Dear Tom Dine and all
Gosh, some very big questions !!
I just want to say that I don't think the phenomenologists hold exclusive
licence to the immersion-in-the-world idea, if that means the attempt to
break down the the idea that we are one thing and the environment another -
or if they do there are others who seem to be trying the same thing and
don't claim the label. Just a thought - that the meaning of place in
relation to experience and to personal and cultural identity has to be
relative to that place's 'location' between 'home and horizon' for the
individual concerned. Maybe that's the source of some of the difference in
a place for all of us - and that's much more difficult than what is the
same in that place for all of us. Bachelard apparently claimed that the
exploration of self-identity through place might give more insight into the
person than psychoanalysis. The *'mechanism that relates the behaviour of a
person to a particular place'* need not be narrowly about the senses, but
also about how we organise our worlds - and how we individuate and identify
things. We give places names and then organise or structure the city on the
basis of the relations between these named things. Some of this must happen
at the smaller scale as well. The definition of a 'place' must at some
point be left to the spatial instincts of the person using it. The raised
part outside a cafe is a 'place' if people think of it as a 'place'. We can
probably devise a way of researching whether this is happening.
Harvey (Justice, Nature ...) uses the idea of 'permanences' from Whitehead;
"A 'permanence' arises as a system of 'extensive connection' out of
processes. Entities achieve relative stability in their bounding and their
internal ordering of processes creating space, for a time. Such permanences
come to occupy a piece of a space in an exclusive way (for a time) and
thereby define a place - their place - (for a time). _The process of place
formation is a process of carving out 'permanences' from the flow of
processes creating spaces_." p 261. Harvey thinks that there is no
independant spatial science but that the study of space is a general branch
of the study of socio-environmental processes. If this is true then all
these questions people keep asking are highly relevant because *'what we
are measuring with Space Syntax'* is going to be questioned. Is it
structure in space or structure in knowing - its probably both
(spatio-cognitive)?? (see last paragraph). I think we know this but its
important to keep on reminding ourselves that its the processes being
spatialised - acting out their intrinsic spatialities in the real world -
that we are looking at and not the space on its own. Does a deserted city
have a spatial structure?
Talking about immersion-in-the-world, Rod Brooks at MIT AI dept is making
robots who's 'model of the world' is not internal but is the world itself -
saving masses of computing power and getting highly satisfactory results
apparently. I'm sure David Seamon knows about this and wonder if he has
written about it?
Stephen Read
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