A Sense of Place
By emerald13, 5th Jun 2010 | Follow this author
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‘there is no there there’
What is it? The term ‘sense of place’ is defined and used in different ways and may include the actual geographic location or a feeling, a perception. It may be an inner sense of place or an actual location that is defined by name, its meaning to some, or its importance to a society.
‘there is no there there’
A SENSE OF PLACE
How we see other places can widen or narrow our place in the world. If we see similarities between say, Melbourne and Prague, we can widen our sense of place, however if we look only to the differences we tend to narrow our perspective. A sense of place is further defined at a micro place-making level; for example, the homeless person settling in for a night’s sleep in the doorway of the grocery store vs the store owner goes back to how we define the boundaries of place.
Places that lack a ‘sense of place’ are referred to as inauthentic; they have no special relationship to where they are located, they could be anywhere such as shopping malls, petrol stations and fast food chains.
Social commentator Hugh Mackay has written, that no matter your culture, connection to place is vital to our sense of identity and those who have lost their sense of place, experience much anxiety, unease and moral uncertainty.
He tells of this sense that extends to all levels of being. Mackay says that only when we feel connected to others do we seem willing to accept some responsibility for their wellbeing. That the real test of our moral sensitivity is how we treat the people who share the places where we live and work, whether we happen to like them or not.
If places shape us and we are bound to the landscape in which we live; if connection to it is enhanced by its inhabitants, by us, then a sense of place is tied not only to the environment but to the community, the individual within it.
As a highly conceptualised theory one can see how sense of place develops and evolves across three social scales; ie the individual, the collective and society.
Our own description of our place and other places is inseparable from our identity. Our identity is part of the dynamic interaction of relationships that develop between self, others and the landscape and these three key elements contribute to our sense of place. Landscapes are imbued with symbolic and material meanings that develop with various experiences and memory.
Atmosphere, as an essence of place, has less to do with aesthetics than it does the way the inhabitants act or define it.
Musing on this piece takes me further, to thinking about how we go about photographing this sense of place? And is it possible to do that as a visitor to a place we do not inhabit?
I shall be looking with a new eye at travel photography and at the inhabitants of places I travel to and will keep an eye out for the vital uniqueness that becomes the essence of a place. This applies to my daily walk around my neighbourhood.
A sense of place is a thread that ties each of us to our surroundings - a learned way to understand ‘somewhere’.
The paradox though is that, on the one hand, you can comprehend a sense of place by analysing place, yet on the other you understand a sense of place as a feeling, a quality, an atmosphere. No matter how much we try to develop a ‘sense’ of a place we also need to recognise that places have their own individual ‘sense’ – highly elastic, encompassing a range of people’s interpretations of it, and a hell of a lot harder to pin down.
Being that there is no given formula to creating or understanding a sense of place and it could take a while to get ‘right’, I look forward to researching the question ‘do Australian wines lack a sense of place’?
© Gina 2010
Acknowledgement
[1} from “Place is crucial to all Australians. It is fundamental to the human sense of self, sense of community, sense of mortality and sense of destiny”. By Hugh Mackay, 15 October 2005.
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