Place As Context: Identity and Reflexive Interplay Between Self and Geography

They say that when it comes to real estate, it’s all about “location, location, location!” As I contemplate place/space and its ability to center and de-center writing and learning, I am beginning to see place, space, and person as a relationship, a contextual and reflexive moment in being that shapes or re-shapes perceived reality.

I also am coming to see space as both literal and abstract interplay between space and time, as we tend to bring our previous places to our current ones. Our sense of place, when mapped, might actually be far more three-dimensional than we can express as our “…drawings of psychological locations (both literal and abstract) created by writers to represent their relationships to place” (Brooke, McIntosh 131) may actually be printed on a mental vellum, transparent, one map laid upon the next.

When we are in, we are also of a place, and it’s quite possible to have these prepositional matters span considerable, real geographical terrain. It’s possible to be sitting at work, while also thinking of sitting at home, or to be in the living room of your present while thinking or perceiving reminders of the living rooms of your past. I know that I, whenever I look at the brass survey compass my father gave me for Christmas ten years ago, the one sitting on my desk now as I type, I am transported in some sense to his living room in Longmont, Colorado with its slate floors and leather furniture. I can almost smell the spent ashes of the evening fire and hear the gentle ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. So though I am sitting in a rather institutionalized, impersonal apartment, I am also comparing that to the personalized and pleasant spaces of my past. There is always an overlap of past and present, of shared space and individual space, of who I was and who I am.

In my mind, place consciousness is an inherently multiplied consciousness, an awareness of multiple spaces that overlap the present and influence our interpretation of the immediate space. Though I see the in my language the emphasis on binaries, that we know hot because we know cold, as Derrida would say, I think that when it comes to space and place consciousness, we are released from these binary constructions but lack the language to express the multiplicity. We know “home” because we know so many spaces/places that are not home, yet even “home’ is problematized by time itself. The home of our youth is not the same as the home of our adult life, and culturally we accept but cannot always name, the temporal qualities of home, of “where I’m from.” A person could sit down each morning, for example, and write a “I Am From” poem and get a different contextual center, a different sense of home, that is largely dependent on that morning’s sense of the writer’s world, history, and lived space(s).

Learning to articulate this sense of space, what Sobel termed the “three-legged stool” (school, community, environment) may indeed, as Sobel advocates, increase one’s “social capital,” community sustainability, and civic responsibility. However, it seems to me that this view and the objectives it promotes is a political response, a sort of direct action in response to Neoconservative practices that are, as Nancy Welch argues, reducing out writing and living spaces. As Sobel notes, “schools can be the epicenter for environmental change in their communities, motivating civic officials to take action” (42). It’s not that I disagree, I do believe schools can be a tremendous site of resistance (reactive) and insistence (proactive). That being said, I am more interested in place consciousness as an individual response that can help a writer or learner reclaim their vision, quite literally their ability to see and sense the world around them.

In the postmodern world, with the trends in architecture taking on a post-Heidegger, Nihilistic view, architecture is mass-produced (think of store chains here) and our daily experiences in urban spaces are often experiences of sameness or continuity (or to put it bluntly, brand recognition). As architecture theorist Juhani Pallasmaa notes, “The current industrial mass production of visual imagery tends to alienate vision from emotional involvement and identification, and to turn imagery into a mesmerizing flow without focus or participation” (22).

In terms of space consciousness, the current mass production creates what Marc Auge terms “non-places” (1995), like the strip mall, or the Starbuck’s shop that seems the same everywhere you go, or the McDonalds. In time, as we navigate our urban landscapes, we don’t actually see these places or engage in emotional place and person reflexivity. We are instead in limbo, our vision privileged to the point of subconscious acceptance of circumstances, without the displacement of questioning, or the interplay of difference and the self.

As Robert Brooke notes, this issue of suburban and urban interpretation of both place and non-place has been occurring for a quarter of a century. “It is in suburbia that most American youth are educated,” Brooke reminds us, “It is suburbia where the dominant modes of citizenship for the next century will be created” (2009).
In some sense, the idea of mass-produced, Nihilistic spaces that feel like non-places disconnect people from their lived realities dependent on those spaces. Abstract concepts such as economic well being become disconnected from one’s immediate geography and are viewed as something that happens or is shaped in Washington (for example). The power to change the world is always seen as “over there,” when the world one could change is the immediate, the space one cannot see because it looks like everywhere else. In this sense of architectural, space-sameness, we lose our ability to represent our differences because our communities are built on sameness. We lose, in short, our sense of individual and collective identities.

Or, as Brooke notes of Beauregard’s theory, “the psychological effect of moving to (and living in) a suburb, surrounded by similar houses with similar families in them, was a gradual eroding of cultural and ethnic pluralism that had been central to the national identity” (2009).

As Pallasmaa notes, “architecture is our primary instrument in relating us with space and time, and giving these dimensions a human measure” (17). What place consciousness does is give us and our students the opportunity to expand or complicate that sense of time and space, to explore the overlap of past and present, of then and now, of Me and Them.

For Sobel, this reflexive work begins by engaging, literally, in the environment. Planting seeds of environmental awareness will help schools to have localized successes that encourage community growth and independence. For Sharon Bishop, this work begins with collecting histories to better understand the present. For Brooke, the work begins in an exploration of suburban sameness and place-conscious teaching and learning as a way of developing a civically active critical conscience.

To me, place and space provide a context, a temporary lens through which to view matters of identity and purpose, of community membership and personal possibility, and critical consciousness begins by first exploring the ground on which we place our feet.

Auge, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Verso; London: 1995.

Bishop, Sharon. "The Power of Place." English Journal: Vol 93, No. 6. July 2004.

Brooke, Robert and McIntosh, Jason. "Deep Maps: Teaching Rhetorical Engagement through Place-Conscious Education."

Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Wiley-Academy; London: 2005.

Sobel, David. Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities. 3rd ed. The Orion Society; Great Barrington, MA: 2004.