Landscape architects tend to use the term “sense of place” to describe the aspects of a place that set it apart from other places. In a rapidly homogenizing world, noticing and honoring these differences is important.
But another component of “sense of place” lies in a place’s connections outward, and its place within a larger world: A town on a trunk railroad line, for example, will have a different sense of itself than a town on a one-track commuter line. Knowing that the same sun you see setting is simultaneously at high noon somewhere far to the west can give you a sense of your situation on the globe. A cold front coming in from Canada reminds you that even though you may never see the arctic, it’s not really that far away.
This “sense of situation” can gain some support from the electronic media that are often seen as the enemy of place:
- On the eve of New Year’s Day, 2000, we could sit in your living rooms watching TV and see, hourly, the celebration of the New Year approaching across Asia, Europe, the Atlantic islands, and the Eastern Provinces before it reached the US. We could picture a front sweeping the globe, or the earth gradually rolling into the new millenium.
- On facebook, we can listen in as our friends in different regions announce their weather. It’s snowing in North Carolina … in Washington … in Pennsylvania …
- And now we can use our phones to connect the bird that is (or isn’t) in our back yard to its species’ seasonal migration, reported and mapped in real time.
We are becoming more like John McPhee’s basketball players, whose “sense of where they are” combines alertness to their immediate surroundings with a constantly updated awareness of the court as a whole.
(Thanks to Mary Oliver for the title of the post.)
Deborah Howe
Toby Wolf
I experienced this electronic apprehension of place this morning: I had planned to do some video commentary with two arborists, one in Northborough and one in Westford, MA. Here in Norwood, we’ve been having rain since last night (Mary Oliver’s “clear pebbles of the rain”!). Around 8 a.m. I had a call from the Northborough arborist; where he was, west of here and higher in elevation, 4-6 inches of wet, heavy snow had fallen. As it had knocked out power, schools were closed and his kids were all home. So no commentary from him today…In Westford, which is east of Northborough, west of Norwood, and at an intermediate elevation, only 1-2 inches of snow had fallen, and it had turned almost immediately to slush when the rain began. Two phone conversations and a look out the window gave me a pretty accurate sense of conditions in each of the three places, and a realization of how different those conditions can be even within a radius of about 40 miles.