In the article The Identity of a Place: Place-Based Interventions Between Land and Society, I argued for the necessity of a place-based document or report that could assist practitioners who work with places (e.g., architects, planners, politicians, social scientists, etc.) in making decisions, whenever they are concerned with understanding the character of a place from a holistic or, as I prefer to call it, a unitary and systemic perspective. Now, I am going to explore this argument a bit more; the transdisciplinary shade of the article remains unchanged, even if it can be more precious for design professionals, and those interested in the transformation of the human environment, to have a general framework of the relationship between Place, Planning, and Architecture. The philosophical and scientific background is the reformed – transdisciplinary, organic and systemic – understanding of spatial concepts I am promoting at RSaP – Rethinking Space and Place. The considerations I will propose have many intersections with Patrick Geddes’ proposal for ‘regional surveys’ – see the article On the Modernity of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932).[1]
1. The Identity of Places
Each place has a true personality; and with this shows some unique elements — a personality too much asleep it may be, but which it is the task of the planner, as master-artist, to awaken.[2]
Patrick Geddes
In the past, I referred to the basic idea of a place-based document or report with a thought-provoking idea: by analogy with the fact that any human being, as an individual with a unique identity, has an ID-card that identifies his main traits, I argued for the necessity of a similar document for places (places, just like persons, are unique): a sort of inventory, or guide, containing basic information through which practitioners could have a first synthetic approach to places, saving precious time for their research of sources, data and records which are usually scattered in many different archives, repositories, books, libraries, documents of private or public institutions, according to the specific instance of place we are interested to. For example: Where do we find historical data about the meteorology of a certain place? Where do we find archaeological data or traces about that place? How can we know which botanical or animal species succeeded in that place? Where do we find information about the main happenings and events that defined the cultural history of that place? In most cases, all of those data and other basic information concerning the nature of a place (town, city, region, etc.) can be found in different places, created by various public or private institutions, scattered between different offices; however, I wish they could be immediately accessible through one single document – a synthetic report – possibly in the public domain. Such a document, a sort of guide any city or region should be equipped with, could be the first useful reference for practitioners interested in knowing the characters of a place globally or holistically rather than in bits and pieces, as it often happens when specific surveys are undertaken with a focus that, from time to time, may vary from archaeological to meteorological, from ecological to sociological, from historical to architectural or literary, artistic, and so on. A document like that could become a sort of protocol to follow whenever we intervene in places, e.g., by designing new buildings or urban areas that modify the structure of places (e.g., architects and urban planners), by modifying certain customs, rites, or behaviours of people by introducing new social functions or changing and removing old ones in certain neighbourhoods (e.g., politicians, entrepreneurs, planners, architects, social scientists, etc.), by studying the cultural history of a territory and related symbolic values (e.g., social scientists, novelists, artists, filmmakers, etc.), its climate and ground (e.g., climatologists, meteorologists, archaeologists, etc.), etc.
However, a document like that shouldn’t be reserved for practitioners only: ideally conceived for being in the public domain and sponsored by communities at the municipal, regional, or national level, it should be a document available to people who have an interest in the different histories of the places where they live and they care for. In this way, it could also represent a first step for everybody – and not just for those who live in a specific place – to become native to a place by knowing the processes and the relationships between the processes that sustain the life of a place, from nature to culture and the way it presents through its built symbols.
A document like that could be available to those who are going to visit a new territory, natural land or city, for instance, promoting more sustainable forms of tourism – that’s why I am also introducing the concept of ‘guide’ to delineate the outline of such a place-based document. Moreover, it could be available to those who need to study foreign realities for whatever reason (architects, entrepreneurs, politicians, etc.). Overall, a document like that could be the first source of environmental education for people: a good starting point to get in touch with the Genius Loci – the overarching quality of a place, made of visible and invisible traces – and its intersecting histories – geographical, ecological, cultural, symbolic, etc. In simplified forms, it could also be used as an educational instrument at primary or secondary school levels, taking the concept of place (in a reformed, scientifically and philosophically up-to-date sense) back into the limelight.
With the due difference of epochs, advancement of knowledge and understanding of spatial concepts, some historical precedents can offer a practical vision of what I am speaking about regarding the idea of a place-based document or report: I am referring to Patrick Geddes’ proposal for Regional Surveys, and, to a lesser extent, to the American Guide Series commissionedunder President Roosevelt’s administration.[3]
Image 01: The American Guide Series included books and pamphlets published from 1937 to 1941 to outline the geography, climate, history and culture of American states and cities.
Image 02: The Abbey Church of Dunfermline (Scotland) seen from North West. This is the image of the frontispiece of the first survey report made by Patrick Geddes (1904), for the Scottish town Dunfermline: ‘City Development: A Study of Parks, Gardens, and Culture-Institutes – a Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust’.[4]
Here, in the context of the research on spatial concepts that I am pursuing at RSaP, it is especially valuable the works and teachings of Patrick Geddes, a pioneer in understanding and discovering the intersecting aspects that determine the qualities and histories of a place or, in Geddes’ vocabulary, a ‘region’: as a matter of fact, his regional surveys were ‘intended to produce less an inventory of the region, than an analysis of the interconnections between the ‘physical’, the ‘organic’, and the ‘social’,[5] which is fundamentally the same holistic and systemic scope of my work with places, and more generally with spatial and/or placial concepts. Very much like Geddes’ unusual and innovative (for his epoch) transdisciplinary approach, which we have examined in the past article, I’m not merely proposing a collection of data or inventory of facts divided for arguments (history, culture, nature, climate, etc.,) and gathered in a single document, which, is anyway a necessary moment for any placial research or study on places, especially for architects and planners; for that, good guides of cities or regions may partially serve the scope. The message to pass regards the systemic relationship between processes unfolding in and through places, at any level, from inorganic to organic, from sociological to cultural and symbolic – a relationship whose working principles have been quite recently discovered as the result of a new vision of Nature which we all should be aware of, independently of our profession, status, age, gender, race, religion or provenance. This relatively new, systemic and anti-reductionist perspective on the nature of places that I am calling for follows a new understanding of Nature, that is, a new world vision, radically different from the mechanistic, deterministic and reductionist vision we’ve been ingrained with since the times of Newton – on this issue, among other articles, see Place, Space, and a New Conception of Nature and also the Prologue to On the Modernity of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932).[6] Accordingly, the kind of report about the Identity of Places I am speaking about – which, in the wake of Geddes’ proposal for Regional Surveys, we could also understand as Place Survey Report – should necessarily reflect this new world vision, which a man ahead of his time like Geddes was able to foresee, at least in its fundamental principles: we are not speaking about the mere accumulation of data, records, or information regarding the multi folded characters of a place (physical, archaeological, meteorological, ecological, cultural, historical, etc.) but their interpretative key according to the new conception of nature: this is the decisive factor behind a document like the one I am proposing; this would mean take Geddes’s fundamental teachings to a new life.
Of course, we are saying that a place-based report to follow with the aim to penetrate the intimate nature of places as deep and wide as possible should go far beyond the description of physical or geographical characters (which I usually refer to as physicochemical processes and systems): as also intuited by Geddes, it should include biological, ecological, socio-cultural and symbolic or intellectual levels of enquiry. In this way we will know the main different constituents of a place: its topography, climate, geology, hydrology, character of the soil, plants and vegetation, and the wildlife they support, that is, its ecology; we will know the influence that places have on the physiological and psychological processes of men, we will know the social customs and habits of people living in that place; we will know their economies and politics, that is, overall, we will get acquainted with the established nature and culture of that place and the way it represents concretely through symbols, buildings, monuments, artistic productions, etc. That means understanding a place – land or territory –, and its spirit, holistically: nature and culture, at the same time, in their reciprocal influences.
Whence the necessity for any town, city, or region to produce a single, unitary, document like that, immediately recognizable and easily accessible? The scope is to be aware of the fundamental importance of place as a well-defined, unitary entity emerging from different sets of processes (inorganic, organic, sociocultural, and intellectual or symbolic): only if we understand places within an encompassing horizon can we intervene on them successfully, healing them or taking care of them, by keeping a wise balance between natural and cultural aspects of life. Place is the moulder of our lives the same way our lives have increasingly moulded places.[7] This ‘placial’ approach reflects the following, fundamental belief of mine: similarly to what ancient Greeks called ‘archè’ – the origin or principle of things – I am sustaining that place is the basic principle of reality, presenting both natural and cultural aspects. We are one thing with the places where we were born, where we grow up, and where we live in. From an existential and metaphysical perspective, place has to do with creation: its presentation or appearance – the existence of a place – is the expression of such creation. Things and places cannot be disjoined, the same way the culture of people cannot be disjoined from their territories: there is reciprocity between them.
However, we must recognize that our understanding of the dynamics that sustain the nature of places today is different from our understanding of the same dynamics decades or even hundreds of years ago; that means that the very concept of place cannot be understood in traditional terms – commonly, as a geographical territorial unit or a social one – but must be understood as a systemic notion, that is as the integrative product of different physical, chemical, biological, ecological, socio-cultural and symbolic or intellectual processes (all other processes, e.g., economic, political, architectural, etc., are derivative of those more primordial forms of processes). To understand the dynamics of a place means to understand the dynamics of Nature; to understand places, to understand priorities and distinguish between causes and effects of processes running in and through places is mandatory in an epoch of environmental crisis such as the one we are currently living – a global environmental crisis which has direct effects on local societies, their cultures and economies. The encompassing knowledge of places – which means the knowledge of lands or territories, from small to large – is the first step to understanding, and eventually protecting, ameliorating or improving the current state of health of our (= belonging to everybody) territories, towns, cities, regions, nations, and, ultimately, planet Earth, which is the ultimate system of places, or ‘the Place of places’ (obviously, we are limiting our horizon to the planetary scale).
In a systemic, organic or ecological analogy, we should understand planet Earth as a nested concatenation of places: places within places within places… all of them seamlessly connected on a material, spatial and temporal horizon. This character of places entails it is problematic to separate their material and spatiotemporal continuity (e.g., see Images 02, 03 in The Identity of a Place…), and that’s why, at RSaP – Rethinking Space and Place, I am holding that a reformed understanding of place cannot be limited to the local but will necessary include the global in its constitution: both the neighbourhood and planet Earth are places – the place of process –, one related to the other even if they belong to such distant scales. This fact – the continuous horizon of places – does not mean we cannot set human-made limits or boundaries, that is abstract lines of demarcation (e.g., social, political, national, etc.), to study the nature of places from particular perspectives. The presence of limits or boundaries, either physical or symbolic, is unavoidable when we speak of places: the very notion of place is structured on the concept of limit (e.g., see: Aristotle on the Concept of Place (Topos), or Place Limit Experience). However, this fact, the presence of limits, does not mean the actual and complete separation or seclusion of a place with respect to adjacent places; any complete separation (e.g., a physical barrier) would be detrimental to the survival of a place and its processes. We should consider places to behave similarly to organisms made of cells: the single cell and the entire organism survive in their dynamic states of equilibrium and health if cells work in mutual cooperation with other cells or groups of cells making tissues and organs that compose the final organism. The osmosis or relational contact between adjacent cells that constitute a choral (common) environment is vital as is the boundary that preserves the identity and functional operativity of the single cell. Analogously, a specific place – call it niche, neighbourhood, town, city, etc. – is related to the adjacent places and together form higher unities – habitat, metropolis, regions, etc. – which culminate in planet Earth as a whole – the final organism. So, to preserve the health and complex life of planet Earth and its constituting places, it is vital to keep the osmotic relation between a place and the adjacent ones, which form a higher territorial/environmental unit. In consideration of this important analogy between organisms and places, concerning the reformed understanding of place I am calling for at RSaP, I have spoken about the systemic or organic nature of places as one out of five main characters of a reformed notion of place (the other characters are ‘processual’, ‘relational’, ‘evolutionary’ and ‘choral’: see the article What Is Place? What Is Space?).
In a nutshell, a unitary document such as the one proposed with the thought-provoking label ‘Identity Card for Places’ – at any rate a Place Survey Report – would serve both practitioners and common people as an educational source to understand the complex nature of places and their dynamics, at the beginning of a new epoch – the Anthropocene. We cannot understand the true, complex and multi folded nature of places from a single perspective: we need to understand the global picture, and, to that, with the same spirit of Geddes’ understating of regions and promotion of regional surveys, a place-based document or report that prepares the ground for and points to become a protocol for the thorough study and understanding of places is a first step.
a unitary document such as the one proposed with the thought-provoking label ‘Identity Card for Places’ – at any rate a Place Survey Report – would serve both practitioners and common people as an educational source to understand the complex nature of places and their dynamics
The ratio behind this transdisciplinary approach to places is clear and in line with our current knowledge of the behaviour of complex systems (place is a complex system): if we are concerned with the study of a specific and circumscribed aspect of a place (be it ecological, economic, architectural, literary, etc.), to better understand that aspect we cannot completely remove it from the multitude of connections and bonds that sustain that specific aspect, are a hindrance, or allow it to thrive, or simply be what it is as a part of a larger system. That’s why we cannot access the secrets of places from a single perspective but we need a holistic vision of the kind Geddes already called for many decades ago: we need to recover his fundamental teachings.
Now, many decades after Geddes’ illuminating example, not only by intuition but also by means of newly acquired scientific knowledge, we know that physical processes determine sociocultural processes the same way sociocultural processes determine physical processes – there is a correlation between the physical environment and human activities (in Image 06 of the article The Identity of a Place…, I termed that reciprocity between processes ‘network coupling’); if, at the time of Geddes, it was a well-founded intuition, now it is scientific evidence: our current awareness of the environmental crisis at global level is nothing other than the realization of that interdependency of processes at both local and global levels. To know how the parts (specific places) of a system (planet Earth) work we should have a general idea of how the entire system made of parts works; in this sense, consider the closeness of meaning between ‘organism’ and ‘system’ where the original sense of the Greek term ‘organon’ is that of instrument functioning with reference to the whole, a conception very close to that of ‘system’, where the ‘whole’ is more than the summation of the constituent parts. Then, the reformed understanding of the concept of place we are proposing – place conceived as a complex system of interconnected processes – necessarily includes the local and the global simultaneously, all at once (in the organic/systemic analogy, local and global correspond to cells or organs made of cells, on the one side – that is, neighbourhoods, towns, cities, etc. – and the final organism – planet earth – on the other side). When we approach the study of places, we should be aware of the connections between processes, at any scale and from different perspectives.
If we embrace the systemic hypothesis, we can understand that reality is fundamentally a system of places and that the phenomenon of place consists of the integrative unity of different kinds of processes – this is the fundamental thesis I am maintaining at RSaP (What Is Place? What Is Space?; Places Everywhere; On the Structure of Reality); What does that mean in architectural terms? How did architects comply with places in the past, or even in more recent times? How could we characterize an architecture of place beyond mere common sense or ill-defined conceptions of place? This will be the subject of the next article – The Place of Architecture the Architecture of Place – Part II: A Historical Survey – of this series on Place, Planning, and Architecture.
Notes
[1] When I started to work on the present article, I did not know the work of Patrick Geddes, if not superficially: for me, Geddes was just the name of an old town planner linked to the British Garden City Movement of the early XX century. Apparently, a secondary character… I was close to the conclusions of this article when I decided to postpone its publication as soon as I became acquainted with the real extent of Geddes’ work: I delved into the exterminate horizon of his thinking and I immediately noted many points of convergence between his research and mine, due a similar understanding of the basic working principles of nature; fundamentally, I share with Geddes a systemic and organic understanding of the complex dynamics that regulate the relationships between nature and organisms, including men and their products – from material to immaterial. This means understanding nature as an integral fact, natural and cultural, all at once.
[2] Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics (London: Williams & Norgate, 1915), 397.
[3] On this, see Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World, second edition(New York: Routledge, 2021), 149-150. I give credit to this book for having given me the opportunity to rediscover the work of Geddes, through the concept of ‘regionalism’.
[4] Patrick Geddes, City Development: A Study of Parks, Gardens, and Culture-Institutes – a Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust (Bourneville: The Saint George Press, 1904).
[5] Harry Parker, The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th-century Britain, in History of the Human Sciences 2023, Vol. 36(3-4) 3–26
[6] The temporal scale, when I have talked about a new vision of nature ‘quite recently discovered’, is a scale of centuries; since the origin of Western philosophy and physics Western conceptions of Nature can be referred to two main cosmologies: the first associated with Aristotelian and Ptolemaic visions; the second with Copernican and Newtonian visions. Now, after Einstein and the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics, we are in a phase of transition towards the redefinition of a new cosmology and, therefore, towards the redefinition of Nature and its laws. While Newtonian cosmology was sustained by mechanistic, deterministic and reductionist thinking, the new cosmology and its laws will be systemic, non-deterministic and organic. I have talked about these fundamental questions in the introduction of Preliminary Notes and also in the following articles: Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part One, and Place, Space, and a New Conception of Nature. See also the Prologue to On the Modernity of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932)
[7] As Patrick Geddes once said: ‘Holland has made the Dutch, yet the Dutch have made Holland’. Patrik Geddes, The Movement towards Synthetic Studies, and its Educational and Social Bearings in The Sociological Review, a20(3), 1928, 232.
Works Cited
Geddes, Patrick. Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics. London: Williams & Norgate, 1915.
Geddes, Patrick. City Development: A Study of Parks, Gardens, and Culture-Institutes – a Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust. Bourneville: The Saint George Press, 1904.
Geddes, Patrick. The Movement towards Synthetic Studies, and its Educational and Social Bearings.The Sociological Review, a20(3), 1928, 223-232.
Lefaivre, Liane and Tzonis, Alexander. Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World, second edition. New York: Routledge, 2021.
Parker, Harry. The Regional Survey Movement and Popular Autoethnography in Early 20th-Century Britain, in History of the Human Sciences Vol. 36(3-4), 2023, 3–26.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Oberholz Hut, Obereggen, IT, 2018. Architect: Peter Pichler Architecture. Photography: Alessandro Calvi Rollino.
Image 01: Cover of the books – American Guides Series.
Image 02: Frontispiece of the book City Development, by Patrick Geddes (1904).