Spatial interferences: site-specific strategies for immersive regeneration.

This chapter explores immersive approaches to site-specific performance and architecture within the context of placemaking and regeneration. Performativity plays an essential role in spatial practices, as it is always involved in generating meaning and distinctiveness of a place. Spatial interferences emerge from the intersection between site and spatial practices, and they can only be revealed through immersion, defining a two-part process, immersive exploration and immersive intervention. Spatial interferences are framed through the philosophical concept of Genius Loci – spirit of place – and palimpsests. Immersion unveils what space - either performative, architectural or urban - contains in its original traces; whatever it was that generated that space – physical elements or performative actions - will always be contained in it, as a layer of its palimpsest. This understanding of the genesis of spaces and places, and its subsequent immersive explorations and interventions, leads us to articulate place-making narratives, defining placemaking as an immersive process. This understanding is based on The production of Space by Henri Lefebvre (1973); "the spatial practice of a society secretes that space", defining the spatial practice as the perceived space. Through two case studies; Praça Roosvelt (Sao Paulo, Brazil) and Ceramics, Memory and Site (Stoke-on-Trent, UK), this chapter examines the relationships between the structure of space and its narratives – being performative or the everyday lives of its inhabitants - and how on its intersection we can find strategies for immersive regeneration.