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Spatial Cleansing

Monumental Vacuity and the Idea of the West

Harvard University, USA

This article comprises preliminary remarks about spatiality and power, with a particular focus on field data from Greece and Thailand (with secondary materials from Italy). I suggest that the creation of large open spaces in city contexts, generating a marked contrast with local tolerance of crowding, represents the intrusive presence of regimentation and aesthetic domination. Within a larger pattern of conceding to hegemonic ideas about classical ornamentation as well as rational town-planning, such idioms of ‘spatial cleansing’ create a context entirely compatible with the current structures of economic inequality. They also occlude the understandings of past experience that characterize local groups wishing to remain in historic centers; it is noteworthy that in Thailand, where the middle class has not yet succumbed to the global fashion for antique domestic spaces as has its counterpart in Italy (and to a lesser extent in Greece), it is the poor who seem more interested in calibrating their lives to official master narratives in the hope of being rewarded with continued rights to inhabit their existing lived environment.

Key Words: historic conservation • power class • southern Europe • spatiality • Thailand

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