Why Place Matters

Why write a place substack?

I am a cultural geographer. I have written about, and taught about, place for over three decades in both the UK and the United States. In that time, I have learned that place is a topic that resonates with people once they grasp some of the complexity of what place means. This substack is an attempt to reach a wider audience with these thoughts about place. Place is, in some senses, obvious. It is part of common-sense because it is something that unites humans. We all have and know places that are important to us, places we avoid, places that infuriate us, and places we would love to visit. When we think of place we probably start with specific sites on the Earth’s surface with names (Paris, Toledo, Edinburgh, Little Snoring) and specific topographies or landscapes. If we think of Paris, we get a picture of what it looks like – the Eiffel Tower, cafes spilling out on to the street, small hotel rooms with impossible shower. There may also be characteristic sounds (the bells attached to the goats that pass the place in Calabria where I sometimes go to write) or smells (the smell of roasted malt from the distillery in the middle of Edinburgh).

Places have what we often call a “sense of place” – a combination of immediate sensory experience and mediated narratives that give places, even ones we have never visited, a specific kind of presence – a presence that might be positive of negative. But places are not necessarily the kind of locations that are named on a map. Our home is also a place – perhaps the most resonant place we have. The chair where I always sit for dinner is a place. My office is a place. The whole Earth is a place when seen by an astronaut from the moon or a space station. My PhD supervisor, the great scholar of place, Yi-Fu Tuan called place a “centre of meaning and field of care”. This makes place different from mere location. To be sure, all places are located, even when they are moving, like a ship for instance. Location is one important aspect of what makes a place. But to be a place in the sense that I am talking about here, it must have some emotional and sensory resonance. Places are meaningful and when our relationship to them is working well, we care for them.

The difference between location and place can be illustrated by comparing the location in longitude and latitude 43.0722° N, 89.4008° W with the name of that location – Madison, Wisconsin. To some of you that name will not mean much more than its co-ordinates. To some, it may bring forth images of frozen winters and people wearing cheese wedges on their heads. To many hundreds of thousands it will be where they went to College and the name will immediately bring back memories of all the things, some good, some bad, that happened there. To me, it is where I did my doctoral work and where I met my wife. It is now the name of one of our daughters. Places are a combination of location, a particular physical presence or landscape, and a set of meanings and narratives, both individual and shared.

While this provides the beginning of a definition of place it does not encapsulate quite why place is so important to us. To get at this we must recognize that we are place-bound and place-making creatures. Being human is being in place. We tell our stories through the places we were born, places we grew up and went to school, places we visited, arrived at, and left. We decorate student rooms with posters of our favourite bands, put pot-plants on windowsills, pour over maps of cities to figure out the right neighbourhood to rent or buy. We spray graffiti on walls, or clean it off. The philosopher Martin Heidegger described our being as “being-in-the world”. We are always dwelling. It is impossible to understand being human without thinking about place. That, surely, makes place an important thing to think about.

But there is more. As well as being a philosopher, Heidegger was also a Nazi. His evocation of dwelling in place became, by accident or design, part of an ideology that posited an Aryan master race firmly rooted in the deep soils of the Black Forest. As soon as we start talking about the importance of attachment to place, we simultaneously encounter the problem of the role of place in political processes of inclusion and exclusion. When “we” become attached to place, we often do so at the expense of others who do not “belong”. So, as well as place being fundamental to being human, it is also one of the main things we fight over – one of the main ways we differentiate between “us” and “them”. Place is at the heart of politics.

It is no surprise, therefore, that place is constantly in the news. Whether it is debates about the wisdom (or otherwise) of Saudi Arabia’s plan to build a futuristic 170km long city in the desert, the millennia of struggles over who belongs where and why in Israel/Palestine, arguments about gentrification or homelessness in San Francisco, attempts to remove statues of Confederate soldiers or British slave-traders from public space, or to impose a entrance fee for tourists to enter Venice – place is everywhere. It is precisely because place is central to being human that it is also subject to conflict. As humans we are attempting to make this blue dot in the endless universe into a good place. Everything we do to is just a global version of decorating rooms or planting a garden. Everywhere you look we are involved in place-making.

That is why place matters.