Abstract
This article proposes an alternative spatial form for a university campus, which embeds itself within the region, in which it is located. The proposed campus spacing is inspired by recent research from the environmental psychology discipline, around Attention Restorative Theory, along with its central four principles. Furthermore, the article explores how a critical interpretation of Foucault’s six heterotopic principles, following Harvey, maps onto Attention Restorative Theory principles and reflexively unmasks the dialectic tensions of what is termed ‘restorative, heterotopic spacing’. Focusing on the potential implications to campus sustainability, a specific campus initiative called the Oberlin Project will be critically explored, in relation to the potential enactment of Attention Restorative Theory, from an academic and local community perspective. It reflects on the significance of an artistic, regional set of trans-disciplinary integrated initiatives for such restorative spacing, within the expanded urban and regional notion of Oberlin campus. However, it concludes by expressing a concern over the extent to which the generative embrace of diverse Oberlin actors, both on and off campus, is being fulfilled.
Keywords
Introduction
This article focuses on alternative, contested geographies, within university campuses and their localities, in the context of ecological sustainability. It draws on the field of environmental psychology for inspiration in spatialising such alternatives. As Tucker (2010: 526) argues, ‘theorising psychological activity as a spatial product appears a logical extension of moves in social theory to emphasize the role of space and place in the consideration of experience’. The focus here is around spatialising the increasingly influential theory from environmental psychology, Attention Restorative Theory (ART) (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989).
The article aims to contribute to three areas of human geography research through the integration of psychology theory. Drawing from Hopkins (2011), the first human geography research area tends to focus on how university campuses are sites of activism and resistance. For example, M’Gonigle and Starke’s (2006) study, published in this journal, is a particular inspiration, as it explores campus-based activist activity around sustainability. The second research area tends to focus on the relationships between university campuses and the local region and city. The third research area explores how the internal places, structures and processes are experienced in empowering or exclusionary ways.
As Hopkins (2011) points out, there needs to be a greater focus on integrating these different areas of research. More specifically, this article contributes to how new potential geographies of social and spatial relations within higher education institutions could contest the way university campuses are constructed, managed and experienced, in relation to sustainability (Philo and Parr, 2000). Many university and college actors, such as academic faculty, students and local community groups, are struggling to contribute meaningfully to sustainability, in the institutional context of league table demands. More specifically, many academic actors are feeling cynical, powerless and mistrustful of the ecological sustainability agenda of their universities.
In light of the above institutional pressures, this article poses the question of how university actors could contribute more and gain a more involved relationship to the campus sustainability discourse. Could an alternative university campus space offer a way to rupture the usual horizons of time and space within universities? Searching for clues, this article is inspired by Beyes and Michels (2011), and asks the question of how universities can enact ‘other spaces’, which open up to positive emancipatory power, where surprising things may happen, rather than closed down for negative control. It also follows Davies (2006), who reminds us that university actors can dissent from normalising categories and spaces to subvert and disrupt the institutional status quo.
How can we conceptualise and enact these ‘other’ spaces, both on campus and within the city and region where they are located? This article is inspired by ART to conceptualise a campus ‘other’ space, embodying its de-familiarising narrative. Initial research around ART was based on the significance of underlying spatial attributes shared by specific natural environment–person interactions, in which an individual’s involuntary non-directed attention is effortlessly engaged, without mental fatigue, in order to restore an individual’s directed attention (Herzog et al., 1997). In contrast to the directed attention demanded by the institutional, immediate tick-box demands of sustainability league tables, could ART’s focus on in-directed attention open up possibilities for contestation. Furthermore, could ART also provide a bio-cultural pathway to affect institutional change? Further emergent research around person – natural environment interactions, exhibiting ART factors or attributes, show how they have not only restored directed attention but also have reduced stress, have improved physical and emotional well-being, have fostered reflection and have increased pro-environmental behaviour (Hartig et al., 2007). Could the realisation of ART’s multiple psychological, reflective impact and its potential behavioural agency offer a conceptual basis for restoring our diverse bio-cultural relationship with campus sustainability agendas? As Ouellette et al. (2005) argues, there appears to be a paucity of research around the conceptualisation, enactment and benefits of restorative university settings. The article’s contextual focus on universities follows other ART research around museums, favourite places and monasteries (Kaplan et al., 1993; Korpela et al., 2001; Ouellette et al., 2005), in fostering a critical, bio-cultural engagement.
The main aim of the article is to spatialise the above ART conceptual lens by mapping the restorative principles of ART, with a dynamic and critical interpretation of Foucault’s (1984) heterotopic spatial principles, i.e. the notion of ‘restorative, hetorotopic spacing’ implied in this article’s title. The latter focus on the processual and critical notion of a heterotopia offers an emancipatory mechanism to explore any emergent tensions over time and space between what is planned and what is enacted.
Conceptual and methodological structure: Mapping ART/heterotopic spacing within the Oberlin Project
The core of the article will specifically endeavour to explore the role of ART’s four principles or attributes (elaborated within later sections) within the socio-spatial enactment of such potential restorative settings, around university campuses and their locality (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989):
Being-Away; Fascination; Extent; Compatibility.
As research around these four ART principles has only been described in broad terms, this article moves further and endeavours to develop a conceptual clarity around such an emergent enactment. Although physical or spatial qualities of ART are sometimes implied (such as the significance of different physical or conceptual settings to restore directed attention), how the principles may be expressed in socio-spatial form is not elaborated, particularly with respect to a university context. Therefore, the following endeavours to gain a social-spatial understanding of restorative university spaces, through connecting the different ART principles with Foucault’s (1984) notion of different forms of heterotopias and their constituent heterotopic principles. Such heterotopic principles are used here as they represent (similar to ART) a means to point to different, other spaces that reflexively contest the space we live in, whilst providing a context for action (Steyaert, 2006). They also both possess the disconnecting and connecting spatial quality, which could be complementary. These six heterotopic principles (also elaborated in the following sections) are as follows:
heterotopias have systems of opening and closing; heterotopias function in relation to all remaining space; heterotopias are linked to ‘slices of time’; several spaces may be juxtaposed in a single heterotopia; the function of a heterotopia may change over time; heterotopias may be either based on crises or deviance.
It is pertinent to point out that Harvey (2009) is particularly critical of Foucault’s notion of a heterotopia, compared with Lefebvre’s (2005) perspective. He argues that the former is an escapist, fairy-tale like fetish, with an emphasis on the separateness of ‘other spaces’, in which non-normative practices can emerge, which are somehow outside the dominant social order. He moves on to assert that it is no accident that Foucault singles out the seafaring ‘ship’ as the ‘heterotopia par excellence’, since in highlighting ‘pirates’ and ‘adventure’, Foucault reveals this fairy-tale like separateness of a heterotopia (Harvey, 2009: 160). Alternatively, Harvey (2009) reveals that we must embrace Lefebvre’s more dynamic version of a heterotopia, which focuses on a dialectical tension in the interplay between the heterotopia’s space of desire and the restless colonisation of the dominant order. The usefulness of a heterotopia does not rely on ‘segregation and separation, but about potentially transformative relations with all other spaces’ (Harvey, 2009: 162). The emancipatory potential of a heterotopia lies in avoiding being entirely reclaimed by the dominant praxis and altering that dominant praxis in some progressive way.
Both spatial properties of contestation and agency around Lefebvre’s dynamic notion of heterotopia could prove pertinent here. Such a notion could act as an ontological check to Foucault’s conceptual frame, considering the dominant institutional pressures on universities to focus their attention on rising up compartmentalised sustainability league tables, rather than acting as bio-cultural societal change agents (Cortese, 2003). In this context, the article follows the notion that a university is viewed as offering generative, process-based, heterotopic ‘other’ spaces (Saldanha, 2008). Moreover, as Beyes and Steyaert (2012: 53) argue, being attentive to the open-ended and processual notion of ‘spacing’, rather than ‘space’, directs attention towards embodied affects and encounters generated in the here-and-now. Such heterotopic spacing highlights neglected spatialities and invents new ones (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 4). Therefore, the notion of ‘spacing’ offers such an agency, compared with the use of ‘space’. It puts space back into the hands of the different actors and reminds us that ultimately someone’s conceived fairy-tale can be someone else’s living nightmare. As Saldanha (2008: 2091) reminds us, the Derridean question remains: alternate to whom? This would then align with the argument that no space is free of some internal discordance and conflict.
Focusing on inventing and naming neglected spatialities, the article develops a heuristic conceptual framework around what could be termed restorative, heterotopic spacing. It does this by mapping the above six heterotopic principles based on their congruency with the four overarching ART principles. In order to take account of Lefebvre’s dialectic tension perspective on heterotopias, the article will highlight any possible tensions between different actors, emerging from the potential enactment of each ART principle. Put in another way, this heuristic could be used to critically understand how the potential of new forms of campus sustainability activities are not only conceived but also received by different actors, in both contesting and potentially changing institutional campus sustainability agendas. This reminds us of the difference between what Lefebvre (1991) aptly calls conceived space and lived space. Whereas conceived space refers to conceptually constructed space, finding its expression in plans, images and models as well as in physical manifestations, lived space refers to the non-specialist production of space by bodily enactment, arising from users making symbolic use of objects.
But how can these alternative campus spacing activities be identified? Reacting to the polarisation of space and place, could Braun’s (2001) notion of extending the notion of campus by experiencing it as an event or project space prove pertinent here? This research suggests that the history of place erupts in the present, suggesting that we reconceptualise ‘place’ as an event that happens. The distinctiveness of a physical setting is not essentially of that place, but is constituted elsewhere.
Translating Braun’s (2001) research to this article, this notion of restorative, heterotopic spacing could mean enacting campus place where it is historically not enacted, which does not consign the essence of particular places to an ever-receding, nostalgic past. This could effectively extend campus spacing to include the town/city/region but also actors beyond local place boundaries, dependent upon the enactment of the overarching spatial principles. This reminds us of M’Gonigle and Starke’s (2006) research around sustainability activism on campus, where they assert that the unique potential for innovation exists specifically in the local – non-local intersection, where the university begins to take its place-based boundedness and global relationality seriously. M’Gonigle and Starke (2006: 340) reiterate that the promise lies in creating a new form of place-based ‘community’, where one does not presently exist. It is rooted in one place but linked to other places, with its wider influence manifest as activities which ‘construct place as a project’.
One such illustrative example of a new spatial sustainability campus event or project space is the aptly named ‘Oberlin Project’, in Ohio, U.S.A. The Oberlin Project was initiated in the summer of 2009 by one senior academic, David Orr, with an alternative regional vision for Oberlin College. This vision is to create a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum neighbourhood, including Oberlin town and its surrounding area, encompassing a 13-acre piece of land the college owns in downtown Oberlin. Orr (2011) describes its aim as to revitalise the local economy, eliminate carbon emissions, restore local agriculture and forestry, and use the entire effort as an educational laboratory relevant to multiple disciplines. In terms of institutional support, in 2010, the President of Oberlin College became a lead partner with the College signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Clinton Foundation Climate Positive Development Program (CPDP) to attain climate neutrality by 2025. More recently, Daneri et al. (2015) point out, key actors represent not only the four full-time members of staff in the project office but Orr’s students themselves, who are driving a range of sustainability projects on and off campus.
Whilst focusing on the heterotopic vision of the Oberlin Project’s founder, this article also reflects here on how such a potential conceived space is being received and produced by different actors, particularly Orr’s environmental studies students and the wider local community. As Daneri et al. (2015) highlights the Oberlin Project is currently encountering numerous challenges around inclusion. By doing this, the article responds to a heterotopic critique by Saldanha (2008: 2091) who warns against ‘simply picking out spaces and labelling them “heterotopic”’, thereby ignoring the heterogeneity of power struggles and differences between different actors. The key point here is to find out where, how and for whom difference erupts and maintains itself. In the context of sustainability, the local community is particularly significant to focus upon here as 19.4% of Oberlin’s citizens are at or below the poverty line, compared with 9% for Lorain County, 10.6% for Ohio and 12.4% for the U.S. as whole.
In order to gain an appreciation of different actors’ views, this article specifically draws on any significant findings from Goldstein (2011), Johnson (2015), Daneri et al. (2015) and a specific report on local community perspectives (Management Assistance for Non-profit Agencies (MANA), 2013). Although the contribution here is more conceptual than empirical, this reflection around secondary research findings on the wider impact of the Oberlin Project is crucial to the article’s heuristic development. It is also recognised that this approach purely offers some indicative empirical research directions to explore around the on-going impact of the Oberlin Project.
The following sections will thereby endeavour to cover three themes. The first theme will explore the relationship between each ART principle and Foucault’s (1984) heterotopic principles. The second theme will then explore the extent to which the different conceived elements of the Oberlin Project’s match each principle. Finally, the third theme will explore how this space is being received by the students and local community to ascertain the extent to which the different principles are enacted.
Enacting attention restorative theory within a higher educational context?
Being-away
Being-away implies a setting that is physically or conceptually different from one’s everyday environment …. situations that involve psychological distance from aspects of one’s usual routines. (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989)
For example, Foucault (1984) argues that a heterotopia of illusion is where space and time could be collaged at will (in museum period rooms or on stage) and codes of behaviour could change very rapidly. A heterotopia of illusion creates a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory. This assists in the conceptualisation of the bio-cultural restorative heterotopia, as such a space clearly falls within the heterotopia of illusion, as it endeavours to expose what Bateson (1967: 10) refers to as ‘our absorbed societal beliefs and constructs which foster our illusions of supremacy, dominance, separation from the “natural” world and immunity from the consequences of our eco-systemic ignorance’.
The relationship between Being-Away and a heterotopia of illusion is the emphasis not only on being physically disconnected, but it points towards a space which psychologically disconnects, with a reflexive agency quality, which critically exposes and contests. The following sub-sections will endeavour to illustrate this quality by initially identifying a pertinent conceived Being-Away space for the Oberlin Project and then reflect on its enacted potential by focusing on local community views.
Implications of ‘Being-Away’ to the Oberlin Project’s conceived space
Is the Oberlin Project offering a potentially reflective, disconnecting space to more fully contest and then critically connect with and challenge the dominant institutional campus sustainability agenda? In terms of the former contesting function, Orr (2014) describes what could be construed as the ‘Being- Away’, disconnecting heterotopic quality of this campus conceived space, when he represents the intent of the Oberlin Project as ‘a jailbreak from the conventional silos, boundaries, pigeonholes, disciplines, and bureaucracies by which we have organized governments, economies, education, social movements, and entire worldviews’.
For Oberlin, ‘Being-Away’ points towards a form of trans-disciplinary space, operating within a geographical and social extension to the campus, embracing the wider local, urban community. Orr reflects on the importance of extending the university definition to the population of Oberlin, within an interview by Carlson (2011), Imagine taking the whole population and making that the schoolhouse. Why not get a holistic education in Oberlin, with people learning from teachers at the vocational school, the tradesmen with businesses here, the avid gardener, or the retired seamstress who lives down the street?
However, reflecting on the principle of Being-Away, the question remains whether the whole range of Oberlin actors feel part of such a trans-disciplinary, conceived space? Therefore, the following sub-section starts to explore the complexity of heterotopic thinking by exploring the emergent dialectical tensions of such a project, from different actor perspectives.
Implications of ‘Being-Away’ to the Oberlin Project’s campus spacing
To what extent do the Oberlin local community perceive the Oberlin Project as inclusive? Clearly, Orr’s environmental studies programme students are being given the opportunity to experience such a space, in their involvement with the local community. However, even for Orr’s students, to what extent is their experience of this space truly trans-disciplinary? To what extent are they experiencing a ‘Being-Away’ psychological distance from their campus space by embracing alternative spacing suggestions from different actors, such as from across the local community?
Some indications that such a conceived trans-disciplinary space is experiencing some tensions, even with the student body, could be drawn from Johnson’s (2015) recent research, which highlights how students are starting to recognise the weaknesses of such a college led initiative. As one respondent highlights, there is a need for the Oberlin Project to embrace, … talking across … lines like I disagree with you but also talking across like departments; like public works needs to talk to utilities and sociology needs to talk to psychology … we’ve been in silos … And now we have a really, really big complicated problem that’s totally interconnected and we have to learn across those silos.
Although much of the Project’s rhetoric centrally is around community engagement, this is still framed in quite a top-down, carbon-centred approach rather than to open up and involve the local community in the more systemic, raison d’être of the Oberlin Project. Carlson (2011) highlights that observers say one of the project’s main risks is that it could be perceived as an effete, academic, environmental endeavour. As Tony Mealy, a local resident states, ‘… they are lecturing to us’ (Carlson, 2011). As Johnson (2015) argues, could environmental action here be the privilege of those who could afford to be engaged. Orr recently reflected that such an initiative, no matter how well intentioned, had to integrate ‘a background structure of laws and regulations that deters gentrification, because the environmental movement is increasingly trendy’ (Donohue, 2015). Clearly, environmental issues could be seen as highly fundable and are indeed complementary to the branding of Oberlin College as socially progressive. It could be seen as supporting a financially elite set of students and donors. Seen through a wider lens, asan elitist liberal arts college, it leverages its class privileged background to attract funding by large individual donations and grant agencies (The Oberlin Project, 2015). As of 30 June 2015, Oberlin endowment funds totalled $814.3 million (Oberlin, 2015). In July 2015, students demanded that Oberlin College actively expand its board membership to reflect the narratives of individuals it claims to represent such as transgender, queer, low income communities and communities of colour (Trupin, 2015). Although Oberlin College publically strives to be inclusive, such demands remind us of the fact that 69.5% of the student population is white, approximately representing the local Oberlin population. Meanwhile, the African American student population of 5.5% is almost 3 times lower than the African American local community population, in Oberlin town itself (Oberlin College, 2015).
One participant’s response from Goldstein’s (2011: 93) research summed up the feeling of participants, I would like to see balanced development, and by balanced I mean development that takes into account the needs of the entire community. We have a downtown area that logically orients itself to the needs of the College. I would like to see.… development that reaches across class.
Fascination
Fascination is an involuntary or non-directed, absorbed attention in which an individual’s attention is effortlessly engaged, intrigued and captured without mental fatigue. Our attention is aesthetically engaged, although no response from us is required. (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989)
In order to enact a soft fascination aesthetic, this article focuses on alternative heterotopic campus spacing, focusing on a particular ‘aesthetic as [bio-cultural] connection’, as described by Taylor and Hansen (2005). This concurs with the selective, low intensity, reductive palette of how a few aspects of nature are absorbing or fascinating to the eye. In other words, the focus on restoring the diverse cultural connection with the natural environment represents identifying restorative, aesthetic spacing opportunities around cognitive slowness. This bio-cultural spacing around the primacy of embodied, tacit aesthetic/sensory knowledge offers fresh insight and awareness, enabling us to see in a new way (John, 2001).
This primary focus on the aesthetic/experiential, rather than the instrumental, within restorative spacing does not mean that the rationale, cognitive forms of knowing are neglected, but merely slowed down, i.e. in the cognitive sense. Moreover, it reflects that this experiential or aesthetic knowing is not only a separate way of knowing, but that other forms of knowing such as those derived from rational thought depend on, and grow out of aesthetic experiences as well (Gagliardi, 1996). This is at the core of ART, as it asserts the importance of non-directed attention in restoring our directed attention. In other words, aesthetic experiences are constantly spilling over and being integrated into other activities, enhancing and deepening them (Shusterman, 2001).
The cognitive slowness reminds us of another of Foucault’s heterotopic principles around special slices of time. Elaborating on this Foucault (1997: 272) argues, heterotopias are as much special spaces as special slices of time, so-called heterochronies, times where people break radically with their traditional time, such as when you enter a cemetery, where time stands still, or when you enter a library or museum that tries to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, an immobile place that is itself outside of time.
Implications of ‘Fascination’ to the Oberlin Project’s conceived space
In the context of the Oberlin Project, the campus ethos around the central importance of the Arts, within the built and social fabric of Oberlin College, corresponds mostly with the conceived enactment of the Fascination principle. Pertinently, Packer (2014) argues that the Arts, particularly the performing and fine arts, have the capacity to embody a cognitive and temporal slowness, through their potential aesthetic immersion. Packer and Bond (2010) highlight that the introspective, immersed experience is the best predictor of restorative outcomes. They argue for the use of visual art, poetry and music as a means of stimulating reflection and this sense of Fascination. More systemically, as Finley (2008) argues, ‘arts-based enquiry’ ideally combined with a radical and even revolutionary politically active social science responds well to pressing social and environmental problems.
An example of such conceived Fascination within the Oberlin Project is the central significance and expectation placed upon the construction of a 13-acre ‘Green Arts Block’, within Oberlin town centre. Reddell (2010) describes the Oberlin Project as a ‘green arts district’, which would catalyse a green redevelopment of the city and surrounding area as a whole. It will feature LEED certified buildings such an arts museum, restoration and expansion of a performing arts centre, a black box theatre and a centre for ecological design (Orr, 2015). In terms of the cognitive slowness of the Oberlin Project, in an interview by Carlson (2011), Orr argues that universities such as Oberlin will need to become genuine anchor institutions, relying on a particular form of intellectual leadership for moving forward in an era that is going to be radically different. He argues that such leadership will move beyond our abstract, intellectual disciplines which often produce a paralysis of will because they do not link intellect to affect or to the ecologies of particular places (Orr, 1994).
Reflecting upon the importance of the inclusion of the arts within a wider aesthetic, emotional and cognitive engagement around sustainability, Orr in the interview by Carlson (2011) reflects on the Oberlin Project, where he envisions a ‘fertile intersection’ of the arts with the issues of sustainability: ‘This would involve all the arts … to encourage a conversation about human survival and sustainability’. He moves on to argue this point: ‘communicate the hard things, the uncomfortable things, about climate change and the lifestyle changes it demands, through music, painting and dance – and so reach the emotion, not just the intellect’. Orr admits, however, that it represents a challenging concept for his most pragmatic supporters, the sciences can tell you down to parts per billion what’s wrong in the world and with the climate – but can give you no particular reason to want to survive. But humans are meaning-seeking creatures, and this project is also aimed at fostering the big conversation in a way that only the arts – and religion and philosophy, too – can really do.
Implications of ‘Fascination’ to the Oberlin Project’s campus spacing
To what extent are any tensions surfacing within the Oberlin Project? Despite Orr’s pedagogical vision of involving virtually all disciplines in experiential education for sustainability (Daneri et al., 2015), many disciplines and faculty in Oberlin College have yet to become involved in the Oberlin Project. At present, the majority of student engagement occurs through the specific aforementioned undergraduate environmental studies programme, outside of which many faculty do not identify with the project or see relevance to their discipline and teaching.
Consequently, there has been a predominance of cognitive, information-based technical solutions, based upon environmental criteria, rather than focusing on the participative design process for the Oberlin Project. For example, a possible illustrative initiative is the ‘Bioregional Dashboard’, which has been solely designed by a group of Oberlin environmental studies students, faculty and graduates evaluating various approaches to delivering real-time feedback as a mechanism for breaking down the bio-cultural disconnection of many of Oberlin’s wider set of actors (Orr, 2011). Orr (2014) highlights his environmental, technological and cognitive orientation here, when he points out that they have been investigating what happens when people are made immediately aware of the resource flows necessary to support their activity in the built environment, and how the use of visual displays of resource usage might ultimately change behaviour and promote conservation.
However, Orr (2014) does move on to assert that initiatives such as the Bioregional Dashboard will only be successful if they create models of both thought and action that inspire others. Similarly, a respondent from Johnson’s (2015) recent research on the Oberlin Project reflects that technology cannot solve their problems in and of itself. It must be used in conjunction with a learning community willing to engage with the physical and social aspects of the technology to produce an outcome like carbon neutrality. Indeed Orr does recognise that this will require collaboration among several disciplines, including the Arts, in order to enact the Fascination principle reflected upon here. The drawback of initiatives, such as the Bioregional Dashboard, is that they do not aesthetically and emotionally engage the attention of different actors, such as from the wider local community. As a student from Johnson’s (2015: 108) research remarks, ‘I mean I think that this engagement issue is also really big, that there’s a desire to engage people but not an understanding of how to engage people …’. Therefore, there has been a lack of aesthetic input into the design stage of the project by many different parts of the local community. The result is the blind hope of a change in behaviour by the Oberlin Project’s protagonists rather than to truly endeavour to aesthetically engage and understand the different actors’ behaviour and potential. In fact, rather than enacting the principle of ‘Fascination’ within the local community, many of the participants are sceptical, wary and even apathetic. As the MANA report (2013) points out, considering the broad perception that, for many Oberlinians, the College’s Green Arts District plan is the centrepiece of the Oberlin Project, the report authors were surprised that the subject attracted relatively few comments from the local community. For the development of the Green Arts District, this article thereby concurs with Daneri et al. (2015), who advocate much earlier involvement of the artistic community, including both faculty and local community in the design process of the Green Arts District and the respective architecture and technologies which underpin its development.
Could greater input by the arts offer such a participatory approach, which not only encourage ongoing and consistent listening and dialogue but also offer the aesthetic and emotional space and time required to even engage the historically disenfranchised.
Extent
Extent is the quality of a physical or conceptual setting sufficiently rich and coherent that it can engage the mind and promote exploration … a whole other world from a person’s perspective. (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989)
In order to enact the ‘Extent’ principle, Foucault’s (1984) notion of heterotopia is revisited again, through exploring one more of his six heterotopic principles. Conceptualising the ‘other world’ connected scope aspect of ‘Extent’, Foucault (1984: 272) argues, a heterotopia ‘is capable of juxtaposing in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’. With respect to this article, restorative campus spacing would connect strategically through space and time and thereby offer the cumulative potential for challenge at the organisational, sectoral, regional and national levels. The principle of ‘Extent’ thereby relates to how heterotopic spaces connect, not only to other heterotopic spaces but also to how they critically connect, in terms of contesting and then challenging the dominant institutional campus sustainability agenda. Foucault (1984: 272), through another of his principles, argues that heterotopias, ‘have a function in relation to all the space that remains’. Therefore, it conforms to John’s (2001) argument that worthwhile aesthetic knowledge must be able to travel a bit beyond its acquisition site, allowing us to build upon that knowledge in other contexts.
The significant point here is that, following the principle of ‘Extent’, the adoption of connected and integrated restorative spacing across campus and/or local community projects (significant for urban universities) could be a way of developing more critically engaged actors, towards institutional sustainability agendas. Through such increasingly connected spacing activities, could the more instrumental sustainability agendas, potentially become relatively less significant to overall campus sustainability? As different university actors prioritise diverse bio-cultural responses as an alternative form of spacing, could a restorative, heterotopic agency emerge as central to campus sustainability?
In summary, it is proposed here that the principle of Extent, with its emphasis on the scope and connectedness of campus spacing, can be spatially enacted here through Foucault’s principles focusing on spatial multiplicity (aligning with scope) and relationality (aligning with connectedness), respectively. What Foucault’s principles add here is that it reminds us that restorative campus spacing moves away from the individual towards embracing the campus as a wider set of social, cultural and political actors, along with the tensions between them.
Implications of ‘Extent’ to the Oberlin Project’s conceived space
On face value, the Oberlin Project’s vision appears to embody the Extent principle, not only in terms of coherence but in scope as well. Orr (2014) describes the Oberlin Project as an attempt to ‘connect the dots’ between the various parts of sustainability and thereby give form and operational vitality to the word ‘systems’ in the public realm, and to extend the time horizon by which we judge our successes and failures and our profits and losses.
In summary, there appears to be a systemic understanding of the potential impact of the Oberlin Project at different local, regional and national levels. However, the next section will explore how this intention to leverage systemic impact has been received by different actors, particularly the local community.
Implications of ‘Extent’ to the Oberlin Project’s campus spacing
Unfortunately, the wider scope and coherence of the Oberlin Project has been limited to date, due to the primacy placed upon Orr’s environment studies students in implementing his vision. This has in turn created a lack of involvement both internally (across faculty) and externally in terms of the emergent strategic direction for the Oberlin project. There has been a top-down focus on students ‘engaging’ other actors, with a core environment remit, rather than developing a trans-disciplinary, two-way process of wider involvement. A local community example illustrating this point is a recurring ‘Community Voices’ exercise, where students specifically interview community members, but these are specifically selected to focus on pro-environmental thought and behaviour. Quotes are extracted and paired with photographs, then broadcast on the aforementioned digital bio-regional dashboards or monitors around town, including all public schools (Daneri et al., 2015).
The lack of connectedness of the Project to the local community’s wider concerns was emphasised by several local community members in the research by Goldstein (2011: 105) when she pointed out that, … the Project is going to get too out in front of the community ….to feel a part of it …. it’s purely telling them what they are doing. What needs to happen is full inclusion … allowing the Project to be informed and rethought by what the community thinks, but that is not happening to the best of my knowledge.
Could the Oberlin Project start to develop an embedded connectedness between its local community actors and initiatives to be able to realise its wider institutional change vision? The enactment of the principle of Extent also concurs with one of the key recommendations of the MANA report (2013: 6), around the need for a broader representation of Oberlin, including the surrounding towns, such as Elyria and Lorain.
In summary, the enactment of the principle of Extent here appears to need greater involvement and connection to local community actors, within the wider institutional engagement of the Oberlin Project.
Compatibility
According to ART, is a quality of a setting that fits with and supports one’s inclinations or purposes and the kinds of activities supported, encouraged, or demanded by the setting. (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989) potential for folding, that is not contained within any frame or grid … What is thus implicit in a space, which it cannot frame, may at any point or moment break out of it and cause it to be reframed. (Rajchman, 1998: 19)
In the context of this article, a university campus could act as a context for heterotopic, restorative experiences, but for different reasons depending upon the individual and collective subjectivity at a particular time, which can be viewed as the result of complex human–environment transactions. Therefore, ART’s ‘Compatible’ context here means not simply a preference for a physical setting or physical aspect of the environment (e.g. its natural or built features), but multiple potential restorative experiences (Korpela et al., 2001), contingent upon the physical, cognitive, emotional qualities of this human–environment interaction within the restorative space at that time. In terms of the earlier discussion around ‘Being-Away’, restorative campus spacing can be enacted as varying from illusionary, crisis and deviant heterotopic experiences (representing the final heterotopic principle) depending upon the subjectivity of the actors involved. Such compatible spacing can be seen as surfacing what could be seen as the underlying ‘crisis’ of campus sustainability (fitting within Foucault’s notion of crisis in terms of crucial but not always evident transitions in life and the body) and with offering shelter and emotional, cognitive and aesthetic agency, whether temporary or permanent, to actors who then wish to ‘deviate’ from such mainstream university norms and relationships and potentially contribute to restoring a more diverse bio-cultural connection.
So what are the implications of the principle of ‘Compatibility’ within campus spacing? Could the compatible campus conceived space embrace the need for political, cognitive, emotional and aesthetic margins, redundancy or slack. Such margins could continually enable different and even opposite interpretations, uses and experiences (Koolhaas, 1995). As Lefebvre (1991: 59) argues, ‘Change life!’ ‘Change society!’ Space can be viewed here as not only socially produced but socially producing as well. New social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa.
In summary, it is proposed here that the principle of Compatibility, with its emphasis on restorative experiences being contingent on the subjectivity of the individual, can be spatially and collectively enacted here through Foucault’s contingency and dynamic heterotopic principles. By enacting the latter principles, could universities embrace generative opportunities for collective spatial production and contestation. We now turn to the Oberlin Project one final time to explore the implications and extent to which such compatible, generative campus spacing is being embraced here.
Implications of ‘Compatibility’ to the Oberlin Project’s conceived space
In terms of conceived Compatibility, Andy McDowell, a field director with the Western Reserve Land Conservancy who is helping Orr establish the greenbelt, reflects that he doesn’t mention climate neutrality or use the term ‘greenbelt’ when talking to conservative farmers outside Oberlin (Carlson, 2011). He emphasises reflexivity to community concerns and argues for a focus on economic stability, growing the local economy, and food security. He reflects that the strategic narrative requires a reflexive turn when attempting to engage with different actors in order for the strategy to resonate once it gets beyond the academic bubble. Orr (2014) outlines the generative challenge of the Oberlin Project as, ‘having lunch with many different kinds of people and attending lots of meetings to bridge the chasms that divide us by issue-areas, race, class, and political affiliation’.
In an interview by Carlson (2011), Orr himself acknowledges the importance of developing a balance between the strategic intent of the academics and the reflexive, emergent knowledge of the non-academic as a core factor in the implementation of the Oberlin Project. Looking to the future, exploring the generative potential of the Oberlin Project, Orr (2011) reflects that the participation and support of the town, the college, the alumni, the students, the faculty, the regional political leadership and every academic discipline will be crucial for its success. In particular, the central artistic focus of the Oberlin Project appears to offer an ambiguous, non-performative and generative quality. Most optimistically, Orr (2014) recently argues, we intend to do our work within the next few years to make sustainability the default – and then get out of the way. That is to say that we, as a project, aim to be catalytic and to set processes in motion, rather than establishing ourselves as a permanent fixture.
Implications of ‘Compatibility’ to the Oberlin Project’s campus spacing
Could the above catalytic role be seen as directing conversation rather than creating the context for a truly trans-disciplinary dialogue from the start? A faculty member within Johnson’s (2015: 108) research highlights this very point, there’s a huge amount of economic diversity in this town and I sometimes worry that if the college is a catalyst for, is providing the catalyst or the impetus to get groups together, that you’re not reaching the groups that have been alienated by the college.
In Goldstein’s (2011) research study, participants were insistent that Oberlin Project planners should solicit the input of the wider citizenry specifically in relation to their needs. These participants believed that Oberlin Project planners should approach various specific groups and ask, ‘What can we do to help you be more sustainable in what you do?’(Goldstein, 2011: 98). According to one of these participants, ‘It’s about listening and responding to needs [and] addressing the root issues that people have in their lives’ (Goldstein, 2011: 98). Likewise, within Johnson’s (2015: 121) research, a student highlights the importance of listening: I think for, especially for an institution, for a non-profit like the Oberlin Project, one of the most important skills is listening because resilience develops out of existing networks and structures and … so not just what [the] needs are but where people are moving right now and where their visions are right now.
In summary, a conceived space which embraces non-performative redundancy appears to be a significant factor in providing the opportunity for generative campus spacing.
Conclusions
By taking a heterotopic spatial perspective and drawing from the emerging findings from environmental psychology, it is hoped that this article contributes to a new way of viewing the challenge of campus sustainability. Moreover, the proposed restorative/heterotopic principles offer a way of critically reflecting on current sustainability initiatives within and beyond the university campus and pointing towards ways of enacting a more diverse bio-cultural connection.
This article’s proposition is that rather than abandoning universities’ intent to rise up league tables, they could break free of the bio-cultural constraints of such a pursuit by actively and simultaneously being open to and engaging in generative restorative, heterotopic spacing. By offering a new heuristic, conceptual framework, it is hoped that experiments around campus initiatives, such as the Oberlin Project, can be seen as part of a more systemic, processual challenge, which not only reflect and deconstruct but re-construct dominant campus sustainability agendas.
It is pertinent to note that whereas the principles of ‘Being-Away’ and ‘Fascination’ offer a ‘disconnected’ mirror, reflective, playful, non-instrumental space, this article has not shied away from the question of how to then to foster a ‘connected’, embodied and generative set of bio-cultural integrated experiences with the principles of ‘Extent’ and ‘Compatibility’, to contest the institutional attraction of league table legitimacy. It is argued here that only through generative, integrated campus spacing, could the notion that such restorative spacing realistically contest and challenge the dominant campus sustainability institutional environment.
In terms of the central conceptual contribution around the combined notion of ‘restorative heterotopic spacing’, four ART principles were mapped onto the following six heterotopic principles:
Being-Away: heterotopias have systems of open and closing; Fascination: heterotopias are linked to ‘slices of time’; Extent: several spaces may be juxtaposed in a single heterotopia; heterotopias function in relation to all remaining space; Compatibility: the function of a heterotopia may change over time, heterotopias may be either based on crises or deviance.
In order to understand how far we are away from such an imagined future, the restorative spacing conceptual frame has been used to critically explore the Oberlin Project’s campus initiative, which appears to embody the various ART/heterotopic principles. Whilst advocating an artistic, regional set of trans-disciplinary initiatives on the basis of embodying the ‘Being-Away’ and ‘Fascination’ ART principles, this critique also highlighted the significance of integrated, generative embrace of diverse Oberlin actors both on and off campus, with respect to embodying ‘Extent’ and ‘Compatibility’ ART principles. However, what seems to be emerging from the conceived aspects of the Oberlin Project are the social tensions of pushing ahead with implementation of the project by leading university actors, centrally around Orr and his loyal student alumni, at the same time as philosophically, emotionally and aesthetically engaging and reflexively responding to a diverse set of actors and their different forms of knowing. This article has drawn out particular tensions, particularly with the poorer south eastern quadrant of the Oberlin local community and the way in which their voice has been under-represented within the Oberlin Project.
Conceptually, this article adds value as it is the first time Harvey’s critique of Foucault’s notion of heterotopias has been used to draw out dialectic tensions within a campus sustainability context. Clearly, the Oberlin Project is a work in progress and thus it represents not only a planned and designed ‘other space’ but an emergent process of ‘other spacing’, with its on-going tensions between different actors.
Empirically, it remains to be seen whether the Oberlin Project effectively balances David Orr’s academic plan with the generative potential around wider regional engagement. This represents a justification for a longitudinal, ethnographic piece of empirical research to be adopted in future. This on-going research could also explore whether such an initiative has any significant institutional impact on the dominance of university sustainability league tables and rankings. Whilst the restorative, heterotopic spacing notion proposed here offers a conceptual frame to critically reflect on sustainability initiatives, such as the Oberlin Project, the above empirical research is crucial to understand its unfolding systemic impact. We could then test out M’Gonigle and Starke’s (2006: 341) assertion that such campus spacing ‘is a one-place approach that seeks to create directly a comprehensive working precedent. A working precedent represents both the greatest threat to the status quo and the greatest opportunity for learning about what can be done’.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.