Space and Place - Nenad Lipovac

By – Poornima Panda

What is a Place? What is a Space?

The meaning of place is connected with all settings and situations we live in. Man lives,
moves, and works in the world that is differentiated with places, but still we have a very
poor understanding about the places and their experiencing. Places are sources of identity
for every single living being.
Speaking from the planning aspect, typical example of placelessness are the towns and
neighbourhoods in US with a street grid system, where the blocks are of the same size, and
even the type of the houses are the same.
1. The Essence of Place
Place can occur at all levels of identity: subjective (mine or yours, ours or theirs) or objective
(here, there, in the house, on the street, in the town, or even any solar or star system). For
e.g. My house is the safest place for me, which is subjective; My house is in Odisha is
objective.

 Location
 Landscape
 Time
 Private, Personal and Public Place

2. Space and Place

Space defines itself by everything we can experience in daily life sky and earth, water and
land, hamlet and city, street and square, a building itself from outside and inside. We call it
visible space,space with physical or objective awareness which we can see or feel or
perceive.
Space with subjective awareness and without physical appearance is space in astronomical,
mathematical or other kind of meaning as the space claimed to be occupied by objects,
settlements or even countries.

 Primitive Space
 Perceptual Space
 Cognitive Space
 Abstract Space
 Spatial Ability, Knowledge of Space
 Relations Between Form and Space
 Architectural Space and Planning Space
3. The Experience of Place
Human mind is capable, somehow, to "translate" the 3-D image into a 2-D one, and vice
versus. In order to understand the meaning of the experience of place, we shall try to the
feel for place experience, sense of place and sense of time, spirit of place, and its impact. To
understand the meaning of place experiencing very important role has the perception and
awareness of the place.
For e.g. I can feel the place safe if I’m aware of that place or if I know few bare minimum
things about the place.

 Feel for Place Experience

 Sense of Place, Sense of Time
 Spirit of Place
 Perception and Awareness of Place

SPACE AND PLACE: HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE - YI-FU TUAN

Space and place together define the nature of geography. Place incarnates the experiences
and aspirations of a people. Place is not only a fact to be explained in the broader frame of
space, but it is also a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the
people who have given it meaning.
The study of space, from the humanistic perspective, is thus the study of a people's spatial
feelings and ideas in the stream of experience. Experience is the totality of means by which
we come to know the world: we know the world through sensation (feeling), perception,
and conception.
The space that we perceive and construct, the space that provides cues for our behaviour,
varies with the individual and cultural group. Mental maps differ from person to person, and
from culture to culture. Here the writer tries to explain that a same space can be treated
different from person to person. For e.g. Odisha , the city of temples can be perceived by
tourist as the tour guide guides them, but for me I will perceive different.
 SPACE

1. Space and Time

The notion of 'distance' involves not only 'near' and 'far' but also the time
notions of past, present and future. 'Here' is 'now', 'there' is 'then' which lies both in the
past and in the future.
 The primacy of time.
 The primacy of space.

2. Space, Biology and Symbolism

 Anthropological studies have familiarised us with the idea that people's conception
of, and behaviour in, space differs widely. Human beings are more sensitive to vertical
and horizontal lines than to oblique lines, more responsive to right angles and
symmetrical shapes than to acute or obtuse angles and irregular shapes. In action
vertical and horizontal figures are easier to distinguish than those which are oriented
obliquely in different directions.

3. Spatial References and the Ego

The parts of the human body serve as a model for spatial organisation. Instead of 'back'
meaning 'behind', the 'track' left by a person means 'behind'; and 'ground' or 'earth'
means 'under', 'air' means 'over'.

4. Personal Experiential Space

The space that we can perceive spreads out before and around us, and is divisible into
regions of differing quality. Visual space is dominated by the broad horizon and small,
indistinct objects. This purely visual region seems static even though things move in it.
The feel of the visual-aural zone, and this is sense of a lively world. The affective zone,
which is accessible to the senses of smell and touch besides those of sight and hearing.

5. Group Experiential Space

People do not make a crowd if they seem an organic part of the environment, such as
Nature is not ordinarily perceived to be crowded not only is this true of the great open
space but also of forested wilderness. For e.g well-attended ball game and a mass
political or religious rally are alike in that the crowds do not detract, but enhance the
significance of the events.

6. Mythical-conceptual Space
A central theme in this survey of space is the bond between space and the human
existential: body implicates space; spatial measures are derived from dimensions of the
body; spatial qualities characterised as static, dynamic and affective, patent and latent,
high and low, near and far are clearly called into being by the human presence; depth
and distance are a function of the human sense of purpose and adequacy; 'crowdedness'
is less an expression of density than a psychological condition.

 PLACE

1. Definition
Place means primarily two things: one's position in society and spatial location.
The study of status belongs to sociology whereas the study of location belongs to
geography.

2. Meaning of Place
People talk of the 'spirit', the 'personality' and the 'sense' of place. 'Spirit' in the literal
sense: space is formless, 'Personality' suggests the unique: places, like human
 beings, acquire unique signatures in the course of time. People demonstrate their
sense of place when they apply their moral and aesthetic discernment to sites
and locations.

3. Stability and Place

A scene may be of a place but the scene itself is not a place. It lacks stability: it is in the
nature of a scene to shift with every change of perspective. Hence, a street is not
commonly called a place, A street comer is a place but the street itself is not.

4. Types of Place
It is relatively easy to identify places that are public symbols; it is difficult to identify
fields of care for they are not easily identifiable by external criteria, such as structure,
physical appearance, and articulate opinion
Places as fields of care
(low imageability)
park
home, drugstore, tavern
street corner, neighbourhood
marketplace
town
Places as public symbols
(high imageability)
sacred place
formal garden
monument
monumental architecture
public square
ideal city

5. Public Symbols
Monuments, artworks, buildings and cities are places because they can organize space
into centres of meaning. Some symbols transcend the bounds of a particular culture: for
example, such large architectural forms as the square and the circle, used to delimit
ideal cities, and such smaller architectural elements as the spire, the arch, and the
dome, used in buildings with cosmic pretensions.

6. Fields of Care
Human relationships require material objects for sustenance and deepening. Personality
itself depends on a minimum of material possessions, including the possession of
intimate space. Fields of care, by contrast, carry few signs that declare their nature: they
can be known in essence only from within.

7. What is a Place?
Place can be as small as the comer of a room or large as the earth itself: that earth is our
place in the universe is a simple fact of observation to homesick astronauts. Location can
become place overnight, so to speak, through the ingenuity of architects and engineers.

FORMALIZING SPACE AND PLACE - MICHAEL GOODCHILD, LINNA LI

Space, or the spatial perspective, is generally refer to the surface and the Earth, as
organized by coordinate systems such as latitude and longitude, and concepts such as
distance and direction that are measurable within that space.
Place, on the other hand, is normally defined as a social construction. Places have
properties, but there may be differences in individual perceptions of those properties,
and their importance in defining places.

1. THE SPATIAL PERSPECTIVE

2. SPACE AND PLACE IN HUMAN DISCOURSE
3. PROSPECTS FOR A PLACIAL PERSPECTIVE

RELATIONAL CONCEPTS OF SPACE AND PLACE: ISSUES FOR PLANNING

THEORY AND PRACTICE

In a world of change, how can we best conceptualize the dynamics of places and the role
of planning action in shaping them, With globalization apparently 'stretching' and
deepening the relations between places, and ways of thinking, translate new
understandings of socio-spatial relations into their practices.
1. Object-Centred, Euclidean Conceptions of Place
Space, distance, and the city, in effect, were reified as automatic and determinating
forces directly shaping the social and economic world in some simple, linear, cause
and effect way. Human life was seen to be shaped by the environment and location
within which it occurred.
An object-centred, view of cities unfortunately remains implicitly dominant in the
deep intellectual foundations of many areas of planning theory and practice.

2. Time and Space as External 'Containers' to Urban Life

The tools of spatial representation which planners use (master plans, development
plans, comprehensive plans, etc.) were traditionally two-dimensional and purported
to offer single,objective, representations of urban spaces. The planning field needs a
vigorous effort to re-configure our thinking about socio-spatial relations and their
translation into the routines and spatial strategies pursued in planning practices.