AFFORDANCES

How can we, then, approach the heterogeneity of street rhythms in relation to the embodied context? Here I refer to Gibson’s (1979) concept of environmental affordances (see also section 2.1.3) that refer to the different (positive or negative) offerings of the environment; or the complementarity between an organism and the environment (Scarantino 2003). Whereas the role of affordances has been examined in relation to landscapes (Heft 2010), the argument here is that affordance could possibly also be a useful concept in the analysis of rhythmscapes. The interest here is on the day-to-day street space, and affordances as relational properties (Heft 2010) for the mobile bodies: ‘Affordances are the functional properties of an environmental

feature for an individual. - - They [affordances] indicate what one can do in some setting, and what activities may be ruled out.’ (Ibid.: 20, italics in original.)

In reference to the research data, and urban rhythms, affordances can be thought of in a two-folded manner. First, the route project, as noted above, sets constraints on how the space is practices both temporally and spatially, and how the events and other happenings taking place in and around the route are (or are not) engaged with.

The project-like form of the route comes to limit direct engagements between the body and the environment beyond functional movement (the route ‘project’), even if it provides possibilities for various perceptual experiences, and the building up of various environmental knowledges (vistas, changing landscapes, atmospheres; new services, social gathering places, and so on). Second, the liminal temporalities of the day (the dawn/dusk hours examined here in this study) provides more variation and alternative approaches to both mobility rhythms and spatial uses, as the day-time traffic pressures of the mobility-oriented sites give away, and the social schedules facilitate more staying-like practices and leisure activities. The liminal temporalities, in other words, provide different kinds of spatial (temporary) uses, at least from the studied observer’s perspective, as recorded in the data as increasing variety in spatial and temporal uses of the sites.

The notion of affordance can provide some insight to the relations between context, space-time and the body, and how these relations change (or oscillate) between different temporalities, such as through the different times of the day or seasons. It might help us to understand similarly, how any ‘single’ rhythms (if one can really be identified in separation from others) can change – or be multiple simultaneously – depending on different embodied contexts, and how they weave together multiple rhythmic assemblages. This is more of an exploratory notion, and requires further and more focused inquiry, but some preliminary notes can be brought up.

This ties closely together with the notion on pacemaking in the previous section above, but highlights that spaces are not only experienced differently but that the possibilities for engagements with the space change as well. The space – as a site of possible activities – changes both temporally and contextually. Similarly, Mattias Kärrholm and Gunnar Sandin (2011) examine the affordances of different mobile timespaces of waiting (transport hubs) for different kinds of uses and durations. They investigate what such spaces can offer to the body in waiting; what actions can be taken in different kinds of waiting-sites. The interaction with the other bodies and social schedules provide, as noted above, dominant rhythms (opening/availability of services, appropriation practices [groups hanging out in specific places], social

interactions) that affect the affordances of the environment, but the embodied (and situated) context in which one engages the space matters as well. In other words, the different pacemakers – as collective and shared elements creating temporal orders and structures – have different kinds of effects on the body in different contexts.

From an urban environment perspective, rather than places having a pace (Lynch 1972), or being ‘slow’ or ‘fast’ (Wunderlich 2013), there are numerous paces, differently captured, engaged, and experienced in relation to the body: the ‘measure’

of the rhythm (Lefebvre 1992/2013), in other words, changes depending on the body as the rhythms of a space (or a place) are tied to the rhythms of the perceiving body, and to the context in which the body engages the timespace. This means that place-rhythms not only change and oscillate throughout the day, or seasons or other shared temporalities, but through different embodied contexts – through different micro-temporalities – in which the space is engaged in. A site’s rhythmicity does not just appear differently in different embodied contexts, it is different, it is a different kind of assemblage.

This is, of course, not something that can directly be drawn from the (limited) empirical research data here, but the route narratives, together with the observation data, lead to such conceptual conclusions, or openings. Drawing from Ihde’s (2009) take on postphenomenology, when approaching a phenomena, the (‘perceptual-bodily’ [Ibid: 12]) point of view is important, as ‘the same configuration could be seen quite differently’ depending on the view – as multistable. Moving in a site in different times of the day, and moving in it in different contexts, might each open up the

‘same’ space differently. Of course, it is no news that people experience spaces differently, but the subjective experience (as socio-material relations and affordances) can be different in different subjective day-to-day conditions, and thus multiple in form, and it is this multiplicity that requires attention in research and in design and planning practices. Spaces are to be understood as ‘fields of emergent potentialities‘ (Crang 2001), or as a ‘realm of possibilities’ (Lapintie 2005; following Massey 2005). We need to move from a focus on spatial organization towards a focus on actions (Anderson and Harrison 2010), or different capacities (Anderson et al.

2012), in understanding how space opens up differently, and how the temporal intensity of the space is experienced and engaged differently.

These are movements away from a singular rhythmic-profiles of a space towards more heterogenous understandings of the rhythmicities of a space, and how they are assembled differently alongside and simultaneously with one another, and even might be conflicting or contradictory with one another.

The role of such heterogeneous temporalities and context-specific approaches in urban planning and design practices are examined next.

5.3 RHYTHM-BASED THINKING IN URBAN PLANNING AND