Study of the history of ideas can lead quickly to the conclusion that hu- manity does not really change, at least not over relatively short periods of time as measured in global history. Human concerns and interests and the questions they pose are in most instances the same now as centuries past, only expressed with greater elaboration. Technologies and social structures do change, to be sure, but the basic fears, aspirations, and intellectual quests of human beings seem not to. Thought is refined and made more complex with the increasing production of information, but the fundamentals re- main.5 Consequently, the concept of place is at least as old as the written word and surely very much older. There are ‘‘many dimensions to meanings ascribed to place: symbolic, emotional, cultural, political, and biological.
People have not only intellectual, imaginary, and symbolic conceptions of place, but also personal and social associations with place-based networks of interaction and affiliation’’ (Buttimer, 1980, p. 167). In fact, the word
‘‘place’’ is so rich in variant meanings that it occupies 12 long columns of extremely fine print in the second edition of theOxford English Dictionary.
Therefore, the following selection of definitions that apply to the meaning understood in this essay is intended as the first step in an attempt to cut through that dense field of significance by providing a context for further
refinement of the more specific concept of place at issue throughout this essay.
Place is a special kind of object. It is a concretion of value, though not a valued thing that can be handled or carried about easily; it is an object in which one can dwell.
(Tuan, 1977, p. 12)
We call locations of experience ‘places’. Experience means perceiving, doing, thinking, and feeling. Every event happens somewhere, but we don’t often locate an experience by its latitude and longitudeyA place has a name and a history, which is an account of the experience located in that position. (Walter, 1988, p. 117)
Places are not just presences in some ‘nature’ abstracted from human being; places are presences in that nature raised to some sort of human significance or, perhaps more broadly, raised to significance for some sentient being. (Flay, 1989, p. 6)
The concept of place provides an organizing concept for what is termed to be immersion in, or interpenetration with, the world. With its experiential perspective and varied scale, place relates to an area which is abounded and has distinctive internal structure, to which meaning is attributed and which evokes an affective responsey. (Pocock, 1981, p. 17) Place is a center of meaning constructed by experience yPlace is known not only through the eyes and mind but also through the more passive and direct modes of experience, which resist objectificationyTo know a place fully means both to under- stand it in an abstract way and to know it as one person knows another. (Tuan, 1975, p. 152)
Place has two aspects: Thesense of place, which is the particular experience of a person in a particular setting, (feeling stimulated, excited, joyous, expansive, and so forth); and thespirit of place, which is the combination of characteristics that gives some locations a special ‘feel’ or personality (such as a spirit of mystery or of identity with a person or group yA sense of place is the pattern of reactions that a setting stimulates for a person. (Steele, 1981, pp. 11–12)
Place, at all scales from the armchair to the nation, is a construct of experience; it is sustained not only by timber, concrete, and highways, but also by the quality of human awareness. (Tuan, 1975, p. 165)
To get into the spirit of a place is to enter into what makes that place such a special spot, into what is concentrated there like a fully saturated color. (Casey, 1993, p. 314) Personal place depends on and influences actions. Virtually anything can help constitute this place, and virtually anything can change ityPersonal place does not simply exist—
it requires constant (though often preconscious) effort to support and is connected to the more physically visible and stable places in the landscape. (Sack, 1992, p. 31) Place is, in other words, the place of freedom from the contingent impositions – and crises – of what we have come to know as history [meaning politics, society, and econ- omy]. It is the transcendental value – hence its ‘verticality’ – that defines humankind in its authentic essence, and defines a community in its organic identity. (Dainotto, 2000, p. 33)
Drawing upon these and other explanations of the concept of place and related phenomena, the following definition is constructed for use in the present essay: ‘‘Place’’ is a setting of any dimension and type in which an individual perceives a special spirit (genius loci) that is generated by the quality of experience related to the values and associations it recalls, and whose significance to the individual captures an extraordinary order and heightens related awareness that becomes an inspiration for imagination and behavior. More will be said about the important role of perception in understanding the concept of place, but it may be useful to note here a neurologist’s finding that ‘‘Perception is at a level of psychological integration intermediate between sensation and conception’’ (Herrick, 1956, p. 352).
This definition of place logically raises the question of its relation to space. Both explicitly and implicitly, the relevant literature makes the dis- tinction that space is the physical container, while place is the metaphysical content. ‘‘It is not spaces which ground identifications, but placesyPlace is space to which meaning has been ascribed’’ (Carter, Donald, & Squires, 1993, p. xii). This distinction is not a recent fabrication, but extends at least as far back as ancient Greece, where two separate words for place, chora, which is the older word, andtoposwere used to represent different features, much the same as space and place are used for purposes of distinguishing the special features understood in the phrasea sense of place. According to psychiatrist Eric V. Walter:
In antiquity, a writer could saychorophiliafor love of place, but nevertopophilia. In the classical language,topostended to suggest mere location or the objective features of a placeyThe older word,chora– or sometimeschoros– retained subjective meanings in the classical period. It appeared in emotional statements about places, and writers were inclined to call a sacred place achorainstead of atopos. (Walter, 1988, p. 120)
The concept of place, then, has long signified a set of unusual, perceived human properties that are worthy of closer consideration.
But place does not possess these powerful and unusual properties through inherence, although some spaces are more conducive than others; it is en- dowed with them only by the beholder whose awareness of the experience generates it. Thus, ‘‘these personal views are the most elementary and ac- cessible ways of being in geographical space and place, for it is the way we constantly experience the world and act upon it’’ (Sack, 1992, p. 11). This differentiation of the many physical spaces in one’s life has been called
‘‘indexing,’’ which is accomplished both explicitly and implicitly. ‘‘I submit that one will always be at a loss to define place without taking into account
this human indexing’’ (Flay, 1989, p. 5). Nor, of course, can place even be identified without it.
Although there probably are as many manifestations of the sense of place as there are individuals and physical spaces, most often they convey emo- tional and moral qualities. As interpreted by the individual, ‘‘The ‘soul’ of a place is the pure, expressive meaning of a location, a concrete image that represents its quality of expressive space’’ (Walter, 1988, p. 145). Indexing spaces so that they consequently become places requires that such a space be
‘‘lived in’’ in the sense that the individual fully experiences it6and is ‘‘aware of it in the bones as well as with the head’’ (Tuan, 1975, p. 165). Thus, places have ‘‘soul.’’ Something that we take so for granted within ourselves is nonetheless a highly complex phenomenon7 for reasons that are brought together quite poignantly in the analysis by philosopher J.E. Malpas:
Placeypossesses a complex and differentiated structure made up of a set of inter- connected and interdependent components – subject and object, space and time, self and otheryThe fact that place possesses such a variously complex structure, and is capable of presenting itself in such differentiated and multiple ways, leads to an inevitable mul- tiplicity in the ways in which place can be grasped and understood; place may be viewed in terms that emphasise the concrete features of the natural landscape; that give priority to certain social or cultural features; or that emphasise place purely as experienced.
(Malpas, 1999, p. 173)
Ultimately, a geographer asserts, physical place ‘‘is ‘re-placed’ in the mind and through our sensibilities by an image of place.’’ (Pocock, 1981, p. 17).
These images can have much or little to do with reality, for they are partial and may be either exaggerated or understated. Collectively, a set of place images shared by segments of society forms a place myth (Shields, 1991, pp. 60–61). The myth can be identified – as it has been at least since antiquity – with hierarchical levels of value, usually in three positions:
upper, middle, and lower. ‘‘The high place inspires feelings of elation, dom- ination, transcendence; it is the traditional home of poetry.’’ (Lutwack, 1984, pp. 39–40). This is the level of place sense, or the image, to which many regular users of the library place assign it.