Speaker
Description
The proposed contribution argues for stronger integration of the theoretical notion of place in planning against multiple current challenges. It revisits established and novel conceptual readings of place and outlines its implications for planning, arguing for the theoretically informed use of the place notion as instrumental in planning better cities for people.
Cities have undergone dramatic transformations since ‘the world’s first’ city of Çatalhöyük in Konya, Türkiye, marked the transition from rural to a new urban type of settlement. Planning strives to respond to constant urban transformations. As any other institutionalized domain, planning faces challenges of institutional inertia, path dependency, and rigidness of established paradigms that hinder the responsive potential of planning. At the same time, planning itself acts as a major agent of urban transformation, bringing novel challenges of growth and development that uproot established ways of living. In the age of planetary crisis and accelerating global changes, the responsibility of planning is not only in providing adequate response by leading transformations but in ensuring continuity and upholding a human-centric approach in tackling the above.
Place-based measures are an often-evoked response to the above conditions. Place-based policies to promote local solutions, sense of place to foster stewardship of locales, place-making initiatives to improve public spaces are among planners’ remedies against many facets of crises, from climate change, economic depression, to social fragmentation and migration. Yet, place is far from being an established conceptual term in planning practice. More often than not, it is used in an ad hoc or common sense manner stripped from underlying conceptual substantiation (Ellery, Ellery, and Borkowsky 2021; Strydom, Puren, and Drewes 2018).
The term ‘place’, however, is a theoretically loaded notion, albeit no overarching theory of place exists (Cresswell 2015). Place is theorized across a heterogeneous landscape of disciplines, spanning from geography, environmental psychology to cognitive science, among others. Early systematic theorizing on place is attributed to humanistic geography as a critique of the overtly abstract notion of space that dominated the spatial disciplines in the 1960s (Tuan 1979; Relph 1976). Since then, the broad notion of place as space imbued with meaning has entered common use.
Further, place becomes conceptualized in many other ways within phenomenological, non-representational, feminist, critical and socio-constructivist veins, relational and post-human philosophies, psychological, cognitive and behavioural models, among others. The pervading conceptual feature of the above remains that place changes the mode of our engagement with space. Relational readings of place suggest that cities cannot be adequately governed without considering dynamic flows of people, resources and information that all play out on a local scale. Feminist perspectives on place demonstrate how spatial experience differs along gender lines, while phenomenological approach brings forward an embodied and perceived spatialities which are closer to human experience of cities than abstract plans. Many novel approaches to place arise building on advances in GIS, data science, and other areas (Wagner, Zipf, and Westerholt 2020; Rossetti, Lobel, Rocco, and Hurtubia 2019), expanding the relevance of its application for various urban issues even further (e.g. Slivinskaya 2022).
With its practical focus on shaping physical spaces in cities, planning delivers applied results and contributes valuable empirical insights into the physical setting of cities. Notion of place, on the other hand, allows formalizing diverse social, subjective and intersubjective relations that frame our spatial experience in cities in no less important ways than its physical setting. The contribution concludes that the value of the term place for planning lies in bridging the physical realities of urban spaces with the human dimension of spatial experience.
References
Cresswell, T., 2015. Place: An introduction. 2nd ed. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley and Sons.
Relph, E., 1976. Place and placelessness. London, UK: Pion.
Tuan, Y.F., 1979. Space and place: Humanistic perspective. In: S. Gale and G. Olsson, eds. Philosophy in geography (Theory and Decision Library). Dordrecht, NL: Springer, pp.387-427.
Ellery, P.J., Ellery, J. and Borkowsky, M., 2021. Toward a theoretical understanding of placemaking. International Journal of Community Well-Being, 4(1), pp.55-76.
Strydom, W., Puren, K. and Drewes, E., 2018. Exploring theoretical trends in placemaking: Towards new perspectives in spatial planning. Journal of Place Management and Development, 11(2), pp.165-180.
Wagner, D., Zipf, A. and Westerholt, R., 2020. Place in the GIScience community – an indicative and preliminary systematic literature review. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Platial Information Science (PLATIAL’19). Coventry, UK: Zenodo, pp.13-22.
Slivinskaya, L., 2022. Thinking places: Towards application of place-based GIS in urban morphology. In: Annual Conference Proceedings of the XXVIII International Seminar on Urban Form. Glasgow, UK: University of Strathclyde Publishing, pp.658-663.
Rossetti, T., Lobel, H., Rocco, V. and Hurtubia, R., 2019. Explaining subjective perceptions of public spaces as a function of the built environment: A massive data approach. Landscape and Urban Planning, 181, pp.169-178.
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
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