A Sense of Place
The featured image shows Cannery Row in Monterey, California, in October 2020. This is one of my favorite places, because of its rich literary heritage by my favorite writer John Steinbeck, who wrote a novel of the same name and many more tales about the hardships of life and freedom within this mystical California coastline and agricultural valleys. And I love this place for the mesmerizing Northern California coastline.
Should you feel the pandemic blues, have a look at the live otter cam from the world renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium! That’s what I’m doing to soothe down, when not following airplanes on Flight Radar.
After High School and before university, I jobbed at a well known Swiss bakery factory. With that money, my sister and I set off for a California road trip, at a time when gas was cheap and the dollar thrice its current value. We drove from San Francisco to Los Angeles and back. We stopped in Monterey because I had read about it in John Steinbeck’s books. It was an emotional and mythical place for me to visit.
In my PhD thesis, I was tracing spaces and places within airports, the aura, and the displacement due to globalization. Spatial theories are quite important in academic and cultural studies, as they define our societal development. Our human dwelling space has evolved from tribal fireplaces we used to gather around, through the agora of the ancient Greek, medieval marketplaces, city arcades of industrialization, utilitarian transportation spaces to ones centered on the spectacular culture of capitalism and consumption.
Airports, as well as train stations, are the main places of transition that modernism has created. Then there are highways, malls, entertainment venues, ubiquitous office buildings and their atriums and and many more places we traverse. Marc Augé calls them the so-called non-places of our civilization. Non-places describe the alienation of everyday life by our consumer culture. The loss of our anthropological place due to all these modern achievements.
French anthropologist Marc Augé pleads for the anthropological place (our history, our roots) and the sense of place to counteract the non-place. Sense of place involves the human experience within the landscape and the interplay of the people and their culture. Sense of place design is not a new concept, but since the ubiquity of Modernism and the International Style of the mid- to late 20th Century, architects started rediscovering the indigenous and vernacular roots of architecture in the wake of postmodernism. Many airports in the Far and Middle East, but even in the United States, offer a glimpse of recreated regional culture and architecture within their premises. Denver, Bangkok and Beijing Airports are designed upon the symbolism of their sense of place.
The Potemkin Village
There is a danger though, that the sense of place design deviates into a Potemkin Village. The Russian fable might have been debunked, but metaphorically it stands for any artificial construct created to please the eyes of the spectator, no matter if it’s unreal.
It depicts the case when non-local architects try to recreate a folkloristic image of a region that they have never lived in. The beautiful Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok can be re-imagined as a buddhist spa retreat with a Thai Shopping Mall, yet it is a folkloristic construct.
The theorist Homi Bhabha calls colonial mimicry the “colonists’ desire” for a recognizable Other, the appropriated culture (in our case: the exotic looking airport or building). At the same time, the colonized also mimic the culture of the colonizers. The result is an alienated authenticity of the regional. This interaction of both parties is the third space as per Bhabha – the construct and the agreement of these opposing identities.
Now I have talked to airport architects who built spectacular airports in the Far East, and they were appalled at these colonial theories I mention. One was so upset, he wouldn’t talk to me. It is true, that architects don’t mean to colonize. That’s not the reproach here. Architects build on commission, they are hired by countries, regions and business conglomerates, most of the selection process happens through international competitions, where architects enter with proposals.
But architects face themselves with this social criticism when they build in Non-Western cultures. The cultural theories and studies on the exotic, post-colonialism and cultural appropriation discuss these problems. I don’t want to further delve into this topic here, as I would wander too far off the subject.
Another French philosopher, Michel Foucault, established space as the sum of our concerns, our theory and systems. The space in which we live is where our time and history occur. Space is the relations between transportation, streets, trains, public spaces, shopping arcades, cafés and home. But there are spaces which are linked with all others and also contradict them. Foucault calls them heterotopias (derived from Greek: other spaces) and utopias. There even are crisis heterotopias and heterotopias of deviation, reserved for individuals who are, in a state of crisis, in relation to society (such as in hospitals, prisons and airport immigration). Foucault’s assertion is, that the spaces we temporarily inhabit define us, no matter how pleasing or deplorable they are, and that they are related to each other by our actions.
The difference between Space and Place
The nomadic travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote The Songlines in 1987. In this journey through Aboriginal history and mysticism, Chatwin informs us about the Aboriginal Australians’ tradition of mapping their culture through dreaming tracks, so called songlines (footprints of the ancestors). Songlines are a labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over the Australian continent. While they traversed the land by foot, the Aborigines would sing every rock and stream into being. These songlines have been handed down through generations and contain the oral history of their people.
Michel de Certeau, yet another French philosopher (vive la France!), offers the best characterization of space and place. In his book The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), he wrote about people’s rituals and actions in everyday life. One of the book’s chapters is titled Walking in the City. In it, de Certeau discerns space from place. Similar to the Aborigines’ songlines, de Certeau argues that the identity which we carry to a physical place is created by the journey of traversing that space.
Every person’s journey is a unique personal experience and we bestow our own identity onto the place through our journey through space and through our actions. De Certeau makes the example of a tourist studying a map of Manhattan with inert places in his mind, which he intends to visit and starts walking. Through this motion, the tourist begins a journey with experiences, no matter how minuscule or unimportant. Yet when he reaches each of the points of the map he has traversed a space which has become his personal experience of the city. Walking from place to place, we create our own unique mental space – journey.
Now why is this discourse worth mentioning in my aviation blog? Because experiencing the place defines the space. More precisely, the genius loci, the spirit of the place, the aura.
Sources:
Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthology of Supermodernity, 1992.
Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1819.” The Location of Culture, 1994.
Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, 1987.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1980.
Michel Foucault, Of other Spaces, 1967.
Henri Lefebvre, Toward an architecture of enjoyment, 1974.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, 1980.
Stephanus Schmitz, Identity in Architecture – A Construction? In: Constructing Identity in Contemporary Architecture. Case Studies from the South, by Stephanus Schmitz, Editor: Peter Herrle and Stephanus Schmitz. TU Berlin: Schriften der Habitat Unit, Fakultät Planen Bauen Umwelt, TU Berlin, 2009.
