ABSTRACT
Defining “place” should be easy for an urbanist like me. What have I been writing about my whole adult life, if not about places? Often these are places in the city where I live, New York. From neighborhoods and shopping streets to workspaces connected, at least rhetorically, to “innovation” — they are all recognizably members of a category called “places”: you can go to them, stand in them, and see-smell-and-hear them. In other words, places have physical presence, territoriality, and names. “Place” seems to be the most solid thing we humans know: a fixed point in space and time, the material foundation of our memory, identity, community, and home. It’s a trope of symbolic, if not always legal, ownership. But what if place is not “solid”? What if the realities of place are too varied and unstable to sustain a unified concept?
