The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part I: The Identity of Places   

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—a tool that could assist practitioners working with places (architects, planners, policymakers, social scientists, and others) in making informed decisions whenever the character of a place must be understood from a holistic perspective—or, as I prefer to say, from a unitary and systemic perspective. In what follows, I will expand on that argument. While the transdisciplinary dimension remains unchanged, my focus here is on clarifying its value for design professionals and for all those engaged in transforming the human environment. What is most needed, I suggest, is a general framework capable of articulating the relationship between Place, Urban Planning, and Architecture.

The philosophical and scientific foundations of this proposal lie in the reformed—transdisciplinary, organic, and systemic—understanding of spatial concepts that I am advancing through this website RSaP–Rethinking Space and Place. In many respects, these considerations intersect with Patrick Geddes’ call for ‘regional surveys,’ as discussed in my 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 introduced the idea of a place-based document or report with a deliberately thought-provoking analogy: just as every human being, as an individual with a unique identity, possesses an ID card that records their essential traits, I argued for the creation of a similar ‘identity card’ for places. Like people, places are unique. Such a document would serve as a concise inventory or guide, providing basic yet essential information through which practitioners could form an initial, synthetic understanding of a place—saving valuable time otherwise spent hunting for data dispersed across archives, repositories, libraries, and institutional records.

For example: Where can we find long-term meteorological data for a particular location? Archaeological records? A history of the botanical and animal species that have inhabited it? Which events shaped its cultural history? At present, such information—whether meteorological, archaeological, ecological, sociological, historical, or artistic—is often scattered across a patchwork of public and private institutions, offices, libraries, and digital repositories. I envision a single, accessible document—ideally in the public domain—that would consolidate these disparate data into a coherent reference.

Every city or region could maintain such a guide as a primary resource for anyone seeking to understand a place holistically rather than in fragmented, discipline-specific snapshots. This document could become a kind of protocol for intervention: informing the design of new buildings or urban areas (e.g., architects, urban planners), guiding policy changes that reshape social life (e.g., politicians, entrepreneurs, social scientists), supporting cultural and historical research (historians, artists, filmmakers), and assisting environmental and scientific study (e.g., climatologists, ecologists, archaeologists). In short, it would be a foundational tool for any action that alters, studies, or interprets the identity of a place.

However, such a document should not be reserved for practitioners alone. Ideally conceived as a public-domain resource and sponsored by communities at the municipal, regional, or national level, it should be accessible to anyone interested in the layered histories of the places they inhabit and care for. In this way, it could serve as a first step for everyone—not only long-time residents—to ‘become native’ to a place: to understand the processes and interrelationships that sustain its life, from the natural systems to the cultural expressions that emerge in its built symbols.

It could also serve visitors—those exploring a new region, natural landscape, or city—by promoting more sustainable forms of tourism. This is why I use the word ‘guide’ to outline the concept of such a place-based document. Likewise, it could support those studying unfamiliar contexts for professional purposes (architects, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and others). Above all, it could be a foundational source of environmental education: a starting point for engaging with the Genius Loci—the overarching spirit of a place, composed of both visible and invisible traces—and with its intersecting histories, whether geographical, ecological, cultural, or symbolic. In simplified form, it could also serve as a pedagogical tool at the primary or secondary school level, restoring the concept of place—redefined in scientifically and philosophically up-to-date terms—to the center of attention.

With due regard for differences in historical context, knowledge, and spatial understanding, some precedents illustrate the practical potential of this idea: Patrick Geddes’ proposal for ‘regional surveys’ and, to a lesser extent, the American Guide Series commissioned under 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]

Within the research on spatial concepts that I am pursuing at RSaP, the works and teachings of Patrick Geddes are particularly valuable. Geddes was a pioneer in revealing the intersecting factors that shape the qualities and histories of a place—or, in his own vocabulary, a ‘region’. 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] This is fundamentally the same holistic and systemic scope that underpins my work with places, and more broadly, with spatial concepts in general.

Much like Geddes’ unusual and innovative (for his time) transdisciplinary approach—which I have examined in a previous article—I am not merely proposing a collection of data or an inventory of facts divided into discrete categories (history, culture, nature, climate, etc.) and assembled into a single document, even though such a compilation is an essential step in any placial research, especially for architects and planners. For that, good city or regional guides may partially suffice. The real message I wish to convey concerns the systemic relationships between the processes unfolding in and through places, at every scale—from inorganic to organic, from sociological to cultural and symbolic. These relationships operate according to principles that have only recently been brought to light, as part of a new vision of Nature—a vision we should all be aware of, regardless of profession, status, age, gender, race, religion, or origin.

This relatively recent, systemic, and anti-reductionist understanding of the nature of places is part of the broader rethinking of Nature itself—a worldview radically different from the mechanistic, deterministic, and reductionist paradigm ingrained since Newton. On this point, see Place Space, Matter and a New Conception of Nature, and the Prologue to On the Modernity of Patrick Geddes.^[6]

Accordingly, the type of report I propose on the Identity of Places—which, following Geddes’ proposal for regional surveys, we might also call a Place Survey Report—must necessarily embody this new worldview. A visionary like Geddes was able to anticipate its core principles. What I am advocating is not the mere accumulation of data on the multiple characteristics of a place (physical, archaeological, meteorological, ecological, cultural, historical, etc.), but their interpretation through the lens of this new organic and systemic conception of Nature. This interpretative key is the decisive factor behind the document I envision, and it would give Geddes’ fundamental teachings a renewed life.

A place-based report aimed at uncovering the intimate nature of places as deeply and comprehensively as possible must go far beyond describing their physical or geographical characteristics (what I usually refer to as physicochemical processes and systems). As Geddes also intuited, such a report should encompass biological, ecological, socio-cultural, and symbolic or intellectual levels of inquiry. In this way, we could identify the principal constituents of a place: its topography, climate, geology, hydrology, soil character, plant life and vegetation, and the wildlife they support—in other words, its ecology. We could examine the influence of the place on human physiological and psychological processes; we could document the social customs and habits of its inhabitants; we could understand its economic systems and political structures. Ultimately, we would come to know the established nature and culture of that place, and the way these are expressed tangibly through symbols, buildings, monuments, artistic works, and other cultural artifacts. This is what it means to understand a place—whether land, city, or region—holistically: grasping nature and culture together, in their constant and reciprocal influences (P.S.: the application of this method, oriented toward a place-based urban and architectural regenerative design, has been discussed in The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place–Part III: A Case Study).

Whence the necessity for any town, city, or region to produce a single, unitary document of this kind—immediately recognizable, easily accessible, and universally understood? In Geddes’ time, the regional survey was a pioneering attempt to unite disparate strands of knowledge into a coherent understanding of a place. His goal was not mere data collection, but the revelation of interconnections between the physical, the organic, and the social. Today, with our expanded systemic understanding of nature, we can—and must—extend that ambition.

Only by recognizing place as a well-defined whole—emerging from intertwined inorganic, organic, sociocultural, and symbolic processes—can we intervene with wisdom, healing, and balance. A true understanding of place means holding both its natural and cultural dimensions in view at once.

Place moulds our lives just as surely as our lives mould place.^[7] We are inseparable from the lands and territories where we are born, grow, and live—whether those are the same place or different places in today’s mobile society. We’ve been shaped by places, just as they’ve been shaped by us. This placial understanding reflects the following, fundamental belief of mine: just as the ancient Greeks spoke of archè, the generative principle of things, I hold that place is the foundational principle of reality itself, uniting nature and culture in a single existential fabric. 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 the territory: there is reciprocity between people or things and places.

Yet our present understanding of place differs profoundly from that of past centuries—and even from Geddes’ own era. Place is not a static geographical or sociocultural unit, but a systemic entity—an evolving synthesis of physical, chemical, biological, ecological, sociocultural, and symbolic processes, all unfolding in time, as intuited by Geddes. To grasp the dynamics of place is to grasp the dynamics of Nature. And in an age of environmental crisis and deep social transformation, this comprehension is no longer optional—it is imperative.

The encompassing knowledge of places – which means the knowledge of lands or territories, from small to large, simultaneously permanent and changing, just like living beings are – is our first step toward safeguarding, regenerating, and guiding the health of our (= belonging to everybody) territories, towns, cities, regions, nations, and, ultimately, Earth itself, which is the ultimate system of places, or the Place of places—the living totality within which all our local environments are nested. In this sense, the place-based document I propose is a contemporary continuation—and philosophical expansion—of Geddes’ vision: a unifying framework that would stand as both a practical guide and a philosophical and ethical compass.

In a systemic, organic, or ecological perspective, planet Earth can be understood as a nested concatenation of places: places within places within places—each seamlessly connected across material, spatial, and temporal horizons. This nested character makes it problematic to treat places as isolated units or to ignore their continuous physical and temporal interconnections (e.g., see Images 02, 03 in The Identity of a Place…).

At RSaP–Rethinking Space and Place, I hold that any reformed understanding of place must go beyond the local to necessarily include the global in its constitution. Both the neighbourhood and planet Earth are places—places of process—interlinked despite their distant scales.

This continuity does not deny the use of human-made limits or boundaries—whether social, political, or symbolic—to study places from particular perspectives. Boundaries are inherent to the very notion of place, as Aristotle’s topos already implied (e.g., see: Aristotle on the Concept of Place (Topos), or Limit Place Appearance). But boundaries should not be mistaken for absolute separations: complete disconnection from neighbouring places would be detrimental to the survival of a place and the processes that sustain it.

Here, a biological or ecological analogy is useful. Places behave like organisms composed of cells: the single cell and the entire organism thrive only if cells maintain cooperative exchanges with other cells, forming tissues and organs that support the whole. Osmosis between adjacent cells is vital—just as the boundary of each cell preserves its identity and function. Similarly, a place—whether a niche, neighbourhood, town, or city—remains viable only through dynamic relations with neighbouring places. Together they form larger units—habitats, metropolises, regions—that ultimately culminate in Earth as the total organism, the Place of places. Thus, preserving the health of Earth and its constituent places requires maintaining these osmotic relations, allowing each place to sustain its identity while contributing to the vitality of the whole. In my framework at RSaP, this analogy underpins one of the five main characters of the reformed notion of place I’m discussing: the systemic or organic character. The other four are processual, relational, evolutionary, and choral (see What Is Place? What Is Space?).

In short, the proposed Identity Card for Places—or, more formally, the Place Survey Report—would function as a shared educational resource for both practitioners and the wider public, helping to reveal the complex nature and dynamics of places as we enter a new epoch—the Anthropocene. No single perspective can capture the true, multifold reality of a place; we must see the global picture. In the spirit of Patrick Geddes’ understanding of regions and his promotion of regional surveys, such a place-based document would lay the groundwork for, and ultimately serve as, a protocol for the thorough study and understanding of places—a necessary first step toward informed and responsible action on territories or lands.

a unitary document such as the one proposed with the thought-provoking label ‘Identity Card for Places’ —or, more formally, the Place Survey Report—would function as a shared educational resource for both practitioners and the wider public, helping to reveal the complex nature and dynamics of places

The reasoning behind this transdisciplinary approach to places is rooted in our current understanding of complex systems—and a place is precisely that: a complex system. If we focus on a specific, circumscribed aspect of a place—whether ecological, economic, architectural, literary, or otherwise—we cannot truly understand it in isolation. Its nature is shaped, sustained, hindered, or enabled by a network of interconnections within the larger whole. To grasp its meaning and behaviour, we must recognise those relationships. This is why the secrets of places cannot be unlocked from a single perspective; they require a holistic vision of the kind Patrick Geddes advocated many decades ago, and which we now urgently need to recover and advance.

Now, many decades after Geddes’ illuminating example, we can affirm not only by intuition but also through solid scientific evidence that physical processes shape sociocultural processes just as sociocultural processes shape the physical environment. This reciprocity—what I have elsewhere called network coupling (see Image 06 in the article The Identity of a Place…)—is no longer a matter of conjecture. Our current awareness of the global environmental crisis is, in fact, the recognition of this deep interdependence between processes at both local and planetary scales.

To understand how the parts (specific places) of a system (planet Earth) function, we must first grasp the principles by which the entire system operates. Here, the kinship between the notions of organism and system is instructive: the Greek organon—an instrument that works in reference to the whole—evokes the same systemic principle that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. In this light, a reformed understanding of place—as a complex system of interconnected processes—must integrate the local and the global simultaneously. In the organic analogy, neighbourhoods, towns, and cities are like cells or organs, while planet Earth is the final organism. Approaching the study of places, therefore, demands an awareness of processual connections across scales and from multiple perspectives.

If we embrace the systemic hypothesis, we can recognize that reality is, at its core, a system of places, and that the phenomenon of place emerges from the integrative unity of different kinds of processes. This is the central thesis I maintain at RSaP (What Is Place? What Is Space?, Places Everywhere-Everything Is Place, On the Structure of Reality). But what does this mean in architectural terms? How have architects, in the past and in more recent times, responded to the demands of place? And how might we define an architecture of place beyond common-sense notions or loosely formulated ideas? These questions will be addressed in the next article in this series on Place, Urban Planning, and Architecture: The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place-Part II: A Historical Survey.

Notes

[1] When I began work on this article, my knowledge of Patrick Geddes was only superficial: to me, he was merely the name of an old town planner associated with the British Garden City Movement of the early twentieth century — apparently a secondary figure. I was nearing the conclusion of this piece when I decided to delay its publication, prompted by a deeper encounter with the true breadth of Geddes’ work. As I immersed myself in the vast horizon of his thought, I quickly noticed striking points of convergence between his research and mine, rooted in a shared understanding of the fundamental principles governing nature. At heart, both Geddes and I view these principles as systemic and organic, shaping the complex dynamics that bind nature and organisms — including human beings and all their creations, from the material to the immaterial. It is a vision of nature as an indivisible whole, at once natural and cultural.

[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] When I refer to this ‘relatively recent’ vision of nature, the temporal scale in mind spans centuries. Since the birth of Western philosophy and physics, conceptions of Nature in the West can be traced to two great cosmological frameworks: the first shaped by the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic worldviews; the second emerging from the Copernican revolution and Newtonian mechanics. Today, in the wake of Einstein’s relativity and the advances of quantum mechanics, we stand in a transitional phase — moving toward the definition of a new cosmology and, with it, a redefinition of Nature and its laws. Whereas Newtonian cosmology was grounded in mechanistic, deterministic, and reductionist thought, the cosmology now coming into view is systemic and organic, probabilistic, and irriducible to mere physical laws. 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, Matter, 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).

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