IEP 405: Phenomenology and Environment

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 10. Place as Place

Place as place

One of the reasons I first got interested in phenomenology and place was because it seemed to offer a way of saying there was something important about a place that is not captured by the grid reference or its designation in terms of a humanly constructed system of categorisation. Of course in a built environment particularly, but in any place human responses are crucially important, but they are responses to something and what phenomenology seems to offer is a way of getting at that something. By getting at, I mean understanding but also understanding that then feeds into where appropriate, design and development or withdrawal. If anyone is interested in following up more on this you could look at my paper 'Can 'Spirit of Place' be a Guide to Ethical Building?' in Fox, W. ed. Ethics and the Built Environment (2000) I will put a version of it on the discussion site.

Extended example

To further explain the distinctions I have been drawing let's take a hypothetical example. Place A is a city square which seems to afford human interaction and a pleasing sense of place, I feel this myself and when I look around I see two elderly women who have put down their shopping and have stopped for a chat, someone is reading a book on a bench and father is standing to watch his child run her fingers through the falling water of the fountain. Other people around the edge of the square stop to look in shop windows and there is a peaceful atmosphere. Place B is another city square that I had never really noticed but now I do I see people walking briskly, cutting across the open space to get from one street to another, some shops are boarded up and the faces of the buildings on two sides are the same blanked out glass of a large store. In these reflections I am in the natural attitude, we all walk around towns and cities and are attention is sometimes drawn to a particular feel of a place and in this case that reflection is deepend very slightly to notice a difference. I am in one place whilst thinking about another and this might spark the question, why is there this different feel to them?

So far the only minimal departure from the natural attitude is perhaps the rather disciplined noting of one or two features. The father with his child probably did not notice the women talking except as part of the peripheral landscape. If the question, 'why does place A work in a way that place B doesn't?' troubles me enough I might go on to thinking about the squares and revisiting them. My exploration, my research does not become a phenomenology of these places until I undergo a systematic shift from the natural attitude to a phenomenological one. The potential problem of not experiencing the squares as they would be experienced in the natural attitude and thus not (a long way down the line) coming up with any design ideas that would be appropriate to anyone except another phenomenologist does not arise because of the fundamental nature of the livedworld that is the ground of both. Yes there is a difference between using the square in a normal everyday kind of way and sitting on the bench trying to bracket my presuppositions about how old buildings suggest a sense of historical solidity to a place in order to open myself to the feel that these specific of old buildings seem to impart. We could cut to the chase and say it seems that people like old buildings so we should just order reproductions by the yard, but this will not get at why we respond in this way and why attempts at repeating a successful formula seem to fall flat when dislocated.

When I undergo a change of perspective such that I no longer assume that old =good, or trees = good, or flourescent colour posters = bad then I am in a better position to experience the impact of the oldness, the treeness and the vibrant colourness afresh. My unexamined subjective responses might be confirmed, but the idea of phenomenology is to intuit these things in a more direct way that is not tied to a personal subjectivity, but made possible through a pure subjectivity. This does not strip the experiences of meaning if it did this would mean I had been driven to a kind of idealised objectivity rather than transcending the categories of subject and object completely.

So far so good, but remember that my question was about the feel of the squares and how they are being experienced - not just from the perspective of a purified subjectivity, but by the users of the squares themselves. My initial description involved reference to other people and when I am engaged in creating a full description of my two squares - at different times of day, in different types of weather, on different days of the week- the activities and movements of people through the place will be a significant aspect that will need full description. However, the people, as opposed to the litter bins and benches, are also experiencers of the squares they like I am, to quote Merleau-Ponty, "this remarkable variant in the stuff of the world" the "sensible-sentient".

If you have not done so already do now read the chapter on intersubjectivity in Solokowski's book.

Long Exercise

Remembering the distinctions between natural attitude and phenomenological attitude and their grounding in the lived world, and the distinction between personal subjectivity and a purified subjectivity. How should I go about incorporating others' experiences into my phenomenological study of place?

There is no right answer to this but I will make a few suggestions on the discussion site after you have had a go and posted some of your own ideas there.

Our last reading for the course is in two parts, first have a look at 'Phenomenology, Place,Environment, and Architecture:A Review of the Literature' by David Seamon available here
then I suggest you follow up one of the authors/studies mentioned and send your own account of the study to the discussion site.

Web notes by Isis Brook updated 2005