Place

An Introduction

Tim Cresswell

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118574164
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Thoroughly revised and updated, this text introduces students of human geography and allied disciplines to the fundamental concept of place, combining discussion about everyday uses of the term with the complex theoretical debates that have grown up around it.

• A thoroughly revised and updated edition of this highly successful short introduction to place
• Features a new chapter on the use of place in non-geographical arenas, such as in ecological theory, art theory and practice, philosophy, and social theory
• Combines discussion about everyday uses of the term 'place' with the more complex theoretical debates that have grown up around it
• Uses familiar stories drawn from the news, popular culture, and everyday life as a way to explain abstract ideas and debates
• Traces the development of the concept from the 1950s through its subsequent appropriation by cultural geographers, and the linking of place to politics

1
Introduction: Defining Place

Place is one of the two or three most important terms for my discipline – geography. If pushed, I would argue that it is the most important of them all. Geography is about place and places. But place is not the property of geography – it is a concept that travels quite freely between disciplines and the study of place benefits from an interdisciplinary approach. Indeed, the philosopher JEFF MALPAS (2010) has argued that “place is perhaps the key term for interdisciplinary research in the arts, humanities and social sciences in the twenty-first century.”

This book is, therefore, both a disciplinary account of a key geographical concept and an interdisciplinary introduction to an issue that transcends geography, philosophy, or any other discipline. Regardless of the discipline we are rooted in, and despite this general enthusiasm for the study of places, there has been very little considered understanding of what the word “place” means. This is as true in theory and philosophy as it is among the new students signing up for university geography courses. Place is a word that seems to speak for itself.

Given geography's long history of grappling with the issue of place, the relatively recent resurgence in interest in place across disciplines and in the wider world presents an opportunity for geography to situate itself at the center of a lively interdisciplinary debate. Discussions of place are popping up everywhere. Creative writers and literary scholars have been busy rediscovering and “re-enchanting” place. In the English-speaking world there has been a resurgence in creative non-fiction which puts place at the heart of things. Writing on both “wild” and urban places has become more visible with the popularity of forms of “psychogeography” and nature-writing (Sinclair 2009, Macfarlane 2007). A recent collection of essays and poems about places across Britain was titled Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings (Evans and Robson 2010). The text on the cover reads “Here are paths, offered like an open hand, towards a new way of being in the world, At a time when multiple alienations of modern society threaten our sense of belonging, the importance of ‘place’ to creative possibility in life and art cannot be underestimated.” Artists, too, are grappling with place. Gstaad, in Switzerland, is a small alpine town visited regularly by the richest people in the world. It is a place for the 1 percent. Recently it was also the site of an array of artistic interventions by some of the world's leading conceptual artists. One of the installations, by the British artist Christian Marclay, is a video screen installed in a cable car which shows extracts from Bollywood movies which are set in the immediate vicinity. Gstaad, it turns out, is frequently used as a setting for escapist dream and dance sequences in Bollywood movies. The idea for the exhibition was Neville Wakefield's. Wakefield is a curator for the British art fair Frieze. His rationale for the project is outlined in an article in the New York Times.

But the show…is also a response to their frustration with seeing so much art “set in these jewel box architectural spaces, and you really can't tell whether you are in Singapore, Shanghai, Berlin, London or whatever,” Mr. Wakefield said, adding, “What's happened in terms of making art accessible is that it's homogenized.”

Their exhibition, he said, is meant to be an antidote to the “art-fair, urban, white-cube gallery experience.”

“It is difficult to get to,” Mr. Wakefield added, “but because of that, it also demands a different kind of attention. You discover the art through the place and the place through the art” (Donadio 2014, C2).

The exhibition at Gstaad reflects a wider interest in how art and place interact on the part of both artists and art theorists (Doherty 2009, Hawkins 2010, Kwon 2002).

It is not just the creative world of writers and artists that are engaging place. At the other end of subjective–objective spectrum, place has also entered the lexicon of businesses and scholars who use geographic information systems (GIS). GIS are sophisticated computational software systems that can represent data spatially in the form of maps. Since their origin they have largely been centered on the manipulation and representation of quantifiable things in a spatial form. To many writers on the theme of place (as we shall see later), this has been the opposite of an interest in place. Recently, however, the fusion of mapping software with social media software has led to a new level of what we might think of as “augmented” place. Our phones (at least the smart phones that many of us, usually living in the Global North now have) know where we are. They are linked to data that knows where other people or things are too. They provide a level of information about place. Apps such as Foursquare are premised on an interest in place. They ask what we think of a place (public square, restaurant, etc.) and tell us what other people think of it. They even allow us to become “Mayor” of our favorite hangout, if we go there and log in frequently enough. This merging of GIS and social media apps has not gone unnoticed by GIS scholars who have started to engage more fully with place as a concept. Consider just one example:

Formalizing place in the GIS context will be both interesting and challenging; until recently, place has been off the intellectual radar screen of GIScientists, many of whom appear to use the two terms place and space somewhat interchangeably. Preliminary work has begun in the digital gazetteer literature…In a broader sense, the emerging GIS literature of the past 15 years has caused a subtle shift of focus from space to place, with its rich cultural dimensions; yet in GIScience, we still do not have an overarching theory of place or how to work with the concept. (Sui and Goodchild 2011, 1744)

The interest of GIS scholars in place reflects the profound way in which software developers in the corporate world have been engaging in place in sometimes sinister ways. Politicians want to know about place to finely target their funds at swing voters. Supermarkets want to know about our shopping habits so they can encourage us to buy more. Police forces and security services want to know about the links between crime and place so that they can more effectively discipline and survey. Google Maps purports to tell us about the places around us in objective ways but, in fact, is filtering place for us – directing us towards businesses that have engineered their appearance on the first page of a Google search. Software is producing DigiPlace (Zook and Graham 2007).

And place is central to forms of struggle and resistance too. Recognizing the danger in Google mapping the world, others are producing an open source map (OpenStreetMap) project that does not allow corporations a monopoly on the production of place. An article in The Guardian online reported on these efforts under the subheading “Geography is big business.”

The modern daytime dilemma is geography, and everyone is looking to be the definitive source. Google spends $1bn annually maintaining their maps, and that does not include the $1.5bn Google spent buying the navigation company Waze. Google is far from the only company trying to own everywhere, as Nokia purchased Navteq and TomTom and Tele Atlas try to merge. All of these companies want to become the definitive source of what's on the ground.

That's because what's on the ground has become big business. With GPSes in every car, and a smartphone in every pocket, the market for telling you where you are and where to go has become fierce.

With all these companies, why do we need a project like OpenStreetMap? The answer is simply that as a society, no one company should have a monopoly on place, just as no one company had a monopoly on time in the 1800s. Place is a shared resource, and when you give all that power to a single entity, you are giving them the power not only to tell you about your location, but to shape it. (Wroclawski 2014, npn)

This struggle over virtual place reflects longstanding struggles over place by protest movements around the world. In 1989 protesters all over the world took over prominent places and brought about political change of historic significance. The crossing and demolition of the Berlin Wall was perhaps the most significant example. In China, up to a million student protestors and their supporters occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing before they were brutally removed on June 3 and 4. The fact that it was Tiananmen Square (named after Tiananmen Gate, the Gate of Heavenly Peace) was significant as this was and is a prominent place in the symbolism of the Chinese nation, surrounded by important buildings, such as the Great Hall of the People, signifying the Chinese state and nation. More recently we have seen waves of protest in Tahrir Square in Egypt as part of the so-called “Arab Spring.” First the longstanding leader of Egypt, President Mubarak, was forced to step down in 2011 and then, in June 2013, possibly the largest public protest in history occurred, leading the military to remove the elected president, Mohammed Morsi. The square became an important place for protest. During the occupations a Facebook page called “Tahrir Square” was set up to counter official news outlets' representations of the protest. In 2013 a documentary film, The Square, was released, tracking a number of protestors through the period 2011 to 2013. In each case it was clear that the square as a place played a significant role in the various protest movements.

Figure 1.1 Demonstrations in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt demanding the removal of President Mubarak and his regime in 2011. Source: photo by Jonathan Rashad (Flickr) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wik...