Matthew Barlow

I’m reading a bit about theories of place right now.  And I’m struck by geographers who bemoan the mobility of the world we live, as it degrades place in their eyes. It makes our connections to place inauthentic and not real.  We spend all this time in what they call un-places: airports, highways, trains, cars, waiting rooms.  And we move around, we travel, we relocate.  All of this, they say, is degrading the idea of place, which is a location we are attached to and inhabit in an authentic manner.

I see where these kinds of geographers come from. I have spent a fair amount of my adult life in un-places.  I have moved around a lot.  In my adult life, I have lived in Vancouver, Ottawa, Vancouver again, Ottawa again, Montreal, Western Massachusetts, Boston, and now, Alabama.  If I were to count the number of flats I have called home, I would probably get dizzy.

And yet, I have a strong connection to place.  I am writing this in my living room, which is the room I occupy the most (at least whilst awake and conscious) in my home.  It is my favourite room and it is carefully curated to make it a comfortable, inviting place for me.  It is indeed a place. And yet, I have only lived here for six months.  In fact, today is six months sine I moved into this house.  I have a similar connection to the small college town I live in.  And the same goes for my university campus.

So am I different than the people these geographers imagine flitting about the world in all these un-places, experiencing inauthentic connections to their locales?  Am I fooled into an inauthentic connection to my places? I don’t think so.  And I think I am like most people.  Place can be a transferrable idea, it can be mobile.  Our place is not necessarily sterile.  It seems to me that a lot of these geographers are also overlooking the things that make a place a place: our belongings, our personal relationships to those who surround us, or own selves and our orientation to the world.

Sure, place is mobile in our world, but that does not mean that place is becoming irrelevant as these geographers seem to be saying.  Rather, it means that place is mobile.  Place is by nature a mutable space.  Someone else called this house home before me. This house has been here since 1948.  But that doesn’t mean that this is any less a place to me.