Page 8 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

GILLIAN ROSE
SPATIALITIES OF ‘COMMUNITY’,

POWER AND CHANGE: THE IMAGINED
GEOGRAPHIES OF COMMUNITY ARTS
PROJECTS

ABSTRACT
This article draws on current discussions about the discursive
construction of space. Different organizations of space are produced in part
by different discourses about social identity, as Stuart Hall, for example,
has recently been arguing. This suggests that to change oppressive
definitions of identity it is also necessary to rethink the spatialities which
give both material and symbolic structure to those definitions. This article
explores the politics of one particular spatialization of identity in the
discourse of one group of cultural workers. This is the identity of those
with whom the workers work—people living in the peripheral housing
estates of the Scottish city of Edinburgh—which the workers spatialize
through their complex use of the term ‘community’. Drawing on in-depth
interviews with community arts workers in the city, I argue that they
radicalize the notion of ‘community’ by placing it in a geography of lack,
and that in so doing they articulate both the costs of marginalization and
fragile, non-essentializing possibilities for change.
KEYWORDS
community, spatiality, identity, community arts, Edinburgh

Introduction
Rosalyn Deutsche (1995:169) has recently described ‘the newly popular field of
spatial-cultural discourse’ as a convergence between arguments being made in
cultural studies about the importance of the spatial to cultural politics, and the
way many geographers are now theorizing spaces, places and landscapes as
culturally constructed and contested (see, for example, the contributors to Bird et
al., 1993; Carter et al., 1993; Colomina, 1992; Keith and Pile, 1993; Pile and
Thrift, 1995). This convergence is clearly signalled by Stuart Hall writing a

Cultural Studies 11(1) 1997:1–16© 1997 Routledge 0950–2386