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Sensing Place: Living with Melbourne’s Stone

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Abstract

Drawing on ideas from non-representational, phenomenological and post-phenomenological thinking, this chapter examines how besides being saturated with contesting meanings and practices, places come to be known through often unreflexive sensory and affective experiences. The focus here is on how stone constitutes part of the material fabric that contributes to this sensory and affective apprehension of the city, and the chapter investigates how Melbourne offers a host of distinctive stony affordances that solicit particular practices and experiences. Particular attention is paid to how the tactile affordances of stone in the city cajole bodies into particular embodied performances that vary from functional to playful. In addition, the ways in which light reflects on stone to generate particular experiences of colour is shown to be especially distinctive with regard to Melbourne’s dark bluestone. These considerations foreground the non-representational apprehensions of routine practice and emphasise that though the affective and sensory experience of materiality is often difficult to access, it constitutes an integral role in shaping how people come to know, live and belong in a place.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

    Tim Edensor

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  1. Tim Edensor
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Correspondence to Tim Edensor .

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Edensor, T. (2020). Sensing Place: Living with Melbourne’s Stone. In: Stone. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1_6

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-4649-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-4650-1

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