Sunday, October 5, 2008
place part 3
I disagree with the idea of places such as Disneyworld or airports are placeless or pseudo-places. while these places may feel fleeting or ephemeral to most people, it is only because most people are un-knowledgeable and unfamiliar with them. Places people pass through to get to other places, or fabricated places like theme parks are places to those who spend the time to know them. for the guy who walks around Disneyworld all day long dressed as mickey mouse the park is a very real place. just like a stretch of highway that millions of people drive over every day year might not seem like a place to those people, but for the guy who cuts the grass in the median, or the repair crews doing construction all summer, its a place like any other. The book often touches on the subjectivity and personal relationship to individuals that make places so hard to pin down; a place to one person isn't a place to another. this to me is the contradiction to the arguement of placeless places. just about everywhere on earth is a place to someone.
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One thing to keep in mind Ryan, is that Cresswell is presenting a variety of arguments from different geographers, many of whom disagree on crucial ideas. Marc Auge and Edward Relph's suggestion of "non-place" and "placelessness" are not necessarily arguments Cresswell is making himself. He is, however, introducing them to us as ideas that are used to understand "place" as a useful concept.
I think it's also important to dig into those concepts a little deeper. Neither Relph nor Auge (as presented by Cresswell) argue that theme parks (to use the example you pick up on) can't or don't have different meanings for different people, especially when one considers the difference between a consumer and a worker at such institutions. Their focus is on the meaning for consumers, obviously, as they are the "intended" audience of the institution and, as such are the assumed reason for it being constructed a certain way. The perspective of the person wearing the Mickey suit isn't a part of the meaning of the place as it is projected/constructed. To put this in terms that we've been using in our projects, the Mickey suit wearer's sense of place would be a "story from below." Her/his perceptions aren't given visible meaning for the people whom the place is designed for.
Such places could be considered placeless, because they construct a "timeless" sense of place, one that has neither an origin nor end - it exists as a fantasy reality that could presumably be constructed anywhere, at any time. This is in terms of its meaning, not its political economy, which is a different story altogether. But the point of thinking about place as an image is to consider how meaning plays a role in the concrete actions of individuals and groups in space.
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