Spatialities of ‘community’, power and change: The imagined geographies of community arts projects

This article draws on current discussions about the discursive construction of space. Different organizations of space are produced in part by different discourses about social identity, as Stuart Hall, for example, has recently been arguing. This suggests that to change oppressive definitions of identity it is also necessary to rethink the spatialities which give both material and symbolic structure to those definitions. This article explores the politics of one particular spatialization of identity in the discourse of one group of cultural workers. This is the identity of those with whom the workers work — people living in the peripheral housing estates of the Scottish city of Edinburgh — which the workers spatialize through their complex use of the term ‘community’. Drawing on in-depth interviews with community arts workers in the city, I argue that they radicalize the notion of ‘community’ by placing it in a geography of lack, and that in so doing they articulate both the costs of marginalization and fragile, non-essentializing possibilities for change.