Thirdspace and Second Homes

The Notion of Place and Space

In geography, the question of space and place is not just about where, when, and why matters take place but also how it matters (Farinelli, 2003). Space and place are both very complex terms with wide range of interpretations.

Place is a type of object (Tuan, 1977, p.17). The conventional idea of place is often two-fold:

one considers the actual address and the other considers living at that address (Agnew and Livingstone, 2011). However, this divide becomes increasingly problematic as many activities now take place in hetero-local addresses (Agnew, 2011). Today, the term is used in a wide range of ways but there are three dimensions in terms of geographical research (Agnew, 2011). The first dimension reads place as a site where specific object or activity is located (Ibid). Urban geographers often think city in this way as part of a collection or system of places and discuss the relations or motilities within (Agnew & Livingston, 2011). The second dimension puts place as a series of locales where everyday life takes place. The meaning of the locale goes beyond the mere address and reaching structures where social interaction and the environment transform (Agnew, 2011). Empirical examples of this dimension include homes, shopping malls, churches, vehicles, etc. The third dimension views place as sense of place which deals with perceptions and emotions associated with places (Ibid).

The previous discussion of second homes have been strongly link to the notion of place. At least three common features can be found in the ‘semantic war’ of varies definition of second homes (Hall and Müller, 2004):

Privately owned;

Physically away from ordinary home;

Sense of temporary destination where owners and users can escape to and return from.

In this fashion, current discussions about second homes embraces the notion of place, which concerns the actual, tangible and physical object and people’s use of it. In other words, the term receives an imbalanced attention: the notion of second dominated the sense of home.

This chapter attempts to challenges this view.

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Space is more abstract than place. This thesis follows such distinction:

‘If we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place’

(Tuan, 1977, p.6).

Hubbard and Kitchin (2010) suggest that space is an on-going production of spatial relations.

Similarly, in Harvey’s relational space objects only exist through power relations. Harvey (2010) suggests that space is neither absolute, relative nor relational, but it can become one or all simultaneously depending on the circumstances. To give an example, the mobility and flow of people, goods, services and information take place in a relative space because it takes resources to overcome the friction of distance. On the other hand, the forces of demographic, market and merchandising potential also exist within an urban system to knit the form of relational space into human social practice. Thus, the ontological question of ‘what-is-space’

is now replaced by ‘how is it that different human practices create and make use of distinctive conceptualisations of space’ (p.13-14)? The discussion of space, is therefore to commute between the nature of space and the relationships between social processes and spatial forms.

The Production of Space

For Lefebvre (1991), the space is an extension form of the body. It is safe to conclude that Lefebvre views space as productive consumption (Soja, 1996). Lefebvre (1991) sees the whole of the planet’s resources as the material for space production and the entire urban pattern as means of production. He chases the spatial patterns as early as the twelfth century Western Europe, where he finds existence of spatial production both in the central and peripheral areas. The sixteenth century becomes a turning point when the town becomes representative for the fully matured abstract space with its own rationality (p. 263).

The analysis of such space follows an approach of what Lefebvre calls a tripartite-dialectical, or a spatial triad approach (Shields, 1999). This was later re-invented by Soja given the name of ‘trialectics of space’. Lefebvre (1991) recognises the complexity and plurality of space by asking: ‘how many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents?’ (p.85).

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The trialectics of Lefebvre’s thesis leads to his renowned classification of spaces following the following interconnected components:

Perceived Space is defined as a spatiality that highlights the spatial practices: the process of producing the material for the production and reproduction of the society. Perceived space concerns how space is used in a daily or routine reality. With relations to this study, the physical dwelling of a second home and its associated usage makes it a perceived space.

Conceived Space is used by scientists, planners, technocrats as representations of space. For example, the knowledge or signs behind the space which links to ideology. A second home is also conceived because of the ideas and perceptions about it as seasonal, lifestyle mobility, tourism and leisure.

Lived Space is the cultural space that is symbolic, imaginative and representational space.

Lived space is a subject of ethnologists. In the case of second homes, the experience of such space combines its perceived and conceived nature but such experience is due to be changed according to the trialectics of the space.

Soja (1996) highly appraises this model in his Thirdspace. He makes two observations towards the conventional approaches. Firstly, previous scholars tend to overly emphasise on the physical quality of space, especially in the fields such as architecture, urbanism and planning studies. Secondly, the more ideological or idealistic notion of space is popular among those who studies political economics of space. Soja (1996) argues that both thinking is limited to help understand the increasingly complicated spatial characteristics.

Building on these, the Thirdspace adds two intertwined dialectics, namely socio-spatial and spatio-temporal, to the traditional Western thought which emphasised on the relationship between the society and its history (Soja, 1996). Thirdspace refers to a particular way of thinking about and interpreting socially produced space rather than an actual form of space (Merrifield, 1999).

It needs to note the concept of Thirdspace is full of controversies. Many of the critics have targeted a quote from Soja’s original work:

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‘Everything comes together in Thirdspace: subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and unconsciousness, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history’ (Soja, 1996, pp.

56-7).

The Thirdspace is arguably a writing about everything and, perhaps nothing at all (Price, 1999).

In an unsympathetic manner, since the Thirdspace has been constructed on such an ontological level that ‘the fact all Soja seems to be saying is that time, space and society are mutually constitutive’ and sarcastically asks ‘is Elvis still alive in Thirdspace?’ (Barnett and Soja, 1997, p.528-529). However, many of these critics have been defended, either by Soja himself or others, as a misread of the original text and falling into the trap of asking the same question;

‘does location X or location Y qualify as your Thirdspace?’. In fact, the greatest contribution of the Thirdspace is probably not the idea of a postmodern geography per se; rather it is how it provides a broadened theoretical and conceptual horizon for fellow studies to interpret and constitute everyday geographies (Mohammad and Sideway, 2004).

For this thesis, the Thirdspace is useful because it offers an inspiring linkage between Lefebvre’s trialectics and Foucault’s heterotopia. With trailectics, the spatial characteristics of second homes can be gathered; with heterotopia, the spatial quality of second homes can be understood. Putting them together, the production of social relations behind the emergence of second homes can be evaluated.

Second homes in Thirdspace

The Thirdspace offers useful perspectives to help understand the phenomenon of second homes because it overcomes the dualist approach in current research.

Because of transnationalism and globalisation broadly, the meaning of home is now different to its traditional sense (McIntyre et al., 2006). It is increasingly difficult and problematic to assume home as rooted in one place (Thulemark et al., 2014). Not only that many second home owners are de facto owners of multiple homes (Paris, 2013), the sense of home is changing also because of the global pattern of lifestyle mobility (Cohen et al., 2015). In her research of round-the-world travellers, Molz (2008) suggests the concept of ‘global abode’ in

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order to describe the cases when people are physically and emotionally attached to the veritable ‘home-on-the-move’ (338).

Earlier, different terms have been offered as an alternative to second homes, including

‘multiple dwelling’ (McIntyre et al., 2006) and ‘home as sedentary and mobile’ (Ralph and Staeheli, 2011). However, to a large extent all of these terms are limited to the actual places and the very usage of it. In other words, second-home research has been conducted mostly through Lefebvre’s spatial practice instead of conceived space or lived space. What is missing is probably not the entry of a new semantic debate, but the understanding of it in context.

The geographies of home or second homes remains a vital point to discuss belonging and identity within lifestyle mobility. This idea reflects in many literatures in the field of lifestyle mobility. Terranova-Webb (2010) argues that mobility might offer the same sense of stability that a home can supply. Likewise, Butcher (2010) suggests that mobility has changed the very definition of homes as ‘the physical place and a metaphor for cultural belonging to a place of origin’ (p.34). While home has become multi-sited, at the same time, mobility does not preclude the desire for home (Butcher, 2010). Although some research is not specifically concerned with the intersection between leisure and housing, they have implications about how the transnational knowledge can be useful to understand the meaning of mobility in an era when the notion of home is de-territorialised and national borders receding (Brickell and Datta, 2011).

The conventional research on second homes suggest that rural areas are vulnerable to the growth of such demand without asking why those areas are often left behind at the first place.

In fact, the regional disparities between rural and metropolitan regions have long been discussed in terms of economic activities and income (Copus, 2001). Rural areas are more likely to be vulnerable in economic process because of their peripherally (Ibid). Therefore, blaming second homes as a singular source of the ‘rural-out’ migration or displacement of the locals is a problematic approach (Gallent et al., 2003). Because rural areas hold are geographically distant to crucial resources for economic development, they are often ‘lagging behind’ (Storper, 1997). With the acceleration of mobility and flows of capital, technology and society, urban-rural distance is now evolved from a pure geographical sense to an organisational dimension (Lagendijk and Lorentzen, 2007). In development theories, regional

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economic problems are attributed to three generation of discourses: as the lack of access to markets or economic centres (Parr, 1999b), as the lack of cluster effects (Porter, 2000), and most recently as the lack of learning capacities (Malecki, 2004). Therefore, the causes and circumstances of the rural economic problems cannot be simply attributed to second homes.

Following these thoughts, the spatial characteristics of second homes or lifestyle mobility is needed for this research. It is worth noting that the conception of key resources of economic development has also been changing in the past few decades (Gaile, 1992). It has shifted from the conventional sense of of tangible production factors such as land, labour, capital, technologies and infrastructures to more abstract sets of dynamics such as economic linkages, institutional supports and learning capacities (Storper, 1997). This might explain why second homes have been accused in some areas but not in others (Müller and Hoogendoorn, 2013).