PROPOSAL FOR I-21
Michael R. Curry
Department of Geography
University of California,
Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA 90095
E-Mail: CURRY@GEOG.UCLA.EDU
These are broadly spatial questions. They begin from the premise that geographical questions are spatial questions. They emerge from both a literature and a conceptual background that see people as living within a world that is in an important sense spatial. And they imagine an important set of issues to be the relationship between spatial metrics. Here a recurrent question concerns the incongruity between the metrics that people use in their everyday lives--the naïve geographies--and those that exist in more formal and technical settings--in the work of cartographers, and so on.
There can be no doubt that in connection with work in artificial intelligence and psychology, this work has become increasingly sophisticated. Yet I would argue that in its basic conceptualization it contains the seeds of its own limitations. There are important geographical questions that this work will not be able to answer. And this is true just because of its reliance on a limited conceptualization of space.
Granted, the models of space are much more sophisticated than those that we have seen before. The rethinking of issues like dimensionality, for example, gives the work a new richness. Yet the studies of formal models of common-sense geographic worlds maintain a central tenet of the works that they have replaced. That tenet is the following: We can always understand places as elements within larger spaces.
This tenet, I would argue, is simply incorrect. Indeed, much of what people say and do about places has no connection at all to the issue of space. Rather, the experience of places, the description of places, the response to changes in places, the making of decisions about allegiance to places, all of these in many cases take places themselves to be objects that have an existence sui generis. If when asked, and on reflection, people put those places within a larger, spatial context, that contextualizing has nothing at all to do with the everyday actions in which people engage.
If this seems a radical thing to say, I would point to a long and distinguished set of thinkers, beginning with Aristotle, who have adopted just this position. In Aristotle, for example, one explains the movement of objects in terms of place, of where those objects belong. The spatial location of those objects is, in fact, quite irrelevant.
So I would argue that one needs to extend the understanding of common-sense geographical worlds beyond a consideration of spatial questions to include those questions that concern places. Here it is helpful to begin by laying out the multiple ways in which people both construct and maintain places.
Places are created by naming; indeed, Paul Carter has eloquently shown for the case of Australia just how important this process of naming has been (Carter 1987). Every country has a governmental body devoted to the naming of places and the adjudication of disputes associated with naming, and every one of those bodies, surely, has stories to tell, of the power of names--and of what is at stake in deciding to call a place the Falklands rather that the Malvinas.
Similarly, people make places by categorizing locations. If names, in a way, make places unique, categorization is a way in which places are rendered similar. A desert here is like a desert there, a lake here like a lake there, a ghetto here like a ghetto there. Most recently, we have seen this in the film "The Englishman who went up a hill...".
Places are also created through the association of locations with symbols. In this metonymic process, one defines a place--Australia--by connecting it to a symbol--Ayer's Rock. The Eiffel Tower becomes a symbol for France; Big Ben for England. Such symbols may be natural or artificial, permanent or temporary; what is important is that they bring to mind the place, in what is often an emotion-laden way.
Related to each of these--to naming, categorizing, and the association with symbols--is the connection of places to memory, and the use of narrative as a means of ordering those memories. Such narratives--in the form of founding myths or stories of shared disaster and triumph--become important means by which the inhabitants of places tie themselves one to another. And at the same time, the inability to imagine an individual or group as capable of authentically reciting such a story or myth is one very important source of the feeling that they do not belong.
Finally, one important--in a sense overarching--way in which people construct places is by establishing habits, cu--toms, and practices. I say that this is overarching just because the acts of using language and symbols and telling stories are themselves habits and customs, ones that take place in places. Nonetheless, here I have in mind a much broader set of activities. People construct and inhabit places just by doing certain things in certain ways. When I take a regular route to work--what Jakob von Uexküll called the "familiar path"--I make that path, and its beginning and end, a place (Uexküll 1957). And I do so whether I am aware of it or not; indeed, in an important sense the creation of places is an activity that takes place without, or even in spite of, the awareness of the individuals and groups involved (Tuan 1980). And any who believe it easy consciously to create places within which people will develop an intended set of habits and customs need only look at the history of architecture to see how truly difficult the process is (Boudon 1972).
If these ways of creating and maintaining places lack implicit and necessary spatial referents, it is, nonetheless, possible to make systematic statements about them. Indeed, I would argue that if we are to develop models of common-sense geographical worlds that will deal adequately with the complexity of geographical issues that arise in everyday life, those models must deal not merely with space, but also with places.
WORKS MENTIONED
Boudon, P. 1972: Lived in architecture: Le Corbusier's Pessac revisited. Translated by Onn, Gerald. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Carter, P. 1987: The road to Botany Bay. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tuan, Y.-F. 1980. Rootedness versus sense of place. Landscape 24: 3-8.
Uexküll, J. v. 1957. A stroll through the worlds of animals and man. In Instinctive behavior, ed. C. Schiller, pp. 5-80. New York: International Universities Press.
Dr. Curry is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds degrees in liberal arts, philosophy, and geography. A member of the faculty at UCLA since 1988, he has in addition been a visiting faculty member at a number of institutions, most recently at Harvard's Program on Information Resource Policy.
His research concerns the development of and interactions among geographic ideas (space, place, nature); geographic technologies (geographic information systems, the written work, the map); the structure of the discipline of geography; and the broader social, cultural, and legal contexts within which the discipline, ideas, and technologies are situated. He has recently completed a book on the nature of the written work in geography, and on the development of that work in the context of traditions of scientific representation and rhetoric (The work in the world: Geographical practice and the written word (University of Minnesota Press, 1996)); he is completing a second book on the social and ethical issues surrounding geographic information systems (Beyond the endless grid: Understanding geographic information systems (Routledge, 1997)); and he is beginning projects on privacy, property, and place and on the ethics of spatio-visual representation.
Selected recent publications:
"The digital individual and the private realm" (Forthcoming) Annals, Association of American Geographers.
"On space and spatial practice in contemporary geography," (1996) in Carville Earle, Kent Mathewson, and Martin S. Kenzer, eds., Concepts in human geography. New York: Rowman and Littlefield., pp. 3-32
"Space and place in geographic decision making" (1996) Proceedings of the 1996 International Symposium on Technology and Society 1996: Technical Expertise and Decisions," Piscataway, NJ: Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, pp. 311-18.
"Rights, responsibilities, and geographic information systems: Beyond the power of the image" (1995) Cartography and Geographic Information Systems.
"Image, practice, and the hidden impacts of geographic information systems," (1994) Progress in Human Geography 18, #4: 500-18.