Why Place Matters
A Keynote Address Delivered by Visiting Fellow Philip Sheldrake at the Georgetown University “New Faces of Place Management” Research Forum which convened over 50 local non-profit organizations from across the Washington Metropolitan Region to discuss emerging practices in place-based community development. The forum was organized by the Georgetown Urban & Regional Planning program as part of its Place Management Project. For more information on the project, see placeleadership.georgetown.domains.
Hello! As you can tell from my voice I’m not from Washington, D.C.!
I hope that what I'm going to say doesn't come across as too abstract, because what I would like to do is to reposition our dialogue slightly, to a more visionary level. This is not to say that it should be detached from the practical, far from it! Behind all of the strategic and practical images that we have seen this morning as presented by place-making practitioners, we see an articulated vision of what being human is. And we see how being intentionally connected to “place” is actually a core part of our human identity.
I was asked to speak about this spiritual significance of place.
I want to begin with a man named Marc Augé, who is a French anthropologist. He was a student of a Jesuit historian and social anthropologist Michel de Certeau. Augé has very interesting insights distinguishing “place” from “non-place”.
It's all person-centered, of course. Place, for Augé, is engaged with our identity. It includes social facilities; it includes the historical monuments that remind us of our narrative and memory. It's creative; places which are creative of social life.
What he calls non-place includes, “curious things that are everywhere and nowhere at the same time,” where there is no organic social life. And he takes as examples of this -- and you may agree or disagree -- shopping malls, airports, hotel lobbies and freeways. Or, as I saw in London the other day, a person pushing a child in a stroller, just walking and looking down into their phone and very nearly getting into a serious accident.
A crucial expression of place in the city, according to Augé, are urban public spaces and classic urban centers. He is thinking of the French “place de la ville”, or the Italian “piazza”, or the “plaza” as expressed in Spanish cultures. These places somehow resonate with authority and symbolic meaning, and they also pull people in, in a manner where they actually encounter each other.
Augé makes the point that, historically, monumental buildings have defined key locations in cities, many of which still exist in Europe. For example, a religious building, such as a cathedral, functions more than simply a space to host worship. It hosts other activities, like music concerts, but it also functions as a symbol of the values of a community. In the case of a religious building, it probably contains monuments to people, to events or to values, and these monumental elements are accessible to people whether or not they consider themselves religious.
The key point is that they somehow stand in a place. There are other expressions of this too, art museums, war memorials, etc. Augé suggests these monumental buildings resonate with some kind of spiritual quality. But of course, the most important spiritual quality of place is that it's humanly active, and that it's humanly hospitable to all without exception. People not only go there, but they also literally gather there in order to interact.
Augé acknowledges we need cafes; we need businesses, and many other single uses. But, he says, the true place -- the true urban place -- offers places for living by being places of human encounter, where individual journeys intersect and mingle, where a few words are exchanged and solitude is momentarily forgotten. Maybe it's on the church steps, front of a town hall, at the cafe counter or... in the baker’s doorway.”
The concept of “a sense of place” for me is one of the ways we shape human experience to have the greatest impact on how we understand the world and how we situate ourselves within it.
So, what does place mean in that sense?
It certainly involves far more than geography or architecture and design. It is a location with a particular significance, precisely because of its connection with people. The people who exist there, or work there, rather than somewhere else. And because place invokes an idea of significance, it embodies historical memories of a long-standing community, or, memories of particular events that are significant to a community. So, place involves a complicated relationship between physical environments and our human narratives.
A sense of place is also bound with moral and social values. For example, think of phrases such as: “to know your place,” which implies a sense of identity in relationship to a wider community; “to be in the right place,” which is to be at home or to be related to what's natural to us; or, “to feel out of place,” which is exactly the opposite of being at home.
In the words of Richard Rogers, a practicing British architect, “We need to think about where we are and what's unique and special about our surroundings, so that we can better understand ourselves and how we relate to others.” This is a very person-centered, humanistic understanding of the purpose of design and buildings, rather than mechanistic or purely practical.
Anne Buttimer, a social geographer, deplores the impact of an over-emphasis on mobility in cities. She suggests – and I think there's something to this -- that mobility, is today understood by so many people in cities to be a freedom that has been brought about by wealth and education. One might say it is “bought about” and not “brought about”. And in the case of the former Rust Belt cities in the United Kingdom, the idea of remaining in the same place, sadly, has come to symbolize a lack of choice. An entrapment.
This is the lot of the disadvantaged, the elderly, or people with disabilities, in an increasingly place-less culture. Latimer suggests we've become not merely mobile people but also implicitly removable and replaceable.
Referring back to Rust Belt cities in the U.K., these were once vibrant steel towns; cities which once attracted workers from all over the country. Now, their populations are seriously contracted. And if you are skilled or went to college, or have enough money, you go away. You move elsewhere. Desolate housing estates remain; specific places from which people were not able to move away from. These communities are still there, and sometimes they've been unemployed across several generations.
Another important part of place is the issue of belonging and commitment. The French-Jewish philosopher Simone Weil suggests that the sense of roots and a hunger for roots is fundamental to our deepest human identity. She says “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul and it's also one of the hardest to define.” Another French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard in his book on the poetics of space says, “For our house is the corner of the world, as has often been said, it's our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word… all truly inhabited place as opposed to desolate place, all truly inhabited place bears the essence of the notion of home”. The concept of roots and home represent critical truths about our spatial experience.
Home represents our need for locations where we can pass through the stages of life and develop our fullest self.
I mention “commitment to place”; to a spirituality of place, if you like. It has a great deal to do with our commitment to our individual context and to human contexts. It also relates to being accepted within them, and to accepting those within them, particularly those who are in some ways, strange to us, maybe somewhat unattractive to us, or even those who represent what we fear.
A true place -- as opposed to a mere location -- invites our active participation in the environment. Environment, in the fullest sense, implies a range of relationships between people and their context, and between people and each other. A part of becoming committed to those relationship is the importance of memory.
This is why monuments are absolutely critical to human existence. By monuments, I don't literally mean big statues -- though we've recently seen the ongoing relevance of statues – but rather the idea of a monument to human events. Monuments emphasize the importance of remembrance and remembering, and the importance of needing to recover a firm memory as absolutely critical to human existence.
That's why French social anthropologists Marc Augé and Michel de Certeau -- who was also a Jesuit priest -- write about the danger of erasing the past. One of the reasons why de Certeau got so upset with modernist urban planning in the '50s and 60’s -- which I think was best represented by a certain gentleman named Le Corbusier – is that “urban renewal” ended up meaning nothing more than sending in the bulldozers; eradicate and flatten the city; and start from zero. De Certeau and Augé both said this is humanly destructive, citing the loss of history of previous generations rooted in place.
On a personal note, my cousin married a person whose background was in a working-class district of Manchester. I remember meeting his mother, who was living in one of the 1960s high-rise blocks of apartments. Her apartment was very comfortable, modern and clean. Her family had been moved there after the bulldozers had been sent in. She still remembers how the process destroyed Victorian terraces, street terraces, and an extended set of communities which were deemed to be “slums”. She said, “We ended up with good apartments, but we also ended up losing our community. You know what? Many of us wish we were back on those streets”.
De Certeau talked about the idea that cities and urban places are not created just by design, planning, architecture, and top-down policy making, but rather that real places are created by a narrative, a story. In an essay he wrote called “Walking the City,” he reflects on the observation of New York streets looking down from the top of the late World Trade Center. He refers to the distant, little dots -- that were actually people -- and he says you can treat them as irrelevant “microbes”, or, you can come to understand that it's precisely those apparent microbes, who are actually “walking the city into existence”.
The city is not created by top-down planning, but by people walking the sidewalks; people walking the city into existence. The stories they tell, the encounters they have on the street corner, and the memories they share literally become the city. We must leave space for our imaginative freedom to “walk the city into existence” by leaving space for people to express their memories and histories.
We come, finally, to the crunch point, which is the importance of the sacred and the sacred space. What is the sacred? What is the nature of the sacred? Where is it expressed? How is it expressed? What’s its role and what's its value in the city?
The concept of the sacred isn't a simple word. It is an abstract construct, whose meaning is varied throughout history and across cultures. It isn't necessarily associated with the religious and that's very important. What it is associated with is a high evaluation of persons, of people and community. The world -- if I am approaching this from a Christian theological point of view -- the world is viewed as sacred in some sense, because it has been seen by Christians, and other people, as a gift of God's love through creation.
This notion is a revelation of the divine. You may choose to step back from the explicitly religious expression of that, but a true sense of the sacred is the revelation of the divine in and through people and how they encounter each other and build community. The Sacred is articulated in a variety ways and elements of the built environment have long been icons of that. In multicultural Western civilization, this can still include religious buildings, which often have now a much broader role than just providing spaces for worship.
I'm thinking of a place like a famous church in the center of London on Trafalgar Square, Saint Martin in the Fields.
Well, this is still an active Christian church. So, there are services that go on there. However, it also does a lot of other things that make it accessible to the widest possible range of people of all social groups, of all religions, of no religion, and so on. It houses a wonderful cafe. It has a general bookshop. It has a regular program of art exhibits and musical concerts. It has its own little Academy, and a sort of orchestra. It also hosts jazz concerts. But I think for me, one of the most important things that Saint Martin in the fields does, is actually provide an ongoing shelter for street people and the homeless. And I don't just mean this casually, they've actually reconstructed a whole wing in which people can sleep in relatively comfortable rooms. Not in big open spaces, 20 people sharing the same space, but in a specific room with proper services and with the presence of a doctor and a dentist, and more.
It has a very strong sense of inclusivity. Although it's a religious building, it is actually a social building in a much broader sense and it's on a famous square which contains Nelson's Column, an important historical monument, even if people don't know who Nelson was anymore! The place of Trafalgar Square has the National Gallery (the largest Art Museum in London) and the Portrait Gallery. Around the corner there are all sorts of spontaneous pop-up street art, street music, street concerts and much more.
Trafalgar Square provides an environment for all sorts of interesting encounters to take place as well as permanent things. I take that kind of iconic space, not only for what it offers, but what also for what it stands for, and what it enables. It manifests what it means to value the sacred.
What counts as sacred space these days are those places that provide opportunities for human enhancement through meeting each other and growing together. Leonie Sandercock, a Canadian woman urban planner, talks about the spiritual city and cities of spirit. She argues as a secular humanist that the sacred and the spiritual are absolutely vital to human life.
Whether you're religious or not, it is the nature of the city itself that supports people to work, to meet, to encounter, to live. This is the most important thing that cities do. Will we have a high view of the city or a mechanistic, pragmatic view of the “take it or leave it” city?
The most sacred of spaces in the city are actually the places which embody the vibrancy of the city itself.
Thank you.
This public address has been edited for publication.