Nigel Thrift’s Non-Representational Theory [NRT]: Space, Politics, Affect (2007) challenges the dominance of representational thinking in human geography and social theory. It is grounded in a concern with space as lived performance, and—in contrast to representational epistemologies—proposes a more relational, processual, and affective ontology of life.

Thrift’s sources all converge around a single intuition: that the world is not to be known from a distance, but to be practiced—performed, sensed, and continually co-composed through affective, embodied participation.

It sees the world as a dynamic, performative, and affective process: one that is always in motion and constantly coming into being through embodied practices, encounters, and material forces.

At the heart of NRT is a shift from “what things mean” to “what things do” via “practices, doings, and performances.”

Space is not static or representational but is seen as continually enacted through practices that studies of the flows, intensities, and performances that constitute spatial experience. This opens a path toward rethinking resistance, creativity, and ethics in terms of generating alternative affective arrangements and micropolitical practices.

The emphasis is on creativity, invention, and experimentation in everyday practices—such as walking, dancing, or urban dwelling—as sites where new forms of subjectivity and sociality can emerge. NRT is, then, both descriptive and prescriptive: it aims not only to analyse how the world is performed but to encourage more inventive and responsive modes of living and can transform affective and material relations from within lived experience.

This way of working reorients theory away from representation and interpretation toward the generative, affective, and performative processes through which life continually unfolds. In doing so, it invites a form of practice that is beneficial precisely because it alters our mode of engagement with reality—opening us to the immediacy, contingency, and relational vitality of existence.

This calls for the cultivation of awareness within action, a sensitivity to movement, rhythm, and affect through embodied responsiveness—a way of participating more consciously and creatively in the ongoing performance of the world.

Practice is cultivate presence, generosity, and transformative resonance rather than control or alienation, and engages the world as an unfolding field of relations and experiments with ways of sensing and becoming that expand possibility. Its benefit lies not in serving productivity or representation, but in deepening relational attunement—transforming perception and worlding through embodied, co-creative participation. This is about how people inhabit cities, how space is experienced (not just mapped or represented), and how material infrastructures/affective atmospheres shape the everyday.

Opportunities:

Prototyping and micro-interventions / use small-scale, experimental design interventions (pop-ups, light installations, soundscapes, vegetation tweaks) to test affective atmospheres and observe how people perform them.

Sensory & experiential mapping / combine traditional mapping with sensory walks, embodied recording (sound, smell, thermal, light) + participant diaries to surface the affective and rhythmic layers of the site.

Design for modulation, not control / instead of prescribing a fixed outcome, design frameworks or infrastructures that allow modulation, adaptation, and tuning of atmospheres (e.g. lighting systems, retractable surfaces, flexible furniture, acoustic elements).

Co-design and participatory affect engagement / engage local users in sensing, naming, and experimenting with atmospheres (e.g. eliciting metaphors, affective descriptors, sensory workshops).

Hybrid methods & multimodal representation / use sketches, storyboards, video, VR/AR, and other media to experiment with and communicate affective potentials — not just static plans.

Layering scale / combine micro-affective insight with interpretive structuring — e.g. use the insights from affective mapping to inform more conventional urban-form decisions (street alignment, massing, thresholds) while preserving flexibility for finer tuning.

Reflexivity / remain reflexive about own affective biases and assumptions and treat NRT as a guiding sensibility rather than rigid method.

Working Notes:

Post-representational theory / Nigel Thrift: ‘Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect’, 2007 (summary)

1. capture the ‘onflow’…of everyday life…desire to do more than simply squeeze meaning from the world…intentionality…performative…adaptive living, as an instrument of sensation, play, and imagination.

2. anti-biographical and pre-individual.

3. practice, action, and performance / joint action.

4. relational materialism…co-evolve with things.

5. be experimental / “poetics of the release of energy that might be thought to resemble play” / don’t explain.

6. [Dewey] embodied, antidualist, aesthetically sensitive, “personal authorship” of one’s life while rejecting fixity.

7. “jump to another world” [James] / the craftsmanship of everyday life and existing on the “interstices of interaction” / new forms of neighbourliness and community.

“more action, more imagination, more light, more fun, even”

and…

The post-representational artist:

“What is obtained from architecture, at all levels, is graduated experience. I would regard this as a fundamental problem. …the attempt to fuse all forms of visual imagery with architecture and architectural concepts. It also poses the question – an immensely important one – of whether the essential act of contemplation of a work is at all possible outside that graduated experience… / What is envisaged is people working outside the context of highly structured institutions but – this is essential – possessing the identity of the one to which they belong, engaged in work involving interested specialists in other fields and thus breaking down the mutually destructive isolation and exclusivity now common to both. … This would go some way to re-define the role of experimentation.”

– Peter de Francia: ‘Mandarins and Luddites’, RCA, 1973

and…

“…the avant-garde attack upon the institution of art. The autonomous status and the concept of the work of art operative in the bourgeois institution of art imply separation from social life. This is essential for an art intending to interpret the world at a distance. For such an aesthetic project, a concept of the work of art as being a closed, albeit “complex” unity is appropriate. Avant-garde aesthetic praxis, though, aimed to intervene in social reality. The avant-garde saw that the organic unity of the bourgeois institution of art left art impotent to intervene in social life, and thus developed a different concept of the work of art. Its concept of art sees a chance to reintegrate art into social praxis if artists would create unclosed, individual segments of art that open themselves to supplementary responses. The aesthetic fragment functions very differently than the organic whole of romantic artwork, for it challenges its recipient to make it an integrated part of his or her reality and to relate it to sensuous-material experience.”

– Jochen Schulte-Sasse: ‘Foreword: Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-Garde’ to Peter Burger’s ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’, Theory and History of Literature, Volume 4, 1984

and…

“…this old Self, a pair of very worn trousers!—the Self, a posthumous signature after creation, or rather after failure. But the Self corrected when activity weakened: it is the painting of rescue, in the memories of continuity. The Self is psychic capitalization, small profit.”

– Carl Einstein: ‘Exposición de collages (galería Goemans)’, 1930

“He had removed the prehistoric word ‘I’ from the vocabulary. In the Durruti Column, only [the] collective syntax is known.”

– Carl Einstein: radio obituary for anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti, 1936