place: chapter 3

Harvey's idea about the tension between the mobility of capital and permanence of place was actually something quite interesting and something i had never really considered. It is really interesting to think about when you consider place as a function of money. Places have always been created where there is money. if there was resources for commerce and trade in a location, a city and communities would soon form to take advandage of that money, but in the emerging economy of the mid early 90's was one where money no longer had a location. Money is now so immaterial, transferable and mobile that there is no place for it anymore. money is wherever it needs to be so its role in determining place is much more confusing. wherever there is need for a place, a different place, a bigger place, the money can just materialize and have a devistating or profound effect on it. it can turn a small town into an abandoned one, or turn and old community into a shiny new strip mall. this can lead to strange or unnatural behaviors of communities and places, cities creating an image, trying to attract money, attract business and residents. this strange facade serves to further muddle the identity of a place.

Doreen Massey's comparison how the diversification that is occurring throughout the western world is very similar to the westernization that colonialism pushed on the rest of the world just a century ago. I'm sure that the way people feel somewhat alienated by the presence of so many new foods, and stores, and cultures from all around the world infultrating their world must be just how people in india, africa, and east asia felt when westerners showed up and introduced their culture, ideals, and lifestyles.

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.

Place: part 2

One of the things from this reading that stuck out to me was the response to the phenomenological ideas about place with the theory that if we are conscious, we must be conscious of the place we are in; that this is a part of what makes us humans. Human's always have a need to place themselves in a context, it helps us to understand ourselves, and our importance to that around us. Whether we are waking up and realizing the place we are sleeping, or in our daily life and how we understand our relation to the places we travel through, the places we stop, or the places we care about.

Place Intro

The intro to this book had some interesting ideas that the author had collected from other sources, and the one i liked best was Yi-Fu Taun's description of place. His idea of a place versus a space was that a place was simply a space where you pause for something, thous bestowing it with meaning and making it a place. Space is the empty and unmeaningful void that exists between spaces; it is what we travel through to reach one place from another. This better than all the other grasps at defining the idea of place struck me to be the most true. Anywhere can be a space if we don't care about it. Ideas of place and space are very personal and a very biased in their nature. It is entirely based on the experience and feelings of the individual. Places are differnet to everyone in them. The idea that your places, like the room you live in, have been different places for many other people, people you will never know, and they hold many meanings for reasons you will never understand. People need to make the spaces they inhabit their own places, they need to nest, to make themselves comfortable, to be happy. The nebulous concept of place wether we can define it or not is something we all understand.

reaction to Signs

The majority of this article seemed to reiterate the same fairly simple concept in the most obtuse language possible over and over again. This concept was the idea that a sign is anything and everything which evokes the thought or idea of something else to us. If we see an open sign on a store we know the store is open, or the same sign on a box means to open the package. its not the sign that carries the meaning, but how it represents instructions, ideas or feelings to other people. language is simply sounds which indicate instructions or ideas in repeated patterns, and the written word is only a visual extension of that set of signs. words are visual signs which make us think of the auditory signs which then in turn give us the information that is assigned to them.

Response to Denotation, Connotation and Myth

There were many conflicting and varied opinions given along with several examples, so I'm going to speak to what i found most interesting. I liked the concept that all signs, objects, words and symbols have a connotation in some capacity. that there is nothing that exists that can give us some sensory signal or directive without also imparting to us some connotative information as well. everyone and everything has some level of additional meaning and relation to something that is recognized by people in different ways. I also found the description of the myth an interesting concept. that as a culture we will distill all the connotations, thoughts and feelings about a particular subject, object or image down to the simplest and easiest to digest package which is then accepted as the natural and most logical meaning for it. We sift out all the details which actually give the thing its power and meaning and strip them away to make the simple, black and white categorizations easy labels to attach to everything.