introduction!

"Space"and "place" are familiar words denoting common
"Sexperiences.We live in space. There is no space for an-
<•/ other building on the lot. The Great Plains look spacious.
Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one
and long for the other. There is no place like home. What is
home? It is the old homestead, the old neighborhood, hometown,
or motherland. Geographers study places. Planners
would like to evoke "a sense of place." These are unexceptional
ways of speaking. Space and place are basic components of the
lived world; we take them for granted. When we think about
them, however, they may assume unexpected meanings and
raise questions we have not thought to ask.
What is space? Let an episode in the life of the theologian
Paul Tillich focus the question so that it bears on the meaning
of space in experience. Tillich was born and brought up in a
small town in eastern Germany before the turn of the century.
The town was medieval in character. Surrounded by a wall and
administered from a medieval town hall, it gave the impression
of a small, protected, and self-contained world. To an imaginative
child it felt narrow and restrictive. Every year, however
young Tillich was able to escape with his family to the Baltic
Sea. The flight to the limitless horizon and unrestricted space
3
4
Introduction
of the seashore was a great event. Much later Tillich chose a
place on the Atlantic Ocean for his days of retirement, a decision
that undoubtedly owed much to those early experiences.
As a boy Tillich was also able to escape from the narrowness of
small-town life by making trips to Berlin. Visits to the big city
curiously reminded him of the sea. Berlin, too, gave Tillich a
feeling of openness, infinity, unrestricted space.1Experiences
of this kind make us ponder anew the meaning of a word like
"space" or "spaciousness" that we think we know well.
What is a place? What gives a place its identity, its aura?
These questions occurred to the physicists Niels Bohr and
Werner Heisenberg when they visited Kronberg Castle in
Denmark. Bohr said to Heisenberg:
Isn't it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that
Hamlet lived here? As scientists we believe that a castle consists only
of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together. The
stones, the green roof with its patina, the wood carvings in the
church, constitute the whole castle. None of this should be changed
by the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely.
Suddenly the walls and the ramparts speak a quite different language.
The courtyard becomes an entire world, a dark corner reminds us of
the darkness in the human soul, we hear Hamlet's "To be or not to
be." Yet all we really know about Hamlet is that his name appears in a
thirteenth-century chronicle. No one can prove that he really lived, let
alone that he lived here. But everyone knows the questions Shakespeare
had him ask, the human depth he was made to reveal, and so
he, too, had to be found a place on earth, here in Kronberg. And once
we know that, Kronberg becomes quite a different castle for us.2
Recent ethological studies show that nonhuman animals also
have a sense of territory and of place. Spaces are marked off
and defended against intruders. Places are centers of felt value
where biological needs, such as those for food, water, rest,
and procreation, are satisfied. Humans share with other animals
certain behavioral patterns, but as the reflections of Tillich
and Bohr indicate, people also respond to space and place in
complicated ways that are inconceivable in the animal world.
How can the Baltic Sea and Berlin both evoke a sense of openness
and infinitude? How can a mere legend haunt Kronberg
Castle and impart a mood that infiltrates the minds of two
5
Introduction
famous scientists? If our concern with the nature and quality of
the human environment is serious, these are surely basic questions.
Yet they have seldom been raised. Instead we study animals
such as rats and wolves and say that human behavior and
values are much like theirs. Or we measure and map space and
place, and acquire spatial laws and resource inventories for our
efforts. These are important approaches, but they need to be
complemented by experiential data that we can collect and
interpret in measured confidence because we are human ourselves.
We have privileged access to states of mind, thoughts
and feelings. We have an insider's view of human facts, a claim
we cannot make with regard to other kinds of facts.
People sometimes behave like cornered and wary animals.
On occasion they may also act like cool scientists dedicated to
the task of formulating laws and mapping resources. Neither
posture holds sway for long. People are complex beings. The
human endowment includes sensory organs similar to those of
other primates, but it is capped by an exceptionally refined
capacity for symbolization. How the human person, who is
animal, fantasist, and computer combined, experiences and
understands the world is the central theme of this book.
Given the human endowment, in what ways do people attach
meaning to and organize space and place? When this question
is asked, the social scientist is tempted to rush to culture as an
explanatory factor. Culture is uniquely developed in human
beings. It strongly influences human behavior and values. The
Eskimos' sense of space and place is very different from that of
Americans. This approach is valid, but it overlooks the problem
of shared traits that transcend cultural particularities and may
therefore reflect the general human condition. When note is
taken of "universals," the behavioral scientist is likely to turn
to the analogue of primate behavior. In this book our animal
heritage is assumed. The importance of culture is taken for
granted; culture is inescapable, and it is explored in every
chapter. But the purpose of the essay is not to produce a handbook
of how cultures affect human attitudes to space and
place. The essay is, rather, a prologue to culture in its countless
variety; it focuses on general questions of human dispositions,
6
Introduction
capacities, and needs, and on how culture emphasizes or distorts
them. Three themes weave through the essay. They are:
(1) The biological facts. Human infants have only very crude
notions of space and place. In time they acquire sophistication.
What are the stages of learning? The human body lies prone, or
it is upright. Upright it has top and bottom, front and back,
right and left. How are these bodily postures, divisions, and
values extrapolated onto circumambient space?
(2) The relations of space and place. In experience, the
meaning of space often merges with that of place. "Space" is
more abstract than "place." What begins as undifferentiated
space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it
with value. Architects talk about the spatial qualities of place;
they can equally well speak of the locational (place) qualities of
space. The ideas "space" and "place" require each other for
definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware
of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa.
Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement,
then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it
possible for location to be transformed into place.
(3) The range of experience or knowledge. Experience can
be direct and intimate, or it can be indirect and conceptual,
mediated by symbols. We know our home intimately; we can
only know about our country if it is very large. A longtime
resident of Minneapolis knows the city, a cabdriver learns to
find his way in it, a geographer studies Minneapolis and knows
the city conceptually. These are three kinds of experiencing.
One person may know a place intimately as well as conceptually.
He can articulate ideas but he has difficulty expressing
what he knows through his senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing,
and even vision.
People tend to suppress that which they cannot express. If
an experience resists ready communication, a common response
among activists ("doers") is to deem it private—even
idiosyncratic—and hence unimportant. In the large literature
on environmental quality, relatively few works attempt to understand
how people feel about space and place, to take into
account the different modes of experience (sensorimotor, tac7
Introduction
tile, visual, conceptual), and to interpret space and place as
images of complex—often ambivalent—feelings. Professional
planners, with their urgent need to act, move too quickly to
models and inventories. The layman accepts too readily from
charismatic planners and propagandists the environmental
slogans he may have picked up through the media; the rich
experiential data on which these abstractions depend are easily
forgotten. Yet it is possible to articulate subtle human experiences.
Artists have tried—often with success. In works of literature
as well as in humanistic psychology, philosophy, anthropology
and geography, intricate worlds of human experience
are recorded.
This book draws attention to questions that humanists have
posed with regard to space and place.3 It attempts to systematize
humanistic insights, to display them in conceptual
frames (here organized as chapters) so that their importance is
evident to us not only as thoughtful people curious to know
more about our own nature—our potential for
experiencing—but also as tenants of the earth practically concerned
with the design of a more human habitat. The approach
is descriptive, aiming more often to suggest than to conclude.
In an area of study where so much is tentative, perhaps each
statement should end with a question mark or be accompanied
by qualifying clauses. The reader is asked to supply them. An
exploratory work such as this should have the virtue of clarity
even if this calls for the sacrifice of scholarly detail and qualification.
A key term in the book is "experience." What is the nature of
experience and of the experiential perspective?