place and placelessness Essay

PLACE
Places are not merely the built environment, but total environment comprised of physical space, people, furnishings, machines, sensory attributes, actions and meanings.
Place is a location in space imbued with unique attributes that set it apart from other places.
Has objective attributes (size, ethnicity, income levels) and subjective attributes (big, exciting, or crime ridden).
Places are also collections of memories, your own and other peoples.
A café can become a welcome or unwelcome place depending on whether you met up or broke up with there – perhaps both.
We all ‘brand’ places by choosing what to believe about them and what to tell others about those beliefs.
Our views can persuade others what to believe about places.
Real attributes are those a place generates based on precedent – e.g. you live on a farm and believe it is wholesome and good.
Perceived attributes are those based on your belief that a particular type of place would be good – e.g. while never having lived on a farm you believe the life would be a good and wholesome one.
Contrived attributes occur when your beliefs are manipulated to create a sense of place about somewhere, either through marketing and/or actual creation of the place.
Real, perceived and contrived attributes are premised on experiences and/or expectations.
Experiences are your personal record of attributes that generate positive or negative feelings about a place or type of place. For example parks may generate negative or positive feelings depending on what happened to you there.
Expectations may be based on personal experience but may also be based on other people’s experiences or beliefs about places or types of place. For example, Auschwitz has come to symbolize horror to Jews and non-Jews alike, whether victims or not.
SENSES” OF PLACE Sight:
Visual input most predominant.
Smell:
Associations “takes me to a happy place” – or not: the Febreeze clip.
Touch:
Less an input, but think of walking on sticky streets.
Hearing (noise vs sound):
Level and type, and circumstances (e.g. our own? related to what we are doing?)
Factors Affecting Sense of Place
Status and Stigma:
Places get labeled according to their social position: the mansions of Rosedale are still mansions but the mansions of Parkdale are rooming houses.
And Yorkville has run the gamut from working class suburb to Hippieville to Yuppie living.

PLACELESSNESS
E. Relph (1976) claimed that, with mass communication, and increasingly ubiquitous high technology, places become more and more similar, so that locations lose a distinctive ‘sense of place’. With increased personal mobility, people are said to identify less with one place; the pull of the home town is slackening. This view is contested; it might be that some meanings are lost as places become increasingly homogenized (similar new architecture, the same chain stores, and so on), but that new meanings are gained. For example, the association of Manchester with a distinctive style of music and club culture is relatively recent

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/placelessness#ixzz2jjkOZXCE http://liveattheshops.com/2012/08/15/shops-at-don-mills-urban-village/ Common Explanations for Placelessness:
· mass impersonal societies Lack social and cultural contexts
· mass communication & consumption mass tastes
· multinational corporations profit motivation
· standardization of products & services mass production, technique -- air travel reduces place to space. And like

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