Places are Assemblages - Kim Dovey

ArchiForum Tuesday 27 July

Kim Dovey is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely on social issues in architecture, urban design and planning. Books include ‘Framing Places’ (Routledge, 2008), ‘Fluid City’ (UNSW Press 2005) and ‘Becoming Places’ (Routledge 2009). He is engaged on research projects on transit-oriented development, creative cities and informal settlements.

Places are Assemblages
This lecture sketches a theory of ‘place’ as a dynamic ‘assemblage’ of desires, territories, senses and intensities. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, assemblage theory holds potential to incorporate phenomenological, materialist and post-structuralist approaches; resisting any reduction of place to essence, subjectivity, objectivity or discourse. The prospect is to replace the Heideggerian ontology of being-in-the-world with a more Deleuzian notion of becoming-in-the-world. This implies a break with static, fixed, closed and dangerously essentialist notions of place, but preserves a provisional ontology of place-as-becoming.

Professor Kim Dovey
Kim Dovey is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely on social issues in architecture and urban design.

Image source: http://www.findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/researcher/person13169.html