Sense of Place and Metaphor
I speak of an orientation advisedly.
more and nothing less than that.
We are concerned with nothing
We are concerned with what might
be called a ‘sense’: an organ that perceives, a direction that may be
conceived, and a directly lived movement progressing towards the
horizon.
And we are concerned with nothing that even remotely
resembles a system.
Henri Lefebvre, The
Production of Space, 423
Place is an important element of our understanding of the world.
As the
grounding of time and space, it profoundly affects the interpretation and
meaning of our relationship with the world.
This grounding in the world is
contrasted to concepts that consider the universal or absolute as a central
element of their theories or philosophies.
It runs counter to the Renaissance
mode of thought that the particularity of place is substituted by universal space
and that places are merely momentary subdivisions of neutral and homogenous
space (Casey, Fate 134).
The significance of place can be found not only in our experience of place,
but also in the grounding of our experience in place.
We are “bound” to place.
This binding to place is rooted in the very nature of human existence, rather
than just a contingent feature of human thought, experience, and identity.1
1
This idea of grounding in the world is best elaborated by Jeff E. Malpes in his Place and
Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), where he meticulously advances an account
People of different cultures through time have shown different interpretations
of place, and this is reflected by or revealed in both the way they get along with
the natural environment and the way they understand their built environment.
Individuals with a physical and spiritual attachment to a community tend to
reject the extreme mobility of advanced industrialized societies.
For example,
bio-regionalists emphasize the importance of place and see individuals as
having a physical and spiritual attachment to a community of other people and
to a biophysical, defined space.
They reject the new-found extreme mobility
of advanced industrialized societies and deny globalization of economic
systems with its attendant reliance on free markets and mobile capital (Doyle
73).
Against the new international division of labor and production, this
attachment to place increasingly serves as a local strategy of transnational
resistance.
As Raymond Williams points out, place is “a crucial element in
the bonding process . . . by the explosion of the international economy and the
destructive effects of deindustrialization upon old communities” (Resources
242).
However, the concept of place has been treated as an ancillary
phenomenon, marginalized or even forgotten.
Little attention has been paid
by philosophical treatments to place and man’s relation to place.
Even when
scholars discuss about issues related to space, they tend to put less emphasis on
the distinctiveness of place.
David Harvey strongly criticizes some
oversimplified treatment of space and place in the work of many humanistic
geographers, without (3-13). Doreen Massey argues for the abandonment of
having a particular concept of place as she complains that different authors
of the nature and significance of place as a complex but unitary structure that encompasses
self and other, space and time, subjectivity and objectivity.
assume different meanings when they apply the terms “space” and “spatiality”
to the deployment of the concept of place (66).
Even when Michel Foucault
suggests, in his “Of Other Spaces,” a certain rehabilitation of lived spaces from
the dominance of conceptual spaces, primacy is given to space:
The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.
We
are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition,
the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.
We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is
less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network
that connects points and that intersects with its own skein. (22)
Foucault’s remark seems to be a synthesis of divergent notions, but none of
them—simultaneity, juxtaposition, network—grants any significance to the
relationship between “our experience of the world” and the place we live in.
Even though his “other spaces” accommodate both the concept of space as a
network of locations and that as a system of locality, little emphasis is put on
the human experience with place.
It should be noted, however, that this rehabilitation of place is manifest in
many of the discussions of place in the existing literature.
sees a need to distinguish place from space.
Elizabeth Grosz
She puts more emphasis on place
than on space, on the grounds that the former is for people to dwell and live in
while the latter is for people to map and explore (123).
stresses the distinction of place from space.
Edward Casey also
He thinks that place and space
are incongruous on the one hand, but together they form an uneven doublet of
two quite variant kinds (Getting 293). Above all, the importance of place lies
in its being a treasure for both sociologists and architects, who have to deal
with the relationship between people and place. For them, the concept of
place covers a very broad range of ideas and carries a great variety of senses.
A place may be a general vicinity, a public square with room for pedestrians, a
proper or appropriate position or location, a point located with respect to
surface features of some region, or an area set aside for a particular purpose.
A place may even be an abstract mental location. It is true that these only
capture some shades of meaning carried by place; it is also true that concepts
and senses of place often overlap and interconnect in various ways.
There are
aspects of place that show how it is situated in the world; there are other
aspects of place that have everything to do with society, culture, and values.
A society develops in a certain place. The grounding of place helps the
society take its root and retain its memory.
influences every individual in the society.
between an individual and his/her world.
tactile link to the outside world.
This societal memory strongly
It provides a psychological anchor
It builds within the individual a
Without this connection, the individual may
often feel out of place and may lose his/her root.
When displaced, he/she is
likely to experience a sense of alienation, finding it difficult to get along with
the new place. Likewise, the relationship between a group of people and their
place is both spatial and social.
They not only simply live in the place, but
also get alone with the place. The concept of place in architecture as a
tripartite of private, public and urban spaces should be understood not only as
spatial attribute, but also as a reflection of people’s relationship with their place.
As the concept of what is meant by private, public, and urban changes through
time, their relationship with place changes accordingly.
Thus, changes of
physical environment can always have a great impact on an individual or a
group of people, in terms of action and thought.