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March 22, 2005
Many academics, professionals, and journalists continue to downplay the importance of place, both as a part of our theory (conceptual structure) as well as as an integral part of everyday human life. Yet people need place because having a place and identifying with a place are integral to what and who we are as human beings. The human experience of place is a fundamental aspect of our existence in the world.
Instead of place as being-in-the-world we have placelessness associated with modernism. This is more than a corporate indifference to particular localities because of standardization in production and consumption as placelessness is also written into our concepts which we use to explain and make sense of the world. A good example is economics. An instrumental economic reason, concerned with the most efficient means for attaining givern ends, has an overriding focus with efficiency as an end in itself Economists, in focusing on the supply and demand, competition and deregulated markets, either ignore place, or reduce it to location.
Some critique this turn to place and sense of place because of its ugly aspects. Places can, for instance, be the basis for exclusionary practices, for parochialism and for xenophobia. There is ample evidence of this in such things as NIMBY attitudes, gated communities and ethnic bigotry and racism.
Hence the turn to borderless world of electronic information and the unprecendented scale of recent global capital and population movements for both migration and tourism.
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