Place and Space
Place, in contrast to space, is a context-specific, meaning-rich concept. Although many use the two
words interchangeably, a fairly clean distinction can be made between them.
Space is more abstract and undifferentiated than place. Space often is used to
express a freedom from or a potential for something—“give me some space” or “we
need space for this relationship to develop.” Place, by way of contrast,
describes a realm where something significant has happened or is
happening; “there’s no place like home.”
Walter Brueggemann identifies place as “storied.” One
way to easily visualize the relationship between space and place is to think of
a college dorm room. Before a student moves in, the dorm room has everything
that is needed for college life, but it’s generic, undifferentiated space.
Typically, there is a desk, a bed, a closet, a mirror, and a light. Within a
week or two after the student moves in, this space is transformed into a place.
There are pictures on the mirror, a cover on the bed, posters on the walls, and
bric-a-brac on the desk. The story of that particular semester of college in
that student’s life has already begun to be inscribed on the walls.
There is a dynamic relationship between space and place. Place is good,
but we sometimes need a break from it. As a person lives life, one’s narrative
begins to etch meanings on a particular space, causing it to become a place. As
the meanings and memories crowd a place, a person may express a desire for more
space. This is why we go on vacations to be restored or sometimes long to start
over.
Space can be good in and of itself as well. Space is sometimes necessary
for personal growth or identity formation within a group. Often we go on
retreats not to disengage, but to reconnect with God, with ourselves, or with
others. Often, however, new spaces are lonely and disorienting. Strangers finding themselves in this kind of situation long to find a place that they can call home.
The
Demise of Place
John Inge discusses how modernity has diminished the importance of place
in contemporary life. In ancient and premodern cultures, place was a significant determiner of one’s identity. A person typically
was born, lived, and died in one particular place and was closely identified with that place (Jesus of Nazareth or Joseph of
Arimathea). With the universalizing impulse of modernity typified in the scientific method, the
particularities of place began to be perceived as a liability to the modernist
project. For an experiment to be valid, it had to be repeatable regardless of the
particularities of place. Through this and other developments, space began to
be valued more highly than place.
With increasingly faster modes of transportation and communication,
place became swallowed up by time. As people could get information and goods
from various places and could easily travel, places (and the people associated
with them) became less and less important. In the nineteenth century, a person
from North America would have to travel on a boat for many weeks to experience
the taste of a kiwi or would have to wait months for news from the mission
front in interior China. In the twenty-first century, a North
American can eat a bowlful of kiwis in the middle of winter while participating
in a video conference with missionaries from six continents at once. If you
want to make a direct connection with another person today, the most important
thing you need to coordinate is the time of your connection. With the cell
phone, Skype, and Facebook, your location and theirs are insignificant.
Placelessness
Globalization and the horizontal integration of corporate
structures have more recently introduced the notion of placelessness into the
modern vocabulary. Big-box chain retail stores and identical, production-built
tract houses can be understood as placeless places. These are technically
places in that stories are lived in them, but the generic nature and short time
span of the buildings make them resistant to holding the stories that are
generated there. More and more of the contemporary landscape is being taken
over by developments in which it can be very hard to tell where one happens to
be located.
Implications
While one would be hard-pressed to try to make a convincing case
against the scientific method, improvements in
communications technology, or the significant benefits of expanding productivity in industry, it may still
be helpful to consider some of the implications of the diminishing importance
of place in contemporary life.
As one’s connection with a particular place becomes more tenuous, it can
be harder to make sense of one’s identity. Gaston Bachelard makes the argument
in The Poetics of Space that our identity is
formed by our early interaction with places like the homes of our childhoods.
This notion suggests that placelessness might play a contributing role in the
current crisis of identity.
The loss of place can have a detrimental effect on our collective and
individual memory as well. Places of significance hold memories, and
when they are designed with standardized elements or for short-term use, they
tend to hold memories less well. To people who have been commanded in the Bible
to “remember,” this should be particularly concerning. We will explore this
theme in more detail later in this chapter.
The boundedness of place has been an important element in relational
development. We know one another more deeply when proximity forces us to
interact on a regular basis. The contemporary ease by which we can move from
one place to another has tended to pull us further apart from one another rather
than bring us closer. Martin Heidegger has observed that in contemporary life
“the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness.” This theme will be
taken up in chapter 3.
Ambiguity
about Place
Not all of the attributes of place can be considered unequivocally
good, however. For some people, place is primarily associated with oppression.
A place can signify the stigma of one’s identity in a particular context. One
woman who encountered Jesus understood only too well that her place carried
with it certain restrictions, “for Jews do not associate with Samaritans.” A
place can evoke painful and destructive memories, and place can provide the
pretext for relational disassociation and social stratification—“they ought to know their place.”
In many ways, postmodernity has been concerned with navigating the
assets and liabilities associated with place. On the one hand, postmodernity
has revived an interest in narrative and localism in an attempt to recover some
of the richness of place. On the other hand, postmoderns have embraced the fluidity and mobility allowed by modern
communication technologies. Modernity brought the radical notion that a
son of a blacksmith from Bath could grow up to be a lawyer in London.
Postmodernity presents us with the possibility of making up an online identity
that needs no correspondence with our actual geographical or demographic
particularities. We have yet to discover the implications of this radical
dismissal of place.
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