Schrodinger's Place

The first class brought forward a number of issues that strike me as fundamental for moving forward with discussions on place. Quite simply, the round robin discussion highlighted a number of stances – some quite varied – about what places are, whether there can be things that are not “places”, and how we should account for changes to/in places: do they lose some sense of placeness over time? These three main questions seem highly relevant for the remainder of the class, and I am (selfishly) choosing this opportunity to outline a number of positions and questions that came to my mind during class by way of one example.

One particular topic of conversation that stuck with me had to do with the site of Pergamon. For this site, much of the conversation revolved around its current status as a touristed location with prescribed routes for movement between the modern town of Bergama and the top of the ancient site. Tourists, it seems, tend to visit only certain parts of this site, and the new roadway privileges (encourages?) rapid access to the most popular upper portion. In class, Omur pointed out that such an engagement fails to bring the visitor to many of the old streets and paths that formed around the lower portion of the town, accessible today by a hole in a fence. Several students suggested that the bus and the tour guide components of the site prevent something akin to a ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ interaction with this location, perhaps preventing it from becoming a place. Access is too directed, too quick, and too impersonal. The visitor does not, it would seem, arrive at a strong sense of place in this way. This example seems to me to highlight all three of the questions outlined above.

The basic question of whether Pergamon is a place is loaded. One thing that the class seemed to form a consensus about is that place depends quite a bit on experience, or interaction. We did not, however, discuss the composition of these experiences or interactions. Is it between people? How significant is the location itself? Are there limits to what a place can be? Is a place not a place if it fails to meet certain criteria? Does a place cease to be a place if it is no longer experienced or interacted with in familiar ways?

In class I was (possibly mistakenly) left with a view to two different kinds of place: the material thing and the perceived thing. Discussion in the Pergamon example seemed to favor place as perceived. In this case, people don’t have time to be with place long enough to have a perception of it as place. If, however, we think of it as something more than just in the mind of the beholder, as having something locationally (ontologically?) significant to it, then place might move beyond notions of perception and social construction. Certainly those two things are involved in place-making, but we might shift the balance of ‘place’ away from the social to arrive at a more nuanced description. A move in this direction, rather than essentializing something about places, could also expand the notion of place. For instance, we might also regard places as retaining something of their pasts in what they are in the present. Pergamon, notably, is not devoid of its past connections just because tourists don’t see it in the same way as was done in the past. Those aspects of it as a place are still there, in some form or another – through description, documentation, stories, etc. In a sense, just because WE don’t see/experience/hear/interact with a place like Pergamon in its entirety, doesn’t mean that that entirety doesn’t exist. What Pergamon is as a place could be thought of as more and more all the time, rather than dwindling and disappearing.

As a quick last note, to my mind this also suggests that non-places are non-real. Everything, everywhere, all the time, has these long-term components that easily get overlooked. Everything is a place?