A Double Sense of Place

A Double Sense of Place.
 
No one can understand “place" (sure that I don’t) without running into politics, geography, economics, history, philosophy, literature, physics, etc--but none of these categories can sum ‘place’ up. And no one, I think, can approach 'place' from the few or all of the perspectives I've just named. For my own part, I've focused on history and geography (the latter of which seems a conglomeration of many of the different categories that I’ve just mentioned) but dabbled in each of the others, and Gallatin has provided three chances to learn each: this class, Marie Cruz Soto's "Narrating History, Memory, and Place,” and Becky Amato’s Place and Memory (which i haven't written about). The most challenging part is to put them into dialogue. Here So this is what I'll do with my last post.
 
Narrating History, Memory, and Place.
 
A Sense of Place (of its history, of what defines it, who it belongs to) is implicit in one’s politics. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Unlike this class which in some ways was an examination of places, NHMP was about the stories we tell about them.
 
Marie's class was very much about the intersection of history (of places big and small, socially constructed, socially imagined—no sympathy for Genus Loci here, no searching for an unreal Arcadia), politics, and media  in the defining of places, and of making the implicit claims within those identities known. For example, Robert Moses, backed by his own political machine, wanted revenge for Jacob’s successful defense of Washington Square Park. He planned to eradicate her home, but before he could do so he needed to declare areas of the West Village “blighted.” This is a necessary erasure of a vast magnitude: of the people the homes within that absolute space; of the interconnections in relative space; and of the history of the West Village. He in essence declared it a ‘space’—an area without meaning, without any felt value—and tried to cast New York as the fledgling great modern city in need of highways and high-rises to ascend to the heights of its potential. He declared himself the promethean hero of this story, though perhaps his brand of creative destruction is more like Faust’s. To fight back, Jacobs narrated the West Village as a Place. To do this she re-write the American Urban narrative, and in doing so she made some very populist claims about who should govern the use of space. This is why her vision has been called republican by some. She changed the whole idea of the city in history—it is something that stretches on, always changing, never finished with a final form. Robert Moses felt very differently—that once the modern city was completed, it was done forever.  As we can tell from this story, the narratives that we tell ourselves about places compete with other stories to be the dominate understanding of that place.
 
Another instance when I was happy to have the classes overlap was in reading James Howard Kunstler’s The  Geography of Nowhere. Kunstler is trying to change the history of a familiar place—the United States—by writing a different story, to change what Doreen Massey calls “The Space Time Envelope.” If his version of postwar American history successfully became the dominant narrative against what has been called the Pastoralist of American political and social understanding, the public might be convinced that we have indeed neglected issues of ‘place,’ that the car is responsible for many of our ills, etc.