Dovey, K. (1999). Framing places. Mediating power in built form. London, Routledge.

Architecture and urban design frames space, both literally and discursively (1)
Everyday life takes place (1)
Action is structured and shaped by streets, walls, doors and windows; it is framed by the
decisions of designers. As a form of discourse, built form constructs and frames meanings. Place
tells us stories; we read them as spatial text. (1)
Through both these literature and discursive framings, the built environment mediates, construct
and reproduces power relations (1)
Because architecture and urban design involve transformation in the ways we frame life,
because design is the imagination and production of the future, the field cannot claim autonomy
from the politics of social change. Such a rejection of autonomy entails no suggestion of
determinism; the relations of architecture to social behaviour are complex and culturally
embedded interactions. (2)
It is the complicitous silence of place as a framework to life that is the source of its deepest
associations with power. (2)
Pages 12-14: force, coercion, manipulation, seduction and authority and their mediations
through the built environment (with examples of typologies of buildings such as the prison, the
fortress etc).
Built form often operates as metaphor, wherein it simultaneously represents and masks its
associations with power (15)
[the power embedded in imagining the future] hints at a crucial role for architects and urban
designers as imaginative agents (15)
The capacity of buildings and urban forms to stabilise identity and symbolise a grounding of
authority in landscape, nature and time-less imagery means that architecture is regularly
called on to legitimate power in a crisis. (17)
Page 18: dimensions [=discourses] along which the dialectic of power in places are played
out
Places frame and construct social programs and representational narratives, as they are framed
and constructed by them. (45)
Place is not a third in a series that proceeds from program and text, rather it is the practice of
their intersections and much moreideas of place as an assemblage of socio-spatial dialectics,
and as a product of practice rather than an effect of built form (45).

Most phenomenological theory within architecture and urban design has focused on this
ontology of dwellingthe primary functions of buildings are to orient and identify
architecture tells us where we are and who we are. In this view buildings are seen to ground,
shelter and stabilise a fragile sense of being. (46)
Much less usedis the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962) who established a phenomenology of
space based in the body [ according to which] place experience is not a subjective encounter
with an objective world but cuts across the binary division between subject and object: one
does not first have a subject that apprehends certain features of the world in terms of the idea of
place; instead, the structure of subjectivity is given in and through the structure of place (Malpas
1999: 35).
The second line of anti-Heideggerian argument in architecture is a more direct attack on the
notion of a spatially rooted ontology. (47)
From this view, the gravitas and heaviness of the earth is to be overcome in a Nietzchean spirit
of freedom; place is a centre of orientation and identity is an anchor which weighs us down.
(48)
There is here a desire to sever the connection of building with site and place, a privileging of
movement over stasis, of wings over roots (48)
Marc Auge and non places (maybe useful for Berlin?)
Non places are spaces of transit and temporal occupation such as freeways, transit lounges,
aircraft cabins, supermarkets, hotel rooms, leisure parks, shopping malls and the informational
spaces of telepresence. Koolhas has given architectural expression to such desires of lightness,
an un-grounding of architectureas a form of freedom from place and its grounded critiques
the non-place, the generic city (Koolhas 1995). Some of these ideas appear to mesh well with
Deleuzian thinking about lines of flight, folding and smooth space (Deleuze and Guattari
1988). (48)
While I am sympathetic with such critiques, questions about the ontology of dwelling are not so
easily wished away. The non-place is another kind of place experience geared to a new form of
identity production with certain classes of people who feel quite at home in them. (48)
The common ground of most such critiques of place is to select the stabilizing tendencies of
Heideggerian dwelling as the point of critique, seeing it as the propagation of illusions of stable
identity .Yet I would note a crucial point of agreement between many phenomenologist and
deconstructionist in this field it is that built form does operate to stabilize identities, the
disagreement is over whether it should do sothe question is not whether place is a good or
bad concept but how good are our theories of place. In this view the concept of place should be
approached dialectically as a set of practices, and as the product of conflict, contradiction,
resistance and the play of difference. (48)