Phenomenology of Place

John Sayles is one of America’s most successful independent filmmakers, whose works include Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), City of Hope (1991), and Lone Star (1996). This article examines Sayles’ portrait of place in Sunshine State (2002), a film set in Plantation Island, Florida, where large-scale corporate development is transforming two communities—one black, the other white—into upscale winter resorts. Sayles’ film probes the place experience of some sixteen vividly drawn characters and illuminates how the same physical place, for different individuals and groups, can evoke a broad spectrum of situations, meanings, and potential futures. One of Sayles’ conclusions is that people cannot escape the place in which they find themselves. They can, however, learn from that place and thereby decide whether and in what ways they will offer that place commitment or not.

Using a weekly outdoor marketplace in Varberg, Sweden, as a real-world example, this article explores the phenomenological notion of place ballet--the interaction of individuals' habitual actions and routines in space, which becomes place. Varberg is a coastal town of about 20,000 located about fifty miles south of Gothenburg.  Varberg's outdoor maket has stood in the same place in the center of town for some 400 years and operates throughout the year on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Drawing on photographic, interview, and participant-observational materials, the authors identify two underlying patterns in Varberg's place ballet--regularity and unexpectedness.

This book,  A Geography of the Lifeworld (1979), focuses on a wide-ranging phenomenon labelled everyday environmental experience—the sum total of peoples’ firsthand involvements with the geographical world in which they live. By geographical world is meant the everyday places, spaces, and environments in which people find themselves. The source of experiential descriptions was environmental experience groups, small focus groups of students and other interested participants who were willing to meet weekly to examine in their own daily experience such themes as movement patterns, emotions relating to place, the nature of noticing and attention, the meaning of home and at-homeness, places for things, deciding where to go when, and so forth.

Through a phenomenological explication of the more than 1,500 personal observations offered in these environmental experience groups, the study identifies three overarching themes—movement, rest, and encounter—that appear to mark the essential core of everyday environmental experience.

The section on movement examines the habitual nature of everyday environmental behaviors and argues, after French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), that the lived foundation of these behaviors is the body as preconscious but intelligent subject. The section on rest explores people’s attachment to place and gives particular attention to at-homeness and positive affective relationships with places and environments.

The book’s final section on encounter considers the multifaced ways in which people make attentive contact with their world. Group observations indicate that this range of awareness extends from obliviousness and minimal attentive contact with the world at hand through watching, noticing, and more intense kinds of encounter where the experiencer, at least metaphorically, feels a sense of “merging” with some aspect of world.

The last section of the book examines lived relationships and interconnections among movement, rest, and encounter and argues that their threefold structure offers one simple but integrated way to envision human environmental experience conceptually and to think about design and policy implications practically.

Phenomenology, Place, Environment, and Architecture:
A Review

David Seamon
Editor, Environmental & Architectural  Phenomenology Newsletter

This review article introduces the reader to the nature of phenomenology and reviews phenomenological research dealing with environmental and architectural concerns. An extensive list of  references is provided at the end of the article.
      A much-abbreviated version of this review appears as “A Way of Seeing People and Place: Phenomenology in Environment-Behavior Research,” published in S. Wapner, J. Demick, T. Yamamoto, and H Minami (Eds.), Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research (pp. 157-78).  New York: Plenum, 2000. This shorter, published version is available here at academi.edu at the following link:

https://www.academia.edu/39758883/A_way_of_seeing_people_and_place_phenomenology_in_environment-behavior_research_2000_

This summer/fall 2018 issue of Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology includes the following items:
• A “book note” on the recently published 2nd edition of philosopher Jeff Malpas’ groundbreaking Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, originally published in 1999. This expanded version includes a new chapter on place and technological modernity, “especially the seeming loss of place in the contemporary world.”
• A “book note” on EAP editor David Seamon’s recently published Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds and Place Making, which gives particular attention to the generative aspects of place and locates six place processes that Seamon identifies as place interaction, place identity, place release, place realization, place intensification, and place creation.
• An essay by the late philosopher and science educator Henri Bortoft, who focuses on ways of thinking holistically, including the conceptual efforts of proto-phenomenologist Wolfgang Johann von Goethe; physicists Niels Bohr and David Bohm; and philosophers J. G. Bennett, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
• An essay by retired environmental educator John Cameron, who begins a new series of essays on the lived relationship between interiority and exteriority, particularly as qualities of the natural world and place contribute to that relationship.

This essay is a response to Shaun Moores’ commentary on the author’s A GEOGRAPHY OF THE LIFEWORLD, a book that  examines the significance of the everyday spaces, places, and environment in peoples’ daily lives (Seamon 1979). The author discusses a number of Moores’ concerns, including the role of media in supporting or undermining physical places; the value of phenomenological method for media and communication studies; and the charge that phenomenology is hindered by an essentialist approach that presupposes the presence and significance of invariant existential structures.

Keywords: architecture; digital media; everyday life; experience; media use; phenomenology; physical environment; place; space; placelessness; Merleau-Ponty

This essay examines, from a phenomenological perspective, the New York photographs of André Kertész (1894 1985), one of the great pioneers of modern photography. In one sense, Kertész's photographs are an implicit phenomenological record because they portray the fabric, style and tenor of the lifeworld—the ordinary, tacit pattern and elements of life's everydayness, normally taken for granted but given direct scholarly attention in phenomenology.

My aim is twofold: first, to examine the underlying qualities of the lifeworld suggested by Kertész's photographs, especially the way they illustrate lived immersion in the world; and, second, to identify phenomenologically the underlying pattern and process that sustains the vividness and power of Kertész's lifeworld presentations.

First, I discuss the phenomenological interpretation of the person world relationship, drawing particularly on philosopher Martin Heidegger's picture of human-immersion-in-world.

Second, I examine several Kertész photographs to illustrate variations of this person-environment immersion. Third, using Heidegger's notions of "readiness to hand" versus "presence to hand" and "belonging together" versus "belonging together," I seek to understand phenomenologically the underlying dynamics that make Kertész's photographs so powerful.

Key words: André Kertész, phenomenology, photography, belonging, wholeness, place, New York City photographs

Since the 1980s, occupational therapists and scientists have given increasing attention to how qualities of physical environments and places contribute to human health, well being, and productive occupations (Corcoran & Gitlin, 1997; Dunn et al., 2003; Gitlin, 2009, Kielhofner, 1995, ch. 7; Kiernat, 1987; Rowles, 2003; Stewart et al., 2003; Ulrich et al., 2008). In this overview, I emphasize how human beings experience environments, places, and spaces; therefore, I draw largely on phenomenological research. Most simply, phenomenology is the description and interpretation of human experience (Finlay, 2011; Seamon, 2000; van Manen, 1990). In this chapter, I briefly describe the phenomenological approach and then consider four environmental themes important for occupational therapists and scientists: (1) place; (2) environmental embodiment; (3) home and at-homeness; and (4) digital technology and virtual places.

In this chapter, I examine how the ideas of three current researchers—architect Christopher Alexander, architectural theorist Bill Hillier, and political philosopher Daniel Kemmis—provide important new insights for understanding the urban lifeworld and for making more vibrant places. I argue that these thinkers’ conceptions of place, though considerably different in some ways, can be drawn together to offer a powerful understanding of how physical-spatial and human worlds might mutually sustain each other by bringing human beings together informally and thereby generating a sense of togetherness, particularly in cities. In turn, this possibility of spontaneous geographical gathering can support a liveliness of place and one kind of implicit environmental belonging.

Though relatively unknown today, American novelist and agrarian reformer Louis Bromfield (1896—1956) was regarded in the 1920s as one of America’s most promising young writers. A major theme in many of Bromfield’s works is the 20th-century loss of a lived sensitivity to the natural world percipitated in part by American industrialism and materialism. At the same time, Bromfield sought to resurrect a style of environmental encounter whereby plants, animals, and places could be seen as they were in themselves and thereby be genuinely cared for and protected.

One label he used for this sympathetic way of knowing nature is “teched”—a colloquial word referring to a capacity for experiencing an intuitive intimacy with things, creatures, and landscapes such that the boundaries of self and other dissolve. Bromfield believed that such direct openness to the world was essential to understanding nature and for using it in a responsible, sustainable way, especially in regard to particular places, including his home region of northern central Ohio.

In this paper, I draw on two of Bromfield’s short stories—“Up Ferguson Way” and “The Pond” (both written in 1944)—to examine the experiential dimensions of “teched” and to indicate how this mode of encounter relates to attachment to place.

Key words: Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm, environmental experience, place, attachment to place, love of nature, phenomenology of place

A major theme in American independent filmmaker John Sayles’ films is exploring relationships between people and places, particularly as those places incorporate economic and existential limitations or possibilities. In Sayles’ 1999 Limbo, the place is current-day Alaska, which is both the setting and antagonist for the three main characters who face personal and interpersonal risk as that risk is impelled by place in both its human and natural forms—in other words, the hazard of civilization, on one hand; the hazard of pure nature and wilderness, on the other hand. A central conclusion that Sayles points to in Limbo is that looking for one’s place may ultimately be more significant than the actual finding itself. Here, I examine this phenomenon of “trying to find one’s place” as portrayed in the experiences, situations, and events encountered by Limbo’s major and minor characters. I also consider how Sayles presents the place of the natural world in this effort to find one’s place.

Whenever we hear the word 'place', we immediately recognize an inconspicuous 'image', that isn't just visual imagery, but a memory that is embodied within ourselves. It is this memory that roots all us people to the world and gives an existential meaning to the 'survival'.