3 Rhythms of Historical Disposal

The Role of Absent Spaces in the Organizational Process of Space Planning

Fabio James Petani and Jeanne Mengis

Introduction

In our attempts to organize and plan the present and the future, much energy goes into conceiving—through meetings, documents and other forms of representation—places and objects that later are discarded. Amongst these absences, we often recall particular possibilities that did not materialize and which, regardless of the alternatives that for better or worse replaced them, we still consider as unachieved potential, a shame, a missed chance, a waste of our time and effort. In this chapter, we focus on this “waste” in the context of spatial planning, aiming to develop a processual understanding of how the planning of space is organizationally lived, in a rhythm punctuated by its most burning defeats and by struggles attempting to make up for or regain some material possibilities.

The history of absent materiality is largely undertheorized in organization studies. The analysis of unbuilt or transformed spaces, planned in connection with the construction of a public cultural centre in a small city, aims at better understanding how space is conceived (i.e. planned). To this end, we integrate Lefebvre’s original insights on space (1991/1974) with his work on history (1970, 1975, 2014b), rhythm (2004/1992), and temporality (2014a), and develop the production of space through a processual focus on the disposal of planned space. Planning always implies the exclusion of alternative possibilities. In the practice of space planning, such possibilities shed light on the project’s organizational history of how absent materiality was lived and interpreted (Giovannoni and Quattrone, 2017; Meyer, 2012). Absent spaces capture the outcomes of hidden power relationships, account for sacrifices lived as unfair, and by contrast shed light on the disposal of planned spaces that do not become significant for their absence, but remain irrelevantly disposed of and materially excluded.

Much frustration of spatial planners lies in realizing how much of their individual and collective work is consumed in a seemingly inconsequential manner, as a lot of spaces fail to be implemented as planned and much design efforts appear to vanish without leaving material traces of their existence beyond paperwork. We argue that this sense of waste clings to particular organizational possibilities that symbolically represent a sort of alternate organizational history, a list of discarded but emotionally charged resources that over time help us to analyse the organizational practice of spatial planning. Some material absences become organizationally inhabited by actors, who use them to justify and explain why and how certain objectives were not pursued as expected. This chapter aims at grasping part of “our larger wastes of human effort … [that] are less visible, less tangible, and are but vaguely appreciated” (Taylor, 1911: 5). We do not attempt to understand how to increase efficiency by eliminating these wastes (which appear inescapable in any design process), but to study, in a performative account, how “the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory” and risk “lapsing into oblivion” (Sebald, 2001: 31), counts (or fails to count) in space planning. Planned and unbuilt spaces become charged with immaterial qualities of absence in view of the considerable time, energy, emotional attachment and values that practitioners invest in their production.

Important literature on the geographies and practices of disposal has shown that “[o]bjects die but do not disappear: things are dismantled, cast aside, destroyed and disposed of but remain in countless material and immaterial ways” (Crewe, 2011: 27). Clearly, disposing of the material form of something does not erase its semiotic presence. On the contrary, by physically throwing away objects, their semiotic presence might even be heightened (Edensor, 2005), which suggests that the practice of disposing can actually make an absence more present (Hetherington, 2004: 159). For space, such a relational focus on present absences or absent presences (Callon and Law, 2004; Meyer, 2012) suggests that “presence and absence cannot be thought of as two sides, recto and verso of one mental (or social or natural) phenomenon” (Lefebvre, 1980: 225). Rather, space “is defined as the play of absences and presences” (Lefebvre, 1980: 230). This ‘play’ does not always unfold as a straightforward process, just as production, consumption and disposal do not replace one another over time in a linear, discrete sequence (Hetherington, 2004). A focus on the alternation (and simultaneity) of absences and presences in patterns of repetition and difference allows us to analyse the rhythms (Lefebvre, 2004/1992) of everyday organized life. Absence is immanent in all “acts of human production” (Cooper, 2007: 1567) as a major force, since missing presence haunts and incites production and organization (Cooper, 2006) in latent ways we are not aware of.

In particular, we need to better understand how, in the practice of conceiving space, discarded spaces remain present and how presences and absences perform and interact over time, in view of the power relations at play in the production of space (Lefebvre, 1991). In contrast with a conceived or planned space¹ considered like a cold technical representation dominating society (Lefebvre, 1991: 38–39), detached from spaces lived through concrete and emotional imagination, absent spaces indicate a residual by-product that goes beyond mere technocratic representations. We argue that some of these rejections matter in many planning processes, and particularly in the production of space, since they reverberate rhythms of past energies, inciting critique and motivating actors to win back some of this loss in future plans (Petani and Mengis, 2016). The stories of places that materialized only on paper remain often untold (for a notable exception, see a suggestive ‘paperwork alternate history’ of New York City in Shanor, 1988). Our analysis of a single construction project reveals that some planned spaces were not easily erased because they remained telling non-occurrences, and absences were mobilized discursively as promising possibilities. We paraphrase Taylor (1911) to explain the rationale of our focus: being attentive to the “draining of the world’s untold sacrifice of conceived space” allows us to appreciate how absent materiality (cp. Giovannoni and Quattrone, 2017; Meyer, 2012) performs in the process of organizing.

To this aim, we introduce the concept of absent space and suggest a larger appreciation of Henri Lefebvre’s work for organization studies. A spatiotemporal and sociomaterial view of Lefebvre’s spatial theory (1991) has shown how spatial planning can narratively and strategically manipulate the past, when—in the attempt to regain a convenient identity—lost spaces are searched for to re-enact a glorious History, or ‘remember the future’ (Petani and Mengis, 2016). Yet, space planning has also an organizational history with a small h, an everyday life made of paperwork representations, which “end nowhere,” or, to be more accurate, that neither end, nor actually become somewhere. This chapter selects two illustrative vignettes of this representational wasteland of plans suspended in a pendulum between absence and presence.

We provide a longitudinal analysis of the planning and construction of a great public cultural centre, observing the organizational process of space planning with a selective focus on some planned spaces that over time risked (or actually ended up) not being built as originally designed. Existing organizational studies drawing on Lefebvre dwell predominantly on how space is transformed by organizations and practitioners that appropriate ‘already constructed’ facilities with their practices and imaginations (de Vaujany and Vaast, 2014; Decker, 2014; Ford and Harding, 2004; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011). Organizational research has shown how space production is a political form of control, against which practitioners are more or less subdued or resistant, producing or reproducing, through their work practices, the spaces conceived to contain and constrain particular uses, attribution of meanings and identities (Dale and Burrell, 2008; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011). We know less, instead, about how organizational pre-production is lived, that is how the conceiving of space is experienced before or during the physical construction of buildings (although see Giovannoni and Quattrone, 2017). Organization studies attentive to the historical legacies of places have shown that the production of space neither starts with the material re-building or restructuring of facilities (de Vaujany and Mitev, 2013; Gastelaars, 2010), nor does it end with their demolition (Petani and Mengis, 2016). By analysing the lived organizational practices of space planning proper, we answer the recent call to account specifically for the history of conceived space (Mitev and De Vaujany, 2013: 327). We complement extant research on organizational space drawing on Lefebvre by shedding light on the interplay between conceived, practiced and lived space (Lefebvre, 1991) when planning a new building, a moment of the production of space in which conflicting spatial possibilities are excluded and are experienced as a waste, or outcomes of undue disposal. In synthesis, we ask two questions. First, how does the ‘waste’ of planned spaces help us to understand how planning and more specifically space planning is lived and practiced before it gets inhabited by end-users? And second, how does the concept of absent space, by clarifying a lived dimension of conceiving, help us to theorize the untold rhythms of disposal in space planning?

The focus on absent spaces allows us to assess the possibilities that ‘leave a trace’, a necessary condition that Lefebvre posed for moments to qualify as ‘historical’ (Lefebvre, 1970). The organizational becoming of space can therefore be understood through its planning process, which is historically marked also by traces of non-occurrences, or significant absences. In the following sections, we introduce our theoretical background, present our empirical case and methods, and present findings under the form of illustrative vignettes, delineating our contribution in a concluding discussion.

Theory Background

Lefebvre’s Threefold Production of Space: From Conceived Space to a History-Laden Process of Conceiving

Henri Lefebvre (1991) critically argued that the concept of space was either used to indicate an abstract, reductive representation of the world, or to indicate its concrete, inert manifestation in the material environment. Because these two appreciations shape concretely the everyday life of users, Lefebvre called for a refined understanding of the lived dimension of space and the history of social practices, shifting from the study of things in space to the social production of space.

Lefebvre’s notion of lived space intended precisely to grasp the concrete experience of space appropriated by the everyday imagination and experience of dominated users, who saw their needs disconnected from the technical representations that perpetuated the agendas of social control of space planners. Lefebvre thus bridged the political and representational gap between “conceived space,” critically defined as the dominating, technocratic representation of space (Lefebvre, 1991: 39), identifiable in the abstract space planned by architects, engineers and managers (Dale, 2005: 657), and “perceived space,” the concrete space of our material routines of spatial practice (Lefebvre, 1991: 38). As an organizational view clarifies, lived space “is balanced carefully between the two poles of conceived space (purely idealism) and perceived space (pure materialism)” (Zhang, 2006: 221).² Lefebvre conveys therefore a plural understanding of space as a compromise between opposed sociomaterial forces, in whose dialectic tension lies great historical explanatory power about how space is produced by (and produces) social relations.

Lefebvre’s triad has allowed organizational research to study how practitioners use many kinds of organizational space. The contradictions between how space is designed and how it is actually lived and imagined have shown how organizations attempt to control, or otherwise shape their employees’ sense of self (Ford and Harding, 2004; Ford and Harding, 2008), and their collective identities (Dale and Burrell, 2008). This social and material work (Dale, 2005) of space may ignite aesthetic fascination (Hancock and Spicer, 2011), resistance against strict codes of behaviour (Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011), or daunting feelings of loathing (Ford and Harding, 2008). Organization scholars have analysed the spatial dynamics of homeworking (Wapshott and Mallett, 2012), gender performativity (Tyler and Cohen, 2010), theatrical performance (Watkins, 2005), high commitment organizations (Fleming and Spicer, 2004), extreme bureaucracies (Zhang and Spicer, 2014), and even the extreme hyper-organizational spaces of modern fiction (Zhang, Spicer, and Hancock, 2008).

The triad however “loses all force if it is treated as an abstract ‘model’” (Lefebvre, 1991: 40). The three spaces risk being mistaken for the simple modelling of three temporal sequences of space production, whereby space is first conceived and represented, then perceived and practiced, and only later experienced and lived, charging it with emotions or symbolic meanings. On the contrary, organizational research suggested that the three spaces flow into a single time of space since “spatial practice, spatial planning and spatial imagination come together into a single moment of social space” and therefore “must be treated holistically” (Taylor and Spicer, 2007: 335, emphasis added). Similarly, we also view production, consumption and disposal as not clear-cut processes within a simple temporal linear sequence, but as coexisting in multiple temporalities that co-constitute their reciprocal becoming (Hetherington, 2004).

The treatment of time and history is central in the theory of the production of space (Lefebvre, 1991), and in Lefebvre’s work more generally (Elden, 2004b: 170). Lefebvre proposed “‘a retro’ study of social space in its history and genesis […] which allows us to glimpse into if not foresee the future and what is possible” (1986; 2003: 211, emphasis added). Lefebvre advocated, in the study of space, a historical awareness about the gap between reality and possibility, “because any realization cuts off certain possibilities … What is lacking is a history of space.”(Lefebvre, 2014b: 89, emphasis in the original).

The suggestion, rarely picked up in organizational research, is to trace the long-term dynamics in the production of space (de Vaujany and Vaast, 2014; Decker, 2014; Gastelaars, 2010; Kingma, 2008), to reconstruct also the history of conceived space (Mitev and De Vaujany, 2013: 327). In a recent account, we have shown how the strategic narratives of certain spaces of the distant past enter the process of conceiving future spaces, involving not only interesting temporal dynamics of repetition (e.g. “remembering the future”), but a tight sociomaterial interplay between perceived, conceived and lived space (Petani and Mengis, 2016). Organizational research seldom employs Lefebvre in a time-sensitive way to analyse the practice of conceiving space (Giovannoni and Quattrone, 2017), most often analysing the end-users’ practices and lived experiences of organizational spaces, conceived by anonymous others through unknown or obscure design practices. Organizational literature knows little about the conceiving of space as an everyday organizational history with a small h, made of untold, invisible defeats experienced by the space planners and managers of space production.

A processual account on the conceiving of space benefits from the wider insights Henri Lefebvre offers on temporality, rhythm and history (1970, 1975, 2004/1992, 2014/1947) complementing his theory of spatial production (Lefebvre, 1991) with nuanced sociological appreciations of disposal and absence (Hetherington, 2004; Lefebvre, 1980) as part of our everyday practices of production and consumption.

Temporality and History in Lefebvre

Lefebvre did not substitute the study of time for that of space, but rather addressed “the relation between space and time, and in the process rethought both concepts” (Elden, 2004b: 170). This relationship interested him very broadly, ranging from historical events (Lefebvre, 1970, 1975) to the mundane practices of everyday life (Lefebvre, 2014a). His broad spatiotemporal concern emerges from the unit of analysis proposed in his latest work: “Everywhere there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm” (Lefebvre, 2004/1992: 15, in bold in the original). A rhythm, however, does not unfold in an indistinct, homogeneous and automatic flow, but everyday routines can be disrupted in productive and revelatory “moments” (Elden, 2004b: 170). For Lefebvre, perceived, conceived and lived space are moments (Lefebvre, 1991: 40), and the important concept of moment is defined as “the attempt to achieve the total realization of a possibility” (Lefebvre, 2014a: 642, emphasis in original). For Lefebvre, possibility was key to understand history: “The introduction of Possibility … permits us to conceive the objectivity—while yielding its due to relativity, novelty and inexhaustibility—of history” (Lefebvre, 1975: 35, capital letter in the original). Events do not all unfold as equal to one another in our grasp, but they have their differential rhythms and historical relevance. Something is historical, if it leaves traces (Lefebvre, 2003: 178). We suggest that also unrealized possibilities leave traces and count as historical. When conceived (spatial) events do not occur and are experienced as unresolved, the past remains “both connected to us and separated from us” (Dale and Burrell, 2008: 78, emphasis in original; Lefebvre, 1970, 2003): We cannot repeat and repair past moments, which remain detached, inaccessible, although very present to us in their absence, in the negation of their planned and imagined (i.e. conceived and lived) possibilities.

Everyday organizational history of spatial planning leaves interesting traces of absences, which help us to understand the becoming of space, as lived by its producers. Urban planning draws justification from strategically remembering the lost places of a golden history it seeks to regain (Petani and Mengis, 2016). In a related way, planners feel the urge also to make up for or re-present a problematically unachieved potential, whose absence reverberates from the past under certain conditions. A sensitivity towards the production of space through Lefebvre’s insights on temporality helps to grasp the ‘historical rhythm of organizational planning’ as an interesting sociomaterial interplay between successful and failed attempts to achieve possibilities, where even absences count.

The Role of Disposal and Absence in the Process of Conceiving Space

Lefebvre’s aim of capturing the genesis of space out of its historical possibilities, invites tracing the management of absence. In a review of the theoretical and practical understandings of representation, Lefebvre overcomes the view of presence-absence as a binary phenomenon, reducible to a linguistic, logic and atemporal representation of opposition (Lefebvre, 1980); instead, he will later analyse such a relationship as a dialectical movement with lived practices and rhythms (Lefebvre, 1980: 227; 2004/1992).

The dialectical, rhythmic movement of absences and presences builds on an understanding of reality as a complementary, processual interaction of visibility and invisibility (Kallinikos, 1995) whereby “forms and objects are constituted [also] by what they are not, by their deferral in time and space” (Cooper, 2014: 589, emphasis in the original). Because “presence can be absence; and the absent present[,] … we should be putting the oppositions implied in such pairs behind us (…) we should be looking at processes” (Callon and Law, 2004: 3, emphasis added). Actor network theory friendly organizational research, whose sociomaterial awareness our approach embraces, has discussed spacing and timing as an issue of accounting for alterity, apparent absences or hidden presences in effortful orderings and organizings (Jones, McLean, and Quattrone, 2004).

One way to grasp the role of absence in the representation and production of space is to relate absence to a process inherent in all practices of production and consumption: disposal. Disposal “is about placing absences and this has consequences for how we think about ‘social relations’,” since “[g]etting rid of something is never simply an act of waste disposal. Issues of agency and representation (and nonrepresentation) get drawn in too.” (Hetherington, 2004: 159, emphasis in the original). The suggestion is not only that the temporality of discarded plans and ideas provides insights into how planning practices enable or hinder particular spatial and social configurations (Hetherington, 2004). More importantly, during the organizational planning phase, the disposal of conceived spaces or spatial possibilities, involves also the “placing of absences” (Hetherington, 2004: 159) as some of these discarded plans acquire agencies as they are charged with a more-than-representational dimension (Lorimer, 2005).³

The notion of absent space can grasp the dialectic process whereby a conceived space, in the form of the organizational representation of a space still to be built, does not translate into a materially perceived space and its disposal gets lived with a sense of non-completion and absence. In other words, in relation to Lefebvre’s spatial triad (see Figure 3.1), absent space is an expression of how a once conceived, but then disposed space becomes lived (Lefebvre, 1991). Indeed, planned, albeit temporarily not perceived spaces (except being perceived as paperwork organizational representations) can be lived by planners as ‘absent spaces’.

As visualized in Figure 3.1, absent space is in diametrical opposition to perceived space, since it cannot be experienced as a materially practiced space. This does not prevent absent space being lived as an important, historical moment of unrealized possibilities. Indeed, each production of space—with its three moments of conceived, perceived and lived space—casts a shadow of disposal as an inherent part of producing space (see black shadow in Figure 3.1). When the disposal of a conceived space creates a sense of attachment to the lived, yet not materially realized (perceived) space, then this space becomes an absent space. Not all disposed spaces have over time the ability to re-enter the production process, by becoming ‘present’ as significant absences. The moment of absent space is the attempt to realize materially a conceived spatial possibility, which temporally survives the moment of its disposal by further influencing future planning. It is indeed this performative capacity of the absent space, which makes it relevant to consider in the process of conceiving. Because absent space is lived as a significant organizational waste of conceiving, it remains relevant to the production process as a sour lesson learnt or as an unrealized possibility one wishes to recover.

Figure 3.1 The inherent part of space production involving disposal of space and its emergence as absent space.

Figure by the authors.

Case Study

This study draws on a longitudinal, ethnographic study investigating the coordination of multiple actors involved in the planning and construction of a public cultural centre. With total costs of over 230 million CHF, the centre was a historically important project for a small Swiss city of 60,000 people and included multiple facilities: a museum, a theatre-concert hall, a rehearsal room, a bookshop, a café, administrative offices, a restaurant, a multipurpose conference area, and an underground parking. The centre was built on a plot of land where a former ruinous grand hotel from the nineteenth century was placed. Attached and related to the new centre are an invaluable sixteenth-century Romanesque style church owned by the Canton (region), its former convent, which underwent refurbishment at the same time, a major public square and a hillside area destined to become a public park. The council acted as the project owner and main investor with over 200 million CHF, collaborating with the region as the Canton contributed 5.5 million CHF. Local, private real estate developers in November 2004 acquired from the city the former hotel and built luxury lakefront apartments.

The public project met fierce political resistance by the opposition party on the base of two premises. First, over a period of time the financial crisis dramatically reduced the city’s main source of revenues in annual taxes and the public financing of the grand project became a significant burden. During the approval of the funds for building the cultural centre, the opposition party imposed a cutback in costs through a reduction of the museum’s exhibition area from two floors to one, arguing on its own Sunday free press that the scarcely profitable elite activity of the museum did not justify the planned space. Second, the contractual formula of the general contract proved an uncomfortable innovation that cut off local builders and assigned the work to a consortium headed by a multinational foreign firm, immediately depicted in the opposition party newspaper as a “lawless invader.”

The felt controversy of the project led to much public scrutiny and the over 150 change requests to the original plan and contract were in part also a result of the contested nature of the project.

Data Collection

Both authors were actively involved in the difficult access to the field, conducting interviews and carrying out observations between November 2011 and July 2014. We collected archival data of 132 public and private documents, collecting both the official documents of the council (e.g. council funding resolutions) and confidential organizational documents (i.e. administrative files on contract management). We interviewed all the major actors involved in planning and construction management activities, conducting 60 semi-structured interviews (all audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim) and 70 ethnographic interviews during observations.

We had repeated interviews with nine key informants: the project manager, the contract manager, the councillor responsible for the project, the director and deputy-director (from the council town planning division); the lead project coordinator, the construction manager, the general manager (from the general contractor), and of course the lead architect. After reconstructing the project and the history of the actors’ involvement in the project, our interviews asked very open questions like: “How is the project coming along? What are the major challenges you faced and are currently facing? How did these challenges come about, how were they solved?” Answers often pointed to never-built spaces, as tokens of remorse for unachieved possibilities of space planning practices, but also spaces that risked not happening and were rescued.

Our process-sensitivity focused on: a) the “dramatic” shifts in the project (Pettigrew, 1990); b) the sequence of events describing how particular spaces changed over time (Pettigrew, 1997; Van de Ven, 1992: 169), and c) through which sociomaterial practices (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008) coordination evolved.

We carried out 43 days of observations, during which we attended also of building site meetings (10) and of political steering committee meetings (2) in the presence of the highest political and corporate authorities involved in the project. We also did participant observations at the council general archive (5 days over a 6-month period), helping the project manager to file all the official documentation of the project.

Documents played a crucial role in our ethnographic work, revealing both macro-historical planning narratives on lost spaces in official documents (Petani and Mengis, 2016), and detailed micro-stories of the everyday life of construction project management.

Data Analysis

Our research questions narrowed focus on the process of conceiving in planning and construction (so before end-users occupied the centre). We used rhythm, following Lefebvre “as a mode of analysis—a tool of analysis rather than just an object of it” (Elden, 2004b: xii), addressing the inductively emerging themes of disposal and absence in spatial planning practices. The temporal interest in the socio-material gap between conceived space and perceived space, was inspired by the methodological insight that to understand organizations as they happen (Schatzki, 2006) we need to grasp also what is not happening and what could have happened (Nicolini, 2013: 168). This helped us to uncover power relations and to tell the untold stories of excluded planned possibilities, so absent spaces had the methodological implication of orienting data collection and analysis over time on the conceived and unbuilt, and also on the conceived space temporarily perceived as absent.

Using NVivo software, we coded a closer selection of documents and interviews relating to conceived parts of the project that actors called ‘wasted spaces’. These included: 1) a ground floor restaurant on the square that was never built as planned; 2) the park, once conceived to be entirely walkable, and later transformed and reduced; 3) a planned laboratory for young artists in a donated basement, which instead became an exhibition space for a private art collection; 4) a planned hostel for resident artists at the former convent, later substituted by administrative offices for cultural managers; 5) the initially planned second floor of the cultural centre, temporarily made absent by not financing it, and later approved. We analysed how these wasted spaces over time became related to conceived, perceived and lived spaces and to the rhythmical Lefebvrian issues of “change and repetition, identity and difference, contrast and continuity” (Elden, 2004a: xii). We then coded a subset of these wasted spaces as “absent spaces,” indicating discarded spaces that seemed to play a productive role in the practices of conceiving and in the reflexive narratives of practitioners.

The stratified rejected plans began to resemble the telling film negatives of the printed photographs (i.e. the emerged, perceived built space), revealing a submerged organizational history of the planning process. Elaborating on the interviewed practitioners’ reflections, rejected spaces could move from a sort of organizational “waste,” or merely “consumed and disposed” possibilities (which could also remain so), to a historical moment in the planning of space: failing to produce what was planned created frustration or a resisting attachment towards vainly attempted possibilities. We thus followed various moments of rejection to compare and contrast over time different types of the organizational transformation of conceived space.

An abductive dialogue between our data-induced insights and Hetherington’s (2004) illuminating review on the sociology of consumption, led us to interpret these spaces, initially inductively coded as ‘wasted’, as part of the process of disposal, or absence management, a way of ordering that works well on condition that actors do not encounter “absence as unexpected presence, in effect an unresolved question of value” (Hetherington, 2004: 170, emphasis added).

Absent Spaces

In this section, we contrast two conceived spaces of the cultural centre, the museum and the park, which both became radically transformed, being more or less temporarily rejected during the process of conceiving. Together, the two narrative vignettes illustrate the lived practice of conceiving space through instances of disposal, which assume a productive sense of absence in one case, or fail to do so in the other.

A Temporary Disposal. When Rejection is Historically Resisted and Absence Multiplies Presences: The Museum

At one of the most critical moments in the project’s planning history, political representatives of the town entered into a harsh conflict over the planned spaces of the cultural centre and its costs. The planners managing the project were faced with a drastic disposal of a space, and intentionally suspended a conceived space between absence and presence, strategically waiting for a more convenient moment to realize particularly valued possibilities (remember how Lefebvre, 2014/1947: 642 defines moment as an attempt to realize a possibility). The temporary absence of this planned space, disposed of in a display of power by the political opposition during the approval of the project’s funds, was lived in ways that made a traceable difference on both the conceived and the perceived (i.e. built) spaces of the project, as these presences were organized to fight absence/disposal.

The decision to fund the cultural centre in 2004 imposed a controversial cost-cutting logic of reducing the museum from two floors to one. Many actors experienced it as a major drawback. With only one floor, the museum could no longer both display its permanent collection and hold temporary exhibitions as initially planned. The interviewed museum art director mentioned that “by sacrificing the second floor, the project was one-legged, a tiny museum with only 1200 m² of exhibition space, smaller than the present cantonal museum.” Even a council member from an opposition party recalled: “the future use of the new building was absurd … we fought against this reduction, which a few years later was effectively reconceived.”

The sense of sacrifice and missed opportunity of the absent second floor was so present, at the time of its disposal and thereafter, that actors geared their planning practice towards resisting the decision. Actors bet on the possibility of re-introducing the planned space with support from the regional authority (i.e. the Canton) to fund the second floor’s cost, the only argument used for its disposal. This meant fighting absence back in the representational planning practice of preparing, during the 2004–2007 interval, a call for tenders for general contractors (the single most important organizational representation of space of the project’s history), that accounted also for the possible future presence of the museum’s second floor. The councillor responsible for both town planning and cultural activities explained:

The absence of the museum’s second floor led to the flexible strategy in the call for tenders (2007): despite the funding decision’s disposal of this space years before (2004), this absent space was managed as a possible presence in the future, on condition of meeting certain budgetary requirements. A possible future re-inclusion of the absent space became easier because the costs for its re-inclusion could count on a competitive representation of this possibility, avoiding a later “emergent” request to an already established general contractor in a stronger negotiating position to impose a higher price. This non-linear process of planning uncertain spaces shows how conceived space is not always an abstract and dominating representation of space (Lefebvre, 1991), but can be lived as a conflictual managing of absence against powerful rhythms of disposal. Our data suggest that the lived risk of future spatial absences, incited by the disposal of valued spatial plans, influenced the practice of conceiving: spatial planned possibilities were lived as endangered (i.e. absent spaces), making them more resistant to disposal.

The museum’s second floor remained formally absent (i.e. not approved for construction) for several years of the planning practice (2004–2010); in this status it exercised a historically traceable (Lefebvre, 2003: 178) post-disposal agency. During this time it urged the councillor to negotiate with the Canton a swift merger between the town and the state-regional modern art museums. This took place in 2010, when the Canton agreed to contribute 5.5 million CHF towards a ‘more than just spatial’ event of the project’s and the city’s organizational history: Not only was the museum’s floor recovered, but the merger sealed a long-term city-region institutional cooperation.

The museum thus won back the reintegration of the original two-floor plan not only because it raised extra funds, but also thanks to a completely different set up of institutional relations and circumstances. The second floor’s absence signalled an “unresolved question of value” (Hetherington, 2004: 170, emphasis added). The absent second floor catalysed the broader process of merging the two museums. The prospective two-floor museum represented a material, necessary condition for enacting the long-term cost reduction plan of not substituting the retiring art director of one of the two merged institutions. A slimmer, integrated public art offer was accelerated through the spatio-historical planning objective of winning the missing floor back.

The absent space proved to be a relevant ‘information’, understood as a difference that made a difference (Bateson, 1972). The councillor was not alone in resisting the disposal of the museum’s second floor. Its absence threatened far higher costs than the construction expenses saved by not building the facility. Powerful private art collectors started reconsidering the prospect of donating to the city their precious art collections in the absence not only of the missing floor, but also of a unique institution where their collection would become part of an extra-urban, state-regional project. These contingent social relations acted as powerful levers in charging the absent floor’s resilience. Resistance did not however wait for the merger of museums to materialize in built outcomes (i.e. perceived spaces). In the 2004–2010 interval the museum expanded downward, conquering an extra makeshift space in the basement. During a guided visit at the building site in 2013, the architect explained this historical evolution in the project’s conceived and perceived spaces, which we verified on the evolving plans and on site. The museum art-director of the time had taken immediate “mole steps” to transform the underground technical spaces into added exhibition space, a complex operation to realize with zero budget. The temperature and humidity conditions of technical spaces did not comply with strict requirements to host and insure works of art worth millions, which required a retrofit adaptation of the space. The spatial ‘plan B’ adding the basement floor succeeded in compensating for the unexpected disposal of the museum’s second floor. So when the second ‘official floor’ became present again, its temporary absence had informally but practically multiplied spaces: the museum ended up having three floors.

The processual accountancy of production (Lefebvre, 1991) and disposal (Hetherington, 2004) of conceived and perceived spaces evolving over time clearly shows the effects of absent space. Had the second floor been funded from the start, the extra floor downstairs would not have been planned and realized, as it gained justification only to substitute the absent floor. The example suggests that in the practices of conceiving space, an important absence produced multiple presences, and not only quantitative, in terms of floors, but also qualitative, reflected in the different set up of social relations and merged institutions.

A Successful Disposal. When Rejected Space Fails to Become Absent: The Park

Not all the spaces that did not get built as planned were lived as a painful disposal, despite embodying substantial changes to the project. The disposal of some spaces was regarded as simply inevitable. When the prospect of a lack of perceived space was organizationally lived as problematic (e.g. the museum’s floor), it signalled the gap between planned and constructed space, and absent space became a significant moment of the production of space. Yet, the organizational consumption of some of these conceived possibilities remained in a shadowy disposal of space (see Figure 3.1).

We found that a necessary, though not sufficient condition for rejected planned spaces to become absent and consequential in space planning practices was the strong emotional investment of planners and other stakeholders. Space ‘gained in absence’ when discarded planned spaces became inhabited, before their end-use, by a multitude of powerful sociomaterial relations that fought disposal, creating a political steadfast attachment to their presence. This is the stronger motivation for participatory planning, an idea pioneered by Lefebvre’s notion of a right to the city (Lefebvre, 1968), with citizens joining the lived process of planning by appropriating the space before construction. Interestingly, our case however shows that some planned spaces failed to get ‘charged as lived’ and were easily disposed of, despite strong public communication on them.

A good example of a space that was effectively disposed of is the park. Plans could evolve dramatically without any significant protest, regardless of a demonstrable transformation from what was previously promised during public presentations, and reinforced in ad hoc book publications.

The originally conceived park was a major asset of the winning architectural design for the centre, which had a strong urbanist vision strengthening park area. The inspiring representation of green possibilities remained abstract and temporally detached both from both the project’s cultural functions developed only later, and from the power relations that shaped the city.

In the initial public documents (e.g. council request of funds, 2004), the park was represented as the “second green reference” (building on the perceived strength of a lakefront park already present) that “embraced” the historical built agglomeration and gave it the necessary “green lungs”: many stakeholders valorized this aspect of the urban intervention in the early planning stages, but also during construction. When in 2012 we interviewed the councillor responsible for the project, she explained: “We told ourselves that in a hundred years there will still be a park of 6000 square meters, so something the city needs will remain for future generations.”

The park oriented key, early choices of the planning process, so its increasing disappearance struck us the most. The winning project, from its first shortlisting in 2000 out of 104 anonymous competing designs, to the advanced competition between four identified plans in 2002, underwent a historically traceable (Lefebvre, 2003: 178) green shift that helps to explain its final selection. The initial design placed private villas on the hillside to the rear of the cultural centre (where the park is now located), with the former hotel still belonging to the city and filled with public contents (i.e. the theatre in 2000); the later revised plan relocated the private residential space, managed by powerful real estate tycoons, within the more spacious former hotel at the lakefront. Interpreting the will of the town to sell the hotel to support financially the onerous public investment, the changed plan appeared to balance (cover, hide?) with a strengthened green area the loss of a once publicly owned historic hotel. The park was rhetorically depicted as a flagship oasis for the entire urban landscape. It is difficult to exaggerate the emphasis the council and the architect placed on the added value of the park.

A reputed landscape architect was employed in the task of reconstructing the botanical 500-year history of the hill, to restore it in keeping with the practices of the Franciscan monks of the convent, who had cultivated the hills between 1490 and 1848 (see painting on Figure 3.2). A public conference held in May 2012 presented the planned park to the citizens, also through an illustrated monograph. The park helped the overall marketing of the project history: first for the architect selling the design to the contest jury and the council; second, for politicians selling it to citizens/voters. Up until 2012 (midway into construction), we can trace the life of the conceived park in the architect’s contribution to the bilingual, luxurious monograph published for the conference: “the park is conceived as a LIVING SPACE, an external space expressing the same values we find in the interior” (Anonymized Architect, 2012, monograph: 13, upper case in the original English translation).

Figure 3.2 Photos from the monography on the park published for the conference held in May 2012, pp. 17–19.

Courtesy of Studio Pandakovic e Associati.

The regained park echoed a philosophy of minimal architectural intervention, valorizing the natural landscape through a link with the existing green, lakefront urban areas, and also by recuperating green places of the past. Such spatiotemporal narrative was thus summed up by the conference intervention of the landscape architect: “Every intervention on public spaces is culture, because every place must refer dialogically with what this place has been in its past history.” The symbolical value of the park was communicated most explicitly. Figure 3.2, taken from the monograph, shows, on the left, an image of the planned park, criss-crossed by white footpaths enabling the public to climb the hill; on the right, the historical frescoed lunette on the theme of the Calvary (sixteenth century, in the contiguous church) which inspired “a hill scenery reflecting the peaceful Franciscan image of nature and recalling an old farm landscape” as the landscape architect puts it in the monograph (p. 19). Finally, politicians had made also attempts to engage the population in the appropriation of this part of the project by giving citizens the possibility of “adopting and dedicating” a bench or tree at the park.

In these ways, politicians took all possible credit for the planned space ahead of the 2013 local elections—long before the park’s material construction—strategically narrating and betting on the space’s future (Boje, 2011): in May 2012 in an interview to the local press the councillor responsible for the project envisioned the as yet non existing park as “a slow island of peace in the hustle and bustle of the city.”

So far we have offered a glimpse of the representations and the more-than-representational (Lorimer, 2005) affective practices relating to the park before construction. The promised park was however destined to change greatly in perceived size and content.

The cultural centre materially ate up parts of the park, as a close study of the evolution of plans over time indicates. Figure 3.3 shows how, by 2014, the building of the culture centre occupied a significant volume of space conceived in 2002 for the park. In addition, while the design presented in May 2012 still included an entirely pedestrian-friendly link between the hill side of the city and its lake-front and historical centre, a year and a half later, the planned park area, was sacrificed mercilessly, becoming a walled-in sloping back garden, less usable by pedestrians, without the previously designed gently rising paths. The interviewed landscape architect critically resumed this evolution in November 2013: “The garden, because to call it park now is a bit… . Before it was all walkable … the paths … Now the paths we have left are almost service routes … the hillside will now be … only to look at from below … You won’t be able to walk to that part.” The council Town Planning director, interviewed during a steering committee meeting in 2014, acknowledged the reduction of the park more coldly, referring to practical reasons that made it necessary: “Yes, it’s true, perhaps the urban concept of the green area helped the architect to win the design contest, but it was not compatible with the storage and logistic functions of the museum and theatre, which we later revolutionized… . Once we had fixed this aspect, the urban concept of the park died and was buried there, it remained on paper.”

Figure 3.3 The cultural centre eating up the park: The dotted line shows the original design’s boundaries of the cultural centre (2002) respect to its expansion by 2014.

Courtesy of Architects Claudia Scholz and Louise Brandberg Realini.

The sudden death of an important park for the city out of logistical reasons contrasted strikingly with the inspirational narrative that had accompanied its planning for so long. Since the design contest, the park faced a series of practical tests with the space needed for trucks to unload and deliver all the materials for both museum and theatre being the most important. Also the power of financial resources and political interests explain the park’s disappearance. The park was built last and paid the consequences of the whole project’s cost overrun, which led to a reduction of the park’s budget by half. Lastly, the use of the conceived park to obtain a political return was already consumed by the end of 2013, making the park more disposable. After the local elections, the park remained present, but its gradual disappearance unfolded in a silent disinterest.

The park’s partial disposal was not lived as a sacrifice by major politicians, nor by citizens. During a steering committee meeting in January 2014, the abovementioned town planning director even mocked the original park as exaggerated, since the landscape architect’s design “had something like 400–500 plants, and we’d struggle to fit in some blueberries… . This happens because everyone feels obliged to do the impossible. Then you go there, you see how small the space really is, it’s a steep slope and not a flat surface, so you start asking yourself: ‘Is it worth building a mountain-type track to go up to the city hillside, when people already use a stairway on the side?’” However extreme the originally planned park was, we find it noteworthy that until now, no citizen group has protested against the radical pruning of the park, so different now from how it was publicly presented.

We ourselves lived such untold planning rhythm of disposal as the story of a place ‘with no power of memory that is therefore never heard, described or passed on’ (see Sebald’s opening quote). But in fact the fairy tale of the park was told long ago, the promise of that space had been fulfilled narratively, perhaps contributing, paradoxically, to make its material disappearance less conspicuous. No powerful stakeholder fought for the park.

The case illustrates how not all discarded spaces become absent and play a productive role in the planning process, yet constitute the shadow that disposal casts over the production of space (see Figure 3.1). It shows how conceived spaces are politically practiced within particular temporal rhythms (i.e. election cycles) that consume their semiotic presence/absence before they can materialize to benefit the majority of stakeholders (i.e. taxpayers, citizens). Disposal did not turn the park into an absent space, but followed almost an opposite trajectory compared to the absent museum floor: While the floor started temporally with a dramatically lived absence and won back a multiple perceived presence, the park, initially represented as an inspirational presence, ended as a decreasingly present conceived and perceived space. The case of the park also suggests that a conceived space, however representationally charged on paper with deep symbolic meanings (i.e. as a lived and almost already perceivable space), and however legitimized by winning a design contest, can organizationally be disposed of, when later developed conceptions collectively impose themselves rendering impracticable the plan selected during the design contest. Representations of space (i.e. conceived spaces) (Lefebvre, 1991) unavoidably change over time, as projects get closer to their material implementations (perceived space). And as the production of space is not concluded with its physical construction, we maintain a small hope that our alternative account of the killing of a planned park may enliven its “absence” for future planning to win back some of the green disposed of.

Conclusion

Absence is related to disposal and incites a processual thinking towards the complementary reality it (be)comes from: just as absence suggests presence, disposal evokes production and consumption (Hetherington, 2004), and these dialectic tensions capture the sociomaterial relations of a political power struggle (Dale and Burrell, 2008). The spaces of Lefebvre’s triad must not only be treated holistically (Taylor and Spicer, 2007: 335, emphasis added), but qualitative studies should get behind or beyond what happens (Schatzki, 2006) to capture also the unachieved organizational possibilities of practices (Nicolini, 2013: 168). Absent space contributes a theorizing on the particular production which, through disposal, transforms over time some conceived and materially absent spaces, into lived and still influential spaces (Meyer, 2012). Practices of conceiving space interplay organizationally with Lefebvre’s perceived/practiced and lived/imagined. We have shown specifically how immaterial spaces count (Crewe, 2011: 27) in valorizing (or silencing) the possibilities of historical moments (Lefebvre, 2014/1947: 642) that leave interesting traces (Lefebvre, 1970): both those loudly told by absent spaces and those left untold by disposed ones.

We illustrated how the lived dimension of conceiving makes an important material difference. The second floor of the museum’s abrupt and unexpected absence hurt like an amputated limb, creating the historically influential possibility of regaining it as materially present. Instead, the repeated rhetorical celebration of the park made it so vividly present in all its imagined, material, symbolical and historical relations, that it could be perceived as lived even prior to its realization, making its material production less important, as not attuned to the political rhythms of elections and still not lived by the citizens as an absence.

Not all missed historical possibilities of urban planning are lived as such. This suggests that the way planned spaces are affectively experienced matters for whether a disposal is felt and perceived as an absence or not. What provides a quality of absence to conceived spaces is the threat towards future possibilities for powerful actors, who expect an accomplished historical realization from certain perceived spaces. To add specificity to our argument, the living of conceiving cannot be left to scattered participatory planning masking political promotion, with random participation by the general public. Desirable conceived spaces may better resist disposal (i.e. become absent, in the sense of being critically recognized as a lack) in a long-term rhythm and history of everyday organizational struggle, if coupled with powerful institutional and historical organizational support (e.g. agreements between city and cantonal museum; city and private art collectors; city and real estate investors).

We have shown that discarded plans do not all behave in the same way. The difference rests in the lived dimension that over time charges some planned spaces but not others. The everyday lived dimension of conceiving space is made up of a stratification of possibilities, some of which inevitably become impossibilities. Only a selection of rejected planned spaces—through their lived absence—become significant ‘moments’ in the production of space. By focusing on the presences and absences of disposal, absent spaces contribute to make the organizational history of conceiving more intelligible in its non-linear twists and turns.

The production of space is organizationally lived by the historical ongoing disposal of conceived spaces. Accounting for the material and lived absence of the planned spaces, we traced processually how actors move from plans to the perception of their performative effects. Emotional responses and related imaginations of what is possible feed back into the planning process, to defend practitioners’ efforts from becoming historically inconsequential, failing to achieve the possibilities they aimed for.

A longitudinal view on space planning should consider variously charged and lived rhythms of disposal as a management of absences (Hetherington, 2004). To this end, we showed how absences may continue to influence the production of space (Lefebvre, 1991). We added a further moment to Lefebvre’s spatial triad (Lefebvre, 1991) that provides a historical, time-sensitive and processual account of conceived space (Mitev and De Vaujany, 2013). Absent space addresses social materiality in the long term, since affectively charged plans continue to reverberate their values, and embody recrimination for the wasted human efforts and the untold stories of possibilities lapsing into oblivion (see opening quotes).

Disposal and absence can be materially traced and shown to be productive (Meyer, 2012). But we want to be clear that there is nothing deterministic in the absence of spaces, conceived or otherwise. As an additional moment, absent space shares the features of other moments as “attempts to realize total possibilities” (Lefebvre, 2014/1947: 642). These moments are important turning points, which can fail, succeed, or even accomplish their intended organizational possibilities only partially or temporarily, depending on ‘from when’ (or by whom) history is told.

This chapter has integrated some of Lefebvre’s thoughts on temporality, rhythm and history (Lefebvre, 1970, 1975, 2004/1992, 2014/1947) to advance a processual appreciation of his spatial triad (Lefebvre, 1991), and further adds spatial specificity to his general reflections on representation, absence and presence (Lefebvre, 1980). By looking at what is historically and in everyday practice represented as possible, but then proves not to be, absent space contributes to the ambition of the production of space of being “‘a retro’ study of social space in its history and genesis […] which allows us to glimpse into if not foresee the future and what is possible” (Lefebvre, 1986; 2003: 211, emphasis added). Absent spaces show qualitatively the performative effects of a recurring and related disposal/production dialectical process within the practice of conceiving space.

Absence is not a planning anomaly. Disposal is in fact an unavoidable political controversy on the value of possibilities, and the absences it produces (and consumes) motivate presences that would not otherwise emerge. This finds support in Lefebvre’s reflection: “Absence, as a moment, has nothing pathogenic about it. On the contrary: it provokes, it incites” (Lefebvre, 1980: 231). Absence and disposal thus help a processual view of the production of space in that they provide an emotional counterpart to what physical spaces mean to us, even before (or beside) their materialization. Much as the spaces we use and practice are imbued with a life that often contradicts their abstract design, so the spaces we could never realize, despite having conceived them with great inconsequential effort, reverberate energies hard to dismiss as simply ineffective.

This chapter inevitably has some limitations. First of all, we only addressed partially the question of how the notion of disposal can be applied holistically to Lefebvre’s spatial triad (Taylor and Spicer, 2007). This constitutes an interesting agenda for a wider Lefebvre-inspired, process organizational research on space. Here we limited our exploratory analysis to the role that conceived and absent space have in the production of space. A full engagement with the notion of disposal would no doubt include the disposal of perceived spaces, in examining the long term organizational agency of ruins (Edensor, 2005) and of demolitions in the production of space. This seems a rich path for process organization studies, beyond a focus on space. How do we organize by disorganizing, how do we undo what we (or others) did before? How is the creative, innovative force of destruction performed materially and symbolically?

Secondly, within the interesting dynamics of disposal and absence in space production and the way they shape possibilities in planning practices, further reflection on the representation and materiality of conceived spaces and their absences is necessary. Lefebvre himself posed the problem of representing absence: “Absence? How to represent it, since the representation fills the voids of absence?” (Lefebvre, 1980: 230). Our study provides only first indications that the representation and ‘materialization of absences’ matter broadly in the lived practices of conceiving. Future research may address the relationship between representational, more-than-representational (Lorimer, 2005) and material spaces more systematically.

How can these material and immaterial absences and presences be politically managed in space planning? How can researchers, citizens, and planners themselves identify the significantly undesired disappearances from spatial plans? The second floor of the museum was made particularly conspicuous from an early disruptive absenting of its plan, whereby disposal actually transformed an absence and made it more present (Hetherington, 2004: 159). A specular inverted argument can apply to the park, whose early, promotional presentation to the citizens did nothing to prevent the disposal of that plan, almost as if putting the spotlight on that space allowed it somehow to hide its disappearance in plain sight, to silence its absence less visibly, because in many ways already seen. When politicians promise green areas in connection with urban renovation projects, they should be made preventively accountable for respecting those plans, for instance allocating separate untouchable budgets allocated to green areas. This would at least warrant the independent means for certain promises to be kept, avoiding that green areas got easily sacrificed as the temporally last thing to be constructed in big projects. Cost overruns should not be contained at the expense of green areas.

This chapter has foregrounded waste, absence and disposal as organizationally relevant elements in the context of spatial planning, and in planning more generally. A compelling argument sees all architecture as marked by melancholy (Benjamin, 2000) “for each building is what it is, but simultaneously is ‘that which is not’. The latter absence creates a feeling in all those at the site of ‘a loss’, a negation of what might have been” (Dale and Burrell, 2008: 291, emphasis added). Materially built facilities obscure the realm of possibilities from which they were planned, calling for a specific organizational search into the history of conceiving (Mitev and De Vaujany, 2013: 327). Material spaces do not always reveal, but often conceal their planners’ intentions, covering the trails of ruined dreams and merely attempted alternative conceptions of space. In Gyerin’s words: “[o]nce completed, buildings hide the many possibilities that did not get built, as they bury the interests, politics, and power that shaped the one design that did” (Gieryn, 2002: 38–39, emphasis added). We like to think of absent space as a critical tool to unearth those organizational interests, politics and power.

Acknowledgements: This study was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under grant numbers 138105 and 152272.