Places

Place is more difficult. Place is what you are left with – or more often deprived of – once all the rules have been applied and all the masterplans built. Place is the ‘there’ in Gertrude Stein’s often quoted comment about Oakland in California – that when she arrived there, ‘there was no there there’. It is unfortunately often the case that new urban areas, once they are completed, don’t quite measure up to the aspirations of the people who designed and built them. In terms of the rule book they are ‘correct’ in every respect, their spaces are well designed and they may even be well used, but they still lack a certain something. That certain something is a ‘sense of place’.