Summarizing place

In Chapter 4 of Tim Cresswell's place, Cresswell covers a variety of ideas and discussions about place.Places are about a process, flow and mobility, marked by constant movement. Geraldine Pratt reveals that place and boundary still do matter even in the world of a migrant worker, however. Strategies of globalization attempt to negotiate the production of locality in a non-place based way that increasingly delocalizing effects. Place and memory are inevitably intertwined, and places become sites of contestation over which memories to evoke. The idea of 'home' is very importnat in trying to define place, make a place feel comfortable. More often than not, the idea of place is conceived through the exclusion of some 'other'- a constitutive outside. A 'good place to live' is constructed through the promotion of a particular exclusive history. The geographers' notions of place have primarilty viewd place as relatively knowable and small scale. The construction of places forms the basis for the possibility of transgression, or in Douglas' terms, pollution. The idea of home as a place has given negative consequences for the homeless- people without place.

Protecting place

In Chapter 3 of Cresswell's 'Place,' Cresswell discusses Doreen Massey's paper, 'A Global Sense of Place' from her book Space, Place, and Gender. I found the discussion of gated communities to be quite interesting, and I have never really thought about it before, but I somewhat agree with Harvey that "Place, in whatever guise, is like space and time, a social construct." The statement on page 58 that "places are constantly having to adapt to conditions beyond their boundaries" is especially relevant today with globalization. On page 61, Harvey explains that groups are attempting to build their own places and communities in order to live differently from the mass of people. Harvey states that the place is often seen as the 'locus of collective memory'- a site where identity is created through the construction of linking a group of people into the past. In the face of globalization, protecting these distinct characteristics is pretty important. Harvey reveals that not only do small groups of people need to combat the forces of global capitalism, but mainstream religions and nations also use place to emphasize their distinctiveness and independence from greater pressures. Cresswell explains on page 72 that the reactionary sense of place that disturbs Harvey are marked by at least three interconnected ways of thinking according to Massey: 1. A close connection of place and a singular form of identity. 2. A desire to show how the place is authentically rooted in history. 3. A need for a clear sense of boundaries around a place separating it from the world outside.

Dancing place

On pages 33, Cresswell discusses David Seamon's view of "bodily mobility rather then rootedness and authenticity" as "the key component to the understanding of place."

Seamon invokes "the metaphor of dance in order to describbe the sequence of preconscious actions used to complete a particular task such as washing the dishes." To Seamon, washing the dishes is a kind of "body-ballet." (without the tutu, I presume). According to Seamon, there are many mobile habits and routines that help define a person's sense of place, including "driving to work, leaving the kids at school, goin to lunch, etc." By looking beyond individual body movement to group behavior, Seamon further shows that the "mobilities of bodies combine in space and time to produce an existential insideness - a feeling of belonging within the rhythm of life in place."

Seamon's 'place-ballet' is a compelling, real idea that I have never seriously thought about until reading about his viewpoint. Dance, or movement, certainly does define place. There are some locations where the norm is to sit, sit, sit, such as in class, on the bus, at a movie theatre. However, there are other locations, where people must be constantly moving, such as in a track event, an Olympic swimming event, or on the treadmill at the gym.

People's movements truly define their sense of place in these specific locations, because if these sedentary and energetic movements were reversed, an unbalance would be felt in these places. This unbalance would be felt in the classroom by the teacher who had a room of wild students running around like hyper monkeys, on a bus by the bus driver who can't concentrate on the road because all of his riders are jumping and down all over the seats and shaking the bus violently back and forth, by the old people in the theatre who can't watch the show because everyone else in the theatre is running, sprinting, throwing popcorn at each other, blocking the screen, rolling all around in the movie theatre. The unbalance would likewise be experienced by the angry track coach whose athletes sit totally still and motionless on the field during the 100 meter sprint, by the Olympic spectators who yell at the competitors to go, go go! who sit unmoving at the edge of the pool when they are supposed to be breaking world records, and by the local gym owner who wonders why all of his gym members sit on all the machines, but never work out.

In Seamon's sense, place is truly defined not merely by location, but also movement.

Consuming place

On page 23 in "The Gelealogy of Place," from Cresswell's 'Place' (wow- so many 'places' within this book!), Cresswell talks about Robert Sack's view of our current relationship with 'place' mainly as one of consumption.

According to Sacks, we are "sold products in consumption places and they are advertised with reference to a variety of fantastic contexts." The net result of all of this, he argues, is a "diminished sense of the consequences of our actions." Sacks also has a unique view of morality in relation to consumerism. Sacks states that "[m]orality is based on knowledge of the consequences of what we do. Consumption, through the disguise of production processes hides the consequences of our purchase and thus creates an amoral consumer's world."

The way I interpret Sack's view of this amoral consumer's world involves products being produced and manufactured in some unknown, faraway place, where consumers can choose to be ignorant of the social consequences of child labor, unfair wages, long working hours, etc, and the environmental costs of pollution, deforestation, waste etc. In this consumer-based sense of morality, Sacks is correct that most people do not really think of how their T-shirt was made, where their underwear really came from, who picked those peaches, how many trees were destroyed to make their soft, absorbent toilet paper, and the list goes on. Consumers don't have to think about these issues if they don't want to, all they should be concerned with is price, availablity, and of course, new and improved products. Yet, some day the consequences of consumerism will really bite us in the butt, because, whether in consumerism, or any aspect of life, we can ignore morality for a little while, but not forever.

Smelling place

After reading the first chapter in Tim Cresswell's "Place," I was really intrigued by John Agnew's three fundamental aspects of place as a 'meaningful location.' Agnew states that location, locale, and sense of place define a 'meaningful location,' yet I find "sense of place" to be the most interesting and unconventional in the traditional thinking of place. Usually when I think place, I think of a town, a building, or a room, etc. But a "sense of place" is really defined by a lot more than pure location. I remember the fresh smell of green grass and the outdoors when I went to 4-H camp, the smell enhanced the summertime feel of being outdoors and being away from home, it made me feel happy and somewhat nostalgic. Years after going to camp, I remember smelling that same scent just a couple of times, and the same feelings, the memories, all of that came rushing back, and for a moment I felt like I was back at camp, back at that place. I think smell is a sense that is not talked about enough, perhaps because our human noses are rather inferior when compared to the sniffers of our fellow animals. Yet smell is really important when defining place- think about it- how would you feel about being at a restaurant that smelled like a sewer- that is definately not a place where you want to eat.

City Themes

These are some of the categories that our group/class came up with to describe the city.

Conceptual/thematic:

-history
-focus on buildings, not people
-enduring
-noisy
-idealistic
-expensive
-poor v. rich
-competition
-unnatural (competes with nature)
-fantasy
-traffic
-industrial
-pollution

Formal/Constructive:

-cold (blue, black, gray)
-geometric
-architectural
-movement
-neon/electricity
-beautiful
-panoramic view
-bird's eye view
-towering architecture
-structure, organization
-grid

First Readings

"Chandler's Signs" definately went way deeper into the interpretation of signs than I have ever pondered about them. This reading made me think about the meaning behind names and the importance of them as well. I recalled a book that I read in about fourth grade which was about a boy who basically changed the name of an ink pen just by constantly calling it by the name that he had made up, which I can't remember at the moment. I also began to wonder where people get the names for hurricanes, what meaning do they hold? I once met a very kind and charismatic girl at music camp whose name was Katrina, and then, what do you know, a few months later, there's this massive, devastating hurricane named Katrina as well! I wonder if that hurricane changed the way that people interacted with Katrina the person. Last week in class, my teacher looked at me and said, for some reason you don't look like a Miranda- what kind of meaning does she see in that name that she does not see in my face? Or maybe I just looked like crap that day...