In today’s class, we were presented with a reading from Tim Cresswell’s 2015 Place: An Introduction called “Place as a Way of Understanding”. To me it highlighted a distinction between the idea of place as a physical form and place as a sense of belonging. Cresswell takes issue with the common perception of place, arguing that “ideas” we have of place are vague in the sense that they are not critical; that often times we look at place as an object – a tangible thing.

As such place can be more conceptual and as Cresswell suggests, can be a way of knowing, understanding and seeing the world. Place can be viewed as the dynamic cultural fabric that flows between all the walls of a place – an “interplay” between the people and the environment.

This made me reconsider how place can differ for people within different circumstances. I was paired with Georgia in class and discussed the reading where she raised the point of ‘place’ being a way of understanding people’s sense of belonging within a group, I.E. subcultures and scenes.

This is something that very much fascinates me going into the next assignment – I’m interested to see if we can come up with a specific space that acts as a pseudo melting pot for something, in the same way that religions and/or cults have that gravitational pull.