Spatial phenomenotechnics : making space with Charles Booth and

ing space There is something unsettling about space. Whether it is existential or historical, our spatiality seems to generate a persistent sense of unknowing that animates repetitive projects of abstraction. Space has to be marked, framed, mapped, subject to boundaries. In that sense, as Perec writes in his extraordinary catalogue of forms of spatiality, space is a perpetual doubt (1997 [1974], page 91). From this perspective, the abstraction of space is not necessarily a malign operationödisciplinary, rationalising ... öbut perhaps only a human one. At the most localised scale, we try to colonise our own spaces, our places of work, our desks, our tools, our chairs and rooms. Any science of `topoanalysis', wrote Gaston Bachelard, would have to recognise that the house is a ``tool for analysis of the human soul'', whether it is the ``houses of man'' (rooms, homes, offices) or the ``houses of things'' (drawers, closets, shells, filing cabinets) (1994, page xxxvii). Even such `eulogised spaces' as formed the object of Bachelard's own oneiric reflections thus appear as the products of the doubts we have about space. And the inescapable corollary is that the fashioning of ourselves as humans is accomplished, in part at least, by the fashioning of our intimate spaces of existence. Spatial phenomenotechnics: making space with Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes