Place Vs. Space In A City
Place – a specific site, whether an entire city or a smaller location within, that is shaped by human beings and shapes the lives of human beings Space – Geographic entities with distinct shapes, scales and other properties that set the stage for certain kinds of human activities. There is a need to clarify the definitions of space and place. Space and place are two terms that cannot be separated and to define its limits in a rigid form is not what is intended in this essay. As Cresswell (2004) wrote, "the concept of space is more abstract than the place. When we think of space we tend to think of the outer space, or the geometric spaces, areas and volumes. When a space acquires meaning for an individual, it becomes place (Tuan, 2005) and the places "are important sources of common identity and individual, centres of human existence, with which people have strong emotional and psychological ties. " (Relph, 1976)Most of us have lived in a city or metropolitan area. More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities. Cities are also the centres of the world’s economy.
They are not only sites of production, where industries cluster, but also the central nodes in service and distribution networks and the command points from which economic decisions are made. Across the globe, wealth is generated and spent in cities. While cities, in both developed and developing countries are important for these reasons, cities are also particularly important in place making. Places are specific sites, whether entire cities or smaller locations within cities, that are shaped by human beings and shape the lives of human beings. Places include large metropolitan areas as well as individual homes, workplaces, playgrounds, schools, and street corners. They are all those specific and rich sites to which we feel attached, that become a part of us. As places, cities are distinct and meaningful sites in which people live out their lives. If you look at the history these reflect the uses to which places are put: who has lived in a place and how. Histories, uses, and experiences instil places with memories and meanings that distinguish one place from another.
Places are thus inherently social creations. In distinguishing the ideas of place and space, we separate the particular from the general. Places are specific sites, whether structures or neighbourhoods or entire metropolitan areas, to which people have attached meaning, these particular places are also different kinds of spaces – geographic entities with distinct shapes, scales, and other properties that set the stage for certain kinds of human activities. Consider, for instance, a city block. As a space it may be dense or sprawling, accessible or remote, pedestrian-friendly or designed to accommodate automobiles. These qualities of space and others may then incline the block to becoming a certain kind of place. Cities are full of streets, sidewalks, public parks, abundance of housing, factories, offices, government institutions and empty lots and vacant buildings. The cities are full of all kinds of transportation whether it is public or private. The landscape is largely paved while bits of nature still remain. What makes cities places is more the presence of these kinds of surroundings – it is the way that these surroundings become useful and meaningful over time. It is these uses and meanings that connect human beings to cities and that make cities more distinct from one another. Take away the everyday use and meanings and every city begins to look much like the other.
Although most of us do not announce our place-based identities with a tattoo, the places we are from still constitute an important part of who we are. This is in part because the meanings attached to places also attach to people. When a stranger asks you about yourself, one of the first things that you tell them is likely to be where you are from. We know that others are familiar with a variety of places, and we allow those familiarities to say something about us as individuals. What do we say about ourselves when we tell people where we are from. To start, our home places convey something about our cultural roots. For instance, one religion may predominate in a particular city, or the city may be known for a distinct set of values. Our hometown may have a well-known art or music scene of which we are a part or it may be recognized as a place that is known for its sports teams. Places also announce social differences, whether high or low. It is essential to speak of the home when it comes to place, because the house is our first place in the world, from which we will develop our identity. It is up to us how a place will have an influence on how we will apprehend spaces and turn them into places, during our lives. Different people will come to associate different meanings with places, in part because they use them in very different ways. A good example of this are tourists, they have very different experiences of cities than locals, often because they are insulated from areas of danger or decline.
As a result, tourists may associate a given city with leisure, culture, or romance while locals have far more complex associations that are less universally positive. One example of this can be found in how differently the dwellers of Mumbai’s slums and the foreign tourists who visit those slums view and feel about these places. While the residents see and experience the wretched conditions as living quarters and work environments, the tourists walk through them and gaze at the people, thereby satisfying their own fleeting curiosity and for them it’s just a place. We have spoken quite a bit about place but so far we haven’t said much about space. We have to look into how the two differ and how they would work together. The distinction: space is different from place in that places represent specific locations in space.
As spaces are used and made meaningful by human beings, they become places. Good examples of this are spaces and places dedicated to tourism, a growing share of urban areas. The same location is therefore simultaneously a certain kind of space and a particular place. Some spaces are constructed for certain kinds of uses – ball fields, for instance, or streets – though this does not always mean that they are used for their intended purposes (indeed, a street may come to serve as a cricket pitch when no proper field is available). Scale also matters when it comes to talking about space, a small spaces suggest intimacy and privacy while large spaces seem to foster anonymity. Many more qualities of spaces matter as well, as these allow spaces to facilitate some activities rather than others. Jane Jacobs called attention to the ways that parks, an important type of urban space – differ from one another. Park spaces that offer a sense of enclosure, for instance, will actually be more inviting. Examining similar properties of urban space, William H. Whyte, found that something as simple as the presence of movable seating will make one park more popular than another.
One of the most important qualities of spaces is the degree to which they are freely accessible. We have to look into the distribution of private spaces and public spaces within urban areas. Cities have always contained private spaces, which provide a degree of protection from the outside world, and where the owner of the property may dictate just who is allowed to enter and what they may do on the premises. Homes are the major private spaces that we human beings occupy. Both private and public spaces serve important purposes: free speech and assembly are cornerstones of democratic societies, but most of us would like to have some say regarding the uses of some spaces, particularly our homes. This process is referred to as the privatization of space: efforts to make space less accessible and to curtail the freedoms of those who use it. Take a shopping mall, for instance. While it may appear to serve many of the same functions as an open-air market, malls are privately owned and the rights of those who use them are specified by owners and management. Neighbourhoods, too, particularly gated communities and common-interest developments, are extending private control of space beyond individual residences to the formerly public areas of streets, sidewalks, and parks.
