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More Than Words: Place, Discourseand the Struggle over Public Space inBarcelonaAndrés Di Massoa & John Dixonb

a University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spainb The Open University, Milton Keynes, UKAccepted author version posted online: 05 Sep 2014.Publishedonline: 11 Nov 2015.

To cite this article: Andrés Di Masso & John Dixon (2015) More Than Words: Place, Discourse and theStruggle over Public Space in Barcelona, Qualitative Research in Psychology, 12:1, 45-60

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Qualitative Research in Psychology, 12:45–60, 2015Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1478-0887 print/1478-0895 onlineDOI: 10.1080/14780887.2014.958387

More Than Words: Place, Discourse and theStruggle over Public Space in Barcelona

ANDRÉS DI MASSO1 AND JOHN DIXON2

1University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain2The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

The social construction of human-environment relations is a central concern of anemerging tradition of research on place, which extends the so-called “discursiveturn” in social psychology. This research highlights the primary role of everydaylinguistic practices in the production of place meanings, challenging the prevailingtendency among environmental psychologists to treat place meanings mainly as anexpression of individual cognitions. By the same token, in this article we argue thatresearch on human-environment relations also has the potential to enrich the field ofdiscursive psychology, tempting discursive researchers to move beyond their custom-ary focus on verbal and written texts. Specifically, we propose an analytic frameworkthat transcends the dualism between the material and discursive dimensions of human-environment relations. In order to develop this argument, we outline the novel conceptof place-assemblage and illustrate its utility by conducting an analysis of a recent con-flict over a public space in Barcelona. This analysis shows how discursive constructionsof the development of this public space over time were inextricably entwined with otherkinds of material and embodied practices—practices through which place meaningswere actively performed, reproduced and contested.

Keywords: assemblage; discourse; discursive psychology; dualism; environmentalpsychology; place; struggle

Introduction

Psychological research on human-environment relations has been conducted primarilywithin the subdiscipline of environmental psychology. Such research has shown how indi-viduals’ cognitions, emotions, and actions are shaped by the material settings in whichthey unfold. It has also elaborated a range of concepts designed to elucidate the spatialdimension of human experience, including place attachment, place identity, and territo-riality (e.g., see Altman & Low 1992; Proshansky, Fabian & Kaminoff 1983). Recently,this spatial dimension has increasingly engaged researchers working in the companion dis-cipline of social psychology, who have explored, for example, how physical settings arelinked to collective processes of belonging, remembering, identification, and differentiation(e.g., Bonaiuto, Breakwell & Cano 1996). More fundamentally, they have explored how thevery meanings we attribute to our material environments are themselves a product of social

Correspondence: Andrés Di Masso, PsicoSAO Research Group, Department of SocialPsychology, University of Barcelona, Pg. Vall d’Hebron, 171, 08035, Barcelona, Spain. E-mail:adimasso@ub.edu

Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/uqrp.

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46 A. Di Masso and J. Dixon

psychological processes of interaction, communication and collective representation (e.g.,Bonaiuto & Bonnes 2000; Castro 2006; Devine-Wright & Lyons 1997).

The latter theme has been developed most directly by work capitalising on the so-called “discursive turn” in social psychology (Aiello & Bonaiuto 2003; Dixon & Durrheim2000; Taylor 2010). Among other contributions, this work has instituted an epistemologicalbreak with research conducted in the mainstream of environmental psychology, particu-larly with respect to its formulation of the relationship between language and social reality.Environmental psychologists have generally treated individuals’ accounts of their locatedexperiences as (more or less) faithful expressions of their perceptions, cognitions, andevaluations of objective physical environments. From this perspective, language is viewedsimply as mediating between a pre-established “internal” psychology and an already exist-ing material world “out there.” The discursive approach, by contrast, treats language asthe mechanism through which people, together, actively create the meanings of the mate-rial environments they inhabit and in the process construct varying kinds of psychologicalrelations with those environments. Moreover, rather than treating the language of placeas a transparent expression of an interior subjectivity, a neutral mirror of the exteriorworld, or some complex combination of the two, this approach highlights its occasioned,action-oriented, contested, and often politically consequential nature.

This general epistemological tension gives rise to two more specific and seeminglyirreconcilable binaries, which are relevant to the central theme of this special issue. On theone hand, the discourse-mind dualism divides the study of internal feelings, thoughts, andperceptions from the study of discourse as the primary, if not sole, material through whichour “psychological” relationships with place are forged. On the other hand, the discourse-space dualism divides the study of how “real” features of the physical world affect ouremplaced experiences from the study of how the physical world and emplaced experi-ence become “real” through discursive practices. The discourse-mind dualism has beenextensively discussed by discursive psychologists (Edwards & Potter 1992; Potter 1996),whereas the discourse-space dualism has barely been considered, at least outside of workinfluenced by the Foucauldian concept of discourse as encompassing linguistic, institu-tional and material practices (Foucault 1993; see also Hook 2007). This brief article buildson the discursive-psychological framework in order to interrogate, probe, and dissolve thissecond dualism, but also seeks to broaden its conceptual, methodological and empiricalhorizons. By transcending this dualism and redefining the study of subjectivity as a complexpractice including space, words, emotions and the body, we hope to deepen into researchon the psychosocial.

What follows is the outline of what, we believe, is a more fruitful analytic framework.Rather than presenting a narrative of ontological or epistemological priorities (i.e., onethat privileges material space over place-discourse or vice versa), we call for an integra-tive approach that moves beyond the futile split between the discursive and the material.Although resonating with work in the Foucauldian tradition, our approach deliberately pre-serves a focus on talk-in-action as a distinctively discursive and rhetorical property of placeconstruction (i.e., in the creation of meaning-full spaces). At the same time, we argue thatthis property cannot be understood outside the wider assemblage of material locations andbodily practices with which it is inevitably intertwined. In order to develop this argument,we outline the novel concept of place-assemblage and illustrate its utility by conductingan analysis of a recent conflict over a public space in Barcelona. This analysis showshow discursive constructions of the development of this public space were inextricablyentwined with other kinds of material and embodied practices—practices through whichplace meanings were actively performed, reproduced and contested.

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Grappling with the Discourse versus Space Dualism

The physical environment shapes subjectivity and social interaction (Proshansky et al.1983), as much as environmental discourse constructs the meaning of place and the natureof our emplaced relationships and experiences (Aiello & Bonaiuto 2003). For instance, theneighbourhood in which we grew up may inform our sense of self and trigger deep-seatedemotions of belonging and continuity, there. Engagement with certain physical propertiesof place (e.g., architectural features) over time may shape what that environment means (tous). Equally, however, when talking about where we grew up, discursive constructions ofour “neighbourhood” may serve local rhetorical functions. Architectural features may fig-ure, for example, in accounts that reject environmental change by questioning the presenceof “newcomers.” This tension instantiates what we call a discursive versus material dual-ism. The physical reality of a given neighbourhood is opposed to the discursive constructionof “neighbourhood.”

Four Perspectives

We can identify four potential approaches to the resolution of this discourse-space dual-ism that are implicit within the existing literature. These resolutions are rooted in researchtraditions that overlap and interpenetrate one another in complex ways, including criticalpsychology, cultural geography, urban studies and affect theories.

The first approach is illustrated by Macnaghten’s (1993) analysis of a public inquiryinto a controversial landfill site plan. The inquiry pitted a group of developers, for whomthe planning application was framed as a business opportunity, against the county counciland community representatives, for whom it was framed as spoiling the local landscape.Macnaghten identified the main discursive constructions of “nature” deployed to define themeaning of the proposed location and explored their rhetorical functions. Most important,he related these arguments to external constraints (i.e., power structures such as legislation),to the dispute’s final outcome (i.e., the inspector’s report) and to the ensuing environmen-tal consequences (i.e., for dealing with the landfill itself). After evaluating the competingarguments, the inspector produced a report in which a particular construction of place war-ranted a concrete material outcome (i.e., a physical landscape that remained unaltered).Place-discourse, it seems, can have all-too-tangible consequences. To echo Macnaghten’sevocative phrase, words can literally “move mountains.”

The second approach is illustrated by Cromby and Nightingale’s (1999) critique ofsocial constructionism. If Macnaghten emphasized the material consequences of place-discourse—words can move mountains—Cromby and Nightingale foregrounded the roleof embodiment, materiality, and power as extra-discursive realities that limit the nature andconsequences of practices of linguistic construction. Indeed, they proposed that materialityis a precondition for the discursive constructions that inform everyday experience, and,more specifically, listed the location of bodies and the organization of space as two ofthese preconditions. According to this approach, talk about the material environment isboth enabled and constrained by its concrete organization, which shapes the conditions ofpossibility under which particular rhetorical constructions become meaningful, plausibleand consequential. For example, a neighbourhood whose design, infrastructure and archi-tecture divides members of particular social groups from one another or relegates somemembers to marginal spaces beyond community boundaries also delimits the constructionsof place and people-place relations that can be meaningfully or coherently formulated (seeBuizer & Turnhout 2011; Di Masso 2012; Durrheim & Dixon 2005).

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The third approach is illustrated by Deleuze-inspired studies in urban geography, build-ing on the recent “turn to affect” (Clough & Halley 2007) and on what has become known asthe Non Representational Theory in cultural geography (Amin & Thrift 2002). Latham andMcCormack’s (2004) discussion of the relationship between the material and the imma-terial in urban experience exemplifies this approach. Here, the immaterial is conceivedas lying both beyond and before discourse: it is a set of “nonrepresentational forces andpractices and processes through which matter is always coming into being” (Latham &McCormack 2004, p. 705). Advocates call this the “virtual dimension” of the material.Accordingly, this approach encourages the analysis of the material not as a domain of tan-gible objects, but as a form of reality already penetrated by pre-reflective relational forcesconstantly reshaping the urban. Hence, in experiencing “our” neighbourhood, for example,we would be flowing inside an affective process defined by an ineffable configuration ofarchitectural features, streets, automobiles, people, smells, lighting, movement, matter, andtechnical machinery.

The fourth approach attempts to overcome the space-discourse dualism by bring-ing into sharper focus a new object of empirical and methodological enquiry: the messy,complex, and constantly unfolding, entanglement of material geography, embodied prac-tices, and language that structures place-experiences over time. Durrheim, Rautenbach,Nicholson and Dixon’s (2013) study of nightclubs in South Africa offers one exampleof how this kind of approach might work in practice, without pretending to resolve itsunderlying philosophical tensions. Their ethnography examined both how cocktail barswere linguistically constructed as sites of heterosexual opportunity that constitute womenas sexualised objects of desire and, simultaneously, how this process implicated a myriadof other material structures and embodied practices. The material structures were institutedwithin the design, visual imagery, and decor of place. The embodied practices were insti-tuted within the dress codes and conduct of staff and patrons, which ranged from mundaneactivities such as sitting, walking, and talking to overtly sexualised practices of flirting,watching, and dancing. According to Durrheim et al. (2013), this “affective ensemblage”of practices together constituted the cocktail bar as a space of heterosexual and hetero-normative desire: a space that privileged certain ways of being and acting, certain bodies,and certain gendered and sexualized identities.

In sum, these approaches clarify the relationship between material space and place-discourse by providing four main ideas. First, discourse about space potentially affectsphysical space; second, physical space limits the sorts of discursive place-constructions thatare available, possible and meaningful; third, in experiencing physical or discursive spacethere is always an “excess” that eludes our analytical focus if we consider only the material-as-physical and the immaterial-as-discourse; and fourth, the space-discourse dualism maybe potentially eroded by redefining the analytical unit of empirical work as an affectivepatterning in which place-discourse, emplaced bodies and material space are treated asinextricably intertwined in the production of human-environment relations. We developand illustrate the latter idea (see also Durrheim, Mtose & Brown 2011) in the rest of ourarticle.

Human-Environment Relations as Dynamic Assemblage

Our starting point is simple. We believe that researchers should neither erase nor under-play any of the main elements that constitute human-environment relations. Materialspace, the body-in-space, talk in/about space or the “inner” experience of place, all ofthese elements somehow combine to constitute the human-environment relations. The

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More Than Words 49

challenge is to find an approach that reconciles—or at least accommodates—these disparateprocesses.

Drawing on Durrheim et al.’s (2013) work and on Wetherell’s (2012) discussion ofaffect and emotion, we re-conceptualise the discourse-material environment nexus as adynamic assemblage: an ever-shifting but temporarily stabilised entanglement of spatialarrangements (including geographical locations, physical objects and spatial boundaries),embodied practices, and discursive constructions (i.e., socially organised and orientedpatterns of language use) of environment and people-place relations. Treating human-environment relations as an assemblage entails reconceptualising such relations as fleetingcrystallizations that emerge through the indissoluble composition of properties and prac-tices, and not from the interaction between ontologically bounded spaces or bodies ordiscourses. Developing this idea, we take theoretical bearings from Wetherell’s (2012,pp. 15–19) concept of assemblage—“something, in other words, that comes into shapeand continues to change and refigure as it flows on,” as part of “an organic complex inwhich all the parts relationally constitute each other.”

From this perspective, the linguistic and the material, the intangible and the physical,the imagined and the real, are re-specified as relational properties and processes that perma-nently create, reproduce and modify human-environment relations as part of an indissolubleunity. Materiality and the emplaced body are neither more nor less “real” than the discursiveproductions with which they dynamically interrelate in order to produce environments that,at some point, become “thinkable,” “feel-able,” “usable” and so on.

By redefining the practices that construct human-environment relations as dynamicassemblages, we acknowledge that some elements will remain under-explored in any givenmoment of analysis, which inevitably entails limitations of emphasis, focus, and perspec-tive. We acknowledge, too, that the concept of assemblage may stand in lieu of a betterdeveloped vocabulary, methodology and perhaps even political imagination. Nevertheless,we believe that this concept allows us to begin to transcend the discourse-space dualism.Most important, it replaces an analytics of disjunction (discourse or materiality) with ananalytics of articulation and jointness (discourse/materiality). Ultimately, in this article atleast, we are less interested in showing what discursive and spatial-material analysis inde-pendently contribute than in showing what is missing if we do not explore them together(for similar approaches, see Conlon 2004 on the mutual constitution of public space, bodiesand sexualities, and Tamboukou 2010 on assemblage as a new social ontology illustratedthrough the interrelationships between education and art in women’s narratives). In the nextsection, we seek to foster an emerging analytics of assemblage by outlining an illustrativecase study.

The Struggle over the “Hole of Shame”

The public space lying at the heart of the medieval neighbourhood of Santa Caterina(Barcelona) was earmarked for urban development in 1985, but lack of progress raisedconcerns amongst local residents. The neighbourhood was poor, deprived and in decline.Its residents worried that the city council had abandoned a proposal to create a civic, greenspace for residents in favour of developing upmarket flats, trendy shops and elite restau-rants. The 6500m2 area in the middle of the neighbourhood—known locally as the Holeof Shame—had stood vacant for several years, and suspicions arose that local inhabitantswere being gradually eased out of the area. In an expression of collective resistance, agroup of residents occupied the Hole of Shame in December 2000 and created the so-called“Self-Managed Park of the Hole of Shame.”

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Between 2000 and 2007, a complex, and occasionally violent, struggle unfoldedbetween the various parties interested in the space’s development. Some parties affirmed therights of local people to create a self-managed park (residents, neighbours and squatters);others sought to enforce the original urban regeneration plan (city council and developers);still others were opposed in principle to the occupation but also criticized the city council’splan (members of local civic organisations). Ultimately, following a controversial consul-tation process, the Self-Managed Park of the Hole of Shame was demolished, its occupantsevicted, and an institutionally approved public square was created in its stead. The Hole ofShame became “Figuera’s Well gardens.”

Elsewhere, we have presented a detailed analysis of discourse about the evolution ofthis public space. We have described, for instance, how stakeholders constructed, contestedand warranted different versions of human-environment relations in order both to justify theoccupation and to oppose it (see Di Masso, Dixon & Pol 2011). However useful in its ownright, this earlier work also highlighted for us the limitations of a methodological and con-ceptual approach based solely on the analysis of linguistic texts. It seemed to gloss over vitalfeatures of the struggle for the Hole of Shame and, perhaps most important, the intimateconnections between the discursive, embodied and material dimensions of that struggle.At the same time, simply supplanting an approach focused on everyday language about theHole with an approach that emphasized its concrete and embodied nature seemed to us tomiss the point. The concept of place-assemblage thus emerged as a potentially useful ana-lytical tool—a tool that highlighted how the Hole’s transformation comprised a process inwhich material and discursive elements were complexly and dynamically imbricated and,in fact, how understanding the role of one element literally demanded understanding therole of the other.

A Methodological Perspective on the Analysis of Place-Assemblages

The analysis of place-assemblages presents two methodological challenges. On the onehand, we require techniques for gathering data that can somehow capture a complex objectof inquiry: the emerging interplay between material features of place, embodied relationsin place, and linguistic constructions of place that crystallise into a dynamic unity. Hereplace-assemblage defines a unit of analysis and operates as a methodological concept.On the other hand, once data are gathered, a second analytic challenge emerges: How do weunravel not only isolated instances of discourse or space or embodiment, but also momentsof assemblage? This points to the ontological dimension of assemblage as a “portion” ofreality, and it raises epistemological questions insofar as such an exercise of unravellinginevitably requires an imaginative process of reconstruction that owes as much to the ana-lyst’s interpretive frame and personal investments, as it does to self-evident features locatedeither within the environment itself or within the textual practices that surround it.

When analysing the Hole of Shame case study, for example, we began by collecting awide range of kinds of empirical data, including photographs taken by the first author whiledoing fieldwork at the time of highest intensity of the conflict (2004–2005), pictures andtexts published by local newspapers, social movements’ blogs, visual material recorded aspart of a video-documentary entitled “El Forat” (“The Hole”), shot by a local inhabitantin real-time as the struggle unfolded, and newspaper accounts. We then selected a seriesof socio-spatial episodes that seemed to implicate, simultaneously, discursive constructionsof place, the transformation of material objects and architecture, and embodied practices.Next, we divided episodes into two kinds of place-assemblages depending on the temporalstructure of the discourse-material-bodies entanglement. By temporal structure we mean

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More Than Words 51

the “real timing” of the relational articulation of material, embodied and discursive prop-erties meeting in the actual episode to create a “locational” reality. One set of episodesincluded text or talk physically located in the Hole of Space that seemed to have a “place-indexical” quality, making sense only when emplaced geographically (e.g., see Scollon& Scollon 2003; Benwell & Stokoe 2006, pp. 209–10). The other set of events involvedcircular sequences of text/talk, spatially located embodied actions and physical environ-mental changes (i.e., materially consequential discursive action frames and discursivelyconsequential material actions). As we will illustrate, the timing factor is central. It keepsanalysis within the margins of what we could call a space-embedded criterion of “observ-able relevance” (Antaki 1994). That is, analysis concentrates on what is actually going onin the space, as a space-and-time pattern of assembled properties. However, this processinvolves a narrative reconstruction of events years after the struggle happened. Since thetime factor is central in shaping place-assemblages, we may acknowledge that an “in vivo”analysis of those episodes would have probably offered a perspective closer to the “zeit-geist” of the ongoing struggle, not easily reproducible years later but nonetheless presentin the first author’s personal background.

With these methodological notes in mind, we now present some examples drawn fromour Hole of Shame case study. Textual extracts were translated from Spanish or Catalan bythe first author, and are presented here as standard written text.

Empirical Analysis: Place-Assemblage in Action

For the purpose of this article, we have selected two sequences of events that, quite lit-erally, became landmarks in the Hole of Shame struggle. The first event inaugurated theoccupation when a group of local inhabitants planted a Christmas tree in the middle of theempty space. The second event involved the creation of a wall and shortly afterwards itsdestruction. Both events set in motion an assemblage of practices that progressively shapedand reshaped the local environment to create a new reality for those living there. The pho-tographs and extracts 1 and 2 included in this analysis belong to the video-documentarymentioned in the previous subsection.

Episode One: Planting the Christmas Tree. The Hole of Shame struggle was, above all, astruggle over spatial occupation and control. Indeed, use of the term “occupation” is onlypossible because the struggle involved the physical appropriation, use and transformationof an empty patch of ground. The planting of a symbolic fir tree on December 15, 2000(Figure 1) represented its (concrete) starting point. The neighbour who video-recorded thisevent offered the following account:

Extract 1Despite the fact the Ayuntamiento1 has not made clear what is going to be doneon the soil, the demolitions have started already. A small group of neighboursclaim for a green zone. That’s why they have planted a Christmas tree.

The planting of this tree began to create a place whose meaning, we would argue, aroseonly through the interrelation of its various material, embodied, and linguistic elements.A number of things are worth noting here. First, what was planted was a tree and not, say,a flag, washing machine, or city council sign: the object was chosen to signify somethinggreen, natural, organic and true—not as a matter of necessity, but in combination withthe other elements with which it was imbricated (e.g., Extract 1). Second and relatedly,

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Figure 1. Fir tree planted inside the Hole of Shame (Source. “El Forat”; Falconetti 2004).

this process depended upon a complex amalgam including the tree as a cultural sign, theimmediate physicality of the tree, the bodily practices involved in the planting, and thediscourse that arose around its planted presence. Third, it is not incidental that this treewas installed inside the empty space. The location chosen had place-indexical properties,made possible by that environment and not just any other. If the tree had been planted just astreet away, for example, its meaning would have been entirely different. Fourth, of course,we concede that planting the tree did not, in itself, articulate, elucidate or finish a politicalproject. Accounts such as Extract 1 allow us to glimpse how the fir tree was rhetoricallyconstituted as an act of political protest. Nevertheless, we insist that this outcome arosethrough the indissoluble combination of material, geo-indexical and discursive propertiesthat created, in that space, a meaning-full reality. It arose as an assemblage.

This theme can be illustrated further by considering the sequence of events that fol-lowed the planting of the tree. To begin with, the act of planting was itself read as a seditiousaction by local authorities, who responded by sending an official to chop the tree down onFebruary 21, 2001. Residents responded by planting a second tree on March 9, 2001. Thesignificance of this act arose partly through the discursive practices that defined its mean-ings. As Extract 2 illustrates, for example, neighbours constructed the second planting as apositive act of resistance, an act that somehow encapsulated their political project to givethe space “life” as a green environment for local people. However, at least in part, suchaccounts made sense and became effective because they were entwined with other materialand embodied practices.

Extract 2Here in the neighbourhood we have decided, the neighbours and the Hole ofShame Collective, to buy another fir tree. Tomorrow with the kids we’ll deco-rate it a little and if this is a problem for the Ayuntamiento because we haven’tasked them for permission, we ask permission now: permission so they don’tremove it because it has life, that one has life.

To begin with, the second tree was of the same species as the original tree (a fir) and itwas planted in exactly the same spot as its predecessor. In this way, it could materiallyembody the tenacity of a grass-roots struggle whose environmental vision had not been

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Figure 2. Hand-written sign in the second fir tree (Source. “El Forat”; Falconetti 2004).

altered by the official intervention. If a different tree had been planted in a different place, itspolitical environmental meanings would also have been altered. In addition, once installed,the new tree could become a focus of other kinds of place-making practices. Consider, forexample, the photograph presented in Figure 2, which depicts a hand-written sign hungfrom the branches of the second tree shortly after its planting. The sign reads: “I have a life.Don’t cut me. Don’t kill me like happened to my brother (the Neighbours’ Collective ofthe Hole of Shame).” The “death in the family” image here is clearly part of the rhetoric ofenvironmental resistance: it serves both as a condemnation of past government action andas an emotive plea against future intervention. Crucially, however, it signifies a particularset of environmental meanings precisely because it is hanging from that tree in that spaceand not, say, on the wall of an activist’s living room. That is, again, it operates as a part ofan assemblage of place-making properties.

To conclude our discussion of this opening example, we wish to add that this secondtree was also removed and, once more, an identical tree was replanted in the same place.Indeed, over the next year, several more trees appeared in the site of the original fir treeand numerous community activities were organised there, including meals, street-theatre,musical events and bicycle workshops. When police finally removed the park and evictedits defendants in November, 2002, a digger was sent in to uproot the Christmas tree (seeFigure 3) and the administration erected a wall around the Hole of Shame in order to pre-vent access to it. Interestingly, in this context, occupants’ resistance replaced the plantingof “real” trees with the production of symbols, objects and graffiti that incorporated treesymbolism as part of a place-indexical rhetoric of resistance (see Figure 4).

Episode Two: The Wall of Shame. The Hole of Shame was cleared in November 2002 anda quite different assemblage of elements emerged. Its occupants were evicted en masse,several being physically wounded and arrested in the process (see Figure 5). Systemsof defence and surveillance were implemented to ensure that they did not return. Treeswere uprooted and other traces of the occupation removed. New territorial boundaries wereerected—initially in the form of plastic tapes that read “Police – keep out” and later in theform of a concrete wall designed to permanently restrict access to the Hole (see Figure 6).

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Figure 3. A digger uproots the fir tree (Source. “El Forat”; Falconetti 2004).

Figure 4. Graffiti in the Hole of Shame (Source. Nova Ciutat Vella n◦72).

Figure 5. Police charge in the Hole of Shame in November 2002 (Source. © Jordi Roviralta/EdicionesEl País, S.L., 2014).

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Figure 6. Policemen standing by the Wall of Shame (Source. Isabel Esterman, http://www.flickr.com/photos/isa_e/1959474001/in/set-72157603208358260/).

To adapt Sack’s (1986, p. 21) phrase, these boundaries expressed simultaneously “. . . astatement about direction in space with a statement about possession and exclusion.”

The bodily removal of occupants and the construction of the perimeter wall created, inturn, a material context that profoundly shaped emerging discourse about the nature of theHole of Shame:

Extract 3We denounce that, while the neighbour movement has dignified the Hole ofShame planting trees in it, the Ayuntamiento has privatised this urban space bybuilding, under the police’s protection, a wall of shame that degrades the envi-ronment and criminalises the neighbours. We denounce that the lack of meansto face the citizens’ fear of crime that we all suffer contrasts with the hugeabundance of forces of the Guardia Urbana2 to repress the neighbour move-ment and to besiege the Hole of the Shame night and day during all week toguard a simple wall. We believe that a popular initiative to defend a green areafrom the threat of speculative projects and to humanise an urban space devas-tated by the massive and indiscriminate demolitions deserves to be respectedby the public institutions.

In the account offered by the occupants’ social movement in Extract 3, for example, thenew defensive architecture of the Hole was portrayed both as an incarnation of the gov-ernment’s neglect of local citizens’ demands and as an attempt to privatize what wasformerly an accessible and green space. This rhetorical contrast between the two spaceswas clearly designed to problematize the intervention. In pointing this out, we are not sug-gesting that talk about environmental neglect and privatization was inevitably associatedwith particular spatial or embodied transformations. Indeed, widely varying accounts of itssignificance emerged at this time. Some framed the changes as a positive and necessarystep in the space’s development, others as a degradation of a valued environment of thecommunity. Some highlighted the legitimacy of police action, others its illegitimacy. Someargued for calm acceptance, others for collective protest. Yet all of these accounts were

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56 A. Di Masso and J. Dixon

oriented, in one way or another, to the shifting realities of an environment that had beentransformed in its basic design, layout and patterns of access, occupancy, movement andusage. Accounts did not float free or independent of this reality but were complexly focusedon, enmeshed with, and delimited by, many other non-linguistic properties shaping aplace-assemblage.

By the same token, of course, discursive constructions of the material changes wroughtby local council and police created the impetus for forms of action designed to uphold orreverse precisely those changes. Thus, during a public assembly, one neighbour explicitlyproposed to “gather in a demonstration, starting in the Hole of Shame, knocking downthe wall and taking the debris to the Ayuntamiento.” This proposal met with applauseand, immediately afterwards, some revealing graffiti appeared on the wall of shame (seeFigure 7). It read “1, 2, 3, Boom,” anticipating the collective action that was soon to takeplace there, across the talking bricks. The ensuing demonstration (see Figure 8) began aftera popular meal and a music concert had taken place close to the wall and took the form ofa march through the neighbouring streets of Casc Antic. Yet again, we would argue, thesedetails of geographic placement and route are not inconsequential but an intrinsic part ofits meaning. As they arrived back at the wall of shame, protestors used their hands, stones,fence posts, bricks, sticks and pliers to cut the wire and knock down the wall (see Figure 9).Within half an hour, it had disappeared and hundreds of people had gathered inside theHole of Shame. They clapped their hands in joy and used spades to dig new holes in thesoil and put new plants in them.

The point of this brief outline is not to offer a detailed or exhaustive account of eventsthat led to the creation of the so-called second Self-Managed Park of the Hole of Shame.Rather, we wish merely to indicate how such events implicated a complex, unfolding andmutually constitutive set of practices in which the line between discourse, materiality andthe body was constantly being blurred. In this process of territorial reclamation, a complexassemblage of tangible and intangible practices served to create, or perhaps more accu-rately to recover, a particular form of human-environment relations, including speeches,marching, writing on the wall, digging and planting, and the physical destruction of territo-rial boundaries. This assemblage reconstructed the identity of place by “plugging” its manytexts, bodies, movements and spaces into one other in different ways and at different scales

Figure 7. Graffiti on the Wall of Shame (Source. “El Forat”; Falconetti 2004).

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More Than Words 57

Figure 8. Demonstration before knocking down the wall (Source. Arquitectes Sense Fronteres).

Figure 9. The people knock down the wall (Source. “El Forat”; Falconetti 2004).

(from the micro-location of signs to police actions and institutional bylaws) (see Malins2004). The “green and public space” of the local community was resurrected, even if it wasnot to last.

Conclusion

Our rationale for writing this article was to extend the emerging discursive psychologicalapproach to human-environment relations. Discursive psychological research has alreadymade several important contributions to this field of inquiry, notably by drawing attention tothe role of everyday language in constructing the meanings of place and person-place rela-tionships. By the same token, however, such research has generally overlooked how suchmeanings and relationships are not a product of linguistic practices alone. If the discursiveperspective on human-environment relations is to evolve, we feel that it needs to transcendits traditional comfort zones—to look beyond the analysis of linguistic texts in isolation

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58 A. Di Masso and J. Dixon

and towards a more expansive approach that incorporates a wider range of methods, dataand sensitizing concepts.

In this regard, we have advocated an analytic framework that seeks to transcend thespace-discourse dualism implicit in the human-environment divide, by providing a morecomplex, psychosocial account of emplaced subjectivity and social practice. Our frame-work presupposes that physical spaces, embodied practices and place-talk simultaneouslyshape each other as constituents of a same (but shifting) unity of sense and meaning.As such, neither arises as an independent or sui generis reality. Rather, they are alwaysparts of an unfolding assemblage of elements, which crystallize in moments of mutual con-stitution and delimitation within particular contexts. We have used the Hole of Shame casestudy to illustrate just a few ways in which such assemblages unfolded within a particularenvironment. In so doing, this framework echoes Foucauldian work that treats language asinseparable from other meaning-making practices within discursive formations that alreadyinclude material spaces and embodied relations. Here, the discourse-space divide is simplyirrelevant. However, we believe that even to this audience the analytic tool of assem-blage is useful as a sensitizing concept, particularly as a methodological resource to guideanalysis of the mutual constitution of space, language, material artefacts and bodies asarticulate-able properties of subjectivity that only make sense in relation to each other overtime.

Empirically, of course, a focus on assemblage poses a number of methodological chal-lenges. It requires data-gathering techniques able to record complex patterns of space,bodies and discourse over time (e.g., video-records, ethnographic records), whether astextures of meaning that are inevitably unstable (see Wetherell 2012) or as sequences ofaction-oriented talk, bodily practices and physical environmental changes. It also requiresmodes of interpretation able to trace the environmental-psychological implications of com-plex entanglements of elements within specific spaces and also, perhaps, new ways ofreporting and evaluating our findings. We believe that these challenges can and shouldbe met. Their resolution promises to yield a richer understanding of spatial “experiences”such as place identification and attachment, spatial behaviours such as boundary construc-tion and territorial personalization, and spatial problems such as segregation and exclusion.We can both capitalise on and develop the contribution of discursive to environmentalpsychology.

Notes

1. City council.2. Local police forces.

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About the Authors

Andrés Di Masso, PhD, is a lecturer in Political Psychology and Qualitative Methods at theUniversity of Barcelona, Spain. His research focuses on the social construction of spaceand the ideological regulation of people-place relations.

John Dixon, PhD, is Professor of Social Psychology at The Open University, UnitedKingdom, and co-editor, with Jolanda Jetten, of the British Journal of Social Psychology.His publications include Racial Encounter: The Social Psychology of Contact andDesegregation (2005), co-authored with Kevin Durrheim.

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