READING : TIM CRESSWELL

At the end of the week, we were given readings by Rohan from chapter 1 and 5 from Tim Cresswell’s book, Place: An Introduction. The reading was to help us study, understand and build our knowledge on the notion of Place and prepare for our report for PB2. In the book, Creswell talks about the fundamental concept of place, marrying everyday uses of the term “place” with the more complex theoretical debates that have grown up around it.

Chapter 1 was mainly about Creswell explaining the basic concept and definition of Place along with example of what Creswell thinks place means. He says that eventhough “place” has been studied, it still has very little understanding on its own and that geography and place may be related, they are not the same thing. Throughout Chapter 1, Creswell gives examples on how place can mean alot of places related to art, geographic information system (GIS), politics, history and memories.

Creswell also talks about three fundamental aspects of place as a “meaningful location” outlined by the political geographer John Agnew, which includes location, locale and a sense of place. (Agnew 1987) I applied this theory to Rohan’s feature documentary on Winter at Westbeth as they are fairly similar. This is because the Westbeth Artists Housing not only is a location for artists to accommodate, it also has a “sense of place” of past events both personal and shared by each character in the documentary which makes the Westbeth community housing a meaningful locale. Therefore, the Westbeth Artist Housing is a “meaningful location”. Not only that, Creswell says that “space” and “landscape” are often used and substituted with the word “place”. However, space and lanscape can both be transformed into place just by making it meaningful and connected to us with a memory or it’s history.

Overall, “place” can be a just a location but it can also be a place with attachment and connection with people or a thing. Place is a way of understanding and another way of seeing the world through our own eyes. Creswell has definitely outline place very well in this chapter as well as what it means.

I have applied Tim Cresswell’s notion of place to the documentary, Winter at Westbeth for PB2 – PB2 (link)

REFERENCE

Cresswell, T., 2014, Place : An Introduction, 2nd edn. John Wiley & Sons, pp. 1-21.

Winter At Westbeth 2015, film, Unicorn Films PTY LTD, Australia. Directed by Rohan Spong.