Semi-public Spaces: The Spatial Logic of Institutions

Over the last few decades, media theory, philosophical anthropology and architectural theory have all called attention, with increasing emphasis, to what may be called ‘the crisis of place’.1 The importance of place, as an inte grative and stabilising force in human experience, is waning. Our experiences of time and space, work, communication and social relations are increasingly becoming mediated by a series of devices and systems that diminish the impact and meaning of place. Transport networks and, more recently in particular, communication and information networks, are radically redefining what it means to be ‘someplace’. At first, these devices and systems seem merely to lift old restrictions, without affecting the form of the experience itself. The elevator seems to be merely a way of getting up the stairs faster; flying another, quicker, mode of travel; the telephone merely a device for shouting over a very great distance; and the television screen a kind of enlarged town square. However, the realisation has gradually dawned that these things are not what they seem. A person who has flown someplace has not travelled, and talking to someone on the telephone is something completely different from a face-to-face encounter. Communication networks have effected the most dras tic change on experience, with unforeseeable consequences. They entail that the act of speaking is completely disconnected from a specific place: the place occupied by the speaker in reality (that is, where his or her body is) has no bearing on the speaking and listening, and does not determine the distance over which the voice carries. Virtual contact and virtual ubiquity result in the body being left behind on the edge of the network, as well as in new types of social relations, unconnected to bodily presence, substituting for place-bound relations. The speaker's ‘real’ place and his or her body are no more than residue.