What gives a place a sense?
By Maria Dogin
COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS
The very term ‘place’ is a very difficult term to dissect. The meaning is so common sense to us but to articulate it in words proves a highly complex and ambiguous process. As demonstrated in the seminar regarding this topic, it is very easy to get lost in a world of theory, boundaries and definitions. My initial thoughts before starting the readings were about the movie Blood Diamond and the conflict over Israel. I thought of Blood Diamond because of the way that Africa was spoken about in the movie. One of the references that lingered in my mind is the reference to the red colour of the earth as being due to the bloodshed that occurred there throughout history. This is a reference that beautifully summarises my idea of sense of place as being a collective consciousness that connects people to aesthetics directly in a cause and effect relationship. I also thought of Israel because it is one of the most infamous examples of how important place can be, so important in fact that we are willing to kill for it. The way that we describe our place and other places is inseparable from our identity. Edward Relph article ‘Senses of Place’ in Susan Hanson, ed, Ten Geographic Ideas that Changed the World, seems to follow this view when discussing the general opinion of geographers such as himself: ‘they see sense of place as a thread that ties each of us to our surroundings, and as a learned way for understanding somewhere on its own terms.’(Relph, p 208)
EXPLAINING ATMOSPHERE
Another way to approach this subject is to examine how an ‘atmosphere’ is developed (as I feel that this is the essence of a place). In this case I looked at Bondi Beach as a case study. This beach is not that spectacular looking however it remains one of the most famous beaches in the world attracting thousands of tourists each year. The collective consciousness of the multicultural laid back crowd featuring a few stylish locals is what makes Bondi the beach it is. Atmosphere or a sense of a place has less to do with aesthetics than it does the way that the inhabitants act or define it. In this respect perception is reality. This perspective leans toward that of Gabriella Gahlia Modans in Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity and the Politics of Place who employs a sociological discipline to gain an understanding of a place by collecting ethnographic research in Mount Pleasant. Modans feels that the way that people talk about the places that we live have material implications for how those places develop and change. (Modans p 5)
PLACE AND BELONGING
Edward Casey in Getting back Into Place: Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World proposes that as human beings we have an innate physical and psychological need to move places and fill emptiness both in mind and space. On the other hand, the feeling of long term displacement or emptiness can lead to disorientation and depression. In this sense it seems that while humans need to travel and ‘spread their wings’ they also need a place to call their own- to come home to. How then can we explain those that consider themselves ‘citizens of the world’ and travel from place to place without a base or sense of belonging to any particular area or culture? Or on the flip side, how can some people be born into a small village and never attempt to leave as the sense of belonging is what keeps them feeling secure and safe from the unknown world? The answers can be found in Tim Creswell’s Place: A Short Introduction (which happens to be my favourite of all the readings). The difference between the two extreme examples is how these people decide to define their place in relation to the ‘other’ places. On an individual level, our place in the world can be widened or narrowed by altering the way that we look at it. By concentrating on similarities between say Sydney and Moscow, we can widen our sense of place, however if we look only to the differences we tend to narrow our perspective, concreting the concept of sense of place. Furthermore (as an almost relevant aside) place making activities occur on both macro and micro levels and can result in tension, such as the tension between a homeless man settling in for a sleep outside a grocery and the shopkeeper that owns it. It all goes back to how we define the boundaries of place.
POPULAR DISCOURSE: MODERNISM AND POST-MODERNISM
A neat way of understanding the sense of place is by looking at popular discourse over time. Relph compares the modern and post- modern attitudes towards place. It seems to me that the aim of the social theory modernity was to widen sense of place through the practice of standardisation across the globe. Ley agrees with this idea in his article ‘Modernism, Postmodernism and the Struggle for Place’ saying it created ‘spaces not places’.(Ley p47) Thus without the differences that result from historical and cultural reference each individual will see sense place as almost a redundant concept as all they see is sameness. Interestingly enough modernity is also criticised by Relph as dehumanising process. Therefore no place means no identity.
Post-modernism was a direct response to the ‘void’ left by modernism. Post-modernism sees a return to individualistic structures through celebration of the past and difference. Relph criticises this theory for having an unauthentic property to it. The example that I feel best summarises this is that of the historically inaccurate placement of the fake settlement towns that try to capture the atmosphere of the olden day towns. These places are simply marketed as an image by recreating the look of those towns without any real connection or root to the place they were replicating.
Sense of place in my opinion is the organic progressive connection between inhabitants to their land. This is what creates vital uniqueness which becomes the essence of the place. There is no given formula for creating or understanding it!
Comments
Maria, I really enjoyed reading this paper. Of the papers I’ve read so far, I think yours is perhaps the best written. The writing is clear, personal, conversational, and articulate: the style, I believe, that we should be striving for in this sort of paper. The examples you use to illustrate your points – from Bondi Beach to Blood Diamond – are pretty wide-ranging, but they don’t come across as arbitrary at all. They work well: they’re purposeful and nicely integrated. I also liked the way that you structured your paper in little segments, moving from one idea or approach to another. It felt like your ideas were actually forming as you wrote, like I was following your train of thought as opposed to just reading an argument. So interestingly, your ideas didn’t have that inflexible, pre-determined quality that ideas so often have in traditional intro-body-conclusion essays.
But I didn’t quite get what you meant by “place as a collective consciousness that connects people to aesthetics…. in a cause and effect relationship.” You lost me at “cause and effect”. Maybe you could have explained this a little further. The very last paragraph also left me scratching my head a bit. This paragraph doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the paper. It seems like a hasty attempt to come to a conclusion before you reach the word limit. Perhaps you could have spent more time throughout the paper developing the opinion that you present in the first and last paragraphs. But then again, if your ideas were more ‘streamlined’, and your paper was about developing that one argument, it probably would have lost the nice, meandering quality to it.
One last thing. I think it would have added a lot to your paper if you’d explored the central paradox about ‘sense of place’ that we discussed in the seminar in Week 2: the paradox between ‘sense of place’ as a way of understanding and comprehending ‘place’ and ‘sense of place’ as a feeling, a quality, an aura about a place. On the one hand, we have ‘sense of place’ as a tool for the analysis and comprehension of place; and on the other, we have ‘sense of place’ as something quite ethereal, something that defies easy understanding and comprehension. We can try to ‘make sense’ of place. As individuals we can try to develop a ‘sense’ of a place, a sort of sixth sense. But we also need to acknowledge that places have their own individual ‘sense’ -- highly elastic (able to encompass a range of people’s interpretations of it) and because of this, a hell of a lot harder to pin down.
Posted by: Luke Heffernan | April 11, 2007 08:05 PM
Maria
Offering examples which summed up your own thinking about place, as you did here, is always thought-provoking. I particularly liked your most personal observations (‘I feel that “atmosphere” is the essence of a place’; Cresswell’s chapter ‘happens to be my favourite of all the readings’).
I did feel, however, that you were trying to do too much in this piece. You were trying to define place, to sum up notions of belonging, and to outline the difference between modernist and postmodernist understandings of place. Trying to get across all those things in such a short piece meant that you could only consider each of them in a superficial way. It would have made your task easier to choose a particular issue to explore in more detail. It would have been great if you’d simply concentrated on the idea of the ‘atmosphere’ or ‘essence’ of a place and what it means, for example, especially since that seemed to be the most interesting aspect for you of the issues you discussed.
In the end, I wasn’t sure that you had demonstrated that a sense of place was something ‘organic’, something that grew inexorably and naturally from a group of people’s experience of land. For a start, some people would argue that you can have a sense of a place that you’ve never experienced physically: from literature, film, family memory, and so forth. And others point out that people’s impressions of a given place can differ wildly according to their race/class/age/gender/idiosyncracies. An acknowledgment of this complexity and a discussion of your thoughts about it was really necessary here. But I still enjoyed it nonetheless!
Posted by: Melissa Bellanta | May 9, 2007 12:32 PM
Maria, I particularly enjoyed reading your discussion on the ‘sense of place’ because of your reflective and lyrical writing style. Your seminar discussion appears to be the abridged version of a complex contemplation about the many facets of a sense of place. I strongly agree with your comment that ‘while humans need to travel and ‘spread their wings’ they also need a place to call their own- to come home to.’ When people go overseas (or interstate) for a holiday or to work, I suspect that the majority, while thoroughly enjoying the experience, yearn to return home to a place of comfort, belonging and familiarity. I traveled around Europe for 6 weeks a few years ago, and while absorbing the culture, history and language of other countries, I also looked forward to the day I would be able to return home, to see my friends, have a home cooked dinner and sleep in my own bed. As the phrase goes, it is not until you lose something or leave it behind, that you truly appreciate what you had. I felt a greater sense of belonging to my home place - suburban Sydney - while overseas, because I was so far removed from what I usually experienced.
This brings me to the question you raised as to whether people who do not settle in one place for an extended period of time can feel the same sense of place as those who have a deep ‘longevity connection’ to a particular place. You answered the question in terms of individual definitions of a sense of place, but did not acknowledge the idea of home and the native inhabitant versus traveler/foreigner. This dichotomy would have been interesting to analyse as I believe one’s sense of place is largely governed in relation to where one calls home and the reasons for why their chosen place holds such ‘home-like’ connotations.
When you write ‘no place means no identity’, are you quoting Relph, or is this your opinion? I didn’t understand this idea as it has multiple readings that seem (at least to me) to be untrue. If the phrase means that people who do not have a place to call home have no identity, then surely they form a distinctive identity that is based on a complex amalgamation of their varied experiences in many places. Their identity needn’t be place based either, as it may be a formed on the basis of their personality and philosophical / moral values. The other reading that can be taken from this phrase is that people, who are not in a place, have no identity. I cannot understand how this is even possible as our entire existence and personal orientation is necessarily place-based and cannot be seen from an outside perspective.
Lastly, while I agree with your comment that ‘Atmosphere or a sense of a place has less to do with aesthetics than it does the way that the inhabitants act or define it,’ I didn’t agree with the conclusion that you came to: ‘perception is reality.’ I understand perception to be the way someone ‘sees’ or thinks about a place. This is very individualistic and determined by their prior experiences, knowledge and cultural/religious/gender etc background. Reality on the other hand is that which constitutes the actual or real thing, it implies a singular, true meaning that distinguishes it from that which is merely apparent (ie. one’s perception of the place). While individual perceptions aren’t necessarily a reality, the collective mismatch of everyone’s perceptions may be more accurately described as a place’s reality.
Posted by: Anna Sambell | June 11, 2007 02:11 PM
Maria,
I really like your writing style. You manage comfortably to write in a personal and relaxed way, while also delving into complex philosophical issues. I also really liked the examples you drew on, particularly relating the seminar topic to a recently released movie, Blood Diamond.
I completely agree with your conclusion that sense of place is the organic progressive connection between inhabitants to their land. But I agree with Melissa that you don’t demonstrate this opinion throughout your response.
While at the end of the paper you discuss an organic connection as the essence of place, in the middle of the paper you argue ‘atmosphere’ is the essence of place. I feel ‘atmosphere’ is too superficial as a concept to represent the essence of place. While it might be the heart of a place like Bondi, I think Israel and the conflict in Palestine are more related to the organic, progressive version of place you describe.
Posted by: Alex Pavli | June 12, 2007 11:40 PM