Search Results (3)

As Villanova University students navigate campus life, ghost stories tied to specific buildings, paths, and rituals circulate as grassroots spatial narratives. This article argues that these stories involving haunted halls, underground tunnels, and ritualized practices surrounding seals, arches, and fountains, function as forms of Radical Placemaking, through which students collectively reinterpret, appropriate, and sometimes resist the university’s officially sanctioned spatial order. Drawing on 162 student testimonies collected in 2019, translated into Spanish, and analyzed using topic modeling, co-occurrence mapping, and GIS visualization, the study demonstrates how vernacular stories encode lived experiences, informal knowledge, and alternative claims to campus space. Nine thematic clusters emerge, organized into three narrative domains: supernatural encounters anchored to institutional buildings (including Alumni Hall’s Civil War history, the St. Mary’s nun legend, and Tolentine Hall hauntings), ritual and tradition practices that reinscribe or subvert formal authority (the Corr Chapel arch, the Driscoll Hall seal ritual, and student ceremonies), and hidden-space narratives that imagine infrastructures beyond official visibility (such as underground tunnels linking campus buildings). Analysis of narrative transmission reveals uneven power relations: institutional channels circulate curated traditions aligned with university identity. Peer networks and personal experiences generate counter-mappings that privilege exploration, embodiment, and affect. Villanova’s ghost stories constitute spatial perceptions that enable students to assert belonging, contest institutional narratives, and produce place through collective storytelling within an evolving and hierarchically governed campus landscape. Full article

This article investigates ufaFabrik’s practice within Berlin’s urban context, which emerged from an occupation of an abandoned site and evolved into a long-term experiment in radical place-making. Through this case study analysis, it explores the role of radical place-making in shaping urban policy, focusing on the dimensions of decision, place and policy. Drawing on an expanded conceptualisation of place-making that embraces a radical perspective, the study is based on a Ph.D. programme and on extensive field research. ufaFabrik has given place-making a political meaning, challenging conventional urban planning in relation to ‘undecided’ spaces. This paradigm of place-making represents grassroots activism and insurgent action and it can catalyse both local and urban transformations. Through a critical analysis of the limits and possibilities of radical place-making practice, the article argues that the ufaFabrik offers valuable insights into the potential of participatory and community-led approaches to reshape urban spaces and promote more inclusive and sustainable forms of urban governance. The study highlights how the re-politicisation of urban issues emerges from conflict and challenges established power dynamics. It highlights the interconnection between ‘place’ and ‘making’, weaving experiential and generative elements into the urban discourse, highlighting its transformative potential and reconfiguration of decision-making dynamics. Full article

This paper considers the political, geo-philosophical musings of Deleuze and Guattari on spatialisation, place and movement in relation to the religious nomad (wandering ascetics and reclusive forest monks) inhabiting the borderlands of Thailand. A nomadic science involves improvised ascetic practices between the molar lines striated by modern state apparatuses. The wandering ascetics, inhabiting a frontier political ecology, stand in contrast to the appropriating, sedentary metaphysics and sanctifying arborescence of statism and its corollary place-making, embedded in rootedness and territorialisation. It is argued that the religious nomads, residing on the endo-exteriorities of the state, came to represent a rhizomatic and politico-ontological threat to centre-nation and its apparatus of capture. The paper also theorises transitions and movement at the borderlands in the context of the state’s monastic reforms. These reforms, and its pervasive royal science, problematised the interstitial zones of the early ascetic wanderers in their radical cross-cutting networks and lines, moving within and across demarcated frontiers. Indeed, the ascetic wanderers and their allegorical war machine were seen as a source of wild, free-floating charisma and mystical power, eventually appropriated by the centre-nation in it’s becoming unitary and fixed. Full article