 Mae'n gweithio i'r eich llwyddiad o'r ydych chi'n gweithio, boeddech chi'n gweithio eich bod yn blaen o'r llwyddiad o'r ddweud o'r freithfaces ac ychydig i'r arddangos i'r aelodau ar y cwylodau a'r gweithio i'r gwneud o'r concept ffiannig. Mae'n ddweud o'r freithfaces yma, mae'n ddweud o'r freithfaces model. Mae'n olygu yn ddweud o'r freithfaces yw'r ddweud o'r ddweud. On quite knows what to do with this, is an abandoned or an old label facility in southern England. So firstly what do we mean by place? So this is taken from OJ and he talks about the anthropological place. So he sees places as being confined relationally. So places don't exist on their own, they only exist because things and people are having relationships with spaces. And they gain their sort of human element because they're concerned with identity, particular types of place become associated with the formation and the performance of different types of identity. So he defines the anthropological place as a concrete symbolic construction of space. The non-place, he sees as being a product of super-modernity. And that's one of the reasons why I was quite interested in exploring the concept. So it is something which is really hyper-modern, it only relates to the late 21st century or is it another term like the end-propercy which talks about all the 20th and 21st century, but humans have been impacting for much longer than that. He also sees the archetypal form as being a traveller space. So I mentioned earlier he talks about airports, motorway service stations, places which exist out of necessity but are somehow removed from society. And you get that feeling in particular in motorway service stations if you go in from the back entrance where the coaches park because you sort of go through these sort of dark tunnels and things before you go into the big world restaurant. So how can we relate this to the Middle Ages? Because if non-places are explicitly aimed to see from modernity, then of course Middle Ages aren't to see from modernity. And I don't think we should necessarily be trying to create that direct line, but rather see can we use this concept as a tool to think with, to think about how we can address places which are ambiguous or spaces which are ambiguous that we can't necessarily in a defined function on. And more importantly, what can we think, how can we use this concept to think about what these spaces actually do? So how can we look to empty spaces for the first substantial contribution I can find is taken at the 1979 by Wilkin Schiffer who looked at vacant lots in Tucson, Arizona. They took some students out to record what was being found and done on these vacant lots. They found they've been used for travel, so people are using these cut-throughs, refuse disposal, so both things that you cashly throw in your drinks can in there, but also more sort of structured flight in and dumping. Storage of bulk goods, so I think we're using those kind of building yards and just dumping parts of bricks there to be used later. Play and recreation, which was a broad term, so that's a child play and also adult recreational activities. And of course they were being used for camping and as accommodation by famous people as well. So we see that yes, these are spaces in this instance which do seem to be associated with those sort of activities which happen at margins. Jeff already put up a reference to Monica Smith's contribution in 2008, published in Arthological Dialogs, which I think is the most substantive hope to discuss the concept of empty spaces in towns. We did ask Monica to contribute to this session, but unfortunately she's not doing fieldwork in India. So she sees that empty spaces are foci for particular tights of activity which have performed at varying timescales, and I think it's important points that spaces may be empty for shorter or longer periods of time. Some spaces are consciously left empty, so you have buffer zones or you have spaces which need to be used for particular tasks, like drying cloth, for example, or drying nets. And she sees actually these spaces are really important for urban communities because there has to be an agreement that that space will stay empty because if you all want to dry your nets on there and then someone goes and builds them, they aren't ready anymore. So she sees that these empty spaces are shaped by urban authorities and by urban communities and that they are inevitable within urban settlements and critically they are very flexible spaces within the urban landscape and that's something which I'll come back to. I mentioned as well that my awareness and interest in the concept of non-place had come from my reading of contemporary archaeology, so particularly this paper by Shannon Dawdy where she's looking at post-industrial cities and the ruins within them. So she argues that post-industrial cities are characterised by a cycle of ruination, buildings go out of use, fall into ruin, get regenerated. And therefore cities are palimpsest of various forms of city building. Cities built at different times for different reasons by different people with different motivations. And ruined spaces somehow haunt these urban spaces. They have varying forms of longevity whether that's in the way that they force the urban space to be divided up into plots, the way that we see many equal plots continuing in the landscape or the way that we get those sort of problematic ruins which you sort of have a heritage obligation to keep hold of and look after but none quite knows what to do with them and they get used for all sorts of different things and she therefore says that these ruins are kind of generative of particular forms of social life. So can we see urban empty spaces as non-places? I would suggest that in some cases they exist outside of the symbolically organised space of the city which would be OJ's definition of an anthropological place and they are produced by urban life. There are certainly spaces which passed through and in a way are defined by their nothingness. But we've had quite a lot of discussion before the break about whether non-place was an appropriate term and actually the term place and non-place I think needs to be understood in a relative sense. So this is a quote from OJ. Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities. The first is never completely erased and the second never totally completed. They're like concepts on which is tangled game by identity relations is ceaselessly rewritten. And this is the key point that place is never just a non-place or just a place. It has an element of placeness or non-placeness. And now on to the smooth space because I knew what you really wanted at five o'clock on the muggy afternoon in Barcelona was more French philosophy. So my work is largely influenced at the moment by the writings of Deleuze and Qatari and their assemblage thought or assemblage theory. If you want to know more about it, then please feel free to leave a like or comment book on the subject and to see some of my prisoners. And in very simple terms, they find the world as being formed of flows of energy of matter of people of ideas which pass through time and space and become entangled and they territorialize or coalesce into entities. And historical actions and persistent structures code the way that these flows move around. So you have walls and regulations, for example, which means certain types of behavior can happen and certain types of behavior can't. And therefore this coding striates the space. So you have a smooth space where you have any number of infinite number of entanglements and connections happening and a striated space where historical action, historical structures mean that the outcomes are all limited. So just like a place can't just be a place or just be a non-place that exists on this kind of spectrum, so spaces cannot be entirely smooth or entirely striated because an overly striated space would be too structured. You'd just be stuck on ground all day repeating yourself over and over again and nothing would ever change obviously the world doesn't like that. And similarly a smooth space would be so unstructured that every second would be different from the second that came before it and there would be absolutely no persistence and continuity. So spaces are always going to be somewhat striated but with different degrees of smoothness. And what's critical about these smooth spaces is that they are the spaces that offer opportunities for creativity and for change. And Ian Buchanan has drawn similarities between the idea of smooth space and the idea of non-place particularly seeing smooth spaces and non-places as being these spaces of ambiguity and transience. So I would suggest that empty spaces are kind of an urban smooth space in physical form that is defined by urban activities. They exist because the town and city exist but their role can be somewhat undefined and their places in which new forms of urban experience might emerge those socialities which Dordi talks about. So this is the context in which I'm talking about and we've heard a little bit about it in the previous paper. The late 14th and the early 15th century the period of Black Death and Recession where we get this what historians have identified as this period of urban decline so towns are smaller and poorer and urban decay of urban fabric falling apart. Individual case studies have emerged we've found that this picture is far too simplistic. My aim is looking at archaeological sites from southern England so they're really getting mixed pictures some towns are prospering others aren't doing so well it's clearly a period of adjustment in which what it was to be urban changed and we can see changes to the urban landscape which created new empty spaces. What I'm interested in is what can these new empty spaces tell us about these new forms of a banus? So I've got three very rapid examples which may or may not be considered non places. So the first is a site at Cuckoo Lane in the major port of Southampton which was an area of mercantile housing in the 13th century a very high status area very rich and imported pottery. In the 14th century after the French raid in 1338 when the new defences were built which cut this site off in the waterfront and fire also destroyed buildings in an unrelated event this area reverted to gardens We've heard about gardens already so gardens emerged in this area out of a mixting of coating or straiting and smoothing so this was a land in the town which was possessed by a major institution God's House Hospital it was acted on by all sorts of different processes and actors, royal and urban authorities in the construction of new defences but it wasn't an area which seemingly led to become bait into no groan which would be a non place in the true sense and we're seeing historical tenement boundaries persisting so I think this place shows how empty spaces are created out of the urban processes and that the processes of decline and decay created new opportunities new spaces for urban horticulture changing potentially urban rural relations potentially being really important for understanding the transition now I don't think that this garden is a non place but it's demonstrative of an urban space as a process of smoothing inspiration and that relational construction of space and place which OJ talks about The second site in a way is similar to Jeff's stone public space it's in other ports Shora by sea in Sussex close to Brighton on the south coast of England and this is the road tackle site which is an empty space at the edge of town close to the waterfront as you can see from the side drawings there's not an awful lot going on there there are dumps of 13th to 14th century domestic waste and there's also evidence that this area was used for range activities such as boat building and fish processing so this is a space which existed outside of the formal urban landscape but was essential to the performance of urban life we've got ephemeral evidence here for periodic everyday activities and space which is being made significant through that activities and through the imposition of structure so this is one of those spaces which again is generating it's generating structures generating sociality it appears to be an empty space it's an important mediator in urban life it's one of those spaces which Monica Smith identifies as as a space of consensus building and the third example is the Castle Bay of Guilford Castle in Surrey so this is Guilford Castle keep into Royal Castle in Palace went out of Houston in the 14th century and the Castle Bayly excavations are shown was largely kept clear of weight in a lot of cases the Castle Bayly gets used as a sort of dumping ground so again maybe we've got a bit of that consensus building going on here because what we have is evidence of the use of this area of the drying plot possibly related to the intensification of textile manufacture so here the ruins of the castle the empty space was adopted for particular activities and that lack of royal interest caused this previously heavily regulated space to become smooth it lost that symbolic power it became the transient and ephemeral space in which new forms of urban spatiality could emerge so we've got Cwyddiw Llanewyr striations persisted it's not a non-place as such but empty space emerged after the processes at the road tackle sites in Shorong we've got a peripheral empty space which was engaged with periodically it seems to be smooth but becomes strated it does seem to be ambiguous they made it some time it had that sort of element of non-placeness and then Gilbert Castle was once a symbol of royal power that was lost political and economic change acted upon space it found a new use became more ephemeral and maybe falls somewhere between these two examples so I think that the idea of the non-place is potentially useful to us for understanding the medieval period but the medieval non-places are necessarily different to those of supermodernity which Odria talks about we do see ambiguous and empty spaces that these clearly played an important role in urban life also those models of decay of decline are far too simplistic we rather than just saying spaces became empty in towns we need to understand what the implication of that emptiness was and I guess there's also scope for thinking about this in terms of other context like the decay of the town so we're walking in front row so space I think it's useful to think of as a process this process of smoothing and striating and the idea of the non-place I think it's really helpful for us to think about what persists and why it persists but isn't necessarily a concept which we can just lift straight out of the anthropological theory and drop into the middle ages