International Symposium: ‘After Tokyo Olympic: Re-Evaluation of Downtown North’, ‘Big Ben: Historicity, Spatiality and Knowledge Formation’

Image: University of Tokyo event poster

Tomoko Tamari was invited as a keynote speaker for the International Symposium: ‘After Tokyo Olympic: Re-Evaluation of Downtown North’ held on November 14, 2020. The symposium was organised by the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. Tomoko discussed city landscape and history.

‘Big Ben: Historicity, Spatiality and Knowledge Formation’
Tomoko Tamari

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to re-contextualize London’s landscape from the spatial-historical perspective. By doing so, the paper attempts to demonstrate how landscape as a space, is fundamental in various cultural forms in the history. There are many iconic architectures and landscapes in London, but I particularly focus on Big Ben. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia, the paper explores. For Foucault, space plays in our history. In his book The Order of Things, heterotopias had described Borges’ Chinese Encyclopaedia, which indicates non-liner form of memory and knowledge.

Image: Keynote slide

This opened up Foucault’s ideas on knowledge production, classification and ordering.  For him, heterotopias act as ‘counter-sites, spaces in contestation of, or in contrast or opposition to’ other sites (Genocchio cited in Topinka 2010). Such contestation creates crucial conditions to generate new ways of ordering and to evoke new classification. Hence heterotopias can be seen as spaces to store and invert the existing knowledge and to creates condition for new knowledge formation will emerge. Big Ben as a heterotopic space which cannot be considered as the fixed and singular, but it can be seen as ‘many spaces in one site’. It can, therefore, be seen as a contested space, which evokes new knowledge and classification will be formed. Big Ben as a space offers ‘spatial histories’ and new ways of knowing of social life. Hence, this suggests that space is historical and ‘a history framed as a history of the present’, Stuart Elden claims.