Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
82
understood as a narrative platform that connects the dimension of space to that of time. She
writes, ‘Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us to resist the Hegelian trap of separating time and space,
and, as a time-space aggregate becomes a complete and inseparable entity.’ Keeping in mind
the landscape’s chronotopic dimension, we can imagine a kind of ethnographic observation of
the city that spans different space-time perspectives and can produce a ‘different way of
seeing time and space together, the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of being in the
world.’ (Soja in Folch Serra 1990: 256).
We could add that the very concept of the chronotope and its application to studying
social phenomena inherently contains the conditions for discovering polyphony. Each
individual can attribute a specific meaning to the place by putting it in relationship to a
particular event, whether present, past or imagined, or his or her personal experience. A road,
a square or an abandoned alley can take on different meanings when related to particular
human experiences, like an important encounter, a traumatic event or the memory of a loved
one. The landscape is never a bearer of a single meaning. On the contrary, landscapes can be
regarded as repositories of polyphony and heteroglossia: places where social, historical and
geographical conditions allow different voices to express themselves differently than they
would under any other conditions. The landscape ‘speaks’ through the different individuals
that question it, challenge it and project their own memories and desires onto it. This work
observed and explored Long Street as a chronotopic unit. Tatiana Argounova has noted how
the street’s chronotopic dimension can be recognized in its analogy to the narrative. She
wrote, ‘I argue that a road is chronotopical through and through because each point on it
corresponds to a certain time and certain location in space and because narratives about roads
take us back to a certain time and certain location in space.’ (Argounova 2012: 201). We
could add that the street’s chronotopic dimension can be understood in its ability to embrace
many narratives. Bakhtin called chronotopes the place ‘where the knots of narrative are tied
and untied’ (Bakhtin 1981: 250). The chronotope is conceived as the interweaving of different
narrative forms that tie to different space-time intersections. Walking down Long Street with
its regulars and exploring how they had attributed a specific meaning to it the evening of the
final through their particular personal experiences, I started to conceive the street as a
space/time ‘knot’ in which countless narratives intertwined.
