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Spatial culture, processional culture and the materialities of social memory in nineteenth-century Sheffield

Griffiths, S; (2016) Spatial culture, processional culture and the materialities of social memory in nineteenth-century Sheffield. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory , 17 (3) pp. 254-275. 10.1080/1600910X.2016.1183219. Green open access

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Abstract

This article presents research about a wide range of processions and crowd activities in the English industrial city of Sheffield c.1790-1910. It identifies a theoretical weakness in the historical scholarship where an emphasis on the role of procession and protest in symbolically ordering the built environment too often serves to represent it as intrinsically un-ordered and lacking in definition. The effect, it is argued, has been to present symbolic regimes, particularly those of local elites, as something imposed on rather than, in any sense arising from quotidian urban performance and to artificially isolate research into processional and other mass-participation activities from the shared material context of a city’s spatial culture. The notion of spatial culture is developed with reference to the work of Bill Hillier, Manuel De Landa and Henri Lefebvre, among others, to propose an interpretative ‘mapping’ of the relationship between the evolving structure of Sheffield’s built form and the development of its processional culture. The research raises the question of how far civic traditions often regarded as ‘inventions’ in fact arose from the material conditions of urban life itself, in that sense revealing the historicity of social memory.

Type: Article
Title: Spatial culture, processional culture and the materialities of social memory in nineteenth-century Sheffield
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2016.1183219
Publisher version: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1600910...
Language: English
Additional information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory on 11/05/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1600910X.2016.1183219
Keywords: Processions, processional culture, spatial cultures, Sheffield, Bill Hillier,rhythmanalysis, social memory
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > The Bartlett School of Architecture
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1501052
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