Blog #1 What is place?

               If someone asked me, “What is place?” I might respond in a matter of different ways, but the main ideas that illustrate place would be culture, home, comfort, predictability, belongings, and emotional understanding.  Since the class has been required to read from Tim Cresswell’s PLACE, I can assume that one very simple definition to suffice as an answer to the question is “a meaningful location”, as stated on page 7 of the book. Now, because I have read through page 14 of PLACE, I can recognize that this definition of place is the most watered down, elementary way of describing a word that took an entire novel to explain. Through the reading, I have reached the realization that the word place has many dimensions and requires a very wordy explanation. The phrase, “undifferentiated space becomes place,” (Cresswell, 8) speaks to the relationship between space and place and the dependence of the two terms upon each other.

               For me space is almost uncomfortable, and makes me feel small, helpless, or even distant. In contrast place feels warm, safe, secure, and most important to me, predictable.  For example, the first day of classes at KSU, each student is looking for their classrooms, for their teachers, for their classmates. They have no idea what to expect, zero predictability, zero direction, zero understanding of whether they are walking past the art building, or the east deck. These places are merely spaces to them at this point because they have not established an understanding of what it is to have the characteristics that make up the art building, or the east deck, or Dr. Whitlock’s classroom. As the semester moves on and we start to associate an arrangement, an assembly of desks, faces, décor, hallways, in a particular space we begin to have certain feelings about what it means to be in that specific space, and at this point it has become a place. No longer am I frantically moving through space blindly looking for room 1022, now I am walking straight to Dr. Whitlock’s room and that is comforting, and predictable.