Crowding

Everyone experiences the sense of “crowding” at some point during their lives.  Interacting and living with others is a primitive skill that humans learn from the earliest beginnings of development.  People live in society, thus crowding is unavoidable.  What constitutes this notion of crowding? How does crowding affect our sense of place?  Yi-Fu Tuan declares “to be in the company of human beings – even with one other person – has the effect of curtailing space and its threat of openness “(Tuan 59) in his book Space and Place.  He continues, “we may say of a forest that it is crowded with trees and of a room that is crowded with knick-knacks.  But primarily people crowd us; people rather than things are likely to restrict our freedom and deprive us of space”(Tuan 59).  Thus human interaction directly affects a sense of place even more than the physical objects in a space.  
 
Tuan utilizes the Eskimo and the New Yorker to exemplify how people perceive “crowdedness” differently.  While these two examples view crowdedness on two very different plateaus as “a sense of crowding can appear under highly varied conditions and at different scales”(Tuan 60), everyone will be faced with working or living closely with others during their lifetime.  Tuan describes the relationship between the Eskimo and the New Yorker: “Eskimos hunt in small groups over the broad open spaces of the Arctic coast.  Urban crowding and stress, as in the crush of humanity during rush hours, are wholly alien to Eskimo experience, yet Eskimos are no strangers to crowding and stress.  They experience crowding at the tragic level of starvation in times of scarcity”(Tuan 66).  Crowdedness is a universal experience relatable to all.
 
I can relate to the different perceptions of crowdedness as mine have changed since moving to New York.  While living in a suburb of Washington DC, I associated “crowds” with the Beltway during rush-hour or the local mall on a Saturday afternoon; always negative a negative connotation involving an over abundance of people getting in my way from making it from point A to point B.  Now living in New York City, my feeling of crowdedness has changed.  While many people would say Times Square and crowdedness would be synonyms, I would not.  Yes there are throngs of people milling about the area, but they did not effect my commute to the office building I work at on Times Square.  Because I learned how to avoid and overlook these crowds of people, they did not personally change my sense of place.  The only times I feel “crowded” now is when I feel my personal space is violated (on a packed subway train or elevator).  I cant avoid these situations thus feeling crowded.  Because I am constantly hurled into experiences with my personal space violated, I have noticed a desire to be alone, even scheduling time out of my busy day to fulfill this need.  Tuan declares, “privacy and solitude are necessary for sustained reflection and a hard look at self”(Tuan 65); a notion to remember and seek out to deal especially with the crowds of New York City.