ADVENTURES IN SMOOTH SPACE
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 28/01/2021

Debates over the decline of medieval towns in the 14th and 15th centuries have often discussed the decay of urban fabrics as a critical theme. Whilst the simplistic equation of emptiness to declining fortunes has been critiqued, particularly by Keith Lilley (2015), less attention has been paid to the productive potential of these ambiguous features in the urban landscape (although see Smith 2008). Here I use the concept of non-place to think through these spalces and what we might learn from them. Through decay spaces become empty, they loose their ‘place-ness’. Yet, as Marc Augé (1995, 79) discusses, ‘place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed’. Empty spaces, the non-places of the medieval town, are always defined by the lingering presence of the past. Here I follow Ian Buchanan (2005) in using the Deleuze-Guattarian concepts of smooth space and re-territorialisation to think about urban space as process, and to explore the ways in which emptiness is assembled through the performance of urban life; to think about empty spaces not as negative features of a landscape, but as spaces of potential, of places in the making. In order to explore these points I draw upon research undertaken into later medieval urban decay in southern England, focussing on ports and smaller towns.


Author(s): Jervis, Ben (Cardiff University, School of History, Archaeology and Religion)


References

Augé, M. 1995, Non-Places. Introduction to the Anthropology of Super-Modernity, Verso.


Buchanan, I. 2005, Space in the age of non-place, in I. Buchanan and G. Lambert (eds), Deleuze and Space, Edinburgh University

Press, 16-35


Lilley, K. 2015, Urban planning after the Black Death, Urban History 42(1), 22-42


Smith, M. 2008, Urban empty spaces. Contentious spaces for consensus building, Archaeological Dialogues 15(2), 216-31