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Place: An Introduction
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.
238 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 29, 2019
Five stars! This one is background, but not required reading, for my first course towards a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies at Duke University. "Place" gives me a better understanding of why Walla Walla will always have a hold on me: it was the dream (anticipated and lived) for so long.
1 Introduction: Defining Place
". . . . there has been very little considered understanding of what the word 'place' means (p. 1).
"One answer is that they are spaces which people have made meaningful. They are all spaces people are attached to in one way or another. This is the most straightforward and common definition of place - a meaningful location" (p. 12).
". . . . where the forest is the realm of danger, darkness, exile solitude, and self-extinction, . . ." (p. 16). This is reminiscent of Hawthorne's"Young Goodman Brown."
"We do not live in landscapes - we look at them" (p. 18).
"An important theme of this book is not a thing in the world but a way of understanding the world" (p. 18).
"Place, at a basic level, is is space invested with meaning in the context of power" (p. 19).
2 Genealogy of Place
". . . . so place, necessarily, provides the basis for existence" (p. 26). See also Kant's pure intuitions of space and time.
"A different argument is made by Nick Entrikin as he traces some of the strands of thought in North America which have argued that the stability of democracy is based on an attachment to place and local community (Entrikin (1991)" (p. 33).
"Consumption, through the disguise of production processes, hides the consequences of our purchase and thus creates an amoral consumer's world" (p. 39).
"Rather they see it as a primary basis for existence - for 'coming to appearance.'. This is very different from the currently hegemonic position taken up by geographers and others that places are primarily socially constructed" (p. 48).
3 Place in a Mobile World
"It is through participating in these daily performances that we get to know a place and feel part of it" (p. 64). I hope that someday I will go to Walla Walla and see how the trees I planted are doing. I have come to realize that I can never go back.
"Place, then, needs to be understood as an embodied relationship with the world" (p. 69).
". . . . so that trade becomes a powerful new source of ecological change" (p. 73).
"Auge's thesis of non-place as a new kind of spatial area, distinct from the deep map of anthropological place, is mirrored in the work of anthropologists and others who locate the production of identities in cosmopolitan forms of mobility rather than in stable and bonded places" (p. 81).
4 Reading "A Global Sense of Place"
"So place, for Harvey, is a conditional form of 'permansence' in the flow of space and time" (p. 92).
"Thus nations invest in monuments, grand buildings, and other projects to fill the place of the Nation and thus secure their power and authority" (p. 97). See Periclean Athens.
"Is it not possible for a sense of place to be progressive; not self-enclosing and defensive, but outward looking?" (p. 98).
"There is a specificity of place which derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local relations" (p. 107). See conservative/farming, but also liberal/Whitman College/wineries Walla Walla.
"The sheer fact of having to get on together; the fact that you cannot (even should you want to, and this itself should in no way be presumed) 'purify' spaces/places" (p. 108). This is a restatement of John Rawls 'overarching consensus.'
5 Working with Place - Creating Places
"Place and memory are, it seems, inevitably intertwined" (p. 119).
"For a frontier to exist there have to be the two sides of savagery and civilization" (p. 135).
"As we have seen throughout this book, the construction of places is more often than not achieved through the exclusion of some 'other' - a constitutive outside" (p. 138-139).
"Whereas cyberspace has previously been imagined as a separate, non-material realm - a kind of alternative reality - virtual worlds are now increasingly layered on to 'real' places" (p. 147).
"At least for the more mobile and networked of us, place has become less about our origins on some singular piece of blood soil, and more about forming connections with the many sites of our lives" (p. 148).
"Art, however, has an uneasy relationship to place" (p. 152).
"There is no doubt that these acts of place-creation are political and contested and researching this 'politics of place' is an important strands of geological enquiry" (p. 161).
6 Working with Place - Anachorism
"Such uses of the term place suggest a tight connection between geographical place and assumptions about normative behavior" (p. 165).
"Anthropologist Liisa Malkki has argued that there is a tendency in the modern world to locate people and identities in in particular spaces and within particular boundaries" (p. 173).
"In philosophical terms, place is more than a question of ontology (what exists) but, perhaps more fundamentally, a question of epistemology (how we know things)" (p. 174).
"There 'vagrants' and 'masterless men' created a new measure of uncertainty about the traditional patterns of rights and duties" (p. 175).
"Refugees and asylum seekers are at the center of the moral panic of the age" (p. 181).
"You cannot be an internal refugee" (p. 183).
"This leads us to think of mobile people as disruptive and morally suspicious" (p. 186).
"From the outset we have seen how places are gatherings, or assemblages, of material things(walls, trees, roads, etc.), meanings (stories, narratives, ideologies) and practices (the many things we do)" (p. 186).
1 Introduction: Defining Place
". . . . there has been very little considered understanding of what the word 'place' means (p. 1).
"One answer is that they are spaces which people have made meaningful. They are all spaces people are attached to in one way or another. This is the most straightforward and common definition of place - a meaningful location" (p. 12).
". . . . where the forest is the realm of danger, darkness, exile solitude, and self-extinction, . . ." (p. 16). This is reminiscent of Hawthorne's"Young Goodman Brown."
"We do not live in landscapes - we look at them" (p. 18).
"An important theme of this book is not a thing in the world but a way of understanding the world" (p. 18).
"Place, at a basic level, is is space invested with meaning in the context of power" (p. 19).
2 Genealogy of Place
". . . . so place, necessarily, provides the basis for existence" (p. 26). See also Kant's pure intuitions of space and time.
"A different argument is made by Nick Entrikin as he traces some of the strands of thought in North America which have argued that the stability of democracy is based on an attachment to place and local community (Entrikin (1991)" (p. 33).
"Consumption, through the disguise of production processes, hides the consequences of our purchase and thus creates an amoral consumer's world" (p. 39).
"Rather they see it as a primary basis for existence - for 'coming to appearance.'. This is very different from the currently hegemonic position taken up by geographers and others that places are primarily socially constructed" (p. 48).
3 Place in a Mobile World
"It is through participating in these daily performances that we get to know a place and feel part of it" (p. 64). I hope that someday I will go to Walla Walla and see how the trees I planted are doing. I have come to realize that I can never go back.
"Place, then, needs to be understood as an embodied relationship with the world" (p. 69).
". . . . so that trade becomes a powerful new source of ecological change" (p. 73).
"Auge's thesis of non-place as a new kind of spatial area, distinct from the deep map of anthropological place, is mirrored in the work of anthropologists and others who locate the production of identities in cosmopolitan forms of mobility rather than in stable and bonded places" (p. 81).
4 Reading "A Global Sense of Place"
"So place, for Harvey, is a conditional form of 'permansence' in the flow of space and time" (p. 92).
"Thus nations invest in monuments, grand buildings, and other projects to fill the place of the Nation and thus secure their power and authority" (p. 97). See Periclean Athens.
"Is it not possible for a sense of place to be progressive; not self-enclosing and defensive, but outward looking?" (p. 98).
"There is a specificity of place which derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local relations" (p. 107). See conservative/farming, but also liberal/Whitman College/wineries Walla Walla.
"The sheer fact of having to get on together; the fact that you cannot (even should you want to, and this itself should in no way be presumed) 'purify' spaces/places" (p. 108). This is a restatement of John Rawls 'overarching consensus.'
5 Working with Place - Creating Places
"Place and memory are, it seems, inevitably intertwined" (p. 119).
"For a frontier to exist there have to be the two sides of savagery and civilization" (p. 135).
"As we have seen throughout this book, the construction of places is more often than not achieved through the exclusion of some 'other' - a constitutive outside" (p. 138-139).
"Whereas cyberspace has previously been imagined as a separate, non-material realm - a kind of alternative reality - virtual worlds are now increasingly layered on to 'real' places" (p. 147).
"At least for the more mobile and networked of us, place has become less about our origins on some singular piece of blood soil, and more about forming connections with the many sites of our lives" (p. 148).
"Art, however, has an uneasy relationship to place" (p. 152).
"There is no doubt that these acts of place-creation are political and contested and researching this 'politics of place' is an important strands of geological enquiry" (p. 161).
6 Working with Place - Anachorism
"Such uses of the term place suggest a tight connection between geographical place and assumptions about normative behavior" (p. 165).
"Anthropologist Liisa Malkki has argued that there is a tendency in the modern world to locate people and identities in in particular spaces and within particular boundaries" (p. 173).
"In philosophical terms, place is more than a question of ontology (what exists) but, perhaps more fundamentally, a question of epistemology (how we know things)" (p. 174).
"There 'vagrants' and 'masterless men' created a new measure of uncertainty about the traditional patterns of rights and duties" (p. 175).
"Refugees and asylum seekers are at the center of the moral panic of the age" (p. 181).
"You cannot be an internal refugee" (p. 183).
"This leads us to think of mobile people as disruptive and morally suspicious" (p. 186).
"From the outset we have seen how places are gatherings, or assemblages, of material things(walls, trees, roads, etc.), meanings (stories, narratives, ideologies) and practices (the many things we do)" (p. 186).
September 30, 2015
An interdisciplinary examination of theory on place. Cresswell, a geographer, looks at the concept of place from as many angles as he can -- a history of the concept in geography, a look at place in terms of philosophy, art, city planning and structure, and more. He sets different thinkers from across the disciplines in dialogue with each other to give us a multidimensional sense of the concept, and how thinkers in different fields and with different agendae think about place and what it means.
Of particular interest is in the binary he sets up (and he sets up a few) of stationary place versus flow or flux -- asking whether place is a static location (informed and created by the lives and lifeways of the people who inhabit the place over longer timescales) or a nexus of lives and lifeways and goods that flow through a particular locale -- a node, in a Big History sense. (The book is a great one for a Big History course that might look at place; Cresswell's discussions of complexity and flow are very Big History).
Politics, particularly the politics of the moment in the United States, is inescapable. We get the history of the gated community as a bulwark of control and thus safety against uncontrollable "vectors" -- human beings who "don't belong". A lot of what's been in the news in the past year is given a language here -- for example, young men being shot or young women being thrown around by police for being present in such communities where they are seen to not belong; the rapid gentrification of San Francisco; the Syrian refugee crisis.
Also interesting is Cresswell's ongoing discussion, then, of Doreen Massey's ideas about the progressive versus reactionary responses to flows (of immigrants, information, and capital -- networks of exchange, in other words), and then the static place vs. flux binary as politics, as progressive (accepting of or embracing flux as essential to place) or reactionary (embracing static place as something to be defended, even through constructed ideas of "heritage", against flows of humans who are seen as outsiders who do not belong.
"Place, at a basic level," Cresswell writes, "is space invested with meaning in the context of power."
He cites Manuel Castells as arguing that "some people are able to travel more or less at will (along with capital and information) and that the poor resist this world of flows through embedding themselves in place ... The poor can practice what David Harvey calls 'militant particularism' (Harvey 1996)"(82).
Again, useful in thinking about this moment in the United States, in which we have a member of a highly mobile cosmopolitan global elite, who has made a fortune constructing places for cosmopolitan elites to flow through, positioning himself as a champion of a not-mobile population of agitated "locals" against a higly-mobile (and thus cosmopolitan) flow of immigrants. Stoking militant particularism to attain power.
The book is not an easy read for laypersons -- it's a bit dense at times, and rather heady and chock full of discussions of other texts. It could also benefit from a more comprehensive conclusion.
But it is a very useful text for understanding some of the forces at play in a rapidly changing world -- as well as for simply opening up discussion of what, at first blush, may seem a pretty simple concept.
Of particular interest is in the binary he sets up (and he sets up a few) of stationary place versus flow or flux -- asking whether place is a static location (informed and created by the lives and lifeways of the people who inhabit the place over longer timescales) or a nexus of lives and lifeways and goods that flow through a particular locale -- a node, in a Big History sense. (The book is a great one for a Big History course that might look at place; Cresswell's discussions of complexity and flow are very Big History).
Politics, particularly the politics of the moment in the United States, is inescapable. We get the history of the gated community as a bulwark of control and thus safety against uncontrollable "vectors" -- human beings who "don't belong". A lot of what's been in the news in the past year is given a language here -- for example, young men being shot or young women being thrown around by police for being present in such communities where they are seen to not belong; the rapid gentrification of San Francisco; the Syrian refugee crisis.
Also interesting is Cresswell's ongoing discussion, then, of Doreen Massey's ideas about the progressive versus reactionary responses to flows (of immigrants, information, and capital -- networks of exchange, in other words), and then the static place vs. flux binary as politics, as progressive (accepting of or embracing flux as essential to place) or reactionary (embracing static place as something to be defended, even through constructed ideas of "heritage", against flows of humans who are seen as outsiders who do not belong.
"Place, at a basic level," Cresswell writes, "is space invested with meaning in the context of power."
He cites Manuel Castells as arguing that "some people are able to travel more or less at will (along with capital and information) and that the poor resist this world of flows through embedding themselves in place ... The poor can practice what David Harvey calls 'militant particularism' (Harvey 1996)"(82).
Again, useful in thinking about this moment in the United States, in which we have a member of a highly mobile cosmopolitan global elite, who has made a fortune constructing places for cosmopolitan elites to flow through, positioning himself as a champion of a not-mobile population of agitated "locals" against a higly-mobile (and thus cosmopolitan) flow of immigrants. Stoking militant particularism to attain power.
The book is not an easy read for laypersons -- it's a bit dense at times, and rather heady and chock full of discussions of other texts. It could also benefit from a more comprehensive conclusion.
But it is a very useful text for understanding some of the forces at play in a rapidly changing world -- as well as for simply opening up discussion of what, at first blush, may seem a pretty simple concept.
September 7, 2021
Tim Cresswell's "Place" makes for some interesting ideas on how we think of place and its meaning in our world. A running argument in the book is that there really is no such thing as place per se. In other words, place is something that is not much different from race or gender—a useful fiction created by man to understand a very confusing world. Still, Cresswell says, we need place to make the world go round. Place, he shows us, is everywhere we look, from our stories, to our religions, to games, family life, and everywhere else in between. The world revolves around place and needs it to survive. I liked the book because while it was weird and at times hard to understand or follow, it made me think.
That said, I will warn prospective readers to be mindful of his biases. He seems to be inclined to the progressive side of the political debate, and in many instances it's clear to see where he stands on certain debates. Then again, as historians and authors (Cresswell is not a historian, but a geographer), we all have our biases. I also disagree with his assertion that place is somehow a useful fiction. Place is very real, in my view, just as gender is also very real. A good book still, even if weird.
That said, I will warn prospective readers to be mindful of his biases. He seems to be inclined to the progressive side of the political debate, and in many instances it's clear to see where he stands on certain debates. Then again, as historians and authors (Cresswell is not a historian, but a geographer), we all have our biases. I also disagree with his assertion that place is somehow a useful fiction. Place is very real, in my view, just as gender is also very real. A good book still, even if weird.
January 31, 2018
I must admit that when I first began to read this book I had a very difficult time with the
repetition of the word “place”. I get very frustrated with repetition weather it is in music, writing, or speaking. It was like listening to someone who uses the word “like” for every other word when they talk. Once I got past my pet peeve and read deeper into the book, I couldn’t help but appreciate the many concepts of the word. That being said, I wouldn't recommend this book and most definitely would not want to read it again.
repetition of the word “place”. I get very frustrated with repetition weather it is in music, writing, or speaking. It was like listening to someone who uses the word “like” for every other word when they talk. Once I got past my pet peeve and read deeper into the book, I couldn’t help but appreciate the many concepts of the word. That being said, I wouldn't recommend this book and most definitely would not want to read it again.
November 28, 2017
Essential for my reading list on place theory. Good introduction to interdisciplinary approaches to place.
October 5, 2018
Read for work. Very useful.
August 24, 2020
This book was so extraordinarily boring. Although for what it is (a philosophical introduction to the concept of place,) I am sure it is good.
March 27, 2017
fun, semi-rigorous theory presented casually
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September 29, 2017304.23 C922 2015
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews