Space and Place Dr Lesley Wylie. Whatever is true for space and time, this much is true for place; we are immersed in it and could not do without it.

Space and Place

Dr Lesley Wylie

Whatever is true for space and time, this much is true for place; we are immersed in it and could not do without it. To be at all – to exist in any way – is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place

Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. ix

• Space: ‘the infinite three-dimensional extent in which all matter exists’

• Place: ‘a portion of space’

‘space is amorphous and intangible and not an entity that can be directly described and analyzed.’

Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), p. 8

Yi-Fu Tuan

Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (1974)

Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977)

What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value… The ideas ‘space’ and ‘place’ require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice-versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.

Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 6

‘In general it seems that space provides the context for places but derives its meaning from particular places.’

Relph, Place and Placelessness, p. 8

Edward S. Casey

‘How to get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of

Time’, in Senses of Place, ed. by Steven Feld & Keith H.

Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research,1996)

ARGUES THAT SPACE IS NOT POSTERIOR TO PLACE

Does this by way of PHENOMENOLOGY

‘There is no knowing or sensing a place except by being in that place, and to be in place is to be in a position to perceive it.’ Casey, ‘How to get from Space to Place, p. 18

Perceptions of Place

• Place is perceived multi-dimensionally• Coordinates help to situate us in place• Place and the body constantly interact

‘Just as there are no places without the bodies that sustain and vivify them, so there are no lived bodies without the places they inhabit and traverse.’

Casey,‘How to get from Space to Place’, p. 25

Body in Place

• Staying in place

• Moving in place

• Moving between places

John Agnew

Place and Politics (1987)

Place = ‘meaningful location’

Location

Locale

‘sense of place’

Senses of Place

You inhabit a spot which before you inhabit it is as indifferent to you as any spot upon the earth, & when, persuaded by some necessity you think to leave it, you leave it not, - it clings to you & with memories of things which in your experience of them gave no such promise, revenges your desertion.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, from The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 Vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, p. 6.

Senses of Place

Sinclair refers to loss of: ‘any sense of place. There is no ‘there’ by which to orientate ourselves, only the legend: ‘Bronze Age, Viking, Roman and Norman inhabitants have enjoyed its temperate climate, fertile land and powerful river . . . A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to revitalise this valley, leaving in its footprints world-class sports, business and leisure facilities.’

Ian Sinclair, ‘The Olympics Scam’, London Review of Books, 8 May 2008

Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962)

‘Intimate Space’

The Poetics of Space, 1957

‘it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams, that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.’

Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston Beacon Press, 1994), p. 6

Responses of Feminists to Bachelard…

‘there seemed little reason to celebrate a sense of belonging to the home, and even less […] to support the humanistic geographers’ claim that home provides the ultimate sense of place.’

Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), p. 55

Urban Space

• Detachment from nature

Urban Space

• Detachment from nature

• Alienation

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

- Written city portraits of Naples (1924), Moscow (1927), and Marseilles (1928)

- One Way Street (1925-26). A collection of aphorisms based on urban phenomena.

- A Berlin Chronicle (1932)- Arcades Project (collection of aphorisms,

anecdotes and observations on Paris. Published posthumously)

Urban Space

• Detachment from nature

• Alienation

• Labyrinth

Urban Space

• Detachment from nature

• Alienation

• Labyrinth

• Underworld

Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down to an underworld – a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise.[…] another system of galleries runs underground through Paris: the Metro, where at dusk glowing red lights point the way into the underworld of names. Combat, Elysee […] they have thrown off the humiliating fetters of street or square, and here in the lightening-scored, whistle-resounding darkness are transformed into misshapen sewer-gods, catacomb fairies.

Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Giland and Karen McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard U. P., 1999), p. 84

Urban Space

• Detachment from nature

• Alienation

• Labyrinth

• Underworld

• Crossing of boundaries

Nowhere […] can the phenomenon of the boundary be experienced in a more originary way than in cities. To know them means to understand those lines that, running alongside railroad crossings and across privately owned lots, within the park and along the riverbank, function as limits; it means to know these confines, together with the enclaves of the various districts. As threshold, the boundary stretches across streets; a new precinct begins like a step into a void – as though one had unexpectedly cleared a low step on a flight of stairs.Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 88.

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991)

Marxist and existential philosopher

The Production of Space (1974)

‘Social Space’

‘every spatial envelope implies a barrier between inside and out, but that this barrier is always relative and, in the case of membranes, always permeable.’

Lefebvre, Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 176

Psychogeography – explores impact of

environment on individuals

Psychogeography – explores impact of

environment on individuals

Psychogeographers explore the city on foot – often crossing into marginal areas or following forgotten routes

Michel de Certeau

The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)

grammar of space

Urban Space

• Detachment from nature

• Alienation

• Labyrinth

• Underworld

• Crossing of boundaries

• Subject to different meanings

Perceptions of Natural Space: New Mexico

Spanish / Mexican settlers – land is cold but productive

Anglo-American explorers – land is barren and empty

Navaho Indians – land is sacred

Perceptions of Natural Space: Amazonia

White settlers – land is productive

Native Americans – land is animate / sacred

only the visitor (and particularly the tourist) has a viewpoint; his perception is often a matter of using his eyes to compose pictures. The native, by contrast, has a complex attitude derived from his immersion in the totality of his environment. The visitor’s viewpoint, being simple, is easily stated. […] The complex attitude of the native, on the other hand, can be expressed by him only with difficulty and indirectly through behavior, local tradition, lore, and myth.

Tuan, Topophilia, p. 63

Panoramic – nature as separate from man

Non-panoramic – nature and man as inseparable

‘the uniquely distinguishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly the fact that no such distinction of self and objects exists in it, since it is esthetic in the degree in which organism and environment cooperate to institute an experience in which the two are so fully integrated that each disappears.’

John Dewey, Art as Experience (London: Allen & Unwin, 1934), p. 249.

1917

View of Yosemite Falls,

California

Wilfredo

Lam

La selva

1943

Alejo Carpentier

‘the world of deceit, subterfuge, duplicity everything there is disguise, stratagem, artifice, metamorphosis. The world of the lizard-cucumber, the chestnut-hedgehog, the cocoon-centipede, the carrot-larva.’

The Lost Steps [1953], trans, by Harriet de Onis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980),p. 149.

novela de la selva – ‘jungle novel’

Landscape

- from Dutch landskip referring to a painting of inland natural scenery

- connections to surveillance

- landscape provided people with a way of assimilating nature, especially non-European nature, and of imposing order on the land.

- important strategy of colonial writing

I looked out over the vast savanna, whose boundaries dissolved in a faint circular darkening of the sky. From my vantage-point of rock and grass, I took in, almost in its totality, a circumference that formed a perfect, a complete part of the planet on which I lived. I no longer had to raise my eyes to find a cloud: those motionless cirri, that seemed as though they had always been there, were within reach of the hand that shaded my eyelids. Here and there in the distance a thick, solitary tree stood out, always flanked by a cactus like a tall candelabrum of green stone, on which unmoving, heavy hawks rested like heraldic birds. Nothing makes a noise, nothing collides with nothing, nothing moves or vibrates. […] I had been there more than an hour without moving, knowing how futile it was to move when one was always at the centre of that which was contemplated.

Carpentier, The Lost Steps, p. 100.

Forest

chief characteristic is its ‘all-enveloping nature. It is not differentiated as to sky and earth; there is no horizon; it lacks landmarks; it has no outstanding hill that can be recognized […]; there are no distant views.’

Tuan, Topophilia, p. 79

After sailing for a long time through that secret channel, one began to feel the same thing that mountain-climbers feel, lost in snow: the loss of the sense of verticality, a kind of disorientation, and a dizziness of the eyes. It was no longer possible to say which was tree and which reflection of tree. Was the light coming from above or below? Was the sky or the earth water? As the trees, the sticks, the lianas were refracted at strange angles, one finally began to see non-existent channels, openings, banks. With this sucession of minor mirages, my feeling of bewilderment, of being completely lost, grew until it became unbearable.

Carpentier, The Lost Steps, p. 145.