Sense of Place
The foregoing accounts of place and its concepts, with their focus on the
relationship between people and place, ultimately lead to an awareness of sense
of place. Places are sensed as a combination of setting, landscape, ritual, and
routine. Specific qualities of landscape, whether the landscape is urban or rural,
would infuse a site with a sense of place for people. Past experience could
heavily influence the relationship between people and place. Each meaning
structure of people, space, and environment contributes a particular set of
qualities to forming a sense of place.
When Allen Ashby indicates that ethical reflection and creation begins
with the living experience of the self and of groups, he notes that “[it] begins
with a sense of place, both temporal and physical” (453).
Ashby accentuates
the tie between community and memory, especially the memory of place,
which constitutes a sense of place primarily about our legacy of impact on the
land. The influence of inhabiting place on one’s memory is also recognized
by Kent Ryden. “A sense of place,” he claims, “results gradually and
unconsciously from inhabiting a landscape over time, becoming familiar with
its physical properties, accruing history within its confines” (Ryden 38). In
terms of one’s relationship with his/her environment, a sense of place can be a
feeling of the beauty and wealth of phenomena that comprise a particular place.
The environment is thus made psychologically comfortable and compatible
with human purposes.
Sense of place is also the thematic device of William New’s Land Sliding:
Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing, an inquiry into
the changing cultural character of Canada.
New draws on the sense of place
and spatial theory in the fields of art history, anthropology, sociology, and
geography, in addition to a diverse body of critical writing and insights from
feminism, new historicism, and postcolonial studies. His general thesis can be
summarized in a short statement: place can be text and text can also be place.
Following recent critical insights in the theorization of space and place per se,
New's study extends beyond the literary to the visual arts, encompassing
familiar Canadian artists and artists working in less conventional media. New
reads place and space as relational notions. For him, place designates a
particular use of space, and space designates a set of assumptions governing a
people's attitudes towards social practice—production, distance, and power.
Based on Lefebvre’s concept of spatial production, he also emphasizes that the
most general descriptions of social relationships are often spatial.
He further
argues that space can become a social commodity and that spatial metaphors
can also be read for the power relationships they reveal.
He demonstrates his
reading of spatial metaphors in the construction, confirmation, and subversion
of a culturally dominant representation of Canada.
Since it is firmly associated with experience and memory, sense of place
appears to be a fuzzy concept and very often purely subjective.
Yet, as
suggested in the concept of place previously discussed, sense of place can be
the attribution of non-material characteristics to a place—the soul of a place or
its genius loci. It can also be the force that defines a person by a given piece
of land, making him/her emotionally and spiritually bound to the land.
Moreover, sense of place is embodied in narratives related to family,
community, and folk, which include features of place and constitutes an
attachment to place.
Intimate understandings of a place are best expressed by
natives, even though it may be possible for an outsider to broadly describe the
place. After all, a place is comprised not only of natural features, but also of
patterns of human settlement and social relationships.
Sense of place is thus
determined by local knowledge and displayed by people congruent with local
identity.
The identification of places, as well as their organization into mental
structures, not only allows people to function effectively but serves also as a
source of emotional security, pleasure, and understanding.
To be sure, the
connection between people and place is a key component of sense of place.
The connection between people and place is also an important aspect in
the study of John Agnew, an eminent cultural geographer.
In explaining his
idea of place as a counter-representation of space, Agnew puts greater emphasis
on sense of place than on location or locale.
Against the common idea that
senses of place derive from our contact with the physical realities of the locale
and location we are in, he holds that a sense of place bears with it a “subjective
territorial identity” (Agnew 262), which is a major requisite for understanding
the order of location.
Agnew thus combines the human subject with the place
it is in, puts it in an interaction with its surroundings, and locates it at a position
where meanings derive from the connection between body and place over time.
The same idea is crystallized in Fredric Jameson’s statement:
Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical
reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction
of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and
which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments
of mobile, alternative trajectories. (51)
What is suggested here is that sense of place is linked to our experience with
lived space rather than to any sense of abstract space.
It is not used only to
refer to spatial locations, but also to locate people inside society.
All the
important metaphors Jameson uses here—ensemble, map, and trajectories—are
spatial vehicles for us to approach a better understanding of what sense of place
can be.
Based on all the preceding ideas and concepts, we can understand sense of
place at least in terms of its nature and functions. First, sense of place
produces spatial orientation. It produces in the human subject the capability
of being oriented by its surrounding objects.
When we lack a sense of place,
we will be disoriented, lost in space. Second, sense of place enhances spatial
mapping.
It encompasses tacit knowledge of a place, enabling one to describe
a part, find a route, or draw a map without needing either linguistic or visual
memory.
Third, sense of place creates spatial awareness.
It can be
understood as an ensemble of knowledge about a place, where there is neither
an articulated system nor a systematic structure, and where a sense of the whole
comes from knowledge about parts. Fourth, sense of place integrates our
spatial experience into a mental model.
Such a mental model helps us situate
ourselves in a given place, and thereby produces our spatial relationship with
the place.
We carry it with us, transfer it to any other places, and employ it to
decode whatever spatial messages that may come to us.
It is noteworthy that these four aspects indicate that sense of place works
in a way that is both metaphorical and metonymical: metaphorical in that it
enables us to transfer our spatial experience with one place to our experience
with another place, metonymical in that it enables us to imagine a space by
certain spatial elements without awareness of its full picture. This is strongly
suggested by Jameson in his statement quoted above. In order to regain a
sense of place, which we have lost and may not have ever had, he resorts to
such temporal elements as memories and experiences.
Yet, rather than a
historical record, he brings these elements together in a cognitive map, which
situates us in a spatial relationship with our memories and experiences.
When
we are cognitively mapping our memories and experiences, we find ourselves
able to understand them in a metaphorical way.
In a cognitive map of our city,
we are able to resituate ourselves in the city and consequently recognize
ourselves as part of the city. As we move along the routes and meet the
blocks and areas on the map, we are also mapped into a moving icon and
integrated into the map. With the routes and blocks and areas, which
represent not only streets and places in our city but also carry our memories
and experiences of them, we can construct or reconstruct our relationship with
the city. This is indeed an integration of temporal and spatial elements.
Through it, a sense of place can possibly generate in us, with the help of
metaphors and metonyms.
Metaphor and metonymy, of course, are familiar concepts borrowed from
linguistics. Such a conceptual borrowing is underwritten by careful
examinations of the relationship between space and language that both Henry
Lefebrve and George Lakoff have respectively practiced in philosophy and
linguistics.