Paul Simpson (Plymouth Geography) 'Spacing politics and methods in ambiance and atmospheres research: Listenings from St Pancras and Gare du Nord'

Part of the Listening Workshop

Friday 17^th January 2014

2pm 11 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3RF, Room F3

Recent work on affect in Anglophone human geography has opened up new material frontiers by theorizing affective atmospheres. In such work   we see an adjustment of thinking towards and around the relations   between bodies and their environments by considering the ways in which   bodies are situated within diffuse, distributed, sensible, and   potentially turbulent 'volumes'. However, Anglophone human geographers   have not been alone in thinking through these sorts of relations. Emerging largely independently from this work, Francophone scholars   have developed an established body of work considering 'ambiances' as   the milieu of social life. Work here has sought to understand the relations of perception in compositions between individuals,   collectives, and their environments, and the co-production of a pervasive and immediate felt sense of space that can emerge from this. In this paper I stage a conversation between these two areas of research. Thinking from atmosphere to ambiance, I suggest that work on affective   atmospheres can help fill a perceived gap in the extant ambiances   literature around what an ambiance-based mode of critique might look like. Thinking from ambiance to atmospheres, I argue that work on ambiance   has demonstrated a far more sophisticated interest in methodological   development and so can therefore help fill a widely noted gap in the affective atmospheres literature on this. This is all illustrated by considering and ultimately reorienting the use of sound in producing specific secure atmospheres/ambiances in two mobile spaces: St   Pancras, London and Gare du Nord, Paris.

Paul Simpson is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of   Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at Plymouth University. His research interests related to the social and cultural geographies   of everyday life and the use of urban public spaces. He is currently pursuing these interests through a collaborative L'Agence nationale de la recherché funded research project that considers the significance of ambiances and atmospheres to understandings of the experience of urban mobilities.