Connecting People, Place and Design

Angelique Edmonds

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789381337
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Connecting People, Place and Design examines the human relationship with place, how its significance has evolved over time and how contemporary systems for participation shape the places around us in our daily lives. Divided into three parts – place, people and participation – this interdisciplinary volume examines people, place and design across the fields of architecture, design, cultural studies, sociology, political science and philosophy.

Part I, on place, considers the cultural, political and philosophical shifts in our historical relationship to place. Part II, on people, considers movement and migration and how it affects place relations. Part III, on participation, examines forms of public engagement and cultural systems for collaborative contribution to the design and creation of place. Improving people's relationships with place requires connection, and in Connecting People, Place and Design, Edmonds demonstrates the importance of connection, underscoring that working together to nurture and sustain places that celebrate the diversity of our human species is one of the most critical issues of our time.

PART 1: PLACE

Chapter 1: Significance of Place

Role of Place Premodern: Neolithic, Aboriginal, Ontological Significance

This chapter examines some of the ways an understanding of place and its role in our lives has been approached. As humans, it has been our conceptual constructions of place that have changed over time. As noted, physical place remains constant over time but our perceptions of it evolve. To demonstrate and give depth to this observation, we will examine two examples of significant orientations to place that predate the contemporary approaches; one lost to us and interpreted mainly through archaeological evidence, and the other embodying the oldest living culture in the world, whose occupation of that Land has been constant through tens of thousands of years. These two examples offer relatively different approaches to understanding the significance of land and its import in our lives, and for broader human understanding of being.

One of the examples for discussion is Avebury, a henge monument containing three stone circles located in England. The construction of Avebury’s standing stones is attributed to Neolithic times (2600 BC). The landscape itself is formidable and contains the largest megalithic stone circle in the world and is listed as a World Heritage Site. Despite indication of significant intent in the way it is laid out, the continuity of culture since its construction has been sufficiently interrupted that, consequently, our contemporary understanding of its original intent and importance is tentative. The interpretation of Avebury’s importance as a ceremonial and scared landscape is also inescapably influenced by contemporary biases, privileging time and temporal distinctions as the basis of organizing our self-understanding.

The other example, by contrast in Aboriginal Australia, offers a less interrupted cultural continuum, such that the land, landscape and culture are attributed to be older, and current occupants of that land maintain responsibility and ability to describe the nature of the relationship with and connection to land. Despite colonization of much of the land in Australia by Europeans over 200 years ago, the specific region of discussion has maintained a (relatively) unbroken² lineage of cultural practice and thus the ancestral beliefs are described by current occupants with authority and conviction, informed by ancestral knowledge and tradition. By contrast, in Avebury such descriptions are offered speculatively via documents at the ‘visitors centre’ marking the World Heritage Site. The structure of social relations derived from the Land in the Aboriginal Australian example will be discussed as they inform the basis of rights in property and display an alternative understanding to place or land as ‘property’ in contrast to the dominant contemporary western approach. These examples are offered to ensure that our discussion regarding the importance of the embodying dimension of place is grounded in particular examples and resists the contemporary predilection for discussion of place in conceptual or abstract terms. This is an important distinction because it is the latter that we aim to cast in relief and to question, to reflect and highlight the impact of its influence in obscuring our attunement to the significance of embodied place in our lives. The following chapter will explore how, in philosophical terms, the shift privileging a conceptual approach to place occurred.

The following introduces the chapter’s themes, to assist in framing the subsequent exploration of ancient orientations to the natural world, evident in the two situated examples that demonstrate the embodied significance of place.

Multiple Perceptions

Places are everywhere. Thomas Gieryn suggests that place ‘can be anything that has the following “necessary and sufficient” features’: geographic location (whether spot, area or linear form), material form (physicality) and investment with meaning and value (positive or negative).³ Contrary to Gieryn’s listed features, there is also often talk of virtual places, the body as place and ‘place’ as any site of human engagement or activity. Since there are multitudes of people holding varying views on the meaning of place and thus how it is defined, it is clear there is no single definition that will satisfy all. Rather there are pluralities of place and place remains fundamentally important to our sense of identity, our sense of community and our humanity. Because it is so fundamental and plural, there is no singular academic discipline or professional practice that has a monopoly on place. As a result, discourse on place and approaches to understanding place draw on contributions from many sources including human geography, environmental sociology, environmental psychology, environmental health, environmental economics, design and architecture, urban and regional planning, landscape architecture, anthropology, philosophy, natural resource management, environmental history, ecology and cultural studies. Place is also a major topic of interest for the arts and there are numerous artists who engage in site-specific creative practice, which takes place as its starting position. Each of these approaches has its own language or discourse for discussions regarding place and despite using different terminology, sometimes they speak of similar meanings. For example, it has been said that ‘place attachment’ is the environmental psychologists’ term for the geographers’ concept of a ‘sense of place’. A recurrent research seam concerns the extent to which place can be both visceral (embodied) and cognitive (intellectual). As the exploration of place unfolds within this book, we’ll discuss some of these differences and how selection of one interpretation or term might privilege certain perspectives. The privileging of one interpretation over another is closely linked with cultural perspectives and systems of knowledge, otherwise considered the context of the thinking.

Enduring Change

It is important to remember that the context of thinking and experiencing place that we have in contemporary life is a result of our history – of the many previous contexts of thinking. It has undergone enormous change over thousands of years. The term ‘nature’, for example, is not a static phenomenon, the way it is currently understood is a product of a particular context of thinking – the Enlightenment – that occurred a few hundred years ago and to which the mainstream context of human thinking still subscribes. There are however, cultures, indeed civilizations whose relationship to the natural world predates the Enlightenment understanding of ‘nature’ as the two examples following demonstrate. Chapter 2 examines the philosophical shift of the Enlightenment that influences our contemporary approach to place, the shift of modernity. The following focus is upon how human relations with the natural world were understood prior to that shift.

Ancient Orientations to the Natural World

Whilst the dominant contemporary delineation of the world occurs through a separation between what is ‘nature’ and what is man-made, this separation was not always the case. To discuss the changing relationships between humans and nature, we will need to consider how the relationship between them is understood. Most strikingly and as a point of departure for this exploration, our understanding of what nature is, occurs through our experience of being and the order of being, otherwise known as ontology.

As Voeglin describes, ‘[b]eing is nothing but a network of relations of order under the primary experience of things given in the cosmos’⁴ (not in the world). It is important here that as Voeglin later explains philosophy becomes senseless if it isolates one of its parts without regard to the others.⁵ The order of experience, that is my experience, your experience and the experience of the world around and between us, is the basis for our understanding of what we call ‘nature’.

With respect to the evolution of the relationship between humans and the natural world, it is useful to consider Only One Earth, the official title of the report from the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1971 in Stockholm. Its authors articulated the change in consciousness that has occurred in the modern era. ‘As we enter the global phase of human evolution, it becomes obvious that each man now has two countries, his own and planet earth’. If each of us now has two countries to care about, we also have two histories to write, that of our own country and that of ‘planet earth’. A comprehensive history of our planet is beyond our current purpose, but even the most brief summary of it reveals at its core is the evolution of the relationship between humans and the natural world. For this reason, in what follows we will examine two examples whose origins in different locations and eras demonstrate the variation and contemporary contrast with respect to the connections and relationship between people and place, between humans and the natural world.

Aboriginal Australian Perspectives

The following discussion regarding Aboriginal Australian orientations to Land is structured in four parts. First, the significance of Land and the particularity of place are introduced. Following that we will consider the agency with which country is invested and how that leads to a perception of the landscape as animated. Third, we will briefly explain how country and custodial obligations are inherited and finally we will briefly describe the nature of property rights and how that leads to a privileging of investment in relatedness and kinship.

Introduction to the significance of and connection to Land and the particularity of place

For Australian Aboriginal people, the so called – ‘inanimate’ world is alive with ‘being’. Hills and mountains are manifestations of creation beings – creatures from ancient stories, each with lessons to teach about the right way to live with the land and its people. The wind is alive with the spirits of the dead, and the plants and animals are in constant communication with us about both our lives and theirs.⁶

Aboriginal Australia is made up of over 350 different language groups and territories, each of which identify as a different ‘tribe’ or group. Whilst there are similarities of custom and belief across the groups, there are also particularities relative to the geographic location, climate and customs that evolved in particular places. For that reason, it is important that knowledge is situated and presented in a manner that grounds and reflects the ‘country’⁷ and group of people where it originates. In 2004, I spent a year living in a remote Aboriginal community in Australia’s north. Much of what is presented over the remainder of this chapter r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART 1: PLACE
• PART 2: PEOPLE
• PART 3: PARTICIPATION
• Conclusion
• Index