Place and Non-Place
What is place? What is non-place? They are places/spaces that we conceive in different ways and have different feelings and cultural understandings towards.
We see place as personal spaces that have meaning and personal security,
Place and Non-Place
What is place? What is non-place? They are places/spaces that we conceive in different ways and have different feelings and cultural understandings towards.
We see place as personal spaces that have meaning and personal security, which can hold sentimental value and memories to a person. A person’s home is a main example of place, this is a place that a person may have grown up in and spent their lives in and created memories in. Doing this will create a extremely personal bond and importance to a person and is not shared by others, this creates a feeling of ownership.
In a place or territory, space is often defined as the distance between things, space is produced as an effect of the functions that orient it and temporalise it. Space is a practiced place, it’s what we do in this space that defines it and gives it meaning and importance. For example; the street outside of a place such as a person’s home would ordinarily not be seen as a place, until people walk on it and move through the area it can then be transformed into a place.
Bicycle lanes, the space doesn’t define the use, the people in it and the cultural behaviour does. In the above picture a bicycle lane is being used in a different way than it was designed for, the people have rearranged the purpose of its use to fit how they see it and what they want to use the space for.
Lords of Dogtown is a film based on this theory, it follows the skateboarding scene from the 70’s and the birth of “bowl skating”. Bowl skating was pioneered by surfers that when they couldn’t surf, they would skateboard, and needed to replicate the feeling of surfing waves, and found that draining the water from swimming pools and skating the walls of the pools did just that.
I really enjoyed this film, as a