Three principal types of space, with large areas of overlap, exis--the mythical, the pragmatic, and the abstract or theoretical.
Tribes of natives might view space as mythical, but with pragmatic activities within (planting crops)
Pragmatic space (areas of fertile soil for example)
p17
Long residence enables us to know a place intimately, yet its image may lack sharpness unless we can also see it from the outside and reflect upon our experience. Another place may lack the weight of reality because we know it only from the outside--through the eyes of a tourist, or from reading it as a guidebook.
It is a characteristic of the symbol-making human species that its members can become passionately attached to places of enormous size, such as a nation state, of which they can have only limited direct experience.
p18
Of special interest in these observations is the child's apparent concern with the remote and the proximate. He points to the horizon and plays with stones
p24
Children as young as five or six show remarkable understanding of how landscapes look from above. They can read black and white vertical aerial photographs of settlements and fields with unexpected accuracy and confidence. They can pick out the hourses, roads, and trees on aerial photographs even though these features appear greatly reduced in scale and are viewed from an angle and position unknown to them in actual experience.
p27
In the period from 1950 - 1970, the ability of children of nursery-school age to understand aerial photographs has improved. ... on the other hand, over the same period children show no sign of greater sophistication in understanding viewpoints from opposite sides of a room or field. It is easier fror both the child and the adult to imagine how a pilot in his airplane sees the landscape then how a farmer on the opposite side of the hill sees it.
p28
Moreover, comprehension of environment suffers less after a 90-degree rotation of perspective from the horizontal than after a rotation of 40-50 degrees. The oblique view can be more difficult to interpret than the vertical view.
To the child, the picture taken from the side or at a small angle above ground has one major advantage over the map or aerial photograph: it is a more direct appeal to imaginative action.
A perspectival picture encourages an egocentric viewpoint.
An aerial photograph or map ... promotes an objective viewpoint. An objective viewpoint discourages action.
p28
Place can acquire deep meaning for the adult through the steady accretion of sentiment over the years. Every piece of heirloom furniture, or even a stain on the wall, tells a story.
p33
What does it mean to be lost? I follow a path in to the forest, stray from teh path, and all of a sudden feel completely disoriented. Space is still organized in conformity with the sides of my body. There are regions to the front and back, to my right and left, but they are not geared to external reference points an hence are quite useless. Front and back regions suddenly feel arbitary, since I have no better reason to go forward than to go back. Let a flickering light appear behind a distant clump of trees. I remain lost in teh sense that I still do not know where I am in the forest, but space has dramatically regained its structure. The flickering light ahas established a goal. As I move toward that goal, front and back, right and left, have resumed their meaning.
p36
Man is the measure. In a literal sense, the human body is the measure of direction, location and distance. The Egyptian word for face is the same as that for south and the owrkd fro back of the head carries the meaning of north.
Spatial prepositions are necessarily anthropocentric... bowl "on" the table rather than table "under" the bowl.
p45
Conquest of space can mean its diminishment. The speed that gives freedom to man causes him to lose a sense of spaciousness. Think of the jetliner. It crosses the continent in a few hours, yet its passengers experience of speed and space is probably less vivid than that of a motorcyclist roaring down a freeway. Passengers have no control over the machine and cannont feel it as an extension of their organic powers. Passengers are luxury crates--safely belted in their seats--being transported passively from point to point.
p54
Since spatial skill lies in performing ordinary daily tasks, spatial knowledge, while it enhances such skill, is not necessary to it. People who are good at finding their way in the city may be poor at giving street directions to the lost, an hopeless in their attempts to draw maps. They have difficulty envisaging their course of action and the spatial characteristics of the environment in which it takes place.
Examples: typist don't know where the keys are. Difference between knowing a thing in an cognitive sense and a visceral sense.
p68
Brown's experimental work suggests that when people come to know a street grid they know a succession of movements appropriate to recognized landmarks. They do not acquire any precise mental map of the neighborhood. Of course, a rough image of spatial relations can be learned without deliberate effort; people do pick up a sense of a starting point here, the goal out there, and a scattering of intermediate landmarks, but the mental image is sketchy. Precision is not required in the practical business of moving around.
p72
When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place. Kinesthetics and perceptual experience as well as the ability to form concepts are required for the change if the space is large.
p73
Drawing maps is indubitable evidence of the power to conceptualize spatial relations. It is possible to find one's way by dead reckoning and through long experience with little attempt to picture the overal spatial relations of localities. If an attempt is made to conceptualize, the result may remain mental rather than being transcribed into a material medium. What occasions would call for a map?
When someone wants to know how to get somewhere: - The most time-consuming help is to take them there - Although difficult, try to describe the route and terrain verbally - A sketch map is by far the simplest and clearest way to show spatial relation
p76
What elements in culture, society, and the physical environment affect a people's spatial skills and knowledge? What conditions encourage a people to experience their environment and be aware of it to the degree of trying to capture its essence in words and maps.
The need to draw maps influences the skill to do so. Primitive hunters as opposed to illiterate Russian peasents.
p78
We have sketched two spatial schemata: one takes the human body to be a microcosm, the other puts man at the center of a cosmos ordered by the cardinal points. With both schemata an underlying question is, how does the environment affect man, his personality, activities and institutions.
p96
Can one discern the myths of the center and of the cardinal points in the spatial lores of the United States? Cardinal directions, in general carry little or no symbolic message in the modern world. They can be used simply as a convenient means to differentiate a territory... streetnames are divided into north and south with no value significance.
p99
Consider the sense of an "inside" and an "outside," of intimacy and exposure, of private life and public space. People everywhere recognize these distinctions, but the awareness may be quite vague. Constructed form has the power to heighten the wareness and accentuate, as it were, teh difference in emotinoal temperature between "inside" and "outside."
p107
Distance, unlike length, is not a pure spatial concept; it implies time.
p119
Western homes have picture windows. A traditional Asian home, in contrast, has no picture windows; the rooms look inward to the interior courtyard, and the only expanse of nature visible to the inhabitants is the overarching sky. The vertical axis, rather than the open horizontal space, is the symbol of hope.
p124
The intention to go to a place creates historical time: the place is a goal in the future. The future cannot, however, be left open and undefined. Emigrants who propose to settle in the interior of the United States must plan to reach their destination at a propitious time, say Spring. This constraint on the future, on historical time, is itself strong reason for estimating distance in time units.
p130
Permanence is an important element in the idea of place. Things and objects endure and are dependable in ways that human beings, with their biological weaknesses and shifting moods, do not endure and are not dependable. Yet Hannah makes a point. In the absence of the right people, things and places are quickly drained of meaning so that their lastingness is an irritation rather than a comfort.
p140
Intimate experiences are difficult but not impossible to express. They may be personal and deeply felt, but they are not necessarily solipsistic or eccentric. Hearth, shelter, home or home base are intimate places to human beings everywhere.
p147
In religions that bind people firmly to place the gods appear to have the following characteristics in common. They have no power beyond the vicinity of their particular abodes; they reward and protect their own people but are harmful to strangers; the belong to a heirarcy of beings that extends from the living members of a family, with their graded authrity, to ancestors and the spirits of dead heros. Religions of this local type encourage in their devotees a strong sense of the past, of lineage and continuity in place.
p152
Two types of territory for native americans/aborigines. Estate and Range. As the aborigines put it, range is where they could walk about or run; estate is where they could sit. Strong emotional ties are established with the estate. It is the home of ancestors, the dreaming place where every incident in legend and myth is firmly fixed in some unchanging aspect of nature--rocks, hills and mountains, even trees, for trees can outlive human generations. Even in times of scarcity, the people will seldom leave their own range for long.
p157
A homeland has its landmarks, which may be features of high visibility and public significance, such as monuments, shrines, a hallowed battlefield or cemetary. These visible signs serve to enhance a people's sense of identity;they encourage awareness of and loyalty to place.
Attachment of a deep though subconsious sort may come simply with familiarity and ease, with the assurace of nurture and security, with the memory of sounds and smells, of communal activities and homely pleasures accumulated over time.
Contentment is a warm positive feeling, but is most easily described as incuriosity toward the outside world and as absence of desire for a change of scene.
159
Place is whatever stable object catches our attention. As we look at a panoramic scene our eyes pause at points of interest. Each pause is time enough to create an image of place that looms large momentarily in our view. The pause may be of such short duration and the interest so fleeting that we may not be fully aware of having focused on any particular object; we believe we have simply been looking at the general scene.
As we gaze and admire a fomouse mountain peak on the horizon, it looms so large in our consciousness that the picture we take of it with our camera is likely to disappoint us, revealing a midget where we would expect to find a giant.
p161
Many places, profoundly significant to particular individuals and groups, have little visual prominence. They are known viscerally, as it were, and not through the discerning eye or mind. A function of literary art is to give visibility to intimate experiences, including those of place.
p162
How is it possible for a monument to transcend the values of a particular culture? An answer might be: a large monument like Stonehenge carries both general and specific import. The specific import changes in time whereas the general one remains.
Enduring places, of which there are very few in the world speak to humanity. Most monuments cannot survive the decay of their cultural matrix. The more specific and representational the object, the less it likely to survive. In the course of time, most public symbols lose their status of places and merely clutter up space.
p164
Most places are not such deliberate creations. They are built to satisfy practical needs. How do they acquire visibility for both local and inhabitants and outsiders? Think of the way a new country is settled. At first there is wilderness, undifferentiated space. A clearing is made in the forest and a few houses are built. Immedately differentiateion occurs; on the one side there is wilderness, on teh other a small, vulverable man-made world. The farmers are keenly aware of their place, which they have created themselves and which they must defend against the incursions of wild nature. To the passerby or visitor, the fields and houses also consistiute a well-defined place, obvious to him as he emerges from the forest to the clearing.
p166
The larger unit acquires visibilty through an effort of the mind. The entire neighborhood then becomes a place. It is, however, a conceptual place and does not involve the emotions. Emotion begins to tinge the whole neighborhood--drawing on, and extrapolating from, the direct experience of its particular parts--when the neighborhood is perceived to have rivals and to be threatened in some way, real or imagined.
Houses and streets do not of themselves create a sense of place, but if they are distinctive this perceptual quality would greatly help the inhabitants to develop the larger place consciousness.
p171
The city-state was small enough that most of its citizens could know it personally. The modern nation-state is far too large to be thus experienced. Symbolic means had to be used to make the large nation-state seem a concrete place--not just a political idea--toward wich a people could feel deep attachment.
p176
Visible limits to a nation's sovereignty, such as a row of hills or a stretch of river, support the sense of a nation as place. From the air however mountains and rivers are merely elements of physical geography, and man-made markers like fences and guard posts are invisible. Aerial photographs are useless in history books. Maps are another matter.
p178
In summary, we may say that deeply-loved places are not necessarily visible, either to ourselves or to others. Places can be made visible by a number of means: rivalry or conflict with other places, visual prominence, and the evocative power of art, architecture, ceremonials and rites. Human places become vividly real through dramatization. Identity of place is achieved by dramatizing the aspirations, needs, and functional rhythms of personal and group life.
p178
In modern society the relation between mobility and a sense of place can be very complicated. Most people achieve a fairly stable position in society by the time they are thirty or forty years old. They settle into a routine of home, office or factory and holiday resort. These are distinctive places.
p182
How long does it take to know a place? ... The visual quality of an environment is quickly tallied if one has the artist's eye. But the "feel" of a place takes longer to acquire. It is made up of experiences, mostly fleeting and undramatic, repeated day after day and over the span of years. It is a unique blends of sights, sounds and smells, a unique harmony of natural and artificial rhythms such as times of sunrise and sunset, of work and play. The feel of a place is registered in one's muscles and bones.
Knowing a place, in the above senses, clearly takes time. It is a subconscious kind of knowing. In time we become familiar with a place, which means that we can take more and more of it for granted. In time a new house ceases to make little demands on our attention; it is a comfortable and unobtrustive as an old pair of slippers.
p183
Sense of time affects sense of place. But ten years in childhood are not the same as ten years in youth or manhood. The child knows the world more sensuously than does the adult. This is one reason why the adult cannot go home again. This is also one reason why a native citizen knows his country in a way that cannot be duplicated by a naturalized citizen who has grown up elsewhere.
p185
Form is more important than the particular substance, which is corruptible. Form can be resurrected whereas the matter of which it consists inevitably decays. In Japan this idea of regeneration explains an ancient Shinto custom. As stated interals, Shinto temples are entirely rebult and their furnishing and decorations renewed. The great shrines of Ise in particular, the very center of the region are rebuilt every twenty years. In contrast, the great Christian shrines of St. Peter's, Chartres, and Canterbury exist for centuries. The forms change in the long process of construction but the substance, once it is in place, remains unaltered.
p190
Skills once learned are as natural to us as breathing. Above all, we are oriented. This is a fundamental source of confidence. We know where we are and we can find our way to the local drugstore. Striding down the path in complete confidence, we are shocked when we miss a step or when our body expects a step where none exists.
199