Lefebvre's Spatial Triad

In Kim Knott's The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis, she introduces Lefebvre's spatial triad. This was new to me and I am thinking through it.

Lefebvre introduces three interrelated conceptualizations of space:

Representations of Space - I understand this as the official and technical plan of space, top down - it is abstract, planned - "conceived space" - the building as it is designed by the architect, for instance

Spaces of Representation - how people (and perhaps other-than-human people) actually live in space - "lived space" - as one article put it "The lived space concerns how human beings use the space and, most importantly, retrofit and mold the space for their own use." 

Spatial Practice - this is still confusing  - It seems to be the everyday ways that people use, perceive, and navigate space  - ordinary everyday practices "from minute, repeated gestures to the rehearsed journeys from home to work and to play" (39). These are the patterns and "paths" that emerge from everyday use. They "encounter and have at times to acknowledge the conceived order, but they form their own stories that are inaccessible to planners and scientists." And they connect to the lived order.

Trying to think about the spatial triad in relation to Barrow, AK:

Representations of Space - this was a city planned and built by white Americans and incorporated in 1958 to settle nomadic Inupiaq people. In this sense it is a city space as conceived and imposed by non-Inupiaq. It has the official pattern of what a city or town is supposed to be, based on American and European precedents. A city must have a post office, a city hall, a school, a hospital, roads laid out in blocks, single-family dwellings. It is small town USA - set down 327 miles above the Arctic circle. Knott writes "Always embedded in such representations are ideology, knowledge, and power" (36), 

Lived Space - Spaces of Representation - All of this is then imposed on 1) the Artic Tundra and 2) on Inupiaq people and culture. So the place "distorts" or changes the idealistic model of small town USA, forcing it, bending it into new directions based on the realities of the place and the culture. So "main street" becomes an ice road in the winter that melts into muddy ruts during the summer. The houses (which are American Lower 48 style houses that are heated, and would warm the tundra beneath them) have to be built on pilings - again because these are houses that are not conceived in relation to the space, its environment and ecology. The Inupiaq also built homes - but these were very different from the homes of the lower 48, the "average American home," because they were built in relationship to the environment. Then there are the meat drying racks outside each home, which is an adaptation by Inupiaq culture trying to live, it fits its lifeways in these spaces. There are the summer camps out on the tundra to which families travel and stay living off the land, hunting, fishing, gathering berries, pushing out against the residential model, deconstructing and subverting the idea of a home in town and the suburban American ideal.

Kim Knott writes that "Such lived spaces, imbued with distinctively local knowledge, often run counter to spaces generated by formal, technical knowledge" (37). These lived spaces can "disrupt the dominant order, through their association with the clandestine and underground side of social life."

Spatial Practice - this seems to be how someone actually perceives a space that they look at or encounter. This perception is mediated by the person's cultural perspective? So one person - say a white person from the outside, or someone who drives a car - looks at Barrows and sees the "offical" planned roads and perceives these as the way to move around the city.  And I did too -- until I got a snow machine or a skidoo. After I began to ride the skidoo around town during the winter, I perceived for the first time a myriad of skidoo trails that twisted around and through the town - through "yards" and around homes and buildings (and therefore subverting the idea of planned roads, space conceived of as private property and homes with "lots." The trails created a new map of shaped by a different perspective on space and the technology of the snow mobile. The trails threaded their way through back spaces, secret spaces that I had never seen before. These trails were used primarily by Inupiaq people. This was a completely different way of perceiving the space and navigating through the space - it paid no attention whatsoever to the "roads" but built a system of trails that mapped out a different world of Inupiaq places and relationships.