Mobilities, Place and Placemaking Seminar
On the 23rd of September, we're hosting a research seminar focusing on mobilities, place and placemaking. The event will bring together a range of speakers exploring the broad topic through various lens covering everyday mobilities of young people, canals and waterways, bus travel and seaside destinations. Each presentation featured in the event is based on a published or working academic paper as detailed in the schedule below.
Event Details
Date: 23rd September
Time: 3-5pm
Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_aePZUrSpT-qWanwrjvMADw
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Schedule and Seminar speakers
Tim Edensor, Institute of Place Management at Manchester Metropolitan University
Introduction
The seminar will be led by IPM Senior Fellow, Professor Tim Edensor, who was awarded his senior fellowship last year. Tim will introduce the event, outlining the various themes covered within the seminar as well as exploring how place is continuously produced and reproduced through mobilities
Sam Wilkinson and Khawla Badwan, School of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University
All About that Place: The Rhythmic Im/mobilities of University Students in Greater Manchester
This paper draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with university students aged 18–25 studying in Greater Manchester. Through discussing the complex, multilayered everyday walking mobilities of students, I illuminate how embodied, emotional and affective walking mobility practices shape students’ experiences and identities. Findings show that moorings are often as important as mobilities to identity formation, and place attachment. Bringing to the fore the embodied, emotional and affective nature of student micro-mobilities is necessary, since various forms of movement and stillness are important to student wellbeing, enabling students to have space and time to think, reflect, and form attachments and belonging with people and spaces. We contend that it is crucial to bring to the fore students’ experiences of walking and sitting in the city, which significantly contribute to constructing sense of place and belonging to the university city.
Maarja Kaaristo and Dominic Medway, Manchester Metropolitan University
Governmobility in linear places: canals and rivers in the UK
Focusing on the multiple, sometimes conflicting mobilities (boating, walking, running, cycling, commuting, angling) on the canals and rivers of England and Wales, this presentation shows how the interconnected canal mobilities are often governed through creative interplays of freedom and control. We will also discuss whether the relative self-governance of canal mobilities might offer insight for managing mobilities in other shared spaces.
Mathilde Dissing Christensen, Cardiff University
Mobile encounters: bus 5A as a cross-cultural meeting place
The aim of this presentation is to explore modes of encounters in the everyday practice of bus travel. Particularly, it addresses cross-cultural encounters located in the tension between familiarity and difference, between inclusion and exclusion. In doing so I am approaching public transport not only as a moving device but also as a social arena. Furthermore, the bus is simultaneously perceived as a public space, at once composite, contradictory and heterogeneous, and as a meeting place involving‘Throwntogetherness’
Steve Millington, Chloe Steadman and Tim Edensor, Insitute of Place Management at Manchester Metropolitan University
Walking at the Seaside: Blackpool and its North Pier
This paper explores how atmosphere is produced, maintained and disrupted within spaces originally designed to facilitate leisurely walking and dwelling, drawing on preliminary findings from Blackpool's North Pier, We draw attention to placemaking interventions designed to produce atmospheres which not only connect to a common understanding of a seaside pier as a place for leisurely walking and dwelling, but also stretch to encompass multiple constructions of nostalgia and commemoration that tap into layers of personal and social memory. However, the final part of the paper reveals how contemporary commercial uses conflict with the attempt to reconstruct the North Pier as a heritage attraction, leading to a fragmentation and splintering of the North Pier's atmospheres.
Claus Lassen and Lea Holst Laursen, Aalborg University
Mobilising Place Management
Mobilising Place Management makes an important contribution to the mobilities field by arguing for the need to rethink place management. It takes a point of departure in the mobilities turn and relational place thinking while exploring the relationship between place and mobility.
https://www.routledge.com/Mobilising-Place-Management/Lassen-Laursen/p/book/9780367188917
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The seminar will run from 3-5pm which will include a short 10-minute break in the middle of the session and time for discussion based on the presentations. All IPM members are welcome to attend as well as anyone interested in furthering their knowledge about place management and the work of the IPM.
Click here to register
About the author
Formed in 2006, the Institute of Place Management is the international professional body that supports people committed to developing, managing and making places better.