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Place

Place typically refers to a particular segment of the earth's surface that is characterized by the unique sense of belonging and attachment that makes it different from other places around it. Thus, place is a meaningful portion of space. In many ways, the concept of place lies at the heart of human geography. This is because it is a concept that is widely used in everyday life; it has become part of common sense. This place is here and that place is over there. This taken-for-grantedness, however, hides the variety of ways in which the notion of place can be approached and the number of roles in play in the human experience of the world.

Location, Landscape, and Sense of Place

At its most basic level, place refers to a location. A location is either an absolute indicator of where something is in terms of an abstract set of measures (e.g., a map reference) or a relative indicator of where something is in relation to other things (e.g., A is 50 miles north of B). This is one way in which place is used both in human geography and in our everyday life. Here place simply refers to the “where” of something.

Place also refers to a physical landscape that makes one place unique from another. We might talk about our favorite place (e.g., somewhere we went on vacation as a child) and mean the total sum of material (both “natural” and “cultural”) at a particular location. In this sense, place is much more than a reference to an absolute or relative location; instead, it refers to buildings, beaches, hills, forests—all the things that make one place different from the next place.

An important component of place is its sense of place. This term indicates all of the subjective meanings that become attached to a location and the physical landscape that is characteristic of that location. Some of these meanings may be personal and arise from individual biographies. It may be, for instance, that a certain smell makes us think back to a particular place, or perhaps the memory of somewhere we once lived fills us with emotions that are hard to explain—nostalgia, fear, sadness, hope. Some senses of place, however, are more shared and are likely to be the product of mediation. Places, after all, often are inhabited by a variety of people who have things in common—who share daily routines. In addition, places are objects of representation and appear in novels, music, and film as well as on television. So, when we mention a place such as New Orleans or Hong Kong, there are likely to be certain meanings that arise again and again among a diverse group of people. We can think of these shared senses of place as place images.

Place in Human Geography

Humanistic Geography

Although place seems to lie at the heart of geography, the idea of place was not examined in any detail until the 1970s. For most of the 20th century, the idea of region formed the basis of human geography. Only with the advent of humanistic geography, and the writings of Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Relph, and Anne Buttimer in particular, was place subjected to critical scrutiny. Humanistic geographers have developed a notion of place that sees it as a way of “being-in-the-world” developed from the philosophy of phenomenology. Being-in-the-world through place involves subjective attachments to the world. Modes of expression, such as literature, film, art, gardening, and architecture, all can be seen as ways of making places through subjective immersion in the world and the assignment of meaning to portions of the world. Humanistic geographers looked to such practices to counter the perceived meaninglessness of concepts such as space and location that had been dominant in spatial science during the 1960s and 1970s. The concept of place also differed from the earlier concept of region in that it was less descriptive. Whereas regional geography sought to define regions as clear portions of the world, humanistic geography was more interested in the ways in which the world was made meaningful. Rather than seeking to map places and noting the differences, humanistic geographers wanted to explore what it was like to be human in a world of places. It was concerned with how places were created through personal attachment as well as the shared forms of meaning production such as art, literature, and the transformation of the material world itself.

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