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Place

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A sense of place can be one of the strongest reasons for environmentalist tendancies. If someone feels a sense of place, they feel connected to their immediate surrounding environment in a way that no transient visitor can achieve. This is often closely related to a sense of identity, and can engender feelings of love, tranquillity, and pride. of course, the latter can be a detrimental thing when it begins to foster xenophobia.

Because people feel such a connection to their place, they often feel a need to defend it from harm, environmental or otherwise.

A sense of place can be engendered when a person has put effort into that place - this can include many things, such as building, gardening, or simply being part of activities in the area.

[edit] 1 place

Place seems to be an idea whose time has come. Within cultural/human geography, where ‘place’ has always been a key framing concept, albeit one viewed somewhat unproblematically, and within philosophy and cultural studies, the 1990s has seen a flourishing of academic course development and learned exposition focused upon the idea of ‘place’. ‘Place’, we now know, is not at all unproblematic, but is rather a complex, even ideologically-coded idea, one that can lend support to conservative appeals to nationalism and communal insularity (often disguised as retreat-from-the-state appeals to local self-reliance), and one that, perhaps more significantly, can serve as a mobilising principle for critiquing dysfunctional aspects of the global economy, and for structuring political opposition thereto. There are cogent theories of place that are Marxist ( [1] [2] [3] [4]), feminist ( [5] [6] [7] [8] [4]), body-focused (in the sense of body as place) ( [5] [7] [8] [9] [10]), post-structuralist ([11] [12] [9] [13]), ‘virtual’ ([14] [15]), post-colonial ([16] [9] [17]), environmentalist ([18] [19] [20] [21] [22]), ethicist ([23] [24] [25]), and phenomenological ([26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36]). Each parts company with the others at certain key points, but only occasionally is the one mutually exclusive of the other in the way that ‘virtual’ and phenomenological perspectives most certainly are.

Theorists of place tend to differ most over how far the concept can be pushed. Those who are comfortable with globalising trends – with cultural globalising trends, in any case – seek to free ‘place’ from ‘ground’; to make the body the primary site of ‘place’ for example, or to interpret ‘place’ in terms of processes of flux and change, to see it primarily as an ‘event’, rather than to interpret it in terms of its tenacities and continuities ([37] [4]). In such views, ‘place’ tends to become another globally transportable commodity.

Others insist upon the centrality of ‘hard’ place – the geographic terrain of attachment. In his pioneering work on place and place attachment, Edward Relph identifies what he believes to be a psycho-social need for assured roots; for the emotional anchor that a conception of ‘coming from’ provides. ‘A deep relationship with place’, he writes, ‘is as necessary as close relationships with people; without such relationships human existence is bereft of much of its significance’ (1976: 41[28]). To be ‘displaced’, then – to be without any tie to ‘home’ – is a pathological human condition. And ‘homeness’ mandates deep, ongoing conversation with place, a ‘dance of being’ evocatively captured in David Seamon’s (1980[38]) notion of ‘place-ballet’, wherein unfolds a rich and particular human and natural history, one that privileges the transmission of place-specific myth, story, and vernacular technologies. A culture’s embeddedness within a biotic community and the biophysical processes that have help construct it is both a significant cultural asset and a prominent element within local identity ([20]), whilst ‘places acquire much of their permanence as well as much of their distinctive character from the collective activities of people who dwell there, who shape the land through their activities, and who build institutions and social relationships within a bounded domain’ (Harvey 1996: 310[2]).

The ‘permanence’ in Harvey’s observation is important. Place – as geographical terrain – only has integrity if it retains a certain configuration through time. He also writes of place as ‘the site of collective memory’. The tenacity of place may require that human-induced change to its physical structures occurs at a measured pace. In order that cultural place meanings can accrue (and these are not necessarily reducible to a single uncontested meaning, nor is the introduction of new stories into the mix precluded as historical events come and go) there must also be a capacity to layer up stories, so that a potent vernacular culture (or cultures) can exist and persist, welding past to present and ensures the seamless passage of time. In such a view, without the binding ties of story ‘place’ is really non-place, and so it is that there is a vertical or temporal axis to place, as well as the obvious horizontal plane of geography.

The integrity of place can be threatened on both axes – by brutal ‘makings-over’ of physical place that pay scant heed to historical or communal place meanings; and on the vertical axis when the thread of story and the seamless progression of time is snapped. The greatest threat to the integrity of place, on both axes, stems from the technological intrusiveness of dynamic global capital. Globalising processes conduce to a blending, a simplifying, to a loss of diversity, particularity, specialness. They bring on globalised technology, communications, architecture, bureaucracy, flora, fauna, consumer fare and perhaps even language. They engender a great mobility of people and a concomitant rootlessness. They conduce to the creation of faux place; and to a weakening of the identity of places to the point where they not only look alike, but feel alike and offer the same bland possibilities for experience. Harvey writes of a ‘militant particularism’ that invokes ‘vernacular traditions and icons of place’ and ‘reanimates the bond between the environmental and the social’ as ‘a basis for a politics of resistance to commodity flows and monetization’ (1996: 306[2]). The extraordinary dynamism of global movements of capital and people constitutes the strongest and most identifiable threat to place particularity and, hence, place identity, but the reverse image of this threat is that ‘place’ can serve as a potent mobilising frame for resistance to destructive globalising processes..

The 'take' on place that would seem to be most conducive to environmentalist aspirations and values is the phenomenological.

If you write about phenomenology you proffer a definition. Here is Cameron’s explanation of phenomenological investigation: ‘phenomenologists bring the taken-for-granted pattern of everyday life into conscious scholarly activity. Discarding theoretical positions or postulates, they seek to describe… experience… itself, and in so doing find that consciousness and the world are reciprocally related’ (2003b: 3[39]). Similarly, van Manem, in his influential work on phenomenology as ‘an action sensitive pedagogy’, contrasts ‘traditional, hypothesizing or experimental research’ that is ‘largely interested in knowledge that is generalizable, true for one and all’, with phenomenology, the latter being, ‘a philosophy or theory of the unique; it is interested in what is essentially not replaceable’ (1997: 7[40]). Moreover, phenomenology always begins in ‘the lifeworld – the world as we immediately experience it pre-reflexively rather than as we conceptualize, categorize, or reflect on it’ (van Manem 1997: 9[40]). Phenomenological understanding thus valorises vernacular constructions of meaning, and their attendant technologies, beliefs, value codes and myth structures.

A phenomenological mindset is uniquely suited to an understanding of place. Indeed, when awareness developed, in the 1970s, that 'place' is not the apparently neutral and perennially backgrounded concept it had hitherto been taken to be, but is in fact alive with complexity, nuance and ideological inscription, it was phenomenologists who made the early running, and here the work of Seamon and Relph – and the latter’s brilliant little 1976 book, Place and Placelessness in particular – was pivotal. Drawing upon the pioneering phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and particularly the latter’s concept of ‘dwelling’, Seamon and Relph saw ‘place’ as the central component within human identity. Individuals and communities define themselves, in large part, from a place that is encoded with the meanings that we associate with the idea of home.

Thhus we can see just how apposite is the mesh between phenomenological investigation and an awakened interest in the nature of place. At the forefront of the revival of interest in place is the identified need for the psychological surety of a grounded identity within times of rootlessness and a pervasive and inchoate alienation. A need to reconnect with the intricacies of the biophysical processes within which one’s life nests as motivation for earth-defending activism is similarly identified. The necessity for continuity through time of key place-iconic physical features and place-defining networks of myth, story and local know how is also regarded as important. The integrity, the meaning, of any given place comes from its time-honed particularity. It is precisely this place because it is not that place, from which it is notably distinct.

The main criticism of place phenomenology is that it homogenises place, seeing it as reducible to a single meaning, and ignoring structures of power and exploitation that radically change the meanings with which place is imbued as one moves between groups, classes, genders and age cohorts. It is certainly true that some place phenomenology does homogenise place in this way, seeing it essentially as just what it is, independently of the character of human interaction with it (for example, Norberg-Schulz 1980[41]). But most phenomenologies follow Relph’s lead and see the construction of place meaning as arising from a quiet, unceasing dialogue between the physicality of place and the interactions of people with it. A myriad of unique senses of place are then mediated via human intercourse into social constructions of place (though there is nothing intrinsic to this process that mandates a single place meaning).


[edit] 2 References/Recommended Reading

Part of this article comes, with permission, from Pete Hay's 2006 paper entitled 'A Phenomenology of Islands'.

  1. ↑ Harvey, D. (1989), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell, Cambridge (MA).
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Harvey, D. (1996), Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Blackwell, Malden (MA).
  3. ↑ Harvey, D. (2000), Spaces of Hope, University of California Press, Berkeley (CA).
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Massey, D. (1994), Space, Place and Gender, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (MN).
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Duncan, N. (ed.) (1996), Bodyspace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, Routledge, London.
  6. ↑ Griffin, S. (1995), The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society, Doubleday, New York.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Hooks, B. (1990), Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, South End Press, Boston (MA).
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Irigaray, L. (1993), An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY).
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Keith, M. and Pile, S. (eds) (1993), Place and the Politics of Identity, Routledge, London and New York.
  10. ↑ Nast, H. and Pile, S. (eds) (1998), Places Through the Body, Routledge, London and New York.
  11. ↑ Cheney, J. (1989), ‘Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative’, Environmental Ethics, 11, 117-135.
  12. ↑ Duncan, J and Leys, D. (eds) (1993), Place/Culture/Representation, Routledge, New York.
  13. ↑ Smith, M. (1997), ‘Against the Enclosure of the Ethical Commons: Radical Environmentalism as an “Ethics of Place”’, Environmental Ethics, 19, 339-354.
  14. ↑ Rheingold, H. (2000), The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA)
  15. ↑ Wark, McK. (1994), Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events, Indiana University Press, Bloomington (IN).
  16. ↑ Agnew, J. and Duncan, J. (eds) (1990), The Power of Place, Unwin Hyman, Boston (MA).
  17. ↑ Lefebvre, H. (1991), The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford.
  18. ↑ Cameron, J. (2003a), Changing Places: Re-imagining Australia, Longueville, Double Bay (NSW).
  19. ↑ Jacobs, M. (1995), Sustainability and Socialism, Socialist Environment and Resources Association, London.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Norton, B.G. and Hannon, B. (1997), ‘Environmental Values: A Place-Based Approach, Environmental Ethics, 19, 227-246.
  21. ↑ Sagoff, M. (1992), ‘Settling America: The Concept of Place in Environmental Ethics’, Journal of Energy, Natural Resources and Environmental Law, 12, 351-418.
  22. ↑ Sagoff, M. (1993), ‘Environmental Ethics: An Epitaph’, Resources, Spring, 2-7.
  23. ↑ Casey, E, (1993), Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, Indiana University Press, Bloomington (IN).
  24. ↑ Malpas, J.E. (1999), Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  25. ↑ Sack, R. (1997), Homo Geographicus, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore (ML).
  26. ↑ Auge, M. (1995), Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, London and New York.
  27. ↑ Buttimer, A. and Seamon, D. (eds) (1980), The Human Experience of Space and Place, St. Martin’s Press, New York.
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 Relph, E. (1976), Place and Placelessness, Pion, London.
  29. ↑ Relph, E. (1993), ‘Modernity and the Reclamation of Place’, in D. Seamon (ed.), Dwelling, Seeing and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology, SUNY, New York, 25-40.
  30. ↑ Seamon, D. (1982), ‘The Phenomenological Contribution to Environmental Psychology’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2, 119-140.
  31. ↑ Seamon, D. (1984), ‘Emotional Experience of the Environment’, American Behavioral Scientist, 27, 757-770.
  32. ↑ Seamon, D. (1986), ‘Phenomenology and Vernacular Lifeworlds’, in D.G. Saile (ed.), Architecture in Cultural Change, School of Architecture, University of Kansas, Lawrence (KS), 17-24.
  33. ↑ Seamon, D. (2005), ‘Phenomenology, Place, Environment, and Architecture’, Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter, 16. Available at: http:www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/Seamon_reviewEAP.htm
  34. ↑ Seamon, D. and Mugerauer, R. (2000), ‘Dwelling, Place and Environment: An Introduction’, in D. Seamon and R. Mugerauer (eds), Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, Krieger, Malabar (FL), 1-12.
  35. ↑ Tuan, Y.F. (1974), Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (NJ).
  36. ↑ Tuan, Y.-F. (1977), Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (MN).
  37. ↑ Escobar, A. (2001), ‘Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization’, Political Geography, 20, 139-174.
  38. ↑ Seamon, D. (1980), ‘Body-Subject, Time-Space Routines, and Place Ballets’, in A. Buttimer and D. Seamon (eds), The Human Experience of Space and Place, Croom Helm, London, 148-165.
  39. ↑ Cameron, J. (2003b), ‘Introduction: Articulating Australian Senses of Place’, in J. Cameron (ed.), Changing Places: Re-imagining Australia, Longueville, Double Bay (NSW), 1-13.
  40. ↑ 40.0 40.1 van Manen, M. (1997), Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy, 2nd edn, Althouse, London (ONT).
  41. ↑ Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980), Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, Rizzoli, New York.
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