The art of inclusion: phenomenology, placemaking and the role of the arts

ABSTRACT

This paper extends emerging research on the role of the arts in placemaking by introducing readers to the theories of Hannah Arendt. Specifically, it outlines the value of an Arendtian phenomenological framework for conceiving why, how and in what ways ‘inclusion’ could and should operate in placemaking. The paper first presents an outline of Arendt’s phenomenological approach. An exploratory case study of arts activities in a rural Irish town is then employed to illustrate the explanatory potential of this approach. The paper closes by reflecting on how an Arendtian approach suggests important lessons for placemaking research and practice.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the interviewees and residents of Callan for the generosity shown with their time and insights during a very busy period.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There are various ‘traditions’ within phenomenology. These are broadly centred around trajectories set by the concerns of key philosophers in the field. Such concerns include issues of relational perception and understanding in the broad areas of: ‘epistemology’ (Husserl); ‘ontology’ (Heidegger); ‘existentialism’ (Sartre); ‘ethics’ (Levinas); ‘hermeneutics’ (Gadamer); and ‘embodiment’ (Merleau-Ponty). Indeed, as noted by Moran (2002,18), phenomenology is ‘a fractured movement, and its inspiration often appears to run like an underground stream enriching the ground rather than as an explicit and self-confident movement in its own right’.

2. Arendt rejected the label of ‘political philosopher’, which she believed to be associated with metaphysical abstractions that paid scant attention to the role of experience (Young-Bruehl 2008).

3. Although she distinguishes between them, Arendt did not believe that ‘what’ we are (e.g. physically disabled male) is completely separable from ‘who’ we are (i.e. our uniqueness). She was fully aware of how the interplay between social context and ‘what’ we are influences ‘who’ we are. Arendt’s project was to resist a growing tendency to reduce the depth of the latter by way of the former.

4. Arendt termed such productive-consumptive activities as ‘labour’. She argued that, ‘The endlessness of the labouring process is guaranteed by the ever-recurrent needs of consumption; the endlessness of production can be assured only if its products lose their use character and become more and more objects of consumption, or if, to put it another way, the rate of use is so tremendously accelerated that the objective difference between use and consumption, between the relative durability of use objects and the swift coming and going of consumer goods dwindles to insignificance’ (Arendt 1958, 125).

5. There is a sense here to which Arendt’s political phenomenology provides a theoretical antecedent to the critical theory of Axel Honneth on ‘recognition’ and Jurgen Habermas on ‘communicative action’, both of whom have acknowledged that her thinking informed their own.

6. Arendt is here referring to the intentional actualization of something in the world that had previously existed in the mind(s) of the designer(s). She refers to this as ‘work’, which as argued by Seyla Benhabib is a phenomenological description of a type of experience rather than an empirical generalization about what people actually do (Benhabib 2003).

7. Arendt exhibits what Dana Villa terms ‘creative appropriations’ of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology, such that ‘Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as primordially both being-in-the-world and a being-with-others helped her to place worldliness and human plurality at the heart of human freedom rather than at the extreme margins’ (Villa 1999, 76). However, as noted by Kattago, ‘while Heidegger tends to be solipsistic and orientated towards the self, Arendt is more interested in the relations of the self to others’ (Kattago 2013, 172).

8. This is reflective of Arendt’s broader suspicion of any form of philosophical essentialism, be it metaphysical (e.g. human rights) or empiricist (e.g. behavioural approaches in economics).

9. Arendt sometimes draws on the metaphor of birth to refer to this experience as ‘natality’, such that action is conceived as a the ‘actualization of the human condition of natality’ (Arendt 1958, 178).

10. The Ballytobin Camphill Community had purchased land in Callan in 1992 for the construction of a housing project to cater for Camphill residents who would have grown up in the Ballytobin Community. However, the need to respond to the specific and pressing artistic needs of a Ballytobin Camphill Community resident meant that work on establishing KCAT took precedence.

11. Workhouses were institutions that operated in Ireland from the early 1840s to the early 1920s. Should people not be able to support themselves they could come into the workhouse. Here they would undertake manual labour in exchange for basic food and accommodation.

12. This is Irish (Gaelic) for which an English translation reads ‘King’s River’.

13. Most commonly referred to by interviewees as the ‘Bridge Street Project’.

14. The premises also served – sometimes simultaneously – as a funeral home and grocery store.