. Reading places is integrally linked to geographical studies. One of the oldest Western formulations of place is chora, which was introduced in Plato's Timaeus and has thereafter contributed to a rich tradition of interpretations. The geographical interest in chora has gradually increased as it has proven its value in making sense of the flowing conditions of contemporary social change. The gradual turn towards chora is also due to intense methodological rethinking in geography during recent decades. This article discusses the latest formulations of the geographies of chora, and focuses especially on the interpretations inspired by Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. Their formulations of chora, including succeeding critiques, have encouraged us to rethink places of co‐design and re‐membering as illustrations of the paradoxes of chora as a ‘place in‐between’.

The article examines the provision of social infrastructures in suburban neighbourhoods from the perspective of street-level workers. The concept of infrastructure is usually related to material and structural conditions but can equally apply to social infrastructures that are continuously constructed and maintained in social practices. These social infrastructures are embedded in structures and social arrangements and are related to past decisions. Our research focuses on the social infrastructures of two high-rise suburbs in Finland, built in the 1960s and 1970s. Since the 1990s, these neighbourhoods have experienced socioeconomic decline and transformation into a multicultural milieu. While suburbs have often been overlooked in urban politics and public discourses, a wide range of social infrastructures have also evolved in these districts and are continuously maintained. The main research data consists of interviews with street-level workers who participate in the production of such local social infrastructures. The article identifies and analyses the essential factors and preconditions as well as the challenges and contradictions of the provision of social infrastructure in these suburban contexts. This understanding is needed in order to foster an extensive social infrastructure and to deter counterforces from exacerbating socio-spatial inequalities and social polarisation in cities.

The relations between texts and the world are at the forefront of cultural geography. Along with the cultural and linguistic turns in geography, the aims of searching for meanings have been problematized, and the awareness of the complicated nature of the textures of place has at the same time been widened. What does it mean if the meanings of place are interpreted as becoming instead of being, if feeling is emphasized instead of seeing, and if there still remain nondiscursive elements that disrupt the supposed order in writing places? The aims of this article are to consider the current discussions on the textuality of place and to give some openings for writing places and understanding the limits of that writing. These questions are connected here to the deconstructive and humanistic efforts to write places by inhabiting them or by crossing their discursive boundaries.

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