āIt is impossible,ā Wendell Berry avers, āto divorce the question of what we do from the question of where we areāor rather, where we think we are.ā1 Our actions in the world are deeply intertwined with our sense of place, that is, how it is we consider our dwelling in this place or another. It is no question that we live in a globalized world and an increasingly mobile culture. When we do stay put for very long, at least in the United States, it is very often in virtually indistinguishable suburbs, a simple carās-ride away from any big-box store or coffee chain we so desire to visit. When some anthropologists attempt to answer this question of where we think we are as a culture, they go so far as to state that we live in an overwhelmingly āplacelessā society, building and spending time in what Marc AugĆ© calls ānon-placesāāairports, waiting rooms, (inter)national chain stores.2 For AugĆ©, these places are not really places at all; they have no particular character and exist as holding tanks for individual and unconnected people who are merely passing through or consuming. What results is a lack of identity, structure, connectedness, and unique character, what James Howard Kunstler describes as a āgeography of nowhere.ā3 This picture of contemporary society is less than positive. However, in recent years there has emerged a cultural movement seeking community, particularity, and place. The topic of place has emerged on the scene as a major concern in a variety of disciplines, as evidenced in the writing of someone such as Wendell Berry, quoted above.
But what do we mean by āplaceā exactly? And what does it have to do with other contemporary theological questions and concernsāthings such as social justice, ecological and environmental problems, questions of identity and human nature? Why should Christians even consider place at all? Everything we do happens in a place. Philosopher Edward Casey reminds us, āTo be at allāto exist in any wayāis to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place.ā4 While his statement may at first seem rather straightforwardāof course we exist in place!āCaseyās writing reminds us that we cannot escape the essential fact of our emplacement and embodiedness in this world. Place is part of who we are; it is both a physical and social reality. While our bodies must physically dwell in places, our minds also structure knowledge and ideologies in relation to places. The word place can thus be used to refer to physical geography or landscape, the community existing within a place, or the place of someone in a social group or network. Physical places can also become metaphors for theological, philosophical, social, or political ideas. For instance, when one visits Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which exhibits Gothic motifs devised to emphasize the viewerās experience of God through particular visual elements, one experiences the beauty of the physical place itself, while also encountering the theological ideas associated with pointed arches or stained-glass windows. The place becomes somewhere the visitor can indwell physically while also providing metaphors through architectural styles for different experiences of Godās transcendence or dwelling presence.5 Similarly, Ellis Island is more often associated with immigrant emotions, ideologies, and experiences than with the physical geography itself, though certainly the physical still plays a primary role in oneās understanding of the placeāit is one of the first physical features one sees when sailing into Brooklyn Harbor.
Place, in this sense, can be understood as a location, an experience, a community, a set of relationships, memories, and habits, a measurement of time and history. Because we are embodied creatures, we cannot separate any of these things from the physical. In fact, all these things cannot be fully understood except through their association with the physical.6 But place is not just a piece of groundāit is an undeniable fact of our existence in relationship with the whole of creation. We are necessarily a placed people. And what we do in and how we think about the physical places we are in matters very greatly.
SPACE VERSUS PLACE
Place, as a term, is often tied up with a discourse on space, and most disciplines seek to make a distinction between the terms place and space. While the terms are used in many different ways (what one writer means by the word place, another might be suggesting through the use of the term space), most agree that space tends to be universal in character, whereas place is particular.7 Walter Brueggemann, speaking from a theological perspective, notes the essential difference between space and place:
āSpaceā means an arena of freedom, without coercion or accountability, free of pressures and void of authority. Space may be imaged as weekend, holiday, avocation, and is characterized by a kind of neutrality or emptiness waiting to be filled by our choosing. . . . But āplaceā is a very different matter. Place is space that has historical meanings, where some things have happened that are now remembered and that provide continuity and identity across generations. Place is space in which important words have been spoken that have established identity, defined vocation, and envisioned destiny. Place is space in which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made, and demands have been issued. Place is indeed a protest against the unpromising pursuit of space. It is a declaration that our humanness cannot be found in escape, detachment, absence of commitment, and undefined freedom.8
Brueggemann provides a helpful, and very particular, picture of what place looks like in relation to space. Humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes it more succinctly: āāSpaceā is more abstract than āplace.ā What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.ā9
What both of these writers hint at is that places donāt just exist; places must be made. American author and essayist Wallace Stegner perhaps communicates placemaking in clearest terms when he writes: āAt least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in itāhave both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. . . . It is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.ā10 Places are made, therefore, through relationshipsāthrough social interactions that shape both the community and physical place in relation to each other. A place becomes what it is by a long history of actions performed there. As we perform and reperform actions in a place, we are simultaneously drawing on that placeās history and memory for our own understanding of ourselves, as well as adding back to the value of the place, remaking it over and over again in a sort of dynamic conversation and liturgy.11
SHAPING SENSE OF PLACE
But when we talk about a āsense of placeā we are talking of something deeper still. This is because how we act in placesāwhat our placemaking looks likeāis a reflection of how we feel about it (whether self-consciously or unselfconsciously), and ultimately, how and whether we love it. Most scholars describe a āsense of placeā using all the various associations highlighted above, including a sense of communal narrative and memory. A sense of place has to do with the nature of belonging within these systemsāthat is, how one belongs to a place or community in both actuality and imagination. There is, then, a mutual relationship between our feelings about a place and the manner in which we act in a place.
To highlight the relationship between placemaking (our actions in a place) and love of place further, Edward Relphās observations about an āauthenticā sense of place may be a helpful starting point. What constitutes a sense of place for Relph is not oneās insider/outsider label but whether one has an āauthenticā attitude toward place. An authentic attitude to place, he says, ācomes from a full awareness of places for what they are as products of manās intentions and the meaningful settings for human activities, or from a profound and unselfconscious identity with place.ā12 The authentic sense of place, then, can be either a self-conscious product or unselfconscious producer. Though Relph distinguishes between these two modes of place discovery, he does not seem to regard one over the other. It is the main difference between these two, though, that suggests how important the cultivation of imaginative placemaking practices are for a worthwhile study of place in the world today.
Relph describes an authentic and unselfconscious sense of place as ābeing inside and belonging to your place both as an individual and as a member of a community, and to know this without reflecting on it.ā13 Relph suggests that this way of thinking is most normally ascribed to āunspoiled primitive people,ā who depend on the land and tend to view places as related to both the spiritual and the physical. Contemporary Western people may unselfconsciously move about and act within their place, however, their relationship to it tends to be less about the sacred quality of the place and more about the utility and functionality of it, which is interchangeable with other secular places. Though Relph emphasizes that an unselfconscious and authentic sense of place āprovides an important source of identity for individuals, and through them, for communities,ā he notes that most people cannot claim this type of relationship to place.14 Spatial mobility has made it so that few people remain in relationship with a single place from birth, or for any significant length of time, for that matter, and as a result, the historic and symbolic quality of a single, particular place is lost on most individuals. Furthermore, the tendency in todayās society to reflect on oneās own identity makes it so that even the āinsiderā must self-consciously choose oneās place. Wendell Berry illustrates this when he says of his return to his native Kentucky farm: āBefore, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice.ā15 Though Berry already had a relationship to his family land as an āinsider,ā he made the self-conscious decision to return to it and acknowledge his identity within it in an act of homecoming.
For these reasons, Relph argues that it is more likely in todayās society that people self-consciously acquire a sense of place. āIn unselfconscious experience places are innocently accepted for what they are; in self-conscious experience they become objects of understanding and reflection.ā16 Self-conscious experience of place tends to be related to the āoutsiderā who makes a place somewhere where she may not have been born or grown up, but yet learns and later maintains a sense of connectedness and identity within the particular community. It is just as often, though, that an insider, often on leaving her place for some time, comes to reflect on it in a self-conscious way and chooses to return and belong within it in a new or different way. It is through this degree of self-awareness that we should understand the way most people find identity within places.17 An authentic sense of place requires openness, reflection, and intentionality: āThe more open and honest such experiences are, and the less constrained by theoretical or intellectual preconceptions, the greater is the degree of authenticity.ā18 According to this account by Relph, intentional thoughts, actions, and placemaking practices are the most important part of cultivating a sense of place. And if, as Relph suggests, the self-conscious attitude toward place is the primary way that most modern people engage with the world of places, then reflection on the practices of placemaking themselves will be an important part of any inquiry into what a Christian sense of place might look like.19
While Relph leaves his readers to wonder exactly what types of practices may help cultivate a self-conscious sense of place, Kent Ryden, in his study of writing and sense of place, identifies some potential practices, which include the learning of place names, speech, artistry and craft, building, and memoriesāin other words, practices related to knowing the place through living, loving, working, and participating in a place over time. But while he identifies several ālayers of meaningā that can be expressed by those who actually belong to that place, he suggests finally that the main difference between the insider and the outsider is love for the place, which is exhibited in both perception of the place and oneās action within it.20 Rydenās conclusion that love is the main proof of a...
