Place

The concept and its importance

Photo: David Redfern.

A legacy of place – coal mining in Doncaster. When I first came to teach in the town in 1973 there were 18 deep coalmines within a 15-mile radius of the town centre. Today, there are none.

There are many ways to consider the concept of ‘place’. ‘Place’ is where someone was brought up, lives and may eventually die, and contains features that are unique to everyone. A place is more than just a location. Try this technique: ask each of your friends, family, and acquaintances what your ‘place’ means to them. We all see places differently.

The definition of place, like any concept, is contested. At its heart, though, lies the notion of a meaningful segment of geographical space. We tend to think of places as settlements, for example, Doncaster or Dundee or Dudley or Dartford. We also consider areas of cities or neighbourhoods – Harrow (London) or Craigleith (Edinburgh) or Longsight (Manchester) – to be places. Closer in, well-known public spaces are referred to as places – Covent Garden or Land’s End. We may refer to a restaurant or café as a ‘favourite place’. We also use expressions such as ‘knowing one’s place’ or being ‘put in our place’ to suggest a more abstract and less locatable interaction of the social and the geographical. We have ‘places’ set at the dinner table and usually one of them is ours. We may have a favourite chair as our ‘place’. We often have our favourite ‘places’ at school. Places, therefore, create an important basis of life, known as a ‘lived experience’.

The latter notions begin to connect with the importance of place in our lives and experiences. At this point can ‘place’ take on a larger scale? Is ‘place’ important to us regionally – some people are proud Cornishmen, or Lancastrians – or nationally – the Welsh and the Scots? What of our ‘place’ in Europe? How many of us regard ourselves as European rather than British? Beyond the scale of the nation, environmental activist groups work to make us think of the Earth as a place – as a home for humanity – rather than a space to be exploited. Place, then, is not scale specific. It can be as small as a setting at a table and as large as the Earth.

The common assumption that place is a settlement is but one definition of place, and not the most interesting. So, we must also consider the subjective aspects of a place, and not just the objective. This leads us to refer to a ‘sense of place’. This refers to the feelings evoked by a place for both the insiders (people who live there) and outsiders (people who visit the area).

Places, then, are combinations of material things that occupy a particular segment of space and have sets of meanings attached to them. The concept of place can, therefore, be summarised as:

Place = location + meaning

Place characteristics

One framework for the study of place characteristics is shown in Figure 1. This approach draws on well-established geographical concepts: physical factors, economic functions, and the cultural landscape. These three elements are interconnected and interdependent.

Figure 1.

Physical features

The site of a place is the actual land it is built on. Settlements have historically taken root wherever geographical site factors favour economic activities that cannot be carried out as profitably elsewhere. Local resources such as coal or water explain why some places are where they are. Places within large cities have their own advantageous site factors and topography. The high elevation of London’s Hampstead neighbourhood, for example, provided wealthy Victorians with clean air and safe water. It remains an affluent place.

Economic functions

The economic function of a place is what it does in terms of providing services and work for people. Originally, this tended to be linked with site factors. Many places have changed their function over time. Liverpool and Manchester are now post-industrial cities where consumer services have replaced manufacturing industries. In some post-productive rural places, agriculture has given way to tourism. Economic functions and site factors are interconnected insofar as industry may cause physical changes (resources eventually become depleted, groundwater abstraction can lead to ground subsidence or other physical change).

Cultural landscape

The cultural landscape is everything we see in a place. It is the totality of the changes which people have brought to the natural landscape, including the architecture, infrastructure, heritage, and demography of a place. It also includes the art, music (soundscape) and sporting life of a place. Originally, football teams drew their amateur players from local factories (the cannon on Arsenal’s badge reflects the club’s birth in the 1880s among the munitions factories of Woolwich, by the river Thames).

As stated above, geographers studying place refer to insider and outsider perspectives.

Insider perspectives:

·         develop through everyday experiences in familiar settings – daily rhythms (e.g. the school run) and shared experiences (e.g. socialising at the village pub)

·         are based on experiences acquired over time

·         underpin the subjectivity that is the basis for the sense of place of a community

·         are intimate/personal views.

Outsider perspectives:

·         are often about looking and learning - a personal view of entering a location or landscape and discovering that place, as a visitor

·         see things afresh

·         ask questions that the inhabitants don’t think to ask because the answers are so familiar

·         are neutral/abstract views.

Categories of place

Various cultural geographers have tried to categorise places. Some categories include ‘far places’, ‘near places’, ‘experienced places’ and ‘media places’. Perhaps these are best illustrated by the following?

Consider a village near Banbury in rural ‘middle’ England where people of different social groups live. At one extreme of the community there are highly educated academics, scientists and businesspeople, mainly men, whose work is based in the nearby city of Oxford, though they all have computers with high-speed broadband at home. These are in constant contact with, and physically travelling between, colleagues and customers all around the world. The spaces that they move in, both physically and virtually, are thoroughly global (far places). At the other extreme of the scale are people who have never been to London and only rarely have made it as far as Oxford, to go to the shops or maybe to the hospital. Members of this group are known as the ‘locals’, and most of them work on farms or in village shops and services (near places).

Other people in these villages work locally but are employed as cleaners or caterers by multinational firms, for which this is just one group of workers among many scattered over the globe. Finally, there are women (mostly) who are the partners of the men, several of whom are occupied in a daily round of nurseries and child-minders, often being the heart and soul of local meetings and charities (near places). They tend to drive into Oxford to do their shopping, maintain contacts with extended family outside the local area and like to go on holiday to somewhere ‘exotic’ (far places).

This account of the different social groups in this hypothetical village shows how place is far more permeable for some (the wealthy incomers and out-goers) than it is for others. In addition, within that social grouping, there are gender differences in the shaping of activities within the place. However, even the more rooted, less travelled lower income people here are increasingly touched by wider events. Farm workers, for example, are subject to agricultural policy decisions made in London or elsewhere, and the cleaners and caterers who work for multinational firms in the area might well feel the force of global economics if those companies were to cut back on jobs (all experienced places).

Add to these the assertion that in today’s electronic society people have no ‘sense of place’; rather they occupy media places. Electronic media are undermining the traditional relationship between a physical setting and a social setting. The world’s media bring to our location events that are taking place in another location, and hence in some ways we are transported to that location even though we remain in our location. At a much smaller scale is the situation in which two people are having a telephone or a WhatsApp conversation in two different locations. Indeed, the telephone (or computer) brings them closer together than with other people in their respective locations. Furthermore, the plethora of media communications in recent years has forced us to consider the bias or agenda of the source(s).