Yi-Fu Tuan, a Geographer from the University of Minnesota, wrote a seminal work titled Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience in which he describes the ways in which people feel and think about their space, linking attachments to home with experience and the sense of time.
As a way of defining the difference between place and space, he states "Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other." This difference that happens to a space over time is essential to our understanding of a sense of place. Tuan claims that a change happens, one that is personal and unique dependent on our own set of factors. “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.... The ideas "space" and "place" require each other for definition.” So we fill in the gaps of a space with our own values, our own memories or attitudes about the space. We fill in the paint-by-numbers of a space with our own colors dependent on how we feel about and the history we have with that space. We are the mediators of how that place becomes created, and it lives in our own vidid colors in our mind.
Since I have been alive, my parents have never moved from their house. This means that the house that I grew up in is the only home that I have associated with that word. I have lived other places, of course, and all of those places have their own merit and value to me as I grow and navigate this world, but none of them are the same as that first, original home. I have painted that house with colors and shades of memory that no other space can have. I have dropped down upon that address all the sentimentality, all the cliche, all the memories and all the history of me as I became me, upon that two story building in Indianapolis, Indiana. And that place to me is colored with different hues and shades, tones and tints than my brothers and parents have colored that house because of the value that I, personally, have added to that home. No one can change the palette, and no one can make that place of mine their place.
Tuan also states that “Experience is a cover-all term for the various modes through which a person knows and constructs a reality.” So, he says that we construct our reality based upon the experiences that we gain, and we gain those experiences through how our bodies interpret and organize data obtained from our senses. He states “Human feeling is not a succession of discrete sensations; rather memory and anticipation are able to wield sensory impacts into a shifting stream of experience so that we many speak of a life of feeling as we do a life of thought.” Our bodies take all the various stimuli, from our sight, touch, taste, smell, and create bundles of memories out of them, and these memories become this experience whenever they are recalled through the mind. Our minds create our experience, and our experience dictates how we perceive place.
Another writer that I have been reading, the French author Marc Auge, has written a book titled Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity in which he argues that some places, such as shopping malls, motorways, and airport lounges, are both everywhere and nowhere, which he calls Non-Space. He believes that, as a culture, we collectively assign this value, this place making, and that we can therefore collectively have spaces that are void of a collective value. Places that are generic, uniform, homogeneous regardless of culture and history become the same regardless of their geographic location because they create this same sensory experience regardless of whether you’re in Bangkok or Boston. Therefore, these spaces are a Non-Space.
Auge also speaks of how, because of increases in technology and information gathering, places live within our minds as much as they live within our experiential memory. “Certain places exist only through the words that evoke them, and in the sense they are non-places, or rather, imaginary places: banal utopias, cliches.” Ahh, Paris in the springtime. Or Central Park in the fall. Whether one has experienced these places in time or not, this collective memory exists in us even though we have not experienced the geography of the place. And this lack of experience creates a myth of exoticism and perfection. A collective idea of perfection.
Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, my parents, siblings and I would pack into a car and drive three and a half hours south of Indianapolis to Evansville, Indiana, These treks became epic in the lore of our family. Yellow and then blue station wagons, then yellow and then blue trucks, and finally a blue sedan contained all the excitement, anxiety, internal family struggles and external personality differences of a family of, at times, six as we sped down first interstate highways then state highways on our way to see our extended family again. And the one concession that my father made was the only pit stop along the trip, a convenient store just south of the town of Terre Haute, Indiana called Stuckeys. It was about equidistant from the two cities, and past the hustle and bustle of Terre Haute, but it became kinda like magic.
In my childhood memory it was dressed as a carnival, like the colors of fair rides, a wonder bread bag of a building. It was bright white with red and yellow stripes, bold and exciting, and it seemed as new to the world as I was. Slick and clean along this rural highway 41, to me it possessed everything that the countryside was not. Now, it could be that it was just too similar to my world of the city, and this familiarity helped me to accept it more, but we would not and could not stop at any other convenient store along the way.
Maybe it was because I was eight, maybe it was because I had two older brothers exaggerating the experience with me, maybe it was because my parents just wanted us to sit still and quiet for another half hour trapped in the back of a station wagon, but Stuckeys took on a life of its own. Mystique was created, possibly due to repetition of it’s reputation, possibly due to the fact that they had candies and sweets that were different and unobtainable where I was from. But quickly Stuckey’s became the other, an exotic place visited only on those trips. It was anticipation and promise, and often an indicator of distance and time, but it took on a special meaning to my brothers and I because of this attraction. It became an all together different place than any other gas station or convenient store, and our memory treated it as such.
Over time, as all things do, Stuckey’s changed. Different owners, new coats of paint, and construction on a new entrance and exits all evolved with our yearly trips, but the mystique remained pretty constant. But like most things, we didn’t notice all the little changes until they all became the large changes, and soon Stuckey’s had become someplace all together different. I first noticed it when the place didn’t look as shiny and new anymore. Graffiti scratched in the bathroom door, water stains on the floor by the cooler, chips and divots in the counter top all began to show the age of the place, and in some respects to me as well. This place was new like I was, and now it was becoming aged.
What it was really becoming was what it always was, a place that belonged both to that community as well as to the transit that passed by highway 41 from Chicago to Evansville. About this phenomenon, Auge says “...but they may pass by again, every summer or several times a year, so that an abstract space, one they have regular occasion to read rather than see, can become strangely familiar to them over time, much as other, richer people get used to the orchid-seller at Bangkok Airport, or the duty-free shop at Roissy I.” And Auge sees this as a detriment to that place, he sees it as a way to make that place a non-place, and that seems to be entirely contradictory.
If we look at Tuan, who says that a space becomes a place when value is added to it, me and my family have added a value to Stuckey’s that few people probably have. And to us it has a place, for us it is more than just a convenient store that one stops by on the way to Vincennes. It has a value placed on it by us, we have given it significance. Auge argues that there needs to be a universal declaration of and definition of a place, dictated by those who live there and are most invested. But what Auge ignores is that there are times when a place has value assigned to it, and it becomes more than non place to an individual who is not continuously ingrained in the place.
Auge admits that not all places are non, and these places can coexist. “In the concrete reality of today's world, places and spaces, places and non-places intertwine and tangle together.” But also, places can oscillate between place and non place depending on whether someone has added that value to the space, just as we assign different values and feelings to different people in our lives. About this intention, Auge admits “In Western societies, at least, the individual wants to be a world in himself; he intends to interpret the information delivered to him by himself and for himself.” This seems to be an integral component to the basis of Auge’s Supermodernity or Hypermodernity, that the individual can manipulate their aspect of their experience. But that will have to wait for another post.
It really comes down to a classic tale of collective versus individual assignment and memory. But in the end doesn’t the collective derive itself, at least in the beginning, from an individuals assessment and proliferation of an idea or belief? And this proliferation, this creation of a notion, becomes the basis for an idea of what a place is. The myth of Stuckey’s becomes created, and eventually becomes place, created by individuals passing through a non place along Highway 41.
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