Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
73
told me his story. He was always in and out of youth detention, and in spite of the fact that he
was only fifteen, his destiny already seemed clear, like that of the majority of young street
kids on Long Street. That day Chris was wearing a Barcelona T-shirt a Spanish tourist had
given him a few days earlier. Across the shoulders was printed the name of Lionel Messi, the
popular Argentinian who plays for the Catalan team. He explained that he would definitely
support Barcelona during the final.
As a result of these conversations I started to understand how the final, like other events
that took place in the street, could be perceived by its regulars, placing them in relationship
with private memories and personal experiences. All Long Street regulars came to the street
with their private, individual temporalities made up of a series of episodes and events that
they considered significant to varying degrees. Edward Casey saw places as gatherers of
experiences. He wrote, ‘Places .... gather experiences and histories, even languages and
thoughts’ (Casey 1993: 24). According to Casey, the power to gather stories should not be
found in the power of individuals to project or reproduce their memories on a particular space
and ‘not even these subjects as they draw upon their bodily and perceptual powers’ (Casey
1993: 24). This power ‘belongs to place itself, and it is a power of gathering’ (Casey 1993:
24). In the case of Long Street we can consider the street as a gatherer of the experiences and
memories of my interviewees. My work’s primary interest was in discovering how these
memories had been formed. This is how I realised that I could take Long Street as an
intersection of different types of temporality crossing, intersecting and overlapping in the
street. Like Bakhtin I saw the street as a chronotope in which I could bring together quite
different temporalities.
The word chronotope has its origins in physics, in particular in the theory of relativity,
where it is used to render the idea of an intrinsic relationship between space and time. The
concept was first used in the field of literature by Mikhail Mikhailovič Bakhtin in an essay
written in 1937. By chronotope Bakhtin meant the ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal
and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (Bakhtin 1981: 84). It is
used with precisely this meaning, as a category which allows for the indivisibility of time and
space.
In the literary chronotope there is a fusion between spatial and temporal connotations
into a whole, which has both meaning and concreteness. Time becomes ‘dense and concrete’
and becomes visible from an artistic point of view. Space becomes intensified and insinuates
itself into the movement of time, of the interwoven effect and of history. The use of the
spatial-temporal conjunction in the chronotope is thus a stratagem for rendering intelligible a
human experience, which would otherwise be emptied of meaning. Literature makes use of
the chronotope to represent the production of human meanings, which are the result of spatial-
temporal fusion.
It is worth noting how the concept of the literary chronotope, as Bakhtin meant it, has
influenced many ethnographic and social science studies in general focused on studying
places. After a study of Sao Paulo focused on its polyphony, Massimo Canevacci (1996)
compared the city to a literary text and its places to meaningful corpora that refer to those that
Bakhtin had termed literary chronotopes. He wrote ‘an urban neighbourhood can be seen,
