Space and Place

第一章 介绍

3 Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other.

4 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.

5 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.

6 Three themes weave through the essay: the biological facts; the relation of space and place; the range of experience or knowledge.

6 What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.

Experience can be direct and intimate, or it can be indirect and conceptual, mediated by symbols.

第二章 经验视角

Experience is a cover-all term for the various modes through which a person knows and constructs a reality.

12 Place is a special kind of object. It is a concretion of value, though not a valued thing that can be handled or carried about easily; it is an object in which one can dwell. Space, we have noted, is given by the ability to move.

第三章 空间，地点，孩子

20 This inability, for most people, to recapture the mood of their own childhood world suggests how far the adult’s schemata, geared primarily to life’s practical demands, differ from those of the child.

He cannot distinguish between self and an external environment. He feels, but his sensations are not localized in space.

29 How does a young child understand place? If we define place broadly as a focus of value, of nurture and support, then the mother is the child’s primary place.

A man leaves his home or hometown to explore the world; a toddler leaves his mother's side to explore the world. Places stay put. Their image is one of stability and permanence. The mother is mobile, but to the child she nonetheless stands for stability and permanence. She is nearly always around when needed.

Things are not quite real until they acquire names and can be classified in some way.

32 Much of the child’s combative possessiveness, however, is not evidence of genuine attachment. It arises out of a need for assurance of his own worth and for a sense of status among peers.

第四章 身体，人际关系，空间价值

34 People of different cultures differ in how they divide up their world, assign values to its parts, and measure them.

Nonetheless certain cross-cultural similarities exist, and they rest ultimately on the fact that man is the measure of all things. This is to say, if we look for fundamental principles of spatial organization we find them in two kinds of facts: the posture and structure of the human body, and the relations (whether close or distant) between human beings.

第五章 空间与拥挤

52 Freedom implies space; it means having the power and enough room in which to act. Being free has several levels of meaning. Fundamental is the ability to transcend the present condition , and this transcendence is most simply manifest as the elementary power to move.

53 When transportation is a passive experience, however, conquest of space can mean its diminishment.

54 Space is a common symbol of freedom in the Western world. Space lies open; it suggests the future and invites action. On the negative side, space and freedom are a threat. A root meaning of the word "bad" is "open." To be open and free is to be exposed and vulnerable. Open space has no trodden paths and signposts. It has no fixed pattern of established human meaning; it is like a blank sheet on which meaning may be imposed. Enclosed and humanized space is place. Compared to space, place is a calm center of established values. Human beings require both space and place. Human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture. attachment and freedom. In open space one can become intensely aware of place; and in the solitude of a sheltered place the vastness of space beyond acquires a haunting presence. A healthy being welcomes constraint and freedom, the boundedness of place and the exposure of space. In contrast, the claustrophobe sees small tight places as oppressive containment, not as contained spaces where warm fellowship or meditation in solitude is possible. An agoraphobe dreads open spaces, which to him do not appeal as fields for potential action and for the enlargement of self; rather they threaten self's fragile integrity.

59 Solitude is a condition for acquiring a sense of immensity. Alone one’s thoughts wander freely over space. In the presence of others they are pulled back by an awareness of other personalities who project their own worlds onto the same area.

Human beings can be treated as objects so that they are no more in one’s way than are bookshelves. A rich man is surrounded by servants, yet they do not crowd him, for their low status makes them invisible.

60 Why did country people, especially the young, leave their small hometowns for the metropolitan centers? One reason was that the hometown lacked room. The young considered it crowded in an economic sense because it did not provide enough jobs, and in a psychological sense because it imposed too many social constraints on behavior. The lack of opportunity in the economic sphere and of freedom in the social sphere made the world of the isolated rural settlement seem narrow and limited. Young people abandoned it for the jobs, the freedom, and—figuratively speaking一the open spaces of the city. The city was the place where the young believed they could move ahead and better themselves. Paradoxically the city seemed less "crowded" and "hemmed in" than the countryside of diminishing opportunities.

Crowding is an awareness that one is observed. In a small town people "watch out" for one another. "Watch out" has both the desirable sense of caring and the undesirable one of idle——and perhaps malicious—curiosity.

64 When people work together for a common cause, one man does not deprive the other of space; rather he increases it for his colleague by giving him support.

65 Out of the crowded room a haven of warmth and tolerance is created. What is the loss? What is the cost of this successful adaptation to crowding? The cost appears to be a chance to develop deep inwardness in the human personality. Privacy and solitude are necessary for sustained reflection and a hard look at self, and through the understanding of self to the full aDDreciation of other Dersonalities. (Irwin Altman, “Privacy: a conceptual analysis”) A man is not only a miner, he is not just "our dad," but also an individual with whom prolonged exchange—opening up worlds in sustained conversation or common enterprise—ought to be possible. Spatial privacy does not, of course, guarantee solitude; but it is a necessary condition. Living constantly in a small dose-knit group tends to curtail the enlargement of human sympathy in two antipodal directions: toward one pole, an intimacy between unique individuals that transcends camaraderie and kinship ties; and toward the other, a generalized concern for human welfare everywhere.

The world feels spacious and friendly when it accommodates our desires, and cramped when it frustrates them.

第六章 空间能力，知识与地点

70 Man’s large brain is redundant to learning the kinds of skills in path-finding that are essential to the survival of animals.

73 When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place.

74 Spatial ability is essential to livelihood, but spatial knowledge at the level of symbolic articulation in words and images are not.

75 In a narrow sense, spatial skill is what we can accomplish with our body. Its meaning approximates that of agility. In a broad sense, spatial skill is manifest in our degree of freedom from the tie to place, in the range and speed of our mobility.

第七章 神话空间与地点

85 Myth flourish in the absence of precise knowledge.

Myths are not, however, a thing of the past, for human understanding remains imited.

第八章 建筑空间与意识

104 To build is a religious act, the establishment of a world in the midst of primeval disorder. Religion, since it is concerned with stable truths, contributes to the conservatism of architectural form.

107 Perhaps one reason why animal emotions do not reach the intensity and duration of human ones is that animals have no language to hold emotions so that they can either grow or fester. The built environment, like language, has the power to define and refine sensibility. It can sharpen and enlarge consciousness. Without architecture feelings about space must remain diffuse and fleeting.

第九章 体验空间中的时间

118 We have a sense of space because we can move, and of time because, as biological beings, we undergo recurrent phases of tension and ease.

129 Music and dance free people from the demands of purposeful goal directed life, allowing them to live briefly in what Erwin Straus calls "presentic" unoriented space. (E. W. Straus, The Primary World of Senses, P33) Soldiers who march to military music tend to forget not only their weariness but also their goal——the battlefield, with its promise of death.

132 Mythic space is commonly arranged around a coordinate system of cardinal points and a central vertical axis. This construct may be called cosmic, for its frame is defined by events in the cosmos. Mythic time is of three principal kinds: cosmomonic, astronomic, and human. Cosmogonic time is the story of origins, including the creation of the universe. Human time is the course of human life. Both are linear and one-directional. Astronomic time is experienced as the sun's daily round and the parade of seasons; its nature is repetition. Wherever cosmic space is prominently articulated, cosmogonic time tends to be either ignored or weakly symbolized.

第十章 地点的亲密体验

137 Intimate occasions are often those on which we become passive and allow ourselves to be vulnerable, exposed to the caress and sting of new experience. Children relate to people and objects with a directness and intimacy that are the envy of adults bruised by life. Children know they are frail; they seek security and yet remain open to the world.

The home itself feels more intimate in winter than in summer. Winter reminds us of our vulnerability and defines the home as shelter. Summer, in contrast, turns the whole world into Eden, so that no corner is more protective than another.

Unique to human beings among primates is the sense of the home as a place where the sick and the injured can recover under solicitous care.

138 To the young child the parent is his primary "place." The caring adult is for him a source of nurture and a haven of stability. The adult is also the guarantor of meaning to the child, for whom the world can often seem baffling.

A mature person depends less on other people. He can find security and nourishment in objects, localities, and even in the pursuit of ideas.

141 Intimacy between persons does not require knowing the details of each other’s life; it glows in moments of true awareness and exchange.

148 In large measure, culture dictates the focus and range of our awareness.

第十一章 对故土的依恋

150 “Center” is not a particular point on the earth’s surface; it is a concept in mythic thought rather than a deeply felt value bound to unique events and locality.

152 Religion could either bind a people to place or free them from it. The worship of local gods binds a people to place whereas universal religions give freedom. In a universal religion, since all is created by and all is known to an omnipotent and omniscient god, no locality is necessarily more sacred than another.

153 Love for one’s own kin and hostility, rather than mere indifference, to strangers was a common trait of place-bound religions.

159 Contentment is a warm positive feeling, but it is most easily described as incuriosity toward the outside world and as absence of desire for a change of scene.

第十二章 可见性：地点的创造

161 place is whatever stable object catches our attention.

第十三章 时间与地点

188 In general, we may say that whenever a person (young or old) feels that the world is changing too rapidly, his characteristic response is to evoke an idealized and stable past. On the other hand, when a person feels that he himself is directing the change and in control of affairs of importance to him, then nostalgia has no place in his life: action rather than mementos of the past will support his sense of identity.

194 The cult of the past calls for illusion rather than authenticity.

199 We have examined briefly certain relationships between time and the experience of place. The main points are these: (1) If time is conceived as flow or movement then place is pause. In this view human time is marked by stages as human movement in space is marked by pauses, lust as time may be represented by an arrow, a circular orbit, or the path of a swinging pendulum, so may movements in space; and each representation has its characteristic set of pauses or places. (2) While it takes time to form an attachment to place, the quality and intensity of experience matters more than simple duration. (3) Being rooted in a place is a different kind of experience from having and cultivating a "sense of place." A truly rooted community may have shrines and monuments, but it is unlikely to have museums and societies for the preservation of the past. The effort to evoke a sense of place and of the past is often deliberate and conscious. To the extent that the effort is conscious it is the mind at work, and the mind——if allowed its imperial sway——will annul the past by making it all present knowledge.

第十四章 后记

199 Above all, we are oriented. This is a fundamental source of confidence.

200 Nearly all learning is at the subconscious level.

This power to see people and places in their complex particularity is most highly developed in human beings.

Analytical thought has transformed our physical and social environment.

Analytical thought has transformed our physical and social environment. Evidences of its power are everywhere. We are so impressed that to us "knowing" is practically identical with "knowing about," and Lord Kelvin has gone so far as to say that we do not really know anything unless we can also measure it. Much of human experience is difficult to articulate, however, and we are far from finding devices that measure satisfactorily the quality of a feeling or aesthetic response. What we cannot say in an acceptable scientific language we tend to deny or forget.

this blindness to the depth of experience afflicts the man in the street no less than it does the social scientist.

201 As social beings and scientists we offer each other truncated images of people and their world. Experiences are slighted or ignored because the means to articulate them or point them out are lacking. The lack is not due to any inherent deficiency in language.

202 The present essay is one attempt to systematize human experiences of space and place.

203 here is the ultimate ambition of this essay, in common with the thrust of humanistic enterprise: to increase the burden of awareness.

这本书写作的出发点（问题意识）：通过分析型思考（analytical thought）所获得的科学知识极大地改变了我们的物理和社会环境。与之相对，人类通过经验（experience）所获得的知识，其重要性、丰富性和原初性有被民众和专业人士忽视的危险。通过撰写本书，作者认为，分析型思考所呈现的“真实”，都是真实世界在具体分析维度上的简化版本，因此，不能本末倒置地使用这些简化版本来指导人们的经验生活，不能因为目前的科学语言无法很好地表达情感或审美体验中不可量化的部分，就将这些部分视为无关紧要，而是应该正视经验的深度，不断增强我们在使用符号表征经验时的自觉性、批判性和想象力。作者以空间和地点这一对符号为例，对人类在空间和地点方面的经验进行系统化的梳理。

换而言之，本书认为经验，而非理性，构成了人类知识论和本体论的基础。这一观点将经验定义为“一个人认知和构建现实的不同模式”，打破了西方/东方、进步/落后、理性/感性等二元对立，体现了一种探索跨文化相似性的尝试。

空间和地点象征着一系列对立关系：自由与安全，未知与确定，拒绝被占有与可以被占有， 主动行动与被动接受，移动与静止，开放与封闭。然而这些对立并不呈现重要性层面上的主次关系。人类既需要自由，又需要约束，既需要地点的归属感，也需要来自空间的流动性召唤。

地点的危险在于，当一个人对身边的环境过于熟悉，则有可能丧失深度向内发展个性的机会。隐私和独处是个体进行深度自我反思的必要条件，而只有对自己形成深入了解，才有可能产生对其他个性的认识。长期生活在同质性小群体中，可能会妨碍个体产生更大的共情能力，既无法对族类之外的个体产生亲密关联，也无法形成对全人类福祉的关心。

p9 As Susanne Langer put it: "The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense organs immediately furnish." p10 To see and to think are closely related processes. In English, "I see" means "I understand." Seeing, it has long been recognized, is not the simple recording of light stimuli; it is a selective and creative process in which environmental stimuli are organized into flowing structures that provide signs meaningful to the purposive organism. p17 Place is a type of object. Places and objects define space, giving it a geometric personality. Neither the newborn infant nor the man who gains sight after a lifetime of blindness can immediately recognize a geometric shape such as a triangle. The triangle is at first "space," a blurred image. Recognizing the triangle requires the prior identification of corners—that is, places. A neighborhood is at first a confusion of images to the new resident; it is blurred space "out there." Learning to know the neighborhood requires the identification of significant localities, such as street corners and architectural landmarks, within the neighborhood space