Geog 262 Week 1 - Place and Everyday Life

Erving Goffman

(1922 - 1982)

• Canadian-born American sociologist

• Analyzed social interaction

• Developed the idea of dramaturgical analysis

Dramaturgical analysis

• Developed by Erving Goffman

• people live their everyday lives like actors performing on a stage

• They engage in “impression management”

Impression Management

• Part of Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis

• People express certain information to impress a certain idea upon an audience during a social interaction

• Front stage vs backstage

Michel de Certeau

(1925 - 1986)

• Came up with the idea of ‘spatial stories’

• idea of Flâneur moving feeling through the city

Spatial Stories

• Idea developed by Michel de Certeau

• Stress the spatial events of storytelling: stories are events that take place

• Theoretical device that lets us understand the urban fabric in terms of the relationships between people, things, and places

Flâneur

• Type of character developed by Baudelaire

• somebody who traverses the streets of the city as an observer of contemporary life

• typically male, has no visible means of income, is urban, contemporary, stylish, part of the crowd yet apart from the crowd, aloof and unreadable, a strolling observer, wanders with no specific purpose but to drink in the sights and sounds of the emerging city

Feminist Geography

Movement in geography with the goal of keeping women visible despite processes of rapid global change, which tend to hide their social, economic, and political contributions

Tracey Skelton & Highmore

• Talked about the idea that everyday life is paradoxical

• It is both ordinary and extraordinary, self-evident and opaque, known and unknown, obvious and enigmatic

Doreen Massey

(1944 - 2016)

• Feminist geographer; wrote Space, Place and Gender

• Talked about “global sense of place”

Global Sense of Place

• Discussed by Doreen Massey

• The idea that places aren’t closed and sealed with clear borders

• Places are the intersection between networks of social relations and movements and communication

John Eyles

• Talked about the relationship between place and everyday life

• Emphasized the importance of everyday life

• Discussed the Structural Formations of Place

Structural Formations of Place

• The relationship between place and everyday life is governed by relationships and social structures

• Talked about by John Eyles and Karl Marx

Karl Marx

• Talked about the relationship between human agency and the structure of our everyday lives

• We have agency, but we make decisions under existing circumstances created by the past, not under self-selected circumstances

Tim Cresswell

• Created a definition for place

• Talked about place as existing between objective fact and subjective place

• Places are like “constellations” of material things occupying a particular segment of space which have sets of meaning attached to them

3 Elements of Place

Developed by Tim Cresswell

• Location: a point in space with specific relations to other points in space

• Locale: a broader context for social relations

• Sense of place: subjective feelings associated with a place

Place

• defined by Cresswell as a combination of location and meaning

• ‘spaces’ turned into ‘places’ by defining them and giving them meaning

Yi-Fu Tuan

• A humanistic geographer whom Tim Cresswell worked with

• Idea that sense of place is elusive, subjective, and personal

  • Constantly changing yet appears fixed

  • Sense of place comes from the spirit of a locale, the living force that makes a space into a place

Dolores Hayden

• Wrote The Power of Place

• Idea that everyday people and regular workers shape the urban landscape just as much as the people in power do

• Believed that all of our sense are key to understand place

  • We use multiple sense in orientation and wayfinding

Kevin Lynch

(1918 - 1984)

• Researched place legibility and mental mapping

• Worked with kids from different areas of LA to get their mental maps of the city

  • Kids living in richer areas tended to have greater and more detailed mental maps of their cities

Place Legibility

the ease with which people understand the layout of a place

Mental Map

a mental representation of what a city contains and its layout according to the individual

Thinking Geographically

• Doreen Massey

• Some of the most pressing issues of our time are inherently geographical

• understanding where things are, why they are there, and the consequences of those spatial patterns

• “The why of where”

• Geographers emphasize understanding the explanations for differences and similarities b/n places and social groups

Power Geometries

• Doreen Massey

• Ways that spatiality and mobility are shaped by and reproduce power differentials in society

• EX: control over distribution of goods and services, different circuits enabled by transportation systems

Fritzi Stoll

• Young boy who drowned in a shallow swamp in Seattle

• The swamp area used to be a garden cared for by the Japanese-American community, but was abandoned after Japanese-Americans were interned in WW2 and nobody was left to care for it