Place

Building Perspectives

This position has been espoused by geographers informed by Marxism, phenomenology, feminism, and critical social and cultural theory, who had become disenchanted with the lack of concern with social issues in spatial science and the way in which its proponents ignored the production of place by capital and global forces. To Marxist geographers, the differential impacts of capitalism were feeding the exclusive forces of bigotry and nationalism, as exemplified by conflicts in many parts of the world. Place thus had negative connotations. Critical cultural geographers began to use the concept of place to reveal the connection between place, meaning, and power. Place had to be understood in terms of social and cultural conflict, and once “places” were established, they became tools in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of relations of domination, oppression, and exploitation. Yet another approach spatialized ideas deriving from structuration theory to demonstrate that places were the outcomes of both larger structural concerns and individual and group action. Other studies demonstrated that the processes of economic competition were having varying effects across the globe, producing geographical difference rather than similarity. These studies led to the conception of place as “locale,” an objective arena for everyday action and face-to-face interaction and the subjective setting in which people develop and express themselves.

Dwelling Perspectives

During the 1970s, humanist geographers wanted to rehumanize human geography and felt that the way to do this was to focus on individual and group life-worlds in an attempt to recover people's sense of place—that is, how different individuals and groups interpret and develop meaningful attachments to those specific areas where they live out their lives. Place, for these geographers, was seen as a universal and transhistorical part of the human experience, and it was not so much particular places that interested them but “place” as an idea and way of being in the world. This work also uses “home” as a metaphor for place; home is seen as the foundation of [Page 2187]human identity, the dwelling place of being. In most of this work, the concepts of oneness, rootedness, authenticity, and experience were given prominence. Subsequent accounts of place in this humanistic perspective have elaborated on these ideas, based on the principle that the social and the cultural are geographically constructed. Places are seen as requiring human agents, who in turn require specific places if they are to be the selves (with identities) they are in the process of becoming: There is no place without self and no self without place. Such places are woven together by movement (practice or performance) and by the network ties that produce places as changing constellations of human commitments, capacities, and strategies.

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