GEOG 3300
Space, Place & Scale
Department of Geography
Faculty of Liberal & Professional Studies
York University
Fall Term 2011-2012
Week 2
Theories of Space, Place & Scale
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
1
Reading Response Assignments
• Three reading response assignments (due 29 September
2011, 20 October 2011 and 24 November 2011).
• 2-3 pages long.
• Each worth 10% of final grade.
• Engage with one or more course readings covered during
month before assignment due
• A reading response is a critical commentary upon the
material, demonstrating grasp of literature and its
relevance to course themes.
• Structure: formal, essay style with thesis statement and
argument.
• Try focusing on a single example, experience or theme.
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris, 2011
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Space, Place & Scale
• Foundational concepts in geography whose meanings are
often taken for granted, as if self-evident.
• But these very concepts are contested and rife with hidden
controversy.
• We cannot call truly ourselves geographers unless we
understand these concepts and the controversies that
enfold them.
• Approaches to geography change over time, but the most
prominent shift has been the ‘cultural turn’ in geography
and the concurrent ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences
since the early 1970s. Place matters now in all the social
sciences, not just geography (one leading example is the
influence of Lefebvre across the social sciences).
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Defining Place
• How we define ‘place’ matters
• Dimensions of place:
– Place as location: coordinates, dimensions, scale
– Place as an idea: public & private; inclusive or exclusive;
places of memory; socially constructed places; spaces of
identity; place-making’; home & nation; contested places
• Cresswell: Places are “meaningful locations”
• John Agnew: Places have three attributes: (1) location; (2)
locale; and (3) sense of place
• Cresswell: “place is not just a thing in the world but a way of
understanding the world.”
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Space and Place
• Often ‘space’ is understood as something hollow or
exterior: a container for place.
• In common usage (even by many geographers), ‘spaces’
are transformed into ‘places’ by naming [claiming] and
filling them. In this sense space and place are treated as a
duality, even as opposites.
• But this is overly simplistic. Rather than think of space as
hollow or as an absence, we might understand ‘space’ as
a broader and more abstract concept than ‘place’.
• Tuan describes space as ‘movement’ and place as
‘pause.’
• Space as possibility, openness, the sublime, the ‘beyond’
• Some geographers (e.g., Lefebvre) use ‘space’ where
others might use ‘place’
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Scale
• The subject of increasing geographical attention since the early
1990s (especially with the rise of GIS)
• Focus on ‘cartographic’, ‘geographic’ and ‘operational’ scale
(Marston, 2000: 220)
• But scale is not just mechanical or measurable; it is not simply
“given.”
• Scale is also socially constructed: “scale is not necessarily a
preordained hierarchical framework for ordering the world … it is
instead a contingent outcome of the tensions that exist between
structural forces and the practices of human agents.” (ibid)
• The idea of scale as a theoretical concern in geography.
• Scale as relational; invoking power, discourse, hierarchy: the
politics of scale (Agnew)
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Scale in Geographical Practice
• The politics of scale: manipulation of electoral boundaries
and political territories by political parties, governments,
trade unions; different ways spaces are divided and
ordered. Mobilization at local and global scales. The
‘rescaling’ of territorial power (e.g., global trade
agreements)
• Localities: spaces of dependence; networks of
engagement (Kevin Cox)
• Sociological: micro / meso / macro scale (or) global,
national, and urban scale … also rural (agrarian?) and
bodily scale.
• Remember: this is about scale as an idea, not only as
something empirical or measured.
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Genealogies of Place
Cresswell outlines three broad approaches to place:
1. Descriptive (‘ideographic’) approaches to place
2. Phenomenological approaches (the ‘essence’ of
being ‘in place’; emphasis on experience and
meaning)
3. Social constructionist approaches (Marxian, feminist,
postmodern, postcolonial)
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Approach
Descriptive
Phenomenological
Social Constructionist
Week 2
15 September 2011
Associated
Schools
Preoccupations with Place
-Regional Geography
(Richard Hartshorne)
-Early cultural
geographers (Carl Sauer)
-Spatial Science (1970s)
-‘ideographic’
-‘chorology’
-Regions and cultures
-Place as a thing: ontologically given
-Environmental determinism (although Sauer held that
culture transforms nature)
-‘Place’ remains largely undefined
Phenomenology
(Heidegger, MerleauPonty, Bachelard)
-Humanistic geographers
(Yi-Fu Tuan, Anne
Buttimer, David Seamon,
Ted Relph, Edward
Casey)
-experienced, ‘embodied’ or lived place
--’topophilia’ (Tuan)
-Home and dwelling
-belonging and attachment
-‘authenticity’
Place as primordial or Place as “mutually constituted”
by environment and culture
-‘romantic’? Naïve?
-‘Radical’ Geography
-Marxism (David Harvey
-Feminism (Gillian Rose,
Doreen Massey)
-Poststructuralism and
postcolonialism (Edward
Soja, Homi Bhabha,
Edward Said)
-Social determinism: places as socially constructed
-Spatial ‘turn’ in the cultural and social sciences
-Class, gender and race
-Transgression and resistance; power and privilege
-Postcolonial legacies
-‘ungrounded? Incoherent?
-What happens to ontology?
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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1. Descriptive Approaches to
Space
• An early and relatively simplistic (naïve?) approach to
space and place
• Place as a thing (ontologically given): ideographic
(focused on the particular)
• Primarily a descriptive approach
• Place  region; territory; boundaries; measurable 
space
• Many early regional geographers were environmental
determinists (although Carl Sauer suggested that cultures
also transform natural environments)
• Place and culture: ‘human regions’; anthropology
• Spatial science in the 1960s and 1970s (‘quantitative
revolution’)
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Place and Space in Descriptive
Geography: the rise of Humanism
“Since the particular had no place in the hierarchy of values
developed in the post-enlightenment world studies of place were
often relegated to ‘mere description’ while space was given the
role of developing scientific law-like generalizations. In order to
make this work people had to be removed from the scene.
Space was not embodied but empty. This empty space could
then be used to develop a kind of spatial mathematics – a
geometry. But this idea of place as a fascination with the
particular and the study of place as ‘mere description’ depends
on a particular naïve view of places as given parts of the human
landscape. In the 1970s humanistic geographers began to
develop notions of place which were every bit as universal and
theoretically ambitious as approaches to space had been.”
(Cresswell, 2004: 19)
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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2. Phenomenology and Humanism
• In the 1970s, ‘place’ becomes explicitly the central
preoccupation in human geography.
• Emphasis on subjectivity and experience
• Dwelling, home, belonging, attachment, authenticity: the
meaning of everyday experiences of place
• Humanism: Tuan
• Phenomenology (Relph, Casey, Seamon): place and
being / consciousness
• To a certain extend phenomenological and humanistic
approaches to place have been supplanted by social
constructionist perspectives. Is the pendulum shifting
back?
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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3. Social Constructivist Approaches
to Space and Place
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Postmodern Geographies (power and discourse)
Marxism (class)
Feminism (gender)
Postcolonialism (race)
Note that these categories intersect, conflict and overlap.
Almost all contemporary research in geography is informed
by social constructionist perspectives.
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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3(a) Postmodern Approaches
• Associated with a “spatial turn” in the social sciences and
a simultaneous “cultural turn” in geography
• 1970s to the present
• Reflects influence of social theory and cultural studies
• Place/space as culturally constructed
• Power, discourse, transgression, resistance, subversion,
difference, hybridity (Soja: ‘trialectics of spatiality’)
• How spatial meanings are imposed, composed and
resisted; how places are re/presented
• Language; textuality matter; graffiti; film
• Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau, Mike Davis, Edward Soja
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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3(b) Marxist Approaches
• For a time this was called ‘radical’ geography (see the
journal Antipode, for example)
• Space under capitalism
• Lefebvre, Harvey, de Certeau
• Places are under threat due to the restructuring of
economic spatial relations under globalization and the
increasing mobility of production and capital
• ‘Space-time compression’ (Harvey)
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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3(c) Feminism/Gender
• Gendered power relations are entrenched in place,
alongside patriarchy, ableism, heterosexism
• Places are the products of structural relations
• Bodies matter (this view overlaps with humanism and
phenomenology)
• Accessibility; autonomy; mobility; safety; resistance;
difference
• Challenge to the role of ‘home’ as a ‘domestic’ place
(e.g., Gillian Rose, Doreen Massey)
• Iris Marion Young, Judith Butler
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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3(d) Postcolonial Approaches
• Challenge notions around territory and dominance,
empire, colonialism
• The idea that even ‘after’ the colonial period has ended, its
influences persist
• Hegemonic and counter-hegemonic influences
• Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Derrida (indirectly)
• Genocide, ‘orientalism’ (Said), ‘exotics’
• Race and racism.
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Criticisms of these approaches …
• Regional geographers and environmental and social determinists
tend to view place as a thing (whether pre-existing or produced)
And
Humanistic geographers are sometimes criticised for seeing place
(even where constituted mutually by nature and culture) naively
in terms of a romanticized past
But
Social constructionists – who argue that place is socially constructed
through narratives, language (postmodern views) and relations of
power (Marxist, feminist geographers) – are criticised for denying
the essential realities of physical place
Where does this leave us?
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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And some possible ways of
opening up space/place …
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
David Seamon (a phenomenologist) describes place via the metaphor of
dance and rhythms
Yi-Fu Tuan (a humanist) on place and/as experience
Allen Pred and Nigel Thrift (influenced by Anthony Gidden’s structuration
theory): place is always ‘becoming’; places are “biographies of people
negotiating” sense of place. See also Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of
Everyday Life
Edward Soja: “thirdspace” (“trialectics of spatiality”)
Homi Bhabha: hybridity
Places as negotiated, contested, threatened/eroded/homogenized,
resisted (or enabling resistance), authentic/inauthentic
Place as an event or a symbol of connections; place as flow
The future of place? David Harvey (a Marxist); Ted Relph (a
phenomenologist) on the erosion of place.
Lefebvre on space-time compression and flows of capital.
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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What sort of place/space is Vari Hall?
• Viewed descriptively, phenomenologically, or as a
constructed space?
• How is Vari Hall a contested space?
• To whom does Vari Hall ‘belong?’
• Who is excluded from it? How?
• What can we make of the ongoing redesign of Vari Hall?
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Other
Spatial
Cosmologies
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Spatial opposites …
• Tuan suggests that most cultures conceive of space
(however differently) as oriented around opposites:
Life  death
Male  female
We  they
Land  water
Mountain  valley
North  south
Centre  periphery
Heaven  earth
High  low
Light  darkness
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15 September 2011
Left  right
Below  Above
Down  up
Behind  in front
Exterior  interior
New  old
Etc.
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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… or cosmological
correspondences:
Wood
spring
east
Lesser yang
green
Anger
Fire
summer
south
Greater yang
red
Joy
Earth
------------
centre
balance
yellow
Desire
Metal
autumn
west
Lesser yin
white
Sorrow
Water
winter
north
Greater yin
black
Fear
Chinese cosmological correspondences. Source: Tuan, Yi-Fu, 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental
Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press. Page 18.
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Space and the Body …
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Space in Islam
• In Mecca, “the Ka’ba [the most holy structure] forms the
keystone of other forms of interlocking spatiality in Islam,
providing the direction (qibla) in which believers face
during the cycle of five daily prayers, and constituting the
focus of the pilgrimage (hajj) that all Muslims, health and
financial status permitting, are enjoined to undertake at
least once in their lifetime.”
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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Traditional Chinese Worldview
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
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At the Threshold of Place
“’A threshold,’ wrote the third-century philosopher Porphyrus,
‘is a sacred thing.’ Thresholds, though wider than the idea
of doors, share their role as repositories of desire and
temptation. What is opened at a door? Onto what
landscape of the imagination does a threshold gaze?
Gaston Bachelard has written that a door is an entire
cosmos of the half-open. A threshold is perhaps, by
extension, a cosmos of the already half-understood.”
(Gary Michael Dault, Cells of Ourselves, 1989)
Week 2
15 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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