The contemporary urban condition is increasingly defined by a fundamental shift in how public space is produced and valued, a transformation driven primarily by neoliberalism. As David Harvey (2005, 2) defines it, neoliberalism is "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade." This framework has entailed, among other things, an increasing reliance on public–private partnerships to pursue economic development in our cities today (Harvey 2005, 76). The design and management of public spaces under such conditions has then extended neoliberal urbanization directly into the everyday life of the street. Margaret Kohn (2004, 6) draws an alarming distinction between two opposing frameworks: the "traditional public forum doctrine" and the "property rights" approach. The former emphasizes the government's responsibility for stewarding public spaces as shared resources and ensuring citizens' access to them; the latter treats public spaces as essentially private holdings, such that "the responsible bureaucracy has discretion to regulate or forbid citizens' access." To live under the neoliberal regime, Harvey observes, is to accept "that bundle of rights necessary for capital accumulation" as the operative inalienable right, one that trumps nearly any other conception of rights one might name (Harvey 2005, 181).

When public spaces are designed primarily as commodities to generate profit, they inevitably reshape the democratic reality of the city. Because capital is risk-averse, it demands urban spaces that hold high investment potential and follow predictable market trends. To guarantee these returns, space must be highly predictable and easily manageable. This economic requirement for predictability closes off generative possibilities, producing homogeneous public spaces that prioritize global market trends over the local social making of place, shutting off the world-making that public space can otherwise enable in its spatial locality (De Waard et al. 2024). As access to the public realm is increasingly filtered through the lens of investment potential and economic favorability, the existence of plural publics is displaced. Nancy Fraser's path-breaking critique of the singular public sphere is instructive here. Where Habermas idealized the public sphere as a single body of "private persons" assembled to discuss matters of "public concern" or "common interest" (Fraser 1990, 58), Fraser shows that cities are in fact composed of multiple "counterpublics" whose distinct forms of presence stand in "always-conflictual" relations with the dominant bourgeois public (Fraser 1990, 61). Bourgeois publics, in turn, have historically excoriated these alternatives and deliberately sought to block broader participation (Fraser 1990, 61). The homogenization of urban space proceeds along this same line. The built environment curates a sanitized experience for the bourgeois public, pushing marginalized groups out of sight or into fragmented, representational roles. The urban experience is reduced to the consumption of a lifestyle, sometimes ironically extracted from the very marginal demographics it has displaced, where inhabitants interact with a curated aesthetic rather than with real people across social divides.

Because neoliberal urbanism is now integral to our urban process, from capital investment and city-making to the day-to-day regulation of space, we must recognize the conditions under which people, rather than capital, might make space. Contemporary urban developments have reduced public life to a network of destinations and treat the immediate, in-between spaces as zones engineered to move bodies as quickly as possible from one point of capital activity to the next. The spatial experience of locality is reduced to what Marc Augé calls "non-place," which "exists, and it does not contain organic society" (Augé 1995, 111). Cities functioning as a logistical network for labor and capital present this "spectacular acceleration of means of transport," as Augé notes:

Its concrete outcome involves considerable physical modifications: urban concentrations, movements of population and the multiplication of what we call "non-places," in opposition to the sociological notion of place, associated by Mauss and a whole ethnological tradition with the idea of a culture localized in time and space. (Augé 1995)

The disappearance of immediate public life produces more than physical exclusion; it fundamentally alters the perceptive function of public space and inflicts a deeper psychological wound: the destruction of moral and psychological ownership. Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks (2001) describe psychological ownership as the feeling that a space belongs to the community and that individuals have a right to inhabit, shape, and attach meaning to it, regardless of legal title. When a city strips its inhabitants of the opportunity to dwell in, adapt, or claim space as their own, it loses the trust of its people in its capacity to host local plural life. People go to destinations, public or private, not only because they choose to, but because there is nowhere else to go. This harms psychological ownership precisely because the framing of public space as a destination keeps it perpetually distant rather than immediate and adjacent. It is a constant reminder that public life is something to be reached for rather than something one practices every day. It harms moral ownership because it hides the process of commoning with one another in our public spaces today, imprinting the highly individualistic notions inculcated by neoliberalism, and thus teaching us to mind our own business rather than attuning to and finding solidarity among our immediate adjacency. As the very process of forming public life is designed out of the public spaces, citizens are no longer required to navigate difference or share space with the "other," leading to an atrophy of public capacity. As Richard Sennett has long argued, the skills of cooperation and civility with strangers are themselves cultivated through exposure to difference in shared public settings (Sennett 2012). Cultivating the conditions for coexistence in public space is therefore the indispensable work of building public capacity. When individuals and communities are allowed to be together, leave traces, and attach meaning to their physical surroundings, they develop a process to claim the space that transcends legal deeds.

If the formal, legal governance of the city has been co-opted by the property-owner model, then the restoration of a truly democratic public realm cannot rely solely on top-down state intervention; it must be reclaimed from the bottom up by residents asserting psychological and moral ownership of the spaces they inhabit. Legal title to urban space may be increasingly concentrated in private hands, but formal ownership is not the only basis for spatial agency. To reintroduce genuine civic governance into the city, inhabitants must first feel that they have a legitimate stake in their environment. This is the core of what Henri Lefebvre (1968) first called "the right to the city": not merely a legal right of access to existing resources, but a collective, moral right to change and reinvent the city through active participation and appropriation. Under such conditions, everyday experimentation can evolve into a process of self-making and world-making, ultimately driving individual and collective self-actualization (De Waard et al. 2024).

To fully grasp the generative capacity of these participatory spaces, we must understand them through Hannah Arendt's concept of the "space of appearance." In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt describes this not as a pre-existing physical stage but as a political realm generated the moment individuals gather to act and speak, and disappearing the moment the action ceases. For Arendt, "appearance" and its shared visibility together generate "power":

Power preserves the public realm and the space of appearance, and as such it is also the lifeblood of the human artifice, which, unless it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human affairs and relationships and the stories engendered by them, lacks its ultimate raison d'être. Without being talked about by men and without housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object; without the human artifice to house them, human affairs would be as floating, as futile and vain, as the wanderings of nomad tribes. (Arendt 1958, 204)

Building on Arendt and her account of "work" and "action," both De Waard et al. (2024) and Bonnie Honig (2017) draw attention to the infrastructural potential of being-together: "the work that builds public infrastructures, and on which political practices, in turn, rely" (De Waard et al. 2024). Such infrastructures, made through participation, "press us into relations with others" and "are sites of attachment and meaning that occasion the inaugurations, conflicts, and contestations that underwrite everyday citizenships and democratic sovereignties" (Honig 2017, 6).

Read through this lens, the making of space and the protection of spaces of appearance demand far greater attention for their immanent social, cultural, and political potential. Attention matters because only when we recognize how public space is actively being claimed can we cultivate the conditions for more plural occupations to emerge. Protection matters because capitalism has a historical tendency either to extract from such spaces when it sees profit in them, or to police them once they get in the way of profit-making.

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso.

De Waard, Jolijn, et al. 2024. [Full citation pending — author list, title, publication.]

Fraser, Nancy. 1990. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy." Social Text 25/26: 56–80.

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Honig, Bonnie. 2017. Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair. New York: Fordham University Press.

Kohn, Margaret. 2004. Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space. New York: Routledge.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1968. Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos.

Pierce, Jon L., Tatiana Kostova, and Kurt T. Dirks. 2001. "Toward a Theory of Psychological Ownership in Organizations." Academy of Management Review 26, no. 2: 298–310.

Sennett, Richard. 2012. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hanzi Meng 5/17/26 Hanzi Meng 5/17/26

Temporal, Liminal, Hopeful: A Reading of Public Space

Molly (Hanzi) Meng

Chapter from Indeterminate Edges: A Temporal, Liminal, Hopeful Reading of New York City's Everyday Public Space.

MS Design and Urban Ecologies, Parsons School of Design, 2026.

Seeing Space as A Product of Temporal Practice

A group of older men plays dominoes at the edge of a Queens plaza every afternoon. They are not where the plaza's design told them to sit. They are where they have decided, through return, that the plaza is. Watch them long enough and what becomes visible is not the plaza as a fixed surface but the plaza as something being produced: by their tables, their chairs, their hours, their bodies leaning over a game that the plaza itself does not know is happening.

This is what Hannah Arendt had in mind when she described "spaces of appearance," not as physical stages laid down in advance, but as political realms that come into being the moment people gather to act and speak, and disappear the moment the action ceases (Arendt 1958). The dominoes corner is a small instance of the same dynamic. The corner is not there until they are there. When they are there, it is unmistakable.

What recurs across different sites and different users is the same basic gesture: the introduction of time and bodily consciousness into a space that the design itself does not yet contain. The chess players who settle into a corner do not find a chess corner; they produce one, through return, through rhythm, through the slow accumulation of presence. The person who brings their own chair into a plaza is inventing a neighborhood living room. These acts constitute what Mike Crang describes as "time as plurality with a sense of social vibrancy... not just through how people arrange themselves in time-space but through their creation of different sorts of time-space" (Crang 2001, 204).

The argument applies at scales larger than the corner or the table. In 2023, the New York Times published An Extremely Detailed Map of New York City Neighborhoods, a project by Larry Buchanan, Josh Katz, Rumsey Taylor, and Eve Washington that asked residents to draw the boundaries of their own neighborhoods on a city-wide map (Buchanan et al. 2023). What the project revealed, at the scale of the entire city, is that the lived geography of New York is not the geography of council district lines or census tracts. Neighborhoods emerge from where people say they live, where they have walked daily, where they have shopped, met, returned. They are accumulations of shared narrative, repeated movement, and identification — temporal sediment, not coordinate. The boundaries on the official map are stable. The boundaries the residents draw move, overlap, and sometimes refuse the official ones entirely. What this confirms, at city scale, is what the dominoes corner shows at body scale: space is what temporal practice has made of it.

If we want to read public space adequately, we have to be able to see this kind of production. The dominant frameworks in urban planning, however, are largely built to see something else. Crang's distinction between spatialized time and temporalized space helps name what is being missed (Crang 2001). Spatialized time treats time as a variable mapped onto a pre-fixed space, linear, directional, descriptive of what a space holds. It is the temporality of the survey, the traffic count, the after-occupancy report. This approach dominates urban analysis because it is quantitative and measurable, compatible with spatial analysis across disciplines. It is also structurally limited. It assumes space itself is stable and prior, that time merely flows through space without altering what space is. It can only describe how a space functions. It cannot read how individuals transform a space through the counter-practices they bring to it.

The transformations spatialized time misses are precisely the ones that matter. Temporal-spatial reclamations that are informal, local, and affective — the dominoes corner, the brought chair, the bench reorganized by regulars — fall outside its analytic frame. Spatialized time renders time visible only insofar as time can be standardized. The rest is noise.

What the observations point to is space understood as the product of temporal practice, called into being through use, return, and accumulation. Henri Lefebvre put this most directly: "space is nothing but the inscription of time in the world... the city is the deployment of time" (Lefebvre 1996, cited in May and Thrift 2001, 190). Time, in this reading, is not an external measure applied to space; it is intrinsic to how space takes form at all.

To take this seriously is to need different eyes. The work of reading public space, on this account, is the work of what Lefebvre called the rhythmanalyst: someone able to see how urban temporalities come into adjacency, how different time-spaces meet, negotiate, and coexist within a single physical surface (Lefebvre 2004).

There is a further reason to take the temporal reading seriously, and it has to do with what kind of resource time is. Heidegger, in Being and Time, identifies publicness as one of the fundamental characteristics of time. The "now," in his account, is not the private possession of an individual or group but accessible to all as a horizon for measuring events: it belongs to everyone and thus to no one (Heidegger 1962). Unlike space, which can be enclosed, zoned, or owned, time cannot be fully sealed off. This does not mean time is free from power. Work schedules, attention economies, and event-driven programming have made temporal governance a powerful instrument. But no authority possesses absolute sovereignty over the now.

Michel de Certeau gives this shared resource its political form. In The Practice of Everyday Life, he distinguishes between strategies and tactics. Strategies belong to institutions that have a proper place — the state, the planner, the property owner — and they exercise power by mapping it onto space: making zones, drawing boundaries, organizing flow. Tactics belong to those who have no proper place. They operate not on territory but on time: improvising within the spaces of others, seizing fleeting opportunities, depending on timing rather than authorization (de Certeau 1984, 36–37). What this thesis will go on to call counter-practices — the chess corner that wasn't planned, the chair brought into the plaza, the dominoes table at the Walgreens facade — are tactics in de Certeau's sense. None of them required permission. Each of them depends on return, on knowing when the bus passes, when the corner is shaded, when the morning crowd thickens or the afternoon empties out. Their durability comes not from authorization but from the way they have been practiced, on time, often enough to become legible to others as belonging there.

Attending to the temporal accumulation of spatial making, then, is not a methodological choice. It is the way the practices that produce public space have made themselves available to us.

Creations of Timespace

During an acting class I took when I was eighteen, we were asked to improvise a scene prompted by two characters and a scenario. One student was trying to play a powerful character. During the attempt, he tried multiple things: he raised his voice, paced around, and told the other person what to do. He tried many things to show his command.

When it came time for Semaj's feedback, he said: "A truly powerful person takes their time."

He then slowly walked into the room, sat down, adjusted his clothes, taking nearly a full minute from entering the door to finally lifting his eyes to meet the other actor's gaze. We were all immersed in the temporality he created for us, the unnegotiable presence, the way he commanded the space without saying a word.

After the moment settled, he looked at us sincerely and said:

"Remember, kids, how you approach time is how you approach space."

With the time-space Semaj claimed for himself, he brought the space to his temporality. The space and its boundaries were no longer defined by its walls; they were created through his actions and presence. Everywhere he touched and interacted with became his space.

But there was something else happening in Semaj's demonstration that I only began to understand much later. The power of his performance was not located in the actions themselves, the walking, the sitting, the adjusting of clothes. It lived in the suspensions between them. Each pause was a held interval. The room hung in it. And then a new gesture would arrive, a hand to the collar, a slow lift of the eyes, and the suspension would resolve into the next moment, only to be reopened.

What Semaj was doing was producing time-space not as linear chronos but as a sequence of small events, backed with the suspended temporality he created. Each happening was inspired and fed into the continuum of his performance, held just long enough for us to grasp before it got composted into the world he created. The space he commanded was not made by his presence alone; it was made by his capacity to set the in-between state of the events, enter and exit suspension on his own terms. Each new gesture took from this time-space continuum and was handed back with somewhere to land.

This is the question the next section takes up. What goes on in that in-between state? What happens when that state is not met by the next gesture?

Liminality

The word liminal comes from the Latin limen, threshold. In its classical anthropological usage, it names the middle phase of a rite of passage: the interval between separation from one social state and reincorporation into another. Victor Turner, building on Arnold van Gennep, described this phase as a time of being "betwixt and between," neither what one was nor yet what one will become (Turner 1969; van Gennep 1960). It is in this in-between that established structures are suspended and new forms of relation, identity, and meaning become possible. The threshold is, in this sense, the condition of change. Things cross it; things emerge from it.

This generative reading of the liminal still circulates widely in design, ritual studies, and theories of social transformation. And yet, when one searches today for images of "liminal space," what surfaces is something quite different in mood. Empty hallways under fluorescent light. Closed shopping malls at three in the morning. Stairwells leading to nowhere in particular. Hotel corridors that seem to extend past the edges of the photograph. These spaces are not depicted as generative; they are depicted as haunted. The liminal, in its contemporary visual vernacular, has acquired an atmosphere of suspended dread.

Same threshold form, two opposite feelings. The shift is worth attending to. What separates the generative threshold from the haunted one is not the structure of the in-between itself, but whether it carries a credible promise of resolution, a way out, an arrival, a next phase. The fear underwriting the haunted hallway is not the fear of change. It is the fear that the threshold has lost its exit.

This contemporary mood finds its most precise theoretical articulation in Lauren Berlant's concept of the impasse. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant writes:

Usually an "impasse" designates a time of dithering from which someone or some situation cannot move forward. In this book's adaptation, the impasse is a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one's sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event. (Berlant 2011)

The impasse is the threshold extended past its promised duration, a stretch of time without a narrative genre to give it shape. It is the haunted hallway, theorized: the historical condition in which exit has stopped being a credible promise. Berlant's images for what living inside it feels like are the cul-de-sac, where one walks paradoxically in the same space, and dogpaddling, where one keeps stroking but the water does not yield a shore (Berlant 2011).

But here is where her account opens. For someone dogpaddling in a pool, resolution might be an exit out of the pool entirely. But it might also be a pole within the pool, something to reach for, hold onto, push off from. Better still if they have brought their own pole into the water. The first kind of stay is anxious, structured by the absence of choice. The second is a stay one participates in. The body is still in the water, but its relation to the water has changed.

This is the move on which the rest of the chapter turns. Resolution does not have to mean exit. When exit is no longer credible, when the historical condition is impasse, resolution can take the form of dwelling: a stay made livable by what one can return to within it.

In contemporary cities, the backdrop is saturated with public surfaces — sidewalks, plazas, transit corridors, edges of all kinds. And yet contemporary public space functions as an impasse, not because there is too little of it but because of what holds people inside it: the requirement that destination be paid for, the assumption that a public surface is something one passes through on the way to a transactional somewhere, the policing of any practice that would treat the surface itself as livable. Berlant gives this condition its temporal name:

The neoliberal present is a space of transition, not only between modes of production and modes of life, but between different animating, sustaining fantasies. This shift generates intensities so present that they impose historical consciousness on its subjects as a moment without edges, and recent pasts and near futures blend into a stretched-out time that people move around in to collect evidence and find a nonsovereign footing. (Berlant 2011)

A moment without edges. The phrase names, in temporal language, exactly what privatized public space materializes spatially. The stretched-out time of the neoliberal present meets, in the city, a stretched-out space whose surfaces have been stripped of the edges that would let bodies find footing on them. Two scales of the same condition, registering each other.

The radical question this thesis takes up is whether dwelling within this condition is possible: whether, through the creation of new time-spaces from within the existing public field, the impasse of the present might be remade, not abandoned, but reconstituted from the inside.

The chess players who claim a corner of a plaza, returning every afternoon with their boards and their folding chairs, suggest that it is. They have not exited public space; they have not built a new one. They have produced a recurring time-space inside the existing one. Through repetition, through the slow accumulation of a daily practice, they have reclaimed the possibility that this surface can be inhabited rather than merely traversed. They have taken back, in Lefebvre's phrase, a small quantity of their right to the city, not as a legal claim but as a temporal one, asserted through the ongoing fact of return (Lefebvre 1968).

How is such a resolution physically enacted? Berlant offers one of the clearest answers in Cruel Optimism:

Literally, by changing the sensorial experience of immediate things in the world, this chapter's cases have interfered with that pattern of treading water in the impasse. Interference with the feedback loop of a genre is one version of ideological iconoclasm. It affirms a model of a civil society that is civil, but in a new manner. (Berlant 2011)

The intervention she describes is not at the level of policy, representation, or large-scale spatial redesign. It is at the level of the immediate sensorial, the body's encounter with the things directly around it: the textures, surfaces, and atmospheres through which a public is held in its current relation to itself. This is why edges become the analytic site of this thesis.

Jan Gehl's observational work established the empirical baseline: people overwhelmingly choose to stay along the edges of public spaces rather than in their open centers (Gehl 2011, 149). Richard Sennett extends this politically: edges are where different publics first encounter one another, as in the La Marqueta on the seam between Spanish Harlem and the Upper East Side, a site of routine cross-class proximity precisely because it lies between two otherwise partitioned neighborhoods (Sennett 2006). An edge, in Sennett's reading, both divides and mixes.

A fuller working definition of edge will be developed in the next chapter; here it is enough to note that edge, in the broadest sense, names anything that sits between two states, two materials, two atmospheres, two publics, two regimes of use, and thereby acquires a mediating function. The edge inherits something of the threshold's structure: it is liminal in spatial form. It can be a bench, a curb, a low wall, a planter rim, a doorway, a market on the seam between neighborhoods.

What Gehl and Sennett describe are two of the things edges do. The argument of this thesis is that, in the condition of impasse, a third function becomes especially urgent: edges can serve as anchors, points the body returns to, leans on, negotiates with, in the absence of a clear destination. This is not a more fundamental function than dividing or mixing; it is a function whose political weight is amplified by the historical condition we are in. When the larger public field has become a stretch of forced motion without resolution, the edges within it are where dwelling, when it happens, gets made.

The proposal that follows is not to reclaim privatized space and turn it back into a destination. It is not to build new public space at the urban periphery. It is to identify, within the existing public field already structured as impasse, which street infrastructures are in fact functioning as anchors, which edges are being touched, returned to, and negotiated with by the body. These edges are already doing political work. They are simply not yet named, protected, or recognized as public resources. What this thesis asks for is not the rebuilding of public space. It asks for public space to be seen again.

Hopeful

Why rhythm is not enough

The previous section established the edge as the analytic site of this thesis: the place within the impassed public field where dwelling, when it happens, gets made. What remains to be asked is how the negotiations that occur at the edge are structurally mediated, what kind of temporal form lets a body return to an edge, lean on it, and improvise around it without exiting the larger condition it cannot exit.

The most obvious candidate is rhythm. There is a long tradition in everyday-life theory, running from Simmel through Benjamin, Lefebvre, Nigel Thrift, and Mike Crang, that places rhythm at the center of urban analysis. Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis became the method by which the city could be read not as a static form but as a temporal composition, the cadence of bodies, traffic, labor, and leisure organized into legible patterns (Lefebvre 2004).

But rhythm alone does not point us toward a hopeful future. It describes patterning; it does not, by itself, describe the embodied experience of being inside that pattern. It tells us that a city is cadenced without telling us how a body inhabits the cadence. More troublingly, rhythm can be a vehicle of domination. Capitalism imposes rhythm. State sovereignty imposes rhythm. The schedule of the workday, the timing of the traffic light, the regularity of the rent cycle, these are rhythms, and they are precisely what holds people inside the impasse rather than what releases them from it. Berlant herself notes how rhythm can reinforce trauma, looping subjects inside the cruel optimism of attachments that no longer deliver. A rhythm pushed to certain extremes, a polyrhythm of 11:23, or a metric structure too dense to be felt, ceases to invite participation altogether. It becomes a pattern one can describe but not enter.

Berlant does not abandon rhythmic analysis; she reframes it. She proposes "a rhythmanalysis of a disturbance in the situation of the present and the adaptations improvised around it" (Berlant 2011). Within this disturbance, she gives particular weight to the gesture:

The gesture is a medial act, neither ends- nor means-oriented, a sign of being in the world, in the middle of the world, a sign of sociality. (Berlant 2011)

The gesture does not mark time, if time is a movement forward, but makes time, holding the present open to attention and unpredicted exchange. A situation can grow around it or not, because it makes the smallest opening, a movement-created space. (Berlant 2011)

What we need is something more precise than rhythm and more sustained than gesture: a temporal form that holds an anchor, leaves room for play, and invites a body to participate in its own way. That form, this chapter argues, is most accurately named groove.

Groove

A groove is a repeated rhythmic pattern, but one marked, in its groovier instances, by what Berlant might call thick moments of ongoingness. It does not march forward; it circles. It accents, leans, rests, pulls. It invites appropriation, the listener can move with it, against it, around it, inside it, without ever being expelled from it. This is what makes groove different from rhythm-as-pattern and from gesture-as-singular-opening. Groove is a rhythm with anchors and play, a structure that returns and offers itself to be returned to.

In the summer of 2025, I had the chance to spend a week at The School at Jacob's Pillow's inaugural Creating in Jazz program, alongside twenty-three other dance artists working across House, Waacking, Hip Hop, Tap, Lindy Hop, and Vernacular Jazz, and a faculty of musicians and choreographers from those traditions. Over the course of that week, I asked the dancers and faculty I worked with the same question: "What does 'groove' mean to you?" The answers, taken together, do something that no single theoretical definition can do. They register groove from inside the practice, from the bodies that have spent years in it.

What is striking is how consistently the answers describe groove not as a feature of the music but as a space. Cedric Easton, the drummer and Associate Director at Jazz at Lincoln Center, put it most directly: "Groove is, foundationally, a space. A space where something belongs, where something can exist... a space for socialization, a space for dance, a space for connectivity. Groove creates the opportunity, sort of frames an invisible space for those things to happen" (Easton 2025). Natasha Powell, choreographer and Artistic Director of HOLLA JAZZ, located the same thing more concretely: "Groove is a place. A LOCATION. Wherever that location may be, in between elements, in a piece of music, it is us finding that space in the rhythm of that space, and to find the pleasure in between that space and continue to roll on that" (Powell 2025).

The phrase that recurs across these descriptions is in between. Le'Andre Douglas reached for the same image through the vinyl record: "When you press the record, the song is in this thing, these lines on the record. You would take the needle and put it in between those lines, and that is the groove. So if you were the needle, you would fit in between the vinyl... So the groove is literally fitting in between the music" (Douglas 2025). The dancer's body, in this account, is the needle. Groove is what is encountered when something fits between something else.

Groove is also, repeatedly, described as a kind of release, a state in which agency works differently than it does outside the groove. Thys Armstrong: "There's a certain letting go, and shedding of something, when you fall into a groove. Your intentional, effort side of your body, your trying to do something side of your body, sheds away a little bit. And your innateness comes out, in a way that's kind of euphoric" (Armstrong 2025). Holly Kiang named the same release as a form of attachment outward: "Groove is a feeling and a vibe that allows you to connect to the environment around you, and to other people" (Kiang 2025). And Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies offered an image of fit that is almost architectural: "It made me think of tongue and groove in woodworking. The way in which you build furniture without nails, by fitting the pieces of wood together very, very specifically. I am the tongue, that's the groove. I'm fitting in, and now we are this larger thing together" (MacKenzie-Margulies 2025).

What these descriptions converge on, taken together, is a coherent phenomenology. Groove is a space, not a property of the music alone but a relational field opened up between bodies and a sonic structure. It lives in between, between the beats, between the panels of the sidewalk, between the lines of the vinyl, between one piece of wood and another. Entering it requires a kind of letting go, a shedding of effortful agency in favor of a different mode of participation. And what one finds there is a fit, a way of being in something that simultaneously joins one to a larger whole.

Tiger Roholt, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, gives this convergence its theoretical name. He describes groove as an indeterminate feel, a quality that cannot be fully fixed in notation or in metric description because it lives in the relational space between the beats (Roholt 2014).

This indeterminacy is not a failure of definition; it is the condition of groove's hospitality. Because the groove is not fully determined, there is room inside it for the body to find its own way of moving. The strong beat offers itself as an anchor; the off-beats and accents leave openings; the participant, dancer, listener, fellow musician, improvises within that field. The structure holds, but it does not prescribe. This is what the dancers were describing from inside their practice: a structure made livable precisely because it does not specify how to live inside it.

Groove as the form collectivity takes in the impasse

It is on this point, the political weight of indeterminate, anchored repetition, that groove opens onto something larger than musical aesthetics.

Sylvia Wynter, in Black Metamorphosis, makes a claim of extraordinary precision about what groove does after the dismantling of older social forms:

As these rituals disappeared from contemporary life, and the social arts with which men experience and affirm social being were swept away by bourgeois productive rationality, they served no "economic" purpose, the music which emerged out of these rituals continued as the societal mechanisms by and through which the relation of the self to the social is experienced. The rhythm, the beat was to become the central underlying principle, as if all previous rituals had become condensed in the beat. (Wynter n.d.)

What Wynter is naming is that groove is what remains of social ritual after the institutions of social ritual have been hollowed out. It is the minimum infrastructure of collectivity that survives the dismantling of the larger forms in which collectivity used to be held.

Read alongside Berlant, Wynter's claim becomes still sharper. Groove is what collectivity looks like in the impasse. It does not require a narrative promise, a guaranteed future, or a functioning institutional frame. It does not depend on the state, the market, or the credible expectation of arrival. It only requires bodies in mutual response. This is why, in the historical condition of Black life, a condition in which external resolution (emancipation, equality, justice) has been perpetually deferred, the groove is not entertainment but rebellion. As Katherine McKittrick puts it, the "relational acts of making and engaging black music, grooving, are collaborative rebellion." It embodies "the impulse to resist, the impulse to produce oppositional narratives." "The ethic is the aesthetic," she writes (McKittrick 2016).

Wynter names the same dynamic from the side of the performer:

It is to the extent that the jazz musician affirms his socially repressed self and plays his own individual style that he enables the collective experience of self-fulfillment, self-actualization, at the same time as he experiences the social. (Wynter n.d.)

The jazz musician does not first achieve self-expression and then offer it to a collective. The act of style-making is the act of social-making. Individual and collective are not sequential but simultaneous, held together by the groove as the medium that makes their simultaneity possible.

This is why groove, finally, is not merely a musical aesthetic. It is the structural form that dwelling-within-impasse takes when it succeeds: a temporal-relational practice that maintains collectivity in the absence of the institutions that used to do that work.

What groove does, when it works, can be named more precisely in the phenomenological terms Roholt drew on. Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, describes the body as held in a permanent oscillation between "an attraction to the richness" of the world and an "anxious warning against getting lost or absolved" in the same richness (Merleau-Ponty 1962, paraphrased in Tønder 2013, 119, as cited in Gerçek 2017, 581). The body is never wholly closed and never wholly open. Its unity, in Merleau-Ponty's words, is "always implicit and vague... never hermetically sealed and never left behind" (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 231). What the body needs to live is not pure closure (which suffocates) nor pure openness (which dissolves), but a structure that holds the two in productive relation: enough anchor that the body is not lost, enough opening that it is not sealed.

Groove is one such structure. The clap that returns on the one, the bassline that holds the pocket, gives the body the anchor that lets it risk the syncopation, gives it enough closure to attempt the openness. And the openness, when it happens, is not solitary. Wynter and McKittrick's account of groove as the structural form collectivity takes when it succeeds in holding itself together is, in these terms, the social face of the same phenomenon. A groove sustains, as Gerçek argues following Merleau-Ponty, "the capacity to attend to collective experiences and render them anew" (Gerçek 2017, 584). Groove is not merely the experience of music that feels good. It is the infrastructure through which a collective body negotiates the indeterminacy of being alive together, anchored enough to recognize itself, open enough to become something it has not yet been.

From groove to the city

If groove is the form collectivity takes in the impasse, then it has consequences for how we read public space. The most important consequence is this: the question of what a public space does, whether bodies can dwell in it, whether anything resembling collectivity can take shape on it, cannot be answered through spatial form alone. It has to be asked of the temporal-relational structure that the space affords.

This sits in a difficult relation to one of the field's most powerful frameworks. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Edward Soja argues that justice has a geography, and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right (Soja 2010). The framework has been productive: it has shown how injustice takes spatial form, uneven development, racialized landscapes, differential access to amenity, and it has given urbanists tools to map and contest that form.

What Soja does not directly address, however, is the asymmetry between injustice and justice. Injustice takes spatial form because it is the sediment of historical power relations: it accumulates in built environments, ossifies into zoning and infrastructure, and reproduces itself through inherited spatial arrangements. The geography of injustice is real, and Soja's project of mapping and contesting it is necessary work. But it does not follow that justice is symmetrically spatial. Spatial form is what holds injustice in place. Whether spatial form can also be what generates justice is a separate question, and this thesis suggests that it cannot, at least not on its own.

What groove gives us is one specific account of where the generative work happens instead. Collectivity, in Wynter's reading, did not survive the dismantling of older social rituals because new spaces of ritual were built. It survived because the beat, a temporal-relational structure, took over the work that those rituals used to do. The infrastructure of survival was rhythmic, not spatial; or more precisely, it was spatial only in the sense that rhythm produces a space between bodies and a structure that holds them. Spatial form alone could not have done it. What was needed was an anchor that could be returned to and a margin of indeterminacy in which the body could find its own way of moving.

This is the model this thesis carries back into the city. A public space functions as a groove rather than as an impasse to the extent that its temporal-spatial structure has anchors and leaves room, to the extent that its edges are touchable, its rhythms negotiable, its surfaces hospitable to the small deviations of bodies that wish to dwell in their own time. Where the imposed rhythms of the city are too rigid, too fast, too policed, dwelling cannot occur. Where there are anchors and openings, where the strong beat holds but the off-beats are free, dwelling has something to rehearse against.

Berlant's claim that politics in the impasse lives in the immediate sensorial — in the textures and surfaces through which a public is held in its current relation to itself — gives this argument its city-scale form. If groove is the temporal structure through which a collective body holds the productive relation of openness and closure, then the edge is its spatial form. An edge in the city does what groove does in a piece of music. It anchors. It returns. It is predictable enough that bodies can come back to it, and unfinished enough that they can make something of it when they do. It gives the body in public space the same thing groove gives the body listening to music: an anchor against getting lost, and an opening against being sealed. And like groove, the edge also does work for the collective. It sustains, by being returnable to and by being appropriable, the capacity for a public to attend to itself and to remake itself in forms it has not yet been. The edge, in other words, is where the productive relation of openness and closure gets built into the material world.

The edge, in this light, is the city-scale form of the anchor. It is what the body returns to within a public field that otherwise offers no resolution. The negotiations that happen around it, the leaning, the lingering, the recurring practices of unauthorized use, are the city-scale form of indeterminate participation. Together, anchor and indeterminacy compose the temporal-spatial structure of a public space that can be inhabited rather than only crossed.

Berlant herself, in the closing pages of Cruel Optimism, names something close to what this thesis is reaching for, not a return to the political-as-state-relation, and not a hope for the restoration of a former public, but a more modest and more durable claim about where collectivity now lives:

Cruel Optimism claims that a new ordinary has emerged in the displacement of the political from a state-citizen relation to a something else that is always being encountered and invented among people inventing life together, when they can. (Berlant 2011)

What Berlant calls the ordinary is the same field this thesis has been calling the impassed public. Her claim is that the political has not disappeared from it, only that the political has been displaced from inherited frames (state, citizen, formal public) into a more diffuse, improvised set of practices among "people inventing life together, when they can." The work that remains is not to rebuild the older frames but to find what mediates this displaced political life. Earlier in the same chapter she gives this mediation a name:

Changing the white noise of politics into something focused but polymorphous can magnetize people to a project of inducing images of the good life that emerge from the sense of loose solidarity in the political that now occupies the ordinary amidst the exhausting pragmatics of the everyday. (Berlant 2011)

Focused but polymorphous. A groove is precisely that. It is focused, it has anchors, it returns, it holds. And it is polymorphous, it leaves room, accepts multiple ways of being entered, does not prescribe a single response. The edges of public space, when they function, do this same work at the scale of the body and the street: they magnetize people without homogenizing them; they offer something to gather around without specifying what the gathering must look like.

This is where the analytic work of the next chapter begins. Naming the form is not enough; the question is which edges, in which conditions, are actually doing this work, and which ones, despite appearing as edges, are not. As Berlant frames the task:

But this is what it means to take the measure of the impasse of the present: to see what is halting, stuttering, and aching about being in the middle of detaching from a waning fantasy of the good life; and to produce some better ways of mediating the sense of a historical moment that is affectively felt but undefined in the social world that is supposed to provide some comforts of belonging, so that it would be possible to imagine a potentialized present that does not reproduce all of the conventional collateral damage. (Berlant 2011)

To take the measure of the impasse, in the terms of this thesis, is to look closely at what edges are doing. To see where they are halting, where they are stuttering, where they hold the body and where they fail to. And from that close looking, to produce better ways for edges to mediate the unnamed life of being in public together, not by replacing them with grander forms, but by understanding the small, often unnoticed work they already do, and asking what would let them do it more.

It is in this sense that groove is, finally, hopeful. Not because it promises a resolution of the impasse, there is no exit, but because it provides the form in which the impasse can be inhabited in common. The hope is not that the corridor will end. The hope is that we can find, in the corridor, a beat we can move to together.

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Buchanan, Larry, Josh Katz, Rumsey Taylor, and Eve Washington. 2023. "An Extremely Detailed Map of New York City Neighborhoods." The New York Times, October 28, 2023.

Crang, Mike. 2001. "Rhythms of the City: Temporalised Space and Motion." In TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality, edited by Jon May and Nigel Thrift, 187–207. London: Routledge.

De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gehl, Jan. 2011. Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space. Translated by Jo Koch. Washington, DC: Island Press. Originally published 1971.

Gerçek, Salih Emre. 2017. "From Body to Flesh: Lefort, Merleau-Ponty, and Democratic Indeterminacy." European Journal of Political Theory 19, no. 4: 571–592.

Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Originally published 1927.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1968. Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on Cities. Edited and translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum.

May, Jon, and Nigel Thrift, eds. 2001. TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality. London: Routledge.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2016. "Rebellion/Invention/Groove." Small Axe 20, no. 1 (49): 79–91.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Originally published 1945.

Roholt, Tiger C. 2014. Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Sennett, Richard. 2006. "The Open City." Essay for the Urban Age project. London School of Economics and Political Science.

Soja, Edward W. 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tønder, Lars. 2013. Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine.

van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published 1909.

Wynter, Sylvia. n.d. [c. 1970s]. "Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World." Unpublished manuscript. Institute of the Black World Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Interviews

Armstrong, Thys. 2025. Interview by author. The School at Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA.

Douglas, Le'Andre. 2025. Interview by author. The School at Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA.

Easton, Cedric. 2025. Interview by author. The School at Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA.

Kiang, Holly. 2025. Interview by author. The School at Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA.

MacKenzie-Margulies, Hannah. 2025. Interview by author. The School at Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA.

Powell, Natasha. 2025. Interview by author. The School at Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA.

Hanzi Meng 5/3/25 Hanzi Meng 5/3/25

夜游在街头神游 / 漫游 / 什么都不深究

好久不骑单车。

这个夜晚前，我对单车的情感还存档在上个夏天风风火火跨上青桔的早晚高峰。那时的我虽然已在北京实习的路上骑了快两个月的单车，但还不知道北京是什么。

当时只觉得北京抽象，像一团磁铁，就觉得她好，也说不出为什么。每天就想骑着单车蹬来蹬去，想把每寸北京城都蹬在脚下。想蹬上中南海去，想蹬进天安门里，想着等我把紫禁城三宫六院都蹬他个遍，就该明白北京是什么了。我每天早上晚上都蹬呀蹬，蹬了东直门蹬朝阳门，蹬完朝阳门蹬金宝街。蹬得我在三十好几度的天里气喘吁吁，蹬得大腿都粗了一圈。我汗流浃背地蹬，没日没夜地蹬，蹬得我感觉我要被北京吃掉了一样：要么蹬要么死！蹬来蹬去蹬了一整个夏天，我对蹬什么就越来越有讲究。我只蹬青桔。抛去它长得好看，最主要是因为它蹬起来省劲儿，能让我把那被北京夏天烤得咕噜咕噜的血液，从心脏和俩大腿间抽出来，都抽进脑子里来供我神游。

我与神游的情感中断于上个单身结束时的瞬间，之后的每天里，脑子都充斥着激烈异常的喜怒哀乐，生活全忙着演绎各类大喜大悲。神游？哪儿有神游的地盘！

说到底我真想死了神游。那被世界短暂遗忘的感觉真是太妙了。我从没有在其他任何地方感受到过这种宁静与自由。我坐在北新桥一家小麻辣烫里安静地吃着，瞅见街道水泥的颜色从亮到暗，再到被照得反光。我瞅见金灿灿的日落从普照大地到慢慢下沉，我瞅觉得今天的日落只属于北京而不属于我。于是我把耳机一带，那第四面墙就来了，那久违的间离感也瞬间来了。我看到了因为我在店坐太久那老板鄙夷的神情，我明白了，就是今晚了。

我阔步走出了烫菜店，觉得自己是整个北新桥最牛逼的天选之人。我间离着所有被街灯照着的行人，仿佛自己飘在一个隐形的气球里，静静观察着不同的世界。我选了首歌，让我得以淹没在这自由的情感里：为我解读的世界悲愤而悲愤，为我观察的生命开心而开心。在其间我看到了形形色色大大小小的世界。我露出了微笑：我好像又是个浪漫而敏感的人了。

走着走着我看到一辆青桔。这次不像上个夏天那样，是我使用它，这次换他在召唤我了。我根本无法控制地跨上它，根本无法控制地沿着东直门外大街骑着，根本无法控制地，它将我带到了春秀路，带到了那熟悉的大楼下面。我一个人站在熟悉的广场上，喘不过气。我想上楼看看，可我清楚那楼上已经没有我想看的人了。我在广场上进退不决，四顾了一阵，然后给那扇窗户拍了张照片。我低头发微信跟他讲说miss u。过了一会儿，他回说，卧槽，我刚从那走。

我又冲回去扫开了码，掉头往回骑。这回的路线是上个夏天每个早上都走的路。我使劲地蹬，站在车蹬上面蹬，仿佛一走这条路我就要把整个北京城都蹬在脚下一样。我好想念他做青旅房东的日子。他是那夏天里我在这大城里唯一一个家。伴着他的调侃和问早每天出门，下班后不要脸地嫖他做的大餐，或是赖一瓶1664或一顿洗衣钱。我蹬呀蹬，使劲地蹬，仿佛只有把车蹬都蹬进地里去我才能扼住那涌上喉咙的思绪。我顺着东四十条边蹬边瞧，路过了好多好多熟悉的地方。他们怎么都和上个夏天一模一样啊。我放肆地蹬，左右乱晃地蹬，在路过交警站岗的红绿灯站起来摇来摇去地蹬。我要蹬进我的心里去！我想着，这好像就是上个夏天啊！我一个人探险，在北京的夏夜里蹬来蹬去，看着没见过的的物件、地方、人儿、事儿，反正哪哪儿都觉着新奇。当时其实每每干什么事儿都心里没底，但每次都打着”无知者无畏“和“此时不勇何时勇“的心理，硬是要在北京蹬出一个世界。这个夜晚蹬的时候我一直边蹬边笑，想起以前的笨拙就觉得好笑，可爱得好笑。想起当时笨拙地闯进职场，笨拙地在adobe和office上琢磨大半天，笨拙又不知天高地厚地接老板的话，笨拙地反驳前辈的意见，笨拙地非要和大家拼酒吃饭。又想起笨拙地约陌生摄影师拍照，笨拙地在公司楼下傻等喜欢的人，笨拙地跟别人屁股后面去好多没听过的地方。哈哈，还笨拙地给来北京找我混的朋友们装老北京呢！

啊，笨拙得可贵，可贵的笨拙！

哎，不知道下次笨拙是什么时候啊？那晚骑车当我满脑子神游回想笨拙的时候，不小心走神和一个电瓶车老大爷撞上了。想起上个夏天开始闯荡北京的第一天，朋友开车撞倒了一辆摩托车，我走下车听到满耳朵的京片子味儿和满街的起哄，整个人不知所措极了，呆在原地不知道说什么，也不知该扶一扶还是该怎样化事儿。但走神那晚我没有不知所措了，我回头抱歉地对老大爷笑了笑，怕他怨我，便赶忙问他“您怎么样啊摔着没有，您没事儿吧？”电瓶车老大爷一开始很生气，见我笑，他也善良地笑了，盯着我看了好一会儿。我也不清楚他看到了什么。然后他说，“没事儿，走吧。”

封面RGB: 156/0/0

标题灵感：SFG 神游

Night Wandering, Mind Wandering / Roaming / Not Probing Too Deeply

It’s been a long time since I last rode a bike.

Before tonight, my feelings about biking were still archived in the rush hours of last summer, when I hopped on a Qingju bike with blazing energy. Back then, even though I’d been biking to my internship in Beijing for almost two months, I still didn’t know what Beijing was.

At the time, Beijing felt abstract—like a lump of magnetism. I just liked it, without knowing why. Every day I wanted to ride my bike all over, as if I could pedal every inch of this city under my feet. I wanted to ride up to Zhongnanhai, pedal right into Tiananmen, imagining that if I could bike through all the palace halls of the Forbidden City, I’d finally understand what Beijing really was. Morning and night, I biked and biked—through Dongzhimen, through Chaoyangmen, from Chaoyangmen to Jinbao Street. I biked until I was breathless in the thirty-something-degree heat, until my thighs had grown visibly thicker. I biked drenched in sweat, day and night, until it felt like Beijing was about to eat me alive: pedal or perish! After an entire summer of this, I became particular about what I rode—I only chose Qingju. Not just for its looks, but mainly because it was easy to ride. It let me draw the hot, bubbling blood of a Beijing summer from my heart and thighs and channel it into my head—fuel for my mind-wandering.

That sensation of mind-wandering ended the moment my last relationship did. After that, my mind was crammed with wildly intense waves of joy and sorrow, rage and grief. Life was too busy performing a constant drama of emotional extremes. Mind-wandering? There was no room for it.

But the truth is, I miss mind-wandering dearly. That feeling of being briefly forgotten by the world—it’s unspeakably beautiful. I’ve never felt such serenity and freedom anywhere else. Sitting quietly in a little spicy hotpot shop in Beixinqiao, I watched the pavement shift from bright to dim, then shimmer in the streetlights. I watched the golden sunset sink slowly, no longer bathing the earth. I felt that tonight’s sunset belonged to Beijing, not to me. So I put on my headphones, and the fourth wall descended—that long-lost feeling of estrangement arrived instantly. I saw the shop owner’s scorn as I lingered too long at my table. And I knew—it was tonight.

I strode out of the hotpot shop feeling like the most badass chosen one in all of Beixinqiao. Estranged from every passerby under the streetlights, it was as if I floated in an invisible balloon, quietly observing different worlds. I picked a song that let me dissolve into this feeling of freedom: it grieved for the injustices I perceived, and rejoiced for the lives I glimpsed. In between, I saw worlds of all shapes and sizes. I smiled: Looks like I’m a romantic and sensitive soul again.

And then I saw a Qingju bike. This time, it wasn’t like last summer when I used it—this time, it was calling me. I couldn’t stop myself from hopping on, couldn’t stop pedaling down Dongzhimen Outer Street, couldn’t stop as it carried me to Chunxiu Road, to the base of that familiar building. I stood alone in the familiar plaza, unable to breathe. I wanted to go upstairs, but I knew there was no one up there I wanted to see anymore. I lingered, torn, then looked around and snapped a photo of that window. I looked down and messaged him: miss u. A moment later, he replied: holy shit, I just left from there.

I rushed back, scanned a bike again, and turned around. This time I was riding the same route I’d taken every morning last summer. I pedaled hard, standing on the pedals as if biking this path again would put all of Beijing back under my feet. I missed his hostel-owner days—he was the only sense of “home” I had that summer in this vast city. Each morning I’d head out with his jokes and greetings, then shamelessly come home after work for his homemade feasts—or just to bum a 1664 or a load of laundry.

I pedaled and pedaled, as if only by grinding the pedals into the earth could I choke down the emotions rising in my throat. Down Dongsi Shitiao I rode, glancing around as I passed so many familiar spots. How is it they all look just like last summer? I pedaled recklessly, wobbling left and right, standing up at red lights to sway on the bike in front of traffic cops. I want to ride into my own heart! I thought. Isn’t this just like last summer? Off on my own little adventure, biking through the summer nights of Beijing, seeing unfamiliar objects, places, people, events—everything felt novel. Back then, I never felt truly prepared for anything, but I always carried the mindset of “ignorance is bravery” and “if not now, when?”—determined to bike a whole new world into existence in Beijing. This evening, I kept pedaling and laughing, thinking of how clumsy I was back then—how ridiculously lovable.

I remembered stumbling into the workplace, fumbling through Adobe and Office all day, cluelessly trying to keep up with my boss’s banter, boldly contradicting my seniors, insisting on drinking and dining with everyone. I remembered awkwardly asking photographers to shoot with me, waiting like a fool outside the office for someone I liked, trailing behind others to places I’d never heard of. Haha—I even awkwardly pretended to be a seasoned Beijinger for my out-of-town friends.

Ah, clumsiness is precious. Precious, precious clumsiness!

But… I don’t know when I’ll next get to be clumsy. That night, as I was biking and lost in thoughts of past clumsiness, I zoned out and collided with an old man on an e-bike. It reminded me of my first day in Beijing last summer—my friend hit a motorbike while driving, and I got out of the car to a flurry of Beijing-accented shouting and jeering. I froze, completely at a loss, unsure what to say or do, whether to help or smooth things over.

But that night—I didn’t freeze. I turned back and smiled apologetically at the old man, worried he’d blame me, quickly asking, “Are you okay? Did you get hurt?” At first, he was angry. But when he saw me smile, he softened too, staring at me for a long moment. I don’t know what he saw. Then he said, “It’s okay. Go on.”

Cover RGB: 156/0/0
Title inspiration: SFG 神游

Hanzi Meng 5/3/25 Hanzi Meng 5/3/25

Groove

Journal Entry: Week 7

Continuing from last week’s reflections, I find myself drawn deeper into the relational nature of space production—not as a static medium, nor as a mere container of events, but as something dynamic, rhythmic, and alive. This week, as I think about groove in relation to Lefebvre’s theory of space, I begin to see groove as the connective tissue between presence and movement, between individual agency and collective flow. If space is not a thing but a process, then groove is its tone, its way of holding and releasing, its way of catching and letting go.

Lefebvre reminds us that space is produced through lived practices, through social relations that are in constant negotiation. But what of groove? If rhythm marks the beats of space—structured, expected—then groove is what allows those beats to breathe. Groove is relational; it is the slight delay before the downbeat, the tension between sync and release, the elasticity of time and movement that allows for adaptation, play, and co-creation. It is a practice of spacing—creating room, making space within space, filling the gaps but never in a way that hardens them into structure.

Groove, then, is the soft infrastructure of spatial production. If we are to understand space not as a rigid framework but as an ongoing process of negotiation, groove is what makes this negotiation feel embodied, felt, lived. The groove of a street corner, of a market square, of a protest—each has a different tempo, a different weight, a different capacity for improvisation. Some spaces groove easily, allowing bodies to move freely, adjusting to one another with an almost intuitive responsiveness. Others resist groove, locking movement into linear paths, stifling the potential for elasticity, for play.

I return again to the concept of groundedness, but this time, I wonder: does groove need grounding, or is it itself a form of grounding? To be in the groove is to be attuned—to the space, to others, to the pulse of what is happening around you. It is not about losing oneself in movement but about being deeply present in the act of moving, of adjusting, of listening. Groove catches you—not to hold you still, but to keep you moving in rhythm with something larger than yourself.

If space is produced, can groove be produced too? Or is groove something that emerges, only possible in spaces that tolerate mistakes, that allow for rhythmic flexibility, that resist the tyranny of efficiency? A seamless, optimized process might feel smooth, but smoothness is not groove. Groove has texture; it holds weight. It creates pockets—pauses, hesitations, anticipations—that allow for depth, for negotiation, for feeling.

This makes me wonder: what happens when a city loses its groove? What happens when the improvisational potential of space is removed, when everything is planned to the millisecond, optimized for flow but emptied of feel? Groove, after all, is not simply about movement—it is about the potential for deviation, for play, for a collective way of holding space that acknowledges and adjusts in real-time.

Maybe groove is not something we create, but something we allow to happen. And maybe the real question is: how do we design for groove? How do we build, plan, or imagine spaces that hold room for the unexpected, that don’t just move people through them, but move with them?

Hanzi Meng 5/3/25 Hanzi Meng 5/3/25

Production of Space

Journal Entry: Week 6

Continuing from last week's reflections on relationality, I've been thinking about how this practice extends into the production of space, which is also the focus of our reading in Urban Theory Lab this week: Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space.

Lefebvre makes a compelling case that the kind of theory we need today must be unitary, embodied, triadic—a theory that fully grasps what it means to hold one’s ground, to be present in the continuous process of spatial production. He introduces the Time–Space–Energy framework, challenging the idea of space as a static thing or neutral medium. Instead, space is something dynamic—much like fluid dynamics.

We are not just talking about locations; we’re talking about energy flows: the movements, rhythms, pulses, and waves that live vividly inside a space. Space exists, produces, and represents all at once, through every interaction that takes place within it.

As I write, I keep circling back to the idea of groundedness—a concept that arises both in the Presence–Connect–Play framework and in Indigenous ways of being. Groundedness is not merely a physical connection to land; it is about attunement to where you are right now. It is about anchoring yourself in the timely, in the present, in your being.

One might ask: How do we find liberation if we tether ourselves to the ground? Isn’t grounding a form of limitation?
But I would argue the opposite: true connection requires presence—in all its honesty, its innocence, its cruelty.
To be grounded is to be open. To be visible. To be here and there, without pretension or judgment.
In connection, we do not perform. We do not analyze. We listen radically. We acknowledge mutually.

This mutual acknowledgment becomes our foundation—our ground. And it is from here, and only from here, that real play emerges.

If connection allows a socially constructed space to form, then play is how energy flows through it.
Play is hydrodynamic. It moves in waves: sometimes predictable, sometimes surprising, always shaped by its context.
A collective liberation is never careless—it is not play without awareness.
On the contrary, it is play that responds deeply to the world around it. Play is dialogical. It listens, adjusts, improvises.

How can we even play without something or someone to play with or off of?
Play must be relational: between you and an object, you and a person, you and the ground, you and the music.
Even when we “play alone,” if we zoom in closely—what’s really happening? Are you playing with your thoughts? Your emotions?
Does one part of your body play with another?

Even in solitude, play is a negotiation—a movement between parts of self, between context and consciousness.
Always relational. Always dynamic. Always grounded.

Hanzi Meng 5/3/25 Hanzi Meng 5/3/25

Relationality

Journal Entry: Week 5

This week, after reading Shawn Wilson’s Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, I found myself deeply stirred by the question: What does an Indigenous mode of research mean when studying community resilience? Wilson writes that, throughout his work with Indigenous communities, many have emphasized that a “relational way of being” lies at the heart of Indigenous identity. For Indigenous peoples, identity is not a singular, internal construct—it is grounded in relationships: with the land, with ancestors who have returned to the land, and with future generations who will also come into being through it.

Rather than seeing ourselves as individuals in relationship with others or the environment, Wilson writes that we are the relationships we hold and participate in.

As someone shaped by urban living and the rational structures of the Western sociological tradition, I paused. How do we—modern researchers, trained to distill, observe, and categorize—come close to grasping this kind of relational ontology?

But then, I thought—no, I do know what this means. I’ve lived it before.

Much like the framework I reflected on in last week’s entry—Presence–Connect–Play—I’ve come to know relationality intimately through community dance practice. The dance floor has long been my site for understanding complex intersections: of trust, care, interdependence, and timing. When we move together, we build relationships through our bodies, through space, and through rhythm. The connections are not theoretical—they are lived, felt, and constantly evolving.

Wilson’s visualization stayed with me:

"Imagine that you are a single point of light. Not like a light bulb, or even a star, but an infinitely small, intense point of light in an area of otherwise total darkness or void. Now in the darkness of this void, another point of light becomes visible... You form a relationship with that other point of light, and it is as though an infinitely thin thread now runs between you and the other..."

As more lights emerge and relationships form, a web begins to take shape—not just around you, but as you. Slowly, these threads become your physical body. Other lights form their webs, and those too take shape, until the world itself becomes visible—not as isolated objects, but as dense knots of connection, history, and context.

This metaphor rearranged something in me. It reminds me that everything I see and touch—every place I research or hope to understand—is already a thick knot of relationships: from the past, present, and future. And I, too, am one of those knots.

Wilson concludes:

"Our reality, our ontology, is the relationships. This is our epistemology. Thinking of the world as a web of connections and relationships. Nothing could be without being in relationship, without its context."

In that light, to study community resilience is not to measure outputs or isolate variables. It is to witness a living web—one built across time, space, and being. To research is to relate, and to relate is to become.

Hanzi Meng 5/3/25 Hanzi Meng 5/3/25

Presence - Connect - Play

Journal Entry: Week 4

“Presence–Connect–Play” is a simple three-part framework often used in Authentic Relating communities to describe a progression of how people can deepen their connection and creativity with each other.

“Presence” begins by landing in the here-and-now, not merely planting our feet but also receiving feedback from the ground—like dancers who feel the earth’s support and allow their own inner pulse to generate movement and connection. In "Connect", we recognize there is someone else in the relational field, with an experience every bit as layered and vibrant as our own. As we acknowledge and invite their perspectives, we weave our unique realities together, co-creating a dynamic exchange that unifies physical sensations, emotions, and thoughts into a cohesive flow. Finally, "Play" emerges when these foundations of presence and connection open a gateway to spontaneous, creative exploration—an embodied, yet cognitive invitation to discover new relational possibilities.

As we connect this framework to “Land as Liberation,” we move toward a wholeness connection to the ground and the other beings on this ground, defragmenting the many parts of ourselves into a single, integrated expression of consciousness—and in doing so, we expand not only our personal awareness, but also the shared space in which authentic connection thrives.

Hanzi Meng 3/3/23 Hanzi Meng 3/3/23

银河公园

我和黑子成大字型躺在坡上。他盯着头顶树枝的轮廓，问道，抽烟吗。我点头。于是他转身去包里拿烟，抽出后侧身用手肘撑着点火，眯眼吸了两口后向后一靠，慢慢地递给我。
“像是抽事后烟。”

九月江边的风开始变凉，我不喜欢我们之间的距离。于是我抽了两口将烟拿起，向他的方向移了移，黑子凑过来张嘴叼住，顺势将手绕过我的头顶，落在我的左肩上。“有天为被地为床的感觉。”我说着，将左手移到头顶，悄悄放到了他的手边。黑子没吭声，只是轻轻将我的手拉着。我们盯着天上的星星发呆，公园很安静。我想说话，可不知道说什么。

“机票买了吗。”
“后天飞，当然买了。”
“我说下个月回来的机票。”
我拿肩膀轻轻怼了他一下，“你又这样。”
他轻轻摸着我的手，又开始看天上的星星。
“下个月什么时候回来。”
”下年。”
”下月。”
”你给我买机票我便回来。”
黑子指了指脑袋说，”用点脑子，想想办法遣返什么的。”

我向头顶他的胳膊打去。黑子不计较，他就要看我佯装生气。我敲他的手，任由两根指头躺他手心。

他紧紧捏了一下我的手。
我也捏了下表示回应。

黑子说着一些鸡毛蒜皮，但我似乎只能听到头顶树叶的沙沙声。我没打断他，听黑子讲话的时间不多了。我想问他很多事。比如为什么封控三个月结束后第一个来找我，为什么翻墙后只给我打电话，为什么那些次酒后抱我那样紧，为什么隔着所有人只信任对我撒娇。可是为什么，为什么上次交合后便不敢迈步。他的喜欢只是在我坦白后避免尴尬吗，他到底有没有在我喜欢他的时候喜欢我。

江边没有了前两天台风时那股子往上返的腥臭。”好闻。” 我转头埋在草里，换了个姿势，掩盖心中翻腾的情绪。

黑子说等会，好像有保安。

我面对着草地，草新修剪完，面上还浮着些残留的草茬。扎脸，我说想转身。可他说保安还在栏杆上趴着。我只好以身体朝黑子头朝保安的别扭姿势保持原状。脸下的草茬扎得我麻麻的，我催他问，转过去了没有。他说没有，好像没动，再撑一会儿。

我说，“应该把后脑勺露过去。头发是黑的。”

“再坚持一小会儿。”
“不太舒服。”
“现在可以，转过来吧。”

我花了十秒时间将脸转向正冲草茬的方向，然后再从上方扫过滑进黑子的臂弯里。他笑了，说看来没看到。

也许是冷了，也许心有余悸，也许觉得抱的紧些可以躲避保安的视线。他摸着我的头发，摩擦着，在想什么。留恋了一会，见保安走远，黑子想好了似的，坐起来看我。以为他起身撒尿，我便抬头看他。看到他转身遮住了头顶树叶的轮廓，顿了一秒后，翻下身来。
熟悉的触感再次融化我的身体，我脑子一沉，沉得像要陷进身下的草地。

情绪牵着欲望，践踏着过往。过时的埋怨与即将物是人非的不舍在粗重的呼吸声中宣泄而出，合着思念，在空旷山坡上安静又激烈地交替质问。情欲在树叶哗哗的夜空中回荡。黑子沿着我的耳根和脖子低声喘气，过了一会，他温柔地啄着我的脖颈。我喘着气，摩擦着他肌肉的轮廓。他的身体，我无数次穿过酒桌想要拥抱的身体。
“别，姨妈。”

保安还在远方转着。而这个四下漆黑，连翻身都沙沙作响的夜晚用她最响亮的方式，挥舞着霎时的迷人，让人不自觉要靠近尽头的真实。再近些是不是能永生？那片草地的声响总是坚毅地挡在我与尽头之间，之后每每离尽头的真实更近时她便轻轻卷起头顶的那片树叶。草地还会扎吗，保安还转吗？尽头还会在吗？那晚踌躇的每一秒我也听到了她温柔的警告，可怀着对转瞬即逝的追赶，我还是凑上了前。

那警告不刺耳，只是回声很大。年少的我不知道靠近尽头是危险的想法，不知道窥探尽头后眼里的枷锁和噬人的虚空。只想着那夜长久。

那夜确实长久。只是没想那夜之后，树上没树叶，草地只扎人。

Heizi and I lay sprawled on the slope, arms and legs stretched out like the careless shapes of stars. The grass was cool beneath us, damp from the evening dew, prickling faintly against the skin. He stared at the silhouette of the branches above, jagged outlines etched into the sky. “Want a smoke?” he asked.

I nodded.

He turned and reached into his bag, pulled one out, propped himself up on his elbow to light it. He squinted, took two slow drags, then leaned back and passed it to me.
“Feels like a post-something cigarette.”

The breeze by the river was turning cold in September. I didn’t like the space between us. I took two puffs, then raised the cigarette and shifted slightly in his direction.

Heizi leaned over, took it into his mouth, and, in one motion, let his arm fall behind my head, resting it on my left shoulder.

“Sky as blanket, earth as bed,” I said, and moved my left hand above my head, gently placing it beside his.
Heizi didn’t say anything—just quietly took hold of my hand.

We stared at the stars in silence. The park was still. I wanted to speak, but didn’t know what to say.

“Did you buy the plane ticket?”
“Flying the day after tomorrow. Of course I did.”
“I meant the return ticket. For next month.”
I bumped him lightly with my shoulder. “You’re doing this again.”
He lightly brushed my hand, still looking at the sky.
“When next month?”
“Next year.”
“Next month.”
“If you buy me the ticket, I’ll come back.”
Heizi pointed to his head. “Use your brain. Think of some way—like getting deported.”

I smacked his arm above my head. He didn’t mind—he liked seeing me pretend to be annoyed. I tapped his hand and left two fingers resting in his palm.

He gave my hand a firm squeeze.
I squeezed back.

Heizi kept talking, about nothing in particular. But all I could hear was the rustling of the leaves above us. I didn’t interrupt—there wouldn’t be many more chances to hear him talk.

I wanted to ask him so many things.
Like why, after the three-month lockdown, I was the first person he came to see.
Why, after climbing the firewall, I was the only one he called.
Why, those drunken nights, he held me so tight.
Why, out of everyone, I was the one he chose to be vulnerable with.
And yet—why, after we slept together, he never dared to take a step forward.
Was his tenderness just a way to avoid awkwardness after I confessed?
Did he ever, even for a moment, like me when I liked him?

The river no longer reeked of that briny stench it had during the typhoon days.
“Smells good,” I said, turning my face into the grass, shifting my body slightly, hiding the storm that was rising inside.

“Hold on,” Heizi said. “There might be a security guard.”

I faced the ground. The grass had just been trimmed—bits of it still floating above the soil.
“It’s prickly,” I said. “I want to turn over.”
“He’s still leaning on the railing,” he whispered.
So I stayed in a twisted position—body turned toward Heizi, face turned away toward the patrol. The grass pressed against my cheek, sharp and itchy.
“Has he left yet?”
“Nope. Doesn’t look like it. Just hang on a bit longer.”
“I’m not comfortable.”
“Now. You can turn.”

I took ten seconds to shift—first facing the grass, then slowly sliding into the crook of Heizi’s arm.
He smiled. “Looks like he didn’t notice.”

Maybe it was the cold. Maybe leftover tension. Maybe we thought holding tighter would help us hide.
He stroked my hair gently, rubbing it between his fingers. He was thinking about something.
After a moment, as the guard walked off into the distance, Heizi seemed to come to a decision. He sat up and looked at me.
I thought he was about to pee, so I lifted my head to look at him.
He blocked the outline of the branches above, paused for a second, then dropped his body down.

That familiar touch melted into mine. My mind went heavy, sinking like it could fall straight into the grass beneath me.

Emotion pulled desire behind it, trampling over all that had been. Outdated resentment, the ache of inevitable distance, spilled out in staggered breath. It tangled with longing—quiet and fierce—pushing and pulling across the empty slope, asking the same questions again and again.
The rustling leaves echoed above us. Heizi panted low along the edge of my ear and neck, then began to kiss me there, gently.
I gasped, my hands tracing the muscles I had longed, across many nights and tables, to touch.
“Stop… I’m on my period.”

The guard was still circling somewhere far off. And that night—dark, rustling, loud even in stillness—sang out its brightest song, tempting us to reach closer to something real.
Was there eternity in that closeness?
That patch of grass kept sounding beneath us, a firm wall between me and the edge.
Each time I moved nearer to the real thing, it would quietly lift the leaves above as a warning.

Would the grass still sting?
Was the guard still watching?
Would the edge still be there?

That night, every moment of hesitation came with a soft warning. But in chasing the fleeting, I leaned closer anyway.

The warning wasn’t sharp—just loud in its echo.
I didn’t yet know that getting close to the edge was dangerous.
Didn’t know that after looking over, the eyes carry shackles. And a biting void.
I only knew I wanted that night to last.

And it did.

I just didn’t know that after it,
the trees would stand bare.
And the grass would only ever sting.