Disturbance and Complexity in Urban Places: The Everyday Aesthetics of Leisure

Abstract

There are a multitude of spaces popularly thought of as being used for leisure — the skate park, the shopping mall, the playground, the coffee shop, the recreation centre, theme parks, the public square. With the sinuous rhythms of people’s daily lives invariably shepparding them into, through and past increasingly urbanized environments, the construction of such spaces transforms previously continuous geographical locations into a series of fleeting places, images and encounters (Simmel, 1997). While leisure theorists remain largely ambivalent about such places, there is growing consensus that the impact of modernity has led to their increasing ‘commodification’ and ‘devaluation’ that, in turn, perpetuates a broader narrative of loss; characterized by a loss of meaning, a loss of proper connection between people and locations, and the perceived proliferation of non-places (Augé, 1995). Bartolucci speaks to this modern predicament in experiencing space and place, claiming:

Our sense of place keeps getting vaguer …we find ourselves uprooted, adrift in an uncharted, alien terrain …we’ve failed to accept that the old definitions of place no longer apply; place is now as much virtual as it is physical …our notion of place, then, must be reinvented …if we are at last to create a contemporary sense of place …we need to acknowledge the ugly as well as the beautiful, the disturbing as well as the cozy, the virtual as well as the real. It is this totality that today constitutes the “here” (Bartolucci, 1997, pp. 60–61).