[from David Seamon, A Geography of the Lifeworld, copyright
1979, 2003 David Seamon]
Part V
In a life span, a [human being] now--
as in the past--can establish
profound roots only in a
small corner of the world
--Yi-Fu Tuan (1974, p.100).
CHAPTER 17
I suggest we think about places in the context of two reciprocal movements which can be observed among most living forms: like breathing in and out, most life forms need a home and horizons of reach outward from that home. The lived reciprocity of rest and movement, of territory and range, of security and adventure, of housekeeping and husbandry, of community building and social organization -- these experiences may be universal among the inhabitants of Planet Earth. Whether one thinks on the level of ideas themselves, or of social networks, or of “home grounds’, there may be a manner in which one can measure and study the reciprocity of home and reach in all of them -- Anne Buttimer (1978, p.19).
Phenomenology explores parts to understand wholes. The whole here is everyday environmental experience. it has been explored in terms of movement, rest and encounter, which can be represented as a whole by the triadic structure of Figure 17.1. A triad as “a union or group of three” (Webster’s Seventh, 1963, p. 945). I call this representation a triad (rather than a triangle) because the term suggests a working relationship among the parts -- as in a chord triad of music.1
Borrowing from past chapters, the following can be said about this triad of environmental experience:
· that people become bodily and emotionally attached to their geographical world;
· that this nexus of attachment is at-homeness;
· that at-homeness sustains a taken-for-granted pattern of continuity, expectedness and order;
· that as people move and rest in their geographical world they also encounter it;
· that encounter varies in the degree to which people are part of or apart from their world.
The last chapters of this book consider in further detail the various links among movement, rest and encounter. The aim is to gain a better understanding of their threefold relationship—to point to ways in which themes in earlier chapters interweave in wider patterns of meaning. In this way, one better understands everyday environmental experience as a whole.
A phenomenology of any experience or phenomenon can never be judged complete. The student, as he proceeds, discovers wider and finer meanings and structures that provide potential new paths for exploration. These last chapters discuss several themes that did not arise directly from the environmental experience groups. Rather, these themes have grown out of my own reflections and discoveries that arose in the process of writing preceding chapters. In this sense, the following patterns and themes have not all been explored intersubjectively and are therefore tentative. Perhaps in time they may become the focus of further group exploration.
The Dialectic between Movement and Rest
Movement and rest are not isolated phenomena: they exist together in dialectic.2 There is a continuous tension between the two which leads to a series of resolutions. ‘man”, says the architect Aldo van Eyck (cited in Norberg-Schulz, 1971, p.33), “is both center bound and horizon bound.” Movement leads to rest that in turn leads to movement. This dialectic can be represented as in Figure 17.2.
Rest is associated with center, home and at-homeness. it points to a basic human need for spatial and environmental familiarity and order. Rest anchors the person’s present in his or her past; it maintains experiential continuity. Security, privacy, quiet, passivity, contemplation and other similar qualities often have their context in rest.
The deepest experience of rest is dwelling, which brings people together and people and nature together in terms of place. The world of dwelling involves regularity, repetition and cyclicity all grounded in care and concern; it is, as Jager says, a “round world”:
The round world of dwelling offers a cyclical time, that is, the recurring times of seasons, of the cycles of birth and death, of planting and harvest- ing, of meeting and meeting again, of doing and doing over again. It offers a succession of crops, of duties, generations, forever appearing and reap- pearing. It offers a place where fragile objects and creatures can be tended and cared for through constant, gentle reoccurring contacts (1975, p.251).
Movement, in contrast, has links with horizon, reach and unfamiliarity. It is associated with such active qualities as search, newness, exploration, alertness and exertion. A person, through movement, extends his knowledge of distance, place and experience; he become familiar with spatial and experiential horizons that were undisclosed or obscure before. Movement helps the person to assimilate places and situations into his world of familiarity. In this sense, movement widens the sphere of at-homeness and dwelling.
Jager (ibid.) discusses movement in terms of journey, which he finds a common theme not only in traveling, exploring and sightseeing, but also in intellectual, artistic and spiritual efforts. The journey carries the person away from his stable world of dwelling. it gives him a sense of
forward and back, past and future; and moves him outward along a path towards confrontation -- with places, experiences, ideas:
Journeying forces [the] round generative world of [dwelling] into the narrow world of the path. The path offers the progressive time of unique and unrepeatable events, of singular occurrences, of strange peoples and places to be seen once and possibly never again. . . Journeying breaks open the circle of the sun and the seasons and forms it into a linear pattern of succession in which the temporal world shrinks to a before and after, to backward and forward. Here the beginning is no longer felt to lie in the middle but instead appears placed behind one’s back. the future makes its appearance straight ahead, making possible confrontation (ibid.,p.251, italics in original).
Movement and rest, because of their dialectical nature, each incorporate aspects of the other. They are not mutually exclusive but often encompass qualities more often associated with the opposite. The afternoon constitutional, for example, first suggests movement. As an experience, however, this daily walk through a regular sequence of paths and places typically involves no adventure or unfamiliarity. It may, however, invigorate the walker and renew his depleted energies. Here, an action that in appearance suggests movement provides an inner function associated with rest. Rest and movement exist together, and each shares aspects of the other.
The dialectic between movement and rest extends over a variety of spatio-temporal spheres. In one sense, our geographical existence can be likened to a continual series of stops and starts at all scales of time and space. I sit quietly in my chair for an interval and then reach for a glass of sherry at my side; the housewife works for the morning in the kitchen and moves to the porch to crochet; the family on their weekly Sunday drive travel for an hour and then stop for lunch; the storekeeper lives in the apartment above his shop for fifty weeks of the year but each May takes two-week vacation to his native Greece. Life, described in this way, is a series of pendulum swings between movement and rest. Through movement, people leave the taken-for-grantedness of place or situation and extend their horizons elsewhere; through rest they return to particular centers and collect themselves in preparation for future ventures outward again. Each requires its opposite in order for itself to be so.
Both Bachelard (1958) and Relph (1976b) speak of the relation between movement and rest as an inside-outside dialectic. Bachelard (cited in Relph, ibid., P.49) explains that “outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which binds us. . . Outside and inside are both intimate -- they are always ready to exchange their hostilities.” Relph (ibid., p. 49) gives the simple example that “we go out of the city into the countryside, yet return again into the city.” A place of rest, the rural landscape, in time loses its attractiveness and the person returns home to another place of rest. What is experientially “inside” for a time becomes “outside”. This frequent “exchange of hostilities’, as Bachelard calls it, is a continual and inescapable aspect of people’s geographical existence. in part because of this exchange, people gain both stability and stimulation in their day-to-day lives.
Particular places have their own particular threshold of inside and outside, staying and leaving. I arrive at my office at eight and leave at five. If I stay beyond that hour, I normally feel tired, anxious or uncomfortable. Around five o”clock, in other words, my office loses its quality of insideness, which is transferred to another place -- my home. Similarly, I take a coffee break at the nearby luncheonette but can usually stay there no longer than a half-hour. Beyond that time, I begin to feel out of place and automatically return to my office, which regains the quality of insideness held by the luncheonette the half-hour before.
The whole of a person’s life can be viewed through the dialectic of movement and rest, inside and outside, dwelling and journey. Changes in place -- from hour to hour, day to day, year to year, early adulthood to middle age -- can all be interpreted in terms of a need to move and rest, to stay in a particular place for a time and then move elsewhere. These temporal thresholds arise partially out of feeling-subject, which after a certain time begins to feel discomfort, boredom, wanderlust, or some similar emotional push or pull which moves the person to another place or situation. Body-subject, at least in shorter periods of movement and rest, also has some role, automatically moving the person elsewhere because of a particular time-space routine.
The body, therefore, has its own sense of time, habitually moving when a particular temporal threshold is reached and emotionally provoked by feeling-subject when that threshold is overextended. Occasionally, cognition may interrupt this threshold process, ordering the person to stay in place longer than he normally would, or deciding to leave that place sooner than usual. More frequently, however, movement and rest, inside and outside change places automatically, and the person’s daily routines proceed with a minimum of conscious directedness.
Imbalance and Balance between Movement and Rest
An imbalance of movement or rest in a person or group’s life provokes awkwardness, discomfort or stress. As Relph (ibid., p.42) suggests:
Our experience of place, and especially of home, is a dialectical one -- balancing a need to stay with a desire to escape. When one of these needs is too readily satisfied we suffer either from nostalgia and a sense of being uprooted, or from the melancholia that accompanies a feeling of oppression and imprisonment in a place.
Besides the oppression and imprisonment to which Ralph refers, an excess of rest may also be associated with isolation, withdrawal, drudgery and provincialism. Robert Coles’ portrait (1967) of Appalachian mountaineers is one example of a people extremely bound in time and space. Their existence, in one sense, is too sheltered and they find it difficult to cope with events and people that intrude from the outside. On the other hand, an excess of movement may preclude adequate rest and be associated with the uprootedness and nostalgia that Ralph mentions, as well as injury, exhaustion, homesickness, or overextension. Coles’ description (1967) of Southern migrant workers portrays a situation of movement at the expense of rest. Because they have no roots, these people know only minimal order in terms of place and home. Coles (ibid., p.116) concludes that this uprootedness fosters a life of wretchedness -- especially for the children:
Even many animals define themselves by where they live, by the territory they possess or covet or choose to forsake in order to find new land, a new sense of control and self-sufficiency, a new dominion. It is utterly part of our nature to want roots, to need roots, to struggle for roots, for a sense of belonging, for some place that is recognized as mine, as yours, as ours. . . It is quite another thing, a lower order of human degradation, that we also have thousands of boys and girls who live entirely uprooted lives, who wander the American earth, who even as children enable us to eat by harvesting our crops but who never, never can think of any place as home, of themselves as anything but homeless (italics in original).
Movement and rest, inside and outside, dwelling and journey, therefore, each suggest and sustain the other. A satisfactory life can be said to involve some balance between these opposites. Perhaps Jager (ibid., p.249) has summarized this balance best, portraying it as a reciprocity and interpenetration between dwelling and journey:
Journeying grows out of dwelling as dwelling is founded in journeying. The road and the hearth, journey and dwelling mutually imply each other. Neither can maintain its structural integrity without the other. The journey cut off from the sphere of dwelling becomes aimless wandering, it deteriorates into mere distraction or even chaos. . . The journey requires a place of origin as the very background against which the figures of a new world can emerge. The hometown, the fatherland, the neighborhood, the parental home form together an organ of vision. To be without origin, to be homeless is to be blind. On the other hand, the sphere of dwelling cannot maintain its vitality and viability without the renewal made possible by the path. A community without outlook atrophies, becomes decadent and incestuous. Incest is primarily this refusal of the path; it therefore is refusal of the future and a suicidal attempt to live entirely in the past. The sphere of dwelling, insofar as it is not moribund is interpenetrated with journeying (italics in original).
For different individuals, groups and historical times, the exact nature of the balance between movement and rest, dwelling and journey no doubt varies, but its presence in some form always exists. The student can perhaps come to understand this balance best by first exploring its nature in his own life situation. He can then consider balances in other people’s lives and ask how they compare and contrast with his own.
Notes
1. The notion of triad (as well as tetrad, which will be discussed shortly) owes its origin in part to the work of the English philosopher Bennett (1966), who has developed a method that he calls systematics -- a way of exploring wholes through the qualitative significance of number. On triads and tetrads, see ibid., pp.23-37.
2. Dialectic has a considerable range of meanings; here, I use the term to mean “the dialectical tension between two interacting forces or elements’ (Webster’s Third, 1966, p. 623). Bennett (ibid., pp.18-23) terms this dialectical relationship a dyad, which he says “is in a state of tension” (p. 23).
CHAPTER 18
People are their place and a place is its people, and however readily they may be separated in conceptual terms, in experience they are not easily differentiated -- Edward Relph (1976b, p.34).
People encounter the world as they move and rest, dwell and journey. Encounter can be joined with movement and rest by inverting the awareness continuum of Figure 16.1 and creating the tetradic structure of Figure 18.1 below. A tetrad is “a group or arrangement of four” (Webster’s Seventh, 1963, p.913). Like the triad, this symbol should be seen as representing a dynamic process rather than a static form (Bennett, 1966, pp.19-37).
Figure 18.1: The Tetrad of Environmental Experience
If one examines this tetrad of environmental experience, he or she notes that it is composed of two separate triads marked out by movement, rest and the tendency towards separateness on the one hand; and movement, rest and the tendency towards mergence on the other (Figure 18.2). The upper triad can be thought of as a triad of openness because it more often incorporates modes of encounter -- heightened contact, noticing grounded in the person -- through which one reaches out to the world at hand and discovers more about it. it will become clear that experiential and environmental education have bearing on this triad (Chapter 20).
In contrast, the lower triad can be called the triad of habituality because it includes modes of encounter -- obliviousness, undisciplined watching, noticing grounded in the world -- that are more often associated with taken-for-grantedness and routine. This triad has implications for environmental design, especially as it has relation to place ballet (Chapter 19).
Figure 18.2.
Two Triads and the Common Man
In Heideggerian terms, the openness triad reflects a more authentic existence than the triad of habituality. Through openness, the person widens his grasp of the world, but in a different way than through movement (which extends the person by introducing him to new places and situations). Rather, openness widens the individual’s horizons in that it fosters a more refined understanding and greater concern for the world; it works “as a removal of concealment and obscurities, as a smashing of barriers with which [being] bars itself from itself”(Heidegger. cited in Vycinas, 1961, p.42).
In contrast, the habituality triad is the world of habitual movement and rest; it is the realm of body-subject, feeling-subject and routine. Here, the person need pay only minimal attention to the world at hand. The attention he or she does give the world is usually expressed through watching or noticing fostered by the environment. Life proceeds with a minimal degree of change or newness. For Heidegger, this triad is associated with the world of common man, who does not encounter the world for himself but gains his understanding through the expressions and dictates of others:
The being of the common man is not its own self, but the self of another. It is not a self-reliant being. The common man goes to work at his appointed hour. After work he looks for some sort of entertainment or relaxation; in his proper time he takes a vacation. He reads what one is supposed to read and avoids things to be avoided. . . The common man, the nobody and everybody at the same time, dictates our culture. . . The domination of common man tends toward uniformity (everyone is an average person equal to others; everyone is selfless), and to publicity (all the ways of the common man are clearly marked out and publicly prescribed so that he does not need his own self to guide his ways) (Vycinas, 1961, p.42).
The triads of openness and habituality, like movement and rest, are not mutually exclusive but share aspects of each other. The common man, to borrow Heidegger’s term, spends some moments in the triad of openness: at times, he sees the taken-for-granted world afresh, or feels it more intensely.
Similarly, the person who strives for a more authentic existence often, perhaps most of the time, finds himself in the sphere of habituality, fulfilling the basic needs of day-to-day living.
The triads of openness and habituality reflect a dialectic between two different modes of awareness and encounter. Each requires the other, and an authentic existence can proceed only because the person recognizes his frequent unauthentic existence. As Vycinas (ibid., p.42) explains, “the unauthentic way of existence is needed to provide the grounds in which the authentic mode of being can be built. Authenticity is nothing more than modified unauthenticity.”
The Triad of Habituality and Placelessness
The triads of openness and habituality are significant to behavioral geography because they reveal two complementary ways to study environmental behavior and experience. The habituality triad points to a way of living that is very much taken for granted and mechanical. The researcher can best study this domain if he focuses on the prereflective, matter-of-fact aspects of daily living. the common man typically resents change or interference in the well established patterns of his life. The nature of the world -- particularly the physical environment -- becomes important, for it, rather than its people, is often more easily modified and changed for the better. Through this change, places might become more authentic.
In the past, explains Relph (1976b, p.68), the common man frequently created authentic places and he typically did this unselfconsciously. His ability to manipulate the environment was generally limited technologically; he therefore automatically created places of human scale built by hand and animal power form local materials. Illustrations, says Relph (ibid., p.68), are found in the architecture of primitive and traditional peoples, for example, the preindustrial villages of Europe. The end result is
places which fit their context and are in accord with the intentions of those who created them, yet have a distinct and profound identity that results from the total involvement of a unique group of place-makers with a particular setting.
In any era, says Relph (ibid., p.71), there are always some places that are “lived-in and used and experienced” and therefore authentic. Today, however, Relph argues, because of a powerful technology, mass communications and governmental centralization, the places of common man are more often unauthentic. They are the placelessness seen in the frequent disorder and monotony of suburban development; the alienating public spaces that belong to everyone and no one at the same time; the look-alike Holiday Inns or some similar corporate chain that has little concern for locality or its people, other than to drain away money and resources.
Places today are less authentic because they are less often built by individual people who have a stake in place and therefore feel kindness and concern for it and the wider locality. Attachment for place arises out of being in a living in a place. Nameless corporations or public agencies are not individual people and can muster no such attachment; their concern for place is reduced to economic motivation or the anonymous “public welfare”. As a result, says Relph (ibid., p.140), “there is little scope for the development of more than a casual sense of place because the identities of places are merely the product of fabrications or of local associations of universal and placeless processes.”
Can the growing placelessness of the world be tempered? Are there practical implementations that would restore the individual’s and group’s sense of place? One notion of value is the place ballet whose various aspects have been discussed in past chapters and now can be integrated into a whole.
CHAPTER 19
PLACE BALLET AS A WHOLE
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is the intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to a dance -- not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse,but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole—Jane Jacobs (1961, p.50).
To regenerate unique and authentic places today requires, first, a self-conscious understanding of human environmental experience; and, second, a means of translating this understanding into action, through life-style and building design. Realization that dwelling precedes building, that community almost certainly arises out of place might lead to a landscape reflecting diversity and a harmonization of people, environment and values.
Such change cannot happen suddenly; it may never happen. For those people who see placelessness as a neutral event or as a sign of equality, prosperity and progress, such change may seem retrogressive or irrelevant nostalgic ideal. Yet if bodily and emotional requirements, as well as the need of dwelling, point to place as more conducive experientially than placelessness, it can well be asked how more places can be generated practically.
In this book, the most valuable practical notion is place ballet, which, I have suggested, is a foundation of at-homeness and dwelling. The groundstone of place ballet is the coming together of people’s time-space routines and body ballets in terms of space. Additional, less regular participants may be drawn to place ballet, but its crux is the prereflective bodily regularity of routine users. Place ballets can involve a room, a corridor, a city park, a block of houses, a shopping mall -- even an entire town, city or region. Place ballets can be a bastion of activity in an empty and dull larger landscape, or they may interpenetrate in interlocking, wider wholes to create an environment of vitality, motion and sense of community.1
This chapter works to suggest the essential character of place ballet. I speak of six qualities: attraction, diversity, comfortableness, invitation, distinctiveness and attachment. The argument is that any place ballet involves to some degree all or some of these qualities.
Discussion in this chapter is based primarily on my own reflections and is therefore tentative.2 Notions and ideas eventually need clarification and correction by phenomenological studies of specific concrete place ballets occurring at different environmental scales in different times and places. The reader makes best use of this chapter if he or she considers themes in relation to specific place ballets with which he or she is familiar. Do they reflect the qualities suggested here and if so, to what degree? Do they involve additional qualities? Do particular features of the physical environment work to sustain or hinder the place ballet?
Attraction
For a place to have people, it must attract them to itself. The luncheonette offers coffee and food; the shop sells merchandise; the apartment house brings home its dwellers; the busy street provides movement and events to which the would-be watcher is drawn. No one normally goes somewhere that has no kind of offering. ‘most of us’, says Jacobs (1961, p.129), “identify with a place. . .because we use it, and get to know it reasonably intimately. We take our two feet and move around in it and come to count on it.” Using a place is a key to all place ballets.
A place which attracts is a focus of some activity. “Counting on” a place and “where the action is’ are everyday expressions reflecting the importance of activity. Activity is movement and goings-on; it is one person walking, or passers-by gossiping on the street corner. Two people regularly together in space is the presence of place ballet, but one that is very weak. The more people regularly in place, the more active the place ballet -- at least to a point. Larger numbers of people foster greater activity, which in turn draws additional people and activity.
Place ballets can become too attractive, in the sense that activity outstrips capacity for support. Crowding, congestion, poor service, lack of goods or similar problems then occur in various combinations. The place ballet may be destroyed; alternately, some participants may no longer come, returning the place to a level of activity in harmony with its supportive level.
Regularity fosters attraction. Place ballet organizes expectations in time and space; it turns over to body-subject repetitive, day-to-day needs like buying food, eating lunch, getting a postage stamp, doing laundry, walking home. Regularity is an integral part of Relph’s existential insideness, whereby a place extends at-homeness and allows its participants to feel profoundly inside (1976b, p.55). Regularity, in other words, fosters attraction because people feel a need for continuity and stability in terms of place and time. Place ballet can fulfil such a need.
Physical design most directly promotes attraction when it works to make a place appealing in some way -- for example, aesthetically, or in terms of physical convenience. Because a key to place ballet is prereflective regularity, however, such direct attempts may be superficial and have only fleeting impact. Design has greater influence on attraction if it develops a physical environment that intermingles different activities and the movements required to get to them. This mixing brings participants together spatially and fosters a sense of interaction, motion and life.
Two techniques are valuable here. Channelling manipulates routes and pathways so that people’s movements intermingle. Many entrances to a building are made fewer, for example, so that people entering will more likely meet. Open edges of a park are planted with shrubbery so that the space can be entered only at certain points along the edges rather than anywhere as was the case in the past. As a result, users are more likely to meet one another. Channelling works to foster face-to-face meetings as people move along in space.
Centering establishes some kind of center to which many people come -- for example, centralized mailboxes, laundry or dining quarters; a market square; a fountain in the middle of a park. “The finest centers’, says Jacobs (ibid., p.195), “are stage settings for people.” Simple requirements -- for food, water, washing, paying bills, sitting after supper -- can be valuable activities around which to promote centering. How amy place ballets in traditional and primitive cultures arose around the watering place? Even in spite of its size, how often at the supermarket do we meet people whom we would never expect to see otherwise?
Diversity
The crux of attraction is often diversity -- the place provides several different reasons for participants using a place. People feel foolish going to, or don’t go to, places for which there is no reason to go. The more reasons to go to a place, the more often the user will get to it. This effect is multiplied many times by many users. Consider, for example, a successful student-faculty lounge. Usually it sustains a variety of functions: an environment in which to relax, a space through which one must pass to reach secretaries; a place to get coffee, to sharpen a pencil, to store lunch, to get one’s mail; the home of Xerox and collating machines. These different uses are more or less regular, yet they provide many reasons to come to the lounge; as a result, people’s interest in space. The lounge gains the added reputation as “a place to meet people”.
The greater the place’s diversity, in general, the more participants using it. In the case of streets and districts, for example, Jacobs (1961, p.150) argues that diversity ensures “the presence of people who go outdoors on difference schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common”. Uses which in themselves are anchorages and draw people to a place Jacobs (ibid., p.161) calls primary diversity. Residences, offices, factories, certain places of education and entertainment reflect primary diversity at the neighborhood level; relaxing, mail delivery, coffee-making, room as pathway to secretaries reflect primary diversity for the lounge.
In addition, place ballet often houses what Jacobs (ibid., p.162) calls secondary diversity -- functions or enterprises that develop in response to the presence of primary diversity. Restaurants, luncheonettes, book stores and craft shops are examples of secondary diversity at street scale. The lounge as a place to meet people or to poll them reflects secondary diversity in interior space.
In terms of physical design, diversity is helped by a mingling of mixed uses. users of one activity pass by other activities that they might not come close to otherwise. A synergy is created whereby the individual function shares in the presence of people going to other functions, thereby gaining a greater flow of potential users that if it were spatially alone. Jacobs (ibid.) has emphasized the significance of such mingling in fostering the success of place ballets in streets and districts -- at least for larger cities. She also emphasizes the importance of three other factors: small blocks; a range of buildings varying in age and condition; a sufficiently dense concentration of people (ibid., pp.178-221). How these four factors are present in particular street ballets and how they might have parallels in place ballets at other environmental scales are important questions worthy of further phenomenological research.
Comfortableness
Comfortableness relates to bodily and psychological comfort and convenience. It involves freedom of movement and activity in a place rather than infringement and delay due to external devices or regulations such as elevators, locks and keys, stoplights, checking-in, speaking to the doorman for permission to enter. Place ballet succeeds best when there is ease and flow of movement.
People using a place normally like to move freely at a pace that reciprocates their reasons for coming to that place. Waiting for an elevator, checking in one’s parcels before one can enter a store, calling on a telephone to reach a fellow worker in the same building -- these situations involve artificial stops and starts that interfere with the natural flow of a particular activity. Too many artificial interruptions impede the flow of place ballet.
The irritation that drivers and pedestrians often feel when waiting for a stoplight points to the crux of comfortableness. Movement is normally one smooth single process. One stops in transit only because one has reason to. Devices or rituals that regulate movement may be invaluable for reducing congestion or providing security. but experientially they interfere with the natural pattern of movement: to go in one smooth flow.
Comfortableness, therefore, is related to naturalness of experience and human scale. Place ballet will generally be less successful in those places that atomize behaviors or make the body dependent on technological devices beyond its own locomotive powers. Skyscrapers, shopping malls, supermarkets and other centralized, massive environments are all guilty of uncomfortableness to varying degrees because the body alone cannot get around in them but must rely on external back-ups such as an escalator or a system of loudspeakers. In addition, these places often foster uncomfortableness because they set up various artificial obstacles -- receptionists, security checks, doors that can be opened only with a special magnetic card.
Comfortableness requires a scale suited to the human body and its reach independent of mechanical extensions -- for example, upper stories that can be reached by walking, enterprises close enough to each other to allow users to move between them easily and quickly, interiors constructed in such a way that people can readily determine where other people are in the space. Comfortableness arises most naturally in places and buildings constructed by human hands without the assistance of sophisticated technological equipment that builds larger-scaled environments than man could by his own bodily devices. In the same way, individual persons and groups who live in an use and own the places they build are more likely to create comfortable environments than impersonal organizations such as corporate enterprises or governmental agencies that normally build more to take advantage of economies of scale or needs of centralization.
Distinctiveness
Distinctiveness refers to those qualities of place ballet that give it a sense of identity -- a sense of being a distinct entity in the midst of a larger environment. “Atmosphere”, “character”, ‘sense of place” and similar phrases all capture the essence of distinctiveness.
Distinctiveness may in part relate to physical characteristics of place -- clearly marked boundaries, cobblestone streets, a canal passing through its center, stylish decor, a peculiar location or unusual landmark. More significantly, distinctiveness is related to the people and activities of place. They generate a special regularity, dynamism and atmosphere that attract new users and bring back regular participants over and over again.
Distinctiveness normally develops because originally a place is a taken-for-granted context of someone’s daily living. If for whatever reason place ballet gains an image of distinctiveness, outsiders visit and perhaps they themselves become regular participants. The “distinctiveness’ of an ethnic neighborhood, for example, is the atmosphere of at-homeness for the larger number of participants; it is an explicit object of attention only for tourists and other outsiders. Place ballet may begin to die when outsiders outnumber the people who feel “inside” the place. Alternately, the place may become a reproduction of itself -- for example, the French Quarter of New Orleans -- and creates a place ballet founded largely on tourism.
Authentic distinctiveness develops organically, in its own way and time. The constellation of people and events in the particular place nurture a unique living whole that over time takes on its own character and becomes a place and name in users’ cognitive consciousness. In contrast is unauthentic distinctiveness -- places that at heart are the same but which are made to seem different, usually for economic gain. Examples are the different-colored and different-textured facades of suburban housing tracts, each trying to make itself distinct; or the essentially standardized and homogenized enterprises along commercial roadside strips -- the doughnut shop with the huge plastic doughnut, or the steak house modeled after a Western cow town.
Successful place ballets normally generate a distinctiveness that is authentic and natural -- unique because of the special combination of insiders, outsiders and events associated with that place. Unauthentic distinctiveness may draw the unsuspecting and unwary to it, but typically the ruse works only temporarily. In time the place survives or succumbs according to its essential qualities as a place and its relationship to the larger environment in which it finds itself.
Distinctiveness arises organically and cannot be directly planned or controlled. Perhaps the best approach is to provide monies and policies whereby insiders can work to strengthen their place in their own way and time. Ideally, plans of action should be developed and carried out by the insiders themselves. This process increases the insiders’ involvement with place and enhances care and concern.
Invitation
Successful place ballets invite would-be participants in. The place projects a sense of insideness. The potential user finds himself in the role of outsider, but because of a sense of invitation, he considers entering the place ballet and partaking of its parts. Invitation has a major role in place ballet. If the person feels invited in, he will return, perhaps again and again. The stronger the sense of invitation, the stronger the attractiveness of the place ballet. The reverse is also true.
Distinctiveness is one element fostering invitation. The place ballet projects insideness because it is a distinct whole separate from surroundings. The would-be user learns of the distinctiveness, directly or second-hand. He develops a wish to visit the place. The nature of the boundaries of place ballet also have much to do with invitation. Permeable boundaries allow the outsider to enter easily. They draw him in freely and sometimes he knows that he has entered only after he has arrived. Open doors, many windows, crossable streets, sounds from within, a vista sweeping into place -- aspects such as these mark out a permeable edge allowing easy entrance. Closed doors; wide streets filled with speeding cars; blank facades; no visual, aural or olfactory allurements -- these features shut the person out or insulate him from place.
Technological devices often have a major role in making the edges of place ballets less crossable. Traffic, expressways, long high walls of huge buildings all create edges that the person can not cross or crosses only with considerable effort. Air conditioning is another example. Its use requires closed doors and screens replaced by windows; passers-by on the street can less likely sense events inside shops and other establishments. Inside and outside are less connected, and the outsider feels less of a pull of invitation within. People inside the place perhaps feel more comfortable, but this comfort arises at the expense of the larger place as a whole.
Attachment
Attachment is the sense of responsibility and devotion that participants feel for place ballet. Attachment is intimately related to at-homeness and dwelling; it incorporates sparing and preserving, care and concern. The automatic impulse to remove a piece of litter from the pavement or to tell the luncheonette cashier honestly what on just had for breakfast -- these authentic gestures arise spontaneously out of attachment. Users who feel attachment will instinctively care for place. They feel a stake in it; the place is an extension of their own selves. At the same time, they feel more human, experiencing a concern and obligation beyond their own personal needs. They feel a part in a larger human and place whole.
People generally can be attached only to humanly scaled places. To feel care and responsibility for a complete shopping mall or a skyscraper or an airport terminal is next to impossible. Attachment is also founded in ownership, either private or collective. Owners feel regard for their place because it is a part of who they are. Users recognize this regard and return it in kind. The placeless environments owned by nameless stockholders or the anonymous public have no or few individual people at their heart. These places have no one to care for them; they often are vandalized, desecrated, poorly constructed, and poorly repaired or cleaned. Sometimes, as in the case of public housing, these places are actively hated and foment in their users a feeling of helplessness and alienation.
As attachment withers, so does the power of place ballet. People use the place for practical, self-serving ends only. Delays, breakdowns, faulty merchandise, poor service are more common and less humanly dealt with. Arguments or dissatisfactions are less likely to be settled face to face. Rather, settlement comes through the courts or some other impersonal context. The corner-store merchant, for example, is sued by a customer who broke her leg on an ice-covered pavement poorly cleared by a neighborhood boy who didn’t care. If the place fostered attachment, the woman might have accepted the accident gracefully, or the boy might have taken more pride in his work. Loss of attachment leads to a vicious circle: fewer people feel care or responsibility, which leads to even further erosion of these feelings. The unplanned and fragile order of the place ballet collapses and another place moves towards dull and lifeless space.
Attachment grows in individual hearts. like other qualities of place ballet, it cannot be made to happen directly. Indirect nurturing, however, can be fostered by activities and events that allow people to become involved actively and experience a sense of sharing -- for example, clean-up or gardening programmers, annual parades or other regularly scheduled rituals that provide people with a sense of participation and community continuity.
Fostering Place Ballet
Regularity and variety mark the place ballet. Their balance is a rhythm of place: speeding up and slowing down, crescendos of activity and relative quiet. The particular place involves a unique rhythm, whose tempo changes hourly,l weekly and seasonally. The arbitrary breakdown of place ballet into descriptive parts is valuable heuristically but makes place ballet more regimented and precise than it is in practice. “In real life”, writes Jacobs (ibid., p.54) of the street ballet, ‘something is always going on, the ballet is never at a halt, but the general effect is peaceful and the general tenor even leisurely.” All place ballets involve a dialectic between predictability and unexpectedness, regularity and surprise, calm and activity.
Place ballet is fragile. Its pattern arises not from conscious planning but from the prereflective union of people usually unaware of the whole they help create. Only when the place ballet is weakened or destroyed do its members normally realize their participation. They are surprised, angry or regretful, but the feelings are too late: place ballet once destroyed is almost impossible to resurrect.
Buttimer (1978) argues that in planning places, two complementary views must be considered: the place in itself as a lifeworld for residents and users (the insider’s view); the place beyond itself as it has links with the wider region and socio-economic milieu (the outsider’s view). In the past, Buttimer suggests, formal planning has too often emphasized the outsider’s view, which looks at places “from an abstract sky” and “reads the texts of landscapes and overt behaviors in the picture language of maps and models’ (ibid., pp.20-1. At the same time, insiders often become concerned only with issues that affect their particular place; they forget the wider socio-economic context of which their place is a part. The need, says Buttimer (ibid., p.19), is “a dialogue between those who live in places and those who wish to plan for them”. Perhaps the greatest challenge is pedagogical and involves “calling to conscious awareness those taken-for-granted ideas and practices within each [of the two views] and then to reach beyond them toward a more reasonable and mutually respectful dialogue” I(ibid., p.21).
In nurturing such a dialogue, place ballet could well be important. Insiders come to discover one taken-for-granted component of the place in which they live. They recognize through their own experience the value of place ballets; they feel a wish to sustain existing place ballets and foster new ones. At the same time, outsiders recognize the ballets of places under their jurisdiction; they institute plans and policies to protect place ballets and integrate their dynamics into larger environmental wholes.
Ultimately, the continued existence of places is in the hands of their day-to-day participants. “The crucial philosophical and pragmatic problem lies in what potential role is allowed for residents to have any creative say in designing [places]” (Buttimer, ibid., p.29). An understanding of place ballet is one way in which insiders might take a more effective role in making their environment a place. They begin to recognize the inherent order of people-in-place and strive to create a lifeworld which supports a satisfying human existence grounded in a liveable environment.
Notes
1. In her description of the Hudson Street ballet, Jacobs (1961, p.51) provides one indication of how place ballets intermingle and fuse: businessmen and women, living on Hudson Street, are picked up by ‘stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up to midtown”. One indication of place ballet at a regional scale is Skinner’s study (1964) of rural marketing in China. He explains how the regular patterns of itinerant merchants moving from one place to another generate a regularity of buyers and sellers meeting in terms of place -- the market town.
2. Many of the ideas developed in this chapter owe their origin to Jacobs (1961). Though she says that her argument is appropriate only for large cities, many of her points seem applicable to place ballets in other settings and at other environmental scales. One of the first aims of the student interested in place ballet should be a careful study and thorough mastery of Jacobs’s book.
CHAPTER 20
AN EDUCATION OF UNDERSTANDING:
EVALUATING THE ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIENCE GROUPS
The important thing
Is to pull yourself up by your own hair,
To turn yourself inside out,
And see the whole world with new eye— Peter Weiss (1966, p.46).
Place ballets of the past arose from the day-to-day strivings of common man immersed in the triad of habituality. Place ballets were a taken-for-granted part of the lifeworld; they developed naturally, with no need for foresight. Today, place ballets grow spontaneously less often. They need to be explored and understood explicitly in a way similar to efforts of the preceding chapter.
In making the lifeworld an object of attention, the student moves into the triad of openness (Figure 18.2). He or she works to extend and heighten his or her encounters with the world. The triad of openness is concerned with more sensitive looking and more thoughtful understanding. The person, for example, who sees a place in terms of time-space routines and body ballets, who can ask how that place might have a better place ballet, is looking more carefully at his day-to-day world. The place for this person is no longer a taken-for-granted context of daily life, it becomes a thing and process in its won right and the person may begin to feel concern and responsibility for it.
The environmental experience groups are one way of fostering encounters in the triad of openness. The primary aim of the groups was phenomenological -- that is, they served as a vehicle through which to explore essential dimensions of everyday environmental experience. At the same time, however, many of the group members felt a sense of increased understanding (Appendix B). Reports describing the group process emphasized its significance in two ways: as an attunement to unsuspected aspects of the individual’s own lifeworld; as a tool for evaluating theories and concepts in conventional social science and education.
Attunement to Lifeworld
The lifeworld is the daily world of taken-for-grantedness. Immersed in the natural attitude, people forget that existence might be otherwise. They live inauthentically in that they accept a world of surfaces and normally never look beneath. The person striving to enter the triad of openness works to penetrate the accepted surfaces; he strives to discover more about himself and the world he assumes. The environmental experience groups assisted people with this aim. Group members began to understand aspects of their own lifeworld.
The process of attunement is expressed in various ways. One group member spoke of an opening and need for sharing -- especially with children:
A whole new world is opening for me in terms of places and situations -- my home, my school, my need for people and privacy. I appreciate these things with a deeper understanding of their necessary role in my life. . . The thought of helping other people understand these things -- especially children -- brings purposive meaning to me (commentary 1).
A second group member felt that the group process was “one of the most important experiences’ of her academic career because it had provided her with new insight into the nature of her day-do-day experiences and behaviors (commentary 4). ‘self-knowledge is a kind of understanding I value highly,” she explained. Because of the group experience, she came to accept the possibility that there may be certain essential patterns of human experience, for example, the significance of centering and habit.
Other reports also highlighted the value of the groups in fostering self-knowledge. “The group work has carried over and become part of my everyday experience” (commentary 5); “I’m thinking about things differently all the time” (commentary 12), “the newly gained level of knowledge that now guides my view of environmental experience” (commentary 7). One group member summarized the sensitizing powers of the group in particular depth, and I quote the account at length. Note especially the person’s better understanding of encounter:
Glimpsing completely unexpected, very basic forces that shape my behavior is exciting. I see a little more fully that I’m not at all in control of many of my everyday movements and feel that this is important to my own experience in many different ways -- like understanding a hard-to-break habit like nail-chewing, or working on a new piano piece and being able to tackle difficult passages more effectively. Discoveries from the group were useful this past summer when I had to adjust to a new living situation. I was able to recognize the importance of routine, of center, of familiar paths, and being able to encourage their development. . .
What was especially interesting to me this summer was the phenomenon of obliviousness. Catching myself (mostly afterwards) so many times caught up inside with some aspect of a situation so that I forgot about the outside world and felt afterwards as if someone else had had the experience. I observed that sometimes the obliviousness had to do with a goal I”d set. For example, one day I took a hike up Pelican Canyon, with ambitious plans to take another trail down a different canyon on the way back. With my day all planned out, the actual hike became almost automatic -- an empty gesture. I caught myself at one point completely preoccupied with random thoughts. the whole tenor of walking the trail changed for a few minutes, as if I”d only just arrived, aware of surroundings that I”d been blind to moments before.
It was a frustrating day, with most of it spent rushing to the next landmark. I see this obliviousness orientation in so much I do and often wonder if there’s some way to keep myself more in touch with the moments at hand. Her is where the group work has been helpful because in the past I wasn’t even aware of this obliviousness -- at least now I see it and perhaps in time I can find more ways of getting beyond it, of actually seeing and looking at the things that are there with me at the moment (commentary 3).1
A Tool for Evaluation
Besides fostering a deeper awareness of daily environmental experience, the groups gave some members a better insight into traditional approaches of social science and education. People could better evaluate their accuracy and value. One group member, rereading a paper she had written on territoriality, realized because the of the group process that the territorial model she had hypothesized was probably erroneous (commentary 11). Before she had assumed that “personal scale and national scale were the same” , now she believes that there are important differences:
I know a lot more about personal scale now. I don’t see how the idea of personal territories could work on a national scale. Some of the needs are the same if you blow them up far enough, but I don’t think the comparison gets you too far - as I had thought before. The group has helped me to see that there are different things going on in the two.
Other members valued the group process because it pointed to a valuable mode of education - a way of learning founded on experiential rather than intellectual knowing. One group member, for example, explained that she came to “enjoy going to the group meetings and sharing experiences, reacting to and getting reactions from people who I feel understand my interest and enthusiasm” (commentary 5). She became aware of “a special rapport in the groups probably because we shared experiences rather than intellectual knowledge or ability like most college classes’.
Another group member felt that the experience has shown her a way of study that she could respect because it itself respected the things it studied; the group approach overcame a gap she had felt between academic knowledge and other ways of learning.
One of the most important things about the work we’ve done for me is that it has shown me a way of knowing that I can respect. In catching phenomena, not manipulating them, and sharing these observations with each other, I feel as if we’ve been receptive and open to the thing itself. So many of my friends feel a gap between what they”re exposed to academically and the rest of their (more relevant) learning experiences. For me, the work we’ve done in the group resolves this problem. I don’t feel a split; learning about myself has become part of my education. . .because of the groups. That is the strongest force which keeps me coming back to school (commentary 3).
Meanings for Education
In a critique of contemporary higher education, Grange (1974) argues that the typical liberal arts curriculum today emphasizes a mode of education founded in explanation. Explanation, says Grange, seeks to understand the genesis of an occurrence; it is “a process of finding out why something happens (ibid.,p.362).
Grange believes that the emphasis on explanation has fostered a growing malaise in contemporary education. Explanation leads to “a curriculum emphasizing methodologies of inquiry” which become “instruments, tools for the future control of history” (ibid.,p.361). The most damaging impact of explanation, says Grange, is the student’s losing sight of a particular idea, theory, or method’s meaning in relation to his own life and the lives of others. Knowledge founded on explanation is “turned on” and “turned off”. The student makes use of his learning in the classroom, as he performs as researcher, or as he works as urban planner. Much of the time, however, as he lives his daily life, his knowledge is forgotten about or drawn from only on occasion. The result, Grange writes (ibid.,p.362) is that
the seamless garment of lived human experience is rent by the very process of learning itself. We do not live as at times a mind equipped with the power to know; nor do we live as at times an agent whose will swings into action to secure certain results. . . We are humans being. The texture, fabric, and “feel” of our being is always a unified zone of awareness, albeit with alternating and shifting currents of self-understanding. The besetting sin of the liberal arts curriculum lies in its indifference to the primacy of lived experience.
Understanding, says Grange, is the need in education today. Understanding is the coming to see more deeply and respectfully the essential nature of human experience and the world in which it unfolds. The subject of understanding is the everyday world met afresh; that world takes on new and richer facets of meaning which speak to the person’s own individual life. Unlike explanation, understanding does not seek the causes of events nor does it predict and control the future. Rather, understanding seeks the meaning of events; it helps the person to see more intimately and lucidly the pattern of his own existence and thereby live better in the future. Says Grange (ibid.,p.362):
Understanding. . .is directly related to the way in which we actually live. Our human existence is constituted by layers of meaning and these layers, in effect, create the “world” in which we live. As we perceive meaning so we act. Understanding is, therefore, the human process of standing-under our “world” so that we support it, sustain it, dwell in it, develop it, and articulate it.
In Grange’s terms, the environmental experience groups and Goethe’s delicate empiricism are both educational tools fostering understanding. These approaches reveal meanings to the student founded in his own experience -- of what it means to dwell geographically, of what a particular thing in nature is. Understanding joins the student intimately with what he studies; it becomes a partner, a friend -- a thing he wished to know more about because it tells him more about himself.
Understanding places the student in the triad of openness -- encounters become more lasting and intense. An understanding of environmental experience, for example, indicates through actual experience the importance of body-subject, the value of routine, the relationship between movement and rest. Such understanding shows the student the way people dwell on earth. It gives him clues to better and worse dwelling. These clues may help him to improve his own life-style and help him understand and improve the life-style of others. Understanding fosters meanings at the center of a circle -- the self -- out from which extend reverberations of relationship to other people and places.
If understanding could be fostered in environmental education, the most significant impact might well be a first-hand recognition of modern man’s placelessness, homelessness and frequent disregard for nature. Understanding of these threatening forces, particularly as they undermine ecological and human communities, might provoke individual and group action for practical repair. The landscape and physical environment might be made to reflect a better harmony among people, place, and nature.
Note
1. This commentary was written in the autumn following the environmental experience groups, after the commentator had gone to Utah for the summer to work as a Forest Service guide at a national forest there.
CHAPTER 21
BEHAVIORAL GEOGRAPHY,
PHENOMENOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL
EXPERIENCE
Once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have given up the understanding—dropped it out of our language, and so out of our thought - that we and our world would create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other— Wendell Berry (1977, p.22).
Much of social science in the last several decades has been premised on positivism - the philosophical stance that genuine knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their relations as verified by the empirical sciences. A positivist perspective assumes that ‘man and nature may be understood in virtually the same terms’ (Samuels, 1971, p.81)1
In translating this positivist view into procedure, geographers have emphasized the tangible, publicly verifiable aspects of people’s relationship with environment and space; they have studied the visible patterns, processes and flows of man’s imprint on the earth. Behavioral geography and environmental psychology. although they have shifted emphasis to people’s inner worlds, have generally accepted the same positivist stance, and developed various methodologies to convert the ambiguity of inner psychological processes into empirically measurable images, attitudes, territories, or similar hypothesized construct that can be elicited and correlated in ordered matrix form.2
The problem with a positivist approach, says Samuels (ibid.) is not so much that man can not be objectified; clearly, contemporary research in social science demonstrates that he can. The problem is that “a science of man that must of necessity objectify its subject can not deal with the whole man, only the fragments’ (ibid., p.97). Positivist science can investigate only the empirically discernable, objective parts of human behavior and experience. The less visible. more subtle portions of human existence - at-homeness, habit, modes of encounter, dwelling - are ignored or reduced to recordable manifestations.
Behavioral geography and environmental psychology, in other words, have frequently fragmented and objectified man’s inner situation. Research has generally arbitrarily focused on one small band of experience - cognitive map, territorial defence, a one-dimensional form of encounter - which is represented and explained in some measurable, reproductive example. The best example is probably the assumption that behavior is a function of cognition. The person in this cognitive approach is not a full human being. He is reduced to a machine-like brain intercepting standardized perceptual input. Through a cybernetic process involving a chain of step-wise decisions, this brain “acquires, codes, stores, recalls, and manipulates information”.3
The students who use the cognitive approach generally justify its implied image of man because it provides one pathway to explanation and prediction. Further, these students might argue that the approach can readily encompass additional aspects of environmental behavior and experience - for example, affective knowledge about a place of varying intensities of perception and information processing.
Yet the chief limitation of the cognitive approach and other behavioral approaches like it lies deeper and cannot be repaired by piecemeal, in-house manipulations. The essential flaw of these conventional approaches is their implicit separation of person from his world. By speaking of a person-environment relationship - even as medicated by inner process - these approaches define the geographical world as an entity apart from man. The environment in this perspective, says Samuels (ibid., p.59)
is something outside, other than, or external to that which it surrounds and has a impact upon. The world as environment is independent of its subject. It is “objective” as a world of things separated from or external to other things (italics in original).
Granted, the world is an objective in a cognitive mode of experience: getting around in an unfamiliar environment is one demonstration of this fact. Much more often, however, we are the world - we are subsumed in the world like a fish is joined with water. For most moments of daily living, we do not experience the world as an object - as a thing and stuff separate from us. Rather, we interpenetrate that world, are fused with it through an invisible, web-like presence woven of the threads of body and feelings. For each person and culture this netting is unique - extending out and joining with the different paths, places, routines and situations which in sum combine to make the particular world in which the individual lives.
Underlying all these unique worlds, however, no matter how apparently different on the surface, are the experiential patterns of body-subject, feeling-subject, at-homeness and encounter. Through these generally unnoticed, matter-of-fact processes compromising our human nature, we live inescapably in the world. We can repeat Relph’s dictum that “people are their place and a place is its people, and however readily they may be separated in conceptual terms, in experience they are not easily differentiated” (1976b, p.34).
The individual person, distinct from the world, has his of her particular integrity, to be sure. “In one respect”, writes the ecologist Paul Shepard (1969, p.s), “the self is an arrangement of organs, feelings, and thoughts - a ‘me" - surrounded by a hard body boundary: skin, clothes, insular habits.” Yet there must be a complementary side of man, Shepard goes on to say - a side which he calls “relatedness of self”. This view requires
a kind of vision across boundaries. The epidermis of the skin is ecologically like a pond surface or a forest soil, not a shell so much as a delicate interpenetration. It reveals the self a ennobled and extended . . as part of the landscape and the ecosystem (ibid., p.2).
The “vision across boundaries’ must be a focus of academic attention in the years ahead. The aim is a deepening understanding of immersion in world. In his notion of “relatedness of self”, Shepard as an ecologist speaks largely of tangible, biological bonds among people, their environment and other organic life. A phenomenological perspective carries the interpenetration of people and environment further. It demonstrates that experientially, too, man can be regarded not as a shell but as a pond surface. As well as the more visible ecological bonds which link people inescapable with environment, human interpenetration with world incorporates less visible, experiential bonds. This interpenetration is difficult to record because it flows through the prereflective forces of body and feelings. But it is present in human existence and must be considered if the aim is a complete picture of people in their world.
If we begin to understand this interpenetration, particularly in our own individual existences, we can better realize that we are not apart from earth but an integral part of it. We are literally immersed in our geographical world, and this immersion is the primal core of dwelling. To understand the earth as the dwelling place of man, we must understand this primal core. At the same time, we may better understand ourselves and cultivate more care and respect for the world in which we live. In this way, we grow as persons and feel a deepening concern and compassion for ourselves, our fellow men and women, and the earth as our home.
Notes
1. “Positivism is the view of the world that equates being with what positive natural science can know. To be real for it, a thing has to be perceptible in time and space. The tangibility of things proves their reality. Nothing, in this view, is otherwise than an object. Being and objective are one.” (Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 1, cited in Samuels, 1971, p. 80, p.80, n.124, italics in original.) Perhaps the most articulate argument for positivism in geography is David Harvey’s Explanation in Geography (1969). He writes: “there is every reason to expect scientific laws to be formulated in all areas of geographic research, and there is absolutely no justification for the view that laws can not be formulated in human geography because of the complexity and waywardness of the subject matter” (ibid., p.169). For critiques of the positivist view in geography, see Guelke 1971; Samuels, 1971; Gregory, 1978.
2. The range of these positivist techniques is well illustrated in More and Golledge (eds.), 1976.