Common preamble to three posts on changes to place over the last 50 years
I recently posted an unpublished and not previously circulated essay at Academia.org on the ways that places and place experiences have altered since about 1970. It draws on some of my posts on this website, and also on my publications about place (mostly book chapters that might not be easily available) since about 1990.   My main reason for writing the essay is that experiences of being rooted in place, belonging, attachment and so on, and indeed the forces of placelessness that might be eroding these, are not timeless and unchanging. What made sense in 1970, when I was writing my book Place and Placelessness, needs to be updated both because there are now practices for protecting, making and promoting places that did not exist then, and because the ways places are experienced have shifted dramatically in a world of cheap air travel and omnipresent electronic devices.

I assume those looking at this website and those reading Academia are mostly from different audiences, so this and two additional posts offer a sort of point form summary of my Academia essay, which is about 60 pages long. This post (#3) offers some theoretical speculations about changing relationships between place and placelessness and what they portend for the future of places. The first post (#1) considers recent changes to ways places are made. The second post (#2) deals mostly with changes since 1970 to the ways places are experienced.

Although they are really only summaries of ideas, I hope that together the three posts offer enough suggestions about recent changes for you to be able to explore them further, perhaps question some conventional assumptions about roots and sense of place, or, conversely, to refine arguments that place provides continuity in the face of change.

Changing relations of place and placelessness
The forces of placelessness and the processes of place constantly push and pull against each other in ways that change over time. In Place and Placelessness I presented them as in opposition to each other, with placelessness eroding the distinctiveness of place. Something like this:

I subsequently began to regard them as in a dynamic balance, always pushing against one other. This interpretation, which regards everywhere as to some degree placeless, and in some ways distinctive, is both more flexible than the idea that place and placelessness are opposing forces. It also makes room for the recognition that a balance is necessary to offset situations where distinctive becomes associated with exclusion, or situations where uniformity is so extreme that identification with place becomes virtually impossible.

But even this sort of yin-yang idea of the relationship between place and placelessness fails to capture what seems to have happened with increasing mobility and the intrusions of electronic media. It does not reflect the complexities of hybrid places in mongrel cities, non-places, and the ways even heritage preservation has resulted in standardization. It now seems more appropriate to understand the relationship of place and placelessness as one of entanglement, at least partially. In some places distinctiveness is clear, elsewhere uniformity is clear, but it is also the case that non-places can be considered as distinctive places, World Heritage Sites can be overrun by mass tourism, the celebration of place can involve NIMBYism and exclusion, and the confusions of hybridity can contribute to complex and distinctive places. This simple diagram is an attempt to capture this blend of balance and entanglement:

Place as a lens to the world
There are many different ways to understand place, but one that I think has considerable methodological value is to regard it as a lens to the world. In other words, all places are microcosms of larger patterns and processes, albeit adapted to local circumstances, because they are the consequences of those processes and also contribute to them. Places are fusions of physical settings, activities and meanings that are parts of the whole world, and they are themselves wholes. It is in and through place, or more specifically through specific places with their own names, that we know the world. The wholeness of place is not something mysterious. It is what we experience everyday, at home, when we step outside, when we travel.

Given this fundamental relationship, the deliberate study of place and of places offers a means to understand the complex unity of the larger world as it is directly known and experienced, and the ways this world is changing. That said, given the heterotopian confusions of the present-day world this is not a straightforward process.

Trend to Heterotopia
Place, and the processes that give rise to places are not immutable. Fifty years ago, when I was writing Place and Placelessness, it seemed that local processes that had once led to distinctive places were being eroded by the abstract forces of modernism. This simple, binary interpretation does not apply well to many landscapes created since then in the light of heritage preservation, branding, mobility and electronic media, all processes that seem to simultaneously enhance yet undermine place identities.

Two examples of present-day place confusion. On the left: Sense of Place clothing store is in the shopping mall underneath Kyoto Japan Rail Station. A sign in the store reads: “Sense of place is about confidence in knowing who you are and what style means to you.” On the right: a conflation of iconic skylines from world cities, on a sign entirely in Chinese in Seattle Premium Outlets, a discount mall on the Tulalip Indian Reserve, north of Seattle, where many of the shoppers are Chinese-Canadians.

Michel Foucault suggested the word “heterotopia” to characterize this confusion. A heterotopy is literally something out of place. In heterotopia most things seem out of place and it is difficult to identify any coherent logic underlying them. Old geographical notions about regions and settlements no longer apply. Everything everywhere is now interconnected, yet filled with unlikely juxtapositions and dislocated experiences.

This fragment of a streetscape in North York in Toronto is a mundane example of the unlikely juxtapositions of heterotopia. Roses New York offers a fusion of North American and Persian food, upstairs is an Egyptian psychic, next door a Korean-Japanese restaurant, the billboard advertises fictional places on Canadian TV. 

Although heterotopia is not entirely new (unlikely juxtapositions have always happened whenever different cultures have come into close contact), in the last half century it has hugely intensified with multi-centred living, mobility and transnationalism. What is remarkable is that, not unlike electronic devices, it has so quickly become familiar and taken for granted in the mobile world and mongrel cities of the early 21^st century. What is perhaps even more remarkable is that it seems to be associated with the decline of Enlightenment ideas of rationalism, truth and reality. The “thrown-togetherness” (Doreen Massey’s term) of many newly created places seems to be one expression of the sense that anything goes, that any belief or ideology is valid even if it unsupported by empirical evidence. Hybrid places and heterotopian landscapes are in themselves harmless, and in some ways reflect the diversity and openness of the present-day world that is a consequence of the decline of oppressive, restrictive practices that masqueraded as rational and realistic. However,  they are not incidental superficial phenomena so much as manifestations of confusion associated with the paradigm shift that is happening at the end of the rationalist era that has lasted several centuries, confusion that is being reinforced by the emergence of social and political forces that deny evidence, resist diversity and promote exclusion.

The most intense example of heterotopia may be the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. The ruined building was remarkably left standing at the epicentre of the atom bomb explosion. It is a World Heritage Site that preserves destruction and reasserts the continuity of place, yet is also the place where rational knowledge reached beyond reason.

The Openess of Place
Though there are no obvious guidelines to help make sense of what is happening as rationalism loses its once privileged position, I think a phenomenological return to place offers possible clarifications in a way that is neither poisoned by the confirmation biases of exclusion nor coldly detached. What I mean by a phenomenological return not only considers the importance of belonging somewhere, but, in the present-day context, also attends to flows of information, mobility and heterotopia. More specifically it has to consider the constant interconnections between here and elsewhere that are an unavoidable aspect of current place experiences. Jeff Malpas refers to place as an “open, cleared yet bounded region in which we find ourselves gathered together with other persons and things, and in which we are opened to the world and the world to us.”

The increased openness of place has eroded the distinction between place and placelessness. One response to this is an attempt to reverse change and deny difference; this is a retreat into parochialism and exclusion that are manifestations of a poisoned sense of place, and it has been exacerbated by the echo chambers of social media. The other response embraces openness and diversity, and recognizes that local and global connections are present everywhere. From this perspective every place is a portal to the world. This is implicit in multi-centred lives, time-space compression, and the global village. It is increasingly how people everywhere connect with geography. It regards heterotopia as positive even if its manifestations are baffling. Above all it acknowledges that humanity is shared regardless of local differences.

An everyday instance of the openness of place.  A sign in the small town of Sidney in British Columbia for LaLoCa, a store that sells products, according to the small print. “Products from ethical social enterprises and fair trade producers from Vancouver Island, BC & around the world.”

Responsibility and the Future of Places
The social and technological changes of the last fifty years which have affected place and place experiences will not be undone in the foreseeable future. We have moved far beyond the world before modernism in which the distinctiveness of places arose from rooted and geographically separated communities. Distinctiveness is now based partly on the protection of cultural, built and natural heritage defended by forceful international, national and local organizations, partly on place branding and placemaking that have become entrenched in business and planning practices, and partly on what people with multicentred lives bring to the places where they currently live. And not least because of these new commitments to distinctiveness it is inconceivable that there will be an untrammelled revival of the modernist placeless predilection for replacing whatever was old with something efficient and new, though principles of international uniformity will continue to be manifest in landscapes of skyscraper offices, production plants, distribution centres and non-places associated with the global economy.

Mobility, whether for tourism or migration, is expected to increase substantially in the coming decades. Cities will continue to hybridize, electronic communications will intrude further and in devious ways into place experiences, heritage preservation and branding will further reinforce distinctiveness. The specific consequences of these trends will vary in intensity and character from place to place and over time. From the perspective of those who consider mobility, multi-centred lives and electronic communications as processes that diminish sense of place and erode rootedness, this is regrettable. My own view is that while these irreversible changes have may have diminished lifelong rootedness in place, they have actually reduced the prevalence of placelessness and have broadened experiences of the diversity of places. They are not without their problems, such as the inconsistent uses of the idea of heritage, the fact that place branding is an indication of submission to neo-liberal economics, the way tourism sometimes overwhelms cities, and electronic media can facilitate exclusionary, parochial attitudes. Nevertheless, on balance I regard the changes a positive trade-off because both because they mostly reinforce place identities and especially because they foster a sense of the openness of place, the understanding that places are portals to the world.

The importance of the openness of place lies in the ways it directly informs how we can understand and take responsibility for places. First, in this ‘post-truth’ age our direct experiences of place allows us to compare the claims and opinions of politicians and supposed experts against what we encounter ourselves – actual people and real things, not ‘the public’ and consumer goods. Second, in a multi-centred mobile world we need to take responsibility for where we are, no matter how briefly we are somewhere. This can happen in countless different ways – gardening, helping neighbours, buying local produce, participation in community activities, and protesting developments that are socially or environmentally damaging. Third, openness to the world is of fundamental significance in understanding the profound challenges of the global village we all now live in, perhaps most significantly, the challenge of climate change, but also water shortages, intensifying social inequality, and the rise of exclusionary authoritarian governments.

Michel Foucault 1970 The Order of Things, (London: Tavistock Press). p.xv.
Jeff Malpas, 2006, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p.221.
Doreen Massey 2005 For Space (London: Sage Publication), Chapter 13

Common preamble to three posts on changes to place over the last 50 years
I recently posted an unpublished and not previously circulated essay at Academia.org on the ways that places and place experiences have altered since about 1970. It draws on some of my posts on this website, and also on my publications about place (mostly book chapters that might not be easily available) since about 1990.   My main reason for writing the essay is that experiences of being rooted in place, belonging, attachment and so on, and indeed the forces of placelessness that might be eroding these, are not timeless and unchanging. What made sense in 1970, when I was writing my book Place and Placelessness, needs to be updated both because there are now practices for protecting, making and promoting places that did not exist then, and because the ways places are experienced have shifted dramatically in a world of cheap air travel and omnipresent electronic devices.

I assume that those looking at this website and those reading Academia are mostly from two different audiences, so this and two additional posts offer a sort of point form summary of my Academia essay, which is about 60 pages long. This post (#2) deals mostly with changes since 1970 to the ways places are experienced. A previous post (#1) considered recent changes to ways places are made. The third post (#3) offers some theoretical speculations about changing relationships between place and placelessness and what they portend for the future of places.

Although they are really only summaries of ideas, I hope that together the three posts offer enough suggestions about recent changes for you to be able to explore them further, perhaps question some conventional assumptions about roots and sense of place, or, conversely, to refine arguments that place provides continuity in the face of change.

A small installation I came upon in a coffee shop in British Columbia that expresses a complementary relationship between roots and mobility in experiences of place.

Increased Mobility In 1965 the Interstate highway system in the US was under construction but far from complete, and there were no motorways in Britain; both now have networks of expressways that have effectively shrunk the distances between places. In 1975, when the world’s population was about 4 billion, there were estimated to be about 250 million motor vehicles in the world, or one for every 16 people; in 2018 there are about 1.25 billion for 7.6 billion, or one for every six people. In 1950 there were about 22 million international tourist arrivals, which amounted to less than one per cent of the world’s population travelling internationally; by 1975 the number had grown to 222 million, equivalent to 6 per cent of the world’s population; in 2016 the there were over 1.25 billion such arrivals, equivalent to 17 percent of the global population. At any given moment there are now estimated to be about one million people in the air, on their way to visit and experience for themselves formerly exotic places, to see their families, or to work.

This graph showing the growth of tourism clear shows one aspect of the change in mobility that has happened over the last fifty years. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/tourism, and data from UN World Tourism Organization.

In short, fifty years ago most people experienced a few places quite slowly; now many people have easy, quick access to many places, and many of which are experienced quite briefly. The consequences of this increase in mobility for place experience means that the deep but confined sense of a few places that prevailed for most of human history, has in half a century for most people been replaced by a relatively shallow experience of many places. Whether this trade-off is beneficial is, I think, an open question.

Merits of Tourist experiences and the Inauthentic Authenticity of Mass Tourist Destinations In effect, what has happened is that travel and tourism have been democratized. No matter how brief, crowded or programmed the consequent experiences of place may be, experiences of many places involves opportunities for appreciation and learning. It is difficult to argue that this is not beneficial because it increases appreciation of the variety of the world and its people, and it challenges the parochialism and exclusion that can all too easily follow from a narrowly rooted sense of place.

On the other hand mass tourism is a mixed blessing for those places that are on its receiving end, where sheer numbers are beginning to undermine the very place qualities that made them attractive. Venice is perhaps the most extreme example, where the dwindling resident population of about 55,000 is confronted annually by about 25 million visitors, many from cruise ships, but Barcelona, hiking trails in New Zealand and many World Heritage sites, such as the Pantheon in Rome, shown here in 2017, are confronting the same problem of authentic place qualities being eroded by sheer numbers of visitors.

Non-Place Places The term “non-places” was coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to refer to airports, service stations, hotels, theme parks, hospitals and similar facilities that have no history, no resident population, and where everyone is an outsider – a client, customer or employee. They have standardized elements that can be understood by outsiders and they have certainly made travel much easier.

Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam is a non-place with few signs in Dutch, but, as the indigenous art installations at Vancouver International indicate, even a non-place can be a distinctive place.

Paradoxically, as Tim Cresswell’s study of Schiphol has shown, they also have their own identities for those who use them frequently or work in them, and their designs and art installation often reflect the local setting. To that degree even non-places are places.

Multi-centred Lives Lucy Lippard describes modern society as multi-centred because many people live for extended periods in different places, or effectively have two different homes (where they come from, where they live now, a cabin or cottage they can escape to,and so on). Multi-centredness is not entirely new, but it has intensified over the last few decades. The UN reports that that are now over 250 million international migrants in the world, and one third of those have migrated since 1990. Global diasporas, transnationalism and multi-centred lives have become a major aspect of the demographic reality of the present age.

There can be little doubt that multi-centredness has changed how people experience and relate to place. For example, research by Stephanie Taylor in Britain has suggested that for women the ‘born and bred narrative’ of long-term family connections to a home place is questionable as increasing numbers choose to participate in the opportunities offered by mobility between places.

Evidence of hybridity in a mongrel. This poster was posted by the Toronto Transit Commission about 2010.

Mongrel Cities and Hybrid Places, yet the Beginnings hold Everything Diasporas are not a new phenomenon, but their variety and character has given rise to cultural heterogeneity in cities that represents a substantial change especially in Anglo-American and European cities that had previously homogeneous cultures. The result of immigration either from former colonies or from places with very different cultural histories has given rise to what have been called “mongrel cities”, filled with hybrid mixtures of races, restaurants, festivals, and religious buildings. If continuity and coherence are considered important aspects of place, clearly neither applies to mongrel cities.

Nevertheless, in all this hybridity, in multi-centred lives, in restless mobility, in displacement of all types, there seems to be one constant. The places where people come from and grew up remain locked in memories that inform subsequent place experiences. In short, in the words of psychoanalyst Elena Liotta, who comes from Argentina but lives in Italy, “the beginnings hold everything.”

This text from an installation in Victoria, British Columbia, captures well the sense that the beginnings hold everything, especially the phrase: “Our ways live both with and within us, and cannot be displaced.”

An unusual, combined expression of electronic media and mobility in the present age. Cell phone relays and a billboard for an travel clothing company in Toronto.

Electronic Media, the Global Village and an Electronic Sense of Place Electronic media permeate almost all place experiences of the present day. There was a recognition of the potentially pervasive effects of these in the 1960s with Marshall McLuhan’s suggestion that they shrink the world into a global village filled with immediate and undigested gossip about places that were once considered remote. But since the 1980s personal computers, the internet, mobile phones and social media have turned this suggestion into an continuous, omnipresent reality. It has been suggested that electronic media completely undermine sense of place, or rendered it obsolete, but a more nuanced argument is that in just a few decades they have reinforced the changes to place experiences associated with increased mobility because, as Sharon Kleinman suggests, they provide “nearly seamless anytime, anyplace connectivity” in which “here and there can be almost anywhere, and, moreover, both can be moving.” It is not exactly that a sense of local place has been destroyed but that an electronic sense of place has turned it into an elusive component of topological networks that connect it with a wider world.

Non-Place communities and an electronically poisoned sense of place There is another more ominous aspect to the impact of electronic media on place. They have made it easy for non-place (i.e. geographically scattered) communities of like-minded individuals to use social media to reinforce what they regard as the distinctive, exclusive and superior qualities of their place. Social media provide echo chambers for otherwise unrelated  individuals to share prejudices and exacerbate the sorts of exclusionary convictions that arise whenever populations develop excessively protective attitudes about their neighbourhood, or their nation. This is an electronically poisoned sense of place that challenges the positive place effects and appreciation of diversity that arise from increased mobility, multi-centred living, and mongrel cities.

Comment As with changes that have happened to the character of places in the last fifty years, the changes that have happened to place experiences have had mixed consequences. In some ways they have reinforced place, in others they have reinforced placelessness, and sometimes they appear to do both simultaneously. They have broadened sense of place, changed it in ways that are still far from clear (especially in the case of electronic media), yet also amplified some its most unpleasant, parochial aspects. In the third post about changes to place I will offer some theoretical comments about how to understand these implications, and what they might bode for the future of place.

Marc Augé 1995 Non-Places: introduction to the anthropology of supermodernity, (London: Verso)
Tim Cresswell 2006 On the Move: mobility in the modern western world (London: Routledge), see p.257 about Schiphol
Sharon Kleinman 2007 Displacing place: mobile communication in the twenty-first century (New York: Peter Lang)
Elena Liotta 2009 On Soul and Earth: the psychic value of place (London: Routledge)
Lucy Lippard 1997 The Lure of the Local: senses of place in a multi-centered society, (New York: W.W.Norton)
Stephanie Taylor 2010 Narratives of identity and place (London: Routledge)

Common preamble to three posts on changes to place over the last 50 years
I recently posted an unpublished and not previously circulated essay at Academia.org on the ways that places and place experiences have altered since about 1970. It draws on some of my posts on this website, and also on my publications about place (mostly book chapters that might not be easily available) since about 1990.   My main reason for writing the essay is that experiences of being rooted in place, belonging, attachment and so on, and indeed the forces of placelessness that might be eroding these, are not timeless and unchanging. What made sense in 1970, when I was writing my book Place and Placelessness, needs to be updated both because there are now practices for protecting, making and promoting places that did not exist then, and because the ways places are experienced have shifted dramatically in a world of cheap air travel and omnipresent electronic devices.

I assume that those looking at this website and those reading Academia are mostly from two different audiences, so this and two additional posts offer a sort of point form summary of my Academia essay, which is about 60 pages long. This post (#1) considers recent changes to the ways places are made. The next post (#2) deals mostly with changes since 1970 to the ways places are experienced. The third post (#3) offers some theoretical speculations about changing relationships between place and placelessness and what they portend for the future of places.

Although they are really only summaries of ideas, I hope that together the three posts offer enough suggestions about recent changes for you to be able to explore them further, perhaps question some conventional assumptions about roots and sense of place, or, conversely, to refine arguments that place provides continuity in the face of change.

Changes to places since 1970 that reinforce distinctiveness

Early Heritage Protection at work. Detroit in the 1980s

1.Heritage Protection. Heritage in the sense of protecting distinctive buildings and place from demolition was effectively an invention of the 1970s, especially a UNESCO convention in 1972 on the protection of cultural and natural heritage that led to the creation of World Heritage Sites and encouraged  nations to develop heritage protection policies. From the mid-70s heritage protection was rapidly and widely adopted through legislation and planning practices and it has become a powerful force for protecting the identity of places that it is an essential consideration in most forms of urban development.

Hadrian’s Gate in Athens, probably built about 130 AD, surrounded by traffic in 1990

Heritage preservation is not unproblematic. An honest assessment is that the results often seem to be jumbled amalgam of buildings and bits from different eras that happen not to have been destroyed. Moreover, there are questions about exactly whose heritage is worth preserving, and heritage sites can be awkwardly out of context. Nevertheless, it is clear that there has been a dramatic change in the treatment of places between the 1950s and 60s, when almost anything or anywhere old was considered obsolete and in need of renewal, and the present-day, when almost all development has to protect old buildings and archaeological sites as a way to maintain visible links to the past of places.

2.Treatment of Natural Environments. The development of policies for environmental protection happened at much the same time as the emergence of heritage protection. In the 50s and 60s natural environments were usually engineered into submission, bulldozed, dammed, destroyed. But since about 1970 environmental conservation and ecological understanding have become accepted practices of most planning and development. Of course, there are still instances of wanton environmental destruction, but there is now widespread recognition of the importance of sustainability (a concept developed in the 1980s) and the need to work with rather than against natural processes and environmental conditions.  The result has been that the environmental distinctiveness of places, which 50 years ago would have been of little consequence, is now usually regarded as an amenity to be protected or even reconstituted in cases where it was more or less obliterated.

Here is a specific case:

On the left, a creek in suburban Toronto abut 1970, engineered into a concrete channel to speed run-off. On the right, a section of the same creek in 2005 that had recently been re-engineered into something approximating its original ecological characteristics in order to slow run-off. 

Mississauga Civic Centre, built in the 1980s, is a post-modern design intended to echo the elements of farms that once dominated this region of Ontario – farmhouse in front, barn behind, wind pump (clock tower) and just visible on the right a silo that serves as the council chamber.

3. Post-modern design. Contemporary with the rise of heritage protection was a movement in architecture and urban planning away from simplistic modernist designs. In architecture these “post-modern” approaches incorporated decorative elements, and quoted older building forms styles. At the larger scale of planning post-modernism was revealed in “new urbanism” and “neo-traditionalism” which aimed to echo regional traditions of domestic building and street layouts with features such as rear laneways and front porches. These post-modern design approaches have reintroduced elements of distinctiveness, especially in master planned developments, into suburban landscapes.

Post-modern design is significant not just a design style, but because it is a visible expression of what in philosophy appears to be a fundamental epistemological shift associated with the decline of the rationalistic approaches of modernist philosophy that promoted uniform ways of thinking and doing. Post-modernism acknowledges diversity, a shift that is apparent socially in the emergence over the last 50 years of  civil rights, gay rights and the women’s movement.  I discuss the implications of this shift in the third post in this series about theoretical shifts in the relationships between place and placelessness.

Amsterdam scarcely needed branding but did it anyway. The epicentre of the I Amsterdam brand at the Rijksmuseum.

4. Place branding. Modern economic globalization is powerfully positivist in its commitment to numbers and rationalistic abstractions. It was initially assumed that rational economic decisions about where to locate businesses had nothing to do with the qualities of places. By the late 1980s it had become clear that this was a flawed assumption and that investment was heading to places that had qualities other than an economically efficient location. The response to this was the business-oriented practice of place branding, a practice that encourages places to promote their distinctive qualities, whether environment, culture, history, in order to attract investment. In the last thirty years place branding has become an important aspect of marketing not only for cities and regions but also for universities, and there are academic programmes and journals devoted to it.

Place branding is held to be most effective when it is based on manifest qualities of a place, and the skill is in identifying and amplifying those. This requires that a place lives up to its brand image, and that can involve such things as investing in destination architecture, and policies that reinforce, for instance, heritage character and other aspects of distinctiveness.

5. Place making. As place branding became increasingly popular from the 1990s on, so, quite independently, did the idea and practice of placemaking. There were a few isolated discussions about placemaking before then, including my own in Place and Placelessness, but it was the publication in 1995 of Linda Schneekloth and Robert Shibley Placemaking: the art and practice of building communities (Wiley), that seems to have triggered widespread interest. There are now thousands of publications devoted to it, numerous consultancies specializing in it, and official plans that attempt to implement it.

Placemaking diagrams from the Project for Public Spaces website

The idea of placemaking covers a range of possibilities as wide as place itself – it can involve an act of personal self-awareness about experiences and memories of somewhere, or planting a garden, or contributing to neighborhood awareness, or master-planning a new development. The notion that has had most impact on place identities is one is one that involves an element of design that will make somewhere more attractive. The American consulting firm Project for Public Spaces, which describes itself as the “central hub of the global placemaking community,” offers this definition: “Placemaking is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighbourhood, city or region.” The hands-on tool requires community involvement to devise ways to make otherwise dispiriting parts of cities attractive, for instance by closing streets or widening sidewalks or adding artwork that will attract people and encourage business vitality.

Place unmaking in Detroit in 2000. The modernist apartment towers have been wired for demolition, and some former residents have gathered in small protest to witness the destruction of their former homes

Placemaking is usually promoted or written about with unalloyed enthusiasm. But all placemaking is in some way an act of creative destruction, an act of replacement. Jame Kalven, who spent many years working and placemaking (by which he means community building) in the public housing projects in Chicago, uses the term “unmaking of place” to describe the consequences of the “Plan for Transformation.” Under that plan the city demolished modernist projects in order to make places supposedly better but which were, in his view, an assault on the identities of those for whom these doomed places were home. His argument is significant because those formerly placeless projects had been transformed into territories of meanings for their inhabitants.

Comment. There are really two conclusions from this summary of changes to way places have been made since 1970. The first is the obvious one that the ways places are now being made and modified is very different from how this happened in the 1960s. This is apparent simply by looking at whatever remains of shopping plazas or social housing projects from then, although many of them have been demolished or deeply renovated. The second conclusion is less obvious. It is that these moves toward greater place distinctiveness are by no means perfect. For all its merits heritage protection is biased in its selections of what to protect, and World Heritage Sites are surrounded by placeless parking lots filled with tour buses. Place branding is a branch of the faceless processes of neo-liberal globalization. Placemaking has paradoxically become a global buzzword, often using a familiar kit of urban design practices – bollards, interlocking pavers.  What seems to have happened is that the once clear distinction between place and placelessness has faded because distinctiveness and standardization have become intermingled.

An advertisement for an art exhibition at the Sturt Gallery in Sydney in 2014

Places have been remarkably dependable sources of inspiration for poets. Poetic accounts of places imagined or real are to be found throughout the history of Western civilization – Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s poems about farms and farming, Dante’s Inferno, Wordsworth poems of the English Lake District and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. At least two recent books of poems are simply titled Place (one by Allen Fisher, and the other by Jorie Graham).

Conversely, poetry offers insights for those whose main interest is in place,. Alexander Pope’s 18^th century advice to wealthy landowners about landscape gardening to “Consult the genius of the place in all” is frequently quoted (including by me in the post on Spirit of Place on this website). Martin Heidegger, arguably the pre-eminent philosopher of place, drew frequently on poetry, especially that of Hölderlin, to inform his thinking. The geographer Tim Cresswell, who wrote Place: A short introduction about the role of place in academic geography, is also a published poet and has recently completed a thesis about “topo-poetics,” which I discuss below.

The connection between place and poetry is strong, diverse and bilateral. In this post I offer some brief, tentative thoughts on this connection, mostly by drawing on observations made by poets writing about place.

Poetic Observation and Imagination
Owen Sheers in his essay “Poetry and Place: some personal reflections” suggests that: “A poem like landscape, situates us by translating the abstract world of thought and feeling into a physical language.” His essay is illustrated with photos of Welsh mountains, so by “physical language” I think he means a language that responds to the carefully observed characteristics of a particular place yet makes imaginative connections with broader feelings and ideas.

Almost two centuries ago the Victorian art critic John Ruskin identified three forms of imagination that occur in both painting and poetry. Associative imagination selects things and ideas to compare and combine, putting them together in original ways both truthful and revealing. Penetrative imagination “seizes its materials… gets down to the root, and drinks the very vital sap of what it deals with.” Contemplative imagination conjures up distinctive images mostly from memory. Every great conception of a poet or painter is touched by these forms of imagination, which, Ruskin claimed, follow from seeing the world clearly. Poor poetry, on the other hand, lacks these forms of imagination, uses borrowed or contrived images, and “plays like a squirrel in its circular prison.”

It follows, I think, that good poetry of place sees significance in things and landscapes to which most of us would pay scant attention, and embodies the imagination needed to draw unexpected associations that amplify this significance. Here’s a brief example from Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar” (quoted by Tim Cresswell in his thesis on topo-poetics):

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.

Specificity and intersubjectivity of place experience in poetry
A more substantial example of the role of imagination in place poetry is William Wordsworth’s “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour,” written in 1798. This has autobiographical significance for me because I grew up in a small community located on the hills a few miles north of the village of Tintern, no more than a few miles from where he must have conceived his poem.

Tintern Abbey about 1970. The River Wye is just to the right of the abbey, but out of sight. This view had scarcely changed when I last visited in 2016. I grew up somewhere behind the hill in the background.

Neither Tintern Abbey nor the River Wye is mentioned except in the poem’s title, yet Wordsworth’s descriptions of “steep and lofty cliffs,” “plots of cottage ground,” “hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines/ of sportive wood run wild,” and “pastoral farms,” evoke the specific character of the Wye valley and make it recognizable even to those who may not be familiar with it. This poem, like many poems of place, is in other words, communicates intersubjectively; it is simultaneously about somewhere particular and has a widely shared resonance.

This quality is deepened because Wordsworth then contemplates how he owes to “these beauteous forms” memories of when he was last here, recollections that offer him “tranquil restoration” and lighten “the weary weight of all this unintelligible world.” And he then reflects on how his experiences of the world have changed as he has matured and makes the chastening imaginative association that has informed much of my own thinking about place and landscape:

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.

“Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey” is, in effect, a concise yet profound phenomenological disclosure of the character of place experience, beginning with description, imaginatively engaging with memories, and disclosing how experiences of a particular place can open into cosmopolitan understanding.

Obviously this sort of imaginative insight is not achieved in all poems about places, perhaps only in a few, but it is perhaps a common intention. James Galvin has a distinctive take on what this involves from the perspective of a poet. “The poet of place,” he writes, “situates himself in place in order to lose himself in it. The poetry of place is actually a poetry of displacement and self-annihilation.”

Screen capture of the map of the Seattle Poetic Grid, showing locations of poems about places in the city.

Localization rather than Globalization
Poetry has a powerful capacity to evoke particular places, to inform us of their meanings, and in effect to ground us in them regardless of whether know them or not. This is in part the inspiration for the Seattle poetic grid created by Claudia Castro Luna, the city’s civic poet. This grid consists of poems about particular places in Seattle, the locations of which are shown on an interactive online map. Luna writes on the home page that the poems trace the city through the voices of its citizens because “we live in the city and the city lives in us.”

 Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place publishes poems that capture the spirit of place, including its history of human presence, as part of the essence of the poem. The journal is, the editor claims, about localization rather than globalization, but the poems are also selected because they challenge the tendency of much modern poetry to turn to interior states of mind in which the external world is incidental.

I fully endorse the quotation on the home page of Windfall from Scott Russell Sanders: “Many of the world abuses of land, forest, animals and communities have been carried out by people who root themselves in ideas rather than places.” This view is echoed in the themes to which each issue of Windfall is dedicated (and which are elaborated in informative Afterwords). These themes include commuter and in-between places, cemetery places, peak oil, global warming and the poetry of place, dwelling in place, and most recently the political poetry of place (which considers fake news). The poetry of place may be local and grounded, but that does not mean it cannot address broad social and environmental issues.

Topo-Poetics
From his dual perspective as geographer and a published poet, Tim Cresswell coined the term topo-poetics to distinguish an approach that conveys the myriad ways in which people dwell in places. The notion of dwelling comes from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, much of whose thought has been shown by Jeff Malpas to be a disclosure of the essential role of place in being, a role that Malpas describes as topology. Topo-poetics differs from geo-poetics and eco-poetics two other approaches to poetry that responds to the earth and its environment, both because of its explicit attention to place and places, and because it acknowledges that a poem about place is in some degree itself a place.

This latter idea is also partially derived from Heidegger, and Cresswell (p19) cites Heidegger’s observation that: “Poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building.” He then suggests that a poem about place is itself a place and constitutes a form of place-making created by its very presence on the page surrounded by blank space that is outside it.

 Cresswell develops these ideas through interpretations of the work of American poet Jorie Graham, who has a book of poems simply titled PLACE; Elizabeth Bishop, who has books of poems called Questions of Travel and Geography III; John Burnside’s poetry of betweeness that explicitly drew on Heidegger’s ideas of dwelling; and Don McKay, whose poems develop a phenomenology of natural landscape through what he called “poetic attention.” Cresswell’s thesis in part required creative writing, and it concludes with a number of his own topo-poems that reflect his own understanding of place and which, he suggests, stress displacement.

A shifting sense of place
A lot of place poems are about bucolic and natural places. They have a tone of what might be described as enduring rural felicity. Contemporary poets, including Cresswell, take a more inclusive view of the modern world with all its comforts and challenges. When C.D.Wright was asked about her sense of place, she replied that it is phrase that she feels is “quite drained of significance,” but she nevertheless writes about actual places because they are “so real”

.Jeremy Richards describes this sort of sensibility as a “shifting sense of place.” He suggests that a classic poet could stroll through a garden, stumble past a church, or kneel in the grass and feel sated and grounded. But today, he asks, “where is the poet’s sense of place? Itinerant, polluted, untethered? Tweeted?” Good questions when so much seems to changing and on the move. Here is Shelley Kirk-Rudeen writing about changes in Zumwalt Prairie in eastern Oregon:

There will be no one place to call home.
Everything on the move, leaving
To become native to new places
As the old homes change.

bell hooks, a well-known poet and writer who grew up in a remote area of Appalachia about which she has written several books, says simply that her identity is firmly rooted in a place that is no longer whole. Poets of place, at least those who combine careful observation with imaginative insights, do not merely celebrate place. They recognize that all places offer comforts and challenges and that these are constantly shifting.

Two place poems by 11 year olds in place in Island Park in Fargo, North Dakota.  There is a National Writing Project in the United States that provides a template for school students to write place based poetry.  I don’t know whether these  poems are a product of this but they certainly illustrate the broad appeal of the poetry of place. 

References

Cresswell, Timothy, 2004, Place: a short introduction (Oxford: Blackwell)

Cresswell, Timothy 2015, Topo-poetics: Poetry and Place, Royal Holloway University of London, Doctoral Thesis in English-Creative Writing, at   https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/files/25313757/Complete_poems.2015.final_signed.pdf

Fisher, Allen, 2005, PLACE, Hastings, East Sussex, Reality Street Editions

Galvin, James, “The Poetry of Place: James Wright’s ‘The Secret of Light’ at https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/collection/poetry-and-place

Heidegger, Martin, 1975 Poetry Language Thought Harper and Row

hooks, bell, 2012, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place University Press of Kentucky

Kirk-Rudeen, Shelley, 2006 “Zumwalt Prairie” in Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place accessed at http://www.hevanet.com/windfall/poetryofplace.html

Malpas, Jeff, 2006 Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World MIT Press

Pope, Alexander, 1731 Epistles to Various Persons: Epistle IV Of the Use of Riches, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington.

Ruskin, John, 1846, Modern Painters Vol II Section II, Chapters 1-IV

Sheers, Owen 2008 “Poetry and Place: some personal reflections” Geography, Vol 93 _Part 3 2008 accessed at http://www.owensheers.co.uk/pdf/geography.pdf

Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place accessed at http://www.hevanet.com/windfall/poetryofplace.html

Wordsworth, William, 1798 “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey” in D.C. Somervell (ed) 1920 Selections from Wordsworth, J.M. Dent and Sons.

Wright, C.D. in Jeremy Richards, ”A shifting Sense of Place: four poets discuss where their work belongs in the world,” accessed at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69640/a-shifting-sense-of-place

Signs showing three levels of government in Canada – the Province of Ontario, York Region and the City of Vaughan.

Places are everywhere permeated with politics. To live somewhere is unavoidably to be caught up in matters of politics and government, variously at municipal, regional or national scales. The degree to which you are actively involved in these is, of course, a matter of choice. Nevertheless, flags, official signs, town halls and state legislatures, news items on television, and websites with information about everything from garbage collections to opportunities for foreign investment are constant reminders of the presence of governments and politics in everyday places.

In spite of this, the great majority of books and articles about place have little nothing to say about politics. One reason may be that suggested by Alexandra Kogl in her book Strange Places : “Place has appeared in political thought for thousands of years, but typically it has done so in disguise, conceptually conflated with community, the public realm, or the territory of the polity itself.” Another is offered by Jeff Malpas (1999), who has proposed that place, because it resists any simple characterization or definition, actually defines “the very frame within which the political must itself be located.” Place is therefore prior to and yet separate from politics.

These comments skate past the evidence that place does play a very important role in political ideologies and practices. This post, which makes no claims to be a comprehensive review of what has been written on the subject, summarizes what I consider to be the two most important themes in the politics of place. One is the great weakness of place – that ideas about roots, belonging and homelands can all too easily be used as a justification for exclusion, and even extreme political ideologies such as ethnic cleansing that facilitate what I have called a poisoned sense of place (Relph, 1997). The other theme is that no place, no matter how distinctive, is an island. You can easily confirm this by reflecting on where you live. All places are simultaneously distinctive localities because of their history and environment, and interconnected to other other parts of the world by roads, immigration, information, airports, trade, family ties, food imports, ethnic restaurants and so on. Geographer John Agnew (1987) expressed this succinctly in his investigation of neighbouring cities in Tuscany by stating that a politics of place has to acknowledge both the local individuality and the interdependence of places.

Extreme and Poisoned Politics of Place
Totalitarianism and fascism pull place apart in apart in opposite directions, both with brutal, oppressive consequences. In totalitarian regimes individuality and history are suppressed, and places are replaced with placeless sameness. This oppressive placelessness is not discussed in writing about the politics of place though it was a focus of dystopian literature of the 20^th century, such as Evgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, written in 1920s Russia, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Versions were realized in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the Chinese cultural revolution, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia

Politically opposite extremes confronted one another with similarly massive iconography at the International Exposition in Paris in 1937. On the left Nazi Germany; on the right and Stalinist Russia.

At the other extreme are regimes that extol the identity of their place and its supposedly glorious past as superior to all others. Roberto Dainotto (2000), a literary theorist, has argued forcefully that all ideas of place which appeal to roots and belonging offer a misleading cozy communalism that ignores the power struggles, class confrontations and hegemonies of history. Instead they invoke exclusion and the worst forms of nationalism, fascism and regionalism, including ethnic cleansing and genocide. He suggests that the search for valid, rooted places began with philosopher Martin Heidegger as an attempt to confront the twin pincers of Bolshevism and capitalism that he saw confronting Germany in 1920s and 30s and which he thought threatened to uproot Germany’s traditional culture and replace it with the “homelessness” or indifference to Being that infects modernity. Heidegger, much of whose philosophical writing was an attempt to disclose the experience of place, was seduced by the twisted, romantic notions of homeland and heimat promoted by the Nazis, and remained a member of the Nazi party from 1933 until the end of the Second World War.

Heidegger’s cabin in the Black Forest, where he presumably thought about belonging, dwelling and homecoming.

David Gauthier, in Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Lévinas and the Politics of Dwelling (2011), offers a more modulated assessment of place and fascism. Gauthier suggests that in spite of Heidegger’s association with the Nazis his writing was for the most part apolitical, and that he had a general antipathy to modern politics because he understood it as supporting the technologies that contribute to the sense of being adrift in the world that is homelessness. Heidegger hoped for a “homecoming” or rediscovery of belonging through dwelling in particular places and regions. Lévinas criticizes Heidegger on the grounds that in Nazi Germany this sort of place-based homecoming had been manifestly conducive to exclusion and tyranny. For Lévinas place is about welcoming others to your home, an attitude that requires a continual effort to create ethically responsible political institutions and policies.

Local Autonomy, Globalization, and an Outward Looking Politics of Place
Those who have written about politics and place have explicitly challenged arguments that promote roots and belonging, not least because globalization in its various social and economic forms has infiltrated almost everywhere and this requires a political recognition of broader spatial processes and the interactions between places. Doreen Massey (1994, 2007), Ash Amin (2004) and others refer to this as a relational understanding of places, one that sees cities and even remote communities as routinely involved in global networks of trade and information and otherwise implicated in distant connections. In their view a place a particular place is a more or less distinctive node at an intersection of these networks. Amin maintains that this requires a reading of the politics of place that cuts across geographies at different scales from local, to regional, to national to global. A relational politics of place, he suggests, is topological rather than just territorial; it combines politics of propinquity and of connectivity. The former addresses the everyday negotiations of diversity in cities, including local history and culture; the latter reaches out to other places through, for example, efforts to attract immigrants and foreign investment, and attempts to learn from other places about policies and practices they have used to address their own local problems.

Resistance against a relational politics of place. A sign protesting neo-liberalism (militarism, and repression, and fascism) in the City of Oaxaca in Mexico in 1997

David Harvey, who like Massey and Amin understands place through the lens of political economy, writes in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference 1996 (pp.293-5) that place in all its guises is a social construct that involves the constant fixing of capital, partly through local growth and partly by creating new networks between different places. In this view, as in Massey’s, particular places are products of the adaptation to local circumstances of economic and social processes (class differences, economic investment and so on) that are international and perhaps universal in scope. Successful places are those invested with sufficient permanence to become centers of institutionalized power, while those that become economically obsolete have to be demolished, or perhaps preserved as heritage sites. From this perspective, while local identity and individual commitment to a place are not unimportant, they are held to be subservient to widely shared political processes and the injustices they perpetrate.

Although a relational politics of place may favour shared and international concerns about class and exploitation over ones of local history and identity, it nevertheless does avoid the dualistic thinking that sets what is regarded as local against globalization. For instance, historian Arif Dirlik (1998) cites Bruno Latour’s argument that a railroad is simultaneously local at all points and global because it connects widely separated places, and then asks: “What if the global were local, or place-based, just as the local were global?” The answer is that in many aspects the global is indeed local, for instance, the origins of goods we buy, the news we watch, and changes in the weather because of global warming. At the same time, the local is global because almost everywhere contributes to global warming, or produces goods and information that are used in distant places. In short, a relational politics of place involves a hybrid understanding that begins to answer, in Dirlik’s words, “the need for new ways to reorganize political space.”

Doreen Massey, whose writing in the 1990s about a global sense of place was a foundation for the idea of a relational politics of place, has summarized this hybrid approach to political space in two innovative phrases. In her book World City (2007) Chapter 10 is titled “A Politics of Place beyond Place,” and in that chapter she elaborates the important ideas of “an outward looking politics of place.”

The Democratic Potential of Places
In her 2008 book Strange Places Alexandra Kogl, a political scientist, offers a slightly different interpretation of this hybrid idea of place politics. She acknowledges the fusion and tension of global and local processes in capitalist, neo-liberal political economies, but in contrast to Harvey and Massey her emphasis is on the local side of the balance between these processes. Specifically she argues for the democratic potential of places in the context of their interdependencies because places are not merely passive vessels but are themselves powerful because of the meaning that is invested in them (p.2). Furthermore she claims (p.142) that: “the political activity that emerges around the shared circumstances of everyday life in the places where people live can be an effective way of generating democratic forms of power among some of the least privileged persons in liberal regimes.” In other words, it is the relative autonomy of a place, rather than its interdependence, that is politically most important. She recognizes, however, that there is a limit to this because it is unrealistic to expect that “the power relations of the larger political economy,” which touch ground in everyday places, can be democratized by persons acting in small groups in those places. As a way to counter these larger power relations she draws on the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari in their philosophical work A Thousand Plateaus, and suggests that democracy must be rhizomatic, which is to say that it too must globalize by growing out of “multiplicities of roots sunk in countless places.”

This partial screen capture from City Mayors, an online forum for mayors of cities around the world, gives an indication of rhizomatic processes that are growing out of countless places around the world and which are unrelated to national politics.

Practical and Pragmatic Politics of Place
The ideas of Kogl, Massey, Harvey, Amin, and for that matter Heidegger and Dainotto, are largely theoretical. Yet according to Arif Dirlik (2001) the politics of place is a practical politics because it addresses issues that have tangible outcomes in the environments where people live and work even as the character of these issues is constantly shifting with the currents of global flows.

I agree with Dirlik. I have written (Relph, 2008) about the need for a pragmatic sense of place that will be needed to meet the challenges of the 21^st century, which include climate change and extreme weather events, mass migration and cultural assimilation, pandemics, terrorism and ragged wars, and a resurgence of religious and cultural intolerance. The consequences of these are so geographically varied and locally specific that national or even regional strategies are bound to have limited success unless they are adapted to the particularities of places, and that can only happen by giving additional responsibility to those places. Federal politicians in the rarified atmosphere of their debating chambers may dither about the causes and consequences of climate change. Regardless of this, local politicians in particular places have to take immediate practical measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, deal with rising sea levels, and establish preparations for cool shelters in the event of heat waves. They also have to find ways to assimilate immigrants, attract foreign investments that can lead to local jobs, and regulate Air BnB rentals that are exacerbating shortages of affordable housing. And they have to do this while respecting local heritage and the diverse opinions of the citizens who elect them.

This sign in the city hall of the suburban city of Mississauga, adjacent to Toronto, illustrates the combination of inward looking and outward looking attitudes that have become essential in the practical politics of place.

My suspicion is that while national governments will continue to be important because they provide financial resources and policy directions, there are indications that they have begun to lose their authority because they have become too remote from everyday life and because they have been bypassed by electronic communications which move directly from place to place. In the practical politics of place responsibility will gradually shift from a national to a local level because it is at the scale of cities and towns that a balance has to be found between local identity and openness to the world.Of course policies and decisions will be contested, sometimes the particularities of place will win out, sometimes interdependence, but overall and in the long run a practical politics of place must continue to look simultaneously inward to the qualities of specific places, and look outward to what they shares with other places and the people in those places.

A Final Caution: A Poisoned Politics of Place
While I believe that a practical politics of place is well worth hoping for, and there are many indications of a shift towards this, there are also indications of a shift towards a poisoned politics of place. A recent article by Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein (2017)on the current political situation in the United States is titled “Cosmopolitanism vs Provincialism: How the Politics of Place hurts America.” Cosmopolitanism is about looking outward and to the future, shared human values, and acceptance of differences. Provincialism, which is the politics of place Isenbery and Burstein suggest is hurting America, sets boundaries to a place, whether region or nation, and looks mostly inward, usually to a glorified past. It is the ideology that this place is somehow special and needs to be protected from outside influences. It is the beginning of a potential drift to a society based on exlusionary conservatism. In various degrees it informs Donald Trump’s exceptionalist view of America, Brexit, the expulsion of the Rohingya from Myanmar, nationalist politics in Hungary, and alt-right nationalist movements around the world. These suggest a resurgence of poisoned and exclusionary politics of place and they need to be resisted by a positive and practical politics of place that welcomes others, embraces difference, acknowledges interdependencies, and looks both inward and outward.

A Bibliographic Note
A search of the University of Toronto online library catalogue for books and articles with titles about the politics of place revealed books on zoning, apartheid, urban India, post-war Germany, native Hawai’i, issues of race in African American communities, regional planning, Ottoman Istanbul, development in the sunbelt, management of grizzly bears, The Death of Jesus and the Politics of Place in the Gospel of John, Girlhood and The Politics of Place, and a British journal on the Politics of Place intended for postgraduates. Apparently the “politics of place” serves as convenient shorthand to describe more or less local case studies where there was perhaps, but not necessarily, some sort of political disagreement. I may have missed something, but as far as I could gather most of these, including the journal, have little or no substantial discussion about politics, place or the politics of place.

Agnew, John 1987 Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and Society (Boston: Allen and Unwin)

Amin, Ash 2004 “Regions Unbound: Towards a new politics of place” Geografiska Annaler, 86B, 1, 33-44

Dainotto, Roberto 2000 Place in literature: regions, cultures, communities (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)

Dirlik, A. 1998 “Globalism and the politics of place” Development 7-13

Dirlik, A. 2001 “Placed-based imagination: Globalism and the politics of place” Places and Politics in an Age of Globalization, eds Prazniak, R. and Dirlik, A. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield).

Gauthier, David 2011 Martin Heidegger, Emanuel Levinas, and the Politics of Dwelling, (Lanham MD: Lexington Books)

Harvey, David 1996 Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell)

Isenberg, Nancy and Burstein, Andrew 2017 “Cosmopolitanism vs Provincialism: How the Politics of Place hurts America” The Hedgehog Review, Vol 12, 2

Kogl, Alexandra 2008 Strange places: the political potentials and perils of everyday spaces (Lanham, MD : Lexington Books)

Malpas, Jeff 2000 Place and Experience: a philosophical topography (Cambridge University Press)

Massey Doreen 1994 Space, Place and Gender (University of Minnesota Press)

Massey Doreen 2007 World City, (Cambridge: Polity Press)

Relph, Edward 1997 “Sense of Place” in Ten Geographical Ideas that Have Changed the World, ed Susan Hanson, (Rutgers University Press)

Relph, Edward 2008 “A Pragmatic Sense of Place” in Making Sense of Place: Exploring concepts and expressions of place through different senses and lenses eds F. Vanclay, M. Higgins, and A. Blackshaw (Canberra: National Museum of Australia)

In a previous post I discussed ideas that the power of place is intrinsic and somehow waiting for us to discover it. This is half the story. John Agnew and James Duncan in the preface to their 1989 book The Power of Place: Bringing together geographical and sociological imaginations say their intention was to raise interest in the notion of place as a medium of political and economic power. The implication of this intention is that power is created, given to or ascribed to places because places are produced and not merely pre-ordained locations. In other words, places serve as vehicles to express human powers and status. Versions of this happen on a range of spatial scales from the home to the nation, and the process of ascribing power can be from the bottom up through community action, or from the top down through as a demonstration of the authority of those who are politically and economically dominant.

Power Ascribed to Small Places
Dennis Saleebey in a 2004 paper on “The Power of Place” has written convincingly of “the power of small” for understanding person-environment relations in his discipline of social work. And he lists what he means by small: “rooms, apartments, office cubicles, gardens, cars, atria, hallways, city blocks, cells, classrooms, restaurants, bars, neighbourhood stores, and the like.” These small places are powerful because they affect us directly in various ways depending on the number of people occupying them, the level of stimulation (noises, colour, clutter), and the meanings of things such as pictures and furniture.  A very specific example of the power of small places is the 2003 phenomenological study in the journal Midwifery on the Power of Place, which investigates the power that place holds over post-natal experiences of women. Not surprisingly this study concluded that women giving birth in hospitals experienced various degrees of alienation and disempowerment, while the familiar territory of home offered feelings of support, security and control. In the latter case the home place had a quality of positive power associated with having been lived in, whereas in the former the power of place was experienced as impersonal and bureaucratic.

 
Two examples of the power of small places. Grenoble Day Care is in Flemingdon Park in Toronto. Ourplace (the name is on the green poster) is an non-profit that provides simple transition accommodation for the homeless in Victoria, British Columbia.

A very different idea of the quality of power ascribed to small places was also at the basis of a survey and report titled The Power of Place: The Office Renaissance, commissioned in 2014 by Steelcase, an office furniture company. This concluded that, in the context of changing business practices, office spaces need to be reimagined in order to promote better employee engagement and retention, and that this could be achieved by creating a palette of places in open plan offices that augment people’s interactions with each other while providing access to resources that can only found at work. Of course, Steelcase can provide the advice and furniture needed to achieve this. In other words, better office places are powerful because they promote productivity.

Sign at a conference in Vancouver sponsored by Project for Public Spaces, 2016

Creating the Power of Place in Public Spaces
At a slightly larger and public scale, the Project for Public Spaces, an American organization devoted to placemaking through the careful design of small urban spaces, has suggested that the power of place can be invoked as a solution to unsustainable development trends of the last 75 years. The argument is that power of place can be created through approaches to placemaking that include appropriate combinations urban design, smart growth, walkability, public transportation and local food. The PPS website claims grandly: “ In fact, we can reinvent entire regions starting from the heart of local communities and building outwards.” This seems unlikely, but there is ample evidence that well-designed small urban places, including the work of PPS and urban designers such as Jan Gehl, do have the power to enliven and generate community pride of place in parts of cities that were previously moribund.

Ascribing Power to Place as an Affirmation of Community Identity
Dolores Hayden’s 1995 book on The Power of Place is an account of a different type of placemaking project, one that is more about the validation of community than urban design. It involved the creation of a non-profit in downtown Los Angeles that brought together historians, planners, artists and community members to record local history not as a conventional chronology but specifically in terms of how relatively disadvantaged African American, Latino and Asian American families had experienced it in the course their everyday lives. This history, which otherwise would have been largely undocumented, was then installed in the urban landscape through memorials and artworks, thereby simultaneously affirming the important contribution of these communities to the history of the place where they lived and reinforcing their sense of belonging to that place.

          
Plaques on the wall  of renovated social housing in Dublin (top left) illustrate ways of ascribing power of place and responsibility to the community and its individuals. 

The importance of community identity is also demonstrated in a permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C titled The Power of Place. The aim is to demonstrate the ways in which people have made places even as those places have changed the people in them. The places highlighted, which include Chicago, Tulsa in Oklahoma, Greenville Mississippi and the Bronx in New York, are powerful for African Americans because they are sites of individual and political struggles, and of cultural creativity. They are places where individual and community identities have been created, tested and shaped over time.

A Canadian research report Connecting the Power of People to the Power of Place offers a more academic argument to support community planning. It proposes that most people care deeply about local housing quality, transit connections, walkability and the overall quality of life in their place. It then connects these important everyday concerns with what it calls “the power of the neighbourhood” through which people can begin to work together in community organizations in order to make changes. In this sense, as in Hayden’s project and the Smithsonian exhibit, the power of place consists simultaneously in the fact that place is the shared locus of community concerns, and in the fact that place can serve as the foundation for local political actions for communities that are relatively powerless.

Place as a Production and Expression of Political Power.
At the other end of the political power spectrum the power of place operates differently. It uses specific places to impress and regulate societies. An indication of this is offered by Richard White and John Findlay (1999) in their edited book Power and Place in the North American West, where they define power as the ability of an agent, whether a person, corporation or state, to influence others or natural forces according to the agent’s will. Place, they suggest, is a spatial reality that is constructed or produced, and from this perspective it is therefore an expression of control, authority and the exercise of power through some combination of force, persuasion and manipulation. It follows that if places are produced, then they are expressions of the power of those who produced them.

The best account I know of how political power is ascribed to and presented through places is David Rollason’s 2016 book The Power of Place: Rulers and their palaces, landscapes, cities and holy places. In this he describes and illustrates with photos the messages of power in places that were created by emperors and kings from the early Roman Empire to the early 16^th century. Their power was dramatically expressed in several different ways, the most obvious of which were great stone or brick palaces with extravagant furnishings. It was also conveyed by the construction of artificial landscapes of gardens, parks and forests around those palaces, and even more grandly by founding or enlarging cities that were patronized by rulers. In addition, palaces were turned into sacred sites by endowing them with holy buildings or holy objects, and monuments and memorials marked those places where rulers were inaugurated into office, or where their remains were buried.

Vaux le Vicomte, a chateau near Paris with extensive landscaped gardens, is a precursor to Versailles. It was constructed in the late 17th century as a palace and garden for Nicolas Fouquet, the superintendent of finances for Louis XIV, and its grandeur and scale make an impressive display of political power.  

Political power was displayed through places in a variety of different ways. Some of it involved a personal display of grandeur and opulence as a way to awe citizens and ambassadors and visitors. Some of it was oppressive, as manifest in forts, castles and city walls, all of which served as ways to subdue and control ordinary people while simultaneously providing security from outside enemies. Some of it was bureaucratic, through the creation of impersonal laws and the institutions to administer them. Some of it was manipulative, building circuses and amphitheatres, or creating popular festivals. Some of it was ideological, merging political power with existing or new religious beliefs, and then persuading citizens and subjects to adopt these beliefs.

Rollason’s book is a history, but it is not difficult to find similarities in present-day displays of the political power of place. In the modern developed world much of this power is bureaucratic. Nevertheless political authority is often displayed in places that have a combination of distinctive architecture and generously landscaped spaces, such as the Capitol and Mall in Washington D.C., which, as the photo on the left suggests, has similar basic elements to convey political power as Vaux le Vicomte – a grand building and extensive artificial landscape. The main differences are that the Capitol is not an opulent private residence but a building for an elected Congress, and the Mall is a public space not a private one. The Mall is also a site for nationally symbolic monuments, such as the Washington monument and the Vietnam war memorial. Many municipalities demonstrate their political authority in similar ways on a smaller scale, with city halls designed by more or less famous architects fronted by a public square where citizens can gather on special occasions. At the state and municipal levels bureaucratic power is subtly revealed through such things as standardized highway design, and signage in parks.

                                                 Toronto City Hall expresses municipal political power in its spectacular design of two curving towers embracing the council chamber (the disc object) hovering above a podium where the Mayor and councillors can stand for ceremonies, and its large public square, here being used for a celebration of the South Asian community. The photo on the right shows the view from the podium on a day when the square is not in use for an event. Compare this use of space with that of the bank towers in the financial district, shown below, which aim to maximize the economic value of the real estate they occupy by covering most of it with rectangular buildings on rectangular lots that aim to maximise the economic use of expensive real estate . The political power of place is often demonstrated by a rejection of the economic value of the land it occupies.  

Expressions of Economic Power in Place.
Unlike political power which mostly opts for distinctive architecture and open spaces, economic power is most obviously displayed through height. Thus financial districts are marked by clusters of skyscraper office buildings where wealth is concentrated and managed, and the only open spaces are ones that have been demanded by planners. In Toronto signature towers of four of the five major Canadian banks, all designed by internationally renowned architects, occupy the four corners of a single downtown intersection. Less obviously, economic power, can be displayed in sprawling campuses of corporate headquarters such as those of Apple, Microsoft and Google. But much of the economic power in late capitalist economies is discrete and distributed and has little obvious presence in places. Stock exchanges are mostly electronic hubs for trading and the signature bank towers in Toronto are now all owned by real estate investment companies, which, like pension funds, mostly eschew such popular and obvious symbols of wealth as signature skyscrapers.

 
Two versions of economic power of place. The concentration of bank towers in the financial district in Toronto 1995 expresses power by height and design – white tower is Bank of Montreal (Ed Stone, architect), slim tower to its right is Scotiabank, shorter and to its right is Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (Mario Pei), three black towers in front of those are the Toronto Dominion Bank (Mies van der Rohe). The photo on the right shows Building 1 on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond near Seattle, the first of over 100 low-rise buildings on a 260 acre site with its own shopping mall and sports fields. It is the sheer, mild-mannered scale of the campus that is impressive.

At a larger scale the growth and continued prosperity of world cities – New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and more than a hundred others – is a reflection of the fact that they have become the command centres of global trade and finance. Together they form a neo-liberal network of prosperous and powerful places that continue to attract wealth while other less powerful places languish on the periphery.

A sign in the City Hall of Mississauga, a suburban municipality on the west side of Toronto that is the sixth largest city in Canada, expresses its hope to participate in the global city network and to enhance its economic power of place while continuing to be “a place where people choose to be”.

Success in the world city network and for other places in its margins, means growth. Since about 1990 this has come to be associated with place branding as a way to attract investment and grow the economic power of a place. This connection is sometimes made explicit, for instance on the website of Resonance, a company that uses strategy, storytelling and design “to build brands that grow places, products and people,” and which includes a short video “Place Branding: Chris Fair (a consultant) on the Power of Place.” A narrower example is Foursquare, a business that offers an app for mobile phones to unlock the power of place for marketers and developers by providing instant access to local businesses and amenities.

There is a very different, bottom-up notion of the economic power of place for communities outside the world city network. The Power to Change is a UK group that aims to put business in community hands by addressing the unique working needs of people in specific locations. Early in 2017 they offered an online discussion and blog of power of place in order to facilitate community collaboration for growing businesses. Their argument is that addressing social challenges and building cohesive communities necessarily happens in particular places, and that supporting local businesses in these places is an essential part of that process. This understanding of the economic power of place aligns well with Dolores Hayden’s community power of place because both involve the community working to make a place even as the place defines the community.

  
Community based economic power of place. Two of a series of signs in store windows in Ellensburg, Washington, in 2011 that advocated local initiatives to grow business.

References

• Agnew, John and Duncan, James (eds) 1989 The Power of Place: Bringing together geographical and sociological imaginations, Unwin Hyman, Boston
• Foursquare, Unlocking the Power of Place for marketers and developers, accessed 2017 https://medium.com/foursquare-direct/unlocking-the-power-of-place-for-marketers-and-developers-introducing-pilgrim-sdk-by-foursquare-ee879c502088
•Gehl, Jan1987 Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space, van Nostrand Reinhold
•Hayden, Dolores 1995 The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History MIT Press
•Lock, L.R. and H.J.Gibb 2003 “The Power of Place” Midwifery Vol 19(2) accessed 2017 at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12809633
•Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership 2016 Connecting the Power of People to the Power of Place: How Community Based Organizations Influence Neighbourhood Collective Agency, accessed 2017 http://neighbourhoodchange.ca/documents/2016/12/neighbourhood-collective-agency.pdf
•Power to Change, 2017 The Power of Place accessed 2017 http://www.powertochange.org.uk/blog/the-power-of-place/
•Project for Public Spaces, 2011 The Power of Place: A New Dimension for Sustainable Development accessed 2017 at https://www.pps.org/blog/the-power-of-place-a-new-dimension-for-sustainable-development/
•Rollason, David 2016 The Power of Place: Rulers and their palaces, landscapes, cities and holy places Princeton UP
• Saleebey, Dennis 2004 “The Power of Place: another look at the environment,” Families in Society, Vol 85 (1) Jan-Mar 2004
•Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Power of Place, A Permanent Exhibition, accessed 2017 https://www.si.edu/Exhibitions/Power-of-Place-4843
•Steelcase 2014 Power of Place: The Office Renaissance accessed 2017 at https://www.steelcase.com/research/articles/topics/employee-engagement/power-of-place/
•White, Richard and John Findlay (eds) 1999 Power and Place in the North American West, University of Washington Press

The notion of the power of place suggests that place somehow has the potential to influence behaviour, attitudes, and beliefs. It has been widely used as a title for books, reports, websites and articles, usually with little or no further clarification of what is meant by either by place or by power, or how they connect. This post and a second one on political and economic power in place summarize the range of ways the idea has been interpreted in books, a few articles, and websites that refer to power and place in their titles. The illustrations should give some indication of how I think the interpretations are revealed in landscapes.

The main conclusion I have been able to draw is that the power of place is a versatile and adaptable idea with many different uses, few of which acknowledge any of the others. A second conclusion, which I have used as the criterion for separating my discussion of it into two posts, is that there are two distinctively different assumptions about how power operates through place. One regards power as an intrinsic quality of place: for instance in sacred sites power is seen a property of the place itself and is independent of human interventions. The other assumption treats places as conduits for expressing political and economic power, in other words, power is regarded as something that is given or ascribed to places in order to support anddemonstrate the authority of individuals, institutions or communities.

Several of the accounts I have read raise important questions about the ways power is exercised in place that I think are worth noting but I do not pursue here because they either have to be asked of particular places, or apply to the politics of place (a topic I expect to discuss in a future post). These questions are:

• Which individuals or groups possess, convey or promote the power of place?
• How is this power exercised – coercion, negotiation, regulation, or persuasion and education?• • On whose behalf is the power used? Who benefits from or is disadvantaged by the power of place?
• How is the structure and shape of a place (and its landscape) a reflection of the power structure of the society that produced and maintains it?

Three Neolithic standing stones in the village of Trellech, Monmouthshire, Wales. They are thought to mark a sacred site whose spirits and power have long departed.

The Intrinsic Power of Sacred Places.
Sacred places, Jacob Kinnard (2014) writes in Places in Motion, seem to have “power fallen from the sky.” Or perhaps the power could have emerged from the ground. Either way it is intrinsic, not necessarily obvious to everyone and waiting to be revealed to or discovered by those who are sufficiently in tune with their surroundings to recognize it. Martin Gray has suggested that the sacred power of place manifests “the presence of the miraculous” and suggests that it was discovered by our ancestors who were more in tune with the energy of the vital earth than us. They sometimes marked ancient sacred places, for instance with standing stones or mounds, perhaps as a means to disclose their power to others, and some of these remain to this day, although their purpose has been long forgotten and the energy they mark is eludes most of us.

Kinnard’s book is about this fluidity of the identities of sacred places such as temples and pilgrimage sites. As with Stonehenge, Tikal or the Camino del Santiago de Compostela their original sacred power faded as the cultures that created them waned. In spite of this the fact that so many former sacred sites are tourist attractions indicates that they still have the power to inspire awe. James Swan (1991) declares that: ”Modern psychology and design have tossed aside such ideas as places of power, but our bodies and minds still hear their call and respond to them.” And intimations of the importance of the intrinsic power of place are apparent in the continuing use of the ancient Chinese techniques of geomancy and Feng Shui that are used to survey positive and negative energies flowing through place and landscape, and which are selectively employed to direct appropriate and propitious ways to situate buildings and facilities such as cemeteries.

  
The first auspicious Feng Shui site in Canada is at Christmas Hill, just north of Victoria, British Columbia, and is shown in this sign at a viewpoint overlooking the site as flanked by the positive forces of the green dragon and white tiger. It was identified in the 1890s and was probably intended as a cemetery, but opposition from local communities prevented this and the Chinese cemetery was located at another auspicious site about ten kilometres away. Feng Shui requires training in the skills of geomancy to identify sites that are auspicious an inauspicious, skills that at one time would have been associated with priests. Now Feng Shui offers business opportunities for consultants, as indicated by the World of Feng Shui “good luck store” at Vaughan Mills shopping centre north of Toronto. 

A curing ceremony at a sacred place near Chichicastenango in Guatemala that is thought to have been used continuously for more than a thousand years. Photo taken 1997.

For indigenous people in North America and elsewhere this sort of understanding of the intrinsic energy and power of places remains vital. Vine Deloria and Daniel Wildcat (2001) have written that: “The Indian world can be said to consist of two basic experiential dimension that, taken together, provide sufficient means of making sense of the world. These two concepts were place and power, the latter perhaps better defined as spiritual power or life force.“ Power is the living energy that inhabits the universe – a qualitative dimension shaping thoughts, desires, habits, actions and institutions, and it operates for the most part without us thinking about it. Place is concrete and palpable, where one discovers his or her personality in the context of that living energy. Native people, they suggest, possess personalities and culture born of places (pp141-144). [For a related but slightly different angle see Michael Marker’s The Power of Place as Methodology in Indigenous Research].

The intrinsic power of place is sometimes experienced by individuals as an affirmation of their religious convictions or as life changing epiphanies. In The Varieties of Religious Experience the philosopher William James (p. 71) quotes an account of someone’s experience on the summit of a high mountain: “I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon…What I felt was a temporary loss of my identity that was accompanied by an illumination of deeper significance than I had previously attached to life. It is in this that I can say that I have enjoyed communion with God.”  Paul Klee, the artist associated with the Bauhaus had a similar, though secular experience when he witnessed a moonrise over a town in North Africa just before World War One.  It was a theme that recurred in his art for much of the rest of his life, such as this painting called “Chosen Site” from 1927.

Intrinsic power can also be a property that some places acquire because of what happened there.  This is true of many sites of pilgrimage, of Jerusalem and Mecca, but also of places that have experienced profoundly tragic events, such as the battlefields of World War One and Ground Zero in Manhattan.

                     
On the left is the Hereford Map of the World, dating from about 1300, that shows Jerusalem as the centre of the world; the Red Sea is top right, the Mediterranean is the T-shape in the centre and bottom, and the British Isles are bottom left. The symbolism that the power of Christianity spreads out from Jerusalem is explicit. On the right is the World War One cemetery in Flanders which is the burial place of John McCrae, the author of the poem “In Flanders Fields” that has defined the way that World War One is remembered in Britain and Commonwealth countries. Many places associated with great tragedies and loss of life have acquired intrinsic power of place.

The Intrinsic Power of Geographical Place Diversity
This is a more rational notion of the power of place. The fact that Geography has often been defined as the study of places has presumably contributed to an assumption by some geographers that place is powerful because places are different, for example in a video instructional series for high school and college students titled The Power of Place, which provides case studies of 25 distinctly different cities and regions around the world.

Scupture of a geographer at work, Cleveland, Ohio

A more explicit and forceful argument is made by geographer Harm de Blij in his 2009 book The Power of Place – Geography, Destiny and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, in which he takes issue with economic arguments about the spatial flattening of the world through global trade and electronic communications. He argues that “the power of place still holds us in its thrall” because “the confines of place (the rugged terrain of the world’s environmental, cultural, social, economic and political geographies) continue to impose severe limits on human thought and action, engendering inequalities…so evident that no flat-world… postulations can wish them away.”

For de Blij the power of place lies in the persistence of intrinsic geographical differences that are expressed, for instance, in regional patterns of health and sickness, wealth and poverty, religion, culture, language and environment. A similar acknowledgement of the potency of regional diversity has been made in art. A 2017 exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta on The Power of Place in American Art 1915-1950 showed 200 works by artists who took inspiration from their surroundings in different areas of the United States, artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Wyeth and Ansell Adams.

The Intrinsic Power of Place Environments
There seem to be two very different strands of thought about how the intrinsic power of places functions. One is the cause-effect argument summarized in the title of Winifred Gallagher’s 1993 book The Power of Place: How our surroundings shape our thoughts, emotions and actions. This is an updated version of the old refrain of environmental determinism, which holds that national and even personal characteristics are directly influenced by the natural environment, especially landforms and climate – for instance, the temperate climates of North West Europe were responsible for the strong work ethic and rational thought that justified imperial expansion into regions where hot climates led to laziness and indolence. Gallagher is rather more subtle than this. She does draw on some scientific evidence to support her arguments, and acknowledges the value of geomancy and Feng Shui. Nevertheless, invoking the power of the natural environments of particular places and regions as something that shapes thoughts and actions does run close to the sort of thinking that that contributed to the rise of National Socialism and genocide in World War 2, and more generally to racism and ethnocentrism. It is a way of thinking that is best avoided.

Nevertheless, environmental differences between places cannot be entirely ignored, as Harm de Blij makes clear in his account of the geographical power of place, and as we know from ecological diversity. The point is to avoid understanding them as simple causes and to understand them as the products of complex interactions between people and natural circumstances that have many different possible outcomes.

Tourists at Thingvellir in Iceland. This World Heritage Site is the boundary of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, a place where the mid-Atlantic rift is pulling apart, and the place where the Althing, considered by some to be the first democratic parliament, met from 930 A.D. to 1798.  An indication of the intrinsic power of geographical place is that so many different types of places have the power to attract tourists. Photo 2016.

An important aspect of natural environments is that ecosystems are intrinsically distinctive because of their relationship to local geology, soils and climate. Proposals for sustainability, conservation, and the expansion of local food supply have to acknowledge the distinctiveness of place environments if they are to be successful. One solution simply will not work everywhere. What is appropriate for the ecosystems of the moors of Scotland has little relevance for the temperate rain forests of the Pacific North West in North America or the deserts of North Africa. Furthermore, conservation strategies have to take into account local economic and cultural circumstances. This is the basis for the proposal in the journal Biological Conservation that approaches to conservation and sustainability need to leverage that the power of place through citizen science. In other words the involvement of well-informed local citizens is needed to achieve effective decision-making for conservation.

Protecting the Intrinsic Power of Place
Many heritage organizations seem to share the view that the power of place, by which they usually mean some combination of local landcape distinctiveness and historical character, is under threat. For example, the Campaign to Protect Rural England has a report Recharging the Power of Place: Valuing Local Significance. The notion of the power of place is not discussed explicitly in this but the concern is that old places had character, depth and promoted a feeling of belonging, and these are being undermined by new developments that tend to “disconnect people from the places around them as well as places from their past.”

In the United States the Trust for Public Land, which “creates parks and protects land for people, ensuring healthy livable communities for generations to come,” had a 2015 donation campaign entitled The Power of Place that raised funds for parks, playgrounds and special places, and preserved 568,000 acres for public access. In other words and in this case, the power of place involves not only undertaking concrete actions in specific contexts, including fund-raising to provide or improve public spaces, but also by inference the great social value of public amenities such as parks and playgrounds.

This image of the White Horse of Uffington in southern England  is on the side of National Trust vehicle parked at the site of the actual White Horse, a 110 m long, prehistoric, stylised image of a horse carved into a chalk hillside. Its original significance is unknown but the carving has been maintained for many centuries, presumably by people who wanted to preserve it.. As the slogan on the side of the truck indicates, the National Trust has now assumed responsibility for protecting its intrinsic power of place. Photo taken 2016.

References

•Annenberg Learner and Teacher Resources The Power of Place: Geography for the 21^st Century, accessed 2017 https://www.learner.org/resources/series180.html
•de Blij, Harm 2009 The Power of Place – Geography, Destiny and Globalization’s Rough Landscape Oxford University Press
•Campaign to Protect Rural England, 2006 Recharging the Power of Place: Valuing Local Significance, accessed 2017 http://www.cpre.org.uk/resources/housing-and-planning/planning/item/1896-recharging-the-power-of-place
•Deloria, Vine and Daniel Wildcat 2001 Power and Place: Indian Education in America, American Indian Graduate Center, Golden, Colorado
•Gallagher, Winifred 1993 The Power of Place: How our surroundings shape our thoughts, emotions and actions, Poseidon Press, New York
•Gray, Martin The Power of Place: sacred Sites and the Miraculous accessed 2017 https://sacredsites.com/martin_gray/publications/the_power_of_place_sacred_sites_and_the_presence_of_the_miraculous.html
•High Museum of Art in Atlanta 2017 Cross-Country: The Power of Place in American Art 1915-1950, an exhibition summarized at https://www.high.org/exhibition/cross-country/, accessed 2017
•James, William, 1961. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Collier Macmillan.
•Kinnard , Jacob 2014 Places in Motion: The Fluid Identities of Temples, Energies and Pilgrims, Oxford University Press
•Marker, Michael 2017 The Power of Place as Methodology in Indigenous Research accessed 2017 http://educ.ubc.ca/critical-dialogues-seminar-the-power-of-place-as-methodology-in-indigenous-research
•Newman, G. et al, 2016 “Leveraging the power of place in citizen science for effective conservation,” Biological Conservation Vol 208, accessed 2017 at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320716302841
•Swan, James (ed) 1991 The Power of Place: Sacred Ground in Natural and Human Environments Quest Books, Wheaton Illinois
•Trust for Public Land 2015 The Power of Place, accessed 2017 https://www.tpl.org/power-of-place#sm.0000bp5oj1egoeitu3f2k5q43clhz

The past and the future are places

Place is infused with time. Indeed, from perspectives such as those suggested in these two illustrations, place and time are apparently the same thing. The future is a place, and the past is a place. (Carillion was a British construction companym working around the globe. Stephen Harper is a former Prime Minister of Canada, and this quote is from an interview in 2016 after he had lost an election and had resigned. Note: Carillion declared bankruptcy at the beginning of 2018. Tomorrow, it seems, was not a better place. )

More conventionally we usually think of ourselves as living in places in the present, looking toward the future with the past behind us. This conforms with the abstract idea of time as a linear flow in which we are immersed as though in a river, a conviction that has long prevailed in English speaking cultures and is implicit in ideas of progress.

An exhortation to acknowledge temporality. This is on a small electrical junction box on a street in Victoria, British Columbia.

Temporality and alternative notions of time

This is, however, not the only way of thinking about time. In Ancient Greece people thought of themselves as having their backs to the future, never sure what was coming next, while looking back to the relative certainties of the past. And according to the physics of relativity time is not smoothly linear, but distorted by motion and gravity. Similarly in our everyday experiences of places time is neither constant nor linear. What we experience is “temporality,” a continually shifting blend of memories and things inherited from the past, intentions, expectations, and occasional moments of dejà vu. (The idea of temporality has several origins, one of which is of particular importance to students of place – Heidegger’s Being and Time).

Time-Places
In his book What Time is This Place? Kevin Lynch investigates what he calls the “temporal collages” of superimposed pasts, present and future as they are manifest in built environments. He examines the diverse manifestations of time in cityscapes – clocks, parking signs, rhythms of movement such as rush hours, evidence of preservation and continuity in architecture, and various intimations of the future. His conclusion (p.241) is that: “…space and time, however conceived, are the great framework within which we order our experience. We live in time-places.” Time-places, he suggests, are consonant both with the structure of reality as we experience it, and with the nature of our minds and bodies. They are, in other words, manifestations of temporality.

Ideas of past, present and future only come into the foreground when we choose to think about them or when we experience abrupt changes, for instance when familiar old buildings are demolished, our personal fortunes suddenly shift, or war or natural disasters destroy somewhere. Then the question arises of how places should respond to change. Should the old styles of buildings and streets be preserved, or is it more appropriate to replace them with something new? How are necessary additions and new buildings to be incorporated? These are questions of heritage conservation.

The Recent Origins of Heritage

In spite of its title and conclusion Lynch’s book is mostly about time rather than place, and it is mostly about the past because place-time collages are everywhere dominated by an enormous inheritance of names, street patterns, monument and buildings that are decades or centuries old. He discusses strategies of conservation, preservation and restoration for protecting these historical remnants. But he does not mention heritage.

Pre-Heritage historical plaque in Buffalo, New York

From the current perspective of how to treat old cityscapes this seems like a remarkable omission, yet the reason for it is simple. The idea of heritage as we now think of it is a relatively recent one. Lynch’s book was written just before 1972, which was the year of a UNESCO Conference on the Protection of Cultural and Natural Heritage that brought the notion of heritage into popular attention. Before then heritage meant little more than family heredity, or perhaps putting a plaque on a wall to acknowledge that famous politician been born or visited there. There had been movements to restore significant old buildings, such as churches and castles, in the 19^th century (Violet le Duc in France and Gilbert Scott in England), and buildings associated with famous politicians, such as their places of birth, were often protected and identified with a plaque. But none of this was called heritage, and there was no broad movement to protect what was old.

On the contrary, the origins of the modernist movement in architecture and planning were based in an explicit rejection of whatever was old and a celebration of the possibilities of the future. This attitude culminated in the practices of the 1950s and 60s, when architects, planners and developers took the opportunity to replace obsolete old buildings and districts with something modern, whenever the opportunity arose.

By 1970 the destruction of old places, environments and buildings began to be seen as synonymous with the destruction of the past, and the 1972 UNESCO conference was a response to this sense that things of great cultural value were being destroyed. The conference hoth established the idea of World Heritage Sites and encouraged participating nations to pass legislation to preserve and protect their own heritage sites. Most of them did. The result has been that since 1972 built heritage has become an integral part of city planning, a major attraction for tourism, a concept whose merits are assumed to be self-evident, and something that should be protected whenever possible.

Place and Heritage

The number of properties on U.S. National Register of Historic Places, 1968-78, parallels the emergence and rapid take-off of interest in heritage preservation just before and after the 1972 UNESCO conference

This rise of interest in the protection of heritage is almost exactly contemporary with the rise of interest in and writing about place. This may not be altogether coincidental. One of the strongest motives for writing about place appears to be that both spirit and sense of place were much stronger in the past and now deteriorating. This is implicit in my own writing about place and placelessness, and in Marc Augé’s notion of non-place. It is explicit in the British RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts) website on Heritage, Identity and Place, and the American National Trust for Historical Preservation website Saving Places. The consequence is that while it is possible to discuss place in theoretical and philosophical ways without much consideration of heritage, it is now impossible to consider the identities of geographical places with paying attention to their heritage.

While it is possible to discuss place in theoretical and philosophical ways without consideration of heritage or time, as much the theoretical literature demonstrates, it is now impossible to consider the identities of geographical places, to contemplate placemaking,or to plan or develop actual places with paying attention to their heritage. This poses problems, because for all its popularity and positive connotations, heritage is a very confusing idea.

Heritage is a Jumbled, Malleable Amalgam

David Lowenthal, who considers himself a devotee of preservation, has suggested that heritage has now become such a sacred cow that it few are willing to question it critically. While it is the basis for preserving artifacts, buildings and townscapes that have huge cultural and aesthetic merit, and identifies some links to our cultural roots that might otherwise be lost: “The heritage past is,” he suggests, “a jumbled, malleable amalgam.”

           Heritage Town (the largest in America!) is a reproduction old-style Chinese food court on the second floor of Pacific Mall, a modern Asian shopping mall in Markham, in Toronto’s outer suburbs, in  Canada. The photo on the right shows the tiled entrance gate underneath the exposed ducting of the modern building.

Heritage is not history, which explores and explains a past that has grown opaque over time. Instead it is the selection and clarification of bits of the past that somebody or some group has identified as important in order to infuse them with present purposes. Heritage distorts history for reasons of education, to attract tourists, or to promote some political agenda. Even when its practitioners strive for authenticity, for example by using the same sorts of tools and methods that were used in the original construction, heritage sites are fragment of an old time-place that are set apart and often fenced off from the time-place of the present.

  
Signs at the Oelsner Mound in Florida, and for a new housing development in Toronto.

Old European cities have a lot of potential heritage available for selection. New suburbs, even in Europe, not so much. In North America the heritage of First Nations was displaced by the imported heritage of British and other European colonists who systematically imposed the names and architecture and customs of the old country on the new one. Now many of the towns and landscapes those European colonists created are in turn being taken over by groups with entirely different cultural backgrounds. In Toronto, for example, Chinatown occupies streets with Scottish names, and South Asian communities live in districts with imported English names such as Scarborough..

   
The Horton Building in suburban Toronto is now part of a suburban Chinatown.  Lever House, the first (1952) modernist skyscraper in New York City, undergoing restoration about 2001. 

Furthermore, the cut-off dates for what constitutes heritage are steadily being moved closer to the present with paradoxical consequences. Modernism is a 20^th century architectural ideology that was explicitly based in a rejection of the past and a celebration of the future, yet iconic modernist buildings, such as Lever House in New York and the Bauhaus are now preserved as important architectural heritage.

I don’t recall the source of this cartoon, which captures well some of the difficulties with heritage preservation.

The strange context of heritage preservation in the context of skyscraper condominiums in Toronto, from a planning document

A Critical Perspective
Heritage seen through the lens of temporality is not easy to unravel. Perhaps it is best regarded as no more than another manifestation of time in place that protects some aspect of landscape, or is a good example of an architectural style, or where something regarded as important happened. It usually involves some blend of nostalgia, aesthetics and supposed educational value, even if the less savoury and smelly aspects of the past are usually omitted. The essential question to be asked of all heritage preservation is whose heritage is being preserved. The achievements of the wealthy and powerful prevail over those who were oppressed and impoverished, in part, of course, because cathedrals and castles are invariably are architecturally more durable than tenements and hovels, but also because they represent positive accomplishments that we are expected to admire regardless of who was oppressed in order to make them.

The Practical Importance of Heritage for Places

Regardless of these theoretical equivocations about the jumbled arbitrary character of heritage, the practical fact is that heritage has, since the UNESCO conference in 1972, become an essential aspect of any places that have a history that can be traced back more than a few decades. The protection of heritage has become an essential consideration in urban planning almost everywhere. In many (perhaps the majority) of countries it is a legal requirement. It is a powerful basis for arguing against new developments that might otherwise ignore local history and contexts and for maintaining whatever remains of the older identities of places. Local heritage organizations research local history, identify building and sites that can be considered significant for architectural or other reasons, advise local planning departments and councils, and constitute a lobby to ensure that the past in places is not forgotten.

It is now impossible to discuss particular places without considering their heritage. And I admit that I really enjoy much of what has been accomplished through heritage protection. It slows down development and encourages thoughtful consideration of the merits of old landscapes and buildings. On the other hand it is wise to remember that heritage designation is frequently arbitrary and not always beneficial. For private homes it can result in increased insurance and maintenance costs that are beyond the owners means; for business properties or institutions it can limit changes that are needed to keep them economically viable, a particular concern for churches with declining congregations. The only options then are to apply for de-designation, or, more drastically to let somewhere to decay in place so that it can be demolished and redeveloped. Designation as a World Heritage Site is both a wonderful accolade and a potential curse because it turns somewhere into a global tourist magnet, attracting tour buses and cruise ships and gift shops and fundamentally changing the character of the place it is meant to protect from change.

         
Crowds at the Parthenon in 1990, which was being renovated and sprayed (by the man in the red shirt) with a chemical to prevent damage from air pollution

A marker for a vanished place, all that remains of Amulet in Saskatchewan, a small settlement with school, banks, a hotel, grain elevators and houses that existed from 1910 to 1973.

In short, for all its benefits, heritage preservation poses problems for the identity of places. ”Restoration.” exclaimed the nineteenth century English art critic John Ruskin, “is the most palpable damage a building can suffer.” All attempts at restoration and preservation are attempts to stave off the passage of time. In his remarkable book How Buildings Learn, Stuart Brand reminded us that change is a fundamental aspect of architecture – buildings, at least the ones that have not been designated, are added to and modified as fashions and needs shift. This is no less true of neighbourhoods and cities. All places are in fact time-places and expressions of temporality in which continuity and change are always present in a state of tension. Fragments of time-places can be set aside for protection, but everything cannot be protected and the larger context of place will continue to change.

Brand. Stuart, 1995 How Buildings Learn: What Happens after they are Built, Penguin

Lowenthal. David, 1996, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Free Press

Lynch, Kevin 1972 What Time is this Place? MIT Press

“Before you can write a good plot, you need to write a good place,” says the Swedish novelist Linn Ullman. Writing well about places is a skill required not only by novelists, but also by travel writers and all those who want to communicate their enthusiasm about the diversity and similarities of places.

Ullman, the daughter of Ingmar Bergman, considers her own life as “somewhat placeless” because she grew up in so many different places. But she thinks that precisely because of this she likes authors who are very place oriented. She admires Canadian Nobel prize-winning author Alice Munro, and specifically a comment Munro wrote in her story Face: “Something had happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened. And then there are the other places, which are just other places.” (This illustration is from the Atlantic Monthly article about Linn Ullman)

Munro’s stories are set in small communities in southern Ontario, where whole worlds play out. Every story has to happen somewhere. You do not have a story of life without an actual place, Ullman declares. “You can’t separate one from the other.”

It isn’t easy to write place
If you start off trying to write a general, all-embracing account of a somewhere without any clear sense of how to do it, you will probably either grind to a frustrating halt or end up with a sterile inventory that conveys nothing of the place’s identity. To write effectively about a place you have to find a hook, an entry point. Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is an account of a search for quality in things he encounters as he makes his way across America on a motorbike, provided a simple example I often think about. Somewhere along his way, perhaps in Montana, he took a teaching job, and asked his students to write a short essay about the qualities of the town they live in. One soon comes back and tells him: “I can’t do this. I don’t know where to start.” Pirsig suggests writing about the main street. Back comes the student a day later and says: “I still can’t begin.” Pirsig says: “Write about the stones in the wall of city hall.” A few days later the student tells him: “It’s amazing. Now I can’t stop writing.”

A sign with important advice at a State Park in Montana, 1998.

Finding hooks isn’t easy. Not because they are obscure, but because most of us are not used to looking carefully and thoughtfully at the world around us, and noticing the significance that lies in details. To write well about places (or to photograph them) you first have to be able to see them clearly. In effect that means reading their landscapes with a critical eye. This is easy to say but actually requires an effort to overcome a tendency to ignore places that are inconspicuous because they are so familiar, and also to overcome deeply ingrained habits of seeing things according to conventional categories about what is pretty or ugly or important

Two Guides for Reading Landscape and Place
I know two useful guides for reading landscape and place in this critical way. One is a website How to Read a Landscape that was prepared in 2008 for of a course taught by William Cronon, an environmental historian at the University of Wisconsin. The course is oriented towards historical research, and pays homage to Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, which was written about a nearby region in Wisconsin. For Cronon landscapes, both rural and urban, are documents that contain invaluable historical and environmental information for those who know to decipher and interpret it. Although Cronon’s website claims that it is not intended as a comprehensive guide, it does consist mostly of very practical suggestions from the students who participated in the course. These range from advice about the equipment needed to start making observations of somewhere, to suggestions about unpacking layers of meaning and the relationships between modes of production and consumption. Landscapes are clues to culture, to borrow a phrase from the geographer Peirce Lewis in his essay “Axioms for Reading the Landscape.”  They are what a culture makes for itself rather than what it says about itself and are therefore honest statements about cultural values.

The other guide is Linda Lappin’s 2015 book The Soul of Place: A Creative Writing Workbook – Ideas and Exercises for Conjuring the Genius Loci. She is a novelist and teacher, and her orientations are towards creative and travel writing. Her book offers a number of exercises for recognizing and writing about genius loci and what she calls the personal geography of places. Lappin offers many questions that can be asked of a place – for instance: how might the natural resources and climatic conditions affect the livelihoods of the people? What color is the light? What succeeds in creating a sense of intimacy? How does it feel underfoot? How do authorities reveal themselves? And she proposes a number of short writing exercises that can attempt to answer these sorts of questions. She also suggests many possible foci (which I called hooks above) for writing about a place, for instance, a bridge, a bus station, a door, a parking area, a laundromat, a shopping mall, a tree, stairs, traffic in motion, where a saint has died. A well-chosen focus can be a microcosm for the identity of the place.

Lappin also discusses what she calls the house of the self, the importance of the picturesque and the sublime, and both postcards and tweets as ways of conveying genius loci. However, for me her most substantial advice is about “Reading the Landscape.” She stresses the importance of identifying patterns and textures, ways of finding images to convey the impressions landscapes have on you, looking for evocative suggestions in place names, and William Least Heat Moon’s idea of “deep maps.” By deep map he means an intensive vertical examination of one place (in his case it is the region around the geographical center of the USA, which is in Kansas), in all its manifestations of genius loci, all its histories and stories and imaginative possibilities.

A store in Washington D.C. that blends writing and place.

Seeing, Thinking and Describing Places
I indicated some of my own thoughts about reading landscape some years ago in an essay “Seeing, Thinking, Describing Landscapes” (available online at Academia.edu). While I emphasized the importance of seeing clearly, albeit in a much briefer and more abstract way than Lappin and Cronon, my main point was that seeing, thinking and describing/writing are activities that reinforce one another, often through a series of iterations. They involve what the Victorian art critic John Ruskin described as “a curiously balanced condition of the powers of the mind.” In other words, seeing clearly involves thinking carefully, responding to patterns in what has been seen, relating observations to theory, reading what others have written, and finding effective language to express your interpretations and observations. Indeed the intention of writing will inevitably direct attention towards certain aspects of a place depending on whether the aim is prepare a planning report, a short story or a travel blog. Moreover the act of writing will often reveal shortcomings in thoughts and observations that have to filled by going back to look again from a different perspective.

Final Comments
Every story has to happen somewhere. I believe the exercises in Lappin’s The Soul of Place, and the suggestions in Cronon’s website, are excellent foundations for learning to read and then write about places and their landscapes. To follow every step they propose would, however, be very challenging. I find it easier to pick and chose from the types of questions and hints they offer, and to allow these to challenge my habits of thinking and to help me to see with what Goethe called “clear fresh eyes.”

NOTE: I see similarities between learning to read landscapes and learning to draw as it has been proposed by Kimon Nikolaides in The Natural Way to Draw and Betty Edwards in Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain. The gist of their argument is that anyone who can use a pencil to write has the motor skills needed to draw well; what most of us lack is the ability to observe carefully. If you can see well, you can draw well, and they both offer sequences of exercises that facilitate drawing well through seeing well. Nikolaides thought it might take months to achieve substantial results, but Edwards shows more encouragingly that for some people a breakthrough can happen with only five days of focused effort.

References and an acknowledgement:
Edwards, Betty 1989 Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain
Fassler, Joe 2014 “Before you can write a good plot, you need to write a good place” An interview with Linn Ullman, Atlantic Monthly April 2014 available online here
Goethe, J.D 1970 (1786-88) Italian Journey (trans W.H. Auden and E. Mayer) (Penguin)
Lappin, Linda 2015 The Soul of Place: A Creative Writing Workbook – Ideas and Exercises for Conjuring the Genius Loci. Palo Alto: Travelers’ Tales
Lewis, Peirce, 1979 “Axioms for Reading Landscape” in Don Meinig (ed) The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, Oxford University Press
Nikolaides, Kimon, 1941 The Natural Way to Draw, Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Pirsig, Robert 1974 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Relph, Edward 1984 “Seeing, Thinking and Describing Landscape” in Environment, Perception and Behavior, eds. T. Saarinen, D.Seamon and J. Sell, University of Chicago, Department of Geography Research Series, No. 209, pp.209-223. Available here at academia.edu.
Ruskin, John, 1843 Modern Painters Vol III, Chapter 17, Section 5

And my thanks to Linda Lappin who generously sent me a copy of her fascinating book which has got me reading landscapes in all sorts of new ways.

In developing this website I have become increasingly aware that the diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches people use to write about place revolve around just a few interpretations of what place is, and a slightly larger but mostly implicit set of reasons about why place is worth studying. This post is an initial attempt to identify what I think are the most significant of those interpretations and reasons. I have no doubt it is possible to come up with different categories (and would be grateful for any suggestions you might have) but the ones I note here have provided a useful basis to organize my thinking and I hope they may have some value for others. I think it informative that the illustrations, which I chose after I had derived these simple classification, suggest that these interpretations also seem apply to everyday ways the concept of place is used.

From the Victoria Times Colonist, February 2017

It is important to note, especially in the context of the current post-truth world, that there seems to be an implicit but common conviction that a clear understanding of our experiences of place is about as close as we can get by ourselves to a confident sense of what constitutes reality. Hence the title of this post. Place experience offers one basis for the development of independent thinking that can challenge and resist borrowed opinion and facile generalization.

A brief background
The importance of place in human experience is revealed in the fact that it is such a widely used word in many languages, one used in a wide range of different meanings and contexts. As a subject of intellectual and academic inquiry it has a long but mostly marginal history. However, since about 1970, and especially since 1990, academic studies of the idea and experience of place have surged. It has been discussed in various ways in thousands of articles and books in social sciences (geography, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies), in humanities (philosophy, theology, fine art, literature and cultural studies), in some sciences (neuroscience, and ecology) and in architecture, landscape architecture and business.

Four Basic Interpretations of Place
In spite of the newness, range and sheer number of academic discussions about aspects of place, I think there are just four main types of interpretations (or perhaps assumptions) about what constitutes place. Aspects of these are often combined, but most authors writing about place gives clear preference to just one of them, and regard the others as secondary.

• Place as primarily a material attribute of the world. A place is some thing somewhere – a room, a building, a neighbourhood, a park, a city, a mountain, It is a fragment of geography. This interpretation prevails in architecture, urban planning, traditional regional geography, ecology, and placemaking. This material idea of place is conveyed in this advertisement for a proposed development in Sydney in 2014.

• Place as primarily a way of being attached to or connecting with the world and with others. These connections might be through habitual actions and familiarity, emotional engagements, or participation in local communities. At a personal scale these connections are regarded as extensions of the body; at a social scale they are variously manifest in place names that provide a means of communicating shared place identities and in the myriad ways in which we participate in communities . This interpretation prevails in environmental psychology, sociology, anthropology, some philosophical studies, and theology. This banner for Fairfield Gonzales Community Association in Victoria B.C. explicitly captures the idea of place as connection,

• Place as primarily a socio-economic construct. Places are distinctive local nodes in networks of economic relationships that operate at regional and global scales. This economic interpretation of place prevails in the work of political-economic geographers who are critical of neo-liberalism. Paradoxically, it is also the foundation for business studies that advocate place branding and other strategies that are intended to generate a competitive advantage for particular places. This illustration is an advertisement for HSBC from August 2015. The text reads, in part: “Today’s successful businesses work around the clock with partners at home and around the world…HSBC offers your business global reach and local expertise.”

• Place as primarily a lens through which to interpret experiences of the world. This is associated with the phenomenological view that place is the first of all things because whatever we do has to be done in places, and that places are territories that gather meaning. This interpretation prevails among philosophers and humanistic geographers aiming to disclose the sort of subtle and profound character of place experience that is suggested in this poem by Laura C. set in the ground in a park in Fargo, North Dakota.

Reasons for Studying Place
Running through these interpretations it is possible to identify a number of different reasons why place is considered to be worthwhile investigating.  These are usually implicit but can be deduced from the substance of what is being discussed. They are also combined in different ways.

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  “Special Place” carved into a driftwood log at Locarno Beach in Vancouver

  To understand better how we relate to the world around us. Place is a subject of intellectual curiosity because all of us live in places that are distinctive in some way, our language is infused with mentions of place, and our memories are filled with recollections of places. It is well worth considering how place influences our lives, our thinking and our very existence.

• To enable us (those who are interested? everybody?) to enhance our appreciation and enjoyment of the places we experience in everyday life or through travel. And to do this especially by clarifying and communicating the character of place experience and the diverse identities of places. This sign was in a store window in Victoria, British Columbia.

• This normative motive is particularly associated with the assumption that place is primarily an aspect of the material world. It has many specific versions. It might involve designing built-environments that aim to improve place and place experiences. It might involve finding ways to live more compatibly with natural environments by identifying the ways that place gathers a continuum of nature-body-mind-society. It might involve finding ways to protect or recover heritage and the qualities of inherited places. It might involve identifying ways for communities to become more resilient in the face of social, economic and environmental changes.

• To improve understanding of community and social relationships to place. An aspect of this is suggested by the posted in Borough Market in London in 2012. An especially important aspect of it has to with understanding and appreciating the grief of displaced communities experiencing rootshock, and for communities in which there is some sense that a distinctive place identity is being eroded by social, economic and/or technological processes, or more specifically by new developments, that fail to respect distinctiveness.

• To explain how economic processes flow through and coalesce in places that serve as nodes in those flows, and to explain how different place nodes relate to one another and may exacerbate class differences, social and environmental inequities, uneven development, and injustice. Also to argue for ways to reduce these place injustices. This is, I think, a major reason for those who adopt an economic and relational view of place.

• To propose ways to enhance the benefits of economic flows and processes for particular places by branding and otherwise managing their identities as a way to give them a competitive advantage. Many universities, such as the University of Otago in this advertisement that was on the back of a bus in Wellington,  have adopted place branding in order to boost recruitment.

• To clarify what is happening in the world by investigating the interplay of processes and manifestations of placelessness (or non-place) and place. Everywhere is simultaneously different from and similar to places elsewhere (as is suggested in the claim that “There’s no place like this place, anyplace” on  Honest Ed’s, a low end department store in Toronto that closed down in 2016), but the character of the balance is infinitely varied. The ways in which this balance is shifting because of increased mobility and electronic communications has become especially important because fundamental place ideas about roots, belonging, and locality are being modified by translocal ways of life and significant engagement with many places.

• To seek reality and truth by disclosing the experience of place and the qualities of places. I am not sure that this has been explicitly stated by anyone writing about place, but I can think of no better reason for studying place. I suspect that in some way it is implicated in many of the reasons people have for investigating place. It is consistent with the phenomenological method of returning to the things themselves, with scientific wonder and observation, and with with Goethe called “seeing with clear, fresh eyes.” It is by no means easy because received opinions and contrived theories will inevitably try to intrude, and there are temptations to become selective or exclusionary. But if we choose to attend to them thoughtfully and carefully, our experiences of places are ours alone. They are, at their foundation, what we know of the world for ourselves. In Walden (in the chapter “What I Lived For”) Thoreau captured clearly what this involves and means: “Let us settle ourselves,” he wrote, “and work and wedge our feet down through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice…till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in a place, which we can call reality.”