Life Takes Place

Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making

David Seamon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815380702
• eBook ISBN: 9781351212496
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Life Takes Place argues that, even in our mobile, hypermodern world, human life is impossible without place. Seamon asks the question: why does life take place? He draws on examples of specific places and place experiences to understand place more broadly. Advocating for a holistic way of understanding that he calls "synergistic relationality," Seamon defines places as spatial fields that gather, activate, sustain, identify, and interconnect things, human beings, experiences, meanings, and events.

Throughout his phenomenological explication, Seamon recognizes that places are multivalent in their constitution and sophisticated in their dynamics. Drawing on British philosopher J. G. Bennett's method of progressive approximation, he considers place and place experience in terms of their holistic, dialectical, and processual dimensions. Recognizing that places always change over time, Seamon examines their processual dimension by identifying six generative processes that he labels interaction, identity, release, realization, intensification, and creation.

Drawing on practical examples from architecture, planning, and urban design, he argues that an understanding of these six place processes might contribute to a more rigorous place making that produces robust places and propels vibrant environmental experiences. This book is a significant contribution to the growing research literature in "place and place making studies."

1

Life Takes Place

An Introduction

As I finished writing this book, Hurricane Harvey struck Houston, Texas, inundating the city with nine trillion gallons of water that would make a liquid cube two miles high and four miles square. Described as “the most extreme rain event in American history,” this “thousand-year” storm devastated Texas communities and uprooted Texan lives. “What do we do when there ain’t no place to go home to?” asked one teary-eyed survivor, who forsook her house in a kayak that her son had just happened to see floating by his house next door. “We want to go home,” the son explained, “but we don’t have no home to go to.”¹ Extreme weather events like Harvey bring public attention to the overwhelming significance of place, place experience, and place attachment in human life. Most of the time, however, this overwhelming significance is taken for granted as daily living proceeds matter-of-factly and uneventfully. In this book, I draw on phenomenology to examine why and how place, places, and place experiences are integral to human life and what happens existentially and experientially when, like the Harvey survivors, people lose their places.

As a thematic hook to focus my argument, I draw on the colloquial expression, “life takes place,” which is a puzzling phrase when one thinks about it. Why does life “take” place? Does “take” mean “requires” as in the phrases “learning takes effort” or “healing takes time”? What could it mean that life requires place? In today’s hypermodern times, does the phrase even make sense as human life so often involves autonomous individuals making their way in worlds independently of any environments or places in which those individuals find themselves? Though the unsettling experiences of Harvey survivors suggest otherwise, could it be today that “life takes place” has much less existential and geographical traction than for past peoples and past places?

These questions are the crux of this book and, in the last several decades, have become central to research in a wide range of disciplines and professions. This interest in place began in humanistic geography and architectural phenomenology in the 1970s. In the last two decades, this research has intensified, particularly because of the phenomenologies of place provided by environmental thinkers Edward Casey (1997, 2009), Jeff Malpas (1999), Robert Mugerauer (1994), Edward Relph (1976, 1981), and Ingrid Stefanovic (2000). Drawing on and extending these earlier phenomenological studies, I argue that life in fact does require place, and I work to explain why this requirement is so.²

What recent phenomenological work on place offers is a provocative new understanding about human life and human experience. These phenomenologists claim that human being is always human being in place. As Casey (2009, p. 14) declares, “To be is to be in place.” If this contention is true, then life does indeed take place. In fact, one can claim that human life is impossible without place. We are always emplaced in that we always already find ourselves present to some world, whether that world is relatively temporary (attending a meeting in an unfamiliar city) or permanent (tending a family farm one’s entire life). Understanding this perpetual, unavoidable emplacement is the main aim of this book.

In the examination of place that I offer, I draw on phenomenology because it is the Western philosophical tradition that provides the most conceptual and practical guidance for examining and understanding human experience, consciousness, and meaning. My aim is a phenomenology of place that draws on situations and experiences relating to specific places and place experiences as a means to understand place more broadly, including a more thorough explication of how “life takes place.” From a phenomenological perspective, one can define place as any environmental locus that gathers human experiences, actions, and meanings spatially and temporally. A more sophisticated phenomenological definition is offered by philosopher Jeff Malpas (1999, p. 36), who describes place as “an open and interconnected region within which other persons, things, spaces, and abstract locations, and even one’s self, can appear, be recognized, identified and interacted with.”

These two definitions suggest that places work as spatial fields that gather, activate, sustain, identify, and interconnect things, human beings, experiences, meanings, and events. Both definitions assume that places range from intimate to regional scale and include such environmental situations as a favorite park bench, a house associated with unpleasant childhood memories, a neighborhood to which one is deeply attached, or a taken-for-granted geographical locale where one has lived her entire life. Experientially, places are multivalent in their constitution and complex in their dynamics. On one hand, places can be liked, cherished, and loved; on the other hand, they can be disliked, distrusted, and feared. For the persons and groups involved, a place can invoke a wide range of supportive, neutral, or undermining actions, experiences, and memories.

Grounding Place as a Phenomenon and Concept

In attempting a phenomenology of place, one faces the important question of real-world evidence. Ideally, a book offering a broad, conceptual understanding of place should ground that understanding in firsthand experience of specific places and place events. For example, one potential real-world context would be several in-depth, longitudinal, participant-observation studies of two or three actual places, selected in such a way as to offer provocative evidence for comparisons and contrasts. These studies would provide thorough descriptions of these places as physical environments, as situations and events, and as ordinary (or perhaps, in some cases, extra-ordinary) worlds for their users and others associated with those places. These real-world discoveries would provide a testing ground and springboard for broader conceptual claims about place.

In this book, I take a different methodological route for considering how life takes place. The experiential evidence for the phenomenological claims I make is a serendipitous cross-section of primary and secondary sources that include newspaper accounts, imaginative literature, and well-respected field studies and conceptual explications of places and place experience. In Chapter 2, I discuss my phenomenological method more fully, but here I offer some examples of real-world places and place experiences so that readers have an incipient sense of the kinds of situations and events that I attempt to clarify conceptually. In later chapters, I draw one source of place descriptions from articles in two American newspapers of record – The New York Times (NYT) and The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). While writing this book, I set myself each day to study these two newspapers and to note articles that made some aspect of place the primary focus. Obviously, almost any newspaper article deals with place, since all reporting requires journalists to ask where? I gave primary attention to entries that discussed some focal aspect of places not subject to recurring newspaper coverage because of significant current events.³ Here, for example, is a summary of eight articles that appeared in the two newspapers on Wednesday, March 1, 2017, a particularly fruitful day for stories about places, which ranged from an up-and-coming Parisian suburb to a disintegrating French town:

• Commercial developers are transforming the Parisian suburb of Aubervilliers, a long-time stronghold of communism, into a toney business district envisioned as an alternative to Paris’s expensive city center (WSJ, p. B8).

• After a sixty-eight-year ban, North Dakota lawmakers are considering state legislation allowing the return of parking meters. Supporters argue that the meters would free up spaces regularly taken by downtown workers and make parking easier for shoppers and restaurant patrons (WSJ, p. A1).

• As a way for cell-phone addicts to be untethered from their devices and to engage with actual places and events, a company called Yondr has developed a lockable neoprene pouch in which one places her phone, which is only accessible again when she leaves that place or event and taps the pouch on an unlocking pod: “For some of us, it takes being locked out of the digital world to realize the extent to which these pieces of electronics have sucked us away from the real one” (WSJ, p. B4).

• The Cloudmount Ski Resort in northeastern Alabama is facing financial ruin because of this winter’s unseasonably warm temperatures. Making use of a snow-making machine, the resort’s owner is typically assured of forty to fifty days of skiing, but this winter has provided only six. There are very few ski resorts in the American Deep South, and Cloudmount is “a gateway for first-time skiers in the south who want to learn the basics before heading to bigger mountains in the northeast or out west” (WSJ, p. A7).

• A chapel in a shopping mall in Paramus, New Jersey, is closing after nearly fifty years of religious services. Officially known as St. Therese’s Chapel, this small space above a Marshall’s department store is open daily from 7 am to 9:30 pm and provides Mass for almost 1,000 worshippers weekly. The chapel must close because mall management has other plans for the space (NYT, p. A23).

• New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio vows to reduce the 60,000 people living in homeless shelters by 2,500 over five years. His aim is to move homeless individuals into more stable residential situations where they can receive community services and be helped to find and succeed with permanent housing. The task is difficult because of insufficient affordable housing and low wages that don’t keep pace with the city’s high rents (NYT, p. A23).

• The Canadian prairie city of Medicine Hat, Alberta, is on the leading edge of a countrywide effort to end homelessness through a “housing first” strategy whereby anyone identified as homeless is provided a home with no preconditions, including sobriety. The argument is that only after people have stable housing can they deal with other life challenges, such as mental illness or drug and alcohol addiction: “The stability of home allows people to gradually address their problems” (NYT, p. A4).

• The southern French provincial town of Albi (population 49,000) is losing the “vitality and buzz” of its historic core, which is marked by vacant storefronts, empty residences, and deserted streets. Remaining retail functions are mostly tourist shops and chain clothing stores. Albi’s deteriorating city center symbolizes many other French towns, where “the interplay of the human-scale architecture, weathered stone and brick, and public life had been one of the crucibles of French history and culture . . . .” Today, many of these towns are endangered, and, in Albi’s case, largely undermined by a shopping mall and by large grocery stores built at the town’s periphery (NYT, p. A1).

Though these eight stories cover a spectrum of environmental and geographical scales, they each have phenomenological significance because they depict some aspect of place as it contributes to the experiences and lives of people associated with that place: the threat to the future of an Alabama ski resort; the loss of a worship space in a New Jersey mall; the efforts of New York City and Medicine Hat, Alberta, to find ways to provide homeless populations with stable homes. In some examples, the place itself is given more attention (Albi’s decline); in other examples, experiencers are highlighted (cell-phone users locking up their devices so they can engage with a place or event). I introduce these stories at the start of this book so that readers fathom the wide range of place types and environmental situations relevant to a phenomenology of place. In later chapters, I draw on additional newspaper articles to illustrate, via actual places and place experiences, broader conceptual themes and patterns that mark place phenomenologically.

Outlining the Book

My major focus in this book is the significance of places in human life and how they might be envisioned and made to strengthen human wellbeing. My conceptual perspective and research method are grounded in phenomenology, which, in Chapter 2, I introduce broadly and identify some of its core concepts relevant to understanding place. In Chapter 3, I consider how place might be considered holistically and identify two contrasting ways of understanding wholes and wholeness. On one hand, I speak of analytic relationality, a situation in which any whole, including place, is pictured as a set of parts among which are located a series of linkages that, when measured, identify stronger and weaker connections and relationships. On the other hand, I speak of synergistic relationality, a situation in which any whole, including place, is pictured as a dynamic, generative field that sustains and is sustained by parts integrally interconnected both physically and experientially.

My main aim in this book is to develop a phenomenology of place grounded in synergistic relationality. To accomplish this possibility, I make use of progressive approximation, a multivalent means for examining phenomena holistically developed by British philosopher J. G. Bennett. Progressive approximation draws on the qualitative significance of number to provide a method to examine a phenomenon from different vantage points guided by the interpretive possibilities of one-ness, two-ness, three-ness, and so forth. For example, Bennett demonstrates how one-ness can be used to locate the phenomenon as a whole, just as two-ness helps to identify important contrasts and complementarities. In turn, three-ness helps to locate relationships, actions, and processes integral to the phenomenon. In Chapter 4, I introduce Bennett’s progressive approximation and argue that it is implicitly phenomenological in that it offers a creative way to explore the experiential dimensions of any phenomenon from multiple perspectives guided by the interpretive significance of number. In Chapter 5, I consider place in terms of one-ness, arguing that human beings are always already emplaced, though the specific nature of that emplacement involves a wide range of place types and place experiences. In Chapter 6, I consider place in terms of two-ness and discuss several existential binaries that include movement/rest, insideness/outsideness, ordinariness/extra-ordinariness, and homeworld/alienworld.

In Chapters 7–14, I consider place in terms of three-ness. This explication is the most extensive portion of the book because, according to Bennett, three-ness involves relationships, processes, and actions. Bennett associates three-ness with what he called triads, which he uses to identify six different processes that I draw on to understand how, over time, places can become stronger, weaker, or remain in stasis. In Chapters 7 and 8, I consider how Bennett’s six processes might contribute to a generative understanding of place, place experiences, and place meanings. I identify six different place processes that I label interaction, identity, release, realization, intensification, and creation. In Chapters 9–14, I examine each of these processes in turn and discuss their value for understanding places as they are and for making those places better through design, planning, policy, and advocacy. In Chapter 15, I examine how these six processes interact dynamically to support robust places, on one hand, or faltering places, on the other. In the book’s last chapter, I identify potential concerns and criticisms of the phenomenology of place I present here and offer a critical rejoinder. I end by discussing the future of places in our hypermodern times.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of this book is my use of Bennett’s progressive approximation. If the crux of phenomenological effort is openness to the phenomenon, how can one justify a research method that uses a predefined structure – the qualitative significance of number – to examine and understand the phenomenon? In responding to this concern, I point out, first, that nothing can be seen purely as it is in itself. Always, we understand the thing from our personal, cultural, intellectual, and historical points of view. We cannot get beyond our own knowledge and experience: They direct what we see and how we interpret what we see. For sure, a major aim of phenomenology is “the pristine innocence of first seeing” (Spiegelberg, 1982, p. 680) whereby one “sets aside” taken-for-granted understandings, viewpoints, and predilections. The difficult methodological question, however, is how this “setting aside” is to be accomplished practically. This difficulty of seeing the phenomenon afresh is the major reason I use Bennett’s method of progressive approximation: I hope to demonstrate that it offers an innovative means for encountering a pheno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Life Takes Place: An Introduction
• 2. Preliminaries for a Phenomenology of Place: Principles, Concepts, and Method
• 3. Understanding Place Holistically: Analytic vs. Synergistic Relationality
• 4. Explicating Wholeness: Belonging, Progressive Approximation, and Systematics
• 5. The Monad of Place
• 6. The Dyad of Place
• 7. Understanding the Triad: Relationships, Resolutions, and Processes
• 8. The Three Place Impulses and the Six Place Triads
• 9. The Triad of Place Interaction (1–3–2 or PP–CP–EE)
• 10. The Triad of Place Identity (2–3–1 or EE–CP–PP)
• 11. The Triad of Place Release (3–2–1 or CP–EE–PP)
• 12. The Triad of Place Realization (3–1–2 or CP–PP–EE)
• 13. The Triad of Place Intensification (2–1–3 or EE–PP–CP)
• 14. The Triad of Place Creation (1–2–3 or PP–EE–CP)
• 15. Integrating the Six Place Processes
• 16. Life Takes Place: Criticisms, Concerns, and the Future of Places
• Postscript: Experience versus Knowledge and the Lived versus the Conceptual
• References
• Index