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| NEGOTIATING PlACE-RESTRUCTURING FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES: A CASE STUDY OF LIEDE VILLAGE, GUANGZHOU |
| GAO Quan1,2, QIAN Jun-xi1,2 |
1. School of Geography, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China;
2. Centre for Cultural Industry and Cultural Geography, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China |
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Abstract The notion of Place which has been conceptualized as a particular location that has acquired a set of meanings and attachments, lies at the center of geography's interests. Existing literature has highlighted the significance of emotion in the dynamics of place-restructuring. In line with this argument, this article seeks to investigate the importance of emotion in constructing everyday understandings of place and place-restructuring, drawing on the theories of recently emerging emotional geographies and "emotional turn". Taking the urban regeneration project of urban village Liede as a case, we investigate how emotions construct the meaning of placeness and the dynamics of emotions operating within place-restructuring. Simultaneously, by applying the phenomenological methodology and basing on the perspective that emotions should not be regarded as entirely interiorized subjective mental states, we pay attention to the widely life-world attached with individuals' feelings and emotions. By implementing field observations and the in-depth interviews, we find that, 1) in the specific context of Liede village, placeness was constructed through emotional knowing and geographic imagination of inhabitants; 2) place-making is an emotionally charged process in which inhabitants' emotional response should not be neglected; 3) emotion has become a new form of cultural capital which can be regulated and manipulated for capital accumulation in urban space; 4) we point out a comprehensive understanding of placeness-restructuring: placeness-restructuring should be understood not only in the dimensions of landscape, symbol, and text related to local culture, but also in the way how emotional space is refigured.
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Received: 06 April 2015
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2016, Vol. 31 
