Perspectives On Place (Part II)
Part of an ongoing series that revisits different ideas I explored as part of my graduate studies in the Environmental Humanities.
RESPONDING TO TIM CRESSWELL’S PLACE (CHAPTERS 03 AND 04)
In the chapter three of his book exploring place, Tim Creswell focuses in on deeper readings of place from two separate theorists, David Harvey and Doreen Massey, who argue distinct positions for the cost and benefits of place construction. This is followed in chapter four by an analysis of several specific examples that further confuse and trouble this elusive issue of place. Seemingly place construction (either literal or embodied) is a critical part of the human experience, but when deconstructed and measured against the fact that individual and social constructions can change lives and physical reality this concept takes on potent real world manifestations.
Globalization and its purported effects on place are a driving focus of the readings Cresswell gives to Harvey and Massey. For Harvey place construction is a reactionary action founded on the contested terrain of competing definitions. Place is constructed by the ambiguous fact of living in globalized, post-modern world. Harvey approaches as place as a social constructionist and critiques long-held ideas of place (like those of Martin Heidegger) as out of touch with reality (since not everyone can “dwell” in the types of places often framed by such argument).
For Massey, however, place construction is a much more progressive act that is not fundamentally threatened by the purported homogenization brought on by the globalization of capital. Rather, she argues that place is constructed of many numerous interests (not just economic). In this way globalization has the unintended and potentially positive power to bring diversity and varying human experiences into place, thereby progressively driving it to broaden in positive ways.
Creswell ends chapter three by offering another vision of place that acknowledges that places are highly contested, even by people living in the same fixed location and time, and that as a result place as dynamically shaped not only by theorists but by everyday inhabitants with competing visions that feed into reality, shape it, and are reshaped when physical realities (of environment, society, politics, economy, etc) inevitably push back.
A driving component of Harvey’s critique of place comes in the clearly observable fact that, whatever its assumed essentialness in human existence, place fundamentally acts to create an inside/outside dynamic that can take shape in any number of social beliefs and power relationships. This insider/outsider dynamic manifests itself across a range of examples, and Creswell specifically cites planned communities, human sexuality, homeless populations, and refugees as areas where this constructed sense of place is seemingly limited and troubled. Pivotal to this discussion is the idea of transgression (itself a spatial concept) which casts those who don’t fit into cultural and social assumptions of place as polluting outsider. This is observable in cultural assumptions about the heternormality assumed in ideas of the home that aren’t broad enough to conceptualize realties outside the heterosexual, as well as the dehumanizing of both homeless and refugees who are fundamentally without home (and therefore place). Deconstructing “home” in Western culture reveals it to be a contested area often controlled and informed by elites and rooted in land ownership (with the accompanying political and social justice issued bound to such a system).
That the social issues tied to place construction are becoming increasing politicized (in the form of debates on gay rights and immigration) demonstrates that this is a vital issue. Place, in all of its forms and guises, appears central to humanity and its seeming ubiquity makes it an important object of further analysis and improved politics.