Introduction
The primary purpose of this chapter is to sketch out an approach to place that takes us beyond an opposition between confining, bounded, âreactionaryâ senses of place that focus on rootedness, attachment and singularity on the one hand and a distributed, open, âprogressiveâ sense of place that focuses on flows, connections and networks on the other. A secondary purpose is to provide an overview of the history of existing theories of, and approaches to, place. Too often we make claims to new theoretical approaches by either ignoring or disparaging older traditions. Here I want to insist on the productive continuities and overlaps between the new and old. In sum, the chapter provides a meso-theoretical interpretative framework for the analysis of place and places in contemporary life.
The chapter is written in a different way from the conventional academic paper/chapter. It takes its inspiration both from Walter Benjaminâs use of montage in The Arcades Project (Benjamin, 1999) and the idea of a âcommonplace bookâ used by Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines and by William Least Heat Moon in PrairyErth (Chatwin, 1988; Heat Moon, 1991). Montage has been used with varying success by geographer Allan Pred (1995). He used montage in order to interrupt the business-as-usual construction of metanarratives in theory. He did this in a far more experimental mode than what follows, breaking up his text such that it had the appearance of poetry. My aim is clarity; his was often to disturb it. Nevertheless, there is something of the spirit of Pred in this chapter.
Through assembling (choice) bits
and (otherwise neglected or discarded) scraps,
through the cut-and-paste reconstruction of montage,
one may bring alive,
open the text to multiple ways of knowing
and multiple sets of meaning,
allow multiple voices to be heard,
to speak to (or past) each other
as well as to the contexts from which they emerge
and to which they contribute. (Pred, 1997: 135)
A commonplace book is, essentially, a collection of wisdom, usually on a certain theme. In many ways, The Arcades Project is an ideal-type modern commonplace book. Appropriately enough, compiling a commonplace book is called âcommonplacingâ â producing a literary topos. What follows is more commonplace book than it is montage.
The text is divided into paragraphs, each of which contains a stage in the construction of a meso-theory of place. Many of these paragraphs are direct quotations and are in italics. The paragraphs accumulate into an argument.
Method of this project: literary montage. I neednât say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse â these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them. (Benjamin, 1999: 460)
The chapter is illustrated by information gleaned from archival research around the 100-year history of a particular place â the Maxwell Street Market in Chicago. In so far as this exercise is haunted by the spirit of Walter Benjamin, the Market serves as my Paris arcades. The archival ânuggetsâ are presented in a different font.
Maxwell Street was the site of North Americaâs largest open-air market for much of the twentieth century. It was at the heart of a densely populated area of Chicago inhabited by successive waves of immigrants from Europe (East Europeans, Jews, Italians, etc.) and from elsewhere in the United States (African Americans from the South). Many of these immigrants set up stalls and stores along Maxwell Street and nearby streets from the 1880s onwards. The street and its market were gradually transformed by the construction of the Dan Ryan expressway in the 1950s and, from the mid 1960s, by the location and development of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. The market was finally closed and relocated in the mid 1990s (Cresswell and Hoskins, 2008).
To recap, there are three parallel elements in this chapter: my own construction of a syncretic theoretical framework for the analysis and interpretation of place, a âcommonplace bookâ element of theoretical reflections on place and elements of place by other writers and, finally, a stream of moments from the extended archive of Maxwell Street. These three elements rarely directly refer to each other. My intention is for the text to be open enough for readers to draw a diverse array of possible readings that might inform their own approaches to place.
Location, Locale, Sense of Place
Place is best known to geographers as a meaningful segment of space. In the humanistic tradition it is most often contrasted with the more abstract idea of space. While the former is richly suggestive of meaning and attachment, the latter is more generally associated with abstraction and action.
Place, here, is defined as a portion of space that has accumulated particular meanings at both the level of the individual and the social. This is the classic definition provided by Yi-Fu Tuan of place as a field of care and centre of meaning (Tuan, 1977). To Tuan, place is a pause in the wider world of space, which, in his terms, is a more abstract field of action.
Open space has no trodden paths and signposts. It has no fixed pattern or established human meaning; it is like a blank sheet on which meaning may be imposed. Enclosed and humanized space is place. Compared to space, place is a calm center of established values. Human beings require both space and place. Human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom. (Tuan, 1977: 54)
According to John Agnew, place consists of three elements: location, locale and sense of place. Location refers to objective position within an agreed spatial framework, such as longitude and latitude (Agnew, 1987). Location also allows us to situate ourselves in relation to other locations that are given distances away in a certain direction. Location is the answer to the question of âWhere?â.
The roadways from curb line to curb line of the following streets: West Maxwell Street from the west line of South Union Avenue to the east line of South Sangamon Street, except the roadway of South Halsted Street; West 14th Street and West 14th Place, from the west line of South Halsted Street to the east line of South Sangamon Street. (Legal Definition of the Maxwell Street Market in the Municipal Code of Chicago, quoted in Diagnostic Survey of Relocation Problems of Non-Residential Establishments, Roosevelt-Halsted Area, 1965. Institute of Urban Life, Loyola University for the Department of Urban Renewal, City of Chicago, p. 21)
Nowhere, unless perhaps in dreams, can the phenomenon of the boundary be experienced in a more originary way than in cities. To know them means to understand those lines that, running alongside railroad crossings and across privately owned lots, within the park and along the riverbank, function as limits; it means to know those confines, together with the enclaves of the various districts. As threshold, the boundary stretches across streets; a new precinct begins like a step into the void â as though one had unexpectedly cleared a low step on a flight of stairs. (Benjamin, 1999: 88)
Locale refers to the physical and social context within which social relations unfold. Locale refers, in one sense, to the landscape of a place â its physical manifestation as a unique assemblage of buildings, parks, roads and infrastructure. Locale also refers to place as a setting for particular practices that mark it out from other places. These include the everyday practices of work, education and reproduction amongst others. We often know a place, in some sense, as a locale â a unique combination of things and practices within which life unfolds.
The latter facility is an open-air market where, on a busy day, more than a thousand individual proprietors arrange their merchandise on temporary stands, at the tailgate of their trucks, or simply on the pavement, in the expectation of selling some of them to passing pedestriansâŚ. Many of the operators sell second-hand merchandise, and bargain-hunters come to Maxwell Street from all parts of the Chicago area, and even from locations outside the State. The entrepreneurs who operate in the Maxwell Street Mark...
