Benjamin 1999 3-13)
Through material and technological shifts that public space becomes a place for leisure and for consumption.
Shopping Mall
Modern forms of consumption have grown to new kinds of space in the city.
Private spaces that feel public
Large glass constructions
Spaces of liberation and of control
Liminal space- between things- between public and private- ambiguous. You can do anything you want but you’re also under constant threat.
Surveillance panopticon micropowers (Foucault)
Shopping centres are designed to promote a specific form of behaviour.
Disciplined not by the institution but by members of the public who take on a disciplinary role.
Ordinary Streets
Places in the city that don’t have this sense of control, true public spaces
High street encounter
Public space & encounter with difference
In the market we have to make our own decisions- a more egalitarian side to consumerism.
Super diversity
High streets reflect the communities that they serve
Enclosure
Medieval property rights
Common land - ‘commoners’ held rights to make a living from land
17th century early 19th enclosure allowed individual landowners to ‘enclose’ common land
Agrarian & industrial revolutions efficient farming & surplus labour force & movement to cities
Rights and permissions
The concept of land ownership is complex
Even “Public Land” is essentially owned by the Crown
Many roads follow rights of way through land owned by others
In modern developments “public” is increasingly wholly private e.g. Olympic site
Anna Minton Ground Control 2009
Mike Raco Governance as Legacy 2013
Public space is not a universal idea
Public space is dependent on ownership and legal structures
The idea of collective responsibility for land ended at the time that modern capitalism begun in the UK
Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
Opposition to NY planner Robert Moses Haussman style ideas
“The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place” p.50
Lefebvre’s Triad
Spatial Practice - Perceived
Representations of Space - Lived
Representational spaces – Conceived
Production of Space (1991:33)
Modernised by Soja Thirdspace (1996)
Knox & Pinch “Social construction of space” (48-49)
Smith & Low
Public space under threat by securitisation and commoditisation of urban space
Tompkins Square Park & Frontier urbanism Revanchist City (Smith 1996 pp.3-37)
Gated communities … Urban Fear (Low 2001)
The Politics of Public Space (Smith and Low 2006)
