University of Heidelberg

For this workshop, we have chosen to interrogate Marc Augé’s concept of “non-places” in the context of the developmental dynamics in Asia’s global/globalising cities. While “non-place” provides important analytical tools for understanding mechanisms of displacement, alienation and loneliness, the spatial and social pluralisation in New Delhi and Shanghai provide the impetus for shifting our perspective a little further. Acknowledging changing modes of community life, sensory experience and social interaction, we want to use this workshop for enquiring into the idea of “spaces in-between”, and take it as a point of entry into shifting transnational practices and encounters. Sites for exploring such spaces might include gated communities, shopping centres, fitness studios, clubs, parks, cafés, universities or office environments and may also express themselves in changing notions of suburbia. In this, we are particularly interested in the visual and sensual language these spaces speak to the various groups of people who inhabit or traverse the city, and we encourage a variety of disciplinary approaches that may help build a more rigorous analysis of how divisions of the public and private, common and exclusive, intimate and trivial, authentic and replicate, or creative and banal, work in these transitioning urban landscapes.