Phenomenological Perspectives on Place, Lifeworlds, and Lived Emplacement: The Selected Writings of David Seamon 1032357290, 9781032357294

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Figures
Tables
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: An Introduction: Going Places
Discovering Phenomenology
Studying Place and Environmental Experience
Part I. The Value of Phenomenology for Studying Place
Part II. Understanding Place Phenomenologically
Part III. Places, Lived Emplacement, and Place Presence
Three Aspects of Places
Robust Places and Husserl’s Renewal
Notes
References
Part I: The Value of Phenomenology for Studying Place
Chapter 2: Lived Bodies, Place, and Phenomenology
Encountering the Lifeworld
The Natural Attitude, Epoché, and Phenomenological Reductions
The Lived Body, Environmental Embodiment, and Body-Subject
The Phenomenology of Place
Environmental Embodiment, Urban Place, and Street Ballet
Lived Bodies and Jacobs’ Four Conditions for Diversity
Building Variety and Short Blocks
Place and Pathway Configuration
A Heat Wave in Chicago
Contrasting Urban Places
Jacobs and Klinenberg Together
The Inertia of Lived Bodies and Places
Places Facilitating Lifeworlds
The Agentic Potential of Material Realities
Notes
References
Chapter 3: The Wellbeing of People and Place
Lifeworld, Natural Attitude, and Homeworld
Place and Human-Immersion-in-World
An Elderly Father’s Lifeworld
An Old Woman’s Homeworld
Compromised Lifeworlds and Place
Immersion-in-Place, Lived Obliviousness, and Wellbeing
Placemaking and Wellbeing
Notes
References
Chapter 4: Body-Subject, Time-Space Routines, and Place Ballets
Natural Attitude, Lifeworld, and Epoché
Conventional Approaches to Everyday Movement
The Habitual Nature of Everyday Movement
The Notion of Body-Subject
Body and Place Choreographies
Wider Contexts
Implications
Notes
References
Chapter 5: Whither Phenomenological Research?: Possibilities for Environmental and Place Studies
Placing Phenomenology
Evaluating Phenomenology
Displacing Phenomenology
Questioning Place, At-Homeness, and Lived Emplacement
Notes
References
Part II: Understanding Place Phenomenologically
Chapter 6: Merleau-Ponty, Lived Body, and Place: Toward a Phenomenology of Human Situatedness
Place, Phenomenology, Natural Attitude, and Lifeworld
Merleau-Ponty and Perception
Merleau-Ponty and Body-Subject
Interpretation 1: A Passage from García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude
Interpretation 2: Observations of a Walk Between Home and Work
Body-subject and Perceptual Field
Intercorporeal Presence
Modes of Place Encounter
Place, Environment, and Situatedness
Observations Relating to Body-subject and Perceptual Field
Observations Relating to Intercorporeal Presence
Observations Relating to Place Encounter
Notes
References
Chapter 7: Serendipitous Events in Place: The Weave of Bodies and Context via Environmental Unexpectedness and Chance
Fortunate Place Encounters
Place Qualities and Serendipity
Deadly Place Encounters
Connections to Architecture and Design
The Future of Environmental Serendipity
Notes
References
Chapter 8: Architecture, Place, and Phenomenology: Buildings as Lifeworlds, Atmospheres, and Environmental Wholes
Buildings as Lifeworlds and Places
A Typology of Building Lifeworlds
Building Lifeworlds and Time
Buildings as Architectural Atmospheres
Architectural Atmospheres and Archetypes
Buildings as Environmental and Human Wholes
Christopher Alexander and Architectural and Place Wholeness
Integrating Lifeworlds, Atmospheres, and Wholeness
Notes
References
Chapter 9: The Value of Phenomenology for a Pedagogy of Place and Placemaking
Max van Manen’s Five Existentials
Phenomenologies of Place
A Phenomenology of Place-as-Process
The Pedagogical Value of the Six Place Processes
Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language
The Meadowcreek Studio as an Example
Phenomenology and Place-Based Education
“To Awaken to the World as Phenomenon”
Notes
References
Chapter 10: A Phenomenological Reading of Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jacobs’ Mode of Understanding as Phenomenological Method
Citiness as a Phenomenon
A Phenomenology of Urban Place
Jacobs’ Street Ballet as Environmental Embodiment
Jacobs as Practical Phenomenologist
Notes
References
Part III: Places, Lived Emplacement, and Place Presence
Chapter 11: Place, Placelessness, Insideness, and Outsideness in American Filmmaker John Sayles’ Sunshine State
Insideness and Outsideness as Modes of Place Experience
Existential Insiders in Sunshine State
Insiders Remaining or Returning
Outsiders as Uncertain Agents of Placelessness
Outsiders Begetting Placelessness
Outsideness Helping Insideness
Place or Placelessness?
Twenty-First-Century Place
Sunshine State as Phenomenological Insight
Notes
References
Chapter 12: Place, Belonging, and Environmental Humility: The Experience of “Teched” as Portrayed by American Writer Louis Bromfield
Up Ferguson Way
Teched as an Experience
Teched and Place
Teched, Place, and Belonging
Teched and Environmental Humility
Notes
References
Chapter 13: Finding One’s Place: Environmental and Human Risk in American Filmmaker John Sayles’ Limbo
A Film in Two Parts
Sayles’ Definitions of “Limbo”
A State of Neglect or Oblivion
A Confining Abode of Abandoned Souls
Uncertainty and Potential Transitions
Natural Versus Human Worlds
Hazard, Authenticity, and Life-in-Place
Notes
References
Chapter 14: Phenomenology and Uncanny Homecomings: Homeworld, Alienworld, and Being-at-Home in Alan Ball’s HBO Television Series, Six Feet Under
Six Feet Under as a Postmodernism of Reaction
Six Feet Under as a Postmodernism of Resistance
Bridging Reaction and Resistance: Homeworld/Alienworld
Homeworld/Alienworld in Six Feet Under
Bridging Reaction and Resistance: Being-at-Home
Six Feet Under and Uncanny Homecoming
Notes
References
Chapter 15: A Phenomenology of Inhabitation: The Lived Reciprocity between Houses and Inhabitants as Portrayed by American Writer Louis Bromfield
Houses and Inhabitants
A Basque Farmhouse
“A Place which Grows about the Heart”
A House Desecrated
A Phenomenology of Inhabitation
Three Place Qualities
Notes
References
Chapter 16: Using Place to Understand Lifeworld: The Example of British Novelist Penelope Lively’s Spiderweb
Explicating Lifeworlds
Concretizing Lifeworlds
Place as Wholeness
Place Ballet in Spiderweb
Place as Binary: Homeworld and Alienworld
Homeworld and Alienworld in Spiderweb
Understanding Lifeworld and Place
Notes
References
Chapter 17: Moments of Realization: Extending Homeworld in British-African Novelist Doris Lessing’s Four-Gated City
Lifeworlds and Natural Attitudes
Homeworlds and Alienworlds
A Process of Self-Discovery
Finding One’s Place
Encountering an Alienworld
Realizing Another’s Experience
Exploring Inner Terrain
“There is No Substitute for Experience”
Notes
References
Chapter 18: Looking at a Photograph: André Kertész’s 1928 Meudon : Interpreting Aesthetic Experience Phenomenologically
Student Responses to Meudon
Meudon and Lifeworld
Reconciling Encounters?
Widening and Deepening Interpretation
Notes
References
Appendix: Other Selected Works by David Seamon (1978–2022)
Books
Journal Articles and Chapters in Edited Collections
Index

Citation preview

PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON PLACE, LIFEWORLDS, AND LIVED EMPLACEMENT

Phenomenological Perspectives on Place, Lifeworlds, and Lived Emplacement is a compilation of seventeen previously published articles and chapters by David Seamon, one of the foremost researchers in environmental, architectural, and place phenomenology. These entries discuss such topics as body-subject, the lived body, place ballets, environmental serendipity, homeworlds, and the pedagogy of place and placemaking. The volume’s chapters are broken into three parts. Part I includes four entries that consider what phenomenology offers studies of place and placemaking. These chapters illustrate the theoretical and practical value of phenomenological concepts like lifeworld, natural attitude, and bodily actions in place. Part II incorporates five chapters that aim to understand place and lived emplacement phenomenologically. Topics covered include environmental situatedness, architectural phenomenology, environmental serendipity, and the value of phenomenology for a pedagogy of place and placemaking. Part III presents a number of explications of real-world places and place experience, drawing on examples from photography (André Kertész’s Meudon), television (Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under), film (John Sayles’ Limbo and Sunshine State), and imaginative literature (Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City and Louis Bromfield’s The World We Live in). Seamon is a major figure in environment-behavior research, particularly as that work has applied value for design professionals. This volume will be of interest to geographers, environmental psychologists, architects, planners, policymakers, and other researchers and practitioners concerned with place, place experience, place meaning, and placemaking. David Seamon is Professor of Environment-Behavior and Place Studies in the Department of Architecture at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, USA. He is Editor of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology. His most recent book is Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making (Routledge, 2018).

World Library of Educationalists Series The World Library of Educationalists celebrates the important contributions to education made by leading experts in their individual fields of study. Each scholar has compiled a career-long collection of what they consider to be their finest pieces: extracts from books, journals, articles, major theoretical and practical contributions, and salient research findings. For the first time ever the work of each contributor is presented in a single volume so readers can follow the themes and progress of their work and identify the contributions made to, and the development of, the fields themselves. The distinguished careers of the selected experts span at least two decades and include Richard Aldrich, Stephen J. Ball, Elliot W. Eisner, John Elliott, Howard Gardner, John Gilbert, Ivor F. Goodson, David Hargreaves, David Labaree and E. C. Wragg. Each book in the series features a specially written introduction by the contributor giving an overview of their career, contextualizing their selection within the development of the field, and showing how their own thinking developed over time. Religious Education in Plural Societies The Selected Works of Robert Jackson Robert Jackson Thinking Philosophically About Education The Selected Works of Richard Pring Richard Pring Language and the Joint Creation of Knowledge The Selected Works of Neil Mercer Neil Mercer Educating Young Children: A Lifetime Journey into a Froebelian Approach The Selected Works of Tina Bruce Tina Bruce Journeys in Narrative Inquiry The Selected Works of D. Jean Clandinin D. Jean Clandinin Researching Literate Lives The Selected Works of Jerome C. Harste Jerome C. Harste The Sociology of Assessment: Comparative and Policy Perspectives The Selected Works of Patricia Broadfoot Patricia Broadfoot For more titles in this series visit www.routledge.com/ World-Library-of-Educationalists/book-series/WORLDLIBEDU

PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON PLACE, LIFEWORLDS, AND LIVED EMPLACEMENT The Selected Writings of David Seamon

David Seamon

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 David Seamon The right of David Seamon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-35729-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-35732-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-32822-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments viii 1 An Introduction: Going Places

1

PART I

The Value of Phenomenology for Studying Place

13

2 Lived Bodies, Place, and Phenomenology

15

3 The Wellbeing of People and Place

39

4 Body-Subject, Time-Space Routines, and Place Ballets

51

5 Whither Phenomenological Research?: Possibilities for Environmental and Place Studies

66

PART II

Understanding Place Phenomenologically

85

6 Merleau-Ponty, Lived Body, and Place: Toward a Phenomenology of Human Situatedness 87 7 Serendipitous Events in Place: The Weave of Bodies and Context via Environmental Unexpectedness and Chance

113

vi  Contents

8 Architecture, Place, and Phenomenology: Buildings as Lifeworlds, Atmospheres, and Environmental Wholes

122

9 The Value of Phenomenology for a Pedagogy of Place and Placemaking 137 10 A Phenomenological Reading of Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities 152 PART III

Places, Lived Emplacement, and Place Presence

163

11 Place, Placelessness, Insideness, and Outsideness in American Filmmaker John Sayles’ Sunshine State 165 12 Place, Belonging, and Environmental Humility: The Experience of “Teched” as Portrayed by American Writer Louis Bromfield 181 13 Finding One’s Place: Environmental and Human Risk in American Filmmaker John Sayles’ Limbo 194 14 Phenomenology and Uncanny Homecomings: Homeworld, Alienworld, and Being-at-Home in Alan Ball’s HBO Television Series, Six Feet Under 210 15 A Phenomenology of Inhabitation: The Lived Reciprocity between Houses and Inhabitants as Portrayed by American Writer Louis Bromfield

223

16 Using Place to Understand Lifeworld: The Example of British Novelist Penelope Lively’s Spiderweb 232 17 Moments of Realization: Extending Homeworld in British-African Novelist Doris Lessing’s Four-Gated City 244 18 Looking at a Photograph—André Kertész’s 1928 Meudon: Interpreting Aesthetic Experience Phenomenologically

260

Appendix: Other Selected Works by David Seamon (1978–2022) 272 Index 278

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES 9.1 Simplified rendition of the give-and-take linkages among the six place processes 142 9.2 A more lifelike rendition of the give-and-take linkages among the six place processes 142 9.3 Key patterns for the Meadowcreek Site Design 146 9.4 Patterns used to design a path to Ripple Ridge 147 18.1 André Kertész, Meudon, 1928 261 18.2 Word cloud of students’ single-word descriptors of Kertész’s Meudon 263

TABLES 9 .1 Pattern language written for Meadowcreek 145 18.1 Descriptors of Meudon provided by 74 Kansas State University architecture students, January 2013. 262 18.2 Author's two descriptions (1986 and 2013) of André Kertész’s 1928 photograph Meudon 265

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The chapters in this volume run from 1980 to the present. Each has been published because of the support and goodwill of a wide range of editors and publishing venues. I am grateful to Routledge editor Hannah Shakespeare, who supported my earlier Life Takes Place and suggested a collection of my published writings in the Routledge series, “World Library of Educationalists.” I also thank Routledge’s Matthew Bickerton, who expertly shepherded this volume through production. I want to thank the following individuals who originally sponsored the chapters in this volume and provided them a place in journals or edited collections: Anna Grear and Karen Morrow (Ch. 2); Kathleen Galvin (Ch. 3); Nigel Thrift (Ch. 4); Ryan Otto (Ch. 5); Thomas Hünefeldt and Annika Schlitte (Ch. 6); Alessandro Gattara, Sarah Robinson, and Davide Ruzzon (Ch. 7); Janet Donohoe (Ch. 8); Gert Biesta, Andrew Foran, Patrick Howard, and Tone Saevi (Ch. 9); Conn Holohan and Elizabeth Patton (Ch. 10); Chris Lukinbeal (Ch. 11); Daniel Payne (Ch. 12); Daniel Boscaljon (Ch. 14); Carol Manix (Ch. 15); Jefferson Rodrigues de Oliveira (Ch. 16); Iulian Apostolescu, Stefano Marino, and Anthony Steinbock (Ch. 17); Steen Halling, Kirsten Bach Larsen, Finn Thorbjørn Hansen, and Ann Starbæk Bager (Ch. 18). I dedicate this book to three individuals without whom my research and writing efforts would be so much less than otherwise. First, I thank the late Anne Buttimer (1933–2017), geographer, teacher, dissertation advisor, colleague, and frank critic. If one believes in serendipitous encounters, then Anne’s arrival at Clark University in Fall 1970, the same semester I began doctoral work, is perhaps the single most fortuitous event in my professional career. Without what she taught me via her intelligence, guidance, wisdom, and good sense, I would never have been able to write the chapters of this volume.

Acknowledgments  ix

Second, I thank the late Robert Mugerauer (1945–2022), philosopher, friend, and ecumenical thinker. Via our mutual interest in how phenomenology might contribute to environmental and architectural research, Bob and I partook in many academic efforts together, including our co-editing Dwelling, Place and Environment, a volume that became a seminal reference for environmental and architectural phenomenology. Though solidly versed in phenomenological thinking, especially the work of Martin Heidegger, Bob also mastered the geographical, environmental, and architectural literature. As his lucid writings demonstrate, he held a clear vision of how phenomenology might offer a grounded means for better understanding built environments. Bob gave me confidence that what we were attempting, in our editing and organizing efforts, had great importance for making everyday worlds better, particularly via design and planning. Finally, I thank my wonderful architecture colleague Gary Coates, who brought me to Kansas State University almost 40 years ago and has steadfastly supported my teaching and research. As with meeting Anne Buttimer, my encountering Gary was serendipitous. In 1981, he had published an edited collection, Resettling America, the title of which was a hopeful rephrasing of writer and poet Wendell Berry’s 1977 The  Unsettling of America. At the time, I was teaching at the University of Oklahoma and always perused the university library’s “new book” shelves, which were placed conveniently by the library entrance. One day in early 1982, I discovered Gary’s book and was doubly impressed: first, because of the reassuring title; second, because so many of the book’s chapters offered reasonable, practical solutions to environmental and ecological problems. I wrote Gary a letter, explaining how much I admired his book. We became good friends and, in spring 1983, I  accepted a tenure-track position at Kansas State and became Gary’s colleague. I thank him for his friendship, ideas, practical advice, and critiques of my writing. David Seamon Manhattan, Kansas USA September 11, 2022

1 AN INTRODUCTION Going Places

I originally proposed “Going Places” for this book’s title, but the Routledge editors requested a more focused phrasing, thus “phenomenological perspectives on place, lifeworlds, and environmental emplacement.” This title better depicts the book’s content, though “going places” marks the heart of my professional trajectory: figuring out how places are significant in human life and asking how design, planning, policy, and advocacy might facilitate better placemaking. Though it has taken me many years to move toward clarity, my central proposition is that places and their users are inseparable. To speak of human beings apart from their worlds is inaccurate conceptually and destructive practically. Rather, human beings are always already bound up with and subsumed by the worlds in which they find themselves. In everyday experience, this non-contingent, always-present, lived entwinement is place, place experience, and lived emplacement. Only since the early 2000s has this integral interconnectedness between people and place been recognized and clarified conceptually, especially through the superlative phenomenological work of philosophers Edward Casey (2009) and Jeff Malpas (2018). Unfortunately, most academics and professionals continue to presuppose human beings as somehow separate from the world in which they find themselves. For sure, technology, globalization, and the erosion of locality and community allow many of the world’s peoples to live in a footloose, mobile way that largely ignores potentially imposing aspects of spatial relationships, physical worlds, and real-world places. Even so, the vast majority of human beings today continue to be inured in place.1 At the same time, those individuals who, until recently, could live independently of their places now confront an unsettling world that includes climate change, economic disruption, political uncertainty, and pandemics. Suddenly, places matter again, and this lived fact remains stubbornly true even as actual real-world places are called into question via virtual reality, digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and ever more sophisticated social media (Relph 2021; Seamon 2018).2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-1

2  An Introduction

In the following seventeen chapters, this lived inurement in place is the central focus and is overviewed in this introduction. I begin by highlighting the two themes of “discovering phenomenology” and “studying place and environmental experience.” These two themes mark the volume’s research core. Next, I discuss chapters themselves as I have divided them into three parts: first, phenomenology as a means for studying place; second, phenomenological insights relating to place; third, phenomenological studies of specific place experiences and situations. I end this introduction by discussing the current state of place and lived emplacement. I suggest that, today, the most encouraging possibility is human beings’ realizing the significance of places in their lives and finding ways that those places might be regenerated, sustained, and revitalized.

Discovering Phenomenology In 1970, I began my doctoral work in the School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. At that time, it was assumed academically that graduate students would produce positivist research grounded in hypothesis testing via measurable variables and quantitative validation. This emphasis on scientific method held little interest for me because it seemed to demand that the researcher arbitrarily simplify and thereby unintentionally misrepresent the situation being studied, necessarily defined via a measurable set of independent and dependent variables. To me, this quantitative work assumed a mode of pre-decided imposition too often out of touch with the situation that the researcher claimed to describe and explain.3 Fortunately, the early 1970s were a time when humanistic geography had come into prominence with its emphasis on human experience and the ways that human beings relate to their worlds environmentally and spatially (Seamon 2015; Seamon and Larsen 2021). For humanistic geographers like Yi-Fu Tuan (1974) and Edward Relph (1976), one could not study geography without considering how human beings engaged with their geographical worlds experientially and existentially. What is space-as-lived and how does it relate to place? How do people encounter their geographical worlds, and is there some continuum of lived ways in which environments and places are engaged with and understood? Why are places important in human life and how can changes in places, whether supportive or undermining, be understood processually? At Clark University, geographer Anne Buttimer had arrived as a post-doctoral fellow in autumn, 1970, the same semester I began my graduate studies. Partly because of her earlier research on French social geography, Buttimer had a strong interest in humanistic and phenomenological themes as they had significance for geographic study (Buttimer 1971a, 1971b, 1974, 1976, 1980). Within a semester, I had asked her to be my doctoral advisor. Largely through Buttimer, I was introduced to humanistic geography and the possibilities of phenomenology for considering such topics as place experience and environmental encounter. Also at Clark was philosophy professor Gary Overvold, who offered seminars in phenomenological philosophy. As a first-year graduate student, I found Overvold’s presentation of

An Introduction  3

phenomenology to be a revelation because it offered a new way of doing research and described aspects of my own life experience that I had never before seen identified or discussed. Immediately, I was enamored of phenomenological method, so entirely different from positivist reductionism because it pictured the researcher as a perpetual beginner never assuming absolute or final knowledge. Unlike the simplistic renditions required by quantitative research, phenomenology sought an intellectual openness with the aim of allowing the phenomenon to present itself accurately and comprehensively. Rather than define the phenomenon in measurable parts relatable quantitatively, the phenomenologist sought trustworthy description arising from the phenomenon itself as much as possible. Though I hugely admired the empathetic method of phenomenology, I was even more attracted to its innovative articulation of human action and experience in a way I had never heard described before. One feature of this innovative articulation was an aspect of my own personal life about which I began to wonder when I was four or five years old: How can it be that I always find myself in the midst of a world that is always there, inescapable but responsive to possibilities? That world shifts as events and situations shift, but a world at every moment is always already present in some form, whether supportive, hostile, or indifferent. Assuming conventional realist and idealist conceptions of the world, all the philosophy and social science I had studied claimed that either human beings shape the world (idealism) or the world shapes humans (realism). In contrast, phenomenologists argued that people and world are always already present together, and each contributes to how we understand and act in the world. This recognition of people-immersed-inworld was a remarkable intellectual discovery because this manner of understanding validated philosophically a quality of personal experience that I had never seen accurately described before. Further, I still remember the exhilaration and surprise I felt when Overvold first introduced Husserl’s concepts of lifeworld and natural attitude. Though now part of the academic literature for more than a 100 years, even today few academics and professionals understand the profound implications and possibilities of these two extraordinary concepts. On one hand, the lifeworld is the everyday world of taken-for-grantedness, so fascinating phenomenologically because most of the time people are unaware of their lifeworlds, which are thus unnoticed and out of sight. On the other hand, the natural attitude is the inner co-constituent of the lifeworld: the taken-for-granted understanding whereby the everyday world is assumed to be as it is and as it should be. In relation to both lifeworld and natural attitude, the world simply is as it is. As I became more alert to phenomenology, I realized that directly related to questions about geographical and environmental experience was the existential grounding in lifeworld and natural attitude: How were places and environments taken-for-granted and thus automatically setting forth an unquestioned grounding of human lives? If places are integral to how people understand themselves personally, socially, and culturally, how might this taken-for-granted embeddedness be

4  An Introduction

described and perhaps drawn upon to sustain better human lives? How did qualities of the physical environment contribute to this taken-for-grantedness of human life, and how could researchers and practitioners draw on this taken-for-grantedness as it might be improved via design, planning, and policy? Phenomenological possibilities provoke these and related questions that underlie the chapters in this book.4

Studying Place and Environmental Experience Finding phenomenology set me on an academic trajectory that I would follow throughout my professional career. My aim became understanding geographical and environmental aspects of lifeworlds and natural attitudes. Though there was a wide range of potential topics, I eventually settled on understanding everyday environmental experience and the significance of places in human beings’ day-to-day lives. I came to this research interest mostly through Buttimer, who had focused on the place theme in her earlier writings (Buttimer 1969, 1971b). In the two years before arriving at Clark as a post-doctoral fellow, she had conducted research on four housing projects in Glasgow, Scotland. She focused on the residential satisfaction of the project residents, most of whom were working-class families relocated from slum-clearance districts. The research aim was to determine whether official planning standards made a difference in residential satisfaction. What was intriguing about Buttimer’s study was its conceptual underpinnings: She had envisioned three interconnected ways environmentally and socially to structure the interpretations of resident responses: patterns of territorial identification, everyday activity networks, and environmental images (Buttimer 1972). I found this threefold structuring of place experience unusual and innovative because it portrayed the residents’ situation in a multimodal way that seemed attuned to everyday lifeworlds.5 As I continued my doctoral work under Buttimer’s direction, the emphasis on place, place experience, and place meaning became progressively central. Humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s Topophilia, a book on positive place attachment, was published in 1974; and phenomenological geographer Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness, a phenomenology of place, was published in 1976. The latter work was central to envisioning my dissertation, which became a phenomenological explication of a phenomenon I labeled “everyday environmental ­experience”—“the sum total of a person’s firsthand involvements with the geographical world in which he or she typically lives” (Seamon 1979, pp. 15–16). That work made ‘place’ a center of research attention, a focus I have brought forward in most of my research and writings since A Geography of the Lifeworld was published in 1979. What is perhaps most encouraging about the place concept is the way it has solidified over the years, particularly through the work of Casey and Malpas. In the 1970s, place was largely understood as one portion of individual and group identity; it was pictured as one aspect of human meaning that was subjective and shifting according to the particular person or group (Manzo and DivineWright 2021). The work of Casey and Malpas in the early 2000s offered a radically new interpretation of the inescapable importance of place in human life. In these

An Introduction  5

philosophers’ understanding, place was ontologically an aspect of human being: As Casey (2009, p. 14) made the point directly, “To be is to be in place.” This new way of interpreting place was revolutionary conceptually because it presupposes that people and place are one lived whole; to break this wholeness changes both places and the individuals associated with those places. Even in a world of globalization, mobility, and dramatic technological changes, the inertia of places remains significant. One must recognize that there is much about human wellbeing integrally related to place and lived emplacement.6

Part I. The Value of Phenomenology for Studying Place In a range of ways, all the following seventeen chapters consider place, place experience, and lived experience. The four chapters in Part I discuss phenomenology broadly and consider its value for place and placemaking. Chapter 2, “Lived Bodies, Place, and Phenomenology,” was first published in the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment for a special 2013 issue on human bodies and material space. This chapter introduces the phenomenological concepts of lifeworld, lived bodies, and environmental embodiment. I explain why I became keen on the phenomenological concept of lifeworld and how it relates to place and placemaking. Written originally for a 2018 edited collection on human wellbeing, Chapter 3, “The Wellbeing of People and Place,” considers the lived relationship between place experience and the quality of human life. The chapter introduces Edmund Husserl’s concept of homeworld, a theme that appears several times in later chapters. One’s homeworld is a portion of her lifeworld: The everyday, taken-for-granted world in which she feels most herself and “at home.” Chapter 4, “Body-Subject, Time-Space Routines, and Place Ballets,” was originally published in The Human Experience of Space and Place, a volume I co-edited with Anne Buttimer (Buttimer and Seamon 1980). This chapter is a synopsis of several chapters published in A Geography of the Lifeworld (Seamon 1979). Drawing on the phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the chapter illustrates the importance of the lived body in human experience, including what I called “place ballet”—a regularity of place grounded in the bodily habituality of users.7 The last chapter in Part I is “Whither Phenomenology?” Originally written in 2020 for the 30th anniversary issue of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, this chapter considers how phenomenological research is currently understood in the human sciences and what that understanding might mean for architectural and environmental concerns. The chapter illustrates the wide range of ways in which phenomenology is interpreted today and points to the recent development of “post” and “critical” phenomenology, which aims to integrate phenomenological and post-structural insights. I conclude that this integrative effort is largely unnecessary because the post-structural emphasis on differences and inequities can be adequately addressed by conventional phenomenological methods and principles. I end this chapter by calling into question the current research emphasis on globalization, mobility, and interconnections at the expense of localities, places, and rootedness.

6  An Introduction

Part II. Understanding Place Phenomenologically The five chapters of Part II consider conceptual and practical means whereby places and lived emplacement might be understood phenomenologically, including in relation to architecture, design pedagogy, and urban placemaking. Originally written for an edited collection on place situatedness published in 2013, Chapter 6 considers the wide-ranging value of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thinking for understanding human actions in place. I draw on accounts from Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez and from my own everyday experiences to illustrate how Merleau-Ponty’s concept of lived body has significant implications for understanding environmental behaviors, routines, and encounters. Chapter 7, written originally in 2021 for the Italian architectural journal Interweavings, draws on themes in my Life Takes Place (Seamon 2018) to examine unexpected environmental events and experiences. The chapter considers contrasting examples of place serendipity—on one hand, the fortunate happenstance event of meeting one’s life partner by chance because of place; on the other hand, the unfortunate happenstance event of losing one’s life because of place. Chapters 8, 9, and 10 of Part II point toward the practical value of understanding place and lived emplacement. Originally published in the 2017 edited collection, Phenomenology and Place, Chapter 8 discusses the practical value of phenomenological thinking for architecture by considering designed environments in terms of lifeworlds, atmospheres, and environmental wholes. Chapter 9, written for a 2021 edited volume on phenomenological dimensions of pedagogy, grounds these possibilities by illustrating the value of a place-grounded pedagogy for an architectural-design studio project involving an environmental education center in Arkansas’ Ozark mountains. This chapter draws on place-as-process as well as architect Christopher Alexander’s design method of “pattern language” to illustrate how practical design can be grounded via phenomenological and related thinking. Chapter 10 was originally published in the online urban magazine Mediapolis in 2019 and argues that the seminal work of urbanist Jane Jacobs can be reinterpreted phenomenologically to illustrate an urban rendition of lived emplacement. My notion of place ballet was originally drawn from Jacobs, and I discuss how habitual place regularity is central in Jacobs’ work. Chapters 8, 9, and 10 all illustrate how broad phenomenological principles relating to lifeworlds and lived emplacement can be useful conceptual, pedagogical, and practical guides for real-world placemaking.

Part III. Places, Lived Emplacement, and Place Presence The eight chapters of Part III highlight my research interest in specific place experiences and specific modes of lived emplacement. These chapters illustrate the wide range of ways in which people are inured in their places and lifeworlds. The chapters are arranged broadly from entries that deal with larger-scaled places and natural environments to houses, at-homeness, and outsiders to place attempting to become insiders. These chapters demonstrate how the phenomenological concepts

An Introduction  7

of lifeworld, natural attitude, homeworld, and alienworld provide valuable thematic foci for understanding specific places, place situations, and place experiences. The focus is how, phenomenologically, researchers might clarify the vast subtlety of lifeworld possibilities and the vast range of ways in which human beings relate themselves to places experientially and existentially. The eight chapters of Part III demonstrate the value of artistic media like films, novels, short stories, and photographs for concretizing human experience and for providing real-world groundings to identify more general aspects of human life and place events. Two chapters illustrate the value of film for explicating phenomenologies of place. Originally published in 2008, Chapter 11 identifies the modes of insideness and outsideness in American filmmaker John Sayles’ 2000 Sunshine State¸ a compelling cinematic portrait of competing place conceptions in 21st-century Florida. In a complementary way, Chapter 13, published in a 2019 volume on place and spirituality, draws on Sayles’ 1999 Limbo, a film about current-day Alaska, to explicate the existential concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity as they relate to contrasting visions of what the natural world might become if place replicas and simulacra of the natural world should replace real-world environments. Two chapters in Part III draw on short stories by twentieth-century American writer Louis Bromfield to consider questions relating to lived qualities of homes and natural environments. Chapter 12 was originally published in Writing the Land, a 2008 edited collection dealing with American nature writing. This chapter examines two 1944 short stories by Bromfield that depict intimate encounters with place and the natural world. Chapter 15 was originally a conference presentation for the 2008 annual meeting of the American Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). The focus is a 1939 short story by Bromfield that considers how houses shape and are shaped by their inhabitants. Originally published in a 2013 edited collection on “uncanny houses and homes,” Chapter 14 considers a house and at-homeness as pictured in Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under, an early-2000s television series focusing on characters who operate and reside in a Los Angeles funeral home. This chapter’s central question is how a conservative, stabilizing quality like at-homeness can be a starting point and impetus for openness to “otherness” and engaged personal and social change. Chapters 16 and 17 of Part III consider various ways in which outsiders to place become insiders or remain outsiders. Originally published in 2021, Chapter 16 draws on British writer Penelope Lively’s Spiderweb, a 1998 novel describing one outsider’s efforts to inhabit a place—a fictitious present-day village in the southwestern British county of Somerset. Originally published in 2022, Chapter 17 focuses on homeworld and alienworld as portrayed in The Four-Gated City, a 1969 novel by African-British novelist Doris Lessing. I use the novel to argue that one way in which a taken-for-granted homeworld can be extended is via moments of revelation in which a person suddenly realizes new aspects of her taken-for-granted world not seen or understood before. The last chapter of the volume was originally published in 2014 and considers one celebrated photograph of André Kertész, the eminent twentieth-century

8  An Introduction

American-Hungarian photographer well known for his perceptive images of everyday, taken-for-granted life. The focus is Meudon, his 1928 photograph of an industrial suburb of Paris. This street scene is remarkable because all the parts seem of a whole. The chapter’s central question is how one can explain the considerable difference between my understanding of the photograph and that of students I teach in a required, second-year architecture course. I explicate these differences via the helpful conceptual language of British philosopher Henri Bortoft, who speaks of assimilation, appropriation, and participatory understanding.

Three Aspects of Places In Life Takes Place (Seamon 2018), I argue that places incorporate three interrelated aspects: (1) environmental ensemble; (2) people-in-place; and (3) common presence. The environmental ensemble is the physical setting of place—its environmental, spatial, and geographical foundations, including topography, geology, weather, landscape, roads, streets, parks, buildings, furnishings, and the like. Most of the time, the environmental ensemble is passive in relation to human events, but its manner of presence and quality of design can play a major role in the kinds of experiences, actions, and meanings with which a place is associated. The second aspect is p­ eople-in-place— the individuals and groups associated with a place, whether residents, users, or passersby. Most of the time, places do not exist without human beings who experience and know those places and make them what they are. The third aspect of place is a more subtle, less effable lived quality that I called common presence—the relative spatial and environmental “togetherness” of a place that grounds and evokes its less tangible expression of atmosphere, character, and sense of place. Common presence relates to the degree of life and ambience of a place—for example, the “West-Endness” of London’s West End, the “Paris-ness” of Paris, the “Capri-ness” of Capri, or the “Japan-ness” of Japan. The major point about common presence is that human and environmental elements gathered together spatially evoke a specific manner of presence and sensibility, sometimes wonderfully pleasant in expression and sometimes unpleasant, inert, or even threatening. All the chapters in this volume make a range of references to these three aspects of place. Some chapters point to the importance of the environmental ensemble in place experience and place meaning—for example, the impinging presence of the Alaskan wilderness or Jane Jacobs’ diverse, exuberant city neighborhoods marked by short blocks, primary uses, and a wide range of building types. One striking example is described in Chapter 1, when I discuss sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s study of how contrasting physical features of two adjacent Chicago neighborhoods contributed to dramatically different death rates during the heat wave that hit the city in 1995. For the Ozark environmental education center described in Chapter 9, the environmental ensemble took center stage as architecture students used Christopher Alexander’s pattern language to conceptualize and generate their design. Their work drew on the Ozark site’s natural features to ground and envision design elements like the placement of new buildings and the layout of trails

An Introduction  9

minimizing environmental damage. The finalized proposal illustrates how an environmental ensemble can be protected, extended, and intensified via thoughtful planning and design. Other entries in the volume give central attention to people-in-place. Chapters describe how people-in-place work to make themselves at home, or how qualities of one’s lived body play a central role in everyday environmental experiences. Several chapters picture outsiders working to become insiders, or dissatisfied insiders who seek some other, more appropriate place. The chapter on John Sayles’ Alaska film Limbo illustrates how people-in-place sometimes understand the same place in contrasting ways. Sayles presents some characters who accept without question the collapse of traditional Alaskan ways of life, while other characters, mostly outsiders, aim to profit from that collapse by misguided business schemes that would undermine the integrity of Alaskan communities and unsettle and destroy the natural environment. As the third aspect of place, common presence is largely ineffable and impossible to specify or facilitate directly. The striking sense of street presence evoked in André Kertész’s photograph of Meudon is one real-world depiction of common presence. Jane Jacobs’ street ballets and urban diversity sustain a powerful common presence in urban situations. In the chapter on phenomenology and architecture, I point to ways that architectural design might propel a robust common presence via designable features like appropriate pathway layouts and integrated building elements grounded in environmental wholeness. The most explicit depictions of common presence are in the two chapters discussing place in Louis Bromfield’s short stories. The imposing presence of the Dakota pond or the Basque farmhouse both evoke, in Bromfield’s evocative phrase, a place that “grows around the heart” (Bromfield 1939, p. 226). This strong emotional attachment relating to the pond and the farmhouse arises from and intensifies the singular common presence of these two places. A central question for our time is how, for specific places, common presence might be activated and strengthened (Seamon 2018).

Robust Places and Husserl’s Renewal At the end of Chapter 17, I explain that, in the early 1920s, phenomenology founder Edmund Husserl published three articles on “renewal” for a Japanese journal. Husserl spoke of the need for a “better humanity” (Steinbock 1995, p. 200). He pointed out that, if there is to be a “genuine human culture,” there must be continuous renewal, which he described as doing “that which is the best possible at a given time and, in this way, [becoming] better and better according to the present possibility” (Husserl 1989, p. 36; quoted in Steinbock 1995, p. 203). I hope that the chapters in this volume contribute to Husserl’s renewal by provoking a better understanding of the non-contingent importance of places and place experience in human life. If our world is to become better, then one important constituent is better human places. How these better places are to be envisioned and actualized is a hugely difficult question. But an answer to the question

10  An Introduction

assumes that people already realize that they are place-bound creatures and that so much of whether human life is good or bad, worthwhile or destructive, is grounded in qualities of place, lived emplacement, and constructive placemaking.8

Notes 1 For example, a 2022 study found that 80% of young American adults at age 26 have moved less than a 100 miles from where they grew up; only 10% have moved more than 500 miles away. The research was based on census and tax data for individuals born in the U.S. between 1984 and 1992. The study was conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in collaboration with Harvard University (Torchinsky 2022, p. A3). An earlier study found that almost 40% of Americans have never left their hometown; another 20% have never left their home state (Cohn and Morin 2008). 2 Philosopher Albert Borgmann (1992, p. 92) emphasizes that reality and virtual reality are crucially different because the former “encumbers and confines.” Virtual reality may superficially seem real but can readily circumvent such inescapable, real-world constraints as obligations, demands, consequences, and material resources. Borgmann identifies several qualities that activate enhancements, distortions, or reductions of what “experience” is in virtual reality. One such quality is brilliance, the way virtual reality can intensify an experience’s attractive aspects and reduce or eliminate their unpleasant, uninteresting, or irrelevant aspects. Another quality is disposability, via which virtual users can end the virtual experience at any time and feel no responsibility for the virtual “events” and “experiences” in which they were involved (see Borgmann 1992, pp. 87–192; Borgmann 1999; Seamon 2018, pp. 62–63; Greenfield 2017, p. 83). 3 The Clark graduate programs in Geography and Psychology were centers of innovation in the 1970s, partly because there was a laudable effort to institute an interdisciplinary Ph.D. between the two fields—“environmental psychology,” as the psychologists called it; and “behavioral geography,” in the geographers’ phrasing. The result was that these programs attracted a stellar gathering of faculty and students (Canter and Craig 1987). I  discuss the Clark experience in Seamon 1980, 1987, 2015; also see Buttimer and Seamon 1980. 4 One excellent explication of lifeworld and natural attitude (as well as homeworld and alienworld) is the first chapter in Luft 2011. 5 In criticizing the emphasis on environmental cognition that dominated environment-­ behavior thinking at that time, Buttimer wrote that the “cerebral orientation struck me as being too narrow, especially for the kinds of curiosities that were raised in my Glasgow study. There were emotional, moral, aesthetic, and habitual aspects to [residents’] takenfor-granted images of home that could not be adequately described in the language of ‘mental maps’. I argued for a focus on environmental experience rather than environmental perception ….” (Buttimer 1987, p. 311). 6 Philosopher Jeff Malpas (2018, p. 30) argued that the early work on place by humanistic geographers was subjectivist because place was understood as a subjective representation inside experiencers without existential or ontological connection to the objective environment outside. He explained that this way of understanding person-place relatedness merely conjoined “the idea of a part of objective physical space with the subjective emotional … quality or set of qualities …” He suggested that these geographers only understood place as “a purely psychological or experiential construct” (Malpas 2018, p. 44, n. 35). This criticism is somewhat unfair, since Buttimer, Tuan, and Relph all emphasized the non-contingent, existential bonding of people and place. For example, Relph (1976, pp. 1, 50) wrote that “to be human is to have and know your place …. [W]e are always at the centre of our perceptual space and hence in a place” Particularly prescient is Tuan’s 1965 article, “‘Environment’ and ‘World’,” in which he argued that a world of any person is a field of relations: “Only a being capable of having relations, only a being of whom ‘inner’ as well as ‘outer’ may be predicated, has a world” (Tuan 1965, p. 7).

An Introduction  11

7 Recent research on place ballet includes Broadway and Engelhardt (2019), Kubla (2021), Pearce (2019), Rink (2019), and van Eck and Pijpers (2016). 8 Two of the best current overviews of effective placemaking are Carmona (2021) and van Nes and Yamu (2021).

References Borgmann, A. (1992). Crossing the postmodern divide. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Borgmann, A. (1999). Holding on to reality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Broadway, M. J. and Engelhardt, O. (2019). Designing places to be alone or together: A look at independently owned Minneapolis coffeehouses. Space and Culture, 22, 1–18. Bromfield, L. (1939). It takes all kinds. New York: Harper and Brothers. Buttimer, A. (1969). Social space in interdisciplinary perspective, Geographical Review, 59, 417–426. Buttimer, A. (1971a). Society and milieu in the French geographic tradition. Chicago: Rand McNally. Buttimer, A. (1971b). Sociology and planning. Town Planning Review, 42, 135–180. Buttimer, A. (1972). Social space and the planning of residential areas. Environment and Behavior, 4, 279–318. Buttimer, A. (1974). Values in geography (resource paper no. 24). Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Buttimer, A, (1976). Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 66, 277–292. Buttimer, A. (1980). Home, reach, and the sense of place. In Buttimer, A. and Seamon, D., eds. The human experience of space and place (pp. 66–187). London: Croom Helm. Buttimer, A, (1987). A social topography of home and horizon. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 7, 307–319. Buttimer, A. and Seamon, D., eds., (1980). The human experience of space and place. London: Croom Helm [reprinted, Routledge Revivals, 2015]. Canter, D. and Craig, K.H., eds., (1987). Special Clark University issue, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 7 (4). Carmona, M. (2021). Public places, urban spaces: The dimensions of urban design, 3rd edn. London: Routledge. Casey, E. (2009). Getting back into place, 2nd edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cohn, D. and Morin, R. (2008). Who moves? Who stays put? Where’s home? Pew demographic trends. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Greenfield, A. (2017). Radical technologies: The design of everyday life. London: Verso. Husserl, E. (1989). Nenon, T. and Sepp H.-R., eds., Aufsätze und vorträge (1911–1921), Vol. XXVII. Boston: Kluwer. Kubla, Q. R. (2021). City living: How urban spaces and urban dwellers make one another. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luft, S. (2011). Subjectivity and lifeworld in transcendental phenomenology. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Malpas, J. (2018). Place and experience, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Manzo, L. and Divine-Wright, P., eds. (2021). Place attachment, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Pearce, L. (2019). Mobility, memory and the lifecourse in twentieth-century literature and culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion [reprinted with new introduction, 2008].

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Relph, E. (2021). Electronically mediated sense of place. In C. M. Raymond, L. C. Manzo, and D. R. Williams, eds., Changing senses of place: Navigating global challenges (pp. 247–258). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rink, B. (2019). Place ballet in a South African minibus taxi rank. In D. Agbiboa, ed., Transport, transgression and politics in African cities (pp. 81–98). New York: Routledge. Seamon, D. (1979). A geography of the lifeworld. New York: St. Martin’s [reprinted, Routledge Revivals, 2015]. Seamon, D. (1980). Afterword: Community, place, and environment. In A. Buttimer and D. Seamon, eds., The human experience of space and place (pp. 188–196). London: Croom Helm. Seamon, D. (1987). Phenomenology and the Clark experience. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 7, 367–377. Seamon, D. (2015). Lived emplacement and the locality of being: A return to humanistic geography? In S. C. Aitken and G. Valentine, eds., Approaches to Human Geography, 2nd edn. (pp. 35–48). Los Angeles: SAGE. Seamon, D. (2018). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routledge. Seamon, D. and Larsen, T. (2021). Humanistic geography. in D. Richardson, ed., International encyclopedia of geography [online]. New York: Wiley. Steinbock, A. (1995). Home and beyond: Generative phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Torchinsky, R. (2022). Most young adults lived not too far from home. Wall Street Journal, July 25, p. A3. Tuan, Y.-F. (1965). “Environment” and “World.” The Professional Geographer, 17 (5), 6–7. Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. van Eck, D. & Pijpers, R. (2016). Encounters in place ballet: A phenomenological perspective on older people’s walking routines in an urban park.” Area, 49, 166–173. van Nes, A. and Yamu, C. (2021). Introduction to space syntax in urban studies. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

PART I

The Value of Phenomenology for Studying Place

2 LIVED BODIES, PLACE, AND PHENOMENOLOGY

Most simply, phenomenology is the description and interpretation of human ­experience.1 As philosopher Robert Sokolowski (2000, p. 2) wrote, “Phenomenology is the study of human experience and of the ways things present themselves to us in and through such experience.”2 A central focus is the lifeworld—the typical, ­taken-for-granted context of everyday experience of which, most of the time, we are unaware. Phenomenologists argue that an integral structure of the lifeworld is the lived body which, through unique modes of encounter and interaction with the world at hand, contributes to the generative structure of each person’s experiences and lifeways. In this chapter, I review the notion of lifeworld and highlight the significance of the lived body in human experience. I suggest that lived bodies are in an intimate relationship with the worlds in which they find themselves. This situation can at least be partly described in terms of environmental embodiment. In turn, environmental embodiment points to the crucial significance of places in human life. I examine the dynamic relations between lived body and place by highlighting how each interanimates the other.

Encountering the Lifeworld Even as a child, I remember wondering how the world could always be present before me—just happening, no one or nothing doing anything—the world just unfolding moment by moment, always already there, one instant before I could catch it. As a doctoral student, I came to phenomenology academically because it was the only conceptual tradition I could find that recognized this remarkable instantaneity of the world and gave it voice in words and concepts (Seamon 1979, 1987). One ontological and epistemological dilemma faced by phenomenological researchers is how to describe in accurate academic language this always-already DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-3

16  The Value of Phenomenology

givenness of the world at hand. From a phenomenological perspective, there is no dualistic person/world or people/environment relationship. Instead, there is only a people-world immersion, entwinement, and commingling whereby what is conventionally understood as two conceptually—person/world, subject/object—is realized as one existentially—person-intertwined-with-world. How thoroughly and fairly to identify and depict this lived wholeness of people-in-world is a challenging phenomenological problem. One of the most precise and insightful terms to portray this lived wholeness is lifeworld, which refers to the normally unnoticed, automatic unfolding of everyday life as it happens for the people involved as well as for the world in which that unfolding happens (Finlay 2011; Luft 2011). In other words, there is a lifeworld for each experiencing person but there is also a lifeworld of the place or situation that houses these individual lifeworlds and is, totally or in part, shaped and sustained by those individual lifeworlds just as they, totally or in part, are shaped and sustained by the larger lifeworlds of which they are a part. As a conceptual term, ‘lifeworld’ is invaluable because it insulates one from falling back into the dualistic phrasing of people apart from world or person apart from environment. I still remember vividly the magical moment as a graduate student when I first discovered ‘lifeworld’ and realized its immense conceptual and practical power for describing the automatic, unfolding structure of human life and experience. I deeply respect the word because it speaks accurately to the lived immersion of human beings in worlds—to the dynamic synergy of all the lived parts of a piece as they unfold. As phenomenological founder Edmund Husserl wrote, [T]he lifeworld … is always already there, existing in advance for us, the “ground” of all praxis whether theoretical or extratheoretical. The world is pregiven to us … not occasionally but always and necessarily as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon. To live is always to live-in-certaintyof-the-world. (Husserl 1970, p. 142) As this passage suggests, the lifeworld existentially is simply there. Always. Though its particular constitution and significance shift from situation to situation, the lifeworld is the latent, normally unexamined givenness of experiences, situations, events, and places. The lifeworld typically goes forward without self-conscious intervention or purposive design; it incorporates an unnoticed, unprompted expectedness. As I prepare morning coffee before I go to bed, I fill the counter pitcher with water, pull out a paper filter, take two tablespoons of coffee from the coffee tin, place the filter in the coffee maker, close the lid, push the coffee maker to the back of the counter, and turn toward the bathroom where I floss and brush my teeth—this entire bedtime routine just happens night after night and requires or wills little self-­ conscious attention. Much, but not all, of the lifeworld is such repetitive, pedestrian routines unfolding predictably with no or minimal regulatory guidance. Most of the

Lived Bodies, Place, and Phenomenology  17

time, lifeworlds just happen, and this automatic unfolding is so even for the conscious behaviors and willed actions that are a taken-for-granted portion of more deliberate lifeworld happenings (Moran 2011, 2014; Seamon 1979). In this sense, lifeworlds are typically regular and, to an outsider, perhaps seemingly humdrum or even dreary, though for each person his or her lifeworld is his or her life and mostly a transparent, lived trajectory that is what it is and, for the most part, rarely changes and cannot be otherwise (Relph 1976, pp. 41–42). Only when some taken-for-granted aspect of a lifeworld shifts (for example, my coffee machine breaks, or my house and neighborhood are severely damaged by a storm) does the lifeworld become apparent (my considerable dependence on a morning cup of coffee or the sustaining everdayness of my home and local environment now dramatically out of kilter because of the storm’s destruction). But even this temporary awareness of what-my-lifeworld-was is within the lifeworld (and will fall back out of awareness once I replace my coffee maker or repair my home and see my neighborhood return to a mode of life akin to what it was before the storm).

The Natural Attitude, Epoché, and Phenomenological Reductions Unless they shift in some noticeable way, we are almost always, in our typical human lives, unaware of our lifeworlds as our lives unfold in an everyday manner in the only way we expect them to be. This typically unquestioned acceptance of the lifeworld is what Husserl called the natural attitude (Moran 2005, pp. 7, 54–56).3 In this taken-for-granted mode of living and understanding, we “accept the world and its forms of givenness as simply there, ‘on hand’ for us” (Moran 2005, p. 7). Because of the natural attitude, we habitually assume that the world as we know and experience it is the only world. The essential feature of the natural attitude is to: put in abeyance any contradiction to the naïve realism of the everyday assumptions of ordinary life. Phenomena anomalous to the assumptions of the natural attitude are put aside. It tellingly exhibits intolerance to the strange, the weird, or the uncanny, as much as it suspends the reality of personal death, or sexuality, or even social phenomena such as the pervasive economic injustice that surrounds us. (Morley 2010, p. 301) One aim of phenomenological research is to disclose and describe the various lived structures and dynamics of the natural attitude and lifeworld—for example, the mostly unnoticed importance of the lived body and places in people’s daily lives. In working toward a self-conscious understanding of the lifeworld and natural attitude, Husserl aimed toward the possibility of epoché—a liberated mode of encountering and understanding whereby we realize that experience and the world of that experience might be otherwise, both for ourselves and for others with similar or vastly

18  The Value of Phenomenology

different lifeworlds and natural attitudes. Phenomenological psychologist James Morley (2010, p. 296) suggested that the epoché is “a profoundly challenging and painfully difficult undertaking,” the aim of which is to “hold back our existential commitment to the very existence of the world, i.e., the reality positing power at the very core of consciousness itself ” (Morley 2010, pp. 295–296). Drawing on phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schutz (1962, p. 229), Morley (2010, p. 301) pointed out that there is, paradoxically, an epoché of the natural attitude whereby the ordinary experiencer assumes that the world can only be the way he encounters and understands it: “What he puts in brackets is doubt that the world and its objects might be otherwise than it appears to him.” This epoché of the natural attitude presupposes, for each person, a range of assumed worlds, each “distinguished from one another through a sort of amnesiac barrier that is the natural attitude.” Morley wrote: Like soap bubbles, each region of meaning is self-contained until contact with another region pops one bubble into another. There is the world of aggressive office politics that bursts when one enters a place of religious worship, a world of fantasy or daydreaming that ceases when I am forced to attend to the car I am driving …. (Morley 2010, pp. 301–302) The intellectual device Husserl developed to circumvent the natural attitude and thereby to bring lifeworlds to more articulated presence is the phenomenological reduction, which refers to ways to facilitate understanding whereby the phenomenon of interest can be spotlighted in increasingly stronger light (Moran 2000, p. 78; 2005, pp. 26–28). On one hand, Husserl spoke of eidetic reductions, whereby one suspends as completely as possible all assumptions about the phenomenon or considers its nature from a particular thematic or disciplinary point of reference (as I will do shortly in regard to the lived body and place). On the other hand, Husserl spoke of a broader, deeper, lived understanding of the phenomenon—what he called the transcendental reduction, whereby I seek to suspend my taken-for-granted standpoint as a cognizant being and place myself in a more comprehensive and empathetic encounter with all phenomena and with my own existence as I live it (Moran 2000, pp. 146–154). Morley (2010, p. 297) pointed out that poststructuralists and social constructionists have incorrectly interpreted the transcendental reduction “as an absolute standpoint that [is] itself another variation of the foundationalism (or the metaphysics of presence) of scientism on the one hand or romantic idealism on the other.” Grounding his argument in the most recently published Husserl texts (Zahavi 2003; Weldon 2003), Morley (2010, p. 298) contended that this postmodernist interpretation is erroneous because Husserl’s “transcendental” did not involve “an isolated disembodied ego extending at a distance above the lived world of perceptual experience.” Rather, especially in his later work, Husserl’s transcendental reduction

Lived Bodies, Place, and Phenomenology  19

presupposed a field of existence always incorporating the bodily dimensions of human life: “corporeal experience is itself, for Husserl, the transcendental ground …. [T]he living present, which is the carnal presence of the body, is a spontaneously self-generating act” (Morley 2010, p. 298). As Husserl wrote, How the consciousness originates through which my living body nevertheless acquires the ontic validity of one physical body among others, and how, on the other hand, certain physical bodies in my perceptual field come to count as living bodies, living bodies of “alien” ego-subjects—these are now necessary questions. (Husserl 1970, p. 107)

The Lived Body, Environmental Embodiment, and Body-Subject If Husserl was one of the first twentieth-century philosophers to recognize phenomenologically that all human experience is always corporeal, it is French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), who more thoroughly probed the bodily dimension of human being and life.4 Merleau-Ponty’s foundational concept is perception, defined as the immediate, taken-for-granted givenness of the world (Cerbone 2008; Evans 2008). In turn, perception is grounded existentially in the lived body—a body that simultaneously experiences, acts in, and knows a world that, normally, responds with immediate pattern, meaning, and contextual presence (Carman 2008; Cerbone 2008; Evans 2008; Seamon 2018b). Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 5) argued that perception is the lived grounding of human experience and meaning. Perception is difficult to grasp and depict intellectually: first, because its presence and significance typically lie beneath conscious cerebral awareness; and second, because perception is almost always in the background as it draws us out into the more organized, directed happenings of our world (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 58). In moving toward a phenomenological understanding of the lived body as it relates to place experience, one can examine the lived body’s relationship to the physical environment and spaces in which experiencers find themselves. We can speak of environmental embodiment—the various lived ways, sensorily and mobility-wise, that the body in its pre-reflective perceptual presence encounters and works with the world at hand, especially environmental and place dimensions (Low 2003; Finlay 2011, Ch. 3; Seamon 2018b). Merleau-Ponty claimed that perception involves a lived dynamic between perceptual body and world such that aspects of that world—for example, hearing the wet softness of gurgling spring water or seeing the cold hardness of a shiny chrome stair railing (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 229)—are known because they immediately evoke in the lived body their experienced qualities. Merleau-Ponty drew on the lived body to also identify a more active, motor dimension of perception—what he termed body-subject, or pre-reflective corporeal awareness manifested through action and typically in sync with the physical world

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in which the action unfolds (Barral 1965; Merleau-Ponty 1962; Seamon 1979, 2018b).5 Merleau-Ponty wrote: [M]y body appears to me as an attitude directed towards a certain existing or possible task. And indeed its spatiality is not, like that of external objects … a spatiality of position, but a spatiality of situation …. The word “here” applied to my body does not refer to a determinate position in relation to other positions or to external co-ordinates, but the laying down of the first co-­ordinates, the anchoring of the active body in an object, the situation of the body in face of its tasks. Bodily space can be distinguished from external space and envelop its parts instead of spreading them out …. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 100) In this sense, body-subject is a synergy of pre-reflective but integrated gestures and behaviors; one has mastered a specific corporeal behavior or set of behaviors when body-subject has incorporated those behaviors into its sphere of unself-conscious taken-for-grantedness (Merleau-Ponty 1962, pp. 138–139). This pre-reflective style of corporeal sensibility evoked through a flow of in-sync actions points toward an intentional bodily unfolding in the world as that world typically sustains the bodily unfolding. Through a repertoire of unself-conscious but intentional gestures and movements seamlessly interconnected, the body-subject automatically offers up the behaviors and activities affording and afforded by the person’s typical lifeworld. Referring to the concept of body-subject, other phenomenological studies have pointed to its spatial versatility as expressed in more complex bodily ensembles extending over time and space and contributing to a wider lived geography (Allen 2004; Toombs 1995, 2000; Jacobson 2010). In my work (Seamon 1979), I have highlighted two such bodily ensembles: first, body routines—sets of integrated gestures, behaviors, and actions that sustain a particular task or aim, for example, sewing on a button, doing home repair, driving a car, and so forth; and, second, time-space routines—sets of more or less habitual bodily actions extending through a considerable portion of time, for example, going-to-bed routines, or weekend shopping-and-lunch routines. These extended ensembles of body-subject relate to the lived corporeality and spatiality of place, but before I explore that relationship, place as a phenomenological concept needs to be introduced.

The Phenomenology of Place I next work through phenomenological possibilities for relating the lived body and environmental embodiment to the world in which the lived body finds itself. As I’ve already pointed out, a central ontological assumption in phenomenology is that people and their worlds are integrally intertwined. As the large literature on the topic suggests, one phenomenological possibility for articulating the lived intimacy between people and world is the notion of place which, from a phenomenological perspective, is powerful conceptually and practically because, by its very

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nature, it offers a way to articulate more precisely the experienced wholeness of lifeworlds. Phenomenologically, place can be defined as any environmental locus that draws human experiences, actions, and meanings together spatially and temporally (Casey 2009; Malpas 2018; Relph 1976; Seamon 2012, 2018a). By this definition, a place can range in presence from an environmental feature or room to a complete building, neighborhood, city, or geographical region (Cresswell 2014; Lewicka 2011, p. 211). From a phenomenological perspective, place is not the material environment distinct from people related to it but, rather, the indivisible, typically unnoticed phenomenon of person-or-people-experiencing-place. Place is typically complex in its lived constitution, involving generative processes through which a place and its experiences and meanings for the people associated with that place evolve, devolve, or remain more or less the same (Seamon 2018a). One of the most precise descriptions of the inescapable centrality of place for human being is provided by phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey (2009, pp. 15–16), who wrote that “[B]y virtue of its unencompassability by anything other than itself, place is at once the limit and the condition of all that exists … To be is to be in place.” Note the remarkable power of place that Casey claims here. First, he contends that place is “unencompassable”’ by anything else because there is no thing, creature, situation, event, or experience that can exist without finding itself emplaced in some wider world, “whether the tiniest locale or the cosmos at large”’ (Casey 2009, p. 15). In this sense, place is a limit of all existing things because there is nothing beyond the emplaced thing or situation except another place for some other thing or situation (as in the way, for example, that a person is nested in a chair nested in a room nested in a house nested in a neighborhood and so forth). Second, Casey contends that, simultaneously with its unencompassability by nothing else, place provides a condition for the “being” of all things, creatures, situations, and events: “Place belongs to the very concept of existence. To be is to be bounded by place, limited by it …. Place-being is part of an entity’s own-being” (Casey 2009, pp. 15–16). As Casey’s understanding of place indicates, the phenomenologist recognizes that the lived body is typically an integral constituent of place and place experience because “lived bodies belong to places and help to constitute them” just as, simultaneously, “places belong to lived bodies and depend on them” (Casey 2009, p. 327). Through bodily encounters and actions, the person or group contributes to the particular constitution of a place as, at the same time, those encounters and actions contribute to the person or group’s sense of lived involvement and identification with that place. In short, lived bodies and places “interanimate each other”’ (Casey 2009, p. 327). This interanimation of lived bodies and places is significant because it suggests that the habitual, unself-conscious familiarity of body-subject is one way by which individuals and groups actualize a taken-for-granted involvement with place. In this regard is the possibility that, in a supportive physical environment, individuals’ bodily routines can come together in time and space, thereby contributing to a

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larger-scale environmental ensemble that I have called, after Jane Jacobs (1961), a place ballet—an interaction of individual bodily routines rooted in a particular environment, which often becomes an important place of interpersonal and communal exchange, meaning, and attachment, for example, a popular neighborhood café, a lively urban park, a vibrant stretch of city street, or a thriving urban neighborhood (Fullilove 2004, 2011; Oldenburg 1999; Rink 2019; Seamon 1979, 2004; van Eck and Pijpers 2017). Place ballet points to the possibility that everyday habitual routines regularly happening in material space can transform that space into a lived place with a unique character and ambience (Rink 2019; Seamon and Nordin 1980). This possibility is powerfully demonstrated in work by Jane Jacobs and Eric Klinenberg, to which I now turn.

Environmental Embodiment, Urban Place, and Street Ballet In considering further the interanimation between places and lived bodies, I draw on two perspicacious accounts of place in the city—urbanist Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities; and sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s Heat Wave. Published in 1961, Jacobs’ Death and Life explored the interconnected human and environmental qualities supporting robust urban neighborhoods. Jacobs argued that a diversity of place grounded in spatial and material features like short blocks, anchor functions, and sufficient numbers of people are the real-world fabric that sustains thriving urban districts and lively street life (Jacobs 1961). Published in 2002, Klinenberg’s Heat Wave examined why some 700 Chicago residents, most of them elderly and poor, died in a five-day heat wave in 1995 (Klinenberg 2002). Klinenberg demonstrated how the environmental, spatial, and human qualities of two contrasting Chicago neighborhoods protected or imperiled residents during this extreme weather event. In their interpretations of urban place, Jacobs and Klinenberg both said much about environmental embodiment. A major conclusion for both thinkers is that successful urban places incorporate an intricate ­people-place web that Jacobs termed organized complexity—a sophisticated synergy of intertwined environmental and human elements, processes, experiences, and relationships always in flux, sometimes evolving and sometimes devolving in their degree of coherence, resonance, and life (Jacobs 1961, Ch. 22). As intimated by both Jacobs and Klinenberg, an integral part of this place synergy is habitual bodies involved in reoccurring urban actions and events that are first of all familiar corporeally. I consider Jacobs’ and Klinenberg’s arguments and then relate points of commonality to environmental embodiment and place. Though Jacobs’ work has never been associated with phenomenology, one can argue that, in terms of method and findings, Death and Life illustrates an implicit phenomenology of urban place (Seamon 2012). Jacobs contended that the primary engine of robust urban districts is diversity—an intricate, close-grained mixture of uses, activities, and environmental elements that mutually support each other, spatially, socially, and economically. Drawing on real-world evidence from her own Hudson Street neighborhood in New York City’s West Greenwich Village, Jacobs argued that urban diversity sustains and is sustained by a dynamic place structure

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that she called street ballet—an exuberance of place diversity and sidewalk life supported by the more or less regular, everyday comings and goings of many people carrying out their own ordinary needs, obligations, and activities (Jacobs 1961, pp. 50–54). Out of the independent actions and situations of individuals arises a more comprehensive synergistic structure of urban place with a distinctive ambience and rhythm. Using choreographic imagery, Jacobs wrote: Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintain the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art from of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time … but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers … While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr. Halpert unlocking the laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair …. Now the primary children, heading for St. Luke’s, dribble through to the west, and the children from P.S. 41, heading toward the east. (Jacobs 1961, pp. 50–51) In Jacobs’ engaging picture of urban place ballet, one immediately recognizes the partially predictable and partially unpredictable intertwining of many lived bodies and the material spaces in which they conduct their everyday lives. Much of the place dynamic of Hudson Street is regular; phenomenologically, one can say this regularity is grounded primarily in the extended time-space routines of individuals coalescing in supportive material space and contributing to the larger, holistic structure of place ballet. In this sense, the most successful urban districts are a rich, tightly woven fabric of people and place interactions undergirded by a good amount of time-space regularity. One recognizes a continuous people-place interanimation arising from daily, weekly, and seasonal actions, events, and situations of residents, workers, visitors, and passersby commingling synergistically to support urban place ballet. Because each neighborhood ballet is a different mix of users and material environment, it radiates a unique ambience and character that, in turn,

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evoke a sense of place identity that may motivate participants to take responsibility and care for their urban place. Jacobs emphasized that these place participants: profess an intense attachment to their street neighborhood. It is a big part of their life. They seem to think that their neighborhood is unique and irreplaceable in all the world and remarkably valuable in spite of its shortcomings. In this they are correct, for the multitude of relationships and public characters that make up an animated city street neighborhood are always unique, intricate and have the value of the unreproducible original. (Jacobs 1961, p. 279)

Lived Bodies and Jacobs’ Four Conditions for Diversity Jacobs, however, was not interested in only describing the workings of robust urban neighborhoods. She also sought to understand the underlying spatial, environmental, and human factors that generated this urban exuberance. Mostly drawing on observational evidence from New York and other large American cities, Jacobs contended that efficient urban diversity and vibrant city street life require four specific material and spatial foundations: short blocks; a range of building types; a high concentration of people; and a mixture of primary uses—in other words, anchor functions like residences and workplaces to which people must necessarily go. As Jacobs summarized her argument: In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity, intricately mingled in mutual support …. [M]ost city diversity is the creation of incredible numbers of different people and different private organizations, with vastly differing ideas and purposes, planning and contriving outside the formal framework of public action. The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop—insofar as public policy and action can do so—cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas and opportunities to flourish, along with the flourishing of the public enterprises. City districts will be economically and socially congenial places for diversity to generate itself and reach its best potential if the districts possess good mixtures of primary uses, frequent streets, a close-grained mingling of different ages in their buildings, and a high concentration of people. (Jacobs 1961, p. 241) For understanding environmental embodiment, Jacobs’ four conditions are pivotal, since each activates and is activated by a certain degree of interanimation between lived bodies and the urban place in which those lived bodies find themselves. Primary uses like dwellings, workplaces, and places of education are crucial because they provide regular, guaranteed pools of street and sidewalk users. Jacobs emphasized that a neighborhood should include at least two primary uses and, ideally, more, since different primary uses provide different people on the streets at

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different times. In turn, these people contribute to the neighborhood’s place ballet and provide “eyes on the street”—in other words, an informal policing structure that promotes neighborhood order, safety, community, and the socialization of children (Jacobs 1961, Chs. 2–4). The users drawn by primary functions are also important because they provide much of the economic support for a neighborhood’s secondary functions—uses like eateries, cafés, taverns, and shops, whose patrons are only present because of primary functions like residence, work, schooling, and so forth (Jacobs 1961, pp. 161–164). Most secondary uses are small, independent establishments that can survive only because of another of Jacobs’ four conditions—a dense concentration of would be users, provided largely by sufficient primary uses and generating, “in small geographical compass, a great and exuberant richness of differences and possibilities, many of these differences unique and unpredictable, and all the more valuable because they are” (Jacobs 1961, pp. 220–221). In lively urban neighborhoods, secondary uses far outnumber primary uses because many people close together require a wide range of needs, products, and activities: Even quite standard, but small, operations like proprietor-and-one-clerk hardware stores, drug stores, candy stores and bars can and do flourish in extraordinary numbers and incidence in lively districts of cities because there are enough people to support their presence at short, convenient intervals…. (Jacobs 1961, p. 147)

Building Variety and Short Blocks In the first two conditions of primary uses and user density, one notes a synergistic dynamic between material functions and people: Human density generated and sustained by place uses and activities in turn generates and sustains the economic and existential support for the primary and secondary functions. People and material space power each other in a kind of virtuous circle of urban placemaking. Jacobs’ two other conditions for robust urban neighborhoods are a range of building types and small blocks. In regard to architectural fabric, Jacobs argues that the district must provide a close-grained mingling of buildings ranging in age and condition, including a good amount of smaller, older structures for incubating new primary diversity and risky, start-up secondary enterprises not typically able to afford high rent. This range of building types becomes “the shelter … for many varieties of middling-, low-, and no-yield diversity” (Jacobs 1961, p. 199). In terms of environmental embodiment, smaller structures are particularly significant because they offer more building units per sidewalk length than larger structures that are typically monolithic and controlled by non-local parties. Smaller buildings also contribute to a more diverse range of uses, activities, and users all propelling the visual, functional, and social variety of the neighborhood’s street ballet. Jacobs’ second requirement for robust urban districts is short blocks, which she sees as integral to a district’s street ballet because permeable, interconnected

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sidewalks and streets support intermingling pedestrian cross use and a longer string of street-front locations than longer blocks can provide. In short blocks, individuals involved in particular body- and time-space routines have many more route choices than in longer blocks, making traversals more convenient and interesting. As Jacobs explains, Long blocks … thwart the potential advantages that cities offer to incubation, experimentation, and many small or special enterprises, insofar as these depend upon drawing their customers or clients from among much larger cross-sections of passing public. Long blocks also thwart the principles that if city mixtures of use are to be more than a fiction on maps, they must result in different people, bent on different purposes, appearing at different times, but using the same streets …. [F]requent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross use that they permit among the users of a city neighborhood. (Jacobs 1961, pp. 183, 186)

Place and Pathway Configuration In highlighting the significance of short blocks for robust urban neighborhoods, Jacobs’ argument foreshadows more recent research on how the spatial configuration of streets and sidewalks plays a major role in whether they are well used and animated or empty and lifeless. First developed in the early 1980s by British architectural theorists Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, this work has come to be called the theory of space syntax (Hillier 1996, 2008; Hillier and Hanson 1984; Seamon 2004, 2015). Though quantitative and instrumentalist rather than phenomenological, this research has demonstrated that different pathway configurations bring users together spatially or keep them apart. Using an argument that partly parallels Jacobs’, Hillier and Hanson examined how the particular spatial configuration of a place’s pathway fabric lays out a potential movement field that gathers or separates people in material space. Natural movement is the term these researchers use to describe the potential power of a pathway network to automatically stymie or facilitate movement and the face-to-face interactions of pedestrians and other place users (Hillier 1996, p. 161). Echoing the criticisms of modernist urban design brought forth by Jacobs in the first chapter of Death and Life, Hillier and Hanson demonstrate that twentieth-­ century urban planning and design typically replaced the permeable, short-block pathway configurations favored by Jacobs with treelike systems of longer blocks and fragmented pathways that stymied or destroyed ease of pedestrian movement and thereby eliminated much face-to-face interaction—for example, the “cul-de-sac and loop” pattern of low-density, automobile-dependent suburbs or the hierarchical circulation layouts of many modernist housing estates (Hillier 1996, Ch. 4; Hanson 2000). Modernist pathway structure regularly separates lived bodies rather than brings them together face to face through an integrated, permeable pathway

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network of sidewalks and streets. Users that otherwise might feel a sense of spatial community—a situation that Jacobs’ short blocks readily afford—remain apart corporeally and environmentally. They do not as readily meet in the course of daily life grounded in the regularity and routine of lived bodies-in-place.

A Heat Wave in Chicago In Jacobs’ interpretation of robust urban neighborhoods, lived bodies are environmentally intertwined in a place-grounded choreography. I next turn to Eric Klinenberg’s research on city mortality patterns in the 1995 heat wave in Chicago (Klinenberg 2002). Drawing on public documents, intensive fieldwork, and in-depth interviews with residents and public officials, Klinenberg demonstrated how spatial and material aspects of two adjacent Chicago neighborhoods played a major role in contributing to dramatically different heat-wave mortality rates. Several of his findings validate, in a real-world context, Jacobs’ four principles for city diversity. The two Chicago neighborhoods studied by Klinenberg are North Lawndale, a predominantly African-American neighborhood with a 1995 heat-related death rate of 40 per 100,000 residents; and South Lawndale (colloquially known as Little Village), a predominantly Latino neighborhood with a much lower heat-­ related death rate of less than four per 100,000 residents (Klinenberg 2002, p. 87). Klinenberg selected North Lawndale and Little Village because, even though they are geographically adjacent and include similar proportions of seniors living in poverty and seniors living alone (the two groups the Center for Disease Control originally claimed as most vulnerable in the heat wave), the neighborhoods had dramatically different heat-wave mortality rates. Drawing on the Chicago School tradition of social ecology, Klinenberg wondered whether this difference in deaths might at least partly be related to contrasting environmental and ecological aspects of the two neighborhoods (Klinenberg 2002, pp. 21–22).6 An earlier study of the 1995 heat-wave mortality data had demonstrated that elderly and poor African-Americans faced the greatest mortality risk during the heat wave, whereas Latinos, despite high levels of poverty, fared better than both blacks and whites (Semenza et al. 1996). Rethinking heat-wave deaths from a social-ecological perspective, Klinenberg chose to study the two adjacent neighborhoods because he wondered whether environmental and place characteristics also played a role in heat-wave deaths. As he became more familiar with North Lawndale and Little Village, Klinenberg came to realize that the two neighborhoods were vastly different in terms of place structure and human sociability. These contrasting environmental and social differences included: the ways in which residents use sidewalks and public spaces, the role of commercial outlets in stimulating social contact, the strategies through which residents protect themselves from local dangers, and the role of community organizations and institutions in providing social protection. (Klinenberg 2002, p. 86)

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Klinenberg came to see that, during the heat wave, local place features inhibited vulnerable North Lawndale residents from finding the social contact that would help them survive. In contrast, local place features helped vulnerable Little Village residents to find that help. He concluded that North Lawndale had many more heat-wave deaths than Little Village largely because the latter was a place of lively streets, much commercial activity, residential concentration, and a relatively low crime rate. All these positive place features contributed to a sense of community especially important for older people, who were more likely to leave home when nearby amenities were safely available. In contrast, North Lawndale was a neighborhood of violent crime, devolving commerce, abandoned buildings, empty streets, and lower density, all of which undermined the viability of public life, setting the stage for fearful older people who rarely left their dwellings. During the heat wave, these dramatically contrasting place situations undermined or sustained “the possibilities for social contact that helped vulnerable Chicagoans survive” (Klinenberg 2002, p. 91).

Contrasting Urban Places In Heat Wave, Klinenberg provided a detailed portrait of the two Chicago neighborhoods’ environmental and social differences. He described North Lawndale as a neighborhood of derelict buildings, shuttered stores, second-tier fast-food eateries, abandoned lots, deteriorating housing stock, few employment opportunities, and much crime, especially drug dealing. One result is that Lawndale residents have few neighborhood places to go or to work. As one long-time resident explained to Klinenberg (2002, p. 94), “There’s not very much in the streets for people to do here anymore.” The deterioration of North Lawndale’s local economy and commercial activity had been devastating for the neighborhood’s street life. Klinenberg referred to Jane Jacobs’ claim that a good number of shops, eateries, and other secondary functions are crucial in maintaining informal sidewalk and street safety: “Commercial institutions draw residents and passersby out into the sidewalks and streets, inviting foot traffic and promoting social interaction among consumers, merchants, and people who simply enjoy participating in or observing street life” (Klinenberg 2002, p. 94). As North Lawndale’s economy declined, residents able to do so forsook the area, leaving behind empty houses as well as neighbors who had neither the will nor resources to leave. These residents who remained isolated themselves or found social support beyond the neighborhood. Klinenberg determined that, during the heat wave, it was largely the place-alienated individuals who died. They had neither the social contacts to assist them nor the courage to seek help in a threatening neighborhood offering few public or commercial establishments where they might escape the heat. There was little collective life that might have protected these isolated individuals, most of whom were older persons living alone “with limited social contacts and weak support networks during normal times” (Klinenberg 2002, p. 41). Klinenberg encapsulated the situation well when he wrote that: “The

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heat wave puts into focus the ways that connections made or missed, visible or unrecognized, can determine the fate of the city and its residents” (Klinenberg 2002, p. 21). Clearly, many of these connections happened or did not happen because of habitual body-subjects spatially commingling or remaining apart. If the material space of North Lawndale contributed to a mode of environmental embodiment that isolated vulnerable residents, the environmental and spatial qualities of Little Village drew habitual bodies together in exuberant place ballets. Though Little Village is just one street south of North Lawndale, Klinenberg described the dramatic environmental changes one noticed in moving toward Little Village’s commercial core on 26th Street, called by locals Calle Mexico. Even though Little Village had similar proportions of poor elderly and elderly living alone, the neighborhood incorporated lively retail, bustling sidewalks, and many more intact dwellings, all of which were occupied. Whereas North Lawndale’s place ensemble undermined neighborhood activity, Little Village’s facilitated “public life and informal social support for residents” (Klinenberg 2002, p. 109). This robust place activity was particularly important for older residents living alone because it drew them out of their dwellings into the streets and public places where they made the social contact that isolated individuals in North Lawndale were much less able to establish. During the heat wave, the activity of nearby streets provided shops, eateries, and other places where these individuals might find respite from the heat. Most vulnerable during the heat wave were older white residents remaining in the neighborhood after it had become mostly Latino. For the most part, however, they too were protected. Klinenberg concluded that “the robust public life of the region draws all but the most infirm residents out of their homes, promoting social interaction, network ties, and healthy behavior” (Klinenberg 2002, p. 21). In discussing the two neighborhoods, Klinenberg also considered social and culture differences and the contrasting significance of more formal social and cultural institutions, including churches and block clubs. But most of the explanation for the two neighborhoods’ dramatically different heat-wave death rates he assigned to the neighborhoods’ contrasting place qualities. Most important was Little Village’s lively neighborhood sidewalk and street life largely supporting and supported by an environmental and human diversity grounded in lived bodies meeting in interpersonal neighborhood encounters. Klinenberg concluded that Many of the [Little Village] elderly I interviewed explained that during the heat wave they sought relief in the air-conditioned stores on Twenty-sixth Street, just as they do on ordinary summer days. Not only did elderly residents in Little Village have less to fear on the sidewalks and streets than did their neighbors in North Lawndale; living in a region with busy commercial traffic and active streets, they also had more incentive to go outdoors and walk to places where they could get relief. The rich commercial resources and a flourishing sidewalk culture animated public areas throughout the neighborhood; and there were always people, including seniors with their

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pushcarts full of groceries and small bags of goods, in the streets when I did my fieldwork …. [T]he sidewalks are primary conduits for social contact and control. The relative security of these public areas makes it easier for residents of Little Village—even the older whites—to engage with their neighbors and participate in community events. (Klinenberg 2002, pp. 116–117)

Jacobs and Klinenberg Together Klinenberg’s findings parallel many of Jane Jacobs’ conclusions, including her argument that the street ballet’s bodily regularity sustains and is sustained by an informal social network that, in Chicago’s 1995 heat wave, played a major role in protecting vulnerable Little Village residents. Klinenberg’s findings demonstrated the particular importance of Jacobs’ sufficiently high density in explaining the contrasting victim rates in the two neighborhoods. North Lawndale’s population density was much lower than Little Village’s because former North Lawndale residents, most of them Jewish, had relocated to the Chicago suburbs, and no immigrants had moved in to replace them. The remaining North Lawn population was insufficient to support businesses, and much of the neighborhood became a commercial and workplace wasteland, which in turn inhibited newcomers from relocating there. In contrast, Little Village retained a dense population, which supported commerce and a lively street life. In fact, so many newcomers were attracted to Little Village that, at the time of Klinenberg’s research, the neighborhood was experiencing a housing shortage (Klinenberg 2002, pp. 115–118). Like Jacobs’ work, Klinenberg’s research demonstrated the intimate lived relationships between people and place, particularly the ways that material and spatial qualities contribute to interpersonal corporeality, co-encounter, and everyday mutual assistant grounded in place regularity and familiarity. In her 2004 Dark Age Ahead, Jacobs (2004, pp. 81–87) expressed her admiration for Klinenberg’s study. She contrasted his place-based approach with the earlier Center for Disease Control study (Semenza et al. 1996), “the findings of which were misleading” because the study “did not take neighborhood variations into account” but instead “turned up only what everybody already knew” that: those who died had run out of water, had no air-conditioning, did not leave their rooms to find cool refuge, and were not successfully checked on. Indeed, the researchers’ findings were worse than useless. Survivors differed in having successfully kept cool. The findings were misleading because they encouraged blaming the victims; after all, they hadn’t looked after themselves. (Jacobs 2004, p. 82) In contrast to the incomplete conclusions of the CDC study, Klinenberg demonstrated that many victims were unable to look after themselves because their neighborhood lifeworld offered little back-up support. Literally and existentially, these

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victims were isolated from the world in which they found themselves. In her discussion of Klinenberg’s work, Jacobs mentioned that the influential American community organizer and Chicago native Saul Alinsky worked in the 1990s “to persuade residents and large businesses not to abandon North Lawndale …, with little understanding or help from city officials or planning staff and none from Chicago employers” (Jacobs 2004, p. 197). As Jacobs’ criticism intimates, continuing professional and political ignorance of the crucial importance of lifeworld, natural attitude, body-subject, spatiality, and place remains a blind spot for urban planners, designers, and policymakers attempting to strengthen community, both in cities as well as in other kinds of places.

The Inertia of Lived Bodies and Places In illustrating the phenomenological perspective on lived embodiment and place, I have emphasized the work of Jacobs and Klinenberg because both authors demonstrate the multifaceted, lived intricacies of people and place. Both writers illustrate how regular bodily actions and routines transform material space into a lived place informally gathering people together and sustaining a sense of environmental belonging. This place-people interanimation is grounded in individual lived bodies carrying out day-to-day lifeworld needs. Clearly, human beings’ relationships with place are more than just bodily and spatial as place also involves emotional, cognitive, volitional, social, cultural, and economic dimensions (e.g., Lewicka 2011; Manzo 2003, 2005; Manzo and Devine-Wright 2021; Relph 1976). In spite of this lived multivalence, however, it is important to emphasize that human life, first of all, is corporeal. As evidenced in Jacobs’ and Klinenberg’s accounts of vigorous and faltering urban places, lived bodies-commingling-in-space is a material and spatial grounding for place interanimation. In the last several years, it has been fashionable in post-structural and social constructionist theory to criticize the place concept in two contrasting ways. One group of critics contend that phenomenological interpretations too readily emphasized the centered, constraining, and parochial aspects of place (Cresswell 2014; Massey 2005; Morley 2000; Rose 1993). This criticism is partly accurate in that the first phenomenological studies of place in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Buttimer 1976, Norberg-Schulz 1971, 1980; Relph 1976; Seamon 1979; Tuan 1974) drew on earlier phenomenological work of philosophers like Gaston Bachelard (1964), Otto Bollnow (1967, 2011), and Martin Heidegger (1971), who gave considerable attention to the static, bounded qualities of place. Critics of this conservative place perspective speak instead of a “progressive sense of place.” They ask how places relate and respond to their larger social, economic, and political contexts. For these critics, places are given attention, but the important practical and conceptual need is delineating ways whereby the particular place becomes more connected and permeable in relation to the wider, surrounding world. How, in other words, might place incorporate diversity and the integration of differences? As geographer Doreen Massey (1997, p. 220) asked, “Can’t we rethink our sense of place? Is it not

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possible for a sense of place to be progressive; not self-enclosing and defensive, but outward looking?” A second group of critics contend that, because of current trends toward globalization and virtual realities, real-world places are, in many ways, increasingly irrelevant and obsolete. Motivated in part by the work of post-structural thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), these critics dispute the rigid, centered stasis of place. They speak instead of shifting movements and flows “between identities, between nation-states, between ideas, between places, between peoples, and so forth” (Kogl 2008, p. 57). These critics emphasize such themes as mobility, hybridity, non-places, hyper-worlds, nomadism, and smooth and striated spaces. A central concept is Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of rhizome: a spatial structure of free, unpredictable flows and movements generating centerless networks that abjure boundaries or containments. Political philosopher Alexandra Kogl (2008, p. 1) perceptively summarized this post-structural criticism of place: The early twenty-first century appears to be an era of radically shifting geographies: from the space of place to the space of flows, from the space of the nation-state to global space, from a round world to a flat one. Places, as the tangible, distinctive spaces to which peoples and states attach meanings, and in which people live their everyday lives, appear to be overwhelmed by flows of values, people, information, capital, pollution, ideas, technology, culture, language, and diseases. Though Kogl (2008, p. 1) appreciated this post-structuralist critique, she pointed out that the perspective is too simplistic, partly because, even as globalization and flows undermine some places, these same processes strengthen other places and facilitate new kinds of places (for example, exporting-processing zones and global cities). Most significantly, places retain their importance because “the human body is always local, living a particular life in a particular place, with others, for better or worse.” (Kogl 2008, p. 143). Even in the mobile United States, for example, almost 40 percent of Americans have never left their hometown and another twenty percent have never left their home state (Cohn and Morin 2008, n.p.). British residence patterns are similar, in that around half of British adults live within five miles of where they were born (Morley 2000, p. 14). In terms of global patterns, about 97 percent of the world’s population continues to live in their home country. Though the percentage of migrants varies from country to country, the total percentage has remained relatively stable as a share of the Earth’s total population, increasing by only 0.2% (from 2.9% to 3.1%), over the decade of 2000–2010 (UN DESA 2010, n.p.).7 In this sense, place remains one of the great stabilizing constituents of human life in that it automatically ‘places’ and holds lived bodies spatially and geographically. Because of this “bodily placement through place,” human beings are automatically provided one mode of spatial order and environmental identity (Manzo and Divine-Wright 2021; Seamon 2018a, Ch. 10). Unless human life becomes entirely

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virtual, non-material, and secondhand because of continuing developments in digital technologies and robotics, places will remain a part of human being. Though not all individuals are equally identified with and attached to the places of their lives, those places are still inescapable in the sense that they provide the everyday, taken-for-granted spatial and environmental context for each person and group’s lifeworld, at least in terms of body-subjects and environmental corporeality. This inescapable corporeality of place is often ignored by the first group of place critics who seeks a more progressive sense of place. These critics are correct that, in our postmodernist age, we must locate ways whereby the stasis of a particular place might be invigorated and in turn invigorate other places through a vibrant interconnectedness that facilitates diversity and contributes to the acceptance of difference. But much of such dynamic exchange will remain grounded in the habitual regularity of body-subjects commingling with place. Nor can these critics discount the reality that a dynamic interchange among places presupposes a robust integrity of each place itself; this robust integrity is at least in part founded in the inertial regularity of lived bodies in material space.

Places Facilitating Lifeworlds As I’ve worked to demonstrate in this chapter, a phenomenological understanding of human life emphasizes that, because of lifeworld, natural attitude, and habitual corporeality, daily living for most people simply happens. Unless ordinary life shifts dramatically and one is forced to do otherwise than usual, most human beings rarely question the nature of their world or suppose that their world might change. The lifeworld is transparent and, because of the natural attitude, people accept that lifeworld as their only world. The isolated Chicago elderly who died in the 1995 heat wave took their social and environmental isolation for granted and had little will or active means to shift their situation in time of crisis. If the inertia of lifeworld is an integral part of being-human-in-place, then positive change whereby one becomes more free and more whole may be most effectively supported by changing qualities of individuals’ worlds, particularly by understanding how spatial and environmental structures contribute to robust placemaking and incorporating those elements accordingly. On one hand, it was very much North Lawndale’s fragmented, withering neighborhood that limited the vulnerable elderly in finding help during the heat wave. While conversely, it was very much Little Village’s intact, vibrant neighborhood that allowed the same vulnerable elderly to survive. The key point phenomenologically is that this support just happened or did not just happen largely because of contrasting place qualities. Officially sponsored institutional structures and agencies appear to have done little formally to guarantee this support which, rather, was or was not provided by specific spatial, environmental, and human features of the neighborhood lifeworld, most of them informal, unplanned, and serendipitous.8 In short, the need is to reconfigure places that facilitate lifeworlds in which people feel a part rather than apart. This manner of improving lifeworlds is indirect in

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that helpful change arises, not by formally allotting power, through legal and political means, to powerless individuals, but by making their place better materially and spatially so that qualities of the place contribute to these individuals’ wellbeing as they simply live their everyday lives (Seamon 2018a). The aim of such placemaking would be what political philosopher Daniel Kemmis (1995, p. 22) called the “good life,” which “makes it possible for humans to be fully present—to themselves, to one another, and to their surroundings. Such presence is precisely opposite of the distractedness—the being beside—that is so prevalent in our political culture.” I repeat that much of the lifeworld and natural attitude is unself-consciously grounded, partly because of body-subject and environmental embodiment. This sphere of unreflected-upon life points to the importance of thoughtfully devising ways whereby places are transformed indirectly through creative spatial and material changes like those argued for by Jane Jacobs—that is, adding primary uses, making a more permeable street structure, increasing residential and employment density, and so forth. In other words, the better alternative to enhancing lifeworlds and improving places is sometimes making constructive shifts in the material environment rather than emphasizing self-conscious behavioral or attitudinal shifts in the human beings associated with those places or environments.

The Agentic Potential of Material Realities From this place-based perspective, a major weakness in many large-scale efforts to improve human life is ignorance of the power of the lifeworld’s material, non-­ human aspects to contribute to the particular lifeworld’s being one way rather than another. Sociologist Thomas Gieryn labeled this ignorance “social determinism”—an emphasis on the human experiencers and experiences of the lifeworld at the expense of the material, spatial, physical, and environmental qualities of that lifeworld. This incomplete understanding presupposes a situation where the “materialities of both ‘space’ and ‘nature’ are ascribed lesser explanatory weight in sociological explanation, which centers instead on what people do to those things” (Gieryn 2002, p. 341). Gieryn (2002, p. 341) used the evocative phrase “the agentic capacity of material realities” to pinpoint the active possibilities of the non-human world. He argued that the conceptual need is to “acknowledge that outcomes (beliefs about nature, behavior patterns, social change) are substantively and autonomously caused by this ‘stuff’” (Gieryn 2002, p. 341). I have elsewhere described this “agentic capacity of material realities” as place intensification, which I defined as the independent power of well-crafted designs and fabrications to revive and strengthen place by being one way materially and spatially rather than some other (Seamon 2018a, Ch. 13). In this sense, place is active in relation to human beings, since physical, environmental, and spatial changes in the place reconfigure human actions and experiences. Place intensification sheds light on how the physical and designed environments, though they may be only passive, material ‘stuff,’ can be an active contributor to enhancing place quality and ­character. The result is that the place becomes better or more durable in some

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way—for example, drawing more users to a plaza by adding well-designed seating; stimulating additional sidewalk traffic by creatively redesigning storefronts; or enhancing street activity by making an urban district’s pathway grid more connected and permeable for pedestrians. In thinking this way, one makes use of indirect means like environmental design, public policy, and place-oriented law to protect vibrant places and to invigorate moribund environments. This possibility points toward one of the most important questions that our postmodern world faces today: Can supportive places be made to thrive intentionally through thoughtful design, equitable policy, civilized politics, and place-sensitive legal structures? In the past, these supportive kinds of places mostly happened unself-consciously because construction, transportation, and communication technologies were mostly limited geographically; entrepreneurship was largely local; and most human beings were very much bodily-bound to place. Today, all places on Earth are more or less equally accessible and the big question arises: In spite of our human abilities to do almost anything, can we do what might best facilitate a ‘good life’ for human beings, other living creatures, and the Earth? A phenomenological perspective on environmental embodiment and placemaking offers helpful guidance for finding conceptual and practical answers to this question.

Notes 1 This chapter was originally published as “Lived bodies, place, and phenomenology: Implications for human rights and environmental justice,” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 4 (2013), 143–166; the article was requested for a special issue of the journal on “human bodies in material space.” The author thanks journal editor Anne Gear and Edward Elgar Publishing for allowing me to reprint the article here. 2 Useful introductions to phenomenology include Cerbone (2006), Finlay (2011), Moran (2000), van Manen (2014), and Zahavi (2019). 3 Moran (2005, p. 56) pointed out that Husserl used the term (in German, die natüliche Einstellung) as early as 1906–1907. 4 According to Moran (2005, p. 3), Husserl was “the first modern philosopher to make the theme of embodiment central to his analysis of consciousness.” 5 Merleau-Ponty originally used the French term schema corporel (Carman 2008, p. 105), which in English is sometimes translated as “body schema” rather than “body-subject” (e.g., Morris 2004). I prefer “body-subject” because “subject” better suggests than “schema” the lived body’s pre-reflective but intentional intelligence in relation to bodily movements. Curiously, one of the earliest English discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s work used the expression “body-subject” rather than “body schema”—philosopher Mary Rose Barral’s Merleau-Ponty: The Role of Body-Subject in Interpersonal Relations (Barral 1965). Barral (1965, p. 49) wrote that “the body-subject knows itself as a body only in the encounter with the world. … That is why Merleau-Ponty says that we discover at the heart of the subject the ontological world as well as the ontological body: the ontological body-subject—a knowing subject—grasps, in a comprehensive view, the world itself.” Discussions of body-subject include Carman (2008), Cerbone (2006, 2008), Evans (2008), Finlay (2011), and Seamon (2014, 2018b). 6 On the Chicago School tradition of social ecology, see Theodorson (1961) and Sampson (2012). 7 The pattern is little different in the late 2010s. A 2017 United Nations study estimated that the global population of displaced people, including refugees, asylum seekers, and people forcibly removed from their home place, was about 66 million in 2016, about one

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percent of the world’s population. About 96 percent of the world’s population continues to live in their home country (Seamon 2018a, p. 187). 8 Klinenberg highlighted several ways in which formal institutional support for vulnerable Chicagoans failed. One problem was that, to save money, public assistance had been shifted from social services to police and fire departments, which had little experience in dealing with a human crisis such as a heat wave. Another problem was that city officials assumed that Chicagoans were “smart shoppers of services made available in the market rather than ‘citizens’ entitled to social protection. This market model of governance [created] a systemic service mismatch, whereby people with the weakest capabilities and greatest needs [were] the least likely to get them” (Klinenberg 2002, pp. 230–235).

References Allen, C. (2004). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and the body-in-space: Encounters of visually impaired children. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22, 719–735. Bachelard, G. (1964). The poetics of space. Boston: Beacon Press. Barral, R. M. (1965). Merleau-Ponty: The role of the body-subject in interpersonal relations. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Bollnow, O. (1967). Lived-space. In Lawrence, N. and O’Connor, D., eds., Readings in existential phenomenology (pp. 178–186). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Bollnow, O. (2011). Lived space. London: Hype Press [published originally in German as Mensch und Raum in 1963]. Buttimer, A. (1976). Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 66, 277–292. Carman, T. (2008). Merleau-Ponty. London: Routledge. Casey, E. S. (2009). Getting back into place, 2nd edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cerbone, D. R. (2006). Understanding phenomenology. Durham, UK: Acumen. Cerbone, D. R. (2008). Perception. In Diprose, R. and Reynolds, J., eds., Merleau-Ponty: Key concepts (pp. 121–131). Stockfield, UK: Acumen. Cohn, D. and Morin, R. (2008). Who moves? Who stays put? Where’s home? Pew demographic trends. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Cresswell, T. (2014). Place: A history. Oxford: Blackwell. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Evans, F. (2008). Chiasm and flesh. In Diprose, R. and Reynolds, J., eds., Merleau-Ponty: Key concepts (pp. 184–193). Stockfield, UK: Acumen. Finlay, L. (2011). Phenomenology for therapists: Researching the lived world. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Fullilove, M. T. (2004). Root shock. New York: Ballantine Books. Fullilove, M. T. (2011). Urban alchemy. New York: New Village Press. Gieryn, T. (2002). Give place a chance. City & Community, 1, 341–343. Hanson, J. (2000). Urban transformations. Urban Design International, 5, 97–122. Heidegger, M. (1971). Building dwelling thinking. In Hofstadter, A., ed. and trans., Poetry, language, thought (pp. 145–161). New York: Harper and Row. Hillier, B. (1996). Space is the machine. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hillier, B. (2008). The new science and the art of place. In Haas, T., ed., New urbanism and beyond (pp. 30–39). New York: Rizzoli. Hillier, B. and Hanson, J. (1984). The social logic of space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. New York: Vintage. Jacobs, J. (2004). Dark age ahead. New York: Vintage. Jacobson, K. (2010). The experience of home and the space of citizenship. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 48, 219–245. Kemmis, D. (1995). The good city and the good life. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Klinenberg, E. (2002). Heat wave. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kogl, A. (2008). Strange places: The political potentials and perils of everyday spaces. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Lewicka, M. (2011). Place attachment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 31, 207–230. Low, S. (2003). Embodied space(s). Space and Culture, 6, 9–18. Luft, S. (2011). Subjectivity and lifeworld in transcendental phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Malpas, J. E. (2018). Place and experience, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manzo, L. C. (2003). Beyond house and haven. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23, 47–61. Manzo, L. C. (2005). For better or worse: Exploring multiple dimensions of place meaning. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25, 67–86. Manzo, L. C. and Devine-Wright, P., eds. (2021). Place attachment: Advances in theory, methods and research, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Massey, D. (2005). For space. SAGE. Massey, D. (1997). A global sense of place. In Barnes, T. and Gregory, D., eds., Readings in human geography (pp. 315–323). London: Arnold. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). The phenomenology of perception. New York: Humanities Press. Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. London: Routledge. Moran, D. (2005) Edmund Husserl: Founder of phenomenology. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Moran, D. (2011). Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of habituality and habitus. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 42 (1), 53–76. Moran, D. (2014). The ego as substrate of habitualities: Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of the habitual self. Phenomenology and Mind, 6, 26–47. Morley, D. (2000). Home territories: Media, mobility and identity. London: Routledge. Morley, J. (2010) It’s always about epoché. In Cloonan, T. and Thiboutot, C., eds., The redirection of psychology (pp. 293–305). Quebec: Interdisciplinary Circle of Phenomenological Research, University of Quebec. Morris, D. (2004). The sense of space. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Norberg-Schulz, C. (1971). Existence, space and architecture. New York: Rizzoli. Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980). Genius loci: Towards a phenomenology of architecture. New York: Rizzoli. Oldenburg, R. (1999). The great good place, 2nd edn. New York: Marlowe & Company. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion [reprinted, 2008, with new introduction]. Rink, B. (2019). Place ballet in a South African minibus taxi rank. In Agbiboa, D., ed., Transport, transgression and politics in African cities (pp. 81–98). New York: Routledge. Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and geography. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Sampson, R. J. (2012). Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schutz, A. (1962). Collected papers I: The problem of social reality. The Hague: Martinus-Nijhoff. Seamon, D. (1979). A geography of the lifeworld. New York: St. Martin’s Press [London: Routledge Revivals, 2015]. Seamon, D. (1987). Phenomenology and environment-behavior research. In Moore, G. T. and Zube, E., eds., Advances in environment, behavior, and design, vol. 1 (pp. 3–27). New York: Plenum.

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Seamon, D. (2004). Grasping the dynamism of urban place: Contributions from the work of Christopher Alexander, Bill Hillier, and Daniel Kemmis. In Mels, T., ed., Reanimating places (pp. 123–145). Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Seamon, D. (2012). “A jumping, joyous urban jumble”: Jane Jacobs’ death and life of great American cities as a phenomenology of urban place. Journal of Space Syntax, 3 (1), 139–149. Seamon, D. (2014). Physical and virtual environments: Meaning of place and space. In Schell, B. and Scaffa, M., eds., Willard & Spackman’s occupational therapy, 12th edn. (pp. 202–214). Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams & Wilkens. Seamon, D. (2015) Understanding place holistically: Cities, synergistic relationality, and space syntax, Journal of Space Syntax, 6 (1), 32–43. Seamon, D. (2018a). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routedge. Seamon, D. (2018b). Merleau-Ponty, lived body, and place: Toward a phenomenology of human situatedness. In Hünefeldt, T. and Schlitte, A., eds., Situatedness and place (pp. 41–66). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Seamon, D. and Nordin, C. (1980). Marketplace as place ballet: A Swedish example. Landscape, 24 (October), 35–41. Semenza, J., Rubin, C., Falter, K., Selanikio, J., Flanders, W. D., Howe, H. and Wilhelm, J. (1996). Heat-related deaths during the July 1995 heat wave in Chicago. New England Journal of Medicine, 335, 84–90. Sokolowski, R. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Theodorson, G., ed. (1961). Studies in human ecology. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson and Company. Toombs, S. K. (1995). The lived experience of disability. Human Studies, 18, 9–23. Toombs, S. K. (2000). Handbook of phenomenology and medicine. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia. Engle Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. UN DESA [United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs] (2010). Trends in international migrant stock: The 2008 revision. New York: United Nations. van Eck, D. and Pijpers, R. (2017). Encounters in place ballet: A phenomenological perspective on older people’s walking routines in an urban park. Area, 49, 166–173. van Manen, M. (2014). Phenomenology of practice. New York: Routledge. Weldon, D., ed. (2003). The new Husserl: A critical reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zahavi, D. (2003). Husserl’s phenomenology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zahavi, D. (2019). Phenomenology: The basics. London: Routledge.

3 THE WELLBEING OF PEOPLE AND PLACE

Though “wellbeing” is defined in a wide range of ways (Atkinson, Fuller, and Painter 2012; Kearns and Andrews 2010; Pain and Smith 2010; Schwanen and Ziegler 2011; Ziegler and Schwanen 2011), the concept is most often associated with “human flourishing” (Fleuret and Atkinson 2007, p. 109) and “optimal psychological experience and functioning”’ (Deci and Ryan 2008, p. 1).1 In this ­chapter, I consider what a phenomenological perspective might contribute to research on wellbeing by examining two central phenomenological principles— first, human-­immersion-in-world; and, second, lived obliviousness. Human-immersionin-world refers to the phenomenological recognition that human beings are inescapably conjoined with and enmeshed in their world, which here refers to the person or group’s sphere of action, understanding, and experience, both firsthand and vicarious. That people are always already caught up in and enjoined with their world suggests that the wellbeing of an individual or group cannot be discussed apart from lived relationships with their worlds, including the places in which they find themselves. In other words, individual wellbeing and place wellbeing mutually presuppose and afford each other. In this sense, one might more accurately speak of the wellbeing-of-person-or-group-in-place (DeMiglio and Williams 2008; Eyles and Williams 2008; Malpas 2018; Relph 1976; Seamon 2014, 2018; Stefanovic 2008). As a second relevant phenomenological principle, lived obliviousness refers to the recognition that wellbeing is not typically an explicitly experienced dimension of most peoples’ everyday experiences; rather, life simply unfolds more or less automatically, and one may not be aware of or reflect upon any stressful, untoward, or undermining elements of daily living that, to an outsider, might indicate a lack of wellbeing. For sure, human beings often experience self-conscious moments when, on one hand, they feel positive and hopeful about their lives or, on the other hand, DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-4

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feel negative and wish their life might be better. More typically, however, life simply happens. People “just get on with things” and don’t regularly give self-conscious attention to the lived fact that life might be otherwise (Moran 2014; Seamon 1979, pp. 99–105). In this chapter, I draw on the phenomenological concepts of lifeworld, natural attitude, homeworld, and place to clarify what human-immersion-in-world and lived obliviousness might mean for research in wellbeing. My real-world starting point is three narrative accounts of ordinary and out-of-the-ordinary place experiences: first, interior designer Jane Barry’s first-person description of her ill father’s last few months of life in the house he had inhabited most of his adulthood (Barry 2012); second, British-African writer Doris Lessing’s novelistic account of the everyday world of Maudie Fowler, an impoverished old woman who is a central character in Lessing’s Diaries of Jane Sommers (Lessing 1984); and, third, sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s empirical research on the significant role that urban place played in contributing to many of the several hundred deaths during a 1995 heatwave in Chicago (Klinenberg 2002). Using these three examples as evidence, I contend that place is an integral, non-contingent aspect of human life and helps to explain why wellbeing can typically be out of sight and thus not recognized as a significant dimension of one’s day-to-day experience. I conclude that, because of the always-already-present reciprocity between human-immersion-in-place and lived obliviousness, professional efforts to enhance individual and group wellbeing might sometimes be more successfully accomplished indirectly by changing aspects of place, including creative neighborhood design and planning that facilitate place attachment and a strong sense of environmental belonging.

Lifeworld, Natural Attitude, and Homeworld From a phenomenological perspective, there is no dualistic relationship between person and world or people and their environment (Casey 2009; Malpas 2018; Moran 2000; Seamon 2013a; Stefanovic 2008). Rather, there is only a people-world entwinement and commingling whereby what is conventionally understood as two—person/world, people/environment, subject/object—is existentially realized as one—people-immersed-in-world. As a means to specify this lived ­people-world connectedness, lifeworld is a valuable phenomenological concept because it spotlights a person or group’s everyday world of taken-for-grantedness typically unnoticed and thus hidden as a phenomenon (Finlay 2011; Seamon 1979, 2013a; van Manen 2014). Unless it shifts in some noticeable way (for example, one’s town is badly damaged by storm or flood), we are almost always, in our typical human lives, unaware of our lifeworld, which we assume is the only way our life could be. This unquestioned acceptance of everyday life is identified phenomenologically as the natural attitude via which we “accept the world and its forms of givenness as simply there, ‘on hand’ for us” (Moran 2005, p. 7). Because of the natural attitude, we

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habitually assume that the world as we know and experience it is the real and only world. Almost always, the lifeworld is transparent and pre-reflective in the sense that day-to-day life just happens, grounded in spatial-temporal actions and patterns more or less regular (Moran 2014; Seamon 1979). A more localized, personalized dimension of one’s lifeworld and natural attitude is the homeworld, which phenomenology founder Edmund Husserl identified as the tacit, taken-for-granted sphere of experiences, understandings, and situations marking out the world into which each of us is born and matures as children and then adults (Donohoe 2011, 2014; Seamon 2013b; Steinbock 1995). The homeworld is the most intimate portion of one’s lifeworld, marking out the experiences, actions, situations, and meanings that are unself-consciously assumed to be appropriate, reasonable, and accepted without question.2 Because the homeworld is pre-given via the arbitrariness of birth and family, we have no choice in what our particular homeworld is. Some individuals are born into homeworlds that sustain kindness, freedom, and beneficence, while other homeworlds are unkind, restrictive, and bleak. In this sense, the homeworld is that lived portion of the lifeworld wherein one is most unwittingly and most primally who one is, largely because of the happenstance of time, place, birth factors, and familial and societal circumstances. The homeworld is “a unity of sense that is manifest in a pre-givenness of the things of the world that constitute the norm by which we judge other worlds and by which the pre-givenness of other worlds becomes given” (Donohoe 2011, p. 30). Here, norms and normativity do not refer to some arbitrary ethical, ideological, or metaphysical system of right and wrong or better and worse. Rather, they refer to “a foundational standard to which other places are compared in terms of our embodied constitution of the world” (Donohoe 2011, p. 25). Steinbock (1995, p. 232) writes that the homeworld is “indifferent to whether we like it or not, or to whether it makes us happy or miserable. The point is that the norms that guide the homeworld are our norms, our way of life, as that to which we have accrued.” The phenomenological notions of lifeworld, natural attitude, and homeworld are important for understanding wellbeing because they demonstrate that, most of the time, we are unaware of and thus naively unconcerned with the degree to which our daily life accommodates “human flourishing” (Fleuret and Atkinson 2007, p. 109) or “optimal psychological experience and functioning” (Deci and Ryan 2008, p. 1). Rather, our particular way of life is what it is and not typically envisioned or evaluated otherwise. In this sense, our manner of living is pregiven, out of sight, and unquestioned, even though, by an external evaluator, it might be judged as unsound, deleterious, or life threatening. This typical, unself-­conscious unawareness of the lived quality of one’s life does not mean that examining that life self-consciously is not possible or unimportant. Rather, it indicates the difficulty of motivating an individual or group to consider their life explicitly in terms of wellbeing and to make life changes whereby wellbeing might be improved.

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Place and Human-Immersion-in-World I next consider how a phenomenological understanding of place might be useful for research in wellbeing. Phenomenologically, place can be defined as any environmental locus that gathers together human experiences, actions, and meanings spatially and temporally (Seamon 2013a, p. 150). By this definition, places range in spatial scale from a favorite chair or outdoor sitting place to a well-used room or building to an urban neighborhood, city as a whole, or meaningful geographic region. In this sense, places are the typically pre-given, unreflected-upon environmental contexts that sustain particular lifeworlds and homeworlds—the locales, settings, resting points, and pathways that provide the environmental, spatial, and temporal grounding for one’s everyday, taken-for-granted experiences, understandings, and actions. For research on wellbeing, the most important aspect of place phenomenologically is the recognition that human being is always human-being-in-place (Casey 2009; Malpas 2001, 2009, 2018; Seamon 2013a, 2018; Stefanovic 2008). “To be,” wrote phenomenologist Edward Casey (2009, p. 14), “is to be in place. There is no being without place.” To exist humanly, in other words, is always already to exist somewhere, spatially, environmentally, and temporally: “Place serves as the condition of all existing things. This means that, far from being merely locatory or situational, place belongs to the very concept of existence” (Casey 2009, p. 15). In this sense, beingin-place is a fundamental ontological structure of being human. If this is the case, then human wellbeing is intrinsically emplaced, and any understanding of wellbeing must consider what this lived emplacement means for empowering quality of life, both individually and group-wise. In short, the quality of human life is intimately related to the quality of place in which that life unfolds, and vice versa. As phenomenologist Jeff Malpas (2001, p. 232) explained, the constitution and quality of one’s life, “is directly tied to the way in which the lived relation to place comes to be articulated and expressed in that life …. To care for and attend to our own lives thus demands that we also care for and attend to place.”

An Elderly Father’s Lifeworld I next present three lived situations that illustrate the phenomenological interpretation offered here. My first example is Jane Barry’s firsthand description of her father’s intense attachment to the house he had lived in for 65 years (Barry 2012). In spite of failing health and declining wellbeing, he insisted that he die at home. For part of the last year of his life, Barry lived with him and attempted to improve his environmental wellbeing via physical changes like stair handrails, high-contrast step edging, and relocating food items in more convenient locations. Because her father was completely inured to his place, however, he mostly ignored Barry’s modifications and continued to conduct daily actions and tasks as he had before, even though these efforts were now often frustrating or unsuccessful. Barry

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offered a heartrending portrait of how his daily life “was deeply rooted in his home … The meaning of [this] place played a strong role in his behaviors and the choices he made, and in his resistance to making changes in his environment” (Barry 2012, p. 4). I highlight Barry’s account here because it demonstrates a lived situation of extreme lived obliviousness and embeddedness-in-place. Mr. Barry’s house and home life had become a lifeworld so habitual and “just so” that he was unable to accept physical changes that might return to that lifeworld a certain degree of comfortable taken-for-grantedness and, in that sense, an improvement in wellbeing. When, for example, Barry moved canned goods from the cellar to a kitchen cupboard upstairs, her father continued to trek downstairs to get similar canned goods still stored there, even though it would be physically easier for him to retrieve equivalent items from the new kitchen storage that Barry had provided. From her objective, professional perspective of interior designer, reconfiguring the home environment would improve her father’s wellbeing. But because of his immersionin-place and lived obliviousness—what Barry at first assumed to be “stubbornness”—he was unable to understand or to accept these modifications: “He refused to make changes. It seems that he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) imagine what helpful changes might be possible” (Barry 2012, p. 5). Barry’s depiction demonstrates how the remarkable inertial power of immersion-in-place and lived obliviousness undermines a well-meaning effort to improve another’s wellbeing.

An Old Woman’s Homeworld A second narrative example is critically acclaimed novelist Doris Lessing’s riveting portrayal of character Maudie Fowler, an indigent, 90-year-old Londoner who faces a life of limitations imposed by circumstances, happenstance, and age (Lessing 1984; Seamon 1993). Lessing presents Maudie’s situation through the eyes of character Janna Somers, a fashionable, middle-aged magazine editor who befriends Maudie after they meet accidentally waiting in line at a local pharmacy. Place-wise, Maudie’s lifeworld is limited in that it includes only her apartment, the street where she lives, and a corner grocery store run by an Indian man with whom she often quarrels because she feels he overcharges. The physical center of her lifeworld is the three-room apartment that Maudie has occupied for over 40 years, though her declining health has entirely interfered with efforts to keep the space clean and tidy: “I have never,” says Somers of her first impression, “seen anything like it outside of condemned houses …. The whole place smelled, it smelled awful …. It was all so dirty and dingy and grim and awful” (Lessing 1984, p. 14). Over time, however, Somers realizes that Maudie’s squalid apartment is an integral part of her world. Somers’ understanding is crucial to Maudie because it means that, if authorities demand that she move to housing they consider better, Somers will support Maudie’s wish to stay in her own apartment. Early on in their friendship, Somers naturally assumes that Maudie would gladly accept new housing with

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modern conveniences. Once she becomes Maudie’s closest friend, however, she understands that the apartment is the central anchor of Maudie’s life. As she explains to Somers, “I’ve never not paid [the rent], not once. Though I’ve gone without food. No, I learned that early. With your own place you’ve got everything. Without it, you’re a dog. You are nothing. Have you got your own place?”—and when I said yes, she said, nodding fiercely, angrily, “That’s right, and you hold onto it, then nothing can touch you.”. (Lessing 1984, pp. 18–19) If Maudie’s wellbeing were defined in terms of modern architectural and social criteria, then her moving to better housing would be the appropriate action for which to advocate. In terms of homeworld, lifeworld, and place, however, Maudie, like Barry’s father, is existentially bound to her dwelling; to propose that she move elsewhere would severely unsettle her sense of self. Somers comes to recognize that more comfortable material conditions are in the end irrelevant to Maudie, for whom physical difficulty and discomfort have long been taken for granted: “By any current housing standard, [her apartment] should be condemned. By any human standard, she should stay where she is” (Lessing 1984, p. 103). Somers understands that Maudie is immersed in lifeworld and place; any improvement in Maudie’s homeworld and wellbeing cannot be had by physical intervention alone: I’ve given up even thinking that she ought to agree to be “rehoused”; I said it just once, and it took her three days to stop seeing me as an enemy …. I am housed, says she, cough, cough, cough from having to go out at the back all weathers into the freezing lavatory, from standing to wash in the unheated kitchen. But why do I say that? Women of ninety who live in luxury cough and are frail. (Lessing 1984, p. 86) Maudie’s situation is significant for research in wellbeing because it demonstrates how immersion-in-place via her apartment is an integral part of her homeworld— that she defines herself in terms of this place that, objectively, is largely unlivable and incompatible with wellbeing. Yet for Maudie, though not aware of this fact self-consciously because of lived obliviousness, the apartment is an integral part of her self-worth and personal identity. From an instrumentalist perspective, one would assume that the squalid apartment undermines Maudie’s wellbeing. From an existential perspective, however, one understands that the apartment sustains her wellbeing because it is a taken-for-granted part of her homeworld that cannot and must not be questioned or changed. In her indelible portrait of Maudie’s life, Lessing movingly depicts an old woman profoundly entrenched in homeworld and place.

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Compromised Lifeworlds and Place A third narrative example relating to the phenomenological interpretation offered here is Eric Klinenberg’s Heatwave, a book examining why some 700 Chicago residents, most of them elderly and poor, died in a five-day heatwave in 1995 (Klinenberg 2002). As one means to answer this question, Klinenberg studied two adjacent Chicago neighborhoods: first, North Lawndale, which was predominantly African-American; and second, South Lawndale, which was colloquially known as Little Village and predominantly Latino. Klinenberg selected these two neighborhoods because, even though they were geographically adjacent and included similar proportions of seniors living in poverty and seniors living alone (the two groups the U.S. Center for Disease Control had earlier determined as most vulnerable in the heatwave), the neighborhoods had dramatically different heatwave mortality rates. Klinenberg wondered whether this difference in deaths might at least partly be related to the two neighborhoods’ contrasting environmental and place qualities. As he became more familiar with North Lawndale and Little Village, Klinenberg realized that they were vastly different in terms of place structure and human sociability. These contrasting environmental and social differences included the ways in which residents use sidewalks and public spaces, the role of commercial outlets in stimulating social contact, the strategies through which residents protect themselves from local dangers, and the role of community organizations and institutions in providing social protection. (Klinenberg 2002, p. 86) Klinenberg concluded that, during the heatwave, local place features inhibited vulnerable North Lawndale residents from finding the social contact that would help them survive. In contrast, Little Village’s local place features assisted vulnerable residents in finding help mostly as it was already a part of their everyday lifeworld. On a considerably broader environmental scale than the two examples above, Klinenberg’s study demonstrates how human wellbeing and place wellbeing each afford the other. North Lawndale’s wellbeing was weak in the sense that it was a neighborhood of derelict buildings, shuttered stores, second-tier fast-food eateries, abandoned lots, deteriorating housing stock, few employment opportunities, and much crime, especially drug dealing. As North Lawndale’s economy declined, residents able to do so departed the neighborhood, leaving behind unoccupied dwellings as well as neighbors who had neither the resources nor will to leave. These remaining residents often withdrew inwardly from North Lawndale, finding social support beyond the neighborhood or isolating themselves geographically and socially. Klinenberg determined that, during the heatwave, it was largely the place-alienated individuals who died because their personal wellbeing was at least partly dependent on the wellbeing of their place. These North Lawndale residents had neither the social contacts to assist them nor the courage to seek help in a threatening neighborhood offering few public or commercial establishments

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where they might escape the heat. There was little collective life or environmental wellbeing to protect them, most of whom were older persons living alone “with limited social contacts and weak support networks during normal times” (Klinenberg 2002, p. 41). In contrast, Little Village’s much more vibrant wellbeing played a major role in the wellbeing of its residents, particularly during the heatwave. Even though Little Village had similar proportions of poor elderly and elderly living alone, the neighborhood incorporated lively retail, bustling sidewalks, and many more intact dwellings, all of which were occupied. Whereas North Lawndale as a place undermined neighborhood activity, Little Village facilitated “public life and informal social support for residents” (Klinenberg 2002, p. 109). This exuberant place activity was particularly important for older residents living alone because it drew them out of their dwellings into the streets and public places where they made the social contact that isolated individuals in North Lawndale were much less able to establish. During the heatwave, the activity of nearby streets provided shops, eateries, and other places where these individuals might find respite from the heat. Most vulnerable during the heatwave were older white residents remaining in the neighborhood after it had become mostly Latino. For the most part, however, they too were protected. Klinenberg (2002, p. 110) concluded that “the robust public life of the region draws all but the most infirm residents out of their homes, promoting social interaction, network ties, and healthy behavior.”

Immersion-in-Place, Lived Obliviousness, and Wellbeing Via the phenomenological principles of lived obliviousness and human-immersionin-world, I have described an entrenched, lived dimension of human experience and understanding that is pre-given, taken for granted, and thus often out of sight in professional discourse attempting to understand and to improve human wellbeing. In the current research literature, wellbeing is typically defined in two contrasting ways (Ziegler and Schwanen 2011, p. 763): either objectively, as a situation related to an individual or group’s observable, measurable living conditions (e.g., income level or housing quality); or subjectively, as an individual or group defines wellbeing for themselves experientially (e.g., in terms of happiness or life satisfaction). A phenomenological criticism of these objective and subjective definitions is that both assume wellbeing to be an accessible phenomenon explicitly identifiable and describable—the objective version, using publicly definable features often evaluated quantitatively; the subjective version, using first-person reports of what the individual or group appreciates or questions in regard to their relative happiness or dissatisfaction with life. In contrast, I have emphasized a dimension of human experience and awareness that is transparent, taken for granted, and thus regularly unnoticed, both for the researcher and for the individuals whose wellbeing is the focus of concern. I have illustrated how this hidden, unspoken dimension of human life can be given direct presence via a phenomenological vantage point.

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Because of lived obliviousness and immersion-in-place, an individual or group may not realize how changes in everyday actions or environmental modifications might improve their lifeworlds, homeworlds, and wellbeing. For individuals or groups thoroughly inured to their place, motivating them to recognize how shifting everyday behaviors or reshaping existing environments might enrich their wellbeing becomes difficult and often impossible as demonstrated by the entrenched situations of Barry’s father and Lessing’s Maudie Fowler. Mr. Barry paid little heed to the thoughtful household improvements made by his daughter, and Maudie resolutely refused to consider moving to better housing even though, objectively, the material quality of her life would no doubt improve.

Placemaking and Wellbeing For both Mr. Barry and Maudie Fowler, lived obliviousness and unchangeable entrenchment in place brooked no possibility for the improvement of their wellbeing directly. In the same way, the isolated elderly who died in the Chicago heatwave took their social and environmental isolation for granted and had little will or active means to shift their situation in time of crisis. If, therefore, the inertia of lifeworld is an integral feature of many human lives, then positive change in human and place wellbeing might be more effectively advanced by making supportive changes in the external worlds of individuals and groups rather than in their understandings, attitudes, or actions. If human beings are always already embedded in place, then one important effort is to recognize how environmental and spatial reconfigurations might contribute to robust neighborhood placemaking. Can we, in other words, draw on design, planning, and policy to recreate, self-consciously, dynamic urban neighborhoods like Klinenberg’s Little Village that in the past developed organically without deliberate plans or actions? In relation to this question, Klinenberg’s research is instructive because it offers support for this claim that benign manipulation and rehabilitation of neighborhood places might reconfigure lifeworlds and thereby strengthen environmental and human wellbeing. On the one hand, it was very much North Lawndale’s fragmented, collapsing neighborhood that limited vulnerable elderly to find help during the heatwave. On the other hand, it was very much Little Village’s intact, animated neighborhood that allowed the same vulnerable elderly to survive. The key point phenomenologically is that this support just happened or did not happen largely because of contrasting place qualities. Klinenberg (2002, pp. 230–235) emphasized that, during the heatwave, officially sponsored institutional structures and agencies did little formally to guarantee this support, which was much more usefully provided (or not) by informal environmental and social features grounded in the everyday lifeworld dynamics of neighborhood place. There is a flourishing research literature on how placemaking might facilitate individual and group wellbeing.3 These studies lay out practical ways to regenerate a better quality of life via place-supportive policy, planning, and design. One example is the work of urban theorist Jane Jacobs (1961), who demonstrated how

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place diversity and exuberance, at least in urban neighborhoods, are sustained by short blocks, a range in building types, a sufficient concentration of people, and a mixture of primary uses—i.e., anchor functions like home and work to which users must necessarily go. Another example is urban designer Vikas Mehta’s observational studies of urban pedestrian behavior (Mehta 2013). He demonstrated how sidewalk sociability can be enhanced or weakened by designable and policy-­ regulated features such as seating, sidewalk width, variety of goods and services, permeable storefronts, and so forth. A third example is urban designer Ian Bentley and colleagues’ efforts to create responsive environments—urban neighborhoods that “respond” to users in the sense that their everyday needs and activities—work, shopping, services, recreation, sociability, and so forth—are conveniently accessible walking-wise from home (Bentley et al. 1985). The underlying aim in all this work is the provision of lively, mixed-use neighborhoods that, within their immediate surroundings, offer a wide range of people, functions, activities, and events. The aim is a sense of place and environmental wellbeing readily at hand for residents and other place users. The potential result is neighborhoods with many of the place qualities that Klinenberg identified in Chicago’s Little Village. In short, one potential way to circumvent lived obliviousness and immersionin-world is to reconfigure places that facilitate lifeworlds in which people feel a part rather than apart. This approach for strengthening wellbeing is indirect in that helpful change arises, not straightforwardly via individual and group assistance and services, but roundabout via physical intervention that makes an individual or group’s place better materially, spatially, and environmentally. Residents and others associated with that place feel a sense of attachment and belonging. The hopeful result is spirited, vigorous environments that sustain and strengthen the wellbeing of individuals and groups as they simply carry out their everyday lives in place.

Notes 1 This chapter was originally published in Kathleen T. Galvin, ed., Routledge Handbook of Well-being (London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 103-111). The author thanks Kathleen Galvin and Routledge publishers for permission to reprint the chapter here. 2 Husserl emphasized that the homeworld is always in some mode of lived mutuality with an alienworld, which is the world of difference and otherness but is only provided awareness because of the always already givenness of one’s homeworld; see Donohoe (2014, pp. 12–20); Steinbock (1995, pp. 178–185). 3 Overviews include Alexander (2012), Atkinson, Fuller and Painter (2012), Carmona (2021), Cooper and Burton (2014), Frumkin, Frank, and Jackson (2004), Kopec (2018), Mehta (2013), Montgomery (2014), Seamon (2014, 2018), and Steinfeld and White (2010).

References Alexander, C. (2012). Battle for the life and beauty of the earth. New York: Oxford University Press. Atkinson, S., Fuller, S. and Painter, J. (2012). Wellbeing and place. In Atkinson, S., Fuller, S. and Painter, J., eds., Wellbeing and place (pp. 78–94). Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

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Barry, J. (2012). My dad’s house, Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 23 (2), 4–10. Bentley, I., Alcock, A., Murrain, P., McGlynn, S. and Smith, G., (1985). Responsive environments. London: Architectural Press. Carmona, M. (2021). Public places, urban spaces, 3rd edn. London: Routledge. Casey, E. S. (2009). Getting back into place, 2nd edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cooper, R. and Burton, E., eds. (2014). Wellbeing and the environment. New York: Wiley. Deci, E. L. and Ryan, R. M. (2008). Hedonia, eudaimonia, and wellbeing. Journal of Happiness Studies, 9, 1–11. DeMiglio, L. and Williams, A. (2008). A sense of place, a sense of wellbeing. In Eyles, J. and Williams, A., eds., Sense of place, health and quality of life (pp. 28–39). Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Donohoe, J. (2011). The place of home. Environmental Philosophy, 8 (1), 25–40. Donohoe, J. (2014). Remembering places. New York: Lexington. Eyles, J. and Williams, A., eds. (2008). Sense of place, health and quality of life. Franham, UK: Ashgate. Finlay, L. (2011). Phenomenology for therapists. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Fleuret, S. and Atkinson, S. (2007). Wellbeing, health and geography. New Zealand Geographer, 63, 106–118. Frumkin, H., Frank, L. and Jackson, R. J. (2004). Urban sprawl and public health: Designing, planning, and building for healthy communities. Washington, DC: Island Press. Jacobs, J. (1961). Death and life of great American cities. New York: Vintage. Kearns, R. and Andrews, G. (2010) Geographies of wellbeing. In Smith, S. J., Pain, R., Marston, S. A. and Jones, J. P., eds., The SAGE handbook of social geographies (pp. 309–328). London: SAGE. Klinenberg, E. (2002). Heatwave, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kopec, D. (2018). Environmental psychology for design, 3rd edn. New York: Fairchild/ Bloomsbury. Lessing, D. (1984). The diaries of Jane Somers. New York: Vintage. Malpas, J. (2001). Comparing topologies. Philosophy and Geography, 4, 231–238. Malpas, J. (2009). Place and human being. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 20 (3), 19–23. Malpas, J. (2018). Place and experience, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mehta, V. (2013). The street. New York: Routledge. Montgomery, C. (2014). Happy city: Transforming our lives through urban design. New York: Farrar, Status and Giroux. Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. London: Routledge. Moran, D. (2005). Edmund Husserl. Cambridge: Polity. Moran, D. (2014). Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of the habitual self. Phenomenology and Mind, 6, 26–47. Pain, R. and Smith, S. J. (2010). Introduction: Geographies of wellbeing. In Smith, S. J., Pain, R., Marston, S. A. and Jones, J. P., eds., The SAGE handbook of social geographies (pp. 1–20). London: SAGE. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Schwanen, T. and Ziegler, F. (2011). Wellbeing, independence and mobility, Ageing & Society, 31, 719–733. Seamon, D. (1979). A geography of the lifeworld, New York: St. Martin’s. Seamon, D. (1993). Different worlds coming together: A phenomenology of relationship as portrayed in Doris Lessing’s Diaries of Jane Somers. In Seamon, D., ed., Dwelling, seeing, and designing (pp. 219–246). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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Seamon, D. (2013a). Lived bodies, place, and phenomenology. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 4 (2), 143–166. Seamon, D. (2013b). Phenomenology and uncanny homecomings. In Boscaljon, D., ed., Resisting the place of belonging (pp. 155–170). Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Seamon, D. (2014). Physical and virtual environments: Meaning of place and space. In Schell, B. and Scaffa, M., eds., Willard & Spackman’s occupational therapy, 12th edn. (pp. 202–214). Philadelphia: Wippincott, Williams & Wilkens. Seamon, D. (2018). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routeldge. Stefanovic, I. L. (2008). Holistic paradigms of health and place. In Eyles, J. and Williams, A., eds., Sense of place, health and quality of life (pp. 75–91). Franham, UK: Ashgate. Steinbock, A. (1995). Home and beyond. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Steinfeld, E. and White, J. (2010). Inclusive housing. New York: Norton. van Manen, M. (2014). Phenomenology of practice. Walnut Creek, CA: West Coast Press. Ziegler, F. and Schwanen, T. (2011). An exploratory analysis of mobility and wellbeing in later life. Ageing & Society, 31, 758–781.

4 BODY-SUBJECT, TIME-SPACE ROUTINES, AND PLACE BALLETS

Phenomenology strives for the actualization of contact.1 As a way of study, it seeks to meet the things of the world as those things are in themselves and so describe them. Geography studies the earth as the dwelling place of human beings. As one of its tasks, it seeks to understand how people live in relation to everyday places, spaces, and environments. Phenomenological geography borrows from both fields of knowing and directs its attention to the essential constitution of human dwelling on the earth. The lived fact that all people find themselves placed in a world that is part geographical is an inescapable feature of human life. Be it as small as an apartment or expansive as the ocean surrounding a ship, as commonplace as one’s neighborhood or as strange as a distant country, people are immersed in a geographical world, the specifics of which can change but the surrounds of which human beings can in no way avoid. A phenomenological geography asks the significance of people’s inescapable immersion in a geographical world. What are people as beings in a world that is partly environmental and spatial? What can be said about the nature of human experience in the context of that world?2 This chapter demonstrates the value of phenomenological geography by exploring the phenomenon of everyday movement in space, by which is meant any spatial displacement of the body or bodily part initiated by the person herself. Walking to the mailbox, driving home, biking to a friend’s house, reaching for some scissors in a drawer—all these behaviors are examples of movement.3 This chapter examines its essential lived character. First, the chapter sketches the notions of natural attitude, lifeworld, and epoché—each an essential concept in phenomenology. Second, the chapter overviews two conventional approaches to everyday movement—­behaviorist and cognitive theories. Third, the chapter introduces a phenomenological alternative and asks its value for environmental theory and design.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-5

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Natural Attitude, Lifeworld, and Epoché Phenomenology seeks the essential structures of human experience and awareness (Wilde 1963, p. 20). It asks if, from the variety of ways that people behave in and encounter their everyday world, there are particular features and qualities that mark out an essential human condition—the irreducible crux of people’s lives when all “non-essentials”—cultural context, historical era, personal idiosyncrasies—are stripped bare through phenomenological procedures. Although it realizes that social, economic, historical, and personal qualities filter and condition patterns of living, phenomenology holds a certain givenness to human experience that extends beyond the particular person, place, or moment. The task of phenomenology is to unbury and describe this givenness, of which people usually lose sight because of the mundaneness and taken-for-grantedness of their everyday lives. In normal life, people are caught up in a state of affairs that the phenomenologist calls the natural attitude—the unnoticed and unquestioned acceptance of the things and experiences of daily living (Giorgi 1970). The world of the natural attitude is termed lifeworld—the taken-for-granted pattern and context of everyday life by which people routinely conduct their day-to-day existence without having to make it constantly an object of conscious attention (Giorgi 1970). Immersed in the natural attitude, people do not normally examine the lifeworld or even recognize its existence; it is concealed as a phenomenon: In the natural attitude, we are too much absorbed by our mundane pursuits, both practical and theoretical; we are too much absorbed by our goals, purposes, and designs to pay any attention to the way the world presents itself to us. The acts of consciousness throughout which the world and whatever it contains become accessible to us are lived, but they remain undisclosed, unthematized, and in this sense concealed. (Giorgi 1970, p. 148) Through a change of perspective—the phenomenological reduction as it is usually called—the phenomenologist makes the lifeworld a focus of attention: “The acts which in the natural attitude are simply lived are now thematized and made topics of reflective analysis” (Giorgi 1970, p. 148). One tool for this effort of directed attention is epoché—the suspension of belief in the experience or experienced object (Spiegelberg 1965, p. 691). In performing epoché, phenomenologists work to disengage from the lifeworld and re-examine its aspects afresh. Epoché does not mean that the researchers reject the world or their experience of it. Rather, they question these things as well as all concepts, models, and theories claiming to describe and explain them. Via epoché, researchers may discover that events and patterns they assumed they “knew” are called into question, while facts previously ignored or deemed unimportant are seen as significant and demand examination and explication (Zeitlin 1973, p. 147). Phenomenology is therefore an exploratory and descriptive discipline. First, it aims to question radically the lifeworld and all

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theories claiming to understand it. Second, it works to return to the lifeworld directly and describe its aspects as carefully as possible in their own terms. A phenomenological geography re-examines the geographical portions of lifeworld. What, for example, is the nature of human dwelling? What lived meanings do places have for people? How do different individuals and groups experience nature and the physical environment? In what ways do people notice or fail to notice their geographical world? This chapter’s aim is to explore everyday movement phenomenologically. Two steps are required: First, to set aside conventional theories of human movement; second, to examine everyday movement as it occurs in its own lifeworld fashion.

Conventional Approaches to Everyday Movement In conventional understandings, everyday movement has generally been ­discussed in terms of spatial behavior—people’s movements in large-scale geographical space—and considered in two major ways. A behaviorist approach, associated with the philosophical tradition of empiricism, views everyday movement in terms of ­stimulus-response—that is, a particular stimulus in the external environment (e.g., the ringing of a telephone) causes a movement response in the person (the hearer gets up to answer it).4 Attempting to imitate the methods of natural science, behaviorists have generally restricted their research to visible behaviors that can be verified through some form of empirical measurement. Strict behaviorists discount all inner experiential processes (e.g., cognition or emotion), which are seen as irrelevant for understanding observable behaviors. Thus, behaviorists typically study what the animal or person does rather than what it, he, or she experiences. In practice, much of the behaviorist work examining spatial behavior has studied rats learning to traverse mazes; research with humans has been much less frequent.5 Because it is best conducted in an experimental context and not readily applied to real-world contexts like pedestrian street behaviors, strict behaviorist theories have had only minimal impact on research relating to environmental and spatial behaviors (Getis and Boots 1971). In contrast, theories of spatial cognition are associated with the philosophical tradition of rationalism and have had a major impact on behavioral geography and environmental psychology.6 In their various forms, these theories argue that spatial behavior is dependent on such cognitive processes as thinking, figuring out, and deciding. In practice, most of this research has studied a particular individual or group’s cognitive representation of space elicited by such means as map drawings or questionnaires. The assumption is made that a study of these cognitive maps leads to an understanding of the individual and group’s spatial behaviors. “Underlying our definition of spatial cognition,” explain Downs and Stea (1973, p. 9), “is a view of behavior which, although variously expressed, can be reduced to the statement that human spatial behavior is dependent on the individual’s cognitive map of the spatial environment.”

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A major weakness, phenomenologically, of both the cognitive and behaviorist approaches is their insistence on explaining spatial behavior through an imposed a ­priori theory. The cognitive theorists assume that the cognitive map is the key to spatial behavior, while the behaviorists look toward the sequence of s­ timulus-response. In performing epoché, phenomenologists break away from these two opposing views and return to everyday movement as it is a phenomenon in the lifeworld. On one hand, they bracket the assumption that movement depends on the cognitive map; on the other hand, that movement is a process of stimulus-response. To carry on this bracketing process practically, phenomenologists aim to return to everyday movement as experience—as it happens in its own fashion with its own structure and dynamics. To do this, they draw on such methods as carefully reflecting on movement as experienced in their own lives or gathering accounts of movement as described by others, through interviews, open-ended conversations, or accounts in imaginative literature. The present explication of movement makes use of a collection of descriptive reports gathered from a group of people who were interested enough in their own day-to-day contact with the geographical world to meet weekly for several months and share in a group context their personal experiences relating to everyday movement and other related themes.7 Out of these environmental experience groups, there gradually emerged several characteristics of everyday movement, of which three are discussed here: (1) the habitual nature of everyday movement; (2) the importance of the body in grounding these movements; and (3) body and place “choreographies.” Each theme is considered in turn, then contrasted with conventional behaviorist and cognitive theories.

The Habitual Nature of Everyday Movement When I was living [at] home and going to school, I couldn’t drive to the university directly—I had to go around one way or the other. And I once remember becoming vividly aware of the fact that I always went there by one route and back the other—I’d practically always do it. And the funny thing was that I didn’t really have to tell myself to go there the one way and back the other. Something in me would do it automatically—I really didn’t have much choice in the matter. Of course, there would be some days when I would have to go somewhere besides school first, and so I would take a different route, but otherwise I would go one set of streets and return another set of streets each time. —a member of the environmental experience group A habit is any acquired behavior that has become more or less involuntary. One of the first characteristics of everyday movement to which the environmental experience groups brought attention is its habitual nature. Consider the above observation. The group member makes automatic use of the same route sequence in her daily driving pattern. Her path movements happen “by themselves,” without the necessary intervention of conscious attention: “Something in me would do it

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automatically—I really didn’t have much choice in the matter.” Phrases from other group observations reflect this same self-acting quality: “You go and you don’t even know it”; “I did the trip so effortlessly and unconsciously”; “I always want to go the same old rote way.”8 Habitual movements extend over all environmental scales, from driving and walking to reaching and finger movements. One group member described how she sometimes goes to class and wonders how she got there, simply because she has no recollection of the traversal: “You don’t remember walking there—you just do it so automatically.” Another group member explained that he had recently switched rooms with his apartment mate, yet occasionally found himself going to the old room rather than the new: “It doesn’t register with me that I’ve headed for the ‘wrong’ place.” A third group member sometimes forgot to place a clean towel under the sink after he had taken the dirty one to the laundry; when he washed the dishes, he found himself reaching for the towel, even though a few minutes before he had already looked and not found it there. A fourth group member reported that in making telephone calls, he caught himself several times dialing his home phone rather than the number he had planned to call: “My thoughts will be elsewhere and my fingers automatically dial the number they know best.” Regardless of the particular scale at which they happen, these observations suggest that many movements are conducted by some preconscious process that guides behaviors without the person’s need to be consciously aware of their happening. As one group member succinctly described the process: “You get up and go without really thinking you know exactly where you have to go, and you get there but you really don’t think about getting there while you’re on your way.” The phrasing of this statement in almost poetic fashion points to a kind of automatic unfolding of movement with which the group member has little or no conscious contact. She has no recollection of the great number of footsteps, turns, stops, and starts that in sum compose the walk from home to school. She finds herself at her destination without having paid the least bit of attention to the movement as it happened at the time. Traditionally, behaviorists and cognitive theorists have dealt with habitual movement in two contrasting ways. The latter researchers argue that habitual behaviors are not really habitual; that if the person could actually see the inner processes direction movement, she would discover that she is consciously evaluating the situation at hand and making use of her cognitive map: Admittedly, much of spatial behavior is repetitious and habitual—in travelling, you get the feeling that “you could do the trip blindfolded” or “do it with your eyes shut.” But even this apparent “stimulus-response” sequence is not so simple: you must be ready for the cue that tells you to “stop now” or evaluate the rush hour traffic that tells you to “take the other way home tonight.” Even in these situations you are thinking ahead (in both literal and metaphorical sense) and using your cognitive map. (Downs and Stea 1973, p. 10)

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In contrast, strict behaviorists reject any cognitive processes intervening between environment and behavior.9 They have consistently emphasized the automatic nature of everyday movement, which they define in terms of reinforcement—any event the occurrence of which increases the probability that a stimulus will on subsequent occasions evoke a response (Hilgard et al. 1974, pp. 188–207). Applied to spatial behavior, this principle argues that a successful traversal of space over a particular route strengthens the chances that this route will be used the next time the space must be traversed. Each time the movement is repeated, the responses evoking that particular route are reinforced and in time the pattern becomes habitual and thus involuntary. In proceeding phenomenologically, the researcher must place in parentheses these two contrasting interpretations and ask what habitual movement is in its own fashion. Through this bracketing procedure, one sees the sensitive role that the body plays in much of everyday movement.

The Notion of Body-Subject Additional observations from the environmental experience groups suggest that the habitual nature of movement arises from the body, which houses its own special kind of purposeful sensibility. On group member suddenly found himself turning left, rather than continuing straight as he should have done. He explained that generally he does turn left because he has friends up the street whom he visits often. In describing the unintentional turn, he explains that something in him acted before he could cognitively act and that this “something” is a directed action in my arms: my arms were turning the wheel … they were doing it all by themselves, completely in charge of where I was going. The car was halfway through the turn before I came to my senses and realized my mistake. Another person pointed to this same kind of directed bodily movement when he described the act of turning on a string light switch: “My hand reaches for the string, pulls, and the light is on. The hand knows exactly where to go.” The role of the body in movement is indicated by other observations. One group member referred to an intelligent force in her legs that gets her about: “You let your legs do it and don’t pay any attention to where you’re going.” Another group member noticed that in sitting at his desk, his hands automatically reached for a required envelope, scissors, or other object without his having to direct the hands consciously. A third group member described this same bodily process in his ability to place letters quickly in their proper mailboxes when he worked at the post office. Taken together, these reports indicate that underlying and guiding many everyday movements is an intentional bodily awareness that manifests automatically yet sensitively: An arm reaches for string or envelopes; hands turn the

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steering wheel or place letters in their proper mailbox; feet carry a person automatically to his destination. Drawing on the understanding of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), I call this bodily intentionality body-subject, which I define as the inherent capacity of the body to direct behaviors of the person intelligently, and thus function as a special kind of subject that expresses itself in a preconscious way usually described by such words as “automatic,” “habitual,” “involuntary,” and “mechanical.”10 The possibility of the body as an intelligent subject manifesting in its own special fashion is foreign to both cognitive and behaviorist theories of behavior. Both perspectives view the body as passive—as an inert thing responding to either an order from cognitive consciousness or from a stimulus in the external environment. Studies in spatial cognition have directed their attention to the cognitive map as it is a record of the person’s cognitive knowledge of space. This research has focused little attention on the actual bodily movements that constitute spatial behavior, Instead, these researchers have emphasized the cognitive process assumed to coordinate relations between environment and behavior. In contrast, behaviorists have emphasized the significance of body in their discussion of spatial behavior, but in this emphasis, they have viewed it as a collection of reactions to external stimuli. If behaviorists were asked, for example, to describe driving behavior from home to work, they would argue that it involves a succession of reactions to the shifting sights, sounds, and pressures impinging on the driver’s skeletal muscles (Tolman 1973). These various stimuli call out particular feet and arm movements reinforced each time a particular driving response successfully gets the driver safely to her destination. Eventually, this series of stimulus-responses is integrated into a smooth, stepwise progression that easily and automatically gets the person from home to work each day. Reports from the environmental experience groups suggest that both cognitive and behaviorist theories are incomplete. The cognitive interpretation is lacking because it ignores the fact that many movements proceed independently of any cognitive-evaluation process; that the cognitive stratum of experience comes into play only when body-subject makes a wrong movement, as when, for example, the driver realizes she is making the wrong turn and consciously involves herself in changing direction. Otherwise, cognitive attention is directed to matters other than the behavior at hand. For example, the driver making the wrong turn explains that his attention was on the impending visit to the dentist. Yet the fact that cognitive attention can intervene when body-subject errs points to a first weakness of the behaviorist perspective: behavior can involve a cognitive component and is therefore more than a simple sequence of stimulus-response behaviors. Furthermore, the notion of body-subject calls into question the entire concept of stimulus-response, since body-subject is an intelligent holistic process that directs, while for the behaviorists, the body is a collection of passive responses that can only react. If one reviews the above observations, one notes no experiential indications that the movements described are a series of responses to external things in the

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environment. Consider the person turning on the light. The central theme in his report is the directed way in which the arm goes up: “The hand knows exactly what to do.” The environmental context here seems almost secondary, and in fact the person explains that the arm can find the string as well in the dark as in the daylight. Similarly, the focus in the report on the wrong turn is the hands that do the turning, “all by themselves, completely in charge.” Here, too, the tone of the observation points to the hands as an intelligent agent in charge of the situation in their own special way. These observations provide no indications that the body is blindly responding to environmental stimuli as the behaviorist would assume. Rather, the observations suggest that the body acts in an intentional way that tackles the behavior needed as a whole and proceeds to carry it out in fluid, integrative fashion. A phenomenological exploration of movement indicates that the body is intelligently active and, through this activity, efficiently transforms a person’s needs into behaviors. If one is to move effectively to meet the requirements of everyday living, the body must have within its ken the required habitual behaviors. Without the structure of body-subject, people would be constantly required to plan out every movement anew—to pay continuous conscious attention to each gesture of the hand, each step of the foot. Because of body-subject, people can manage routine demands automatically and so gain freedom from their everyday spaces and environments. In this way, they rise above such mundane events as getting to places, finding things, performing basic gestures, and direct their creative attention to wider, more significant life dimensions. For behavioral geography and environmental psychology, the notion of body-subject has important implications, especially for the cognitive approach to environmental behavior. Perhaps the biggest challenge that this approach faces is to demonstrate conclusively a link between cognition and behavior. So far this demonstration is lacking. Moore (1979, p. 64) writes: The belief of all cognitively oriented researchers is in the power of ­interveningcognitive variables has not been followed by empirical tests of sufficient scope or quality …. [E]xcept for a few studies of market behavior and interurban migration, we have scant data on the relationship of environmental cognition and subsequent urban behavior. Consideration of the bodily dimension of environmental behavior indicates that the cognitive perspective is incomplete and needs a thorough rephrasing. Images, subjective impressions, category systems, and cognitive maps may have a partial role in environmental behavior, but we need a better understanding of their relative importance. More than likely, there is a reciprocity between body and mind, habits and wish for change, past and future. If behavioral geography and environmental psychology are to have an accurate behavioral theory, they must give this reciprocity more attention (Seamon 1979, pp. 61–62).

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Body and Place Choreographies Body-subject assures that gestures and movements learned in the past will readily continue into the future. It handles the basic behaviors of everyday living. Bodysubject is a stabilizing force, and through it people gain freedom to extend their world horizons. Reports from the environmental experience groups point to the versatility of body-subject as it houses more complex behaviors extending over time as well as space. One such behavior is a body-routine—a set of integrated behaviors that sustain a particular task or aim, for instance, washing dishes, plowing, housebuilding, potting, or hunting. Body-routines are frequently an integral part of a manual skill or artistic sensibility; their sum may constitute a particular person’s livelihood. “His movements were incredible—they flowed together,” said one group member, describing a metalsmith, whom he called an “artist.” “Both hands were working at once … doing exactly what they had to do perfectly.” Another group member described his operating an ice cream truck for the summer. As he worked, he would “get into the rhythm of getting ice cream and giving change.” He would automatically “reach for the right container, make what the customer wanted, and take his money.” Typically, the work required little conscious attention: “Most of the time, I didn’t even have to think about what I was doing—it all became routine.” These observations suggest that, through training and practice, basic movements of body-subject fuse together into wider bodily patterns that provide a particular aim or need. Simple arm, leg, and trunk movement become attuned to a particular line of work or action and direct themselves spontaneously to meet the requirements at hand. In using the words “smooth,” “flow,” and “rhythm,” the observations indicate that body-subject is organic and integrated rather than stepwise and fragmentary. Once having mastered the basic operations of an activity, body-subject can vary its behavior creatively to quickly meet the particular requirement at hand. Related to body-routines, the time-space routine is a set of habitual bodily behaviors that extend though a considerable portion of time. Observations from the environmental experience groups indicate that sizable portions of a person’s day may be organized around such routines. One group member described a morning routine that he followed practically every day except Sundays. He would be up at 7.30, make his bed, perform morning toilet, and be out of his house by eight. He would then walk to the corner café up the street, pick up the newspaper (which had to be the New York Times), order his usual fare (one scrambled egg, toast, and coffee), and stay there until nine when he would walk to his nearby office. A second group member described a time-space routine that her grandmother followed: “She is always in a particular place at a particular time and usually doing a particular thing there.” Between six and nine, for example, the grandmother would be working in the kitchen; between nine and twelve, sewing on the front porch. These reports indicate that a series of behaviors that are in themselves body-­ routines fuse into wider patterns grounded in body-subject. As the first reporter

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explains, he doesn’t figure out his morning routine each day; rather, “it unfolds and I follow it.” A change in routine can cause irritation: I really like this routine, and I’ve noticed how I’m bothered a bit when a part of it is upset—for example, if the Times is sold out, or if the booths are taken and I have to sit at the counter. The time-space routine has a certain holistic pattern that, like movement itself, is well described by the word “unfolding.” When a person has established a series of time-space routines in his typical daily and weekly schedule, large portions of the day can proceed with minimum planning and decision. The person may become attached to these routines; interference, as the above observation indicates, can generate a certain amount of stress. Time-space routines are an essential component of daily living because they appropriate activities automatically through time. They maintain a continuity in people’s lives, allowing them to do automatically in the present moment what they have learned in the past. These time-space routines free people’s cognitive attention for more significant events and needs. At the same time, time-space routines may be difficult to break or change. In this sense, they are a conservative force that may be a considerable obstacle in the face of useful progress or change. In a supportive physical environment, time-space routines and body-routines of the individual may fuse into a larger environmental whole, creating a timespace pattern that can be called a place ballet—a fusion of many time-space routines and body-routines in place. Its result may be an environmental vitality like that found on the streets of Boston’s North End or New York City’s Greenwich Village. Place ballet generates a strong sense of place because of its continual and regular human activity. One group member described her job in a corner grocery store. She had gotten to know customers by face because several came regularly during her hours of work. She appreciated this interaction because “it helps time pass faster and gives me people to talk to.” Similarly, the group member describing his morning routine explained that there are other regular patrons at the corner café at the same time as him each morning. Their presence generated a sense of friendliness and familiarity that he felt “wouldn’t be there if they were new faces each day.” In these examples, individual routines meet together in terms of place. The regularity so generated may also produce a climate of familiarity that participants appreciate and to which they grow attached. This regularity is unintentional and only comes about through time and many repeated “accidental” meetings. At its base is the habitual stratum of body-subject that supports a continuity grounded on bodily patterns of the past.

Wider Contexts For geography and other disciplines of environment and place, the notions of body-routines, time-space routines, and place ballets have value because they join people with space, place, and time. Though the above examples are limited and

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culture-bound, their underlying experiential patterns transcend particular social and temporal contexts and can be found in all human situations, past and present, Western and non-Western. Hockett (1973, pp. 13–14), for example, has pictured the typical daily routine of the Menomini, a native-American tribe living along the northwestern shore of Lake Michigan in the seventeenth century. The women rose at dawn to fetch water, build fires, and prepare breakfast, one of two regular daily meals. After breakfast, the men and boys went to hunting and fishing grounds, while the women tended the crops, processed food, gathered edible plants, wove, and cared for the children. Time-space routines and body-routines are the foundation of this typical daily pattern. The activities follow a sequence that is largely habitual and unpremeditated. The women’s activities are an extended time-space routine incorporating many individual body-routines—water fetching, fire building, crop tending, and weaving. Each activity requires a particular combination of actions and movements that manipulate materials at hand and facilitate the desired aim or artifact. The skill of weaving, for example, is a knowledge of the hands, which long ago learned a proper sequence and rhythm and can now conduct work quickly and automatically. One can also visualize a series of place ballets unfolding throughout the Menomini’s day—for example, the women meeting at the stream as they fetch water. This place is not only a water source but a scene of community interaction and communication that repeats each morning because of the regularity of the water fetching. The underlying structure of this place ballet is no different from the 1960s street scene that urbanist Jane Jacobs described on the block where she lived in New York City’s Greenwich Village: The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers … While I sweep up the wrappers, I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr. Halpart unhooking the laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement’s superintendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning the English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary children, heading for St. Luke’s, dribble through to the west, and the children from P.S. 41, heading toward the east. (Jacobs, 1961, pp. 52–53) The essential experiential process working on Hudson Street, in the Menomini village, and in the corner café is much the same, though on the surface each place is considerably different from the others. People come together in time and space as

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each individual is involved in his or her own time-space and body-routines. They recognize each other and often partake in conversation. Out of these daily, takenfor-granted interpersonal dynamics, these spaces of activity incorporate a sense of place that participants each do their small part in creating and sustaining. These places are more than locations to be traversed. Each comes to house a dynamism that has arisen naturally without directed intervention. These spaces take on the quality that Relph (1976, p. 55) has called existential insideness—a situation in which “a place is experienced without deliberate and self-conscious reflection yet is full with significances.” Relph goes on to say that existential insideness is the very foundation of place experience, and this point is echoed in the place ballet. Through habitual patterns meeting in time and space, an environment becomes a place shared by people who come into spatio-temporal contact. The dynamism of that place is largely in proportion to the number of people who share its space and thereby create and share in its tempo and vitality.

Implications If geographers are to study the spaces, places, and environments in which a person typically lives—his or her lived space (Bollnow 1967)—they must recognize that this space is first of all grounded in the body. Through body-subject, people know who they are in relation to the familiar objects, places, and environments that in sum constitute their everyday geographical world. Whatever the historical and cultural context, the bedrock of their geographical experiences is the pre-­reflective bodily stratum of human life—bodily lived-space. As well as habitual movements in larger-scale environments, this bodily lived-space incorporates smaller actions such as stepping, turning, reaching, and the extended patterns of body- and time-space routines. By exploring the bodily portion of livedspace, geographers gain a picture of the stabilizing, habitual forces of a particular lifeworld. They can better understand how unself-conscious patterns within a particular place continue to make that place what it was in the past. Further, geographers may be better able to predict the effect of particular environmental and social changes on that stability. A strong pattern in modern society is the fragmentation of space and time: home separated from work; neighborhoods split by expressways; work separated from leisure. At the same time, social critics speak of growing alienation and the gradual breakdown of community, which Slater (1970, p. 5) defined as “the wish to live in trust and fraternal cooperation with one’s fellows in a total and visible collective entity.” If community is an important component of a satisfying human life and if community is presently eroding, geographers can well ask what community is in experiential terms and how it might be buttressed. Place ballet may have considerable bearing on this question because it regularly brings people face to face who otherwise would probably not know each other. In this sense, place ballet generates some of the interpersonal cooperation and trust of which Slater speaks.

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Place ballet has particular bearing on the nature of neighborhood, which the economist Barbara Ward defined as a place where Children can grow up without being run over, where friends can meet, where the deeply neglected resource, two human legs, can be recovered and used, and where the sociability and the exchanges of human existence can take place in a civilized form. (cited in Horsley 1978, pp. 1–2) In one sense, this definition of neighborhood is founded in place ballet. Ward suggests a community-in-place grounded in bodily scale and interpersonal continuity. In part, such a place must be founded in familiarity: people knowing each other well enough so they can comfortably interact. A portion of this familiarity may well be the result of unself-conscious regularity. A habitual base, however, does not mean a precisely predictable neighborhood dynamic composed of robot-like humans continuously repeating the same sets of behaviors. Rather, the pre-cognitive regularity of place ballet provides a foundation from which can arise surprise, novelty, and unexpectedness: The spontaneity of child play, neighbors “bumping into” one another, a community group quickly organizing to oppose a proposed street widening. Stability and continuity of place are at least partially responsible for the civilized network of interaction that Ward points to in her neighborhood definition. At the same time, this place ordering establishes a pattern of regularities around which a progression of shifting events and episodes can occur. Place, in other words, requires both regularity and variety, order and change. Place ballet is one means by which a place comes to hold these qualities. Neighborhood is only one example of place ballet. Any situation where at least some users come together regularly—for example, lounge, café, office building, marketplace—may provide a base for place ballet. At the same time, however, many place ballets are eroding and disappearing. The trend, as Relph (1976, p. 117) reminds us, is “toward an environment of few significant places—toward a placeless geography, a flatscape, a meaningless pattern of buildings.” In this sense, the notion of place ballet has important theoretical and practical implications. First, it joins people, time, and place in an organic whole and portrays place as a distinct and authentic entity in its own right. In the past, many approaches to the person-­ environment relationship have been piecemeal and mechanistic: Place is only the sum of the behaviors of its individual human parts. In contrast, place ballet depicts a whole greater than its elements: Place is a dynamic entity with an identity as distinct as the individual people and environmental elements comprising that place. Place ballet, in other words, is an environmental synergy in which human and material parts unintentionally foster a larger whole with its own special rhythm and character. An outdoor marketplace, for example, may be grounded in economic transactions but is considerably more than just those transactions (Nordin 1976). The market takes on an atmosphere of vitality, camaraderie, excitement—even gaiety.

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Meeting friends and acquaintances becomes as important as buying and selling (Seamon and Nordin 1980). For environmental design, planning, and advocacy, place ballet provides a notion around which to create and strengthen placemaking. What places have what kinds of place ballets? Would a place be a better human environment if place ballets could be fostered? For residents and other users of places themselves, the notion of place ballet is especially valuable. People recognize unself-consciously the significance of place ballet but generally, because of the natural attitude, have no refined means for articulating the entity in clear terms. Place ballet makes one implicit dimension of lifeworlds explicit. It provides an articulated concept that might be useful for creating, regenerating, and protecting places.11

Notes 1 This chapter was originally published in Anne Buttimer and David Seamon, eds., The Human Experience of Space and Place, pp. 148–165 (London: Croom Helm, 1980; Routledge Revivals, 2015). The author thanks Routledge publishers for allowing the chapter to be reprinted here. 2 On phenomenology, its history and method, see Natanson (1962), Wilde (1963), and Spiegelberg (1965). Examples of empirical phenomenology can be found in Giorgi et al. (1971, 1975). 3 In practice, this definition discounts reflexive movements such as blinking, breathing, swallowing, and so forth. 4 On behaviorism, see Taylor (1967), Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1963); and Koch (1964). There is not one behaviorist theory but many. Some behaviorists recognize cognition as a significant intervening process in the stimulus-response sequence; see, for example, Tolman (1973). 5 See Hull (1952), Stea and Blaut (1973), and Getis and Boots (1971). 6 For example, Lynch (1961), Stea and Downs (1973), Moore and Golledge (1976), and Leff (1978). 7 A full account of this group process is provided in Seamon (1979). 8 Complete statements of these and following accounts can be found in Seamon (1979). 9 Again, it is important to realize that some behaviorists interpret cognition as an important intervening process between stimulus and response; see note above. 10 Merleau-Ponty (1962). For further discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s significance here, see Seamon (1979). The term “body-subject” is drawn from philosopher Mary Rose Barral (1965). She writes: “[T]he body-subject, in discovering the visible world, does not appropriate things, but rather approaches them and thereby opens itself to the world. There is really no clear distinction between the things seen and the body-subject seeing” (Barral 1965, p. 54). Similarly, one can say that there is no clear distinction between bodily movement and the environment in which that bodily movement unfolds. 11 This possibility is considered further in Seamon (1979, Ch. 19).

References Barral, M. R. (1965). Merleau-Ponty: The role of the body-subject in interpersonal relations. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Bollnow, O. (1967). Lived space. In Lawrence, N. and O’Connor, D., eds., Readings in existential phenomenology (pp. 178–186). Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Downs, R. and Stea, D., eds. (1973). Image and environment: Cognitive mapping and spatial behavior. Chicago: Aldine.

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Getis, A. and Boots, B. M. (1971). Spatial behavior: Rats and men. Professional Geographer, 23, 11–14. Giorgi, A. (1970). Psychology as a human science: A phenomenologically based approach. New York: Harper & Row. Giorgi, A., Fischer, C. and Murray, E., eds. (1975). Duquesne studies in phenomenological psychology, vol. 2. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Giorgi, A., Fischer, W. and von Eckartsberg, R., eds. (1971). Duquesne studies in phenomenological psychology, vol. 1. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Hilgard, E. R., Atkinson, R. and Atkinson, L. (1974). Introduction to psychology. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Hockett, C. F. (1973). Man’s place in nature. New York: McGraw-Hill. Horsley, C. B. (1978). Making a city neighborhood. New York Times, December 24, Secs. 8–9, pp. 1–2. Hull, C. (1952). A behavior system. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. New York: Vintage. Koch, S. (1964). Psychology and emerging conceptions of knowledge as unitary. In Wann, T. W., ed., Behaviourism and phenomenology (pp. 1–45). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leff, H. (1978). Experience, environment, and human potentials. New York: Oxford University Press. Lynch, K. (1961). The image of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception, trans. C. Smith. New York: Humanities Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963). The structure of behavior, trans. A. L. Fisk. Boston: Beacon Press. Moore, G. T. (1979). Knowing about environmental knowing: The current state of theory and research on environmental cognition. Environment and Behavior, 11, 33–70. Moore, G. T. and Golledge, R. G., eds. (1976). Environmental knowing: Theories, research, and methods. Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchison, and Ross. Natanson, M. (1962). Phenomenology: A viewing. Literature, philosophy, and the social sciences (pp. 3–25). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ́ Nordin, C. (1976). Varbergs torg I tiden. In Varbergs Museum-Årsbok 1976 (pp. 111–161). Varberg, Sweden: Varberg Museum. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Seamon, D. (1979). A geography of the lifeworld. New York: St. Martin’s Press [reprinted 2015, Routledge]. Seamon, D. and Nordin, C. (1980). Market place as place ballet: The example of Varberg, Sweden. Landscape, 24, pp. 35–41. Slater, P. (1970). The pursuit of loneliness: American culture at the breaking point. Boston: Beacon Press. Spiegelberg, H. (1965). The phenomenological movement: An historical introduction, vols. 1 and 2. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Stea, D. and Blaut, J. M. (1973). Notes toward a developmental theory of spatial learning. In Downs, R. and Stea, D., eds., Image and environment: Cognitive mapping and spatial behavior (pp. 51–62). Chicago: Aldine. Taylor, C. (1967). Psychological behaviorism. In Encyclopedia of philosophy, vol. 1 (pp. 516–520). New York: Macmillan and the Free Press. Tolman, C. (1973). Cognitive maps in rats and men. In Downs, R. and Stea, D., eds., Image and environment: Cognitive mapping and spatial behavior (pp. 27–50). Chicago: Aldine [originally published in Psychological Review, 35 (1948), 189–208]. Wilde, J. (1963). Existence and the world of freedom. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Zeitlin, I. M. (1973). Rethinking sociology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

5 WHITHER PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH? Possibilities for Environmental and Place Studies

In this chapter, I review the current state of phenomenology.1 To focus discussion, I highlight three conceptual and methodological concerns, the first of which is “placing phenomenology”—i.e., examining recent academic controversies relating to what phenomenology is as a philosophy, research method, and way of understanding. Second, I discuss “evaluating phenomenology”—i.e., considering what trustworthiness is in phenomenological research and how descriptive and interpretive validity is to be gauged phenomenologically. Third, I discuss “displacing phenomenology”—i.e., asking if phenomenology has run its course academically and whether it must be recast as so-called “post-phenomenology” or “critical phenomenology.” I conclude by reviewing phenomenological work relating to place studies, giving major attention to the question of geographical rootedness versus mobility.

Placing Phenomenology In the last few years, there has appeared a spate of exchanges on the nature of phenomenology written by eminent phenomenological thinkers Amedeo Giorgi, James Morley, Jonathan A. Smith, Max van Manen, and Dan Zahavi. From what I can tell, this set of exchanges began because of a controversial book, Phenomenology as Qualitative Research, written by non-phenomenologist and nursing-science researcher John Paley (2017). In this work, Paley was highly critical of phenomenological research as used by health scientists, particularly in the field of nursing. His most damning criticism was that phenomenological researchers offer no precise method for explaining how they arrive at the interpretive meanings they claim to identify in experiential descriptions (e.g., respondent narratives arising from openended interviews). He ended his book by advising nursing researchers to think twice about adopting a phenomenological approach in their research. DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-6

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In developing his criticism, Paley drew largely on the discussions of phenomenological research as laid out by Giorgi, Smith, and van Manen. Unsettled by what they considered to be an unfair and erroneous understanding of their work, Giorgi (2017) and van Manen (2017c) both wrote spirited critiques of Paley’s book; Paley responded with fire-rousing rejoinders (Paley, 2018a, 2018b). Around the same time that Paley’s book appeared, the editors of Qualitative Health Research published a special 2017 journal issue on phenomenological research, headlined with two opening articles by van Manen (2017a, 2017b): “But Is It Phenomenology?” and “Phenomenology in its Original Sense.” In the first article, van Manen argued that one of the most popular current methods associated with phenomenological research—Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)— was not correctly phenomenological in method or results. This discussion led to a 2018 rejoinder, “Yes, It Is Phenomenological,” by Jonathan A. Smith (2018), the principal founder of IPA. In turn, Smith’s commentary was responded to by van Manen (2018), who held to his original criticisms of IPA and developed them further. Smith (2010) and Giorgi (2010, 2011) had already participated in a backand-forth debate as to whether IPA was genuinely phenomenological. Giorgi declared that it was not. Perhaps because of Smith and van Manen’s considerable disagreement in the QHR exchange, the journal editors published a 2019 response to both commentaries by the distinguished phenomenological philosopher Dan Zahavi (2019b), who entitled his entry, “Getting It Quite Wrong,” arguing that both van Manen and Smith misunderstood phenomenology. In addition, Zahavi (2019a) published a critical commentary on Giorgi’s phenomenological method; and, with philosopher Kristian Martiny, a critical commentary on phenomenological research in nursing studies (Zahavi and Martiny 2019). This second entry provoked a spirited rebuttal from psychologist James Morley (2019), an associate of Giorgi. In reference to Zahavi as a philosopher, Morley (2019, p. 163) made the provocative point that “It has been remarkable the extent to which so many phenomenological philosophers have been so unaware of the divergent ways in which phenomenology has been applied to qualitative research.” I bring forward this series of commentaries and critiques because they demonstrate the wide range of ways in which phenomenology is interpreted and understood today. Philosopher Herbert Spiegelberg (1982, p. xxviii) emphasized that there are as many phenomenologies as there are phenomenologists, and the competing claims laid out in these several, often contradictory, entries illustrate some of the most glaring disagreements, of which here I highlight three: (1) Disagreements about substantive focus: Does phenomenology entail interpretive exegesis of seminal phenomenological texts by Husserl, Heidegger, MerleauPonty, Lacan, and so forth? Or is phenomenology a continuing process of discovering phenomena via openness, wonder, and firsthand encounter, whether via one’s own experience or experiences as described by others?

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(2) Disagreements about insight: Are phenomenological claims discovered or constructed? Are phenomenological realizations always already present in experience or are they creatively generated by the researcher and therefore a result of human intervention and invention? (3) Disagreements about how the phenomenon is to be used phenomenologically: Does phenomenology emphasize experiential descriptions, or does it use those experiential descriptions as a means for broader conceptual interpretations and generalizations? (1) Disagreements about Substantive Focus These disagreements are particularly pronounced in the back-and-forth commentaries between van Manen and Zahavi, who identify considerably different starting and ending points for phenomenological research. For van Manen, phenomenology focuses on rich, thorough descriptions of lived experience that unfold via an engaged openness to the phenomenon: “the study of how things appear, show, or give themselves in lived experience or in consciousness” (van Manen 2017a, p. 775). He writes that phenomenology “is driven by a sense of wonder and enigma regarding the meaningfulness of human existence, phenomena, and events” (van Manen 2019, p. 914). Van Manen (2019, p. 910) criticizes Zahavi’s work because it involves little actual phenomenological discovery but emphasizes instead a “philosophical exegesis” of the major phenomenological thinkers, particularly Husserl. These cerebral explications, says van Manen (2019, p. 913), are mostly produced by philosophers, who “argue about issues of phenomenology rather than do a phenomenology of lifeworld phenomena or events. For many outsiders, the technical philosophical terminology [of these thinkers] … can be rather impenetrable.” Such sophisticated conceptual analysis and interpretation may be useful for philosophical clarifications of phenomenology, but: That is only half the story—the mission of modern phenomenology transcends foundational and exegetical philosophical theorizing. To do phenomenological research is a more comprehensive and thoughtful project than proposed by Dan Zahavi. (van Manen 2019, p. 910) In turn, Zahavi (2019b, p. 901) criticizes van Manen’s phenomenological approach because it has “little to do with phenomenology understood as a specific method or tradition in philosophy.” When the major phenomenological thinkers engaged in phenomenological philosophizing, they most definitely were not simply seeking to offer fine-grained descriptions of the qualitative character of different experiences …. Amassing experiential descriptions is a poor substitute for the systematic and argumentative work that we find in the

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phenomenological philosophers. Offering descriptions of “what this experience is like” would not allow us to elucidate the kind of questions that the phenomenological philosophers have often been occupied with, say, the relation between perceptual intentionality and scientific rationality [or] the link between subjectivity and objectivity …. It is no coincidence that many of the phenomenologists dismissed a purely descriptive endeavor devoid of systematic ambitions as mere ‘picture-book phenomenology’.2 (Zahavi 2019b, p. 901) In responding to van Manen and Zahavi’s concerns, I would argue that, yes, we need the conceptual exegeses of the major phenomenological works, but we also need accurate, comprehensive explications of specific lifeworlds, natural attitudes, and lived experiences. As Zahavi demands, we must continue to write about phenomenology, but we also must do phenomenology and perhaps recognize lifeworld phenomena about which earlier phenomenological philosophers were unaware. For example, recent phenomenological research relating to environmental concerns has identified phenomena like place, atmosphere, environmental encounter, lived emplacement, and environmental embodiment—all phenomena mostly ignored by first-generation phenomenological philosophers but offering useful new angles on that earlier phenomenological work. In this sense, both Zahavi (2019c, p. 9) and van Manen (2019, p. 924) agree that “if phenomenology is to avoid the dead end of stale abstractions, it has to reconnect to the richness of everyday life” (Zahavi 2019c, p. 9). Ultimately, phenomenology as a way of conceptual and applied study is defined, understood, and conducted in a wide range of ways. One of the most accessible scholars writing the kind of careful intellectual exegesis appreciated by Zahavi is philosopher Dermot Moran; for example, his introduction to phenomenology (Moran 2000) and his articles on the habitual dimension of lifeworld as understood by Husserl (Moran 2011, 2014) are particularly lucid in demonstrating how the seminal philosophical texts in phenomenology remain an important source for understanding human being and human life. As a means to understand the much broader range of phenomenological research currently being conducted, I recommend psychotherapist Linda Finlay’s Phenomenology for Therapists (Finlay 2011), which remains one of the most fairminded efforts to place the wide range of phenomenologists and phenomenological approaches and demonstrate how they relate to the same conceptual and methodological tradition. Finlay illustrates this range of phenomenological possibilities as it can incorporate both thinking and feeling, and both cerebral effort and intuitive discovery: Phenomenological descriptions often blur the boundaries between science and art …. Some phenomenological researchers are more concerned to be rigorous and systematic, taking a science-like approach to offering finegrained normative descriptions. Others take imaginative flight using poetic

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flourishes, images, and metaphors. Rather than see phenomenology as either science or art, it might best be considered along a continuum with pure rigorous, scientific description on one end and fluidly poetic interpretation on the other, with most practice falling somewhere in between. (Finlay 2011, pp. 18–19) (2) Disagreements about Insight These disagreements relate to whether phenomenological realizations appear via empathetic, serendipitous openness or are arbitrarily generated via imposed intellectual effort. How, in other words, is meaning distilled from experience or text? This concern is central to nursing researcher John Paley’s claim that the so-called “discoveries” of phenomenological inquiry incorporate “self-deception” because phenomenologists can offer no set of procedures or guidelines to explain how these moments of discovery happen or how they can be claimed to be accurate or reliable: If the researcher does not specify criteria for what counts as a “deeper meaning”; if she fails to explain how she identifies the “deeper meaning”; if she does not say why the “deeper meaning” is important and what we’re supposed to do with it; if she does not … spell out the relation between the “deeper meaning” of the text and a sociological theory … then why should the reader looking for solid evidence take any notice of her? (Paley 2017, p. 26) For sure, this criticism is difficult to counter because, as Spiegelberg (1982, p. 672) emphasized, “phenomenology begins in silence. Only he [or she] who has experienced genuine perplexity and frustration in the face of the phenomena when trying to find the proper description for them knows what phenomenological seeing really means.” In phenomenological research, there is the assumption that sincere interest in the phenomenon will sooner or later offer the space for that phenomenon to reveal itself in the ways it is. One thinks of Heidegger’s enigmatic description of phenomenology: “To let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself ” (Heidegger 1962, p. 58). How, in other words, might we engage the phenomenon so that it freely has the space and time to be what it is rather than what we might suppose, imagine, claim, or dictate it to be? (Seamon 2018, p. 10). As a social constructionist who assumes that meaning is actively imposed rather than integral to the phenomenon, Paley cannot accept the “aha!” moments of seeing that phenomenologists claim possible. Because of his ontological, epistemological, and professional starting points, Paley’s criticism is not surprising, since he has not conducted phenomenological research himself and appears to be unfamiliar with these sudden moments of insight that phenomenological effort can facilitate. There is no easy counter for Paley’s criticism other than to say that, once one becomes proficient in phenomenology, these moments of insight do happen, much

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of the time spontaneously with little or no intellectual intervention. Van Manen depicts these unexpected moments in which the phenomenologist better “sees” the phenomenon as “meaning insights.” He writes: [M]eaning insights depend on a “latency” that eventuates an experience of clarity. This clarity of … meaningfulness may be sudden but is more associated with a sense of opening oneself and a constant searching for understanding the meaning of something. Indeed, this opening and searching may be associated with the phenomenological epoché (opening up) and the reduction (closing down and focusing on something) …. Meaning insights tend to occur when we wonder about the sense of the significance of the originary meaning of an experiential phenomenon. Originary does not mean new or original. Originary means inceptual: originary insights reveal the primal meaning and significance of a phenomenon …. Insightfulness should not be confused with creativity. From a phenomenological perspective, the occurrence of a “flash of insight” is more intriguing than understanding it as a creative act. In a creative act, the subject is the creator, the agent of the creation. But inceptual insights do not necessarily depend on my creative agency, rather an inceptual thought may happen to me as a gift, a grace—an event that I could neither plan nor foresee …. The problem for phenomenological researchers is that a meaningful insight often cannot be secured by a planned systematic method. There are no technicalities, procedures, schemes, packages, or programs that will somehow produce or capture an insightful thought or creative insight. (van Manen 2017b, pp. 822–823) Though I understand Paley’s dubiousness regarding these meaning insights, I agree with van Manen that they occur exactly in the way he describes: unexpected, surprising, and often happening only after a long effort of “being with” the phenomenon and hoping that something will be seen. One of my strongest personal recollections of such a moment is when I was writing the dissertation that would eventually become A Geography of the Lifeworld (Seamon 1979). I had collected some 1,500 firsthand observations on “everyday environmental experience” from focus groups that met weekly for several months. One afternoon, in a discouraged mood, I yet again read through these observations, despondent because I could find no thematic structure to house the observations conceptually. Suddenly, I realized that almost all the observations had to do with one of three broad themes: everyday movement (grounded in the habituality of the lived body and environmental embodiment); everyday rest (including “places for things” and “at-homeness”) and everyday encounter (ranging from obliviousness to noticing, watching, and heightened contact with some aspect of the world). I can honestly say that this moment was revelatory, happening in an instant; the threefold structure “sprang” from the observations rather than from some arbitrary, predefined structure.

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Here, we face one of the most controversial aspects of phenomenological work: that to see and understand the phenomenon, one must genuinely believe that there are things to be seen. If phenomenologists are to really “discover,” they must be deeply interested in their phenomena and wholeheartedly trust that there are things to be understood, provided one proceeds with patience, earnestness, persistence, and hope. (3) Disagreements about Locating and Defining the Phenomenon These disagreements relate to whether phenomenology involves only the explication of a particular experience, or whether that explication is to be placed in some larger systematic structure whereby human life and experience are understood more broadly. Ignoring Paley’s criticisms, Giorgi, Smith, and van Manen all agree that phenomenology requires revelatory moments of seeing and understanding. The point of contention, however, is whether these revelations remain within the sphere of experience or become a starting point for wider interpretation and theory. This disagreement is central to Giorgi, Smith, and van Manen’s discussions, though each provides different answers. All three researchers accept that phenomenology’s starting point is everyday lived experience, but each has a different understanding of how that experience is to be discovered and used phenomenologically. Among these three researchers, Giorgi takes the most conventional phenomenological position, aiming to remain close to original phenomenological sources, particularly Husserl’s requirement for a “phenomenological reduction” (i.e., making certain one focuses on the phenomenon without supposition or prejudice). The phenomenological aim is to locate accurate descriptions of essential structures of human experience grounded in and remaining faithful to specific experiential accounts; interpretive embellishment is to be watched for and avoided. As Giorgi (2009, p. 127) explains, A descriptive [phenomenological] analysis … does not go beyond the given …. The descriptive researcher obviously sees the same ambiguities that an interpretive analysis would see but is not motivated to clarify them by bringing in non-given or speculative factors. An interpretive analysis … usually strives for an interpretation that is theoretically elegant or … relatively complete. A descriptive result is more inchoate; it dares not go beyond what is present. Gaps in the results are filled by obtaining more [descriptive evidence], not by theoretical speculation. In practice, Giorgi gathers experiential accounts via interviews or written protocols that are then transcribed and analyzed in a multi-step process that, besides the researcher’s setting aside all past understandings of the phenomenon (the phenomenological reduction), includes studying the descriptions thoroughly so that one pictures the descriptive series as a whole; then carefully examining the descriptions again, breaking them into meaning units to make the descriptions more manageable and understandable phenomenologically. Next, any broader lived meanings indicated by the experiential accounts are identified and elaborated. Finally, the

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researcher integrates the analysis to describe the phenomenon most broadly, making sure this descriptive structure accurately incorporates and reflects the original experiential accounts. Morley (2019) emphasizes that: Giorgi’s method cannot be understood apart from his wider, more radical theoretical project of inaugurating an autonomous psychology on a purely phenomenological basis—a whole disciplinary paradigm that is a unified theoretical approach, methodology, and specifically psychological content. In contrast to Giorgi’s emphasis on description and broader disciplinary aims, van Manen is more freewheeling and interpretive. He poses phenomenological inquiry in terms of a questioning: For example, what is it like to be bored? What is it like to have a conversation? What is it like to experience a meaningful look? The aim is to draw on real-world accounts of human situations to understand the concrete experience (van Manen 2017b, pp. 815–819). He explains: [T]he phenomenological feature of “lived experience” aims to be a corrective: It guards against the common inclination to understand our experiences prematurely in a cliché, conceptual, predetermined, biographical, theoretical, polemical, or taken-for-granted manner. In other words, the adjective “lived” only becomes methodologically significant once we understand the import of the role it plays in phenomenological inquiry to investigate the primal or inceptual meaning aspects of experience as we “live” through them. (van Manen 2017b, p. 812) Jonathan Smith’s phenomenological approach is yet again different and largely focused on practical, real-world situations and problems, especially those relating to health and illness (Smith 2011). The aim is idiographic accounts of respondents’ experiences and understandings and how the respondents themselves make sense of those experience and understandings. For example, what is life like after having a heart attack? What is the experience of individuals who must use a ventricular assist device (VAD) for a failing heart? How is dialysis treatment or chronic fatigue syndrome experienced? Typically, the IPA researcher starts by eliciting each individual’s experience separately and then locating patterns across the individual cases. Smith speaks of a double hermeneutic—in other words, the complex situation in which the researcher attempts to understand the ways that respondents understand their experience. He explains that, for the researcher, part of the complication derives from the fact that access to [the experience studied] comes from a participant who is him/herself also engaged in making sense of what is happening to them. For this reason, I have described the process of IPA as a double hermeneutic, whereby the researcher is trying to make sense of the participants trying to make sense of what is happening to them. (Smith 2011, p. 10)

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From my perspective, the most critical part of phenomenological method relates to the particular phenomenon in which one is interested. In other words, the nature of the phenomenon plays the central role in establishing how it will be approached methodologically and toward what degree of description or interpretation the researcher must aim. Smith and van Manen offer phenomenological approaches that are more open-ended methodologically, whereas Giorgi offers a descriptive process that is more directed and systematic. Yet again, the recent phenomenological work on place and emplacement is much broader and more eclectic in methods of explication and in substantive conclusions (e.g., Casey 2009; Malpas 2018; Mugerauer 2008; Seamon 2018, 2021). Conceptually and procedurally, there is a wide range of ways phenomenologically to identify, describe, and interpret any phenomenon. The central aim is finding ways whereby that phenomenon is most likely able to present itself as fully as possible in the ways it actually is. On one hand, the phenomena of phenomenological research may be quotidian and singular—for example, studying the habitual, daily walking routines among older people visiting a neighborhood park (van Eck and Pijpers 2016). On the other hand, the phenomena examined may be much broader, more generalizable, and therefore more applicable to phenomenological theory—for example, probing the lived and conceptual relationship among Husserl’s notions of lifeworld, homeworld, and alienworld (Donohoe 2014; Seamon 2013; Steinbock 1995).

Evaluating Phenomenology For any manner of qualitative research, there is always Paley’s question of descriptive and interpretive trustworthiness. How reliable are the evidentiary sources of a researcher’s broader claims and do those claims evenhandedly and thoroughly arise from those sources and represent them accurately? One way to circumvent some of the criticisms of phenomenology highlighted above is to evaluate phenomenological studies in terms of the finished research product rather than emphasizing method and underlying presumptions as to what phenomenology is or is not. For such an evaluation, however, is needed some set of reasonable criteria whereby one can adjudicate a study’s relative validity, comprehensiveness, and merit (Madison 1988; Polkinghorne 1983; Smith 2011). Philosopher Brice R. Wachterhauser (1996, p. 234) argues that the need is “a set of practical guidelines that guide the pursuit of truth in the human sciences.” In developing such a possibility more concretely, Wachterhauser identifies four evaluative criteria, which I bring forward here because they are readily applicable to research in environmental and architectural phenomenology. These four evaluative criteria are: (1) comprehensiveness; (2) semantic depth; (3) inclusivity; and (4) architectonic structure. They can be summarized as follows (Seamon 2017, pp. 351–352): (1) Comprehensiveness, whereby the interpretation is complete in that it addresses essential aspects of the text or situation; without comprehensiveness, “any realm of experience will be one-sided, and as such its truth will be threatened by distortion” (Wachterhauser 1996, p. 234).

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(2) Semantic depth, whereby the interpretation evokes a thickness of interpretive understanding that incorporates past, present, and future experiences; the interpretation “should be able to ‘prove itself ’ over time by extending the reader’s present experience as it arises” (Wachterhauser 1996, p. 235). (3) Inclusivity, whereby the interpretation offers an encompassing frame of reference that incorporates and shelters less inclusive interpretive texts; the interpretation offers a thoroughness “that demonstrates its superior truth over other texts in that it can give a more comprehensive interpretation of some phenomenon that is suggestive of both the strengths and weaknesses of other accounts” (Wachterhauser 1996, p. 235). (4) Architectonic structure, whereby the interpretation provides a fitting place for all the interpretive parts; the interpretation works architectonically and teleologically “in that it orders and structures our experience into an intelligible pattern” (Wachterhauser 1996, p. 235). These four criteria are useful because they link the quality of a phenomenological study with research results rather than with conceptual claims or methodological procedures. Does the study provide a descriptive and conceptual structure whereby the particular phenomenon is presented thoroughly? Does the study offer an interpretation that resonates with many readers’ experiences and makes sense in relation to similar situations, whether in the past or present? Does the study pay heed to other research related to the research topic, and does it provide an interpretive structure in which to place and clarify that other research? Does the study successfully integrate its descriptive and interpretive parts into a larger conceptual structure that makes sense experientially and intellectually? Wachterhauser (1996, p. 234) emphasizes that these criteria are not “rules in the sense of either necessary or sufficient conditions …. Instead, these [criteria] may be thought of as heuristic ideals that guide us in many situations of inquiry but do not bind us universally.” In short, these four criteria attend to research results rather than research process and at least partly circumvent the three disagreements highlighted earlier in relation to phenomenological aims and methods. Wachterhauser’s criteria offer one means to “set aside” the many different phenomenological approaches and styles, instead giving primary evaluative attention to thoroughness, soundness, rigor, and believability.3

Displacing Phenomenology Though phenomenological research remains an important part of the social and human sciences, there have been significant efforts since the 1990s for revision, rejuvenation, or elimination (see Cresswell 2013, Chs. 9–12). This critique of phenomenological work developed in a wide range of ways, sparked largely by postmodernist thinking that included post-structural, feminist, critical, assemblage, social constructionist, and non-representational points of view (Seamon 2015). A major claim directing much of this work is the impossibility of identifying “deep, generative structures beneath the variety of the surface of life” (Cresswell 2013, p. 207).

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Post-structural thinking moves away from order, unity, synthesis, generalization, and truth; rather, it emphasizes indeterminacy, diversity, local narratives, particularity, and contingent possibilities (Seamon 2015, p. 45). In many ways, post-structural perspectives contradict the basic phenomenological principle assuming that human life involves a certain amount of unrecognized pattern and structure that can be progressively discovered and ordered via phenomenological efforts. If, however, much post-structural thinking calls phenomenology into question, there has also developed in the last several years a perspective most often called critical phenomenology or post-phenomenology, a set of sometimes-contradictory perspectives whereby a good amount of phenomenological thinking is maintained but extended in critical, post-structural ways (e.g., Ash and Simpson 2016; De Preester 2010; Gibas 2019; Kinkaid 2019; Simonsen 2012; Talebian and Uraz 2018). As geographer Jennifer Lea (2009, p. 374) explains, [N]one of these post-phenomenological accounts “leave behind” the phenomenological … but rather refigure what experience might be, where it might be located, how it comes about, and how we, as social scientists, might account for it. These post-phenomenological modes of working revisit the resources offered by phenomenology, critically returning to concepts such as “dwelling,” but working them through [in innovative ways] …. [A]ll these post-phenomenological writings investigate exactly what it means to transform, rather than abandon, phenomenologies, and in doing [so], continue to push the boundaries of what it means to be in the world. One effort to consider what post-phenomenology and critical phenomenology offer environmental and architectural concerns is a special 2018 issue of the architectural journal, Log, edited by architectural theorist Bryan E. Norwood and entitled “Disorienting Phenomenology.” Norwood uses the word “disorienting” because he claims that conventional phenomenological work presupposes an essentialist, universalist, place-bound subject unthinkingly imagined as male, white, straight, abled, Western, and privileged. In contrast, critical phenomenologists work to suspend their “stable clichés about the world and, importantly, about the subject” (Norwood 2018, p. 18). The aim is “to think about humanness without narrowing it to a holistic entity, to a transcendental identity that mirrors the root identity of colonizing, Enlightenment man” (Norwood 2018, p. 19). The result might be “a way of facing uneasiness, difference, queerness, and otherness” (Norwood 2018, p. 19). In short, the critical-phenomenological aim is “to replace the normal with the strange and to challenge us to learn to live with disorientation” (Allen and Hosseinnia 2018, p. 4). Most of the Log articles attempt such “suspensions of normativity” (Allen and Hosseinnia 2018, p. 4) as they might have architectural, environmental, and place significance. Adrienne Brown (2018, p. 28), for example, examines “architecture’s role in shaping the materialization of race.” Lisa Guenther (2018, p. 42) uses the example of gated communities as they become environmental agents

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for producing places “partitioned and selectively shared among those who belong inside the security perimeter of the fence or wall, and from which those who do not belong are properly excluded on account of their perceived impropriety.” Jos Boys considers how phenomenologies of bodily disableness might shift taken-forgranted norms and attitudes: [O]bjects and spaces are not out there as sensory representations of our deepest psyches. Rather they … contribute to enabling or disabling times and spaces through everyday conduct. Where normative social and material practices are dominated by able-bodied rules and routines, and by able-bodied theories and discourses—and where this very act of unacknowledged privilege and domination stems from an implicit and “commonsense” framing of bodies as separately abled or disabled, independent and active, or dependent and passive—then disability as a concept and disabled people as a constituency disappear. (Boys 2018, p. 65) In seeking to extend the range of human experience and to accommodate individuals and groups whose spheres of experience are different from the experiences of “universal man,” this work in critical and post-phenomenology offers valuable directions for phenomenological research. What is questionable about the “critical” and “post-” labels is that almost everything these thinkers aim to accomplish can be readily accommodated by conventional phenomenological principles, concepts, and methods. Since the 1990s, for example, there has been significant work demonstrating that phenomenology can deal with individual and cultural differences (e.g., Chung-Chi 2004; Finlay 2011; Seamon 2015). I agree that phenomenology is concerned, first of all, with essential, universal dimensions of human experience—for example, the nature of environmental embodiment or lived emplacement. But phenomenology also recognizes that there are other dimensions of experience: first, the fact that each of us is unique, and various aspects of that uniqueness—e.g., our age, gender, sexuality, physical size, degree of ableness—contribute to what human life is about. Second, we typically associate ourselves with a particular social, cultural, and economic context—how we see ourselves racially, ethnically, politically, socio-economically, religiously, and so forth. My point is that phenomenology as conventionally understood can handle these extraordinarily various aspects of human being. In short, there can be a phenomenology of human differences as well as commonalities (Seamon 2018, p.178). One admires the Log contributors’ call for a more comprehensive phenomenology that confronts “the unfamiliar, the surprising, the unhomely” (Legrand 2018, p. 23). One must emphasize, however, that conventional phenomenological approaches and methods may deal with such matters best, simply because phenomenologists have already established a language, stance, method, and set of unique concepts (e.g., intentionality, natural attitude, lifeworld, and homeworld) that readily offer a place of openness to and for these themes.

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Questioning Place, At-Homeness, and Lived Emplacement What is perhaps most problematic phenomenologically about the special issue of Log is its calling into question certain inviolate aspects of human life and experience present regardless of sexual, social, cultural, political, or historical context. The most debatable contention is whether human beings can, in their lives, dispense with the importance of place, lived emplacement, and at-homeness. Norwood (2018, p. 22) suggests that the need is to disquiet and disorient oneself, a way of dis-placing myself rather than projecting ways in which I can be more at home in a world that is mine. I am not trying to claim that an ethics of making humans at home is wrong …. Rather, I am suggesting that if this holistic norm is posited in advance of the practice of phenomenology, then a subjectivity that does not experience that home will be positioned as damaged, as disabled, as inadequate, as the still colonized Other. The way I am as a straight, white, middle-class man has been and remains privileged in the way the orientation and placing of the world is distributed. But it is not the measure of having a body schema or a body; it is only one configuration of a contingent set of practices and habits. The practice of phenomenology should provincialize my embodiment rather than universalize it. Architecture doesn’t need phenomenology; it needs phenomenologies. In fact, phenomenological research has always facilitated phenomenologies. As I emphasized above, phenomenological research has always been able to consider human life and experience in both its universal aspects (we are all human beings) and its particular aspects (probing individual, social, cultural, economic, and historical differences). As far as individuals and groups who, for whatever reason, do not have or have lost their place and home (refugees, asylum seekers, homeless persons, people forcefully separated from their home place, people whose homeplace has been destroyed by war), the question becomes whether place, at-homeness, and emplacement remain integral constituents of a “good life” and, if so, how policy, advocacy, design, and planning might help forge a renewed rootedness and at-homeness. Never would a phenomenological perspective claim, as Norwood intimates, that the lives and experiences of these placeless or displaced individuals are somehow “damaged” or “inadequate.” More broadly, the articles in the special issue of Log point to the considerable intellectual and practical damage that post-structural, critical, and social constructionist perspectives have wrought in their emphasis on mobility, rootlessness, assemblages, rhizomes, and global flows at the expense of places, rootedness, at-homeness, environmental stability, and localities (Malpas 2018; Relph 2015, 2018; Seamon 2018; Seamon and Larsen 2021; Tomaney 2012, 2015). The phenomenological criticism is that an emphasis on mobility and flows reduces the lived wholeness of

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the movement-rest relationship to mobility only. Regardless of globalization and technological and digital innovations, lived emplacement and places are an inescapable stabilizing constituent of human life via which people are automatically provided one mode of spatial order and environmental identity. Unless human life becomes entirely virtual and independent of material environments, lived emplacement remains an essential lifeworld quality. In relation to human experience, place-related constituents like rootedness, at-homeness, and environmental identity are profoundly more than the “fetishizing” of “loss or recovery” (Norwood 2018, p. 12, note 4). In Place and Experience, philosopher Jeff Malpas (2018, p. 197, note 22) argues that discounting rootedness, at-homeness, and place is hazardous existentially and historically because this point of view “refuse[s] what is a basic structure of human being and of the world as such.” Malpas accepts that home and place identity can readily be associated with “an obsessively introverted perspective, or with forms of xenophobic resistance to the unfamiliar and the foreign” (Malpas 2018, p. 197). He emphasizes, however, that it would be a serious mistake “to take such ‘pathologies of place’ as the norm and, on that basis, reject place as inherently problematic or dangerous. To do so would be likely, in fact, to reinforce those same pathologies or else create new ones,” since lived emplacement is always integral to human life. Malpas continues: Given that the fundamental structure of place and the relation to it cannot be treated as anything other than a necessary structure, the basic structure of place and the relation to place must indeed remain much the same now as it has been in the past. That this is so is reinforced by consideration of the fact that the apparent loss of place … is something that itself occurs … in and through the experience of places …. If we distinguish between, on the one hand, place as a general and encompassing structure—the complex bounded and interwoven structure of spatiality and temporality—and, on the other hand, place as it refers to individual places, each of which has its own character …, then it is easy to see how place must persist, even in the face of the apparent loss of place. Places can be objects of experience—as I experience this place or that place—but place is also that within and out of which experience arises. Any experience of the world, along with the appearing of things within the world, will thus always be from within the embrace of place. What is described as the loss of place is more properly described as an experience of place in which place is seemingly effaced in its very presentation. I find myself here, and yet in being here, I find nothing that marks off this place as distinctive—that marks it off as just the place that it is …. Here is the experience of being in a place that nevertheless also appears in such a way that it obscures its very character as a place, and so one can say that the experience is almost like being nowhere at all.

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Geographer John Tomaney offers some of the most perceptive thinking on the continuing importance today of localities, communities, and places (Tomaney 2007, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2016). Tomaney suggests that, in current post-structural thinking about places and locality, “local belonging is an anachronism in the context of hyper-mobility of (post)modernity.” Place attachment and identity are assumed to be little more than parochial, fixed boundedness and of little political or economic value in cosmopolitan globalization (Tomaney 2015, p. 507). Instead, he argues that the local belonging of place continues to matter to most people; that it can have individual and collective dimensions; that the notion of binary oppositions of cosmopolitan outlook versus local attachment is unhelpful, but that scales at which we belong may be multiple and changing. (Tomaney 2015, p. 511) Tomaney (2016, p. 95) concludes that “insideness persists as part of the human condition even alongside the growth of cosmopolitan values.” He continues: “local attachments remain crucial in human life as people seek a way of ‘being at home’ in an unstable world, although the way we belong may have changed” (Tomaney 2016, p. 97). The importance of place and sense of locality continues to be central in human life, even as many places of the world are transformed into placelessness, and many of the world’s peoples are without place. In spite of globalization, mobility, and technological innovations, places and lived emplacement are always required as an inescapable, stabilizing constituent of human life via which people are provided one mode of environmental and social taken-for-grantedness. Unless human experience becomes entirely severed from real-world environments because of virtual reality and the “metaverse,” places and lived emplacement will remain an essential, enduring feature of peoples’ lives everywhere.

Notes 1 This article was originally written for the 30th-anniversary issue of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology published in Fall, 2019. The entry has been revised to be a chapter in this edited collection. The author wishes to thank Ryan Otto, curator of Kansas State University’s New Prairie Press, for publishing assistance. 2 Since Zahavi published his first commentary on van Manen’s work (Zahavi 2019b), he has extended his criticism in Zahavi 2020. In his book-length introduction to phenomenology, Zahavi (2019c, pp. 122–129) is somewhat more supportive of the work of Giorgi, Smith, and van Manen. Zahavi (2019c, p. 123) explains that “there is an ongoing controversy about how narrowly or broadly one should define what counts as phenomenological. Should phenomenological qualitative research remain purely descriptive and seek to disclose essential structures, or should it rather focus on the particularity of individual persons and employ interpretation? Should it embrace and adopt part of Husserl’s philosophical methodology, or should it rather let its research be guided by various phenomenological concepts and distinctions?” 3 For a discussion of how these four criteria might be used to evaluate particular phenomenological research, see Seamon 2017, which considers the relative merits of philosopher

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Karsten Harries’ natural symbols (Harries 1997); architect theorist Thomas Thiis-Evensen’s architectural archetypes (Thiis-Evensen 1989); and comparative-religions scholar, Lindsay Jones’ Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture (Jones 2000).

References Allen, M. and Hosseinnia, K. (2018). Stranger thoughts: LOG’s “disorienting phenomenology.” Avery Review, 34 (October), 1–9. Ash, J. and Simpson, P. (2016). Geography and post-phenomenology. Progress in Human Geography, 40, 48–66. Boys, J. (2018). Crippling spaces? On dis/abling phenomenology. Log, 42 (winter/spring), 55–66. Brown, A. (2018). The architecture of racial phenomena. Log, 42 (winter/spring), 27–42. Casey, E. (2009). Getting back into place, 2nd edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chung-Chi, Y. (2004). Lifeworld, cultural difference and the idea of grounding. In Carr, D. and Chung-Chi, Y., eds., Space, time, and culture (pp. 177–187). Amsterdam: Kluwer. Cresswell, T. (2013). Geographic thought: A critical introduction. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell. De Preester, H. (2010). Post-phenomenology, embodiment and technics. Human Studies, 33, 339–345. Donohoe, J. (2014). Remembering places. New York: Lexington Books. Finlay, L. (2011). Phenomenology for therapists: Researching the lived world. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gibas, P. (2019). Toward a post-phenomenology of home. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1–14. doi: 10.1111/tran.12304. Giorgi, A. (2009). The descriptive phenomenological method in psychology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Giorgi, A. (2010). Phenomenology and the practice of science. Existential Analysis, 21, 3–22. Giorgi, A. (2011). IPA and science: A response to Jonathan Smith. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 42, 195–216. Giorgi, A. (2017). A response to the attempted critique of the scientific phenomenological method. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 48, 83–144. Guenther, L. (2018). A critical phenomenology of dwelling in carceral space. Log, 42 (­winter/spring), 35–42. Harries, K. (1997). The ethical function of architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. New York: Harper and Row. Jones, L. (2000). The hermeneutics of sacred architecture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kinkaid, E. (2019). Re-encountering Lefebvre: Toward a critical phenomenology of social space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1–20. doi:10.1177/0263775819854765. Lea, J. (2009). Post-phenomenology/post-phenomenological geographies. In Kitchin, R. and Thrift, N., eds., International encyclopedia of human geography (pp. 373–378). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Legrand, D. (2018). At home in the world? Suspending the reduction. Log, 42 (winter/ spring), 23–33. Madison, G. B. (1988). The hermeneutics of postmodernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Malpas, J. (2018). Experience and place, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. London: Routledge. Moran, D. (2011). Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of habituality and habitus. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 42, 53–76.

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Moran, D. (2014). The ego as substrate of habitualities: Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of the habitual self. Phenomenology and Mind, 6, 26–47. Morley, J. (2019). Phenomenology in nursing studies: New perspectives. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 93, 163–167. Mugerauer, R. (2008). Heidegger and homecoming. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Norwood, B. E. (2018). Disorienting phenomenology. Log, 42 (winter/spring), 11–22. Paley, J. (2017). Phenomenology as qualitative research. London: Routledge. Paley, J. (2018a). Meaning, lived experience, empathy and boredom: Max van Manen on phenomenology and Heidegger. Nursing Philosophy, 19 (3). doi:10.1111/nup.12211. Paley, J. (2018b). Phenomenology and qualitative research: Amedeo Giorgi’s hermetic epistemology. Nursing Philosophy, 19 (3). doi: 10.1111/nup.12212. Polkinghorne, D. (1983). Methodology for the human sciences. Albany: State University Press of NY. Relph, E. (2015). Place and connection. In Malpas, J., ed., The intelligence of place (pp. 177–204). London: Bloomsbury. Relph, E. (2018). Speculations about electronic media and place. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 29 (1), 14–18. Seamon, D. (1979). A geography of the lifeworld. London: Croom Helm. Seamon, D. (2013). Phenomenology and uncanny homecomings: Homeworld, alienworld, and being-at-home in Alan Ball’s HBO television series, six feet under. In Boscaljon, D., ed., Resisting the place of belonging (pp. 155–170). Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Seamon, D. (2015). Lived emplacement and the locality of being: A return to humanistic geography? In Aitken, S. and Valentine, G., eds., Approaches to human geography (pp.35–48). London: Sage. Seamon, D. (2017). Hermeneutics and architecture: Buildings-in-themselves and interpretive trustworthiness. In Janz, B., ed., Hermeneutics, space, and place (pp. 347–360). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Seamon, D. (2018). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routledge. Seamon, D. (2021). Place attachment and phenomenology: The dynamic complexity of place. In Manzo, L. and Devine-Wright, P., eds., Place attachment, 2nd edn (pp. 29–44). London: Routledge. Seamon, D. and Larsen, T. (2021). Humanistic geography. In Richardson, D., ed., International encyclopedia of geography [on-line]. New York: Wiley. doi: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg 0412.pub2. Simonsen, K. (2012). In quest of a new humanism: Embodiment, experience and phenomenology as critical geography. Progress in Human Geography, 37, 10–26. Smith, J. A. (2010). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: A reply to Amedeo Giorgi. Existential Analysis, 21, 186–192. Smith, J. A. (2011). Evaluating the contribution of interpretative phenomenological analysis. Health Psychology Review, 5, 9–27. Smith, J. A. (2018). “Yes, it is phenomenological”: A reply to Max van Manen’s critique of interpretive phenomenological analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 28, 1955–1958. Spiegelberg, H. (1982). The phenomenological movement. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Steinbock, A. (1995). Home and beyond: Generative phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Talebian, N. and Uraz, T. U. (2018). The post-phenomenology of place: Moving forward from phenomenological to post-structural readings on place. Open House International, 43 (2), 13–21. Thiis-Evensen, T. (1989). Archetypes in architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Tomaney, J. (2007). Keeping a beat in the dark: Narratives of regional identity in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25, 355–375. Tomaney, J. (2010). Paris and universe: Patrick Kavanagh’s poetics of the local. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, 311–325. Tomaney, J. (2012). Parochialism—a defence. Progress in Human Geography, 37, 658–672. Tomaney, J. (2015). Region and place II: Belonging. Progress in Human Geography, 39, 507–516. Tomaney, J. (2016). Insideness in an age of mobilities. In Freestone, R. and Liu, E., eds., Place and placelessness revisited (pp. 95–107). London: Routledge. van Eck, D. and Pijpers, R. (2016). Encounters in place ballet: A phenomenological perspective on older people’s walking routines in an urban park, Area, 49, 166–173. van Manen, M. (2017a). But is it phenomenology? Qualitative Health Research, 27, 775–779. van Manen, M. (2017b). Phenomenology in its original source. Qualitative Health Research, 27, 810–825. van Manen, M. (2017c). Phenomenology and meaning attribution. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 17, 1–12. van Manen, M. (2018). Rebuttal rejoinder: Present IPA for what it is—interpretative psychological analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 28, 1959–1968. van Manen, M. (2019). Rebuttal: Doing phenomenology on the things. Qualitative Health Research, 29, 908–925. Wachterhauser, B. R. (1996). Must we be what we say? Gadamer on truth in human sciences. In Wachterhauser, B. R., ed., Hermeneutics and modern philosophy (pp. 219–240). Albany: State University of New York Press. Zahavi, D. (2019a). Applied phenomenology: Why it is safe to ignore the epoché. Continental Philosophy Review. https//doi.org/10.1007/s11007-019-09463-y. Zahavi, D. (2019b). Getting it quite wrong: van Manen and Smith on phenomenology. Qualitative Health Research, 29, 900–907. Zahavi, D. (2019c). Phenomenology: The basics. London: Routledge. Zahavi, D. (2020). The practice of phenomenology: The case of Max van Manen. Nursing Philosophy, 21 (2). https://doi.org/10.1111/nup.12276. Zahavi, D. and Martiny, K. M. M. (2019). Phenomenology in nursing studies: New perspectives. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 93, 155–162.

PART II

Understanding Place Phenomenologically

6 MERLEAU-PONTY, LIVED BODY, AND PLACE Toward a Phenomenology of Human Situatedness

In this chapter, I draw on French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception and corporeal sensibility to consider the significance of human situatedness as expressed via place and place experience.1 I begin with an overview of phenomenology and a phenomenological perspective on place. I then discuss Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and lived body, emphasizing themes and concepts relating to peoples’ lived relationship with place. To illustrate how Merleau-Ponty’s conceptual understanding might be applied to real-world place experiences, I draw on two sources of experiential evidence, the first of which is a short, 500-word passage from critically acclaimed Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s magical-realist novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez 1967, pp. 246–248). The second source is a set of first-­person observations describing events and situations that I happened to take note of during weekday walks between my home and university office over the course of several months. The aim is to use these two descriptive sources for grounding, clarifying, and extending Merleau-Ponty’s broader philosophical claims, which are often difficult to understand, especially for newcomers. In doing phenomenological research, one faces the difficult conceptual and methodological question of interpretive accuracy and trustworthiness (Finlay 2011; Seamon 1917; Seamon and Gill 2016; van Manen 2014; Wachterhauser 1996). How, in other words, does the phenomenologist establish a convincing interpretive link between real-world experience and conceptual generalization? In this chapter, I suggest that one methodological means to reduce interpretive error is the use of contrasting but related texts that might offer a multifaceted illumination of the phenomenon being studied—in this case, place, lived embodiment, and human situatedness. Here, I draw on three such texts: first, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1962); second, García Márquez’s fictional narrative; DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-8

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and third, the first-person observations of my weekday walks. I call this method triangulation, whereby I use the three texts to illuminate, amplify, and validate each other (Seamon 2018, p. 17). In the literature on qualitative research, triangulation is more typically defined as a research approach whereby the researcher draws on multiple methods, data sources, evaluators, and conceptual approaches to identify different lived perspectives and to corroborate evidence from different data sources (Creswell 2007, p. 208; Willig 2001, p. 142; Yardley 2008, pp. 239–240). In this chapter, my use of triangulation is somewhat different in that the three texts I use for interpretive corroboration are of different descriptive ‘levels’—in other words, one text is Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical presentation, and the other two are narrative accounts of everyday experiences and events. My aim is to use these two narrative accounts to illustrate, via vignettes of everyday human experience, Merleau-Ponty’s central concepts of perception, body-subject, and lived embodiment. I contend that these accounts substantiate Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological claims and point to additional significant elements of human situatedness and place experience.

Place, Phenomenology, Natural Attitude, and Lifeworld I define place as any environmental locus that gathers human experiences, actions, and meanings spatially and temporally (Seamon 2013, p. 150). Places range from intimate to regional scale and include such environmental situations as a frequently used park bench, a cherished home, a favored neighborhood, a city associated with fond memories, or a geographical locale that is a regular vacation destination. Experientially, places are multivalent in their constitution and sophisticated in their dynamics. On one hand, places can be appreciated, loved, and cared for; on the other hand, they can be unappreciated, loathed, and despoiled. For the persons and groups involved, a place can invoke a wide range of sustaining, neutral, or debilitating actions, experiences, situations, and meanings (Seamon 2014). To understand better the constitution of place and place experience, I draw on a phenomenological approach that can be defined most simply as the description and interpretation of human experience, particularly its tacit, transparent dimensions which are usually unnoticed in everyday living.2 Phenomenologists use the term natural attitude to identify the unquestioned way in which people automatically accept the taken-for-grantedness of day-to-day life. In turn, phenomenologists use the term lifeworld to describe this everyday taken-for-grantedness, which, almost always, people in the natural attitude are unaware of reflectively (Finlay 2011; Seamon 2013). One major aim of phenomenology is to study the lifeworld’s taken-for-grantedness explicitly. Phenomenologists have become progressively interested in the phenomenon of place because it is a primary contributor to the spatial, environmental, and temporal constitution of any lifeworld, past, present, or future. As phenomenological philosophers Edward Casey (1997, 2009) and Jeff Malpas (2006, 2018) have powerfully demonstrated, human being is always human-being-in-place.

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In speaking of a lived inseparability between people and the places in which those people find themselves, Casey, Malpas, and other phenomenologists contend that place is not a material or geographical environment distinct from human beings but, rather, the indivisible, normally taken-for-granted phenomenon of ­person-or-people-experiencing-place.3 These phenomenologists emphasize the role of the lived body and environmental embodiment as integral aspects of place and place experience. This understanding is particularly indebted to MerleauPonty, to whose discussion of these topics I now turn.

Merleau-Ponty and Perception In all his work, Merleau-Ponty asks one central question: How can it be that human beings are present to a world that immediately makes sense?4 In our ordinary daily experience, we find ourselves in a particular moment of comprehensible experience that necessarily incorporates a taken-for-granted but understandable world in which our experience unfolds. In the sense that this world is there alongside us in a particular way without any necessary effort on our part, we can say we are enmeshed and entwined in our world, which, simultaneously, is enmeshed and entwined in us. Some manner of world is always present, whether that world is as small as a telephone booth or as expansive as the vista from the Grand Canyon’s rim. Every moment of our lives, we always find ourselves caught up and immersed in a world that is there before us in inescapable presence. Merleau-Ponty argues that the experiential foundation of this immersion-inworld is perception, which he relates to a lived body that simultaneously experiences, acts in, and is aware of the world that, typically, responds with immediate pattern, meaning, and contextual presence.5 Merleau-Ponty understands the lived body as a latent, lived relationship between an intentional but pre-reflective body and the world it encounters and perceives through continuous immersion, awareness, and actions. In this sense, perception is the immediate givenness of the world founded in corporeal sensibility (Cerbone 2008, pp. 128–131). Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 58) contends that perception is a foundational, always-present quality of human experience and meaning but difficult to grasp and articulate intellectually for two reasons; first, because its presence and significance typically lie beneath conscious cerebral awareness. Second, by its very nature, perception places itself in the background as it draws us out into the happenings of our world: “perception hides itself from itself … it is of the essence of consciousness to forget its own phenomena thus enabling ‘things’ to be constituted …” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 58). Merleau-Ponty’s central aim is to reconsider perception phenomenologically by “reawakening the basic experience of the world …” (1962, p. viii). In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty claims that conventional philosophy and psychology have misunderstood perception, introducing erroneous, reductive concepts like sensations, stimuli, judgments, or cognitive representations that misrepresent and distort any conventional philosophical or scientific accounts of actual perceptual experience. In everyday life, the world is not engaged through

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mental images or separate sensory units somehow translated into more organized meanings. Instead, the world we encounter makes immediate sense as all its parts— whether objects, living beings, situations, or events—fit readily into place. In this way, experience can be pictured as an interpenetrating web of sensory and bodily presence and relationship—what Merleau-Ponty (1962, pp. 4, 15) identifies as the perceptual field: “The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, [and] it always forms part of a ‘field’” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 4). This perceptual field means that our lived awareness is not the sum of isolated sensory inputs or cognitive representations but a dynamic and unique commingling of integrated lived possibilities in each moment of experience. Conventional philosophy and science have regularly sought to define and understand the five senses separately (Carman 2008, pp. 67–74), but Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that, as perceptual field, the senses intermingle and mutually resonate. The result is what he calls “synaesthetic perception” —“a whole already pregnant with an irreducible meaning …” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, pp. 21–22, 229). He claims that this lived synergy of the perceptual field is grounded in the sensibilities and possibilities of the lived body that, by its very nature, evokes and engages meanings from the world: “My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘comprehension’” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 235). In other words, qualities of the world directly resonate with the lived body and thereby convey immediate meanings and ambiences, though typically at a tacit, unself-conscious level of awareness that is best located and described via phenomenological study.

Merleau-Ponty and Body-Subject If perception for Merleau-Ponty involves a passivity of sensory experience, he also identifies a more active motor dimension, associated with bodily movement, actions, and skills. In the realm of everyday experience, these sensory and motor facilities of the lived body are never separate but, through the perceptual field, work together seamlessly so that awareness and action unfold as an integrated, continuous experience (Carman 2008, pp. 78–79). Merleau-Ponty understands everyday bodily mobility in terms of a body schema, or body subject, as I call it here. Body-subject can be defined as a pre-cognitive, bodily intelligence, and intentionality manifested through action and intertwining with the world at hand. As Merleau-Ponty (1962, pp. 138–139) explains, “Consciousness is being towards the thing through the intermediary of the body.”6 In relation to place experience, a central concern is how body-subject might be understood via larger-scale corporeal movements happening in rooms, buildings, streets, public open spaces, neighborhoods, and the like. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty provides several real-world examples of how body-­ subject automatically adjusts larger-scale movements so there are no disruptions or accidents: a lady’s accommodating a hat with a feather; a blind man’s using his walking stick; a motorist’s driving his automobile (1962, pp. 143–146). Merleau-Ponty’s

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most significant example is a description of his bodily mastery of the apartment where he lived: My flat is, for me, not a set of closely associated images. It remains a familiar domain round about me only as long as I still have ‘in my hands’ or ‘in my legs’ the main distances and directions involved, and as long as from my body intentional threads run out towards it. (1962, p. 130) Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, other studies have pointed to the spatial versatility of body-subject as expressed in more complex bodily ensembles extending over time and space and fashioning a wider lived geography (Allen 2004; Hill 1985; Seamon 1979; Toombs 1995, 2000). In my own work (Seamon 1979), I have highlighted two such bodily ensembles: first, body-routines—sets of integrated gestures, behaviors, and actions that sustain a particular task or aim, for example, tying a bow, washing dishes, making a sandwich, doing home repair, and so forth; and, second, time-space routines—sets of more or less habitual bodily actions that extend through a considerable portion of time, for example, a getting-up routine, or a weekday going-to-lunch routine. In a supportive physical and spatial environment, individuals’ bodily routines can intermingle in time and space, thereby contributing to a larger-scale environmental ensemble that I have called, after the earlier observations of urban critic Jane Jacobs (1961, p. 50), a place ballet—an interaction of individual bodily routines rooted in a particular environment, which often becomes an important place for interpersonal and communal exchange, meaning, and attachment, for example, a well-used office lounge, a popular tavern, a lively city street, a robust urban plaza, or a thriving city neighborhood (Fullilove 2004; Oldenburg 2001; Seamon 1979, 2013; Seamon and Nordin 1980).

Interpretation 1: A Passage from García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude To illustrate how Merleau-Ponty’s argument is eminently applicable to everyday human experience, I draw on a descriptive passage from García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, pp. 246–248). This passage depicts the situation of elderly family matriarch Úrsula Iguarán, who is losing her sight because of cataracts. She refuses to reveal her condition to family members because blindness would be a sign of uselessness in her remote village community. She sets herself to cope by focusing on “a silent schooling in the distances of things and people’s voices,” so that she can see, via astute mental recollection, what her failing eyes cannot. She becomes keenly aware of odors, which intensify her environmental sensibilities in a way much more acute than the visual presence of “bulk and color.” She comes to know so well the placement of everything in her everyday world that she forgets much of the time she is blind.

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In illustrating Úrsula’s re-mastery of her lifeworld, García Márquez describes two experiences, the first involving family member Fernanda, who loses her wedding ring. Having carefully noticed, because of her blindness, the daily behavior patterns of other family members, Úrsula easily locates the ring. She has come to recognize a household regularity of which other family members are unaware because that regularity is a taken-for-granted part of the lifeworld and out of sight because of the natural attitude. The second experience illustrating Úrsula’s re-mastery of everyday life is an afternoon mishap in which Úrsula collides on the porch with another family member, Amaranta, who is sitting there sewing. Amaranta chides Úrsula for her carelessness, but Úrsula retorts that it is Amaranta’s fault because she is not sitting in her usual place. After this incident, Úrsula attends to Amaranta’s porch behaviors more carefully and realizes that, because of the sun’s shifting seasonal angle, family members imperceptibly changed their porch positions without being aware: “From then on Úrsula had only to remember the date to know exactly where Amaranta was sitting.” In recasting García Márquez’s account phenomenologically, one can say that, via the paradox of Úrsula’s not being able “to see,” she necessarily makes her lifeworld an object of directed attention, though, phenomenologically, it is important to point out that she makes this effort from within the natural attitude, worried about repercussions if other family members discover her blindness. She re-masters her household lifeworld, first, by reconstructing a viable perceptual field sustained by her remaining sensibilities, particularly odor and an intuitive sense of distances and locations. In addition, she artfully attunes herself to family members’ everyday movements and actions, thereby shifting her attention to what might be described phenomenologically as the “bodily constitution of everyday place.” From MerleauPonty’s perspective, she progressively becomes aware of the habitual regularity of household body-subjects. Specifically, this realization for Úrsula centers on her discovery that household members unself-consciously partake in repetitive actions and routines. She understands, for example, that Fernanda’s ring can be found through attention to the “only thing different that she had done that day”—airing the mattresses, removing her ring, and putting it in a place away from the children. Similarly, because Amaranta had shifted her porch position to be in the sun, Úrsula realizes how the absolute regularity of household routines work in dialogue with shifting aspects of place, in this case, seasonal change. This example illustrates how a physical constituent of place—the shifting sun—contributes to a habitual, unnoticed shift in how human beings respond to their place. It is a subtle but vivid example of the mutual given-and-take between human beings and the world in which they are immersed. In describing a house-wide interconnectedness between people and their place, García Márquez’s account intimates the spatial versatility of body-subject as expressed in more complex bodily ensembles extending over time and space and fashioning a wider household dynamic, including body-routines as illustrated by Úrsula’s making breakfast for the family or repairing a torn shirt; and time-space

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routines as illustrated by Úrsula’s realization of Amaranta’s shifting porch position. As García Márquez summarizes the situation, “Without realizing it, every family member repeated the same path every day, the same actions ….” As indicated by Úrsula and Amaranda’s collision on the porch, García Márquez also suggests that the household incorporates a good amount of place ballet in which habitual actions of individual family members commingle to make the household a network of interconnected movements and encounters. Out of individual bodily actions automatically intermingling in space unfolds a more complex synergistic structure that marks Úrsula’s home world as a dynamic wholeness facilitating and being facilitated by place. As Casey (2009, p. 327) explains, “lived bodies belong to places and help to constitute them” just as, simultaneously, “places belong to lived bodies and depend on them.”

Interpretation 2: Observations of a Walk Between Home and Work This co-constitution of lived bodies and place is powerfully depicted in García Márquez’s account of Úrsula’s household, which, in archetypal fashion, illustrates Casey’s contention that lived bodies and places belong together in mutual relationship and support. I now turn to the observations of my weekday walks to consider other lived aspects of place. I start with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the lived body grounds everyday movement (1962, pp. 137–138) but extend this claim further via Casey’s contention that “Part of the power of place, its very dynamism, is found in its encouragement of motion in its midst ….” (2009, p. 326). In refining MerleauPonty’s understanding of the lived body and motility, Casey (2009, pp. 326–327) identifies three kinds of bodily movement relating to place: first, the body remaining in place but moving, for example, Úrsula’s preparing food on the stove; second, the body moving within a place, for example, her family members’ household traversals; and third, moving between places, for example, my weekday walk that I examine more fully here. This walk between home and work usually takes twenty minutes and is about one mile in length along five streets and university sidewalks. The route crosses two well-trafficked city streets and four less-trafficked neighborhood streets. Other than a short stretch through the university campus, the walk traverses three different neighborhoods, two of upper-middle-class housing and one of fraternities and student apartments. There are no shops or eateries on my route. Other than along the stretch through my university campus, I typically meet few other pedestrians as I walk back and forth in the morning, usually around 9 am; and in the evening, usually around 6 pm. Here, I consider this walk phenomenologically, drawing on 74 of the 95 observations that I made of this walking experience over the course of several months.7 First-person observation and description of one’s experience is a legitimate phenomenological method, and my aim in recording observations was to assemble a

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range of lifeworld experiences that I could then examine for broader experiential themes underlying the original descriptions.8 Because phenomenological method demands an openness to the phenomenon, I followed no organized method for gathering observations. Instead, as I walked, I would suddenly become aware of some event or situation toward which I then worked to become more alert and present. If I remembered when reaching office or home, I would go to the computer and type my experience as I remembered it. Often, I would note an event but forget to record it. And during most walks, I would lose sight of the task entirely and make no observations, thus no doubt missing situations and experiences that otherwise might offer phenomenological insight. In this sense, the observations I draw on here are serendipitous, and a set of descriptions gathered at other times, past or future, would probably be considerably different as specific experiences. From a phenomenological perspective, however, one can argue that my 95 observations are one representative portrait of my weekday walk and an acceptable starting point for locating broader phenomenological themes relating to place and movement. Here, I discuss three interpretive themes, all of which relate in some way to the lived body, including an emotional dimension. These three themes are: (1) body-subject and perceptual field; (2) intercorporeal presence; and (3) modes of place encounter. Of the 74 observations that provided the descriptive field out of which these three themes arose, I draw only on 46 that are most illustrative of these three themes. Mostly in the discussion below, I summarize these observations; the chapter appendix provides the complete text of these 46 observations, numbered in the order they are discussed.9

Body-subject and Perceptual Field Twelve of the 46 observations in the chapter appendix relate to some aspect of body-subject, particularly situations in which habitual movements are interfered with in some way. For example, I enter the east wing of my university building, forgetting that I have just moved to a new office more conveniently accessed via the building’s west wing (observation 1 of the appendix). My usual campus route is upset by a construction detour, and I feel a moment of irritation because I am required to go “out of my way.” (2). On my way home after a four-inch mid-­afternoon snowfall, I walk in the plowed streets rather than on the unshoveled sidewalks. I encounter two cars that have stopped and blocking my passage along the street. I am annoyed because, to get around the cars, I must move to the snow-covered sidewalk that is much more difficult to traverse (3). Some observations detail how quickly and efficiently cognitive awareness works out a new route when body-subject’s habitual route is interfered with. I’m heading home and see that, during the day, construction workers have erected a chain-link fence across the sidewalk I normally use: “I quickly decide to use the sidewalk I normally use to get to the old-stadium parking lot when I drive my car to school” (4). My usual street is blocked by an accident and the police won’t allow entry: “I note annoyance and quickly think out a way to shift my route to get home” (5).

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Other observations point to the continuous, integrated interconnectedness between body-subject and perceptual field. I realize my shoelace is untied and scan for a secure raised surface on which I can rest my foot comfortably as I re-tie my shoe (6). A cold fall wind blows on a sunny October day, and I find myself walking on the warmer, sunny portions of sidewalk (7). It’s a hot summer day and I find myself seeking out stretches of shaded sidewalk (8). My way is blocked by new construction fencing but I don’t wish to retrace my route. As I look for a way to move around the fencing, I find myself “automatically pointing my body toward a space in the hedgerow separating the parking lot from the lawns” (9). In some observations, the perceptual field includes a technological component, which in my case is sometimes listening to an iPod on which I have loaded favorite songs. For example, I’m walking home in the dark, listening to Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill.” Its rhythm synchronizes perfectly with my footsteps, and I “do a kind of dance as I walk, swinging arms from side to side” (10). I’m returning home and listening to Don Henley’s “Age of Innocence.” I can’t find the right walking rhythm but then realize the trick is shorter steps: “Such a pleasure to ‘walk dance’ in rhythm to a fine song!” (11). The most comprehensive observation relating to the unbroken, effortless intermesh between body-subject, movement, and perceptual field involves my being caught in a sudden spring rainstorm (12): The sidewalks and streets are suddenly awash in water. I am struck by how my eyes pay attention to the water puddles that my feet jump over as my hand adroitly repositions my umbrella at the angle most effective for deflecting the pelting rain. I feel wetness as water splatters my ankles and hear and smell the rain as it strikes the earth. I observe how my attention continuously shifts in an automatic way, immediately aware of the next water puddle I must move around or the sudden awareness that my left shoe is soaked because I gauge the flow of water along the street as shallower than it actually is. There is a moment when I noticed daffodils blooming along a picket fence I always walk by, and another moment when I noticed a pedestrian running up the street for the cover of his parked car. So much happening in such an ordinary event! As this observation suggests, the experience of walking through the rain involves the perceptual field’s continuously shifting fabric of sensory and bodily awareness and action that just happen. At each moment, some parts of this field are more prominently present in experience—the next water puddle I must traverse or the sudden awareness that my left shoe is soaked. But at each instant, the more focused portion of my experience remains inescapably conjoined with the momentary, less central, aspects of the situation—the daffodils blooming along the picket fence or the pedestrian running up the street for the cover of his parked car. In short, perceptual experience always involves a continuously shifting figure and ground brokered by a broader constellation of related significances and actions all coordinated

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instantaneously with body-subject. This lived integration of movements, surroundings, and need to get home or to work is described most broadly by Merleau-Ponty as a dynamic bodily process via which human beings are always already situated: [M]y body appears to me as an attitude directed towards a certain existing or possible task …. The word “here” applied to my body does not refer to a determinate position in relation to other positions or to external co-­ordinates, but to the laying down of the first co-ordinates, the anchoring of the active body in an object, the situation of the body in face of its tasks. Bodily space can be distinguished from external space and envelop its parts instead of spreading them out because it is the darkness needed in the theatre to show up the performance ….. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, pp. 100–101)

Intercorporeal Presence Seventeen of the 46 observations in the chapter appendix describe interpersonal encounters that range from momentary bodily co-presence to lengthy conversational exchange. Some observations depict an unself-conscious effort to maintain a comfortable distance between myself and nearby others who are moving or standing. Exiting a building, a woman cuts in front of me and, “To make some distance between us, I walk perpendicular to her direction of movement and then meander a bit to make more space” (13). I note a group of five college students crossing the street ahead of me, and “I take my time so there is some space between them and me” (14). A group of schoolchildren turn the corner onto the street I’m walking, and I slow my pace “so I will have some space. I don’t fancy being right behind noisy, unruly kids.” At the next stoplight, I wait a bit so there is “even more space between them and me” (15). Some observations illustrate how firsthand encounters with others can precipitate discomfort or stronger negative feelings. I walk on the sidewalk and a man with an unkempt appearance approaches from the opposite direction. I note a “mild feeling of discomfort with the encounter to come. We pass, acknowledge each other with a hello, and continue on our way” (16). I’m walking down the hill from my house and, suddenly, I sense a cyclist speeding by, very close. I am annoyed and angered: “What if I had suddenly veered left to avoid something on the pavement? It’s a steep hill. He’s going too fast!” (17).10 The most observations involving intercorporeal encounter relate to moments when my walk is interrupted or interfered with by others co-present in some way. I’m walking home on graduation day, and there are many street parties on my route. I note ahead two young men blocking “my” sidewalk. “An inner voice says, ‘You’re in my space, get out of the way’.” They sense my approaching and sidle aside to the adjacent lawn. I note that they don’t look at me directly but must sense my movement in their peripheral vision (18). A driver doesn’t signal at an intersection and turns into the street I’ve just begun to cross, figuring he is continuing straight ahead (19).

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I cross a busy street and have the light, but a truck comes from the opposite direction and cuts in front of me to beat the turn light. I shout, “damn driver!” and am visibly angry (20). I’m walking on the sidewalk in front of an apartment-complex entry, and a young woman in an SUV turns into the entrance without signaling, cutting in front of me. There is a large pothole filled with rainwater, which splashes up toward me, but I quickly back step and don’t get wet. I note a cascade of feeling: irritation that she didn’t signal, worry that I may get wet, anger that she did not have the courtesy to let me pass before she turned into the entry (21). There are other observations that illustrate more supportive modes of interpersonal encounter. I pass two lovers saying goodbye at their car door, and I “turn my head and attention away, projecting a sense of ‘not being there’ so as not to interfere with the privacy of their moment together” (22). I encounter coming toward me an older couple walking their dogs, and I move into the street so my passing won’t be too close to upset the canines (23). I cross a busy street and wonder if the school bus driver, turning right, will allow me right of way. He does, and I wave my hand in thanks (24). I pass a young father and his son and say hello. They both say hello in return. I think that “it’s good that the dad acknowledges a passerby and sets a good example for his son” (25). In contrast, I pass a young father and his son but am rebuffed when I say hello. I write that it “seems a poor way to introduce a child to his neighbors and the public realm” (26). Three observations involve conversing with others I meet on my walk. An acquaintance is doing yardwork as I pass, and we discuss the new plants and shrubs he’s using as ground cover for a replaced sewage line (27). A scruffy, bearded man waves his arms at me across the street, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. At first, I think he’s a homeless panhandler but, as I get closer, I realize he’s asking me the location of the nearest Burger King eatery. I give him directions and he tells me he’s visiting his mother-in-law and doesn’t know the city (28). I pass the house where I used to greet an old gray cat every day. I notice that his owner is out trimming weeds and ask her about him, since I haven’t seen the cat for several days. She tells me that he died on July 4th and she buried him in the back yard. I relate to her how he had been an important “event” in my walks and thanked her for taking him in. He had had a hard life before she took on his care, and I feel sad as I walk on (29). In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty includes a chapter, “Other Selves and the Human World,” which considers how people are co-present in the world. Just as we are immersed in worlds via perception and body-subject, so we are immersed in worlds that include other human beings. Merleau-Ponty writes that we experience the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence …. Our relation to the social is, like our relation to the world, deeper than any express perception or any judgment …. The social is already there when we know it or judge it. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 362)

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We see this preset co-presence in the observations above: The lovers by the car; the dog walkers; the father and son acknowledging me on the sidewalk; the bus driver allowing me the right of way; the man asking directions. These “others” are already present in my lifeworld, and I reciprocate with a spontaneous, matter-offact response: turning away; moving aside; saying hello; waving a hand of thanks; giving directions. As Merleau-Ponty writes, Round about the perceived body, a vortex forms, towards which my world is drawn and, so to speak, sucked in …. Already the other body has ceased to become a mere fragment of the world and becomes the theatre of a certain process of elaboration. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 353) Like the habitual actions of my own body-subject, these others are an integral constituent of my lifeworld’s dynamic, intertwined fabric. Phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke (1997, p. 69) calls this situation intercorporeality, which she describes as a primordial solidarity of and between embodied beings—a pre-personal communality that is never fully effaced but sustains a reciprocal interplay of one’s own and others’ comportment prior to any explicit consensus. As the above observations illustrate, this immediate co-presence of others often incorporates an emotional cast, which Merleau-Ponty identifies as another dimension of the lived body directing and sustaining our lived relations with the world at hand. This emotional presence “can only be grasped through the body and [is] communicated through a reciprocity of intentions and gestures discernable in conduct” (Cataldi 2008, p. 171). On one hand, I feel a tinge of community pride as I exchange hello with the father and son who acknowledge my passing co-presence. On the other hand, I feel a tinge of community despair as the other father and son ignore me. I encounter the scruffy, bearded man waving his hands and my feelings shift from discomfort to uncertainty to relief. In short, these lifeworld emotions are one stratum of a “living embodied meaning … We live [feelings] (rather than know) them. They are a way of establishing embodied relations with the world” (Cataldi 2008, pp. 164, 169).

Modes of Place Encounter Seventeen of the 46 observations in the chapter appendix relate to what I call encounter, which I define as “any situation of attentive contact between the person and the world at hand” (Seamon 1979, p. 99). Unlike the preconscious sensibility associated with perception and body-subject, encounter involves some degree of conscious awareness—in this case, directed attention to some material, environmental, or human aspect of place as registered during my walks. Observations point

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toward encounter’s range of attentive intensity—from momentary awareness to a deeper, more lasting attention. Some encounters are invoked by puzzlement: from a distance, I see a graybrown form on the street ahead that looks like a dead bird, but I come closer and realize the “bird” is a “twisted piece of tree branch wrapped in dead leaves” (30). I notice what appears to be a blanket strung between two trees but then realize that the “blanket” is a hammock in which a young man is asleep (31). I note a blue notebook left on a retaining wall and wonder why it is so much “out of place” (32). I walk by a hillside usually covered with wildflowers and am surprised that it has been cultivated and reseeded (33). I encounter a family walking on the sidewalk at the odd hour of 9:30 am and wonder why they’re here—they seem out of place on a Friday morning. I watch them enter the nearby Catholic Church and realize they are attending a “Good Friday” service (34). Another set of observations illustrate encounters relating to a sense of community responsibility: I notice a mailbox door that has sprung open and close it (35); I see a large, rusted bolt in the middle of the street and move it to the curb (36); I note a branch blocking part of the sidewalk and carry it to the adjacent lawn (37). As with intercorporeal presence, some observations on encounter incorporate an emotional stratum. I notice a dead squirrel at the bottom of my hill and feel distress and irritation that drivers can’t make more of an effort to slow down (38). I walk by a dilapidated house in front of which a dispirited puppy has been chained the last few days. I remember to check on him because I am concerned about his wellbeing, but I see he is not there. I feel concern and wonder where the puppy is (39). I pass a beautifully crafted, miniature snowman standing on a university stone wall and feel joy that someone would take such care in making such a transient but elegant object (40). I walk down my hill on an unseasonably warm February day and am surprised to see, in the open space with trees, a person sitting on a blanket and reading. No one ever uses this space and “I wonder who this person is. Rather mysterious!” (41). Some observations demonstrate how an encounter only happens because something in the world actively triggers my awareness that would be engaged otherwise. I’m walking to school and a cyclist calls out my name. I look to see who the person is, but I can’t tell because he’s wearing sunglasses. I ask, “Who is it?” and the rider answers “Jeff,” a neighbor who lives close by (42). As I approach home, I am surprised by how barren and less attractive the front yard of my house looks because of the loss a day before of an old maple tree toppled by high winds (43). I’m listening to Elisa Gilkyson’s “Requiem”; its beautiful melody and haunting lyrics trigger my looking at the flower-covered hillside, the loveliness of which merges with the poignancy of the song (44). Campus construction requires that I find a new route to my office, and I walk along a stretch of sidewalk I’ve not traversed before. Its special atmosphere pulls me out of myself, and I attend more closely to the experience: “It’s the trees that make this place special. There are many, and one moves through a tree-canopied enclosure. The sidewalk meanders. The overall feeling is pleasant, comfortable, reassuring—quite wonderful!” (45).11

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One observation is unique in that it describes an encounter in which I sense how all the many independent parts of a place coalesce into a larger, interconnected whole. I note how several individuals all converge in the same moment and space to enable a momentary togetherness that speaks to a sense of place: I walk to school and approach the corner of Denison Avenue and Leavenworth Street. I’m walking down the hill of Leavenworth and note a boy in an orange shirt resting against the anchoring post of the stonewall at the corner. A young woman with a tiny terrier walks up Denison on the other side of that street. A blue truck stops at the corner, and the boy runs across the street to the truck. He must have been waiting for a ride. A car coming down Denison slows for the stopped truck. The boy gets in and the vehicle speeds away. I see irritation on the face of the driver, who obviously is not pleased that she’s had to wait for the truck. The girl with the dog crosses Leavenworth and heads north on Denison. Odd how all these folks converge at that one corner and then disperse. (46) From Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, these observations on encounter illustrate another way experientially in which the lived body is immersed in place. As we engage with place, we do not, first of all, see and know that place as a detached object via cognitive consciousness. Instead, these things, people, and situations are already present via perception, and we respond in a manner that phenomenologist David Cerbone (2008, p. 129) describes as “getting a grip” on the world we encounter: I use the word “grip” here both literally and figuratively as when I grip the pen, coffee cup, hammer, steering wheel … in my hands (literally), and when I “get a grip” on things and situations, putting things in order, getting things under control, and optimizing my perceptual access. Though they are far from a comprehensive picture of how human beings encounter their worlds, the observations I present here do detail some of the ways experientially in which we engage the world with attention and thereby “get a grip” on what that world offers via its already-present perceptual givenness. The moments in which the world comes to presence may be related to puzzlement (wondering about the blue notebook on the stonewall), inconsonance (noticing the open mailbox door and closing it), or unusualness (appreciating the miniature snowman on the stone wall). The observations indicate a range of intensity in how we encounter the world: from momentary awareness (the birdlike branch and leaves) to more intense involvement that often incorporates an emotional dimension (walking along the tree-canopied sidewalk or learning the old gray cat is dead). It is important to point out that, in most of my walks, encounter was sporadic as body-subject navigated the walk and my attention remained mostly focused

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inwardly on plans for the day, worries, or random thoughts. I can offer no observations of this obliviousness to the world at hand, since by its very constitution, it assumes a lack of awareness and is largely immune to the attentive contact that my observational method presupposes. But even if, in our typical lives, we notice our world only fleetingly, we still readily cope because of body-subject’s pre-reflective awareness. As Merleau-Ponty (1962, pp. 104, 146) summarizes the situation, “The body is our general medium for having a world … [It is] the matrix of habitual action [and] a means of ingress into a familiar surrounding.”12

Place, Environment, and Situatedness Phenomenologist Dermot Moran (2000, p. 391) perceptively pinpoints the crux of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking as “the ‘mysterious’, ‘paradoxical’, ‘ambiguous’ nature of our embodiment in a world that seems pre-ordained to meet and fulfil our meaning-intended acts.” Merleau-Ponty’s aim is “the reawakening of an understanding of the original acts whereby humans come to awareness in the world” (Moran 2000, p. 401). His way of understanding corporeal situatedness is difficult to grasp because we have been educated in a dualistic Cartesian tradition assuming that the world shapes human beings, or that human beings shape the world, or that the two mutually shape each other. In all his work, Merleau-Ponty attempts to circumvent any dualistic conception, since always because of the lived body, people and world are soldered together. In Western philosophy, they have been envisioned conceptually as two but, existentially and experientially, they are always one and indivisible. How might we better clarify the value of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking in understanding place? One helpful explication is philosopher Shaun Gallagher’s interpretation (Gallagher, 1986) of how Merleau-Ponty understands “environment,” which, in the argument I have presented here, could also be understood as “place.” Gallagher points out that, on one hand, the lived body incorporates the environment: “Phenomenally, the environment is precisely a ‘manipulatory area’ for the lived body—something potentially to be taken up and incorporated” (Gallagher 1986, p. 163). One example of this “incorporation” is Úrsula’s household, where body-routines, time-space routines, and place ballets contribute to the lived body’s inhabiting place. In this sense, environments and places are a distance-gathering protraction of perception and body-subject: All of these incorporations or embodiments require the same ability to appropriate “boundaries and directions” in a given environment, to establish “lines of force,” in short, to organize the environment, “to build into the geographical setting a behavioural one” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 112). Geographically, or objectively, the environment is distinguished as standing over and against the living body. Phenomenally, or experientially, the environment is an indefinite extension of the lived body. (Gallagher 1986, p. 163)

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Gallagher (1986, p. 163) also points out, however, that the environment “conditions the body in such a way that the body is the expression or reflection of the environment.” In this sense, environments and places appropriate the lived body and thereby contribute to the particular manner through which individuals and groups inhabit their worlds. As Merleau-Ponty writes, the environment is “a living connection comparable, or rather identical, with that existing between the parts of my body itself ” (1962, p. 205). As I have noted, Gallagher speaks of “environment” rather than “place.” Though I think his interpretation is perceptive and accurate, I have suggested in this chapter that “place” is a more appropriate concept than environment because the latter suggests a separation, objectively and subjectively, between human beings and their worlds. Though Merleau-Ponty never used it directly, place is a concept more apt phenomenologically because it offers a conceptual and applied means for highlighting the lived fact that human beings are always immersed in their world and that one central facet of this immersion is “being emplaced” and situated via place and the lived body. As Casey (2009, p. 327) explains: [T]he body is the specific medium for experiencing a [place]. The lived body is the material condition of possibility for the [place] while being itself a member of that same world. It is basic to place and part of place. Just as there are no places without the bodies that sustain and vivify them, so there are no lived bodies without the places they inhabit and traverse …. Bodies and places are connatural terms. They interanimate each other. Drawing primarily on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding in Phenomenology of Perception, I have aimed in this chapter to probe this interanimation between people and place, grounding my interpretation in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical insights as illustrated in García Márquez’s narrative account and in my observations of walks between home and work. I have suggested that places and lived bodies are mutually supportive and that their interpenetration can be more thoroughly understood through Merleau-Ponty’s explication of perception and body-subject. At every moment, perception grounds the taken-for-granted presence of the world at hand, just as body-subject assures that actions and ways of being synchronize with the perceptual field, allowing lifeworlds to unfold with little or no mischance or untowardness. As Casey argues, this synchronicity-in-world is further assured via place, which provides a taken-for-granted sphere of orientation, familiarity, and habitual involvement (Seamon 2018). Merleau-Ponty’s work is almost impossible to master intellectually because the central phenomenon—the tacit, preconscious perception of the lived body—is almost always out of sight of conscious awareness. In everyday experience, this latent realm of presence can only be caught in glimpses as when, for example, I suddenly realize how important the fallen maple was to the everyday aesthetics of my house and yard, or I suddenly notice myself walking to the east wing of my university building, even though my new office is now in the west wing. For Merleau-Ponty,

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phenomenology offers a way to bring the latent, undisclosed dimensions of human experience and meaning to direct attention. His thinking reveals the remarkable but pre-predicative sensibilities, understandings, and actions of the lived body as it handily engages the world at hand. Though he says little about the significance of place directly, his perspective does much to clarify its integral relationship with the lived body and human situatedness.

Appendix: Observations of Weekday Walks Between Home and Work These descriptions are presented in the order they are discussed in the accompanying text.

Observations Relating to Body-subject and Perceptual Field 1. To get to my office, I approach my university building’s east wing, forgetting that my office has been moved to the building’s west wing and that I should be accessing entry from the building’s west entry (Tuesday, June 2, 2015). 2. I make my usual right turn toward the alumni center, but the sidewalk is blocked because of construction. A sign reads, “Detour—pass through the alumni center.” I become annoyed because I must go out of my way. So much campus construction right now! (Monday, August 24, 2015). 3. It has snowed several inches this afternoon, and the sidewalks are high with snow so I walk in the streets, which have been cleared. I notice ahead that two cars are stopped in the street. I’m annoyed because I must move from the street back into the sidewalk, choked with snow. Why are these drivers stopping their cars in the street? I realize that one party is dropping someone off, and the other party is parallel parking but not doing it very well. Perhaps the poor visibility as the snow continues to fall? (Monday, February 2, 2015). 4. I’m headed home and discover, during the day, that construction workers have erected a chain-link fence around the east portion of the old stadium right up to the street curb on 17th Street. This fence blocks the sidewalk I usually walk home along, and I note myself quite annoyed that I must work out a new route. I quickly decide to use the sidewalk I traverse to get to the old stadium parking lot when I drive my car to work. There is a good amount of irritation that I must change my usual route (Wednesday, February 11, 2015). 5. There is some sort of accident on Denison tonight, and the police won’t let anyone pass. I note annoyance and quickly thinking out an alternative route to get myself home. Rapidly, I picture turning left and walking down 17th Street to Poyntz Avenue, then up Poyntz to my street (Tuesday, February 3, 2015). 6. I note my shoe is untied. I look for a “platform” on which to rest my foot while I re-tie the shoelace. There is nothing immediately available. I see ahead the stair leading to the natatorium. I walk to the stair and re-tie my shoe (Friday, March 26, 2015).

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7. It’s a chilly October day and, as I walk to school, I find myself using the stretches of sidewalk that are in the sun. I should have worn a jacket! (Thursday, October, 15, 2015). 8. Today is extremely hot and humid. The sun is fierce, and I do everything I can to stay in the shade. Thank goodness there are trees along much of my route and they shade the sidewalk (Wednesday, August 19, 2015). 9. More construction fencing! I’ve come too far to turn around, so I look for an alternative way through. I find myself automatically pointing my body toward a space in the hedgerow separating parking lot from lawn. I expect we’re not supposed to walk through this space, but I am able to get through and continue on my way (Monday, July 20, 2015). 10. It’s late and I’m walking home in the dark. I have my iPod on and am listening to Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill,” which syncs so well with my footsteps. I do a kind of dance as I walk, swinging arms from side to side.” What the heck? It’s dark and no one can see! (Monday, March 26, 2016). 11. Listening on the iPod to Don Henley’s “The Age of Innocence.” I’m having trouble finding a walking rhythm. Ah, yes, I have it: the song requires short steps and a slight lift in the knee. Such a pleasure to “walk dance” in rhythm with a fine song! (Tuesday, May 12, 2015). 12. As I walk home tonight, I am caught in a sudden spring rainstorm. The sidewalks and streets are suddenly awash in water. I am struck by how my eyes pay attention to the water puddles that my feet jump over as my hand adroitly repositions my umbrella at the angle most effective for deflecting the pelting rain. I feel wetness as water splatters my ankles and hear and smell the rain as it strikes the earth. I observe how my attention continuously shifts in an automatic way, immediately aware of the next water puddle I must move around or the sudden awareness that my left shoe is soaked because I gauge the flow of water along the street as shallower than it actually is. There is a moment when I notice daffodils blooming along a picket fence I always walk by. I notice a pedestrian running up the street for the cover of his parked car. So much happening in such an ordinary event! (Thursday, April 16, 2015).

Observations Relating to Intercorporeal Presence 13. A young woman exits the natatorium and walks directly in front of me along the sidewalk. To make some distance between us, I walk perpendicular to her direction of movement and then meander a bit to make more space. I note how I feel uncomfortable when a person I don’t know is too close (Monday, March 21, 2016). 14. There’s a group of five male college students crossing the street in front of me, and I take my time so there is some space between them and me (Thursday, October 15, 2016). 15. I’m walking to school and see a class of schoolchildren turn the corner onto Denison. I slow my pace so I will have some space. I don’t fancy being right

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behind noisy, unruly kids. At the stoplight at Denison and Anderson, I wait a bit so there is even more space between them and me (Monday, July 20, 2016). 16. There is an unkempt man coming toward me on the sidewalk. I note a mild feeling of discomfort with the encounter to come. We pass, acknowledge each other with a hello, and continue on our way (Tuesday, March 29, 2016). 17. I’m walking down the hill from my house and a cyclist speeds by, almost brushing me. Annoyance and anger—that someone would be so thoughtless as to ride so close to a pedestrian. What if I had suddenly veered left to avoid something on the pavement? It’s a steep hill. He’s going too fast! (Friday, April 1, 2016). 18. It’s graduation day, and there are some street parties in the houses I walk by. There are two young men standing on “my” sidewalk. An inner voice says, “You’re in my space, get out of the way.” They sense my approach and sidle aside to the adjacent lawn. I note they do not look at me directly but sense my movement in their peripheral vision (Saturday, May 16, 2015). 19. A driver doesn’t have his signal on at the intersection of Delaware and Poyntz, so I assume he’s continuing straight ahead. I start to cross the street, but he turns in front of me. I stop and wait for him to pass. What a jerk! (Monday, August 21, 2016). 20. I’m crossing Anderson with the walk light for pedestrians. A truck speeds to the intersection and turns left, cutting in front of me even though I have the right of way. I swear and say, “Damn drivers!” (Friday, February 13, 2015). 21. I’m walking to school and, from the other direction, a young woman driving a large SUV turns into her apartment drive that crosses my sidewalk. I’ve already noticed that she hasn’t signaled, and now she cuts in front of me, striking a large pothole full of water that splashes toward me. There is a quick emotional flash: “I hope I don’t get wet!” I’m angry because she didn’t signal, she cut in front of me, and almost covered me with water. I swear and ponder how stupid people can be (Monday, August 22, 2016). 22. As I walk home, I see lovers saying goodbye at their car door. I walk by the car and turn my head and attention away, projecting a sense of “not being there” so as not to interfere with the privacy of their moment together (Tuesday, May 26, 2015). 23. Walking home on Denison, I see a couple with their two dogs approaching me on the sidewalk. I move into the street just in case my presence might upset the canines. No need to excite excitable dogs! (Monday, March 28, 2016). 24. I’m crossing Anderson toward the university and a big yellow school bus is in the right turning lane. I enter the crosswalk and wonder if the driver will stay stopped or attempt to move right before I get to that side of the street. I note he remains stopped, and I wave my hand in thanks for his giving me the right of way (Friday, February 6, 2015). 25. I’m headed home and approach a young father and son out for a walk. I say hello, and they both say hello in turn. I think it’s good that the dad acknowledges a passerby and sets a good example for his son (Wednesday, May 27, 2015).

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26. I’m walking to work, and a young father and son move toward me on Denison. I say hello but receive no acknowledgment. The father scowls. Seems a poor way to introduce a child to his neighbors and the public realm (Thursday, March 19, 2015). 27. An acquaintance is doing yardwork as I pass, and we discuss the new plants and shrubs he’s using as ground cover for a replaced sewage line. Some of these plantings I need to try in my front lawn. We converse for about ten minutes, but I must get home to make dinner (Wednesday, July 13, 2016). 28. I’m walking down my hill and approaching Poyntz. Across the street, a scruffy, bearded man waves his arms at me, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. At first I think he’s a homeless panhandler but, as I get closer, I realize he’s asking me the location of the nearest Burger King eatery. I give him directions and he tells me he’s visiting his mother-in-law and doesn’t know the city. I feel relieved that I can help him so easily. I was not in the mood to deal with a homeless person this morning. 29. I notice that the woman who lives in the house where the old gray cat used to live is trimming weeds. I call out to ask her what happened to the cat, which I would say hello to each day as I walked by. He was very old and had a hard life until this kind-hearted lady took him in. She explains that he died on July 4th and that she buried him in the back yard. I relate to her how he was an important “event” when I would walk by. He conveyed so much suffering and hurt. He was an important “event” in my weekday walks. I felt very sad as I continued on (Monday, July 29, 2016).

Observations Relating to Place Encounter 30. I’m walking down the hill from my house. In the distance, I see near the right curb a gray-brown, baglike form that looks like a bird. I come closer and realize the “bird” is a twisted piece of tree branch wrapped in dead leaves. I feel relieved. Not another “roadkill.” I continue walking (Friday, December 12, 2014). 31. I’m walking home on Denison and suddenly see in my peripheral vision something hanging between two trees that looks like a large blanket. I look more carefully and realize that a man has put up a hammock in which he is resting. He looks asleep (Thursday, May 12, 2015). 32. I’m walking along a stone wall in front of a house on Denison. I spy on the wall a blue notebook that seems so out of place, especially since it looks like it will be raining soon. I think about moving the notebook to the front porch of the house but don’t. Who knows who it belongs to?! (Monday, December 15, 2014). 33. I walk by a hillside that is usually covered with wildflowers this time of year, but this spring the owner has cultivated and reseeded the hillside, which is now mostly bare earth. I miss the flowers. They were a pleasure to look at (Wednesday, April 20, 2016).

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34. I’m walking down Denison near Poyntz and see, on the opposite side of the street, two adults and three kids—a family. It’s about 9:30 am and this group seems out of place. They cross Poyntz, and I realize they are going into the Catholic Church for a service—it’s “Good Friday.” They must have parked their car on one of the side streets and are walking the rest of the way to the church (Friday, March 25, 2016). 35. A mailbox of a house on North Delaware is open. I close it. I hope someone else would do the same for me (Monday, March 28, 2016). 36. There is a large, rusted bolt in the middle of Poyntz. Cars might strike it so I pick it up and move it to the far curb (Wednesday, January 14, 2015). 37. There has been a strong wind this morning. On the Denison sidewalk, I encounter a fallen tree branch blocking the right of way. I move the branch to the adjacent lawn. It would be an obstacle for children walking this way (Tuesday, March 24, 2015). 38. As I walk to work, I see a dead squirrel at the bottom of the hill. Poor creature. Why can’t drivers slow down? (Monday, March 16, 2016). 39. I walk down Leavenworth and past a dilapidated house in front of which an unhappy puppy has been chained the last few days. I remember to check on him because I am concerned about his wellbeing, but I see he is not there. I feel concern because he looked so dispirited and uncared for. I wonder what’s happened to him? (Friday, March 25, 2016). 40. As I enter campus, I see, on the stone wall next to the sidewalk, a handsomely crafted, miniature snow man with bottle-cap eyes. He really is beautifully made, and I feel a sense of joy that someone would take so much care in making such a transient object (Tuesday, January 19, 2016). 41. I walk down my hill on an unseasonably warm February day and am surprised to see, in the open space with trees, a person sitting on a blanket with a bike propped up nearby. It is a lovely afternoon—at least 60 degrees Fahrenheit—so it makes sense one would wish to be reading outside in the sun under a tree. But I’ve never before seen anyone use the space this way. I wonder who this person is? Rather mysterious! (Friday, February 6, 2015). 42. I’m walking to school. Someone calls my name, but I don’t recognize him because he’s on a bike and wearing sunglasses. I ask, “Who is it?” and he answers “Jeff.” I realize it’s my neighbor, but he seems “out of place” with the bike and sunglasses (Monday, July 6, 2015). 43. I return home and note how different my house and front yard look. Yesterday there was a fierce thunderstorm, and the old maple tree near the entry of my house was blown over. The yard looks barren without the tree, and the aesthetic sense of my property is not the same. I’ll need to plant a new tree! (Thursday, September 10, 2015). 44. I’m listening on my iPod to Elisa Gilkyson’s “Requiem” as I walk by the beautiful hillside garden on North Delaware. The loveliness of the song draws my attention to all the flowers. So many yellow daisies and purple Echinacea flowers.

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A great sense of hope and joy. The world can be a good place! (Wednesday, July 22, 2015). 45. There is much construction on campus this summer, and a detour requires that I leave my usual sidewalk, cut across a parking lot, and use a stretch of sidewalk I’ve never traversed before. I am immediately touched by the atmosphere and mood of this path, which is tree-lined and shaded. This stretch of sidewalk is no more than 300 feet, but it has a strong sense of place. It is the trees that make this place special. There are many and one moves through a tree-­canopied enclosure. The sidewalk meanders through the trees. The overall feeling is pleasant, comfortable, reassuring—quite wonderful! (Monday, July 20, 2015). 46. I’m walking down the hill of Leavenworth and note a boy in an orange shirt resting against the anchoring post of the stonewall at the corner. A young woman with a tiny terrier walks up Denison on the other side of that street. A blue truck stops at the corner, and the boy runs across the street to the truck. He must have been waiting for a ride. A car coming down Denison slows for the stopped truck. The boy gets in and the vehicle speeds away. I see irritation on the face of the driver, who obviously is not pleased that she’s had to wait for the truck. The girl with the dog crosses Leavenworth and heads north on Denison. Odd how all these folks converge at that one corner and then disperse (Tuesday, September 8, 2015).

Notes 1 The starting point for this chapter was an invited paper, “Situated Cognition and the Phenomenology of Place: Lifeworld, Environmental Embodiment, and Immersion-inWorld,” prepared for a symposium on “Situated Cognition and the Philosophy of Place,” organized by Thomas Hünefeldt and Annika Schlitte, and held at the 6th International Conference on Spatial Cognition, Rome, Italy, September 2015. The presentation was then revised and published as a chapter in T. Hünefeldt and A. Schlitte, eds., Situatedness and Place (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018, pp. 41–66). The author thanks the editors and publisher for permission to include the chapter here. 2 Introductions to phenomenology and phenomenological methods include Cerbone (2006), Finlay (2011), Moran (2000), Seamon (2013), Seamon and Gill (2016), and van Manen (2014). 3 Phenomenological discussions of place include Casey (1997, 2009), Donohoe (2014), Malpas (2009, 2018), Mugerauer (1994, 2008), Relph (1976, 2009), Seamon (2013, 2014, 2017, 2018), and Stefanovic (2000). 4 Introductions to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy include Carman (2008), Casey (1997, pp.  228–242), Cerbone (2006, pp. 96–133), Diprose and Reynolds (2008), Moran (2000, pp. 391–434), Pietersma (1997), and Romdenh-Romluc (2012). Works relating Merleau-Ponty’s thinking to environmental, spatial, and place themes include Allen (2004), Casey (2009, pp. 317–348), Cataldi and Hamrick (2007), Evans (2008), Hill (1985), Leder (1990), Locke and McCann (2015), Morris (2004, 2008), Seamon (1979, 2013, 2017, 2018), Toombs (1995, 2000), Weiss (2008), and Weiss and Haber (1999). 5 Discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the lived body include Behnke (1997, pp. 66–71), Bermudez, Marcel, and Eilan (1999), Casey (1997, pp. 202–242), Cerbone (2006, pp. 96–103; 2008), Evans (2008), Finlay (2006), Heinämaa (2012, pp. 222–232), Leder (1990), Moran (2000, pp. 412–430); Morris (2004, 2008), Pallasmaa (2005, 2009), and Seamon (1979, 2013, 2015).

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6 I prefer “body-subject” to “body schema” because “subject” better suggests than “schema” the pre-reflective but intelligent awareness of the lived body. Whichever term one uses, it is important to recognize that the underlying imagery of corporeal autonomy (i.e., body as autonomous agent) can readily lead to another kind of subject-object dichotomy and bifurcation that loses sight of the lived connectedness and intimacy between body and world. As Morris (2004, p. 36) explains: Unfortunately, it is all too easy to reify the body schema [body-subject], to conceive it as an independent thing, a bridge built in advance that is to be abstracted from the movement in which it emerges…. Once we have an ‘it’, a schema, to talk about, our tendency is to turn it into a thing, because our minds and languages—and the body schema itself—disposes us to lend a thingly, solid sens [sense] to the content of the world. Merleau-Ponty himself does not escape this tendency and sometimes even invites misconception of the body schema as some sort of thing. In this chapter, I work to avoid the danger of bifurcation, but it is extremely difficult to keep to an understanding and language that faithfully depict the intertwinement of body and world as a lived whole rather than as a body/world duality. The same is true of the lived entwinement and interconnectedness of people and place. 7 Originally, my plan was to use these observations as one set of experiential descriptions for the conference presentation mentioned in note 1. I began the observations shortly after I accepted the conference invitation, in early December 2014. Ultimately, I did not draw on the observations for my conference paper but decided to incorporate them in the present chapter. I therefore continued observations of walks right up until the time of writing this chapter—early September 2016. 8 Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. viii) points toward the value of first-person explication when he writes that “We shall find in ourselves, and nowhere else, the unity and true meaning of phenomenology. It is less a question of counting up quotations than of determining and expressing in concrete form this phenomenology for ourselves…” On the use of first-person accounts in phenomenological research, see Finlay (2011) and van Manen (2014). One of the best examples of first-person explication is the work of philosopher Kay Toombs (1995, 2000), who lives with multiple sclerosis and explores her illness phenomenologically via concepts like the lived body. 9 The three interpretive themes that I identify and discuss here arise out of careful, multiple readings of the original 95 observations recorded during the several-month period in which I set myself to pay heed to my weekday walks. Twenty-one observations do not relate to the three interpretive themes and are thus not discussed. Of the 74 observations that are the descriptive base out of which I located these three themes, twenty relate to “body-subject and perceptual field”; 28 to “intercorporeal presence;” and 26 to “place encounter.” As already explained, I draw on only 46 of 74 observations because I judge these 46 to provide sufficient real-world evidence for claiming the validity of the three interpretive themes, which owe much to Merleau-Ponty’s broader phenomenological discoveries and principles. Depending on their topical interests, other phenomenologists might generate a different set of observations and locate different interpretive themes. The key phenomenological concern regarding relative interpretive trustworthiness is the degree of correspondence and fit between descriptive accounts and interpretive generalizations; see Seamon (2017), van Manen (2014), and Wachterhauser (1996). 10 The state of Kansas is stereotypically imagined as flat topologically, and this is the case for western Kansas. My home city of Manhattan, however, is part of a natural region known as the “Flint Hills,” a high-grass prairie with rolling hills, of which some are quite steep, including the hill on which I live. 11 Elsewhere (Seamon 1979, p. 108), I have identified this mode of attention to the world as noticing—an encounter in which “a thing from which we were insulated a moment

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before flashes to our attention” (Seamon 1979, p. 108). I identified two modes of noticing: on one hand, “world-grounded noticing,” where something in the world “grabs” one’s attention; on the other hand, person-grounded noticing, which involves the person’s suddenly seeing something in the world because he or she is interested in that something—e.g., the birdwatcher’s “knack” for noticing birds (p. 108). The observations from my walks illustrate some other ways of depicting noticing phenomenologically: on one hand, becoming aware of something in one’s world passively and by chance (e.g., observations 30–34 above); or, on the other hand, becoming aware of something in one’s world because that “something” actively brings attention to itself (e.g., my friend’s shouting) and thus one becomes aware of it (e.g., observations 42–46 above). The modes of human encounter are complex and multifaceted. What is needed is a thorough phenomenology that includes but moves beyond Merleau-Ponty’s unself-conscious perception and body-subject. 12 Elsewhere, I have conceptualized encounter as a continuum of awareness extending from “person-environment mergence” (e.g., an intense engagement with some aspect of the world) to “person-environment separateness (e.g., obliviousness, whereby “the experiencer’s conscious attention is not in touch with the world outside but directed inwardly” (Seamon 1979, p. 104)). No matter how oblivious one is to the world at hand, however, the preconscious perceptual facility of body-subject is present, allowing for necessary habitual actions and routines; see Seamon (1979, pp. 97–128).

References Allen, C. (2004). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and the body-in-space: Encounters of visually impaired children. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22, 719–735. Behnke, E. (1997). Body. In Embree, L., ed., Encyclopedia of phenomenology (pp. 66–71). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Bermudez, J. L., Marcel, A. and Eilan, N., eds. (1999). The body and the self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carman, T. (2008). Merleau-Ponty. London: Routledge. Casey, E. (1997). The fate of place: A philosophical history. Berkeley: University of California Press. Casey, E. (2009). Getting back into place, 2nd edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cataldi, S. L. (2008). Affect and sensibility. In R. Diprose, and J. Reynold, eds., MerleauPonty: key concepts (pp. 163–173). Stockfield, UK: Acumen. Cataldi, S. L. and Hamrick, W. S., eds. (2007). Merleau-Ponty and environmental philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Cerbone, D. R. (2006). Understanding phenomenology. Durham, UK: Acumen. Cerbone, D. R. (2008). Perception. In Diprose, R. and Reynolds, J., eds., Merleau-Ponty: Key concepts (pp. 121–131). Stockfield, UK: Acumen. Creswell, J. W. (2007). Qualitative inquiry and research design. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Diprose, R. and Reynolds, J., eds. (2008). Merleau-Ponty: Key concepts. Stockfield, UK: Acumen Publishing. Donohoe, J. (2014). Remembering places. New York: Lexington Books. Evans, F. (2008). Chiasm and flesh. In Diprose, R. and Reynolds, J., eds., Merleau-Ponty: Key concepts (pp. 184–193). Stockfield, UK: Acumen. Finlay, L. (2006). The body’s disclosure in phenomenological research. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3, 19–30. Finlay, L. (2011). Phenomenology for therapists. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Fullilove, M. T. (2004). Root shock. New York: Ballantine Books. Gallagher, S. (1986). Lived body and environment. Research in Phenomenology, 16, 139–170.

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García Márquez, G. (1967). One hundred years of solitude. New York: HarperCollins. Heinämaa, S. (2012). The body. In Luft, S. and Overgaard, S., eds., The Routledge companion to phenomenology (pp. 222–232). London: Routledge. Hill, M. (1985). Bound to the environment: Towards a phenomenology of sightlessness. In Seamon, D. and Mugerauer, R., eds., Dwelling, place and environment: Toward a phenomenology of person and world (pp. 99–111). Dordrecht: Martinus-Nijhoff. Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. New York: Vintage. Leder, D. (1990). The absent body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Locke, P. M. and McCann, R. (2015). Merleau-Ponty: space, place, architecture. Athens: Ohio State University Press. Malpas, J. (2009). Place and human being. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 20 (3), 19–23. Malpas, J. (2018). Place and experience, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. New York: Humanities Press. Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. London: Routledge. Morris, D. (2004). The sense of space. Albany: State University of New York Press. Morris, D. (2008). Body. In Diprose, R. and Reynolds, J., eds., Merleau-Ponty: Key concepts (pp. 111–120). Stockfield, UK: Acumen. Mugerauer, R. (1994). Interpretations on behalf of place. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mugerauer, R. (2008). Heidegger and homecoming. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Oldenburg, R. (2001). Celebrating the third place. New York: Marlow & Co. Pallasmaa, J. (2005). The eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses. London: Wiley. Pallasmaa, J. (2009). The thinking hand. London: Wiley. Pietersma, H. (1997). Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In Embree, L., ed., Encyclopedia of phenomenology (pp. 457–461). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Relph, E. (2009). A pragmatic sense of place. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 20 (3), 24–31. Romdenh-Romluc, K. (2012). Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In Luft, S. and Overgaard, S., eds., The Routledge companion to phenomenology (pp. 103–112). New York: Routledge. Seamon, D. (1979). A geography of the lifeworld. New York: St. Martin’s. Seamon, D. (2013). Lived bodies, place, and phenomenology. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 4, 143–166. Seamon, D. (2014). Place attachment and phenomenology: The synergistic dynamism of place. In Manzo, L. and Devine-Wright, P., eds., Place attachment: Advances in theory, methods and research (pp. 11–22). New York: Routledge. Seamon, D. (2015). Situated cognition and the phenomenology of place: Lifeworld, environmental embodiment, and immersion-in-world. Cognitive Processes, 16 (1) (supplement), 389–392. Seamon, D. (2017). Hermeneutics and architecture: Buildings-in-themselves and interpretive trustworthiness. In Janz, B., ed., Hermeneutics, space, and place (pp. 347–360). New York: Springer. Seamon, D. and Gill, N. (2016). Qualitative approaches to environment-behavior research: Understanding environmental and place experiences, meanings, and actions. In Gifford, R., ed., Research methods for environmental psychology (pp. 115–135). New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Seamon, D. and Nordin, C. (1980). Market place as place ballet: A Swedish example. Landscape, 24 (October), 35–41.

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Stefanovic, I. L. (2000). Safeguarding our common future. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Toombs, S. K. (1995). The lived experience of disability. Human Studies, 18, 9–23. Toombs, S. K. (2000). Handbook of phenomenology and medicine. Dordrecht: Kluwer, State University of New York Press. van Manen, M. (2014). Phenomenology of practice. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Wachterhauser, B. R. (1996). Must we be what we say? Gadamer on truth in the human sciences. In Wachterhauser, B. R., ed., Hermeneutics and modern philosophy (pp. 219–240). Albany: State University of New York Press. Weiss, G. (2008). Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary encounters with Merleau-Ponty. Albany: State University of New York Press. Weiss, G. and Haber, H. F., eds. (1999). Perspectives on embodiment. New York: Routledge. Willig, C. (2001). Introducing qualitative research in psychology. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Yardley, L. (2008). Demonstrating validity in qualitative psychology. In Smith, J. A., ed., Qualitative psychology, 2nd edn. (pp. 235–251). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

7 SERENDIPITOUS EVENTS IN PLACE The Weave of Bodies and Context via Environmental Unexpectedness and Chance

An integral aspect of place experience is environmental serendipity—unexpected events and situations arising because of happenstance bodily intersections in place.1 In Life Takes Place (Seamon 2018), I called this environmental serendipity place release. Through unexpected actions, encounters, and situations in place, people are “released” more deeply into themselves. Partly because of surprises happening in place, “life is good” as when one meets an old friend on the sidewalk or notices by chance a street poster advertising a neighborhood coffeehouse reading by a local poet one admires. Importantly, release can also unsettle place when serendipitous events happen that are inappropriate, distressing, threatening, or deadly—for example, an old man is mugged in his own neighborhood, or a woman from the United States is run down on a London street because she looked the “wrong” way. In this chapter, I probe place release by considering journalistic and cinematic descriptions of two contrasting modes of place serendipity, one felicitous, the other ill-starred: on one hand, meeting one’s life partner because of happenstance encounter in place; on the other hand, losing one’s life because of happenstance encounter in place. My aim is to better understand what place release entails and how both human and environmental aspects contribute to its role in the life of places.

Fortunate Place Encounters For accounts of couples meeting fortuitously in place, I draw on journalist Ariel Sabar’s Heart of the City, which tells the stories of nine real-life married couples who accidentally meet in nine different public places in New York City—Grand Central Station, the Empire State Building, Washington Square Park, Times Square, Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty, the subway, and the street (Sabar 2011). Partly because his mother and father had met accidentally in New York City’s Washington Square Park in the 1960s, Sabar aims to “isolate the DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-9

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romantic effects of place” (Sabar 2011, p. xxxi). Unlike homes, offices, schools, or places of worship, public places “draw people with little in common” (Sabar 2011, p. xxxi). Yet his parents’ fortuitous meeting in Washington Square Park suggested to Sabar that public places might sometimes be the starting point for more lasting, long-term commitments between people who would never have encountered each other otherwise: “What if I found couples who had actually met in public? What if these chance encounters had led not just to an exchange of smiles and a batting of eyelashes, but to a wedding day?” (Sabar 2011, p. xxx). In answering these questions, Sabar searched for married couples who had met in New York City public places. He studied online newspaper archives, looked through wedding announcements, posted details of his research on Craigslist and blogs about New York City weddings. He ran a classified entry in The New York Review of Books. Eventually, he gathered a large collection of stories of which he chose nine, selected, first, because each happened at one well-known New York City public place; and second, because he was able to track down the couples, learn about their “chance meeting” firsthand, and update their lives to the present. Ranging from the early 1940s to the early 2000s, Sabar’s nine stories begin just before the chance meeting, when the two individuals “are strangers, oblivious to how, in moments, their lives will irrevocably change” (Sabar 2011, p. xxxiii). Here, I summarize two chance meetings and then discuss what the stories say about place release more broadly. Happening in Central Park in September 1941, the unexpected meeting of 18-year-old Josephine Filip and 22-year-old navy sailor Willis “Bill” Langford is typical of Sabar’s accounts. From Passaic, New Jersey, Josephine had run away from home because her mother demanded she enter a Catholic convent. Sleeping her first night on a subway train, she notices the next day the trees of Central Park and searches for a secure hidden sleeping space for the cold, windy night ahead. Josephine hasn’t eaten since the day before and rests on a bench “at the edge of a curving walk, just before it dropped and wound under a short bridge” (Sabar 2011, p. 4). She moves to the bridge underpass to light a cigarette, but the strong wind extinguishes the match. Just then Bill, a sailor on shore leave, approaches and offers her another light. As they converse, he realizes she’s hungry and takes her to dinner at a Fifth Avenue diner. They quickly fall in love. A month after meeting, they marry, though World War II will keep them apart because of Bill’s navy service in the Pacific. After the war, the couple settled on the West Coast and raised four children. They had been married nearly 64 years when Josephine died in 2004 aged 82 years. In 1994, Bill had written his own account of their meeting, “a story that made him proud” (Sabar 2011, p. 212). He explained to Sabar that, in contrast, Josephine never spoke to their family about how she and Bill met, probably because her upbringing was so traumatic: “Despite the hoopla surrounding their fairy-tale meeting and marriage, most of her children didn’t learn of the story until after her death” (Sabar 2011, p. 213). Over the course of their long marriage, the couple never returned to New York City.

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Another of Sabar’s nine stories describes 23-year-old Robin Miller, an architecture student at North Dakota State University, who travels with three friends to New York City in summer, 2002, to conduct background research for her design thesis focusing on a 9/11 “Ground Zero” memorial. One July evening, she and her friends walk through Times Square, seeking out a restaurant where locals go. Robin asks 36-year-old police patrolman Marcel Sim for recommendations. He and Robin joke. He lists several possibilities, of which she and her friends choose The Pig ‘n’ Whistle. As she thanks him, Robin notes that, above his badge is a shirt pin with the letters “WTC,” indicating he played an important role in saving lives during the 9/11 terrorist attack. After dinner, Robin and her friends return to their hotel through Times Square and are spotted by Marcel, who grins, winks at his two patrol partners, and calls out to Robin. He and she “made small talk: about museums worth visiting, about her college, about his job, about street smarts (‘Any stranger that comes up to you that’s not another tourist, keep walking’)” (Sabar 2011, p. 146). He hands Robin his card, saying, “If you guys need some security pointers or other ideas, whatever, give me a call” (Sabar 2011, p. 146). A few months later, she returns to New York to gather more materials for her “Ground Zero” design. Marcel picks her up at the airport, they spend several days together and, two months after Robin’s graduation in May 2003, she moves to New York to live with Marcel. They marry on Saturday, September 11, 2004, with the idea of surrounding Marcel’s “most painful memories [of 9/11] with better ones, so that one day the good might outnumber the bad” (Sabar 2011, p. 159).

Place Qualities and Serendipity An important question for Sabar is how features of the places where his nine couples meet play a role in their accidental meetings. “How,” he writes, “do the physical places in which we live, work, and play shape us?” (Sabar 2011, p. xiv). He quotes Fred Kent, director of New York City’s Project for Public Spaces, who claims that “we know right away if a place is good, if people are kissing, if they’re affectionate (Sabar 2011, p. xiv). For Sabar’s nine couples, the role of place in drawing them together is unclear. When Sabar asked Robin whether Times Square had a role in their meeting, she responded that the place felt comfortable and safe: “It was so well lit, and everyone around you, they’re all in similar frames of mind: It’s all about fun and relaxation and having a good time” (Sabar 2011, p. 226). She explained that, if the setting had been otherwise, she wasn’t sure “she would have felt comfortable buttonholing a big-city police officer …. ‘In Times Square, when I first started talking to Marcel for the first time, I felt in some ways like I already knew him’” (Sabar 2011, p. 226). Other couples were less certain about the role of place in their meeting. Aged 26, Sofia Feldman, who accidentally encountered 29-year-old Matt Fitzgerald on a New York City street because she was returning home from orchestra practice and he had just left an appointment with his therapist, emphasized that the two could

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never have met in any other way: “It’s a private miracle that makes you believe in something” (Sabar 2011, p. 215). Another couple meeting on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty think of that landmark “as their matchmaker” and ask, “What are the odds of people meeting there and being together all these [21] years?” (Sabar 2011, p. 220). Another couple who met on the subway speak of “fate” (Sabar 2011, p. 221), though another couple who met at the Metropolitan Museum of Art speak of life as accidental: “If you wait a second one way or another your entire life is different. The fact that [we] met in this place, that our paths just intersected, made all the difference. When I saw him, it was a moment of recognition. It was like everything in life was revealed in this one moment” (Sabar 2011, p. 229). One other respondent, who met his wife in Washington Square Park, relates the encounter to randomness and luck: My life was set on a very different path …. I don’t think we had any reason to meet, except for randomness. Except for just luck. The way we met has given me certainty that I know nothing. I’d been for eleven years in a relationship with Elena [his then-current girlfriend] and I was sure I was going to marry her. Then, in twenty minutes, my life was just upside down. (Sabar 2011, p. 232)

Deadly Place Encounters Not all place serendipity produces happy endings. Places also facilitate unfortunate events, the worst of which is death. Some of the most striking examples of deadly place encounters are provided in the opening sequences of Six Feet Under, director Alan Ball’s 5-year running Home Box Office television program, 2001–2005, which focuses on a family who operates a Pasadena mortuary business.2 Almost every episode begins with a human death, sometimes so surprising and unbelievable that viewers can only gasp at the death’s improbability.3 During its 5-year run of 74 episodes, one counts at least 25 deaths related to unfortunate place serendipity, for example: • •

A young gay man is attacked and beaten to death at an ATM machine. A pornographic film star is electrocuted when her cat knocks electric curlers into her bathtub. • A woman celebrating her divorce stands up through the roof of a limousine and is decapitated by a low-hanging stoplight. • A man dressed as Santa Claus on a motorcycle waves to children and is struck dead by a truck at a traffic intersection. • An older woman trips and falls down a mountainside to her death. • A utility worker climbing a light pole is electrocuted because of a sudden earthquake. • A pedestrian is struck dead by a metal lunchbox dropped accidentally by a construction worker in a high-rise tower.

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One can argue that, at least partly, all the 25 deaths transpire because some aspect of place and victim fall inexorably out of kilter: electric curlers fall into bathtub; stoplight strikes woman; truck runs down Santa; earthquake shakes pole; and so forth. Some of these deaths might have been avoided, if the victim had been more aware (the older woman hiking) or if the victim had not been in the particular place at the particular time (the gay man beaten to death). One of the most remarkable Six Feet Under deaths is an older woman who goes outside her house to get better cell phone reception. She is accidentally struck by a large block of “blue ice” jettisoned from a passenger plane’s landing at a nearby airport. In relation to place release, this death is particularly instructive because it marks the end of a chain of events that begins with a father and daughter releasing a pigeon they had nursed back to health. As the pigeon flies away, it defecates on a homeless man’s hat, which he washes in the men’s room of a convenience store owned by the husband of the woman struck by blue ice. Even though he tells the homeless man not to use the toilet because it is out of order, the homeless man flushes with the result that the toilet overflows, the husband must clean up the overflow, and he calls his wife to say he will arrive home late. Not able to hear clearly what he says, she goes outside and is struck by the falling ice. This particular Six Feet Under death is a lamentable but astonishing example of how good intentions can lead to unfortunate results inured in place!

Connections to Architecture and Design Both the couples in Sabar’s book and the victims in Six Feet Under point to the presence of place release in the lives of people-in-place. Mostly, place release is a phenomenon of human life that cannot be directly controlled, designed for, or predicted. Many of life’s events simply happen and some of those happenings unfold because of place-as-context and the unpredictable conjoining of people and place. Can architects design for place release? Sociologist Lyn Lofland (1998), for example, suggests that the most popular places are associated with some sort of unexpected pleasure related to environmental experiences such as whimsy, unusualness, and sociability. For urbanist William Whyte (1980), sociability is centrally important in envisioning public spaces: In his seminal The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, he declares that the best urban parks and plazas are sociable in that they draw large numbers of users informally—in other words, users have mostly come to the space because other people are already present. As he makes the point, “What attracts people most … is other people” (Whyte 1980, p. 19). In his work, Whyte marks out design features that make a park or plaza inviting and thus draw many users, who in turn draw more users. These design features include a good location near large populations of potential users; a well-designed street-plaza relationship incorporating a smooth, almost imperceptible shift from street and sidewalk to plaza; and lots of sitting that is comfortable physically (not too high, too low, or too narrow) and socially (a range of sitting possibilities so that one can sit alone, with an intimate other, or in smaller and larger groups).

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One of Whyte’s most instructive efforts relating to place release is using food sales to produce place robustness. He describes his involvement in creating an outdoor café in Andrews Plaza, next to the New York City Municipal Building. Tables, chairs, and food kiosks were clustered together so that users were drawn into a physical and spatial togetherness: “people were compressed into meeting one another; waiting in line or weaving their way through the tables, it was difficult not to” (Whyte 1980, p. 53). Whyte (1980, p. 53) explains that, very quickly, this space became “a great interchange for city government” and one of New York City’s “most sociable of places.” In pointing to the opportunities that this environmental sociability offers for place release, Whyte (1980, p. 53) writes: I’ve never seen so many people striking up conversations, introducing people, saying hellos and goodbyes. If a check is ever made, it would probably show many marriages and children can be traced back to a summer day at St. ­Andrews Plaza. One architect who recognizes the significance of place release is Christopher Alexander, whose Pattern Language (1977) includes many patterns that incorporate and potentially activate place release—for example, the pattern, “promenade” (pattern no. 31), which emphasizes the significance of unexpected, rejuvenating encounters in places where one goes to see and be seen: Throughout history there have been places in the city where people … could go to get in touch with each other. These places have always been like street theaters: they invite people to watch others, to stroll and browse, and to loiter …. (Alexander et al. 1977, p. 169) A good number of patterns in Pattern Language speak to place release in that they highlight informal, interpersonal encounters and exchanges often unplanned and surprising—for example, “magic of the city” (10), “web of shopping” (19), “shopping street” (32), “night life” (33), “carnival” (58), “accessible green” (60), “small public squares” (61), “dancing in the street” (63), and “windows overlooking life” (192). Some of Alexander’s patterns (e.g., “night life” and “dancing in the street”) describe a broad mode of place dynamism and ambience, whereas others (e.g., “web of shopping” or “accessible green”) provide more precise design suggestions for facilitating place serendipity (Alexander et al. 1977). Thus “web of shopping” offers guidelines for locating retail uses, and “accessible green” highlights the importance of placing city parks within a 3-minute walk of residences and workplaces. It bears repeating that, most of the time, place release cannot be made to happen directly, but many of Alexander’s patterns are significant because they aim to sustain places where accidental encounters and out-of-the-ordinary events might readily happen. There are other decisive possibilities whereby design contributes to place serendipity. Perhaps the most consequential is architectural theorist Bill Hillier’s theory

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of space syntax, which demonstrates that whether and how human beings meet in place is unavoidably connected to the spatial configuration of pathways (Hillier 1996; Hillier and Hanson 1984). As Hillier emphasizes, “The configuration of the space network itself is, in and of itself, a primary shaper of the pattern of movement” (Hillier 2008, p. 30). How to design a sidewalk and street fabric that draws users together rather than keeps them apart is a crucial question in relation to place release, since people meeting or not meeting face-to-face is a sine qua non for many situations of place release. Obviously, design can also play a crucial role in reducing unfortunate place serendipity, for instance, reducing the number of pedestrians struck by cars—over one million deaths each year worldwide (Carmona 2021, p. 461). Unfortunately, drivers do not typically obey posted speed limits but drive according to how safe a street feels. Planning-wise, this fact means that streets should be designed to slow traffic, since it is collisions at high speed that typically kill pedestrians (Montgomery 2013).4 Physical interventions to slow traffic include speed bumps; street narrowing; on-street parking; two-way traffic; median strips with trees or other plantings; and tightened corners at junctions so that drivers must reduce speed. The important design intervention is physical elements whereby drivers “perceive a more complex and potentially hazardous environment” and thereby reduce vehicle speed (Carmona 2021, p. 461). Montgomery (2013, p. 97) points out that another key is the presence of many people on foot: “Lots of pedestrians, and drivers become so attentive that traffic fatalities plummet.”

The Future of Environmental Serendipity In Nesting, architect Sarah Robinson (2011, p. 76) writes that “A shift in our experience enriches who we are.” One of the most striking environmental examples of this fact is place release, whereby surprising happenstances enliven ordinary, even humdrum, life. For sure, the COVID‑19 pandemic called into question whether people immersed physically in real-world places can continue to be an integral feature of human lifeworlds. Even so, the phenomenon of people-interacting-via-­ physical-places remains an integral part of human life. Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 362) describes the social world of bodily co-­presence “not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence,” which he likens to a vortex towards which my world is drawn and, so to speak, sucked in; to this extent, it is no longer mine … Already, the other body [e.g., other-people-bodilyin-place] has ceased to be a mere fragment of the world, and [has] become the theatre of a certain process of elaboration …. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 353) Merleau-Ponty suggests here that other human beings bodily present are an inescapable component of any human world’s dynamic, integrated weave—what phenomenologist

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Elizabeth Behnke (1997, p. 69) describes as intercorporeality: “a primordial solidarity of and between embodied beings.” If intercorporeality is an essential constituent of sustainable human life, then one assumes that human worlds will always include serendipitous place encounters. To lose this aspect of everyday taken-for-grantedness would upset the unexpected pleasures and surprises offered by place and diminish humanness to a dispiriting partiality.

Notes 1 This chapter was originally published as an article for the Italian architectural journal Intertwinings: Weaving Body Context, 3 (2021), pp. 120–133. The journal editors are Alessandro Gattara, Sarah Robinson, and Davide Ruzzon; the journal is sponsored by the Milan publisher, Mimesis International. The author thanks the editors and publisher for permission to include the entry here. 2 For critical commentaries on the series, see Akass and McCabe (2005) and Fahy (2006). 3 See Ball and Poul (2003). For a phenomenological interpretation of the series, see Seamon (2013). 4 Montgomery (2013, p. 97) points out that it is not collisions that kill people but collisions at high speed. A pedestrian hit by a car going 35 mph is ten times as likely to die than if hit by a car going 25 mph (Montgomery 2013, p. 97). Carmona (2021, p. 461) explains that 5% of pedestrians are killed when hit by a vehicle traveling at 20 mph; the fatality rate increases to almost 50% at 30 mph and 85% at 40 mph.

References Akass, K. and McCabe, J., eds. (2005). Reading six feet under: TV to die for. London: I.B. Tauris. Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M., Jacobson, M., Fiksdahl-King, I. and Angel, S. (1977). A pattern language. New York: Oxford University Press. Ball, A. and Poul, A., eds. (2003). Six feet under: Better living through death. New York: Pocket Books. Behnke, E. (1997). Body. In Embree, L., ed., Encyclopedia of phenomenology (pp. 66–71). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer. Carmona, M. (2021). Public places, urban spaces: The dimensions of urban design, 3rd edn. London: Routledge. Fahy, T., ed. (2006). Considering Alan Ball. London: McFarland & Company. Hillier, B. (1996). Space is the machine. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hillier, B. (2008). The new science and the art of place. In Haas, T., ed., New urbanism and beyond. New York: Rizzoli. Hillier, B. and Hanson, J. (1984). The social logic of space. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lofland, L. H. (1998). The public realm. New York: Aldine de Gruter. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). The phenomenology of perception, trans. C. Smith. New York: Humanities Press [originally 1945]. Montgomery, C. (2013). Happy city: Transforming our lives through urban design. New York: Farrar, Status and Giroux. Robinson, S. (2011). Nesting: Body, dwelling, mind. Richmond, CA: William Stout. Sabar, A. (2011). Heart of the city: Nine stories of love & serendipity on the streets of New York. New York: da Capro Press.

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Seamon, D. (2013). Phenomenology and uncanny homecomings: Homeworld, alienworld, and being-at-home in Alan Ball’s HBO television series, Six Feet Under.” In Boscaljon, D., ed., Resisting the place of belonging: Uncanny homecomings in religion, narrative and the arts (pp. 155–170). Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Seamon, D. (2018). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routledge. Whyte, W. (1980). The social life of small urban spaces. New York: Project for Public Spaces.

8 ARCHITECTURE, PLACE, AND PHENOMENOLOGY Buildings as Lifeworlds, Atmospheres, and Environmental Wholes

Architecture plays a central role in human life.1 In providing the most dominant kind of human-made places, well-designed buildings support and enhance particular worlds—for example, schools sustain a world of teaching and learning; hospitals, a world facilitating health and healing; dwellings, a world offering privacy, at-homeness, and familial intimacy. Though critical histories of architecture demonstrate that buildings too often undermine the worlds they are meant for, any architectural design, at least in theory, should support and even invigorate the mode of life for which the building is made.2 This point is underlined by the fact that, on average in the Western world, people spend nine-tenths of their lives inside buildings; about two-thirds of that indoor time is spent at home.3 In this chapter, I draw on a phenomenological perspective to consider three ways in which buildings work as places: first, as lifeworlds; second, as architectural atmospheres; and third, as physical and spatial fields that sustain environmental and place wholeness. I discuss these three themes because they have been given only minimal attention in the growing literature on “architectural phenomenology,” which can be defined as the phenomenological study of architectural experiences and meanings as constituted by qualities and features of both the built environment and human life.4

Buildings as Lifeworlds and Places Phenomenologically, the lifeworld is the everyday realm of experiences, actions, and meanings typically taken for granted and thus out of sight as a phenomenon. Unless it changes in some noticeable way, we are almost always, in our typical human lives, unaware of the lifeworld, which we assume is the way that life is and must be. This typically unquestioned acceptance of the lifeworld is what phenomenologist Edmund Husserl called the natural attitude, because of how we habitually assume DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-10

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that the world as we know and experience it is the only world. A major phenomenological aim is to make the lifeworld and natural attitude objects of direct attention and thereby to recognize how much of human life, both in its ordinary and extra-ordinary aspects, incorporates a lived complexity of which we are normally unaware.5 One dimension of this lived complexity is the fact that, on the one hand, any lifeworld incorporates each individual or group’s unique experiences, actions, understandings, and life events. On the other hand, any lifeworld, including those housed architecturally, incorporates a more comprehensive lived structure with a place dynamic and ambience often different from the individual and group lifeworlds of which it is comprised. In this sense, there is a lifeworld for each experiencing person and group, but there is also a lifeworld of the situation or place that provides the setting for those individual and group lifeworlds. This collective lifeworld is grounded and sustained, totally or in part, by the individual and group lifeworlds, just as they are grounded and sustained, totally or in part, by the collective lifeworld comprising them. In relation to architecture, we can speak of the individual lifeworlds of all individuals and groups associated with a building, but we can also speak of the lifeworld of the building itself. The character and atmosphere of this collective architectural lifeworld may or may not be significantly different from the specific individual and group lifeworlds that the building’s lifeworld draws together. In many ways, place is the lived component of lifeworld that is most relevant for examining architectural experience and meaning. Both theoretically and practically, place is a powerful concept phenomenologically because, by its very constitution, it offers a way to specify more precisely the experienced wholeness of lifeworlds (Casey 2009; Donohoe 2014; Malpas 2018; Relph 1976). From a phenomenological perspective, place can be defined as any environmental locus that draws human experiences, actions, and meanings together spatially and temporally (Seamon 2018, p. 2). By this definition, a place can range from an environmental element or room to a neighborhood, town, city, or geographical region. Clearly, most buildings become places that sustain or undermine the particular lifeworlds for which they are constructed. In this sense, a building can be understood as a constellation of actions, events, situations, and experiences all associated with and activated by individuals and groups’ use of that building, whether for living, working, recreating, conducting business, or something else. In this way, a building helps to sustain the lifeworlds it houses within and also has a lived relationship with other lifeworlds connected to that building spatially and environmentally—for example, the world of sidewalks, streets, and urban district surrounding a downtown high-rise office tower. One aim of an architectural phenomenology is to study buildings as lifeworlds and places and to bring forward questions such as the following: • Does a building’s design support or undermine the building’s functions and uses? • Do the building’s users make use of it in the ways the architect envisioned?

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• How do users describe their experiences of the building and, in what ways, experientially and behaviorally, do they claim that the building sustains or undermines its central purpose—for example, a library should, first of all, work as a repository of information conveniently accessible to patrons, just as an art museum should provide a convenient, readily understandable, backdrop for its collections and exhibitions. • What are the lifeworlds of the individuals and groups using a building, and are those individual lifeworlds enhanced or stymied by the lifeworld of the building-as-a-whole, including its environmental atmosphere and place ambience? • How might the lifeworld of a building shift over time and how might architectural elements of that building contribute to whether and how those shifts unfold? • Can one speak of the “time-body” of a building—in other words, its life from original design vision through construction and use to moment of demolition? What is the lived relationship between a building’s time-body and shifting lifeworlds?

A Typology of Building Lifeworlds So far, there have been few research efforts to delineate a lived typology of architectural lifeworlds and thereby to conceptualize the various lived possibilities for who uses and encounters a building. Over 30 years ago, architectural theorists Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson identified three broad groups of building users: inhabitants, those users who control the building (e.g., staff in a hospital or residents at home); visitors, users who also “occupy” the building but are in a subordinate position to inhabitants (e.g., hospital patients or students in a school); and strangers, shorter-term “guests” in that building (e.g., store shoppers or concert goers in an auditorium) (Hillier and Hanson 1984, pp. 146–147). Though somewhat awkward label-wise, these user designations are important phenomenologically because they point toward different lived modes of using, identifying with, and taking responsibility for a building. In considering what such a user typology might mean in terms of architectural lifeworlds, we can consider the example of a large public library in a central city location (Fisher et al. 2007; Seamon 2017). This building’s “inhabitants” are the administrative staff and librarians responsible for the institution’s everyday functioning and its longer-term aims and accomplishments. At the same time, one can imagine other user lifeworlds—for example, “visitors” such as janitors, library volunteers, and maintenance staff; and a wide range of library “strangers”—not only one-time visitors and regular patrons but also students on class field trips, outside repair people, and even homeless individuals using the library as daytime accommodation because no other central city facilities are available. In addition, each of these user groups would no doubt incorporate varying subgroups and their particular lifeworlds—for example, teen, elderly, and less-abled patrons. One phenomenological aim is to explore the lived commonalities and differences among these various

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lifeworld groups and to identify in what ways the library design and its lifeworld as a whole accommodates or interferes with various users and user-groups’ needs and expectations. In finding ways to identify and to describe architectural lifeworlds, another useful model is geographer Edward Relph’s explication of different modes of place experience grounded in the phenomenological assumption that an environment becomes a place experientially when the person or group feels a sense of lived insideness in relation to that environment—in other words, they feel secure, comfortable, at ease, and in place (Relph 1976). The opposite lived relationship with place is what Relph identified as outsideness—feeling a sense of separation, discomfort, and even ­alienation from place. Relph drew on this outsideness-insideness continuum to delineate several modes of place experience. In relation to architecture-as-place, these modes do not relate to one’s “role” or “social status” associated with the building. Rather, they describe the kind and intensity of experience that one encounters via the building as a place. For example, incidental outsideness refers to an experience in which place is largely a background or contingent setting. This limited, one-­ dimensional experience of place is much different from the mode of place encounter that Relph termed existential insideness—feeling completely at home in and engaged with place, to such a degree that experiencers do not usually notice its taken-forgranted importance in their lives unless that place dramatically changes in some way. In returning to our library example, one can imagine that this same building evokes a wide range of place experiences (Seamon 2017, pp. 88–91). The library staff and its regular users probably experience the building as a place of existential insideness, though it is also possible that a dissatisfied patron or staff member, because of unpleasant user experiences or professional conflicts, might associate the building with existential outsideness. Yet again, one-time visitors or infrequent users would most likely experience the building in terms of Relph’s incidental insideness, since their lived encounter with the building would be minimal experientially. The major value of Relph’s typology of place experience is that it provides one conceptual structure for locating and explicating the wide range of architectural experiences with which buildings can be associated. One realizes how the same architectural environment can host different lifeworlds and invoke a spectrum of varying place encounters, situations, and meanings—some experienced more or less the same by all users, and others experienced more or less differently. Relph’s typology also provides a language to describe how a user’s experience of a building can shift over time—e.g., the long-time patron whose fondness for the library (existential insideness) is suddenly shattered (existential outsideness) because of an unpleasant disagreement with library staff.

Building Lifeworlds and Time It is significant phenomenologically that a building and its lifeworlds may shift over time: buildings deteriorate physically; their structure, functions, and users may change. In working to understand why some buildings have a longer lifespan than

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other buildings housing the same functions and uses, architectural writer Stewart Brand (1994, pp. 12–23) identified six architectural components that shift at varying temporal rates and play a major role in how a building is used over time. In addition, these architectural components offer clues as to whether a building, functionally and experientially, is able to sustain itself over a long period of time or end up derelict or demolished. From shortest to longest turnover cycle, these six architectural components are: (1) Stuff: the building’s furnishings, equipment, and other less permanent contents that can be shifted or replaced frequently—i.e., yearly, monthly, weekly, or even daily. (2) Space plan: the building’s interior layout, including the placement of walls, doors, and other interior-defining elements; for commercial buildings, interior layouts typically change every three years, whereas “exceptionally quiet homes might wait thirty years” (Brand 1994, p. 13). (3) Services: the building’s infrastructure, including plumbing, wiring, elevators, and heating and cooling systems; typically, these building components wear out or become obsolete in seven to 15 years; many buildings are demolished if the value of the building falls below the cost of replacing outdated systems. (4) Skin: the building’s exterior envelope, including roofs and exterior wall sheathing; because of changing technologies and architectural styles, exterior surfaces typically change about every 20 years. (5) Structure: the building’s foundation and weight-bearing fabric; reworking building structure is difficult physically and costly economically; the life of a building’s structure ranges from 30 to 300 years (though few buildings survive more than 60 years but for other practical and lifeworld reasons) (Brand 1994, p. 13). (6) Site: the physical context of the building, including location, environmental setting, and lot specifications; typically, a site outlasts the lives of any buildings it hosts. These six building components and their varying rates of turnover are integral to a building’s lifespan, which, just as importantly, is dependent on whether and how long the building adequately serves its users’ lifeworld needs and actions. Brand pointed out that, in the history of architecture, one finds two kinds of buildings that best accommodate unforeseen functional or architectural changes—what he called “low-road” and “high-road” architecture (Brand 1994, pp. 24–51). Lowroad buildings are nondescript, general-purpose, low-rent structures readily adaptable to a wide range of practical functions and tasks—for example, a large, brick industrial building originally a factory but later converted into apartments, offices, workshops, and artist lofts. Low-road buildings survive because they are readily and inexpensively adapted to users’ shifting economic, social, or institutional needs and situations. In contrast, high-road buildings relate to expensive, signature architecture that, via progressive refinement, becomes richly specialized and, therefore,

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unique—for example, a British country house that over several centuries gathers to itself a singular ambience and character. These high-road buildings survive because users and others familiar with the building feel an attachment and respect that protects the building’s continuing presence. One of Stewart’s most intriguing examples of low-road architecture is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Building 20, a large, wooden, three-story structure hastily constructed in 1943 as a secret site for developing radar (Brand 1994, pp. 24–28). Though scheduled for demolition immediately after World War II, the building remained a major center of interdisciplinary innovation at MIT until it was demolished in 1998 to make way for architect Frank Gehry’s Stata Center. This makeshift building survived for so many years partly because of its five-wing, horizontal layout and in-between courtyards (structure and space plan) that encouraged serendipitous academic and professional interactions said to have contributed to cutting-edge innovation in such fields as electronics, acoustics, computer technology, and even linguistics (Allen 1997, pp. 1–3). The building’s five low narrow wings included long, horizontal strings of operable windows providing excellent daylight and user-controlled ventilation (skin). Because the building was understood as temporary and constructed cheaply as a simple timber shell, users felt no qualms about modifying or updating its room layout (space plan) or infrastructure (services). As one user explained when interviewed about why Building 20 had become an architectural legend at MIT: “If you don’t like a wall, just stick your elbow through it” (Brand 1994, p. 27). If low-road buildings sustain user lifeworlds largely via architectural flexibility and economical function, high-road buildings prolong their lifespans by becoming unique places that users become deeply attached to and wish to care for, preserve, and defend in times of threat. One of Brand’s examples is the Boston Athenaeum, an exceptional independent library located at its current Beacon Street location since 1849 and illustrating the “quirks and traditions characteristic of long, independent life” (Brand 1994, p. 45). All large libraries must find ways to house expanding collections, and the Athenaeum has met this challenge via a series of creative architectural manipulations—for example, adding two additional stories to the original three-story building (structure); relocating book stacks and reading rooms (space plan); replacing staircases with book stacks (space plan and stuff); adding internal floors (structure and space plan) and introducing motor-powered, compact shelving that allows unused stacks to be rolled together (stuff and services). For Brand, the Athenaeum has survived as a building and institution because, throughout its lifetime, its directors have been able to make architectural improvements quickly and creatively in response to shifting collection and user needs. The result is the library’s being held in great regard by patrons and the broader public: “Trust, intimacy, intense use, and time are what made [this building] work so well” (Brand 1994, p. 49). Brand’s discussion of low-road and high-road buildings is important phenomenologically because he illustrates the complex, lived relationship between architecture and lifeworld needs. Lifeworlds can be “shoehorned” architecturally, but

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Brand’s major point is that buildings are more successful as places when their architecture sustains and responds to the human life within. He demonstrates how, over time, the six architectural components play a central role in whether a building adapts to users’ needs and can continue to sustain their lifeworlds. If the building does not have the flexibility of low-road architecture or the user regard of high-road architecture, its life may end through dereliction or demolition.6

Buildings as Architectural Atmospheres In praising the Boston Athenaeum as a place, the American biographer Gamaliel Bradford wrote in 1931 that no library “anywhere has more an atmosphere of its own, none that is more conducive to intellectual aspiration or spiritual peace” (Bradford 1931, p. xi). As indicated by Bradford’s evaluation, it is this ineffable architectural presence that I am referring to when I speak of a building’s architectural atmosphere—in other words, the lived quality of a building whereby it evokes a certain invisible character or ambience that makes that building unusual or unique as a place. Recently in phenomenological discussion, this phenomenon of atmosphere has received intensifying attention (Borch 2014; Böhme et al. 2014; Griffero 2014; Pallasmaa 2014, 2016). Philosopher Torino Griffero (2014, p. 36), for example, defined atmosphere as “spatialised feelings” and “the specific emotional quality of a given ‘lived space’.” In turn, philosopher Gernot Böhme (2014, pp. 56, 96) related atmosphere to “spaces with a mood, or emotionally felt spaces” and described the experience as “that total impression that is regarded as characteristic” of a building or place. Drawing on a somewhat broader description, architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa (2014, p. 20) defined atmosphere as “the overarching perceptual, sensory, and emotive impression of a space, setting, or social situation.” He argued that “overpowering atmospheres have a haptic, almost material presence, as if we were surrounded and embraced by a specific substance” (Pallasmaa 2014, p. 34). In contending that all buildings, whether prosaic or monumental, project some degree of mood and ambience, Pallasmaa (2016, p. 133) went so far as to claim that atmosphere, in contrast to visible building form, is the most important aspect of architectural experience for everyday users: This unconscious orientation and articulation of mood is often the most significant effect of a space or a building. I believe that non-architects sense primarily the atmosphere of a place or building, whereas an attention to visible form implies a distinct intellectual and theoretical position. Griffero, Böhme, and Pallasmaa’s explications point toward the remarkably complex, experiential nature of atmospheres, which are diffuse, largely ineffable, and never fully graspable or describable. They are not brought to awareness or identity via vision alone but incorporate a wide range of lived qualities that include sound, tactility, emotional vibrations, and an active presence of things and spaces.

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As Pallasmaa (2016, p. 133) explained, an awareness of atmosphere involves “our entire embodied and existential sense … and it is perceived in a diffuse and peripheral manner rather than through precise, focused and conscious observation.” In many ways, architectural atmosphere is a variation on the related phenomenon of “spirit of place,” or genius loci—the unique ambience and character of a place, for example, the “Rome-ness” of Rome, or the “New England-ness” of New England (Norberg-Schulz 1980; Relph 2009; Seamon 2018, 2022b). As with architectural atmospheres, most explications of genius loci focus on an ineffable environmental presence impossible to locate or describe completely. For example, British novelist Lawrence Durrell (1969, p. 157) defined genius loci as “the invisible constant in a place,” and cultural geographer Pierce Lewis (1979, p. 27) spoke of “something intangible in certain places—a kind of quality that makes certain places special and worth defending.” As a way conceptually to specify the lived nature of genius loci more precisely, Relph (2009, pp. 25–26) made the helpful differentiation between genius loci (he called it spirit of place) and sense of place. As I have above, he defined “spirit of place” as the singular quality of a particular environment or locale that infuses it with a unique ambience and character. He defined “sense of place,” in contrast, as the synaesthetic and largely unself-conscious facility of human beings to feel and sense the uniqueness of a particular environment or locale—in other words, its genius loci or “spirit of place.” As Relph described it, “sense of place” refers to a lived awareness, much of the time tacit and beneath conscious attention, which radiates from the experiencer toward the place, whereas “spirit of place” refers to a lived quality that radiates from the physical environment toward the experiencer. Experientially, a robust “spirit of place” typically evokes a strong “sense of place,” but the inverse is potentially less so (though it might happen that, if an individual or group is concerned about a weak “spirit of place,” they may work to find ways, through design and policy, to strengthen it or, alternately, they may move to a locale where the “spirit of place” is more to their liking). A central point that Relph’s differentiation suggests is that human beings have an instinctive sense for genius loci and, existentially, gravitate toward it, though he also emphasizes that not all people are sensitive to or concerned with “spirit of place” (Relph 2009, p. 25).

Architectural Atmospheres and Archetypes Relph’s distinction between “spirit” and “sense” has relevance to architectural atmospheres because these lived differences suggest that both qualities of the experiencer and qualities of the built world contribute to the relative atmospheric presence of a building, including the possibility that some users may never fathom or be interested in encountering that presence. A first question that arises is whether there are heuristic means whereby one might become more sensitive to the ineffable qualities of architectural atmosphere. Can we, asks Pallasmaa (2014, p. 29), generate “a deepened sense of materiality, gravity, and reality?” A second question that arises is whether architectural atmosphere can be created directly? Can architects

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and other responsible parties “bring about the conditions in which atmospheres of a particular character are able to develop” (Böhme 2014, p. 58)? Here, I offer affirmative answers to both questions by highlighting architectural theorist Thomas Thiis-Evensen’s Archetypes in Architecture, a phenomenological study that offers one revealing conceptual language for becoming more alert to architectural atmosphere (Thiis-Evensen 1989). Defining architecture as the making of an inside in the midst of an outside, Thiis-Evensen (1989, p. 8) aimed to understand “the universality of architectural expression.” His interpretive means is architectural archetypes—“the most basic elements of architecture,” which he identified as floor, wall, and roof (Thiis-Evensen 1989, p. 8). ThiisEvensen proposed that experienced qualities of a building can be understood more exactly through what he claimed are the three existential expressions of architecture: motion, weight, and substance (Thiis-Evensen 1989, p. 21). Motion refers to a particular architectural element’s expression of dynamism or inertia—whether that element seems to expand, contract, or rest in balance. In turn, weight relates to the element’s expression of heaviness or lightness, and substance involves the element’s material expression—whether it seems soft or hard, coarse or fine, warm or cold, bright or dark, and so forth. How, asked Thiis-Evensen, do a building’s floor, wall, and roof express insideness and outsideness through motion, weight, and substance? Thiis-Evensen emphasized that different architectural styles and cultural traditions may interpret the inside-outside dialectic through different degrees of openness and closure (for example, the medieval fortress’ thick, closed, impenetrable walls versus the Renaissance palazzo’s much more permeable walls of many windows). Regardless of the particular stylistic or cultural expression, floors, walls, and roofs speak to some degree of insideness in relation to some degree of outsideness. In addition, varying physical qualities of floors, walls, and roofs lead to different experiences of motion, weight, and substance. The result is an intricate set of tensions between architectural elements and architectural experience: What is it that the roof, the floor, and the wall do? As a motion, the roof rises or falls. The walls stand up or sink, the floor spreads out, climbs or descends. In this way, weight is also implied. That which rises is light, that which falls is heavy. And if the roof is bright and soft as a sail, it is open. If it is dark and of stone, it is closed. If the openings in a wall are tall and narrow, they ascend, if they are short and wide, they sink. A soft and fine floor is warm and open, but if it is hard and coarse, it closes and is heavy. (Thiis-Evensen 1989, p. 23) Thiis-Evensen’s work provides a grounded conceptual means for better recognizing and understanding how architectural elements contribute to the visceral, affective, and unself-conscious modes of experience that play an important role in architectural atmosphere. One example is his understanding of windows which, he argued, contribute to a building’s sense of inside and outside in that they reveal or hide the

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mode of life within a building. Whereas the door relates to the penetration of the outside in, the window relates to the penetration of the inside out: “While the door is determined by its relation to what is outside, the window is the symbol of what is inside. Just like the eye, it expresses the interior's outlook over exterior space …” (Thiis-Evensen 1989, p. 251). In clarifying how windows contribute to particular architectural experiences, Thiis-Evensen (1989, pp. 253–257) focused on three window elements: first, the opening; second, the placement of the face in the opening; and third, the frame around the opening. He demonstrated how each of these three window elements contributes to a building’s particular expression of motion, weight, and substance; and to that building’s expression of relative openness or closure. In relation to the window opening, he identified three variations—an opening the shape of which is predominantly vertical; predominantly horizontal; or centered (e.g., square or circular). These different window shapes afford different inside-outside relationships, thus vertical and centered windows typically intimate a movement coming from inside out, whereas a horizontal window intimates an inside lateral movement within and apart from an experiencer outside (Thiis-Evensen 1989, pp. 259–263). Similarly, the particular wall placement of a window’s face affords different experiences of openness or closure in that the face is “a boundary relating to the interior because, through the window, we glimpse the interior’s own life … held in check by the window membrane” (Thiis-Evensen 1989, p. 265). For example, a window face deep within a thick wall evokes a strong sense of separation and lived difference between inside and outside—e.g., the deep windows of many Romanesque churches. In contrast, a window face flush with the building wall connects inside and outside visually and, makes the building seem “thin skinned” because the window face and wall seem one and the same—e.g., the typical modernist design of walls that appear “as thin planes, a sort of non-supporting cloak wrapped around an open and expansive interior” (Thiis-Evensen 1989, p. 269). Also important for the lived experience of the window is its frame, which offers a setting for a building’s inside space and thereby leads the inside out. This “leading out” happens in contrasting ways, depending on what parts of the frame—sill, lintel, or jambs—are accentuated or deemphasized. If all frame parts are present, then the entire interior space seems to reach outward. On the other hand, if only the window’s lintel is highlighted, then the window invokes an upward movement; or, if only the sill is highlighted, the window invokes a downward movement (ThiisEvensen 1989, pp. 271–277). My main aim in introducing Thiis-Evensen’s work here is to suggest how his architectural language of archetypes offers one evocative means to locate and understand the tacit, unself-conscious qualities that contribute to a building’s architectural expression and atmosphere. A large portion of architectural experience is pre-cognitive, corporeal, and hidden from conscious view. In this sense, ThiisEvensen provides one innovative language for articulating architectural qualities and situations that otherwise remain unspoken and concealed in the natural attitude of architectural lifeworlds, experiences, and meanings.

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Buildings as Environmental and Human Wholes The last question I address in this chapter is how buildings might relate to environmental and human wholeness. How, in other words, might we conceptualize buildings in such a way that there is a lived integration and connectedness between building and users? How are building parts envisioned and assembled so that they integrate into an architectural whole enabling and even invigorating the lifeworlds for which the building was envisioned? One important body of research for answering these questions is space syntax, a spatial theory developed by architectural theorists Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson in the early 1980s.7 Though not phenomenological but instrumentalist and quantitative, space syntax focuses on how the topological arrangement of spaces in a place—whether a building, town, or city—works to draw users together physically or keep them apart. The focus is how “a system of spaces is related together to form [an integrated] pattern, rather than with the more localized properties of any particular space” (Hanson 1998, p. 23). In relation to architecture, space syntax offers a way to identify how the configurational arrangement of rooms, corridors, and other spaces in a building facilitate or inhibit particular movement patterns throughout that building. This knowledge of an integrated architectural spatiality is possible because the quantitative measures of space syntax identify the underlying topological constitution of the building’s spatial structure as a whole. In other words, these measures describe the way that particular rooms, corridors, and other building spaces are more or less interconnected topologically in the building’s overall spatial configuration and, thus, potentially, support much or little human co-presence and interpersonal interactions purely on the basis of relative spatial connectedness or separation. Procedurally, space syntax requires that any building be converted to a simplified network of spaces (rooms, corridors, and so forth) and connections between those spaces. Though reductionist, the network identified in this way has phenomenological significance because it describes users’ potential ease of movement through the various spaces of a building and identifies spaces and pathways in the building where user co-presence and interpersonal contacts are more and less likely (Hanson 1998; Seamon 2018, pp. 145-147; Shapiro 2005, pp. 52–58). One example of the value of space syntax is a study by architectural researcher Justin De Syllas (1989), who compared three group homes for children who had faced severe personal or familial crises. Though designed by a prestigious architectural firm, one of the homes was greatly disliked by care workers, who contended that the building itself adversely affected the children and contributed to even greater psychological distress (Hanson 1998, p. 281). In aiming to boost the children’s mental state, the architects had designed the building to “give children as much freedom as possible in a homely environment” (Hanson 1998, p. 281). De Syllas compared the spatial configuration of the poorly working home with two more successful homes about the same size and built around the same time. This analysis demonstrated that the failing home incorporated a network of spaces that

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were overly connected so that the children could move freely through the building without using the main public circulation system (Hanson 1998, p. 281). This overly permeable circulation structure made it almost impossible for the staff to supervise or control the distressed children, who in turn perceived the staff more as jailers than as care workers. In contrast, the spatial configurations of the two other homes had a more controllable, tree-like arrangement that allowed care workers to monitor children’s behavior in a “discreet, unobtrusive manner” (Hanson 1998, p. 283.) Even though all three buildings had the same function, the different configurations of their building spaces triggered different architectural and place actions, perceptions, and lifeworlds. De Syllas’ study illustrated how the configurational arrangement among a building’s spatial parts can be “more important than any of the parts taken in isolation” (Hillier 1996, p. 1).

Christopher Alexander and Architectural and Place Wholeness Space syntax is one significant perspective for understanding a building as a lived whole via its configuration of spaces, though the approach is incomplete in that the research focus is only the building’s topological relationships and interconnections. A more comprehensive effort to consider buildings and places as wholes is the work of architect Christopher Alexander, whose primary aim is understanding how the parts of a fabricated thing—whether an elegant carpet, a handsome building, or an exuberant urban district—belong together and have their proper place in the whole (Alexander 2002–2005; Alexander et al. 1977). He asks how wholeness, whether as understanding or making, comes into being and how an ever-deepening reciprocity between understanding and making might allow for more and more wholeness to unfold. Alexander’s most notable effort to understand buildings and places as wholes is his work on pattern language, which involved his gathering examples of buildings and places throughout the world that evoke a sense of order, robustness, and comfort. These examples then became a real-world basis for identifying and explicating underlying physical qualities, or “patterns,” that might be a model for conceiving future buildings and places (Alexander et al. 1977). In A Pattern Language, Alexander and colleagues identified 253 patterns, which are not to be understood as architectural elements or material things but as constellations of environment-experience relationships that sustain, through architectural and place qualities, a sense of human and environmental wellbeing—for example, “identifiable neighborhoods,” “degrees of publicness,” “main gateways,” “entry transition,” “window places,” “balconies at least six feet wide,” and so forth (Alexander et al. 1977). In explicating “main gateways,” for instance, Alexander suggested that urban designers highlight important urban districts with some form of entry marking “where the major entering paths cross the boundary” (Alexander et al. 1977, p. 278). Or, in emphasizing the importance of “entry transition,” Alexander referred to the experienced shift between public and private spaces: “buildings with a graceful transition between

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the street and the inside are more tranquil than those that open directly off the street” (Alexander et al. 1977, p. 549). He illustrated how entry transitions might be strengthened design-wise through gateways and through shifts in pathway direction, level, surface, light, view, and so forth. Alexander’s pattern language is a significant effort to understand architectural and place wholeness because, first, it provides a compilation of time-tested environmental and architectural elements and qualities, arranged from larger to smaller scale, that contribute to place exuberance. Second, the approach provides a programmatic means for explicating new patterns as needed and integrating them with existing patterns to concretize new pattern languages for buildings, places, and situations not imagined in the original language of 253 patterns. In terms of a phenomenology of architectural and place wholeness, the most significant feature of pattern language is Alexander’s recognition that, to locate the right architectural parts of a building or place, one must first identify the largest patterns in terms of which one can then more readily and accurately envision the placement of smaller patterns. In this way, all the parts of the design are understood in mutual relationship and are thereby given their most fitting place in the whole (Seamon 2016).

Integrating Lifeworlds, Atmospheres, and Wholeness Though I have considered lifeworld, atmosphere, and wholeness separately, these themes overlap and commingle in any real-world architecture. Ultimately, any building is a unique combination of the three, which in some buildings evoke a powerful architectural presence and sense of place, but in other buildings, agitate an unsettling architectural presence, environmental dullness, or even placelessness (Relph 1976, pp. 79–121). These three themes are only one way to think through an architectural phenomenology, a major aim of which is to facilitate a self-­conscious awareness of the architectural and place aspects of lifeworlds. By realizing the importance in everyday human life of architectural elements and qualities normally taken for granted, we may be better able to envision and create future buildings and places. Well-designed environments make a tremendous difference in human living, often in ways we do not realize because of the lifeworld’s tacit taken-for-­g rantedness. Though it is only one direction for architectural phenomenology among many, an understanding of architecture via lifeworld, atmosphere, and place wholeness may offer one powerful springboard for imagining buildings that invigorate daily living but also evoke wonderment, imagination, elegance, and grace.

Notes 1 This chapter was originally published in Janet Donohoe, ed., Place and Phenomenology (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2017, pp. 247–263). The author thanks the editor and publisher for allowing him to include the chapter here. 2 For critical overviews, see Hall (2014) and Newman (1980, ch. 11).

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3 National Safety Council, Indoor Air Quality Fact Sheet, 2009. http://www.nsc.org; accessed February 21, 2022. 4 Architectural theorist Jorge Otero-Pailos (2012, p. 136) defined architectural phenomenology as “the study of architecture as it presents itself to consciousness in terms of so-called archetypal experiences, such as the bodily orientation of up and down, the perceptions of light and shadow, or the feelings of dryness or wetness” (Otero-Pailos 2012, p. 136). This definition is a useful starting point, though one must emphasize that the range of phenomenological topics is much greater than the sensuous, bodily aspects of human experience that his definition highlights (Seamon 2022a). One must also realize that, though broad archetypal, dimensions of architectural experience and meaning are important, the phenomenological researcher can also explore specific social, cultural, and place aspects of architectural experience and meaning; see, for example, Seamon (2017). 5 For introductions to phenomenology, see Finlay (2011), Moran (2000), and van Manen (2014). 6 Clearly, other factors, many of them external to a building, also determine its lifespan. Abramson (2012, p. 164) identified factors that include demographic shifts; changes in fashion and district character; newer buildings with better services; and, most broadly, an “embrace of obsolescence” rationalized via the building’s “financial utility for the capitalist owner” (Abramson 2012, pp. 164, 168). 7 Overviews of space syntax theory include Hanson (1998), Hillier (1996), Hillier and Hanson (1984), Shapiro (2005, pp. 39–45), and van Nes and Yamu (2021).

References Abramson, D. M. (2012). Obsolescence: Notes towards a history. In Moe, K. and Smith, R., eds., Building systems: Design, technology, and society (pp. 160–174). New York: Routledge. Alexander, C. (2002–2005). The nature of order, 4 vols. Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure. Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M., Jacobson, M., Fiksdahl-King, I. and Angel, S. (1977). A pattern language. New York: Oxford University Press. Allen, J. (1997). A last loving look at an MIT landmark—Building 20. RLE Undercurrents [newsletter of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology] 9 (2), 1–3. Böhme, G. (2014). Urban atmospheres. In Borch, C., ed., Architectural atmospheres (pp. 42–59). Basil: Birkhäuser. Böhme, G., Griffero, T. and Thibaud, J.-P., eds. (2014). Architecture and atmosphere. Espoo, Finland: Tapio Wirkkala Rut Bryk Foundation. Borch, C., ed. (2014). Architectural atmospheres. Basil: Birkhäuser. Bradford, G. (1931). The quick and the dead. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Brand, S. (1994). How buildings learn. New York: Viking. Casey, E. (2009). Getting back into place, 2nd edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. De Syllas, J. (1989). Aesthetic order and spatial disorder in a children’s home, M.Sc. thesis. London: University of London. Donohoe, J. (2014). Remembering places. New York: Lexington. Durrell, L. (1969). Landscape and character. In Thomas, A., ed., Spirit of place: Letters and essays on travel (pp. 157–163). New York: Dutton. Finlay, L. (2011). Phenomenology for therapists. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell. Fisher, K., Saxton, M., Edwards, P. and Jens-Erik Mai, J.-E. (2007). Seattle Library as a place. In Buschman, J. and Leckie, G., eds., The library as place (pp. 135–160). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

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Griffero, T. (2014). Atmospheres: Aesthetics of emotional spaces. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Hall, P. (2014). Cities of tomorrow. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell. Hanson, J. (1998). Decoding homes and houses. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hillier, B. (1996). Space is the machine. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hillier, B. and Hanson, J. (1984). The social logic of space. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, P. (1979). Defining a sense of place. In Prenshaw, P. and McKee, J., eds., Sense of place: Mississippi (pp. 24–46). Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1979. Malpas, J. (2018). Place and experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. London: Routledge. Newman, O. (1980). Community of interest. New York: Doubleday. Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980). Genius loci: Towards a phenomenology of architecture. New York: Rizzoli. Otero-Pailos, J. (2012). Architectural phenomenology and the rise of the postmodern. In  Crysler, G., Cairns, S. and Heynen, H., eds., Sage handbook of architectural theory (pp. 136–151). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Pallasmaa, J. (2014). Space, place, and atmospheres. In Borch, C., ed., Architectural atmospheres (pp. 18–41). Basil: Birkhäuser. Pallasmaa, J. (2016). Place and atmosphere. In Malpas, J., ed., The Intelligence of place (pp. 129–155). London: Bloomsbury. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Relph, E. (2009). A pragmatic sense of place. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology 20 (3), 24–31. Seamon, D. (2016). Christopher Alexander and a phenomenology of wholeness. In Pontikis, K. and Rofè, Y., eds., In pursuit of a living architecture: Continuing Christopher Alexander’s quest for a humane and sustainable building culture (pp. 50–66). Champaign, IL: Common Ground. Seamon, D. (2017). A phenomenological and hermeneutic reading of Rem Koolhaas’s Seattle Central Library: Buildings as lifeworlds and architectural texts. In Conway Dalton, R. and Hölscher, C., eds., Take one building: Interdisciplinary research perspectives of Seattle Central Library (pp. 67–94). London: Routledge. Seamon, D. (2018). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routledge. Seamon, D. (2022a). Architecture and phenomenology. In Lu, D., ed., Routledge companion to contemporary architectural history (pp. 218–229). London: Routledge. Seamon, D. (2022b). Sense of place. In Richardson, D., ed., International encyclopedia of geography (pp. 612–615). New York: Wiley. Shapiro, J. S. (2005). A space syntax analysis of Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, New Mexico. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Thiis-Evensen, T. (1989). Archetypes in architecture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. van Manen, M. (2014). The Phenomenology of practice. London: Routledge. van Nes, A. and Yamu, C. (2021). Introduction to space syntax in urban studies. Cham, Switzerland: Springer [open-access: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50404].

9 THE VALUE OF PHENOMENOLOGY FOR A PEDAGOGY OF PLACE AND PLACEMAKING

Described most simply, phenomenology is a conceptual and methodological approach that aims for a careful description and interpretation of human experience and meaning.1,2 First introduced by phenomenology founder Edmund Husserl, two central phenomenological concepts are lifeworld and natural attitude. The lifeworld is the taken-for-granted pattern and context of everyday life, normally unnoticed and thus hidden as a phenomenon (Finlay 2011; Jacobs 2013; Moran 2005, p. 9). The lifeworld is simply present and depicts life’s latent, normally unexamined givenness that typically goes forward without self-conscious attention or reflection. Unless it changes in some significant way (for example, our community is disrupted by natural disaster), we are almost always, in our usual human lives, unaware of the lifeworld, which we assume is the way that life is and must be (Moran 2013). This typically unquestioned acceptance of the lifeworld was identified by Husserl as the natural attitude, because of which we habitually assume that the world as we know and experience it is the only world. We “accept the world and its forms of givenness as simply there, ‘on hand’ for us” (Moran 2005, p. 7). Husserl characterized the natural attitude as “naïve” because “we are normally unaware that what we are living in is precisely given to us as the result of a specific ‘attitude’. Indeed, even to recognize and identify the natural attitude as such is in a sense to have moved beyond it” (Moran 2005, p. 55). One important pedagogical question is “How one can awaken to the world as phenomenon instead of being directed at the things and events that appear within that world?” (Jacobs 2013, p. 353). To “awaken to the world as phenomenon” is difficult because, in the natural attitude, we unquestioningly accept the lifeworld that, normally, unfolds uneventfully with a minimum of self-conscious awareness or direction. Most of the time, lifeworlds just happen and natural attitudes just are. In working phenomenologically, one shifts from the natural attitude to a phenomenological attitude, whereby he or she aims to make the lifeworld and natural attitude DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-11

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a focus of research attention. One pedagogical value of phenomenology is its conceptual and methodological power to help students discover unnoticed, taken-forgranted aspects of everyday life and experience. In this chapter, I illustrate how phenomenology can be useful pedagogically to understand the central importance of places in human life and for improving those places, particularly via architecture and environmental design. I begin by drawing on educator Max van Manen’s five existentials of human life and my work on lived emplacement to illustrate how more focused phenomenological concepts provide a pedagogical means for locating and disclosing aspects of environmental and place experience typically out of sight. Next, I turn to the work of architect Christopher Alexander, particularly his method of “pattern language,” which provides an invaluable pedagogical tool for envisioning architecture and environmental design as placemaking. Last, I discuss how a phenomenology of place contributes to a placebased education that incorporates active learning, community engagement, and environmental stewardship. I argue that a pedagogical focus on place is considerably different from the conventional educational emphasis on standardized testing, curricula unrelated to locality, and an instrumentalist knowledge too often in the service of a global capitalism that undermines natural and human places.

Max van Manen’s Five Existentials Though there are many ways phenomenologically to delineate the lifeworld more precisely, one simple but illuminating depiction is offered by educator Max van Manen (2014, pp. 302–307), who identifies five “existentials” that describe integral lived dimensions of any lifeworld, regardless of the person or group’s specific personal, social, cultural, or historical situation. Van Manen calls the first existential “lived others,” or relationality, which refers to the lived connections we maintain with other human beings, including bodily co-presence and interpersonal encounter. The second existential is the “lived body,” or corporeality, which relates to how lived qualities of human embodiment—for example, bilateral symmetry, upright posture, corporeal habituality, degree of ableness, and modes of sensuous encounter with the world—contribute to human experience. Van Manen’s third existential is “lived space,” or spatiality, by which he means the ways that people experience and know the spaces and environments in which they find themselves. The fourth existential is “lived time,” or temporality, which locates us time-wise personally, chronologically, and historically. Temporality relates to the various ways we experience time—for example, pleasant moments seem to pass more quickly than difficult or boring moments. Van Manen’s last existential is “lived things,” or materiality, which refers to the importance in human experience of things, which work in a wide range of ways to sustain, improve, or undermine situations and events. He emphasizes that things “represent themselves at different scales” (van Manen 2014, p. 307). In this sense, buildings, environments, landscapes, and places are things integral to human life at a wide range of spatial, environmental, and geographic scales.

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In asking how these five lifeworld existentials have significance for a pedagogy of place and placemaking, one might argue that spatiality, corporeality, and materiality are most central, since their specific manifestations have much to do with environmental and architectural aspects of human life, especially as one considers larger-scale human movements and actions, whether habitual or intentional, ordinary or out-of-the-ordinary. If, however, these three existentials are important for understanding the lived role of environments and places in human life, temporality and relationality must also be considered, since any environment or place always incorporates time-related and interpersonal dimensions. For example, how do the regular time-space routines of individuals coalesce spatially to sustain a “sense of place,” or how does the spatial configuration of pathways keep users apart or draw them together bodily and communally?3 In the pre-modern past, relational, temporal, and spatial aspects of human life largely involved physical and environmental co-presence with immediate others in the world at hand, whether of the household, neighborhood, or community. Because of the social media of today’s digital world, relationality often bypasses spatiality, corporeality, materiality, and time-specific requirements and situations. A major question is what this lived circumvention means for place experiences and placemaking. Are materialized structures and places still important in human life, or will they be largely superseded by virtual environments, places, and realities? Questions like these are central for a pedagogy of place and placemaking, and van Manen’s five existentials are a useful starting point for specifying lived aspects of lifeworld and for making architecture and environmental design students aware of the integral relationship between human experience and the material world in which that experience unfolds.

Phenomenologies of Place One pedagogical means to consolidate van Manen’s five existentials is available in the considerable research literature on a phenomenology of place, which is recognized as an integral constituent of human life and experience.4 As a phenomenon, place can be defined as any environmental locus in and through which individual or group actions, experiences, intentions, and meanings are drawn together spatially and temporally (Seamon 2018, p. 48). Places range from intimate to regional scale and include such environmental situations as a regularly used park bench, a cherished household, a favorite neighborhood, a city associated with childhood memories, or a geographical locale where one vacations regularly. Phenomenologists are interested in the phenomenon of place because it is a primary contributor to the spatial, environmental, and temporal constitution of any lifeworld. As phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey (2001, p. 684) explains, The relationship between self and place is not just one of reciprocal influence (that much [of] any ecologically sensitive account would maintain) but also, more radically, of constitutive coingredience: each is essential to the being of

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the other. In effect, there is no place without self and no self without place. What is needed is a model wherein the abstract truth of this position… can be given concrete articulation without conflating place and self or maintaining the self as an inner citadel of unimplaced freedom. As indicated by Casey’s emphasis on lived inseparability and intertwinement— what he perspicaciously calls “constitutive coingredience”—place is not the physical environment distinct from the people associated with it. Rather, place is the typically transparent phenomenon of person-or-group-experiencing-place. Place is a helpful concept in relation to van Manen’s five existentials because it provides a framework for their integration via the claim that human being is always human-being-in-place. Place is not only the material and geographical environment distinct from human beings but also the indivisible, normally taken-forgranted phenomenon of person-or-people-experiencing-place. As Casey (2009, pp. 14–15) explains, “by virtue of its unencompassability by anything other than itself, place is at once the limit and the condition of all that exists …. To be is to be in place.” This claim means that human being is intrinsically emplaced and any understanding of human life is intimately related to the quality of place in which that life happens.

A Phenomenology of Place-as-Process Phenomenologists recognize that places are dynamic, shifting, and encountered differently by different experiencers (Casey 2009; Relph 1976; Seamon 2018). The same physical place can invoke a wide range of place experiences and meanings, both supportive and positive or unsettling and negative. Over time, a person or group’s experiences and understandings of a place may alter. In this sense, places are multivalent in their physical and lived structure and complex in their spatial and temporal dynamics. A major phenomenological question is how places change for better or worse. Are there underlying lived processes impelling ways that places are what they are and what they become? In my own work (Seamon 2018), I have identified six processes that provide at least a partial answer to these questions: place interaction, place identity, place release, place realization, place intensification, and place creation. Here, I describe each of these six place processes briefly and argue that they are useful pedagogically because they provide an integrated structure for realizing how different aspects of place experience, meaning, and events play a role in fortifying or eroding specific real-world places.5 (1) Place interaction refers to the typical goings-on in a place and summarizes the constellation of actions, situations, and events unfolding in that place. Some place interactions are routine and taken for granted, while others are occasional or once in a lifetime. Yet again, some interactions are habitual and happen without any conscious intention or organization; other interactions

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(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

are willfully directed and involve some degree of intentional motivation and plan. Place interactions are foundational to place experience and placemaking because they are the major engine whereby users conduct their everyday lives and a place gains in activity and a particular environmental ambience. Interactions undermine place when they become fewer, uncomfortable, stressful, or destructive. Place identity relates to people associated with place taking up that place as a significant part of their world. Place becomes integral to a personal and communal sense of self and self-worth. If people live their entire lives in one place, then place identity is an integral aspect of who people are as they are born into and live their lives in that place. Today, many people regularly change places, and strong place identity is less certain, since it requires time and continual, active involvement. Identity undermines place when people come to feel apart from place and are less comfortable with taking up that place as a matter-of-fact part of their world. Place release refers to an environmental serendipity of happenstance encounters and events. Through unexpected engagements and situations in place, people are “released” more deeply into themselves. Partly because of the surprises offered by place, “life is good” as when one meets an old friend on the sidewalk or notices by chance a poster advertising a local coffeehouse performance of one’s favorite musical group. Release unsettles place when serendipitous events transpire that are unpleasant, threatening, or inappropriate for the place—for example, one’s apartment is burglarized. Place realization relates to a distinctive environmental presence sustained by both effable and ineffable qualities of place, including ambience and atmosphere. The place evokes a unique consonance, feeling, and character that is as real in itself as the people who know and experience that place. One speaks, for example, of the “Vancouver-ness” of Vancouver or the “Tokyo-ness” of Tokyo. Realization undermines place when its taken-for-granted coherence, ambience, and character become negative in some way or non-existent. Place intensification refers to the independent power of the material, designable environment to contribute actively to human wellbeing and place quality. Place-strengthening intensification relates to the power of appropriate plans, policies, and designs to bolster place. The negative variant of place intensification involves inappropriate or destructive plans, policies, and designs that unsettle and even destroy place. Place creation relates to how people, responsible for and committed to their place, envision and fabricate creative changes that make the place better. Individuals and groups associated with a place empathize with that place and generate designs, plans, policies, and actions that respect the place and make it more whole and vital. Creation undermines place when it produces inappropriate plans and constructions that misunderstand and squelch the life of the place.

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The Pedagogical Value of the Six Place Processes In studying the six place processes, one realizes that place interaction and place identity are the generative foundation of place and place experience in that they relate to the everyday actions, meanings, and situations that presuppose and ground robust places. Via place interactions, users identify with place and accept it as an integral part of self. In turn, this lived dynamic between interaction and identity sets the stage for potential place release and place realization. The last two processes of intensification and creation relate more to what places might become via thoughtful understanding and envisioning (place creation) actualized via well-crafted improvements in the place (intensification). The dynamic interconnectedness of these six place processes is visualized in Figures 9.1 and 9.2, which assume that no one process is more important than the others, though for specific places and historical moments, the dynamic may involve different generative combinations and contrasting gradations of quality, intensity, and duration. In synergistic fashion, one process activates and is activated by the others via a complex interplay of intricately intertwined elements, happenings, and relationships, typically in flux, sometimes evolving and sometimes devolving in their degree of relationship, resonance, and animation. These ever-shifting interrelationships suggest that, if we are to resuscitate and strengthen real-world places, all six processes must be present and active; they must be given deliberate attention and provided openings in which to happen continuously and exuberantly.

Simplified rendition of the give-and-take linkages among the six place processes (Based on Seamon, 2018, p. 170; redrawn). FIGURE 9.1 

A more lifelike rendition of the give-and-take linkages among the six place processes (Based on Seamon, 2018, p. 170; redrawn). FIGURE 9.2 

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In using the six place processes pedagogically, a first useful exercise is to ask students to select two or three places important in their lives and to describe those places thoroughly as physical environments and lifeworlds. Students then ponder the ways these places incorporate the six processes and their relative roles in effecting vigor or debility. Students can also consider interconnections among the six place processes. For example, in examining interaction and identity, one typically finds that, for many places, this relationship marks the pivotal place dynamic, since interactions provide the everyday situations and happenings through which place participants identify with place and feel attachment, fondness—even profound loyalty. Or if one considers the relationship between identity and creation, one recognizes that people-in-place are more likely to wish to improve their place if they understand place as an integral part of who they are. Strong place identity motivates individuals and groups to bolster their place (place intensification) and often triggers the inspiration for discovering what those improvements might be (place creation). Particularly for architecture and environmental design students, the two most professionally relevant place processes are place intensification and place creation, since they point toward the actions, processes, situations, and constructions by which place might be fortified and transformed, grounded in an empathetic understanding of how places work. Appropriate, effective interventions and fabrications are envisioned and made via inspired planning and design. One important thinker giving central attention to place intensification and place creation is architect Christopher Alexander, who has dedicated his professional career to studying and creating life-enhancing buildings and environments. Though he has never associated himself with phenomenology directly, one can argue that his work is implicitly phenomenological and is invaluable for a pedagogy of place and placemaking.

Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language In all his writings and building designs, Alexander aims to understand how the parts of a designed thing—whether an elegant doorway, a gracious building, or an animated city plaza—belong together and have their proper place in the whole.6 He asks how architectural and environmental wholeness comes into being and how an ever-deepening reciprocity between understanding and designing might allow for more and more wholeness to unfold. In relation to a phenomenology of place, Alexander’s efforts are important because he seeks to understand the ways by which qualities of the designable environment contribute to invigorative placemaking. His work demonstrates how an inspired reciprocity between thinking and designing might lead to deeper understandings and to more livable buildings and places. One of Alexander’s most useful pedagogical tools is pattern language—a heuristic method whereby designers and their clients identify and visualize the underlying elements and relationships in a built environment that facilitate a sense of place (Alexander et al. 1977). In his master volume, A Pattern Language, Alexander and colleagues identify 253 of these elements, or patterns, arranged from larger to smaller environmental scale and each are given a number from 1 (“independent regions”) to

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253 (“things from your life”). A pattern is both interpretive and prescriptive: first, it is a description of a specific element of the built environment that contributes to a sense of place—for example, “identifiable neighborhood” (no. 14), “degrees of publicness” (36), “main gateways” (53), “high places” (62), and “window place” (180). Second, a pattern is a practical instruction that suggests how to design the element effectively. In considering main gateways, for example, one is directed to “Mark every boundary in the city which has important human ­meaning—the boundary of a building cluster, a neighborhood, a precinct—by great gateways where the major entering paths cross the boundary” (Alexander et al. 1977, p. 278). Pattern language is a helpful pedagogical tool for getting architecture students to envision an ensemble of designable elements that actualize environmental wholeness and effective placemaking. The approach provides a compilation of time-tested design elements that contribute to place activity, ambience, and vitality. In writing a pattern language for a particular design problem, students draw on existing patterns but also develop new patterns, since each design problem is unique and requires its own specific pattern language. Perhaps the most useful aspect of the pattern-­ language approach is the requirement that one identify the largest-scale patterns first so that he or she can then picture where smaller-scale elements fit within the larger whole. In this way, all the parts of the design can be understood in relation to each other and fabricated in such a way as to contribute appropriately to a whole of integrated parts (Alexander 2002–2005; Coates and Seamon 1993).

The Meadowcreek Studio as an Example Here, I illustrate the pedagogical value of Alexander’s pattern language as used by ten advanced architecture students in an upper-level architecture studio co-taught at Kansas State University. The studio focus was the “Meadowcreek Project,” an environmental education center in the Ozarks region of Arkansas. In preparing a master plan for the center’s long-term development, our students sought to immerse themselves in the Meadowcreek experience: They visited the 1,500-acre site and thoroughly mapped its natural and human-made features; they interviewed students, staff, and the program’s two directors; they studied the geography and history of the Ozarks—in short, they worked to establish an intimate familiarity with the project, personnel, and site.7 To master an accurate understanding of Meadowcreek’s philosophical and ethical aims, the students wrote a series of six meta-patterns that included “stewardship ethic,” “sustainability,” “sense of place and regions,” “community commitment,” “place-as-process,” and “connective education.” As the studio proceeded, these meta-patterns were crucial in providing a sighting device for keeping the student’s design work in touch with Meadowcreek’s central purposes and needs. For example, “stewardship ethic” reminded students that the Meadowcreek property should always be treated as a natural and human community rather than an economic commodity. “Community commitment” emphasized that all new physical design should support and strengthen sociability and group solidarity.

Phenomenology and Pedagogy  145 TABLE 9.1  Pattern language written for Meadowcreek (Originally published in Coates and

Seamon, 1993, p. 337; used with permission). Meadowcreek’s Pattern Language 1. Degrees of Human Impact* 2. Sacred Sites 3. Site Repair 4. Activity Nodes 5. Hierarchy of Paths* 6. Identifiable Edges* 7. Degrees of Publicness* 8. Small Learning Groups 9. Circulation Realms 10. Work Community 11. Self-Governing Groups 12. Main Gateways 13. Paths and Goals 14. Access to Water 15. Pools and Streams 16. High Places 17. Terraced Slopes

18. Path Shape 19. Path and Rest* 20. Looped Local Roads 21. Green Streets 22. Something Near the Middle 23. Activity Pockets 24. Shielded Parking 25. South Facing Outdoors 26. Main Building 27. Positive Outdoor Space 28. Building Complex 29. Connection to Earth 30. Building Edge 31. Main Entrance 32. Quiet Back 33. Entrance Transition 34. Edible Landscape*

35. Outdoor Rooms 36. Communal Eating 37. Small Parking Lots 38. Garden Growing Wild 39. Tree Places 40. Fruit Trees 41. Meditation Places* 42. Master and Apprentices 43. Small Meeting Places 44. Small Work Groups 45. Bulk Storage 46. Seat Spots 47. Stair Seats 48. Sitting Walls 49. Garden Seats

* Not originally in Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977) and written especially for Meadowcreek.

Having a comprehensive understanding of clients and site, the students next generated a Meadowcreek pattern language, of which the 49 patterns are listed in Table 9.1. These patterns were then transformed into design elements, as illustrated in Figure 9.3, which describes the primary patterns used to guide design of the site as a whole. These site patterns aimed to preserve and enhance Meadowcreek’s natural character by limiting and concentrating new development as well as identifying and refining the site’s natural features such as slope, water, vegetation, and prominent views. The largest pattern, degrees of human impact, specified that new development should be concentrated around existing places and pathways. This pattern supported others such as sacred sites and site repair, which called for protecting the site’s special natural and historic places and focusing new construction on portions of the site already occupied or less striking environmentally. Figure 9.4 illustrates the patterns and design for a path to Ripple Ridge, which offers panoramic views of the valley in which the Meadowcreek property is located. Once the students had produced a broad pattern language for Meadowcreek, they formed smaller groups to take on more focused design projects that included site design; staff and student housing; an educational and conference center; and a “micro-industrial area” for experiential learning related to farming, forestry, and regional crafts.8 As the studio proceeded, the students continually returned to the 49 patterns and the six meta-patterns as an important means for keeping in sight how Meadowcreek as a place could be strengthened via appropriate design. I overview the Meadowcreek studio here because it demonstrates how Alexander’s approach

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FIGURE 9.3 

Key Patterns for the Meadowcreek Site Design (Originally published in Coates and Seamon, 1993, p. 338; used with permission).

Patterns Used to Design a Path to Ripple Ridge (Originally published in Coates and Seamon, 1993, p. 340; used with permission).

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FIGURE 9.4 

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offers an organized conceptual means for translating a complex planning problem into effective design grounded in the needs of place and actualized as effective placemaking. Readily complementing a phenomenological perspective on place, Alexander’s approach offers a design pedagogy to create environments that work practically and also evoke vibrancy, amity, and the pleasure of place.

Phenomenology and Place-Based Education Though my Meadowcreek example relates to architectural and environmental design education, I emphasize that phenomenological insights relating to place and placemaking might contribute to pedagogical efforts more broadly, including the education of children, adolescents, and adults. In most conventional school programs today, learning is disconnected from the communities and places where the schools are located (Buxton 2010; Hursh, Henderson and Greenwood 2015). Driven by standardized testing and measurable accountability, teachers follow a pre-set curriculum that emphasizes student regurgitation of pre-determined facts, principles, and points of view (Smith 2013). Since the early 2000s, some educators have sought to develop a place-based pedagogy, which works to “make the boundaries between schools and their environs more permeable by directing at least part of students’ school experiences to local phenomena ranging from culture and politics to environmental concerns and economy” (Smith 2007, p. 190).9 Place-based learning is considerably different from the standard pedagogic model in that teachers draw on natural, social, and cultural features of local place to focus instruction in science, social studies, and the language arts. Students learn from community members as well as from teachers and actively produce knowledge rather than passively accept it via pre-structured classroom instruction and standardized examinations. This pedagogy of engaging place via active involvement and learning may facilitate a deepening interest in and concern for one’s home place, including its natural and ecological aspects. With this knowledge in hand, students may be more likely to contribute to making “social healthy and ecologically sustainable communities” (Smith 2013, p. 215). In this way, placebased education can be a valuable pedagogical and community counter to the homogenizing culture of global capitalism, too often responsible for the disintegration of places and the breakdown of terrestrial ecosystems (Relph 1976, 2015; Seamon 2018). At this point in the development of place-based education, the potential contribution of phenomenology has been given only minimal attention.10 Here, I suggest that, as well as bringing student awareness to particular places, place experiences, and place meanings, we need to realize that the existential structures of place and lived emplacement are an integral part of human being and have a lived complexity that, once seen and understood, may offer an innovative, complementary point of view for thinking about specific places, place experiences, and modes of lived emplacement. To consider place experience in terms of van Manen’s five existentials or my six place processes, for example, gets one thinking about aspects and

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patterns of place that he or she might otherwise miss, not typically alert to the always-already presence of place as an integral aspect of lifeworld. In this sense, phenomenological concepts and principles offer unsuspected insights into a particular locality, just as real-world features of that locality assist in concretizing and clarifying broader phenomenological concepts and principles. As indicated by the six place processes highlighted earlier, “place” is as much a phenomenon-in-itself as it is a phenomenon involving the experiences, actions, and meanings of the individuals and groups associated with that place. The perceptions, situations, and experiences of every Londoner, for example, are unique and hugely various, whether for that Londoner as an individual or as part of some larger group identity. At the same time, however, London is a place-unto-itself with a singular environmental character and ambience. From a phenomenological perspective, place presupposes and incorporates all these many lived dimensions, each of which must be considered in a comprehensive place-based pedagogy.

“To Awaken to the World as Phenomenon” In this chapter, I have emphasized phenomenological insights as they contribute to a pedagogy of place and placemaking. A central task of phenomenology is to disclose the taken-for-grantedness of human life, an integral part of which are the phenomena of lifeworld, natural attitude, and place. Van Manen’s five existentials offer one helpful means to probe and clarify specific lifeworlds. In turn, I have sought to demonstrate that the phenomenon of place, interpreted phenomenologically, provides one way in which these five existentials can be consolidated into a larger conceptual structure that has pedagogic value for architecture and environmental design as placemaking. Philosopher Hanne Jacobs (2013, p. 353) suggests that the broadest aim of phenomenology is “to awaken to the world as phenomenon”—in other words, to realize how the vast portion of human experience is typically matter of fact, taken for granted, and unnoticed as a phenomenon. Phenomenology offers a way to disclose the concealed givenness of human living and to realize that “the quotidian everydayness of daily life experiences is much less simple than we tend to think” (van Manen 2014, p. 42). If an efficacious pedagogy aims to facilitate deeper awareness and more comprehensive knowledge, one crucial starting place is realizing how much about human experience we don’t know because we are almost always caught up in the natural attitude and lifeworld. Penetrating beneath this natural attitude and discovering the all-encompassing presence of lifeworld is the crux of phenomenological learning. One awakens to the world as phenomenon. In this chapter, I have sought to illustrate this awakening via a pedagogy of place and placemaking.

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Notes 1 This chapter was originally published in Patrick Howard, Tone Saevi, Andrew Foran, and Gert Biesta, eds., Phenomenology and Educational Theory in Conversation (Routledge, 2021, pp. 164-178). The author thanks the editors and publisher for allowing him to include the chapter here. 2 Useful introductions to phenomenology include Moran (2000), Finlay (2011), and van Manen (2014). 3 On the first question see Broadway et al. (2018) and van Eck and Pijpers (2017); on the second question, see Hillier (1996) and Seamon (2018, pp. 145–147). 4 Research relating to the phenomenology of place includes Casey (2009), Malpas (2018), Patterson and Williams (2005), Relph (1976, 2015), Seamon (2018), and Stefanovic (2000). 5 See Seamon (2018), for a derivation and justification of these six place processes. 6 For introductions to his work, see Alexander (2002–2005) and Alexander et al. (1977). For a recent overview of his work, see Pontikis and Rofè (2016). 7 For an extended discussion of the Meadowcreek studio, see Coates and Seamon (1993). 8 Designs for these projects are included in Coates and Seamon (1993). 9 Useful overviews of place-based education include Greenwood (2013), Gruenewald (2003), Gruenewald and Offei Manteaw (2007), and Smith (2007, 2013). 10 One important exception is Foran and Olson (2008); also see Gruenewald (2003, pp. 621–628). On the relationship between education and phenomenology more broadly, see Friesen, Saevi, and Henriksson (2012). On the relation between pedagogy, learning, and architectural design, see Darian-Smith and Willis (2017).

References Alexander, C. (2002–2005). The nature of order, vol. 4. California: Center for Environmental Structure. Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S. and Silverstein, M. (1977). A pattern language. New York: Oxford University Press. Broadway, M., Legg, R. and Broadway, J. (2018). Coffeehouses and the art of social engagement: An analysis of Portland coffeehouses. Geographical Review, 108, 433–456. Buxton, C. A. (2010). Social problem solving through science: An approach to critical, place-based science teaching and learning. Equity and Excellence in Education, 43, 120–135. Casey, E. (2001). Between geography and philosophy. Annals, Association of American Geographers, 91, 683–693. Casey, E. (2009). Getting back into place, 2nd edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Coates, G. J. and Seamon, D. (1993). Promoting a foundational ecology practically through Christopher Alexander’s pattern language: The example of Meadowcreek. In Seamon, D., ed., Dwelling, seeing, and designing: Toward a phenomenological ecology (pp. 331–354). Albany: State University of New York Press. Darian-Smith, K. and Willis, J., eds. (2017). Designing schools: Space, place and pedagogy. London: Routledge. Finlay, L. (2011). Phenomenology for therapists: Researching the lived world. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Foran, A. and Olson, M. (2008). Seeking pedagogical places. Phenomenology & Practice, 2(1), 24–48. Friesen, N., Saevi, T. and Henriksson, C., eds. (2012). Hermeneutic phenomenology in education: Method and practice. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

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Greenwood, D. (2013). A critical theory of place-conscious education. In Brody, M., Dillon, J. J., Stevenson, R. and Wals, A., eds., International handbook on environmental education research (pp. 93–100). London: Routledge. Gruenewald, D. (2003). Foundations for place: A multidisicplinary framework for place-­ conscious education. American Educational Research Journal, 40, 619–654. Gruenewald, D. and Offei Manteaw, B. (2007). Oil and water still: How child left behind limits and distorts environmental education in US schools. Environmental Education Research, 13, 171–188. Hillier, B. (1996). Space is the machine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hursh, D., Henderson, J. and Greenwood, D. (2015). Environmental education in a neoliberal climate. Environmental Education Research, 21, 299–318. Jacobs, H. (2013). Phenomenology as a way of life? Husserl on phenomenological reflection and self-transformation. Continental Philosophical Review, 46, 349–369. Malpas, J. (2018). Place and experience: A philosophical topography, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Moran. D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. London: Routledge. Moran, D. (2005). Edmund Husserl: Founder of phenomenology. Cambridge: Polity. Moran, D. (2013). From the natural attitude to the life-world. In Embree, L. and Nenon, T., eds., Husserl’s Ideen (pp. 105–124). Dordrecht: Springer. Patterson, M. and Williams, D. (2005). Maintaining research traditions on place. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25, 361–380. Pontikis, K. and Rofè, Y., eds. (2016). In pursuit of a living architecture: Continuing Christopher Alexander’s quest for a humane and sustainable building culture. Champaign, IL: Common Ground. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Relph, E. (2015). Place and connection. In Malpas, J., ed., The intelligence of place (pp. 177–204). London: Bloomsbury. Seamon, D. (2018). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routledge. Smith, G. (2007). Place-based education: Breaking through the constraining regularities of public school. Environmental Education Research, 13, 189–207. Smith, G. (2013). Place-based education. In Brody, M., Dillon, J., Stevenson, R. and Wals, A., eds., International handbook on environmental education research (pp. 213–220). New York: Routledge. Stefanovic, I. L. (2000). Safeguarding our common future: Rethinking sustainable development. Albany: State University of New York Press. van Eck, D. and Pijpers, R. (2017). Encounters in place ballet: A phenomenological perspective on older people’s walking routines in an urban park. Area, 49, 166–173. van Manen, M. (2014). Phenomenology of practice. New York: Routledge.

10 A PHENOMENOLOGICAL READING OF JANE JACOBS’ DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES

Though published over 60 years ago, urbanist Jane Jacobs’ 1961 Death and Life of Great American Cities continues to grow in conceptual and pragmatic significance.1 One can safely say that this book—a remarkably perceptive picture of how cities work—is one of the great twentieth-century explications of urban life, continuing to have profound theoretical and practical significance for urban policy, planning, design, and thinking.2 In the last decade, a productive interdisciplinary field of “Jacobsean” studies has developed, and many articles, books, and edited collections have been published that discuss Jacobs’ life and work.3 Though she has never been associated with phenomenology, I argue in this chapter that, in terms of focus, method, and discoveries, Jacobs (1916–2006) can fairly be described as a phenomenologist of urban place. Conceptually, her work points toward a phenomenology of the city and urban lifeworld. Methodologically, she illustrates a manner of study whereby citiness reveals itself in the course of everyday, taken-for-granted life. Jacobs used firsthand urban observation as a starting point for identifying more general principles and structures that make cities what they essentially are—animated, flourishing places marked by exuberant street and sidewalk life. A city, she wrote, incorporates “an intricate living network of relationships … made up of an enormously rich variety of people and activities” (quoted in Laurence 2016, p. 253). Her hopeful city vision was “ever more diversity, density and dynamism—in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble” (Martin 2006, n.p.) She saw and explicated “an almost inexpressible complexity in the most modest of settings” (Klemek 2007, p. 8)—typical city sidewalks and streets. She argued that cities and citiness play an integral, inescapable role in human life and human history. If we ignore this central importance, we cripple the exuberance and creative potential of the human world. DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-12

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Jacobs’ Mode of Understanding as Phenomenological Method As a method of study, phenomenology aims to be open to the phenomenon so that it can reveal itself and be understood thoroughly and accurately (Finlay 2011; Moran 2000; Seamon 2018a). In Death and Life, Jacobs argued that mid-twentieth century urban design and city planning undermined American cities because professionals understood the phenomenon of the city not as it actually is but as these professionals wanted it to be—for example, Le Corbusier’s “towers in the park,” Louis Mumford’s network of new towns in the countryside, or Robert Moses’ mega-block urban renewal policies and massive highway construction (Caro 1974; Fishman 1996; Laurence 2006b; Klemek 2009, 2011). Urban practitioners and researchers: have ignored the study of success and failure in real life, have been incurious about the reasons for unexpected success, and are guided instead by principles derived from the behavior and appearance of towns, suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs, and imaginary dream cities—anything but cities themselves. (Jacobs 1961/1993, p. 9) Architectural historian Peter Laurence (2006a, 2006b, 2011, 2016) traced Jacobs’ growing disenchantment with post-WWII urban planning and design. As a writer on urban issues for Architectural Forum in the early 1950s, she progressively felt guiltier about supporting urban renewal projects that she realized, through firsthand visits, were dramatic failures as livable places and communities. In 1959, as she was writing Death and Life, she described her growing cynicism to landscape architect and friend Grady Clay: I had a pervading uneasiness about the way the rebuilding of the city was going, augmented by some feeling of personal guilt, I suppose, or at least personal involvement. The reason for this was that in all sincerity I had been writing for Forum about how great various redevelopment plans were going to be. Then I began to see some of these things built. They weren’t delightful, they weren’t fine, and they were obviously never going to work right … I began to get this very uneasy feeling that what sounded logical in planning theory and what looked splendid on paper was not logical in real life at all, or at least in city real life, and not splendid at all when in use. (quoted in ­Laurence 2011, p. 35; originally written March 3, 1959) On one hand, Jacobs’ understanding of citiness developed through seeing firsthand the failure of post-war urban renewal. On the other hand, she was busy identifying and carefully observing successful urban neighborhoods and districts with an animated, diverse street life—particularly her Greenwich Village neighborhood of Hudson Street. This mode of inductive observation and interpretation would

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eventually lead to her claim in Death and Life that her understanding of urbanity was grounded in what the city and urban experience actually are: a lived diversity of place that sustains personal and group identification and attachment. In a description of her method that could serve as instruction for urban phenomenology, she wrote: The way to get at what goes on in the seemingly mysterious and perverse behavior of cities is, I think, to look closely, and with as little previous expectation as is possible, at the most ordinary scenes and events, and attempt to see what they mean and whether any threads of principle emerge among them. (Jacobs 1961/1993, p. 19) I shall mainly be writing about common, ordinary things: for instance, what kinds of city streets are safe and what kinds are not …. In short, I shall be writing about how cities work in real life because this is the only way to learn what principles of planning and what practices in rebuilding can promote social and economic vitality in cities. (Jacobs 1961/1993, p. 5) In every case, I have tried to test out what I saw or heard in one city or neighborhood against others, to find how relevant each city’s or each place’s lessons might be outside its own special case. (Jacobs 1961/1993, p. 22) These accounts of her method intimate a close parallel with two key features of phenomenological effort: first, allowing the thing—in this case, citiness—to reveal itself in the course of everyday, taken-for-granted life (lifeworld, as described by phenomenologists); second, using what one sees in the lifeworld of the city as a starting point for understanding more general principles and structures that make the city what it essentially is (Finlay 2011, pp. 125–138). Any conceptual understanding of the city, said Jacobs, must be grounded in how the city works as a particular kind of place. Further, she emphasized that readers should not accept her discoveries on faith; rather, she demanded that they: constantly and skeptically test what I say against his [or her] own knowledge of cites and their behavior. If I have been inaccurate in observations or mistaken in inferences and conclusions, I hope these faults will be quickly corrected. The point is, we need desperately to learn and to apply as much knowledge that is true and useful about cities as fast as possible. (Jacobs 1961/1993, pp. 22–23)

Citiness as a Phenomenon Phenomenologically, what is striking about Jacobs’ urban approach is her assumption that citiness is a real phenomenon in that there are qualities, behaviors, experiences,

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and principles that evoke and are evoked by an authentic urban situation. In Death and Life, she pinpointed this urban reality as involving place regularity, attachment, and responsibility grounded in an environmental and human diversity supported by particular physical and spatial qualities. In this sense, Jacobs claimed that citiness is a unique people-place whole that can only unfold and thrive provided certain human and environmental elements and interconnections are present. Because this phenomenon involves “the not quite definable spirit and energy that animate a city” (Fulford 1997, p. 8), the crux of urbanity is difficult to locate and demands an understanding of the city radically different from conventional social-­ scientific interpretations that spotlight some set of socio-economic characteristics like income, ethnicity, or social class as independent variables shaping a particular urban place. For example, in his 1962 review of Death and Life, sociologist Herbert Gans (1962) argued that the robust sidewalk and street life that Jacobs emphasized is only one contingent factor in urbanity, which is more correctly explained by social characteristics, especially class and cultural differences. Gans declared that only ethnic or working-class residents valued Jacobs’ diverse, sociable streets, whereas middle-class families, because of a different socio-­economic situation, prefer anonymous, suburban enclaves (also see Gans 2002, 2006). In contrast, Jacobs argued that any urban neighborhood sturdily sustaining street diversity and vitality has the power to draw and hold people, whatever their social, cultural, or economic background. Whereas Gans understood urban sociability as a dependent variable reliant on class, social background, and other sociological and psychological characteristics of self-interested individuals, Jacobs envisioned the relationship much differently, suggesting that, when urban places are working properly, self-interest is overshadowed by sociability and the singularity of place ambience (Keeley 1989, pp. 52–53). She described the necessary grounding as “an intricate living network of relationships … made up of an enormously rich variety of people and activities” (quoted in Laurence 2016, p. 253).4

A Phenomenology of Urban Place Though published 15 years before the first explicit phenomenology of place— (geographer Edward Relph’s 1976 Place and Placelessness), Death and Life can be interpreted as close kin to explicit phenomenological explications of place (Casey 2009; Malpas 2009, 2018; Mugerauer 1994, 2008; Seamon 2018a; Stefanovic 2000). These studies contend that, by its very nature, place offers a way to portray the experienced wholeness of people-in-world. As a phenomenon always present in human life, place gathers worlds spatially and environmentally, marking out centers of human action, intention, and meaning that, in turn, contribute to the making of place. “[B]y virtue of its unencompassability by anything other than itself,” wrote philosopher Edward Casey (2009, pp. 15–16), place “is at once the limit and the condition of all that exists … To be is to be in place.” In other words, human connections with place are not contingent or dependent on piecemeal parts as Gans

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claimed. Rather, to be human is always already to be emplaced: “It is through our engagement with place that our own human being is made real, but it is also through our engagement that place takes on a sense and a significance of its own” (Malpas 2009, p. 23). From this perspective, one can argue that place and, specifically, urban place, is the central phenomenon of Death and Life. Rather than arguing, like Gans, that the social and cultural environment calls out and establishes the physical environment, Jacobs recognized that robust urban neighborhoods simultaneously incorporate and shape an environmental fabric of taken-for-granted daily life. In this sense, urban place for Jacobs is an integral, inescapable constituent of human-being-in-theworld. As Malpas expressed the point phenomenologically, it is not merely human identity that is tied to place or locality, but the very possibility of being the sort of creature that can engage with a world …, that can think about that world, and that can find itself in the world. (Malpas 2018, p. 8) Similarly, Jacobs argued that a robust neighborhood of lived diversity and lively street life is integral to urbanity and founds the kind of place and lifeworld that, because of its vitality and singularity, draws residents, visitors, and other users who feel attachment and belonging for that place. Jacobs contended that the essential lived structure of such robust urban places is a small-scaled functional and physical diversity that generates and is fed by what she called the street ballet—an exuberance of place and sidewalk life founded on the everyday comings and goings of many people carrying out their own ordinary needs, responsibilities, and activities. In turn, Jacobs identified four key environmental elements that typically sustain flourishing street ballets: first, short blocks; second, a dense concentration of users; third, a range in building types; and fourth, primary uses—i.e., anchor functions like residences and workplaces to which people must necessarily go. Primary uses are crucial to neighborhood vitality because they provide a regular, guaranteed pool of street and sidewalk users who provide much of the economic and social support for a neighborhood’s secondary uses—i.e., functions like eateries, cafes, and shops. In this regard, a neighborhood’s primary uses also contribute to a dense concentration of users, who patronize the secondary uses and provide different people on the streets at different times, day and night. Jacobs’ two other place elements supporting place ballet are short blocks and a range of building types. Short blocks are necessary because permeable, interconnected sidewalks and streets support intermingling pedestrian cross-use. Short blocks offer users many more route choices than longer blocks, thus making traversals more convenient and providing more potential street-front locations for secondary uses. In relation to buildings, Jacobs argued that neighborhoods should incorporate a close-grained mingling of structures ranging in age and condition, including a good amount of smaller, older buildings for incubating new primary functions and risky, start-up secondary enterprises unable to afford high rent.

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As Jacobs (1961/1993, p. 245) wrote, “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” These four conditions provide the physical and spatial foundation for a neighborhood dynamic that includes the willingness of neighborhood insiders and outsiders to assist and look out for each other—what Jacobs (1961/1993, p. 45) described as “eyes on the street.” In the publisher prospectus she prepared for Death and Life, she described this place dynamic as a marvelously intricate, constantly adjusting network of people and their activities. This network makes all the unique and constructive contributions of the great city possible; it also makes possible the social controls that have to be effective on people, communities and enterprises within the big city if we are to maintain a high standard (or even a decent standard) of civilization. (quoted in Laurence 2016, p. 252) In implicit phenomenological fashion, Jacobs recognized that urbanites and their urban environment are not separate but meld in a robust “being-in-the-world” grounded in place and its street ballet. More importantly, she came to see that this melding is founded on and contributes to the four physical and spatial elements of primary uses, short blocks, diversified buildings, and many people. Her understanding of successful urban neighborhoods points to a place-grounded choreography facilitated by a self-organizing, interactive nexus of physical and human features and processes.

Jacobs’ Street Ballet as Environmental Embodiment From a phenomenological perspective, Jacobs’ street ballet is closely related to two important phenomenological concepts: the lived body and environmental embodiment (Seamon 2018b). The lived body refers to a bodily intentionality that automatically experiences, acts in, and is aware of the world that, typically, responds with supportive structure, pattern, and contextual presence. In turn, environmental embodiment identifies the various lived ways, sensorily and motility-wise, that the lived body engages and synchronizes with the world at hand, especially with its architectural and environmental elements and qualities. Both “lived body” and “environmental embodiment” relate to phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s more general concept of body-subject—pre-reflective corporeal awareness expressed through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds (Merleau-Ponty 1962). In relation to Jacobs’ street ballet, a key theme is the tacit, taken-for-granted capacity of lived bodies to manifest in extended ways over time and space. How, in other words, do the routine, largely habitual actions and behaviors of individuals intermingling regularly in a space transform that space into a place with a unique dynamic and character—what I have termed elsewhere, after Jacobs, place ballet (Seamon 1979, 2018a). A place ballet incorporates the interaction of individual bodily routines rooted in a particular environment, which often becomes an

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important place of interpersonal and communal exchange, meaning, and attachment, for example, a popular coffeehouse (Broadway and Engelhardt 2019), a wellused city park (van Eck and Pijpers 2016), a nondescript minibus taxi rank (Rink 2019), or a bustling neighborhood sidewalk (Mehta 2013). Jacobs’ understanding of the city in Death and Life provides a clearly delineated connection to urban design, planning, policy, and advocacy. To see the intimate linkages among diversity, street ballet, and the four shapeable conditions is to know what public officials and community activists can do to kindle and sustain urban diversity and place ballet—i.e., they must facilitate and strengthen the four conditions. As Jacobs (1961/1993, p. 315) explained: In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity, intricately mingled in mutual support. We need this so city life can work decently and constructively, and so the people of cities can sustain (and further develop) their society and civilization…. [M]ost city diversity is the creation of incredible numbers of different people and different private organizations, with vastly differing ideas and purposes, planning and contriving outside the formal framework of public action. The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop—insofar as public policy and action can do so—cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas and opportunities to flourish, along with the flourishing of the public enterprises. City districts will be economically and socially congenial places for diversity to generate itself and reach its best potential if the districts possess good mixtures of primary uses, frequent streets, a close-grained mingling of different ages in their buildings, and a high concentration of people.

Jacobs as Practical Phenomenologist Jacobs’ work can be associated with phenomenology because she brilliantly excavated the nature of citiness by realizing that urbanites and their urban worlds are always already present together experientially and existentially. She demonstrated that an integral dimension of those worlds is their physical aspects identified by the four manipulable conditions. These conditions intertwine among themselves and with the people who are in their midst, whether inhabitants or newcomers, insiders or outsiders. This intricate, dynamic web of people and place bolsters a lifeworld that sustains and is sustained by a robust street life and unique neighborhood ambience.5 Just as important as her excavation of citiness is the affectionate understanding and hopeful possibilities that her excavation affords. Through understanding how citiness works, readers may become more willing to work for their city. Death and Life is a lucid example of how a more accurate knowledge of city life can facilitate a way of design and planning that make urban environments more fulfilling and vital. As Kidder (2008, p. 254) explained, Jacobs offers “a kind of applied ethics that responds to issues uniquely connected with human placemaking and, specifically, with urban places.”

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In a 1959 letter written as she was working on Death and Life, Jacobs recognized the radical new understanding of citiness that her effort might offer: This book is neither a retelling in new form of things, already said, nor an expansion and enlargement of previously worked out basic ground, but it is an attempt to make what amounts to a different system of thought about the great city. (quoted in Laurence 2016, p. 234; originally written July 23, 1959) In this letter, she also explained that developing this “different system of thought” demanded a manner of understanding and presentation that was interconnected and holistic rather than disjoined and piecemeal. She wrote that organization of this complexity without confusion is not like chopping off blocks of wood: there, that one’s done, now for next…. [T]he logic of every part is a portion of the logic of the whole, done in the light of the whole. (quoted in Creed Rowan 2011, p. 54) Grounded in her perspicacious, firsthand knowledge of what a vibrant city is, Jacobs’ “different system of thought” can fairly be described as an integrated urban phenomenology depicting urbanites and urban place intermeshed in a dynamic interdependence that is as much a real phenomenon as its separate human and environmental parts. Jacobs saw how all these parts work together to sustain or undermine urban place. She understood how, when working in mutual support, these many parts generate thriving urban neighborhoods, each unique as environments and places but all successful because of a generative, organized complexity that, in Death and Life, she decodes brilliantly.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Mediapolis: An On-Line Journal of Cities and Culture, October 4, 2019; www.mediapolisjournalcom/2019/10/phenomenologicalreading-of-jane-jacobs/ (accessed August 15, 2022). I thank editors Conn Holohan and Elizabeth Patton for permission to use the entry here. 2 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 1961/1993; all page references refer to the 1993 “Modern Library” edition. 3 For overviews of “Jacobsean” studies, see Brandes Gratz (2010), Hirt and Zahm (2012), Kanigel (2016), Klemek (2011), Laurence (2016), Mennel et al. 2007, Page and Mennel (2011), Schubert (2014) and Zukin (2006, 2010). For discussions of the continuing applicability of Jacobs’ ideas for present-day architecture, planning, and urban design, see chapters in Hirt and Zahm (2012) and Schubert (2014). 4 In a commentary written shortly after her death in 2006, Gans (2006, p. 214) is forthrightly insulting of Jacobs’ urban understanding: I think the romance and the subsequent urban ideal were partly a result of being a middle-class resident of a working-class area. Coming from a bourgeois neighborhood in Scranton [Pennsylvania] and observing Hudson Street’s lively street life

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may have led her to romanticize that neighborhood, but it may also have blinded her to the economic insecurity and the resulting personal and social problems that some of her Hudson Street neighbors were surely experiencing …. Jane was always a very enthusiastic but not terribly skeptical person, and in some ways an innocent from a small provincial city. Thus perhaps she missed the dark sides of life below the middle income. In a sharp response that highlights flaws in Gans’ urban understanding (Gans 2002), sociologist Thomas Gieryn (2002, p. 341) moves toward a synergistic conception of urban place paralleling Jacobs’: Ironically, [Gans] might be labeled a “social determinist” …. For him, materialities of both “space” and “nature” are ascribed lesser explanatory weight in sociological explanation, which centers instead on what people do to those things. To my mind, Gans needs [to respect] the agentic capacity of material realities (natural or building, volcanoes or street-grids) and acknowledge that outcomes (beliefs about nature, behavior patterns, social change) are substantially and autonomously caused by this “stuff.” At least for sociologists of science, the era of human or social omnipotence is over. “Posthumanist sociology” redistributes agency among diverse causal powers—human, material, social, ideational. What would it mean for urban sociologists to adopt such a stance? 5 Some commentators (e.g., Grant 2011, pp. 92–93; Harris 2011, p. 79) continue inappropriately to label Jacobs a “physical and spatial determinist,” since she contended that district vitality was not possible without the presence of the four conditions. For example, Grant (2011, p. 93) writes: While conceding that the physical form likely played a role in the urban qualities Jacobs saw in the 1950s, I’m not convinced that form merited the supremacy Jacobs gave it. The short blocks and dense mix of uses of Greenwich Village accommodated the intense street theater that Jacobs described, but it did not produce that interplay …. Social and economic conditions are as much—if not more—a product of time and human history as they are artifacts of spatial configurations. Unfortunately, commentators like Grant seem determined to reduce the holistic lived nature of urban place to some set of independent and dependent variables—a mode of understanding that Jacobs vehemently opposed. Rather, she recognized that urban place is a problem in what she called “organized complexity” (Jacobs 1961/1993, ch.  22). Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of her theory is its understanding of a synergistic connectedness of which no particular part—experiential, social, cultural, economic, environmental, material, or spatial—could be claimed the most significant. Note Gieryn’s similar conclusion in the earlier note above.

References Brandes Gratz, R. (2010). The battle for Gotham: New York in the shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. New York: Nation Books. Broadway, M. J. and Engelhardt, O. (2019). Designing places to be alone or together: A iook at independently owned Minneapolis coffeehouses. Space and Culture, 22, 1–18. Caro, R. (1974). The power broker. New York: Random House. Casey, E. (2009). Getting back into place, 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Creed Rowan, J. (2011). The literary craft of Jane Jacobs. In Page, M. and Mennel, T., eds., Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (pp. 47–55). Washington, DC: APA Planners Press.

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Finlay, L. (2011). Phenomenology for therapists: Researching the lived world. Oxford: Blackwell/ Wiley. Fishman, R. (1996). The Mumford-Jacobs debate. Planning History Studies, 10 (1–2), 3–11. Fulford, R. (1997). Abattoir for sacred cows: Three decades in the life of a classic. In Allen, M., ed., Ideas that matter: The worlds of Jane Jacobs (pp. 5–9). Owen Sound, Ontario: Ginger Press. Gans, H. (1962). City planning and urban realities. Commentary, 33, 170–175. Gans, H. (2002). The sociology of space: A use-centered view. City & Community, 4, 329–339. Gans, H. (2006). Jane Jacobs: Toward an understanding of “death and life of great American cities.” City & Community, 5 (3), 213–215. Gieryn, T. F. (2002). Give place a chance: A reply to Gans. City & Community, 1, 341–343. Grant, J. L. (2011) Time, scale, and control: How new urbanism (mis)uses Jane Jacobs. In Page, M. and Mennel, T., eds., Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (pp. 91–103). Washington, DC: APA Planners Press. Harris, R. (2011). The Magpie and the bee: Jane Jacobs’ magnificent obsession. In Page, M. and Mennel, T., eds., Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (pp. 65–81). Washington, DC: APA Planners Press. Hirt, S. and Zahm, D., eds. (2012). The urban wisdom of Jane Jacobs. New York: Routledge. Jacobs, J. (1961/1993). The death and life of great American cities. New York: Random House. Kanigel, R. (2016). Eyes on the street: The life of Jane Jacobs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Keeley, R. C. (1989). The vision of Jane Jacobs. In Lawrence, F., ed., Ethics in making a living: The Jane Jacobs conference (pp. 39–98). Atlanta: Scholars Press. Kidder, P. (2008). The urbanist ethics of Jane Jacobs. Ethics, Policy and Environment, 11, 253–266. Klemek, C. (2007). Jane Jacobs and the future of New York. In Mennel, T., Steffens, J. and Klemek, C., eds., Block by block: Jane Jacobs and the future of New York (pp. 7–11). New York: Municipal Arts Society of New York/Princeton Architectural Press. Klemek, C. (2009). The rise and fall of New Left urbanism. Daedalus (spring), 73–82. Klemek, C. (2011). The transatlantic collapse of urban renewal postwar urbanism from New York to Berlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laurence, P. L. (2006a). Contradictions and complexities: Jane Jacobs’ and Robert Venturi’s complexity theories. Journal of Architectural Education, 59 (3), 49–60. Laurence, P. L. (2006b).The death and life of urban design: Jane Jacobs, the Rockefeller Foundation and the new research in urbanism, 1955–1965. Journal of Urban Design, 11, 145–172. Laurence, P. L. (2011). The unknown Jane Jacobs: Geographer, propagandist, city planning idealist. In Page, M. and Mennel, T., eds., Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (pp. 15–36). Washington, DC: APA Planners Press. Laurence, P. L. (2016). Becoming Jane Jacobs. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Malpas, J. E. (2009). Place and human being. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 20 (3), 19–23. Malpas, J. E. (2018). Place and experience, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, D. (2006). Jane Jacobs, urban activist, is dead at 89 [obituary]. New York Times, April 25. Mehta, V. (2013). The street. New York: Routledge. Mennel, T., Steffens, J. and Klemek, C., eds. (2007). Block by block: Jane Jacobs and the future of New York. New York: Municipal Arts Society of New York/Princeton Architectural Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). The phenomenology of perception. New York: Humanities Press. Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. New York: Routledge.

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Mugerauer, R. (1994). Interpretations on behalf of place. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mugerauer, R. (2008) Heidegger and homecoming. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Page, M. and Mennel, T., eds. (2011). Reconsidering Jane Jacobs. Washington, DC: APA Planners Press. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Rink, B. (2019). Place ballet in a South African minibus taxi rank. In Agbiboa, D., ed., Transport, transgression and politics in African cities (pp. 81–98). New York: Routledge. Schubert, D. (2014). Contemporary perspectives on Jane Jacobs: Reassessing the impacts of an urban visionary. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Seamon, D. (1979). A geography of the lifeworld. New York: St. Martin’s. Seamon, D. (2018a). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routledge. Seamon, D. (2018b). Merleau-Ponty, lived body and place: Toward a phenomenology of human situatedness. In Hünefeldt, T. and Schlitte, A., eds., Situatedness and Place (pp. 41–66). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Stefanovic, I. (2000). Safeguarding our common future: Rethinking sustainable development. Albany: State University of New York Press. van Eck, D. and Pijpers, R. (2016). Encounters in place ballet: A phenomenological perspective on older people’s walking routines in an urban park. Area, 49, 166–173. Zukin, S. (2006). Jane Jacobs: The struggle continues. City & Community, 5, 223–226. Zukin, S. (2010). Naked city: The death and life of authentic urban places. New York: Oxford University Press.

PART III

Places, Lived Emplacement, and Place Presence

11 PLACE, PLACELESSNESS, INSIDENESS, AND OUTSIDENESS IN AMERICAN FILMMAKER JOHN SAYLES’ SUNSHINE STATE

John Sayles is one of America’s most successful independent filmmakers, whose works include Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), City of Hope (1991), and Lone Star (1996).1 In this article, I consider his cinematic portrait of place, placelessness, insideness, and outsideness in his Sunshine State (2002), an ensemble film set in Plantation Island, Florida, a fictitious locale (based and mostly filmed on Florida’s Amelia Island, located on the state’s Atlantic coast about 30 miles northeast of Jacksonville) where real estate development is transforming two modest beachside communities—one black, one white—into upscale winter resorts for wealthy retirees.2 The white community is Delrona Beach, a prime tourist spot of mom-and-pop restaurants, motels, and roadside attractions built prior to the era of Disneyworld and corporate tourism. The black community is Lincoln Beach, a Plantation Island neighborhood factually based on Amelia Island’s American Beach, one of the few Southern beaches accessible to blacks before integration. Founded in the 1930s and prosperous during the days of Jim Crow, Lincoln Beach progressively lost much of its community cohesion after racial desegregation. One reason for this decline was that black customers no longer had to frequent Lincoln Beach’s black-operated establishments, many of which were overwhelmed by larger white establishments, including corporate chains that began to gain market share in the early 1960s.3 At the start of the twenty-first century, both Delrona and Lincoln Beach are almost entirely at the mercy of two competing corporate developers who conspire legally and illegally (through eminent domain, predatory buyouts, and furtive payoffs to local officials) to gain control of the two communities, which will be transformed into either high-end gated communities and golf courses or lower-end condominiums and corporate-chain strip development. Place-wise, this inexorable intrusion by corporate power is represented by the wealthy, exclusive enclave of DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-14

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Plantation Island, a recently completed gated community that will shortly expand if its corporate owners, collectively called Exley Plantation, can gain control of Lincoln Beach. In his film, Sayles explores the wide range of ways in which insiders (long-time locals and former locals returning) and outsiders (newly transplanted residents and agents of corporate real estate conglomerates) deal with the rapid environmental, social, and economic changes that are transforming Delrona and Lincoln Beach into what phenomenological geographer Edward Relph calls placelessness—the “casual eradication of distinctive places and the making of standardized landscapes that results from an insensitivity to the significance of place” (Relph 1976, p. ii). In various degrees of lived detail, Sayles lays out the situations of some sixteen characters. He gives particular attention to the experiences of two 30-somethings, the first of whom is Marly Temple (played by Edie Falco), a sixth-generation Plantation Island white woman. Marly is the frustrated manager of the Sea-Vue Restaurant and Motel, a deteriorating beachside establishment founded and owned by her father, Furman Temple (Ralph Waite), a self-made entrepreneur who describes himself as a “Florida Cracker.” The second 30-something is Desiree Stokes Perry (Angela Bassett), an AfricanAmerican woman born and raised in Lincoln Beach reluctantly returning to her former home with new husband, Boston anesthesiologist Reggie Perry (James McDaniel). She has come by puzzling request of her estranged, strong-willed mother Eunice Stokes (Mary Alice), who sent her away some 25 years ago because of an unwanted, socially embarrassing pregnancy. A third pivotal character is Dr. Lloyd (Bill Cobbs), the film’s social conscience and Lincoln Beach retiree working tirelessly to save his dispirited community from corporate development. As he explains to Reggie Perry, “We’re trying to save an endangered species—us” (Sayles 2004, p. 196). Pivotal characters Marly and Desiree encounter each other only once in the film—for about five seconds at the very start when Desiree enters Marly’s restaurant to use the women’s room. Almost all the film’s other characters, however, have some sort of association with one woman or the other, and these interrelationships point to a key dramatic concern in all of Sayles’ films—that people are connected, whether they realize it or not. As he explains in one interview (Ryan 1998, p. 162): “… like it or not, people depend on each other. We’re stuck with each other, and we have to deal with each other one way or the other.” Sayles’ interest in human interconnections can be understood more fully by noting three interrelated themes often highlighted in critical commentaries on his films: first, Sayles’ abiding concern for the lives of ordinary people living more or less ordinary lives in more or less ordinary places and situations (e.g., Ryan 1998, pp. 4, 161, 243–244); second, his effort to portray, through the use of ensemble casts, the complex, ever-changing relationships between individuals and the groups, communities, and places in which they find themselves (e.g., Baron 1999, pp. 133–135; Carson 1999, p. xi; Ryan 1998, p. 162); and third, as a way to impel

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dramatic action, immersing his characters in various lived tensions that include rootedness vs. mobility; ethical integrity vs. financial gain; and communal and place loyalty vs. economic development imposed by institutional forces beyond the place, particularly corporate and governmental entities (e.g.,n Molyneaux 2000, p. 199). One can argue that, in Sunshine State, these three themes are expressed through the experiences of insiders and outsiders as they either react to or provoke smaller and larger changes in the place and placelessness of Plantation Island.4

Insideness and Outsideness as Modes of Place Experience The use of insideness and outsideness as conceptual means to describe the range and variety of place experience was first laid out formally by phenomenological geographer Edward Relph (1976) in his book Place and Placelessness, an existential phenomenology of place. He defined place as a fusion of human and natural order and any significant spatial center of a person or group’s lived experience (Relph 1976, p. 141). In Sunshine State, places as significant lived centers range from Eunice Stokes’ beachfront house, Marly’s restaurant-motel, and a local bar through the three communities of American Beach, Lincoln Beach, and Plantation Island to Plantation Island itself. Relph (1976, p. 55) claimed that the existential crux of place experience is insideness—the degree to which a person or group belongs to and identifies with a place. Relph argued that the existential relationship between insideness and its experiential opposite outsideness is a fundamental dialectic in human experience. Through different degrees of insideness and outsideness, different places take on different meanings and identities for different individuals and groups. For Relph, existential insideness is the foundation of the place concept because, in this mode of experience, place is experienced without any directed or self-conscious attention yet is laden with significances that are tacit and unnoticed unless the place is changed in some way (Relph 1976, p. 55). Relph presents these modes of insideness and outsideness broadly, recognizing there may be variations, permutations, and additional lived modes that he did not include in his typology (Seamon and Sowers 2008). Here, I consider how Sayles’ portrait of various characters’ place experiences might offer a refined shading of modes of insideness and outsideness which, in turn, might provide a somewhat different reference point for understanding Sayles’ film. On one hand, I highlight one cluster of characters whose experiences suggest variations on insideness, including Marly’s, Desiree’s, and Dr. Lloyd’s. On the other hand, I highlight a second cluster of characters whose experiences suggest various versions of outsideness, including the film’s civic boosters, corporate developers, and various associates who may or may not be as they appear. Pivotally, there are two characters—Eunice’s grandnephew Terrell; and Desiree’s husband Reggie Perry—who respectively represent situations where, on one hand, insideness devolves into outsideness, and, on the other hand (and more hopefully), outsideness evolves into insideness.

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Existential Insiders in Sunshine State As the deepest kind of lived involvement with place, existential insideness is a situation in which people are normally unaware of the importance of place in sustaining their everyday world. They experience their place without direct attention, yet that place is rife with overriding but tacitly unnoticed significances. There are two characters in Sunshine State who illustrate a more or less pure existential insideness, though varying in tenor and effect. As a long-time resident of Lincoln Beach, Desiree’s mother, Eunice Stokes, remembers the community as it was—a haven for middle-class black families in pre-integration days. Sitting on her porch showing Desiree’s husband Reggie a photographic album of Lincoln Beach scenes, Eunice exclaims, “In so many other ways, we were on the outside looking in, but this was ours” (Sayles 2004, p. 261). Near the end of the film, Desiree promises that, if anything should happen to Eunice, she will sell the house and set up a fund for her psychologically troubled grandnephew Terrell, for whom Eunice has become caretaker. Eunice replies plaintively, “Baby, what good is money going to do for Terrell?” (Sayles 2004, p. 312). Is there no way, her plea suggests, to return to the deep-rooted existential insideness of the old Lincoln Beach where strong communal bonds held neighbors together and made sure everyone was provided for? A more tragic mode of existential insideness is expressed by another native of Plantation Island. Gradually going blind, Furman Temple represents a lower-class white man proud to have become an entrepreneur in the post-World War II period when Floridian businesses were mostly owned locally. Plantation Island’s escalating corporate development threatens his rapidly failing restaurant-motel and leaves him confused and feeling left behind. Eventually, he accepts the fact that his daughter’s dreams are not necessarily his own, and he gives Marly his blessing to sell their beachside establishment. Furman’s monologue, near the start of the film, poignantly highlights a central American dilemma today—how to provide an opening for individual worth and initiative in a world increasingly controlled by corporate capitalism and governmental decree: My days, life was simpler. You knew where you stood …. So if you could carve yourself out a little piece of something you known [sic] that you earned it. The hoopin’ [sic] crane, the spotted owl, the Florida gater, the colored man, the white man, the Spanish—they all started from scratch, and if you couldn’t survive the course that was just tough titty …. Nowadays, we been zoned and regulated and politically corrected and vironmentally [sic] sensitized to the point where it’s only your multi-internationals with a dozen lawyers sittin’ ‘round waitin’ like buzzards for something to litigate that can afford to put one brick on top of another. The little man, no matter how much grit or imagination he brings to it, they got him so tied down he can’t nearly breathe. (Sayles 2004, p. 180)

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Both Eunice and Furman illustrate existential insiders who cling to the past takenfor-grantedness of their place and mostly respond passively to change.5 In contrast, Lincoln Beach resident Dr. Lloyd can be interpreted as a self-conscious existential insider who realizes in a proactive way that much of that change, if allowed to just happen, will further undermine Lincoln Beach’s communal existential insideness and perhaps destroy the community forever. Integration, he points out to Reggie, was good for African-Americans who could “get over” but “them that can’t are in a world of trouble,” partly because there is no longer a tightly knit black community to fall back on for support (Sayles 2004, p. 197). Dr. Lloyd’s full-time work is attempting to save Lincoln Beach from development by urging his neighbors to be more involved and by arguing his case at public meetings and to the press. His exact opposite in terms of existential insideness is another Lincoln Beach native, former college-football star Lee “Flash” Phillips (Tom Wright), who publicly claims to have returned to participate as a “local hero” in the annual “Old Buccaneer Days,” a weekend May festival that structures the film’s 6-day narrative arc. In fact, he works surreptitiously for corporate developers to finagle, through his celebrity status, the purchase of properties from long-time Lincoln Beach homeowners. Phillips does show some remorse when confronted by Desiree, with whom he shares a turbulent past. Having fallen on hard times, however, he knows firsthand that “There’s a handful of people who run the whole deal and there’s the rest of us who do what they say and get paid for it” (Sayles 2004, p. 297). He also claims that Lincoln Beach “was over years ago” so what is he really doing that is ethically wrong?

Insiders Remaining or Returning If, in their points of view on place, Furman Temple echoes Eunice Stokes and “Flash” Phillips is a counter to Dr. Lloyd, the central characters of Marly Temple and Desiree Stokes Perry complement each other in that Marly will probably need to leave Plantation Island to find a satisfactory future, while, for Desiree, that satisfactory future may be found by returning to her native place and repairing the past. In Place and Placelessness, Relph (1976, p. 41) points out how the places to which a person is most attached may sometimes seem oppressive and imprisoning. Such drudgery of place is the case for Marly, caught in the tension between her father’s nostalgic wish that she continue the family business and her private, guilt-ridden desire to dispense with the business and find a future that is right for her. At one point in her life, Marly had hoped to become an oceanographer but, when asked what crippled her dream, she explains that “Shit happens, you know, and a lot of it happened to me” (Sayles 2004, p. 274). Marly wishes to escape a stifling sense of existential insideness imposed by family obligations, but Sayles offers no clear evidence that she will break free of her place or break into a world where she is more content. A certain ennui holds her back, and the one hope she has in which a new male acquaintance might pull her along—Plantation Island landscape architect Jack Meadows (Timothy Hutton)—leaves her in the lurch when, at the

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end of the film, Lincoln Beach construction is stopped, and he is transferred to a new building site in Puerto Rico. In contrast to Marly is Desiree, who, in her reluctant Lincoln Beach return after 25 years, senses vaguely the possibility of a permanent homecoming that, like Marly’s departure, may or may not happen. Sayles is unwilling to say and leaves the future to be predicted by his film audience, perhaps so that they might ponder what they might do in a similar situation. Immediately after her return, Desiree deals with several “ghosts” from her Lincoln Beach past: apologizing to high school girlfriend Loretta (Charlayne Woodard) for stealing her high school boyfriend; apologizing to her high school theater teacher and Marly’s mother Delia Temple (Jane Alexander) for leaving town right before she was to play lead in a community theater production Delia was directing; and informing “Flash” Phillips that he was the father of her stillborn child. The most significant effort that Desiree must make is repairing the relationship with her mother, particularly working through the personal hurt she felt when Eunice and her father sent her away to have the unwanted baby in Georgia. “You— both of you—had these ideas about what a decent person was, how they acted. I let you down. I was—afraid to face that.” Eunice responds that Desiree broke her father’s heart, which provokes Desiree to counter ruefully, “And when you sent me away you broke mine” (Sayles 2004, pp. 310–311). Until the very end of the film, Desiree is ambivalent about her return to Lincoln Beach. As she summarizes the situation to her family’s long-time friend Dr. Lloyd, “I burned my bridges here long ago” (Sayles 2004, p. 282). By the second night back, she tells Reggie she wants to leave immediately after the weekend: “I don’t want to get sucked into any of this. I don’t like what I am down here. And I don’t trust my mother” (Sayles 2004, p. 233). Eventually, through an offhand remark of Dr. Lloyd, Desiree discovers the reason for her mother’s mysterious request that she and Reggie visit: Eunice is dying and secretly hopes her daughter and son-and-law will see the need to take family responsibility for Terrell. At the end of the film, after a heart-wrenching confrontation with Eunice, Desiree is uncertain as to what the future holds but, for the moment, decides to stay to work through the situation with her mother. “Take as much time as you need,” Reggie says encouragingly right before he leaves for Boston.

Outsiders as Uncertain Agents of Placelessness The insiders of Sunshine State illustrate a wide range of place experience. At one extreme, there exists a profound sense of attachment and loyalty to place that is sometimes more nostalgic than real. At the other extreme lies a deep sense of entrapment and claustrophobia from which one must escape. Similarly, characters in the film who represent outsiders intimate a wide range of place experience that, on one hand, can be matter of fact and selfishly pragmatic; or, on the other hand, disingenuous and damaging to place and people. Mostly in the film, Sayles’ portrayal of these outsiders is superficial and satiric.6 Though he suggests they are unstoppable, Sayles critically questions the changes that corporate capitalism is reaping on

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Plantation Island’s natural and cultural landscape; his disdain for the characters who fuel this inappropriate commodification of nature, history, and community is felt throughout the film. He is most kindly to the two characters who are the developers’ uncertain agents: Jack Meadows (Timothy Hutton), the landscape architect designing the manicured gated communities for Exley Corporation; and Francine Pinkney (Mary Steenburgen), an events planner who coordinates Delrona Beach’s Buccaneer Days festival, an annual Chamber of Commerce event contrived to draw tourist dollars. During his brief stay in Delrona Beach, Jack has an affair with Marly, who is attracted by his devotion to his professional work, with which he originally became involved because of his admiration for landscape architect founder Frederick Law Olmsted. “He’s kind of the granddaddy of what I do,” Jack tells Marly. “You take land that’s wild and inaccessible and you—refine it some, showcase its natural beauty—accentuate the topography a little—and create a place that everybody, rich, poor and in-between, can come together and appreciate.” Immediately recognizing that the expensive gated communities built by Exley Plantation are exclusively for the rich, Marly jokingly asks whether she will be invited over for fish fry. Jack responds defensively, “Well—the populist part of it has kind of fallen away. He designed some pretty grand estates too …. [If] you’re gonna put in the effort, you might as well be paid well” (Sayles 2004, p. 264). Marly and Jack quickly fall into a romantic affair, and there seems hope that she might finally find happiness. Near the end of the film, however, Exley Plantation workers accidentally unearth ancient Native-American remains on the Lincoln Beach site for which Jack is doing the landscape design. State archeologists immediately stop work, and Exley corporate directors order Jack to proceed to a Puerto Rican property in development. As he and Marley say a last goodbye in the local bar, there is a moment when it seems he might ask her to go with him, but the moment passes and Marly remains in place, while Jack proceeds in his outsider status to the next job in another new place. If Jack is an outsider because he moves professionally from place to place and hasn’t the time to belong anywhere or to anyone, Francine Pinkney, even though she resides in Delrona Beach, is an outsider because she is trying to reinvent Plantation Island’s history to draw more tourists. Though clearly dissatisfied with her work, Pinkney cannot really belong to her place because she has no will or interest in allowing that place, as it is, to be. At one point, a developer tells her that Plantation Island has “history to burn,” what with “Indians, pirates, Spanish gold and the Plantation thing.” But Francine responds that “people hate history,” which she says, for Plantation Island, is better described as “mass murder, rape, slavery” (Sayles 2004, p. 218). The developer’s solution is to “Disnify [sic] it a little and they’ll come back for more” (Sayles 2004, p. 291). Of course, this is exactly what Francine has attempted as she directs a parade, beauty pageant, and island treasure hunt. Unfortunately, the amateurish, small-scale nature of Buccaneer Days cannot compete with the high-flown ersatz of Disneyworld and other corporate tourist attractions.

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In all the scenes in which she appears, the viewer recognizes Francine’s discomfort and dissatisfaction with her booster efforts. “People think that it’s just there. Like Christmas or Thanksgiving,” she tells her husband mournfully, shortly after the festival is over. “They don’t appreciate how difficult it is to invent a tradition. And at the end of the day, is there acknowledgement? Is there so much as a thank you? Not a peep. I might as well be their mother” (Sayles 2004, p. 290).

Outsiders Begetting Placelessness There are two other related groups of outsiders in the film about whom Sayles is much more cynical: three developers who represent the two real estate corporations competing for Plantation Island properties (Sam McMurray, Perry Lang, and Miguel Ferrer); and four white multimillionaire-golfers, presented as a kind of mock Greek chorus, who are the real power behind Exley Corporation and represent the relentless, colonizing power of global capitalism (Allan King, Elliot Asinof, Cullen Douglas, and Clifton James). The three developers are memorable only in their unstinting efforts, many of them illegal and amoral, to gain control of the island’s real estate. One of their most striking scenes is a discussion in which they use the imagery of warfare to describe how gaining property on Plantation Island is to be accomplished: “The other side have [sic] this whole end of the island locked up,” says the first developer, “and they’re infiltrating into Lincoln Beach over here.” “We’re not opposing?” asks the second developer. “Zoned residential, hostile native population—it’s a minefield,” replies the first. “Whereas right here [where the Temples’ restaurant-motel is located] it’s the soft underbelly of the island” (Sayles 2004, p. 174). Appearing three times, the four golfers bookmark the beginning, middle, and end of Sunshine State. Though they are aware of the negative consequences of their company’s efforts (they mention environmental degradation, species extinction, and climate change), most of their dialogue highlights what they see as the unsullied benefits of large-scale development. “A dream is what you sell, a concept,” says the lead golfer (Alan King) as he prepares to drive a ball onto an immaculately manicured fairway. “Remember, this was the ends of the earth, this was a land populated by white people who ate catfish, and almost overnight, out of the muck and the mangroves we created this ….—nature on a leash” (Sayles 2004, p. 168). In their last appearance in the movie’s final scene, Sayles films the golfers from below, silhouetted by billowing clouds and bright blue sky. His inference is how, in their “Olympian” status, these men and others like them control, behind the scenes, the economic and political forces reshaping both Plantation Island and much of the world. The lead golfer regrets that, unlike the colonizing era of Florida’s European discoverer Ponce de Leon, there are no dreams left to pursue: “We live in impoverished times,” he laments (Sayles 2004, p. 317). Ironically, as the camera shifts from the lead golfer’s swing to the ball he hits, the viewer sees that the four men no longer play their game on a manicured fairway but on a small grass traffic island impinged upon by speeding vehicles and chaotic franchise strip development.

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More so, jests Sayles, we live in “impoverished times” because of the placelessness for which global corporate capitalism is largely responsible.

Outsideness Helping Insideness In one sense, the most important characters in Sunshine State are Terrell, the disturbed teenager in Eunice Stokes’ care; and increasingly empathetic outsider Reggie Perry, Desiree’s husband. Though a native of Lincoln Beach, Terrell is a badly bruised insider-made-outsider who, as a child, witnessed his drug-crazed father murder his mother and then kill himself. Before he was found, Terrell sat alone with the two bodies for six days. Terrell holds a huge amount of simmering anger for which arson of Plantation Island property has been his release. In Relph’s terminology, Terrell is an existential outsider—a person who feels alienated and separate from the place in which he finds himself (Relph 1976, p. 51). Terrell’s situation is doubly tragic in that his home place—a world that should sustain existential insideness—is instead an alien, impinging “otherness” of grief, dislocation, and confusion. Terrell is immediately drawn to Reggie Perry as a positive male role model. At one point in the film, he will tell Furman Temple that in fact Reggie is his father. In terms of place preservation, Reggie is the most important character in the film because he moves from the situation of complete outsider to, in Relph’s terms, an empathetic insider who is willing to engage with and understand Lincoln Beach and its people. As an African-American man from the North making his first trip to the South, Reggie is initially uncertain about how he may be treated. When Desiree insists that they stop at Marly’s restaurant so she can use the women’s room before seeing her mother, Reggie jokes about whether they’ll even be allowed in. Very soon, however, he becomes close to Eunice and Dr. Lloyd, who recount the social history of Lincoln Beach. Reggie listens, appreciates what is said, and quickly grows to like the place. At the end of the film, as Desiree stays on to work through things with her mother and Reggie leaves for Boston, there is a strong sense that he might like to return to Lincoln Beach and that Desiree has similar feelings. Just before Reggie departs, Eunice takes a photograph of Terrell standing between him and Desiree. The implication, by no means certain, is that these three might someday be one family and that Reggie might become a community anchor in the footsteps of Dr. Lloyd.

Place or Placelessness? Sunshine State is an evocative portrait of a wide range of characters’ dealings with place both as a particular lived situation and also as a particular physical world. As Sayles presents contemporary Florida in the film, much of the state’s natural and human landscape has come to manifest Relph’s placelessness—“the weakening of distinct and diverse experiences and identities of places” (Relph 1976, p. 6). Sayles is ambivalent about this escalating placelessness. On one hand, in characters like

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Furman Temple, Eunice Stokes, and Dr. Lloyd, Sayles points toward the unspoken value of local place for individual and social wellbeing. He suggests that people are connected to each other and to their place, and the right thing to do is to accept responsibility for others as Desiree attempts in her tentative reconciliation with Eunice or as Reggie attempts in his uncertain efforts to be a surrogate father to Terrell. Individuals have an ethical obligation to nourish and deepen their connections with family, community, and place. In interviews, Sayles has described this possibility variously, for example: “The hopefulness for me comes from some of the people from below. I don’t have hope coming from above” (Ryan 1998, p. 157). Or: “every positive act of compassion on the part of an individual attempting to cope with frustration or injustice is magnified as its effects ripple out” (Carson 1999, p. 133). On the other hand, Sayles openly recognizes that the implacable drive of corporate capitalism to make money and gain power, relentlessly at the expense of natural and human worlds, is the unchallenged engine of American life today. Nothing is left untouched by the economic obsession to transform nature, history, and place into commodities that can be bought and sold—Disney-like corporate chains, extravagant gated communities, or revisionist kitsch traditions like Plantation Island’s Buccaneer Days. For Sayles, the important question is [W]hat do people do when these huge sea changes happen, when your world is never going to be the same again? Who are the people who can … go with the flow and who are the people who … are too rigid? (Moyers 2002, n.p.) In Sunshine State, Sayles uses the ensemble cast to illustrate a continuum of possibilities for responding to these profound shifts in American life. On one hand are characters like Eunice Stokes and Furman Temple, who, partly because of age and generational qualities, react passively and largely withdraw from the world at hand or retreat into the hope of family. On the other hand, a character like Dr. Stokes doggedly works to counter the intruding external forces, while “Flash” Phillips, Marly Temple, Jack Meadows, and Francine Pinkney largely ignore the threat or become its grudging agents. Of all the characters in the film, Marly, Jack, and Francine are portrayed as the most tentative, confused, and unfulfilled. Searching for dreams that are often unrealistic or unsustainable, these characters intimate a vague but painful sense of loss, much of it unself-conscious. In this sense, the title of Sayles’ film is ironic, pointing to the need to circumvent lived superficiality by confronting threatening undercurrents, both personal and societal, that churn beneath stereotypic images and the humdrum experiences of taken-for-granted life. Can individuals, asks Sayles, break free existentially and thereby come to terms with place, people, past, present, and future? Can individuals accommodate themselves to personal, social, and environmental change without abandoning ethical principles and close interpersonal bonds?

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Twenty-First-Century Place The most overarching and perplexing question that Sayles leaves us with in Sunshine State is what happens to the lived relationship between people and place in 21st-­century America? Phenomenological philosophers Edward Casey (2009), Jeff Malpas (2018), Robert Mugerauer (2008), and Ingrid Stefanovic (2000) all argue that, even in spite of our mobile, continually changing postmodern era, being-in-place remains a non-contingent necessity for people because having a place is an integral, inescapable part of who and what we are as human beings. If this conclusion has merit, then what happens if both physical and lived aspects of place continue to diminish—geographically, through global capitalism and placelessness; and existentially, through deepening divisions, isolation, alienation, and outsideness? Sayles uses several characters in the film to represent the situation and potential outcomes. At one extreme is the tragic figure of blind Furman Temple who, through no real fault of his own, finds his cherished way of life reduced to little more than a buyout opportunity. “Where it’s all headed,” he laments, “I don’t want to know, but if they expect my cooperation they just [sic] shit outa luck” (Sayles 2004, p. 181). At the other extreme are the four golfers, who like Olympian gods looking down on the world they dominate, can actualize almost anything they conjure up for Plantation Island’s future. These omnipotent men have few scruples regarding the environmental and social dislocation and devastation their unceasing efforts impose on the natural world and on ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives in the place where they find themselves. When one of his playing partners expresses concern about species extinction, the lead golfer proclaims: “We still need a lizard the size of a twelve-passenger van? Most of these things, if they came back, people would not be thrilled …. Nature is overrated” (Sayles 2004, pp. 235, 236). In between these two extremes are the characters who point to the potential resilience of Plantation Island as a place: Dr. Lloyd, who works to save Lincoln Beach through political action; Eunice Stokes, who hopes that a reconciliation with her daughter might stir her familial concern for Terrell; and Desiree and Reggie, who just might resettle in Lincoln Beach and contribute to a reinvigorated communal integrity. The two characters most difficult to predict in terms of place possibilities are Terrell and Marly. Terrell may well contribute to Lincoln Beach’s rejuvenation if Desiree and Reggie eventually adopt him. If not, his future is bleak in that one can imagine his pyromania devolving into more destructive anti-social behaviors. Intriguingly, Sayles opens the film with Terrell’s setting fire to the Buccaneer Day’s lead float, which portrays a time when lawless pirates controlled Plantation Island. As the movie proceeds, the inference is clear that the island’s 21st-century pirates are the merciless corporate developers who raid the Florida coast, seize property, and upset settled ways of life. The irony is that Terrell, the character most potentially breakable by their subversion of his place, may, one way or the other, become an unintentional agent who interferes with their ruthless advance.

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If Desiree and Reggie adopt him, Terrell may become a contributing member to a revitalized community that holds off the real estate takeover of Lincoln Beach. If not, the teenager’s unhappiness and anger may push him into an unruly underclass interfering with and potentially undermining the corporate powers’ social and economic security. In one sense, Terrell represents the determining factor for the resolution of place vs. placelessness and local vs. global involvement, action, and control. Can community, place, and ecosystems be reinvigorated through responsible, caring people who take a stand for their place, whether individually or communally? Or will overpowering economic and political forces intensify placelessness, outsideness, and human alienation from nature? The film’s most ambivalent relationship with place is portrayed through Marly, who cannot really belong in Delrona Beach because her world there is not her own. Sayles’ suggestion is that, before Marly can find her place, she must somehow break free from a guilt-ridden sense of obligation to others, whether parents or lovers. After high school, Marly performed in an underwater-mermaid routine at Florida’s Weeki Wachee Springs. “The most important thing,” says Marly, “is to keep that smile on your face. Even if you’re drowning” (Sayles 2004, p. 236). This is Marly’s dilemma: surrendering and then moving beyond the artificial smile—the superficial “sunshine state.” Can she find a way to live that is more in tune with who she is and what she really wishes for her life? On one hand, she succeeds in that, by the end of the film, she has convinced her father to sell the business she had never wished to manage. On the other hand, her world is still uncertain in that her brief fling with Jack Meadows has come to a dead end. In the film’s next-to-last scenes, Sayles adroitly projects a final placement of the central characters: Jack drives his Exley Corporation company car over the island’s causeway bridge toward the mainland, while Reggie backs his rental out of Eunice’s driveway as she, Desiree, and Terrell wave goodbye. But what of Marly? Sayles immediately follows these real-world departures with a dreamlike sequence filmed underwater from a camera considerably below the surface. On the shore and barely discernable is Marly, who dives into the water, swims head on toward the camera, and momentarily appears in close up, her face uncertain but without a smile. Is she now more in touch with whom and what she might become? Will she discover who she really is when she resurfaces? Will that discovery sooner or later bind her to some place? As with other compelling questions that the film provokes, Sayles gives no definitive answer.

Sunshine State as Phenomenological Insight “Very few people,” says Sayles, “can define themselves outside of the small world that they live in” (Sayles and Smith 1998, p. 18). One of the most evocative aspects of Sunshine State is its persistent, empathetic concern for everyday experiences, situations, and worlds that viewers might never know or care about otherwise. As Sayles explains, “The important thing is to get that moment when someone in the

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audience thinks, ‘I have never spent time with the people in this movie,’ and then they realize that, because of the movie, they have” (Carson 1999, p. 144). With this point in mind, one understands why, in interviews and writings, Sayles often claims that he is not an artist but an exacting, compassionate observer and recorder of human lives.7 He wants his viewers to be talking about human beings, about their own lives and the lives of other people they know or could know, rather than thinking, ‘Oh, that was like Citizen Kane …’ The references in [my] movies are … to historical things or personal things, not references to other movies. (Sayles and Smith 1998, p. 52) In this sense, Sayles’ steady, forbearing attention to commonplace human beings and their mundane worlds points to a style of filmmaking that can rightly be called “phenomenological,” if we take that word to mean the excavation of human experience; first, in terms of particular persons and groups in particular places, situations, and historical moments; and, second, as this excavation engenders a self-conscious effort to make intellectual and emotional sense of what that experience reveals in terms of broader lived structures and more ethical ways of being, willing, and acting (Seamon 2015). One recognizes this kind of implicit phenomenological looking and understanding in Sayles’ explanation of how he discovers film ideas and works them through as scripts: A lot of what I do is just listen, eavesdrop, talk to people, hear their stories, try to figure out where they’re coming from, and especially doing that without any preconceptions, just kind of emptying your head and trying to not be in an argument or a discussion with somebody but just hear what they’re saying and how they’re saying it, which is often as important as what they’re saying. (Moyers 2002, n.p.) It is Sayles’ uncanny deftness at cinematically constructing and getting viewers intellectually and emotionally involved with quotidian worlds and places that marks Sunshine State’s most indelible accomplishment. In its multifaceted, complex nature encrusted in everyday taken-for-grantedness, the phenomenon of place is difficult conceptually to grasp and understand. Sunshine State is revelatory exactly because it illuminates the place situation for a wide range of vividly drawn characters and demonstrates how the same physical place can evoke a broad spectrum of experiences, meanings, and potential futures. At the same time, we wonder what will happen to Plantation Island as a place in its own right and what similar developments might mean for the places that have significance for us. Sunshine State is a penetrating cinematic meditation on the possible ways, both positive and negative, that place, placelessness, insideness, and outsideness might sustain or undermine our 21st-century world.

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Notes 1 This chapter was originally published in Aether: Journal of Media Geography, 3 (June 2008), 1–19. The author thanks Aether editor Christopher Lukinbeal for permission to republish the article here. 2 Works making links between phenomenology and film research include Casebier (1991), Kolker and Ousley (1973), Sobchack (1993), Stadler (1990), and Wahlberg (2003). Works examining the portrayal of place in film include Aitken and Zonn (2004), Cresswell and Dixon (2002), Kennedy and Lukinbeal (1997), Lukinbeal (2004, 2005), and Lukinbeal and Zimmermann (2008). Works examining the role of place in Sayles’ films include Arreola (2005), Barr (2003), Barrett (2006), Jones (2002), Mains (2004), Natter (2002), Shargel (2002), Walker (1999), and Whitehouse (2002). Other helpful discussions and interpretations of Sayles’ work include Carson (1999), Carson and Kenaga (2006); Davis and Womack (1998), Light (2003), Magowan (2004), Molyneaux (2000), Ryan (1998), Sayles (1987), Sayles and Smith (1998), and Walker (1999). Works discussing the phenomenology of place include Casey (2009), Malpas (2018), Mugerauer (2008), Relph (1976, 1981, 1985), Seamon (1990, 2015, 2018), Seamon and Sowers (2008) and Stefanovic (2000). 3 Helpful accounts of Florida’s environmental and social history include Davis and Arsenault (2005) and Mormino (2005). Useful accounts of Amelia Island’s American Beach include Phelts (1997) and Rymer (1998). In relation to integration and the demise of many black businesses, Rymer (1998, pp. 219–220) writes: … the immediate tangible commercial benefits of integration accrued exclusively to white business. Integration represented the greatest opening of a domestic American market in the nation’s history, but the windfall only worked one way. Black customers flocked to the stores and hotels and restaurants—and beaches—where they had formerly been prohibited … and forsook the black businesses to which they had been confined. Whites did not storm across the same open border to spend money in black establishments. For them the border had always been open—at least officially …. The results were predictable, if unforeseen. The whole economic skeleton of the black community, so painfully erected in the face of exclusion and injustice, collapsed as that exclusion was rescinded. [One] American Beach resident phrased it in formula, “First we had segregation, and then integration. Then disintegration.” 4 As of this writing (summer 2022), Sayles has written and directed eighteen films, of which the best known include The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), Matewan (1987), City of Hope (1991), and Lonestar (1996). Most critics have identified the last as his most accomplished and satisfying work. 5 In addition to the more comprehensive picture of the deep mode of existential insideness suggested by Eunice Stokes and Furman Temple, there are at least two other less central characters in the film who evoke this deep immersion in place: Loretta (Charlayne Woodard), Desiree’s best friend from high school whose boyfriend Desiree stole; and Mrs. Pierce (Barbara Young), Eunice’s meddling next-door neighbor. One of the most telling lines in the film is said by Eunice, who has prepared a casserole for the ill Mrs. Pierce. When Desiree asks her mother if she has “buried the hatchet with Mrs. Pierce after all these years,” Eunice responds, “No. But she’s my neighbor.” 6 In an interview Sayles explained that “The people I have the least emotional interest in are the people who have no perspective, who should have more. They’ve come from the outside world and have chosen to limit their perspective” (Sayles and Smith 1998, p. 22). 7 The program notes for his film, The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), make this point directly: “John Sayles will never call himself an artist” (Carson 1999, p. 198).

References Aitken, S. and Zonn, L. (1994). Re-presenting the place pastiche. In Aitken, S. and Zonn, L., eds., Place, power, situation, and spectacle: A geography of film. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Arreola, D. (2005). Forget the Alamo: The border as place in John Sayles’ Lone Star. Journal of Cultural Geography, 23, 23–32. Baron, D. (1999). Sayles talk. In Carson, D., ed., John Sayles: Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Barr, A. (2003). The borders of time, place, and people in John Sayles’ Lone Star. Journal of American Studies, 37, 365–374. Barrett, L. (2006). The space of ambiguity: Representations of nature in Limbo. In Carson, D. and Kenega, H., eds., Sayles talk: New perspectives on independent filmmaker John Sayles. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Carson, D. (1999). John Sayles: Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Carson, D. and Kenaga, H., eds. (2006). Sayles talk: New perspectives on independent filmmaker John Sayles. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Casey, E. (2009). Getting back into place, 2nd edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Casebier, A. (1991). Film and phenomenology: Toward a realist theory of cinematic representation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cresswell, T. and Dixon, D., eds. (2002). Engaging film: Geographies of mobility and identity. Landam, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Davis, J. and Arsenault, R., eds. (2005). Paradise lost: The environmental history of Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Davis, T. and Womack, K. (1998). Forget the Alamo: Reading the ethics of style in John Sayles’ Lone Star. Style, 32, 471–485. Jones, K. (2002). The lay of the land: John Sayles draws a map of American discontent for the era of Disneyfication. Film Comment, 38, 22–24. Kennedy, C. and Lukinbeal, C. (1997). Towards a holistic approach to geographic research on film. Progress in Human Geography, 21, 33–50. Kolker, R. P. and Ousley, D. (1973). A phenomenology of cinematic time and space. British Journal of Aesthetics, 13, 388–396. Light, A. (2003). Reel arguments: Film, philosophy, and social criticism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Lukinbeal, C. (2004). The map that precedes the territory: An introduction to essays in cinematic geography. GeoJournal, 59, 247–251. Lukinbeal, C. (2005). Cinematic landscapes. Journal of Cultural Geography, 23, 3–22. Lukinbeal, C. and Zimmermann, S., eds. (2008). The geography of cinema. Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag. Magowan, K. (2004). “Blood only means what you let it”: Incest and miscegenation in John Sayles’ Lone Star. Film Quarterly, 57, 20–31. Mains, S. (2004). Imagining the border and Southern spaces: Cinematic explorations of race and gender. GeoJournal, 59, 253–264. Malpas, J. (2018). Place and experience: A philosophical topography, 2nd edn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Molyneaux, G. (2000). John Sayles: An unauthorized biography of the pioneering indie filmmaker. New York: Renaissance Books. Mormino, G. (2005). Land of sunshine, state of dreams. Gainsville: University Press of Florida. Moyers, B. (2002). John Sayles’ Sunshine State [Public Broadcasting Service NOW, [interview with John Sayles;. www.lpbs.org/now/arts/sunshine.html; accessed February 22, 2022]. Mugerauer, R. (2008). Heidegger and homecoming. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Natter, W. (2002). “We just gotta leminate ‘em”: On whiteness and film in Matewan, Avalon, and Bulworth. In Cresswell, T. and Dixon, D., eds., Engaging film: Geographies of mobility and identity (pp. 89–105). Landam, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Phelts, M. (1997). An American beach for African-Americans. Gainsville: University Press of Florida.

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Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Relph, E. (1981). Rational landscapes and humanistic geography. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble. Relph, E. (1985). Geographical experiences and being-in-the-world. In Seamon, D. and Mugerauer, R., eds., Dwelling, place and environment: Towards a phenomenology of person and world (pp. 15–31). New York: Columbia University Press. Ryan, J. (1998). John Sayles, film maker: A critical study of the independent writer-director. London: McFarland & Co [2nd edn. 2010]. Rymer, R. (1998). American beach: A saga of race, wealth, and memory. New York: HarperCollins. Sayles, J. (1987). Thinking in pictures: The making of the movie Matewan. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Sayles, J. (2004). Sunshine State [screenplay]. Silver City and other screenplays. New York: Nation Books. Sayles, J. and Smith, G. (1998). Sayles on Sayles. London: Faber and Faber. Seamon, D. (1990). Awareness and reunion: A phenomenology of the person–environment relationship as portrayed in the New York photographs of André Kertész. In Zonn, L., ed., Place images in the media (pp. 87–107). Totowa, NJ: Roman and Littlefield. Seamon, D. (2015). Lived emplacement and the locality of being: A return to humanistic geography? In Aitken, S. and Valentine, G., eds., Approaches to human geography, 2nd edn. (pp. 35–48). London: SAGE. Seamon, D. (2018). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routeldge. Seamon, D. and Sowers, J. (2008). Edward Relph, place and placelessness. In Hubbard, P., Kitchen, R. and Valentine, G., eds., Key texts in human geography (pp. 43–51). London: SAGE. Shargel, R. (2002). Last rays and shadows of summer. The New Leader, 85, 35–37. Sobchack, V. (1993). The address of the eye: A phenomenology of film experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stadler, H. (1990). Film as experience: Phenomenological concepts in cinema and television studies. Quarterly Review of Film & Video, 12, 37–50. Stefanovic, I. (2000). Safeguarding our common future. Albany: State University of New York Press. Wahlberg, M. (2003). Figures of time: On the phenomenology of cinema and temporality. Stockholm: Stockholm University, Department of Cinema Studies. Walker, M. (1999). “Everybody has his reasons”: John Sayles’ City of Hope and Lone Star. Cineaction, 49, 37–50. Whitehouse, G. (2002). Remember to forget the Alamo: The dynamics of cultural memory in John Sayles’ Lone Star. Literature and Theology, 16, 291–310.

12 PLACE, BELONGING, AND ENVIRONMENTAL HUMILITY The Experience of “Teched” as Portrayed by American Writer Louis Bromfield

As a phenomenologist, I aim to understand peoples’ experiences with environments, places, landscapes, and the natural world.1 By phenomenology, I refer to the exploration and description of things and experiences as human beings experience those things and experiences, particularly their unnoticed, taken-for-granted aspects (Seamon 2000). For instance, why are places important for people, or how might we find ways to foster a deeper concern and care for nature so that people might think and act in a more environmentally responsible way? This question of facilitating respect and reverence for the natural world explains my interest in American novelist, agricultural writer, and agrarian reformer Louis Bromfield (1896–1956) who, in 1939 at the age of 42, ended a 14-year sojourn in France and returned to his native rural Ohio to begin one of the mid-twentieth century’s most significant agricultural and ecological experiments—Malabar Farm, a 1,000-acre property located in east-central Ohio about ten miles southeast of Mansfield.2 At Malabar, Bromfield set out to demonstrate that misused, unproductive farmland could be renewed and again made profitable, mostly through topsoil restoration. His experiment continued until his death in 1956 and succeeded in restoring Malabar’s depleted soils through easy-to-follow practices that Bromfield hoped would be duplicated by other farmers in the United States and abroad. The result of these practices, Bromfield claimed, would be land that produced “the maximum of its potentiality without loss of fertility” (Bromfield 1945, p. 117). Phenomenology is concerned with the wholeness of human action and experience (Bortoft 1996; Seamon 2018). As a phenomenologist, I am intrigued by Bromfield’s belief that efforts at agricultural restoration must be comprehensive existentially and incorporate both intellect and feeling, both knowledge and intuition, both scientific understanding and an instinctive sense of what is right for nature. At Malabar, Bromfield regularly made use of many of the latest advances in agricultural science and technology—for example, contour plowing, cover crops, DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-15

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legumes as green fertilizer, water resource management, hybridization, disk plows, and tillers (though he seriously questioned the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides).3 At the same time, however, he believed that none of these technical tools and knowledge would make a successful farm unless the farmer felt an instinctive relationship with the land that included respect and empathy: A good farmer, Bromfield (1945, p. 157) wrote, must have “that feel of all which nature concerns herself. He is the man who learns by farming, to whom the very blades of grass and stalks of corn tell stories.” This instinctive, unself-conscious awareness of and caring for nature is what Bromfield often referred to in his writings as “teched” (rhymes with “fetched”)—a colloquial word he used to describe a capacity for experiencing an intuitive intimacy with the natural world’s things, creatures, landscapes, and places. Bromfield believed that this direct openness to the world leads to a truer, more sincere understanding of nature and an instinctive wish to work with and use the natural world in a more kindly, responsible way.

Up Ferguson Way Bromfield’s most thorough portrayal of teched” is in “Up Ferguson Way,” a 1944 short story grounded in his childhood experience (Bromfield 1944b). Set in rural Ohio at the start of the last century, the story begins with the young Bromfield’s first encounter with Zenobia Ferguson, an eccentric, independent elderly woman who lives on a desolate hilltop farm. Locals look on Zenobia oddly, partly because, as a young woman, she accidentally shot and killed her lover. They call Zenobia’s farm “up Ferguson way” because the place, looking down on the valleys below, projects an unusual, ethereal ambience. “So you’re going out of this world for a time,” says a valley neighbor to the 7- or 8-year-old Louis and his father Tom as they head their horse and buggy up the rough, narrow, tree-canopied road to Zenobia’s farm. When they arrive at Zenobia’s weathered, unpainted house, they are greeted by three large dogs and a white colt named Willie. Zenobia welcomes her visitors and then takes Louis’ head in her hands as she gazes into his eyes. “‘Yes, he’ll do’, she says. ‘He has the right kind of eye’.” To Bromfield’s father, she says, “You know, you can tell people and animals by their eyes, Tom” (Bromfield 1944b, p. 245). While Tom and Zenobia go into her house to visit, Louis explores “the jungle of a garden” around her house, accompanied by the dogs and Willie, who all “suddenly became old friends” (Bromfield 1944b, p. 245). Shortly, there arrive a Jersey cow, her newborn calf, many birds, and a squirrel that “sat without fear … and chattered and made faces at me” (Bromfield 1944b, p. 246). The friendly proximity of these animals, writes Bromfield, made the heart of that small boy sing, I think because all these living things seemed so near and so without strangeness or fear. It was as if this little world

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existing high against the blue October sky were a small paradise, a little world that was what all the great world should be. (Bromfield 1944b, p. 246) Zenobia invites Louis and his father to lunch, after which Tom takes a nap and Louis returns outside to play by a pond fed by a spring near the garden. All of the earlier animals plus others gather at the pond with Louis, who suddenly experiences a moment of deep insight: … suddenly the calf became my brother, a small creature for whom I felt a sudden intense love, quite different from the sort of love I felt for any person …. It was if we were both a part of something which other people did not understand, a world apart in which there were sounds which no human could understand. (Bromfield 1944b, p. 248) Louis then realizes that someone is watching him, and he turns to see Zenobia, for whom he has “the same feeling of fathomless understanding” (Bromfield 1944b, p. 249). They stare at each other and Zenobia points to the squirrel, named John, who she says is an “impudent bad character but very comical” (Bromfield 1944b, p. 249.). She calls him and he scampers up her dress to sit on her shoulder and chatters. Zenobia looks at Louis and says, “You see what they’re like. We can talk to each other.” She turned her head a little way and said, “How about it John? Can’t we?” The squirrel made a chattering noise and Zenobia said, “He’s asking who you are and what you’re doing here.” Then to the squirrel she said, “It’s all right. He knows what we know. He may forget it someday but, in the end, it will come back to him. He’s one of those that is teched like us.” (Bromfield 1944b, p. 249) Later, as Tom and Louis drive away, the boy asks his father what teched means. Looking quizzically at Louis, Tom says it means that “somebody’s a little crazy” then asks him why he wants to know. Louis replies that Zenobia told the squirrel it was all right, that he was teched like her. The father laughs, teasing that maybe she’s right but then saying more seriously: “‘Most people think Zenobia is teched but I think she’s a mighty smart woman’. And then he sighed. Why, I did not know then. I only suspected there was something he envied Zenobia” (Bromfield 1944b, p. 250).

Teched as an Experience The Oxford English Dictionary (1989, vol. 17, p. 836, vol. 18, p. 298) identifies “teched” as a version of “tetched,” which is a colloquial variation of “touched,” in

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the sense of “mentally deranged to a slight degree.” This is the definition that Louis’ father provides, though his sense of envy as he speaks of Zenobia’s intelligence suggests that he knows much more about this kind of experience than he lets on. Significantly, the OED gives no definition of teched as young Bromfield knows the experience—a fullness of encounter in which he and the natural world meld in a feeling of wholeness and care, to such a degree that he understands, sees, and converses with the inanimate and living things of nature in a vivid, other-worldly way: I began to feel … the sensation … of coming … into another strange world that somehow existed on a different plane from all other human life. I did not fall asleep yet the sensation was that of being suspended between sleep and consciousness when everything becomes amazingly clear and one’s senses are awake to things which at other times go unseen and un-recorded. I was very near … to the trees and the flowers, to the rock, to the water that gushed from it. It was almost as if I could understand what the birds were saying as they chirped and sang in the ruins of the old garden … (Bromfield 1944b, p. 265) To others hearing of the experience secondhand, such a way of being with nature might suggest, as the OED definition claims, a mild derangement but, for Bromfield, as the firsthand experiencer rather than the vicarious observer, this encounter seems much more real and sane than ordinary, typical experience—what Bromfield describes as “the world of dull reason and what we call perhaps oddly and wrong ‘reality’” (Bromfield 1944b, p. 261). In his book-length study of Bromfield’s writings, Anderson (1964, p. 154) defined teched as “capable of experiencing a mystic kinship with and understanding of nature and of animals to the extent that intuition and empathy transcend physical and biological barriers.” Anderson (1964, p. 154) noted that, for Bromfield, teched was “essential to understanding nature and to using it by serving it through the laws that cannot be learned except through experience and desire.” Bromfield himself (1955a, p. xi) defined teched as “that inner sense of mystical feeling which makes [people] one with Nature and with animals and birds.” The fact that this definition appeared in the last book he completed before his death suggests that the notion continued to be an important part of his personal environmental ethic. Throughout his writings, Bromfield suggested that the best farmers, in their passion for the land and its life, are teched, though his writings give few indications as to why the experience happens or whether it can be learned. In some places, he seemed to suggest that one is born with this sensibility: “I do not believe that these traits can be acquired; they are almost mystical qualities, belonging only to people who are … very close to Nature itself ” (Bromfield 1945, p. 56). Elsewhere, however, he emphasized the possibility of others, already teched, passing on the experience to children. One person he thanks is his father who “was always a little teched …” and “encouraged in me a love for all that had to do with animals and the out-of-doors” (Bromfield 1945, p. 56).4

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In all his writings, the encounter with Zenobia Ferguson in “Up Ferguson Way” is the most memorable description of the teched experience. A year after that short story, in Pleasant Valley, the first of his five books describing the Malabar experiment, Bromfield explains that the real-life model for Zenobia was a local woman named Phoebe Wise, whose identity he hoped to disguise while she was still alive. Wise was the woman who called the young Bromfield teched and was an influential figure in his life, even though he met her only a few times: “I think I never met any individual who left upon me so profound an impression” (Bromfield 1945, p. 90). His description of their first encounter vividly evokes the effect she had on him: As I turned, I saw her watching me with her burning black eyes, and suddenly there passed between us a strange current of sympathy and knowledge, which bound us together forever afterward. Because of that look I remembered her in strange, far-off places. Sometimes I dreamed of her.5 (Bromfield 1945, p. 90) This empathetic understanding joining people and living beings unrelated before is the experiential crux of teched, strikingly encapsulated here by Bromfield’s poetic phrase, “a strange current of sympathy and knowledge.” Some critics have interpreted this teched experience as illusory, romantic, impractical, or unnecessary. For example, conservationist Charles E. Little (1988, p. 232) suggested that, in today’s agriculture, there is no place for farmers who are teched: “It would now be better to know how to run a computer than to run your hands lovingly over a tall stalk of corn.” As a phenomenologist, I see the significance of teched in a much different light from Little, partly because the notion points toward the possibility of experiencing an intuitive intimacy with things and creatures such that the boundaries of self and Other are replaced by a deepened understanding and, in Bromfield’s case, a lived foundation for restoring and caring for the soil, land, plants, and animals.

Teched and Place In other writings, Bromfield makes clear that a teched relationship can also be had with place. In many of his works, a particular place plays a central role in the story’s development. Typically, the motivating factor is a character’s love of a particular place that he or she has come to know intimately through firsthand encounter, sometimes over a lifetime, other times for a short period involving some kind of deep personal encounter. Bromfield (1944a) presents one of his most powerful evocations of a teched relationship with place in the “The Pond,” a short story included in the same 1944 collection in which “Up Ferguson Way” appears. Although Bromfield never uses the word “teched” in this short story, many of the situations and experiences he presents involve the same sense of lived intimacy encountered by the young Bromfield in “Up Ferguson Way.” Set in the Dakota prairie and the South Pacific during World War II, the story focuses on the last days in the life of Tom Peterson, a young

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Midwestern fighter pilot who, growing up on the flat, open Dakota plains, had never seen an ocean until his flight training a year before. In sharing his personal history with friend and fellow fighter pilot Jimmy as they relax on a Pacific island beach at twilight, Tom returns again and again to his fondness for one place—a small farm pond that sometimes nearly dried up in hot weather. The pond, Tom tells Jimmy, was “the only water for miles around” and became the spatial and lived center of Tom’s childhood and teen years (Bromfield 1944a, p. 3) He explains to Jimmy: The country’s kind of flat up there, no trees to speak of … it just stretches away as far as you can see. It’s kind of lonely. A pond like that made a lot of difference. When I was a little kid, it was like a whole ocean to me. I used to wade in it and sail boats on it. When I began to learn geography, I used to pretend it was the Atlantic—one side was America and one side Europe. I used to pretend the boats were ocean liners. (Bromfield 1944a, p. 3) Jimmy leaves to sleep, while Tom stays to swim. He stands in the ocean water with his feet planted in the warm sand and suddenly becomes aware of a faint sense of ecstasy, as if he were no longer himself, an individual … but only an atom, one infinitesimal particle belonging to this whole universe of palm trees and white sand and space and stars and phosphorescent water, an atom forever immortal and indestructible because he was part of something far greater than himself. (Bromfield 1944a, p. 5) Later in the night as he tries to sleep, Tom can only think of his mother Annie and his newlywed wife Sally, who both care for the pond as much as he does: He kept seeing again the pond and his mother and Sally. But he saw the two women always in relation to the pond. They were standing beside it feeding the ducks … or Sally was cutting the wild iris …. And sometimes he saw Sally and himself as children playing on the shallow, muddy edges of the pond …. And he thought how much the pond had been a part of his life and Sally’s, how they had grown up there beside it, taking each other quite for granted until one day his body told him what love was …. It was beside the pond he had first touched Sally’s hand in a new way …. It was beside that pond that he had said, “I’m going to air cadet school. Maybe we’d better be married before I go away.” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 7) If Tom, Annie, and Sally represent individuals who, through place, engage their world with integrity and care, Tom’s father, Axel Peterson, represents a human type

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for whom Bromfield has little sympathy: individuals disengaged from the everyday wonderment and joy that their place might offer if they could fully encounter it. Bromfield describes Peterson as “a hard man who squeezed every penny—a man who didn’t seem to have much human feeling. He’d never understood about the pond or why his wife and his son loved it so deeply” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 8). The three most important things in Peterson’s life are his land, his cattle, and his bank account. His wife, whom he no longer loves, comes fourth. Having drilled water wells on his property, he no longer has practical need for the pond and, when Tom is 17, Peterson begins to talk about draining it, since he could use the reclaimed land to plant more crops. About the time that Tom is on the Pacific beach telling Jimmy about the pond, Annie and Sally travel to Iowa for three weeks to visit Annie’s family. While they are away, Peterson bulldozes the pond and dynamites the stumps of the cottonwood trees that had grown at the pond’s edge. As Annie and Sally return home, Annie looks expectantly for the silhouettes of the cottonwoods, which seem not to be there. Suddenly, terrified, she realizes her husband has destroyed the pond. She stumbles into the house, and that night there was no sound of frogs or night birds: “In all the hot interminable flatness there was only an oppressive silence” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 15). A few days later, Annie sends Tom, now on an aircraft carrier headed for battle, a “tired letter,” and near its end he realizes why: She explains his father has drained the pond. In a postscript, she tells him not to worry: “It makes less difference than I thought it would” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 16). But Tom knows the falseness of her words and that “the last thing she had to hang on to was gone from her life” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 16). He hopes the baby will help take the pond’s place for his mother, though he suddenly realizes that his child will not have the pond and is filled with hatred for his father. The next day, as Tom’s fighter-plane squadron prepares to take off and attack enemy positions on nearby Pacific islands, a radio operator runs out to Tom’s plane to give him a radiogram message—that Sally has given birth to a boy. Tom flies off to battle, downs one enemy plane, is hit, and crashes into the sea. As the plane plunges out of control, he has the same teched feeling he experienced earlier on the beach—“being only a part of the universe, no more than a grain of the powdered coral beneath his feet” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 22). In the moment before his death, he envisions the pond, “seeing it very clearly as he had seen it as a boy” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 22). Then he remembers it is no longer there and thinks desperately, “‘The boy must have a pond! The boy and Ma must have it back again!’” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 22). Five days after the baby is born, Annie wakes fitfully “at the still hour of the morning when tired, old people die” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 23). As she listens to the sounds outside, she seems to hear lapping water as it was before the pond’s destruction. She looks out a window toward the place where the pond had been. There “in the moonlight was the pond like a burnished sheet of silver” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 24). She rushes from the house, weeping hysterically, not believing what she sees

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until she wades into real water. “How glad Tom will be!” she thinks. “He would be almost as happy as he’d be about the baby” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 24). The news of the pond’s reappearance spreads quickly, with the county engineer hypothesizing that an underground spring was always beneath the pond, and Peterson’s blasting the cottonwood stumps loosened shale underneath so the spring water could flow upward. Local people are “filled with the kind of mystical awe and excitement which touches dry-country people at the sight of running water, for water is a source of life and ties all living things together” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 25). Peterson decides not to try to remove the pond again: “It wasn’t any good fighting a spring,” he thinks (Bromfield 1944a, p. 25). Two weeks after the reappearance of the pond, Annie and Sally are sitting at its edge when the mailman in his old, battered car delivers the letter informing them that Tom is dead. Annie spots the envelope and “almost at once she knew …” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 27). Sally is watching, and she knows too. The women stare out at the pond, then Annie looks again at the letter and “a strange look of wonder” comes into her face. In a quiet voice filled with awe, she says, “Sally, it happened on September 16… that was the night of the full moon—the same night the pond came back” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 27).

Teched, Place, and Belonging What to make of Bromfield’s intertwining life, death, time, and place? Whether Tom’s willing the pond to reappear in the moment right before he dies has anything to do with the reappearance of the pond, who can say? More so, for the issues at hand—teched and place—Bromfield’s story lays bare a penetrating immersion-inworld where, through a deep affection and involvement with place, people are given back a simple but remarkable fulfillment. What Bromfield seems to be suggesting is that human-being-in-the-world is much more complex and mysterious than usually supposed—that love of place, in its power to concentrate human intention and concern, can hold a world together, even as individuals of that world come and go. Place, Bromfield indicates, offers one foundation for a lived continuity in the midst of continual temporal, personal, and life change. How does Bromfield’s presentation of place relate to teched? Partly, it is through moments of being teched that one feels a sense of what Bromfield termed “­belonging”—“of being a small and relatively unimportant part of something vast but infinitely friendly” (Bromfield 1955b, p. 12). People come to belong to place as they realize they are not isolated selves but an integral part of a larger lived continuum. A year before his death, Bromfield wrote: I have come to understand that from earliest childhood, this passion to belong, to lose one’s self in the whole pattern of life, was the strong and overwhelming force that unconsciously has directed every thought, every act, every motive of my existence. (Bromfield 1955b, p. 12)

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Tom, Annie, and Sally find this passion to belong through their deep lived involvement with the pond as a place that often answers back in a kind of quiet, unspoken confirmation. Bromfield suggests that, in such teched moments, one moves away from a sense of isolation toward a melding of self and world out of which one may feel joy and compassion for the greater good. For example, as Tom has his teched moment standing in the warm ocean water, he feels “a sudden desire to weep, not out of any personal sorrow, but out of a sadness that was vast and incomprehensible—the sadness of the whole human race” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 6). When we allow ourselves to let go of our separateness, we feel humbled in the fragility and suffering of a world from which typically we feel apart. In turn, loving place may be one vehicle for allowing this letting go. Throughout the story, Tom and Annie find themselves encountering teched moments in relation to place. For example, Tom cannot really explain to Jimmy why the pond is so important in his life— he would never be able to tell anyone really how he felt about the pond, how much he loved it, how much it was a part of himself, how much it had to do with his life, as if he himself had been born out of its very depths. (Bromfield 1944a, p. 7) Likewise, Annie, as she sits by the pond for hours at a time, often becomes completely a part of that place. This heightened encounter includes a sadness she feels for her husband’s way with the world: She was filled with a sudden rush of pity that he was so hard and so narrow, that he knew and understood so little of the richness of life, that he never saw the beauty that lay in the sheen of a mallard’s wing, in the lettuce green of the cottonwood leaves in spring, or the warmth that came of a calf ’s nose nuzzling your hand. He had made all of his land and the animals that lived upon it no more than a factory. (Bromfield 1944a, p. 11) For people who can give to place by shifting their selfness aside, place gives back in return. Peterson understands place only as a thing to do his bidding, thus the place cannot reveal its deeper presence or joy. Place, in other words, both nourishes and is nourished by the people who help it to be. “It was like a cycle,” thinks Annie, “the cycle of the life of the pond. There was order and rhythm to it” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 14). Or as Tom imagines it, “being only an infinitesimal part of something vast and splendorous which had to be carried on” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 7). Bromfield suggests that to connect and so merge intensively with place is to participate in a lived cycle whereby, through the experience of belonging, people, world, and time are finally a whole.

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Teched and Environmental Humility In Bromfield’s suggestion of a lived reciprocity between people and world facilitated experientially by teched and grounded existentially by belonging, there is a connection with the phenomenological notion of appropriation—i.e., realizing that all things have value simply because they exist and understanding that this realization implies a responsibility to care for and protect what exists so that this value is not squandered or destroyed (Heidegger 1971; Relph 1981, p. 20). Phenomenological geographer Edward Relph (1981, p. 186) writes that “Appropriation lies in that moment of insight that reveals beings for themselves, the moment in which we know that this is.” In this sense, appropriation has relation to Bromfield’s teched in that the young Bromfield’s encountering the animals in “Up Ferguson Way” allows him to know the animals as they themselves are, just as Tom and Annie’s openness to the pond allows the pond to be what it is, a presence that heightens their sense of life. In contrast, Tom’s father only understands his farm and pond in terms of what he can make them produce materially and monetarily. There is no possibility that he can just let the pond be so that, in return, he might find a deeper kind of understanding or personal fulfillment. He remains “a hard man” (Bromfield 1944a, p. 11). Relph develops appropriation further by speaking of an environmental humility—a way of seeing and understanding that is responsive to the best qualities of the Other and that might foster a compassion and gentle caretaking for places, people, and the things of nature. Relph’s call is “for guardianship, for taking care of things merely because they exist, for tending and protecting them. In this there is neither mastery nor subservience, but there is responsibility and commitment” (Relph 1981, p. 187).6 Near the end of his life, Bromfield realized that his philosophy of life and nature was well described by what Albert Schweitzer called “reverence for life,” by which Schweitzer meant that Man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and ­animals as well as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.7 (Schweitzer 1933, quoted in Bromfield 1955b, p. 304) Relph’s “environmental humility” is closely related to Schweitzer’s “reverence for life,” though goes further in the sense that it calls for putting first the entire “Other” outside the person, both living and non-living. We have an obligation to look after things, creatures, people, and places simply because they have the right to be and to become. Though phrased in a different language, Bromfield’s teched presupposes and fosters the environmental humility of which Relph speaks, and the most miraculous thing is that it simply happens, without the need for conscious intent. I would argue that Bromfield’s writings in dealing with the nature of teched, including the way it underlies a more intimate and comprehensive experience of place, are a venue

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offering valuable insights for describing and understanding one real-world expression of environmental humility and perhaps even for helping it to happen in our cynical postmodern time.8

Notes 1 This chapter was originally published in Daniel G. Payne, ed., Writings in place: John Burroughs and his legacy (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, pp.  158–173). The author thanks the editor and Cambridge Scholars Publishing for permission to republish the entry here. 2 Between 1924 with The Green Bay Tree, his first published work, and ending in 1951 with Mr. Smith, Bromfield wrote 24 novels, one of which—Early Autumn—won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926. In his early career, Bromfield was praised by critics, but the nineteenth-century, “genteel” style of his novels quickly fell out of critical favor, though some of his later works received positive reviews, especially The Farm (1934), The Rains Came (1937), and Mrs. Parkington (1943). Among the reading public, his writings have remained popular, and it is estimated that, worldwide, his books have sold more than 20 million copies (Scott 1998, p. 648). Several of his books remain in print today. Critical studies of Bromfield’s writings include Anderson (1964, 1997, 1999), Beeman (1992), Bratton (1999, 2000), Brown (1956), Fleming (2006), Gramly (1987), Hughes (1979), Nelson (2001, 2005), Scott (1998), and Seamon (2010). 3 Bromfield wrote several books about Malabar Farm, including Bromfield (1945, 1948, 1950, 1955a, 1955b). In their history of the “alternative agriculture” movement in twentieth-century America, Beeman and Pritchard (2001) devoted considerable discussion to Bromfield, whom they described as “the most effective voice for permanent ecological agriculture” (p. 80). Malabar Farm, they wrote, “became a clearinghouse for agricultural conservation, ecological agriculture, and the ideology of the independent farmer” (Beeman and Pritchard 2001, p. 80; also see Beeman 1992). At Malabar, these efforts meant “restoring the land and streams to a pre-1800s condition by halting erosion, using a minimum of manufactured agricultural chemicals, rebuilding the pastures and grasslands by planting grass or nitrogen-fixing legumes, using generous amounts of green manures, organic mulches, and composts, and gaining an overall scientific and psychic knowledge of the intricacies of the land …” (Beeman and Pritchard 2001, p. 52). On his view of chemical fertilizers, see Bromfield (1950, Ch. 4). In his Bromfield biography, Stephen Heyman (2020, p. 153) wrote that Bromfield was “the first major writer to give himself over completely to the problems and possibilities of agriculture, to get down into the dirt of it, to become a modern farmer. Farming became for him a calling, a platform, almost a religion. He wanted not just to farm for himself but to change the idea of what a farmer was or could be.” 4 In a memoir of her father, Ellen Bromfield Geld (1962, pp. 119–120) wrote that he passed on the experience of being teched to her. She described how he would regularly take her and her two sisters out into the Malabar landscape and bring their attention to the sights, sounds, smells, and goings-on of the natural world around them. She wrote: “One has simply to come clean from the river, lie in the warm sand, look up at the trees and find heaven all about. It is a trick I have often since used to lift myself out of intolerable depression, one that I learned from my father when he taught us our first lessons about living on the farm.” 5 Before 1944, Bromfield had created other versions of Zenobia Ferguson much more sketchy and much less moving than her portrayal in “Up Ferguson Way.” In “The Life of Zenobia White,” a short story in the collection Awake and Rehearse (Bromfield 1929), the Zenobia character’s last name is White, and her being teched is only implied by the many birds, cats, dogs, and old white horse that live on her property. In this story, she accidentally shoots and kills her lover, whom she mistakes for an intruder. In The Farm

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(Bromfield 1934, pp. 201–203), she appears briefly as the stubborn and fiercely independent Zenobia van Essen, who accidentally shoots and kills an unwanted suitor. In this account, too, nothing is said directly about the character’s being teched, although again she is surrounded by birds, cats, dogs, and the old white horse—here named Robin. 6 Two other useful discussions of a Heideggerian approach to a lived environmental ethic are Mugerauer (1994) and Stefanovic (2000). 7 In his book-length study of Bromfield, David Anderson (1964, p. 168) explained that Bromfield recognized in the principle of reverence for life “what had dominated his life from the beginning and had sent him back to the farm; this principle, he realized, was what had given his life meaning. In seeking to understand nature and to work with it instead of against it, he had been unconsciously following the principle that Schweitzer expressed so succinctly in a phrase”; also see Anderson (1997, 1999). 8 Phenomenologically, a central question is whether “environmental humility” can be taught. One useful possibility is Goethe’s way of science, which can be called an early phenomenology of the natural world. See Bortoft (1996), Seamon (2005), and Seamon and Zajonc (1998).

References Anderson, D. D. (1964). Louis Bromfield. New York: Twayne. Anderson, D. D. (1997). Louis Bromfield and ecology in fiction: A re-assessment. Midwestern Miscellany, 25, 48–57. Anderson, D. D. (1999). Louis Bromfield’s cubic foot of soil. Midwestern Miscellany, 27, 41–47. Beeman, R. S. (1992). Louis Bromfield versus the “age of irritation,” Environmental History Review, 17 (spring), 91–102. Beeman, R. S. and Pritchard, J. A. (2001). A green and permanent land: Ecology and agriculture in the twentieth century. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Bortoft, H. (1996). The wholeness of nature. Edinburgh, UK: Floris Books. Bratton, D., ed. (2000). Yrs, ever affly: The correspondence of Edith Wharton and Louis Bromfield. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Bratton, D. (1999). Ruined landscapes in three novels by Louis Bromfield. Comparative Culture, 5, 1–11. Bromfield, L. (1924). Th green bay tree. New York: Frederick A. Stokes. Bromfield, L. (1926). Early autumn. New York: Frederick A. Stokes. Bromfield, L. (1929). Awake and rehearse. New York: Frederick A. Stokes. Bromfield, L. (1934). The farm. New York: Frederick A. Stokes. Bromfield, L. (1937). The rains came. New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1943). Mrs. Parkington. New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1944a). The pond in The world we live in (pp. 1–27). New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1944b). Up Ferguson way in The world we live in (pp. 240–272). New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1945). Pleasant valley. New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1948). Malabar Farm. Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1950). Out of the Earth. New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1951). Mr. Smith. New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1955a). Animals and other people. New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1955b). From my experience. New York: Harper and Brothers. Brown, M. (1956). Louis Bromfield and his books. London: Cassell & Company.

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Fleming, D. (2006). Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm, and faith in the earth. Organization & Environment, 19, 309–320. Geld, E. B. (1962). The heritage: A daughter’s memories of Louis Bromfield. New York: Harper and Brothers [reissued with epilogue, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000]. Gramly, A. H. (1987). Louis Bromfield. Mansfield, OH: Appleseed Press. Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, and thought. New York: Harper & Row. Heyman, S. (2020). The planter of modern life: Louis Bromfield and the seeds of a food revolution. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Hughes, J. M. (1979). Louis Bromfield: Ohio and self-discovery. Columbus: State Library of Ohio. Little, C. E., ed. (1988). Louis Bromfield at Malabar: Writings on farming and country life. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Mugerauer, R. (1994). Interpretations on behalf of place. Albany: State University of New York Press. Nelson, P. J. (2001). The ideal of nature and the “good farmer”: Louis Bromfield and the quest for rural community. Ohio History, 110 (winter–spring), 5–25. Nelson, V. (2005). The temporal landscape in the writing of Louis Bromfield. Great Lakes Geographer, 12, 1–13. Oxford English Dictionary (1989). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Relph, E. (1981). Rational landscapes and humanistic geography. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble. Schweitzer, A. (1933). Out of my life and thought. New York: Henry Holt. Scott, I. (1998). Louis Bromfield, novelist and agrarian reformer: The forgotten author. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press. Seamon, D. (2000). A way of seeing people and place: Phenomenology in environment-­ behavior research. In Wapner, S., Demick, J., Yamamoto, T. and Minami, H., eds., Theoretical perspectives in environment-behavior research (pp. 157–178). New York: Plenum. Seamon, D. (2005). Goethe’s way of science as a phenomenology of nature. Janus Head, 8, 86–101. Seamon, D. (2010). Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis in the 21st century: The lived reciprocity between houses and inhabitants as portrayed by American writer Louis Bromfield. In Embree, L., ed., Phenomenology 2010 (pp. 225–243). Bucharest: Zeta Books. Seamon, D. (2018). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routledge. Seamon, D. and Zajonc, A., eds. (1998). Goethe’s way of science: A phenomenology of nature. Albany: State University of New York Press. Stefanovic, I. L. (2000). Safeguarding our common future: Rethinking sustainable development. Albany: State University of New York Press.

13 FINDING ONE’S PLACE Environmental and Human Risk in American Filmmaker John Sayles’ Limbo

This chapter discusses Limbo, a 1999 film by independent filmmaker John Sayles, one of America’s most spiritually astute directors. His character-driven movies such as City of Hope (1991), Passion Fish (1992), and Lone Star (1996) focus on self-­transformation stymied or propelled by personal misfortune, social change, or the mystery of fate. A major theme in Sayles’ films is excavating shifting relationships between people and places, particularly as those places incorporate existential limitations or possibilities (Bould 2009, pp. 6–7; Seamon 2008; Shumway 2012, pp.  10–11; West and West 1999, p. 8). In Sayles’ Limbo, the place is early 21st-­ century Alaska, which is both the setting and antagonist for the three main characters who face personal and interpersonal risk impelled by place in both its human and natural forms—on one hand, the hazard of civilization; on the other hand, the hazard of pure nature and wilderness.1 In Limbo, Sayles suggests that what one’s place is may not be the place where he or she really needs to be. This search for the right place may as often require an inner psychological shift as an outer geographical journey. This search may also require risk, whether physical or psychological. In this sense, finding one’s place is never guaranteed but, if we succeed, we break free from “limbo”—what Sayles defines as “a condition of unknowable outcome” but also as “an intermediate or transitional place” (West and West 1999, p. 29). A central conclusion that Sayles points to in Limbo is that searching for one’s place may ultimately be as significant as the actual finding. Here, I examine this phenomenon of “finding one’s place” as portrayed in the experiences, situations, and events encountered by Limbo’s major and minor characters.2 To locate and clarify these varying place relationships, I draw on the existential concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity.3 On one hand, authenticity relates to a way of being in which individuals accept responsibility for their lives and seek to be honest and consistent in their dealings with the world. On the other DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-16

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hand, inauthenticity relates to a way of being in which individuals deal with the world unrealistically: they accept it as fated and immutable, or understand and act only via blindered, self-centered motivations out of touch with the world at hand. Obviously, no human being is totally authentic or inauthentic, and different situations provoke varying degrees of autonomy or dependence, candor or deceit, appropriate or inappropriate actions. The key point is that individuals best choose for themselves how to live, basing that choice on who they are, who they wish to be, and how that choice does good (or bad) for their worlds (Golomb 1995; Pollard 2005). Drawing on determination and progressive insight, individuals may find ways to overcome personal and social estrangement and find their rightful place. I begin the chapter by overviewing Limbo’s story line and introducing its main characters. I then draw on several contrasting definitions of “limbo” to discuss how the film’s characters illustrate a range of authentic and inauthentic relationships with Alaska as a place and as a natural and human environment.

A Film in Two Parts Filmed mostly in Juneau and the city’s outlying natural environs, Limbo is set in fictitious Fort Henry, Alaska, a small fishing community where tourism, recreational development, and real estate ventures threaten the livelihood of long-time residents who are either fisherman or unemployed workers recently terminated from their jobs at the local pulp mill and fish cannery. In the first part of the film, Sayles provides a satirical portrait of how long-time insiders and more newly arrived outsiders succumb to or cash in on corporate developers’ unrelenting efforts to transform Alaska into a tourist destination and one colossal wilderness theme park. Attempting to cope with Fort Henry’s shifting economic and environmental fortunes are the film’s three major characters, the first of whom is 40-something former fisherman and seasoned outdoorsman Joe Gastineau (played by David Strathairn), haunted by his responsibility for the drowning deaths of two high school friends in a freak fishing-boat accident 25 years ago. The second major character is 40-something single mother and itinerant lounge singer Donna De Angelo (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), who relishes her musical career but faces unsettled fortunes professionally, personally, and romantically. Amid his unfolding portrait of Fort Henry’s unstoppable tourist development, Sayles plots the growing attachment between Joe and Donna, a romance that is upsetting for the film’s third major character, Noelle (Vanessa Martinez), Donna’s sensitive but resentful teenage daughter. Noelle is a precocious young story writer who harbors seething anger toward a mother who continually shifts boyfriends and seems unable to provide domestic stability. Joe and Donna’s deepening relationship impel Noelle’s snowballing jealousy and distress, including intentional body cutting under her arms where no one will notice. If the first half of Limbo incorporates sarcastic travelogue and budding romance, the film’s second half unexpectedly becomes a compelling survivalist story. Joe’s underhanded half-brother Danny (Casey Siemaszko) returns to Fort Henry and asks

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Joe to crew his boat when he sails out to meet two men he calls “business associates.” To become closer to Donna and especially Noelle, Joe invites them along. In fact, the business associates are disgruntled drug dealers to whom Danny owes money for a large hashish stash he destroyed because his boat was stopped by a coastal patrol. As he, Joe, Donna, and Noelle sail along southeastern Alaska’s remote, uninhabited coast, the drug dealers secretly pursue their boat, come on board, murder Danny, and try to murder Joe, Donna, and Noelle. They escape from the boat and swim to a nearby deserted island where they are stranded without provisions. Fearing that Danny’s killers will pursue them, Joe, Donna, and Noelle hide out on the island. They find shelter in an old, abandoned cabin once inhabited by a fox farmer, his unstable wife, and teenage daughter Annemarie, who had begun and abandoned a diary accidentally discovered by Noelle. For the two and a half weeks they are stranded and hoping for rescue, the angry, frightened Noelle nightly reads aloud Annemarie’s diary entries that rapidly devolve from pioneer idyll into drudgery, failure, and the eventual suicide of her mother. Near the end of the film, Donna and Joe accidentally discover that Noelle has fabricated most of the diary entries as a vehicle to express her anger at Donna, who Noelle blames for having placed herself and her daughter in a life-threatening situation. The film’s concluding scene is abrupt and open-ended. As the three main characters stand together on the shore waiting for a seaplane that appears on the horizon, the screen fades to white. Neither the main characters nor film viewers know whether the aircraft carries legitimate rescuers or Danny’s killers. Though the uncertain ending has been criticized in both popular and academic commentaries (Molyneaux 2000, p. 255; Ryan 2010, p. 215; Shumway 2012, p. 120), Sayles argues that it is the only ending possible because he was intentionally asking the audience to “take the same trip that the characters [take], and that trip entails surprise and risk” (West and West 1999, p. 31). He points out that for most genre films the viewer knows beforehand that hero and heroine will prevail, “no matter how many twists and turns you go through with them.” In contrast, Limbo’s main characters have each taken an emotional risk, and “now they’re facing a very uncertain future, and I’m asking the audience to face that future with them” (West and West 1999, p. 31).

Sayles’ Definitions of “Limbo” In a 6-minute trailer for his film, Sayles presents six different definitions of “limbo.”4 These definitions provide a valuable clue for understanding the film as it relates to place authenticity and inauthenticity: that the same place can be understood, lived in, and dealt with in vastly different ways, some involving inertia, entrapment, or obtuseness; others involving opportunity and promise, if only individuals make the effort to risk constructive change. These six definitions are as follows: ( 1) Limbo: A state of neglect or oblivion; (2) Limbo: A place or state of confinement;

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( 3) (4) (5) (6)

Limbo: An abode of abandoned souls; Limbo: An intermediate or transitional place; Limbo: A state of uncertainty; Limbo: A condition of unknowable outcome.

In relation to authenticity and inauthenticity, these definitions are insightful because they point to three contrasting ways in which the film’s characters engage with place. On one hand, the first definition intimates a relationship in which place is largely ignored, misunderstood, and misused. On the other hand, the second and third definitions relate limbo to a state of lived inertia in which individuals become so habituated to their place that they hold little hope for its reinvigoration. Yet again, the last three definitions refer to hazard, change, and uncertain futures. One can argue that these contrasting understandings of limbo’s lived nature identify characters’ contrasting place relationships with Fort Henry and Alaska: first, the developers, who unrealistically plan to transform the town and state into a Disneylike, ersatz tourist attraction; second, the unemployed locals, inescapably mired in their place; and, third, Joe, Donna, and Noelle as they bond in a strengthening relationship that includes the potential for becoming more authentically a part of their place. I discuss each of these relationships in turn.

A State of Neglect or Oblivion In studying the six definitions of limbo, one notes that “A state of neglect or oblivion” readily describes the real estate and tourism developers’ relationship to place in the film, which, after a brief underwater image of salmon swimming randomly, opens with a tacky travelogue proclaiming Alaska as: America’s last frontier … where nature’s bounty unfolds in a panoply of flora and fauna, the life of which is seen nowhere else on the planet …. A land that has lifted its siren call to the bold and adventurous, to those willing to risk their lives for the promise of untold fortune be it from fur, fin, from the heaven-pointing spires of old-growth spruce, or from the buried treasures of gold or black energy-rich petroleum. The truth-exaggerating claims of this travelogue are jarringly contradicted by the film’s dated, sentimentalized visual images—for example, Eskimo dolls, fake totem poles, and a man in a polar bear suit hugging elderly tourists in front of a cruise ship. The travelogue’s message is further undermined as the scene shifts to the local fish cannery, shortly to close because no one, as one of the employees makes the point, eats canned salmon anymore when even “people in Peoria” can buy fresh fish at the local grocery. The film then moves to an outdoor wedding reception for the daughter and son-in-law of Albright (Michael Laskin), an Alaskan tourism developer, who tells his friend and timber industry colleague Phil Baines (Tom Bliss) that

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he must pay more attention to “the big picture.” In clear-cutting Alaskan forests, Baines may gain “hundreds of thousands of dollars of timber,” but the sheared, denuded landscape is unattractive to tourists. In countering, Baines retorts that “We all have to make a living.” Albright shrewdly replies, “I’m not arguing that. Cut the trees in the interior. Turn it into a parking lot. Just quit with the chain saws where [tourists] can see.” Albright contends that Alaska’s real future is environmental and historical tourism organized around regional themes: “The Whales’ Causeway,” “Island of the Raven People,” “Kingdom of the Salmon,” or “Lumberland,” which Albright envisions as “a turn-of-the-century sawmill and gift shop.” In a later scene, Albright proclaims that the next important phase in Alaskan tourism is simulated hazard: “What are you buying when you get on a roller coaster? Not risk … but the illusion of risk. Being hurled to the edge of danger but knowing that you never have to cross it.” Albright contends that Walt Disney’s achievement was placing the illusory risk of carnival rides within a story line. The next stage, Albright proclaims confidently, is “not bigger and better facsimiles of nature but nature itself. Think of Alaska as one big theme park.” In relation to Sayles’ definition of limbo as a state of neglect or oblivion, this is the developers’ understanding of Alaska as a place, which they see as a region-sized stage set containing unlimited natural resources to be transformed into a state-wide tourist attraction. In almost every scene in which Albright and his cronies appear, they are in the foreground and set off by breathtaking mountains and ocean scenery appearing as an environmental commodity that is unlimited, controllable, and readily packaged for tourists who look out on nature as a stunning spectacle. The ecological fragility and inscrutable power of the natural environment are neglected and only significant in the sense that the landscape must look beautiful but be absolutely safe for passing tourists. Two developers portrayed more benignly by Sayles are a recently arrived lesbian couple from Seattle, Frankie (Kathryn Grody) and Lou (Rita Taggart), who operate a Fort Henry restaurant, tourist lodge, and trekking business that employ a good number of the laid-off cannery and pulp mill workers. These women, both lawyers, are shown to know very little about local customs or about Fort Henry’s natural environment, but they do take a professional and personal interest in Noelle, who is a waitress at their restaurant; and in Joe, who is their carpenter and repairman. Joe eventually agrees to return to fishing, making use of a boat Frankie and Lou have repossessed from local fisherman and cannery employee Harmon King (Leo Burmester), who has been destroyed financially by Port Henry’s shifting economy. Mostly, however, the developers ignore the integrity and complexity of Alaska’s natural environment as its geographical size, visual grandeur, and practical value as illusory risk are brought to the foreground as a profit-making, objectified commodity. In a similar way, the developers have neither empathy for the long-time residents losing their traditional livelihoods, nor respect for the tourists, most of whom visit

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on cruise ships and tend to be older and retired. As Albright mockingly explains to Phil Baines, Look, our [tourists] cruise by an island. They got [sic] their binoculars out, the ones that can still see. What do we show them? We show them a little Indian fish camp, some totem poles maybe, a black bear foraging … in the early morning mist. We do not show them deforested hillsides and logging equipment, Phil. Heavy machinery they see in New Jersey. Just as these developers denature the complex reality of the Alaskan environment into a scripted progression of safe, readily accessible tourist attractions, so they adulterate Alaska’s diverse range of environmental experiences into counterfeit places and arbitrary visual clichés. Albright and his colleagues are oblivious to the reality of the place because profit is their primary aim. Though the timber and oil extraction industries may sooner or later desecrate much of Alaska’s natural environment, Albright and his cronies are unconcerned, provided the potentially offending development is kept out of tourist sight. These developers exemplify the worst sort of place inauthenticity: for the uniqueness of Alaska as a place, they would substitute a fantastical, money-making simulacrum undermining the natural environment and scuttling the long-time lifeways of Fort Henry as a human community. “A state of neglect or oblivion” is one credible summary of their inauthentic relationship with place.

A Confining Abode of Abandoned Souls Sayles’ next two descriptions of limbo—“an abode of abandoned souls” and “a place or state of confinement”—accurately render the characters who are long-time Fort Henry residents no longer able to find a self-sustaining place in the town’s shifting economy. For the most part, Sayles presents these old-guard Fort Henry insiders as ensconced in place habituality. They seem not to have the will or courage to take the risk to shift their lives in positive directions. In one sense, these long-time locals are confined in place and abandoned by a world in which they no longer fully belong. These characters mostly include several salmon cannery workers who appear immediately after the opening image of aimlessly moving salmon and the disingenuous Alaskan travelogue, from which Sayles quickly cuts to cannery worker Harmon King, who knows the travelogue script by heart and mockingly replaces the original voice-over with his own sarcastic narration: Each river and stream welcoming home the [salmon] … which [are] smashed into cans and quick-cooked to give the colorful local folks something to do other than play cards and scratch their nuts all day. A land where that nice old lady from Fort Lauderdale, who had a stroke three cabins down, was probably

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parked next to the thawed-out halibut you’ll eat tonight, while your floating hotel chugs through the Hecate Straight to deliver its precious load of geriatrics to the hungry Visa-card-accepting denizens of our northernmost and most mosquito-infested state! Unlike the travelogue’s disembodied narration, however, Harmon is neither separate from the world depicted by the film’s images nor is he a tourist who encounters that world as just pleasurable scenery with no real existential bearing on his life. His hometown economy can no longer provide a viable livelihood, and Harmon cannot detach himself “from the physical and intersubjective realities of the place and situation” (Bould 2009, p. 152). Later in the film, we learn that he was once a successful commercial fisherman and owner of the lodging property now run by Frankie and Lou, who repossessed his fishing boat because he did not make promised repairs to their tourist lodge. Though Harmon is the most prominently drawn of Limbo’s place-forsaken characters, they are also represented by other cannery workers, both men and women, who illustrate a range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds that include Native-American, Mexican, and Filipino. Throughout the film’s first half, Harmon speaks for the long-time locals whose employment is dependent on Alaska’s natural resources, including fish and timber. Early on, he jokes about how the cannery, as soon as it closes, will be transformed into a museum of display cases and dioramas. Speaking to his Filipino co-worker Richy (Hermínio Ramos), Harmon says: “They’ll hang fake fish guts all over you, put a label underneath [that says] ‘Typical Filipino Cannery worker’. Probably pay better than this!” Importantly, Sayles includes a scene that depicts the cannery’s closing as the line workers clean the equipment and processing rooms one last time. “That’s all she wrote,” says Harmon, as co-worker Richy replies, “They say the Chinese might buy it. Pack it all up, ship it over. Let them have it.” Harmon responds by asking if anyone want a drink, and the line workers all leave for the “Golden Nugget,” a local bar that is the center of Fort Henry’s social life and Donna’s current singing venue. The establishment is also a brief stop on Fort Henry’s history tour for the cruise ship tourists, who walk through as the unemployed cannery workers sit at the bar. One tourist asks if the Golden Nugget has witnessed any gunfights and killings recently. The young woman tour guide says no but vividly describes how they happened there in the past. In every Golden Nugget scene, Sayles locates the same long-time residents sitting on the same barstools telling more or less the same Alaskan stories involving danger and risk—for example, fishing accidents and seaplane crashes. As Joe’s half-brother Bobby exclaims as he enters the establishment after several years away, “Jesus, look at this. You’re all where I left you six years ago. Same barstools and everything. Hey, Harmon, … somebody come in and dust you off once a week?” Like the randomly moving salmon in the film’s opening shot, the Golden Nugget reflects an environmental inertia as its patrons seem caught in a limbo incorporating human abandonment and a confinement in place. The bar symbolizes an Old Alaska that no longer

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exists, and a New Alaska where long-time locals are little more than living props for “history tours.” Even an important center of community life like the Golden Nugget is translated into a brief tour stop that includes locals who, to the tourists, perhaps seem more like actors than human beings bound to their place. In one sense, the inertial situation of these long-time locals is inauthentic, since they have little inkling of their potential freedom to construct a future not straightjacketed by the past or imposed by outsiders like Albright. These long-time locals are deeply place bound and do not have the psychological or communal means to actively reshape their place in a way that it remains theirs. Sayles sympathizes with these long-time locals, but he also recognizes that their future is largely determined by the relentless drive of global capitalism to make money and gain power, almost always at the expense of localities and natural environments. For Sayles, the important question is [W]hat do people do when these huge sea changes happen, when your world is never going to be the same again? Who are the people who can … go with the flow and who are the people who … are too rigid? The factory closes and the town dies, or the fishery closes and you’re one of twelve generations of fishermen—what do you do then? (Moyers 2002, n.p.) The film’s one exception to the confining inertia of locality is Smilin’ Jack Johannson (Kris Kristofferson), a seaplane pilot and occasional drug dealer who does “whatever pays best, or what he can get away with.” Smilin’ Jack first appears playing pool in the Golden Nugget, contributing stories about Alaskan dangers and risks. In an interview, Sayles explains that Smilin’ Jack represents the roguish adventurers once common to the Alaskan frontier (West and West 1999, p. 31). As Joe remarks to Donna, “I’m not saying people don’t like him, I’m saying I don’t trust him.” Near the end of the film, Smilin’ Jack in his seaplane spots the smoke of a fire that Joe has set as a distress signal. Smilin’ Jack lands but explains that his radio has failed and he’s almost out of fuel. Donna blurts out the story of Danny’s murder, and Smilin’ Jack replies that, as soon as an approaching storm ends, he will return for a rescue. Out of Donna and Noelle’s hearing, he tells Joe that he’s been sent to locate them by two men he’s never seen before: “They laid some money on me to see if I could spot three people in the boonies.” Joe makes it clear to Smilin’ Jack that these two men are Danny’s murderers and, if they learn their location, they will kill Joe, Donna, and Noelle. For the film’s narrative arc, Smilin’ Jack is pivotal because his younger brother was one of the teenagers who drowned on Joe’s fishing boat. Jack has a grudge against Joe, and Sayles provides no indication of what Smilin’ Jack will do. At the film’s ending, he no doubt pilots the seaplane whose occupants—rescuers or ­killers—will determine whether Joe, Donna, and Noelle live or die. Like the other old-time locals of Fort Henry, Jack may be “an abandoned soul” who has largely lost his place in the new Alaska. For Joe, Donna, and Noelle, however, he plays a decisive role in their fate, even though film viewers never learn what that will be.

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Uncertainty and Potential Transitions Between place as lived inertia and place as profit-making commodity is place as a region of precarious possibility as indicated by Smilin’ Jack’s inscrutability as to whether he will inform Danny’s killers of the island location. This region of hazard, unpredictability, and potential betterment is rendered by Sayles’ last three definitions of limbo: “an intermediate or transitional place”; “a state of uncertainty”; and “a condition of unknowable outcome.” Early in the film, Joe, Donna, and Noelle are all, in different ways, entrenched in the inertia of place. Laid off at the pulp mill and now a jack-of-all-trades working for Frankie and Lou, Joe is adrift existentially. He still feels guilty about the drowning of his fisherman buddies and cannot return to the work where he found the most self-worth: “It’s the thing itself,” he explains to Donna shortly after they first meet. “You go out. You fish. You pull him out of the water. Everything else is secondhand.” Once he and Donna begin to care for each other, Joe finds the will to face his past. When Frankie and Lou suggest that Joe go out fishing, using Harmon’s repossessed boat, he agrees, confronts the past tragedy, and realizes he can be a fisherman again. Joe’s moment of decision is movingly portrayed by Sayles as Joe stands alone on the deck of Frankie and Lou’s lodge, looking out to the stretch of sea where he once fished. A cold blue dominates the scene, echoing the drowning deaths and Joe’s uncertainty. Joe’s eyes are entwined with the sea, sky, and mountains. As Ryan (2010, p. 222) explains, “There is a convergence of character and setting.” One senses that, in this moment, Joe makes the irrevocable decision to return to fishing and to rejoin himself with his place. Through Donna’s loving support, he finally releases the accidental deaths 25 years past. He is ready again to accept the natural world’s uncertainty and potential hazard. Donna’s life is also stuck in place, though in a way much different from Joe’s. Her adulthood has been a perpetual road trip: “I’ve sung in thirty-six states and the territory of Puerto Rico,” she confides to Joe shortly after they meet. At one point in the film, she talks with a cruise ship representative about a possible gig on one of his tourist liners. Like Joe, Donna’s life has involved considerable failure, but unlike Joe, she accepts her defeats and moves on. As Sayles (West and West 1999, p. 29) explains in an interview: Both he [Joe] and Donna are people who have had big failures, but they respond differently …. Joe’s reaction to failure … is not to take another risk again, physically or emotionally for twenty-five years. When Donna gets hammered, her reaction is to have … a two-day period of mourning and then to get up and say, “Okay, new day,” and lead with her chin again. And she’s the one who pulls him out. Partly, their mutual fondness can happen because Donna, like Joe, knows the pleasure of immersion in one’s vocation—in her case, singing, which closely parallels his

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love of fishing. When Joe asks her at their first meeting in the Golden Nugget, why, as a 40-something, she continues to perform, she explains: Almost every night—it doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m singing—all of a sudden, I’ll hook into it. I’ll be feeling whatever it is the song is about. And I can hear it. I can feel it in my voice. And I know that I’m putting it across. Moments of grace …. I put my kid through a lot, though. Moving all the time. But when I take a straight job … I feel so defeated. I don’t even want her to look at me. For Noelle, the attachment between Joe and Donna is emotionally unsetting because, through their both working for Frankie and Lou, Noelle meets Joe considerably before her mother and has a crush on the older man, partly because he has been willing to listen to her and offer advice about who she is. “You look like an angel,” he says early on as she serves appetizers at the wedding reception for Albright’s daughter. The only means for Noelle to express her unhappiness is creative writing, which the film viewer first learns of when, in her high school English class, she reads aloud a short story she wrote about the birth of a friendless “water baby” who is part human and part fish. Later, when she, Donna, and Joe struggle to survive on the deserted island, Noelle uses her anger and creative imagination to construct the fantastical story of the fox farmer and his family. In a sense, Noelle becomes the fox farmer’s daughter Annemarie and uses her escalating distress to manufacture a story that reproaches Donna for not protecting her from the life-threatening situation they face on the island. In the last entry she reads, Noelle condemns Annemarie’s mother for killing all the foxes and hanging herself. Now aware that the diary entries are Noelle’s own terrified creation, Donna tearfully apologizes: “[Annemarie’s] mother didn’t love her enough to stick around …. I would never do that. No matter what.” Shortly after, Noelle falls asleep, and Joe and Donna envision a hopeful future as a family. Joe says that Noelle can stay with him while Donna completes her contracted singing gigs in Alaskan towns farther north. “You’re not sick of us?” Donna asks sheepishly. Joe says, “You’re not sick of me?” In a reply that is perhaps the film’s most important moment, Donna answers, “There’s nobody I’d rather be stranded with in desperate circumstances.” This declaration is poignant in that it is said in the midst of the life-threatening situation that may well lead to Donna, Joe, and Noelle’s deaths, whether from hunger, exposure, or human hands. Because of its powerful emotional resonance, the moment is crucially important in facilitating Sayles’ wish that the audience be motivated to face the three characters’ future with them (West and West, p. 31). As the film ends, Noelle has not fully accepted her mother’s apology or gained hope that they will survive their island ordeal. She has, however, learned basic survival skills from Joe and assists him in gathering mollusks and seaweed to eat and wood to burn for the signal fire. When in the film’s last scene, the

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seaplane reappears, the three watch hidden in the trees, but then Donna runs out to the shore, viscerally not caring whether she faces rescue or death. Quickly, Joe and Noelle run out to join her, and the final image is of their standing together, arms enwrapped, as a family. Sayles suggests that neither human nor natural worlds offer absolute security, which instead is only found in human beings caring for one another. All three have taken the risk of mutual responsibility and involvement. Whether they live or die, they have arrived at a meaningful place together.

Natural Versus Human Worlds One of the most prominent themes in Limbo is the lived relationship between natural and human worlds (Barrett 2006). In the film’s first half, nature is presented, on one hand, as a malleable, visually striking prop that, through its historical and cultural associations, can be drawn upon to facilitate simulated risk. The ultimate aim, proclaims Albright, is “Alaska as one big theme park.” The natural world is understood as little more than a picture-postcard landscape providing a majestic backdrop for unrelated human events like the wedding reception of Albright’s daughter. On the other hand, the film’s first half also points out that, for many old-guard Alaskans, nature remains the source of human occupation and, as those employment opportunities disappear, long-time Alaskans lose their place in the world. The social grounding and economic viability of regional life is lost, replaced by inadequate substitutes like Frankie and Lou’s trekking business or fake replicas like Albright’s nineteenth-century sawmill and gift shop. Though these two economic scenarios are vastly different in terms of the places they presuppose, both assume a natural world that is a manageable resource—either nature as a human-shaped simulacrum or nature as a requisite grounding for human occupation and sustenance. In both scenarios, the natural world is mostly passive— shapeable and maneuverable, either directly through hunting, fishing, timbering, or mining; or indirectly, through secondhand manipulations and representations that meet the contrived aims of economic development and corporate tourism. In dramatic contrast, the second half of Limbo illustrates a natural world that is entirely active, intimidating, and uncaring in relation to people and place. After two and a half weeks on the deserted island, Joe, Donna, and Noelle are barely able to survive. Unprepared and with no basic survival gear other than a knife, cigarette lighter, and rusted fish trap left by the fox farmer, Joe cannot provide adequate food, and the start of winter is only weeks away. In striking contrast to its malleable portrayal in the first half of the film, nature now becomes a major character determining and demolishing human survival. Sayles portrays the natural world as dark, forbidding, and closing in, especially in the scenes where continuous rain drenches the exposed interior of the fox farmer’s ramshackle cabin. The one exception to this claustrophobic encroachment is a remarkable helicopter shot in which the camera begins with a closeup of Joe tending the signal fire but then moves skyward and progressively farther away to

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reveal a panoramic aerial view of civilization nowhere and endless, unspoiled nature everywhere. In considering the narrative significance of this imposing aerial shot, one must point out that the eminent American cinematographer Haskell Wexler filmed Limbo.5 Ryan (2010, p. 226) explains that this aerial scene is reminiscent of Wexler’s famous shot in film director Joshua Logan’s 1955 The Picnic, in which “[Wexler] tracked a freight train with his camera from the open door of a helicopter. Here, though, Sayles wants to show the vast landscape that surrounds Joe, Donna, and Noelle.” The contrast between these two aerial views is instructive in that Wexler used the Picnic shot as a geographical means to infer that the film’s young lovers, drifter Hal Carter (William Holden) and small-town Kansas girl Madge Owens (Kim Novak), will reunite in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the destination for the train carrying Hal and for the Trailways bus boarded by Madge immediately before the train shot. In using aerial perspective to picture the toy-like bus and train moving together through the flat, sprawling Kansas landscape, Wexler drew on distance, motion, simultaneity, and scale to suggest a propitious reunion and future for the two main characters. In contrast, Wexler’s panoramic wilderness shot in Limbo is ambivalent and uncertain: perhaps the three characters will survive their environmental ordeal or perhaps they will be annihilated by human violence or nature’s immensity and indifference. This uncertainty of life is perhaps Limbo’s most overarching theme: that human being and becoming are inescapably precarious and neither the natural nor the human world offers any guarantees. The film’s first half in Fort Henry portrays the situation where civilization, through the demise of traditional occupations and the rise of corporate tourism, undermines the lives of Fort Henry residents and transforms the multivalent reality of natural and human worlds into secondhand representations catering to visiting tourists and recreationists. In this world that human beings mostly control, the problem is humans manipulating and misusing other humans and nature. In the second half of the film, however, Sayles suggests that the natural world provides no solution to life’s uncertainties either. The wilderness against which Joe, Donna, and Noelle struggle offers no alternative to civilization but, instead, demonstrates its necessity in that whether the three main characters live or die depends on another person—Smilin’ Jack—and whether he places a bounty payment over the lives of three fellow human beings. How he decides is a product of the ethics and morality of the civilization and place of which he is a part. Importantly, this link between morality and civilization intimates why Alaskan tourism development poses such a formidable economic and existential threat to the Fort Henry community: Honesty and goodwill cannot survive in situations where the daily reality of a place and its people is transmogrified into a counterfeit commodity primarily serving the needs of profit making and only secondarily, if at all, sustaining the everyday worlds of the people who inhabit that place. Goodwill is grounded in the reality of place and the people who belong in that place. When that reality is undercut, so is goodwill and so is civilization.

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Hazard, Authenticity, and Life-in-Place In Limbo, Sayles suggests that the best way to cope with a hazardous world is accepting and using the possibilities offered by one’s place—most importantly, loving and caring for the people of that place who matter most. “Lift me up, darling, lift me up and I’ll fall with you,” sings rock musician Bruce Springsteen in his hymn-like “Lift me up,” a song sung in falsetto that soars in hopeful supplication over the film’s closing credits.6 If Joe Gastineau survives his island ordeal, he will more than likely marry Donna, and they and Noelle will become a viable family who contributes to the life of Fort Henry. In an interview, Sayles admits that his personal definition of limbo is “a state that people get trapped in,” whether it be a failing marriage, an unsatisfying job, or a community where one feels out of place: So many people live in those limbos, where it’s not quite hell, but it’s sure not making them happy. For me, the … key to the film is that the only way to get out of those kinds of situations is risk, and risk involves not knowing what’s going to happen next, or how it’s going to work. (West and West 1999, p. 29) In Limbo, different characters face different traps, some unnoticed and others painfully in the sphere of conscious awareness. By risking the chance to reach out to each other, Joe, Donna, and Noelle direct themselves toward freedom and finding a better place. Whether they live or die, they have moved toward a situation that is more authentic in the sense that what they have done, they have done for themselves, from themselves. In this sense, Sayles’ central message is the need to make stronger connections with others and to strive for our deepest, most authentic selves. By the end of the film, Joe, Donna, and Noelle have set aside inertia, accepted uncertainty, and found courage “to take risks and act in the world, to try out new ways of existing” (Pollard, 2005, p. 179). The lack of closure marked by Limbo’s unresolved ending reminds one of what Albert Einstein reputedly said when asked to identify life’s most important question. “Is the universe a friendly place or not?” he replied (Fox 1998, p. 1). In its uncertain conclusion, Limbo astutely intimates Einstein’s question: Do we consciously make our life happen, or is there some destiny through which life is predetermined, or is life entirely the result of blind chance unfolding randomly in an uncaring universe? Either Joe, Donna, and Noelle die, or they survive to become a durable family. On one hand, Sayles seems to suggest that life offers no certainty and that the world, especially the natural world, is ultimately indifferent to human suffering and striving. On the other hand, he provokes us to care that the horrific uncertainty of survival versus death has brought Joe, Donna, and Noelle intimately together. However short or long their remaining lives, they are psychologically stronger, more hopeful, and no longer alone. At least for the days they struggle on the island, these three people have learned that the vicissitudes of fate can be sundered by forgiveness and love.

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Notes 1 A slightly different version of this chapter was published as “Glimpses of a Place Spirituality in American Filmmaker John Sayles’s Limbo: Authenticity, Inauthenticity and Modes of Place Engagement,” in V. Counted and F. Watts, eds., The Psychology of Religion and Place: Emerging Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 239–259). The author thanks the editors and publisher for permission to republish this chapter. 2 Critical discussions of Limbo include Barrett (2006), Bould (2009, pp. 150–158), Molyneaux (2000, pp. 249–259), Ryan (2010, pp. 214–228), Shumway (2012, pp. 113–120), West and West (1999), and Woodford (1999). Critical discussions of Sayles’ other films include Arreola (2005), Barr (2003), Bould (2009), Carson (1999), Carson and Kenaga (2006), Davis and Womack (1998), Light (2003), Magowan (2003), Mains (2004), Molyneaux (2000), Natter (2002), Nichols (2009), Ryan (2010), Sayles (1987), Sayles and Smith (1998), Seamon (2008), Shumway (2012), Walker (1999), and Whitehouse (2002). Commentaries on cinematic portrayals of place include Aitken and Zonn (1994), Cresswell and Dixon (2002), Kennedy and Lukinbeal (1997), Lukinbeal (2004, 2005), and Lukinbeal and Zimmermann (2008). On the topic of place, see Cresswell (2014), Casey (2009), Donohoe (2017), Janz (2005, 2017), Malpas (2018), Manzo (2005), Manzo and Devine-Wright (2014), Mugerauer (1994), Relph (1976, 1981, 1985), Seamon (2018), Smith (2018), and Stefanovic (2000). 3 On authenticity and inauthenticity, see Baugh (1988), Erickson (1995), Golomb (1995), Guignon (2004), Heidegger (1962), and Pollard (2005, 2016); on the concepts as they have relevance to place and place experience, see Dovey (1985), Relph (1976, 1981), and Seamon (1979, 2008). 4 This trailer overviews the film’s story line and includes commentary from Sayles and some of the actors. The trailer is available at: http://www.videodetective.com/movies/ limbo/852974; accessed March 3, 2022. 5 Wexler also worked with Sayles on Matewan (1987) and The Secret of Roan Inish (1995). 6 Sayles directed three music videos for songs on Springsteen’s hugely popular 1984 album, Born in the USA: “I’m on Fire,” “Glory Days,” and the title track, “Born in the USA.” Ryan (2010, p. 92) explains that “Fairness, opportunity, and community are themes weaving through Springsteen’s music and Sayles’s cinema” (see Ryan 2010, pp. 91–93; Shumway 2012, pp. 41–44).

References Aitken, S. and Zonn, L., eds. (1994). Place, power, situation, and spectacle: A geography of film. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Arreola, D. (2005). Forget the Alamo: The border as place in John Sayles’ Lone Star. Journal of Cultural Geography, 23, 23–32. Barr, A. (2003). The borders of time, place, and people in John Sayles’ Lone Star. Journal of American Studies, 37, 365–374. Barrett, L. (2006). The space of ambiguity: Representations of nature in Limbo. In Carson, D., ed., John Sayles: Sayles talk: New perspectives on independent filmmaker John Sayles (pp. 238–260). Detroit: Wayne State Press. Baugh, B. (1988). Authenticity revisited. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46, 477–487. Bould, M. (2009). The cinema of John Sayles: Lone Star. London: Wallflower Press. Carson, D., ed. (1999). John Sayles: Interviews. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Carson, D. and Kenaga, H., eds. (2006). Sayles talk: New perspectives on independent filmmaker John Sayles. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Casey, E. (2009). Getting back into place, 2nd edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cresswell, T. (2014). Place: An introduction, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Cresswell, T. and Dixon, D., eds. (2002). Engaging film: Geographies of mobility and identity. Landam, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Davis, T. and Womack, K. (1998). Forget the Alamo: Reading the ethics of style in John Sayles’ Lone Star. Style, 32, 471–485. Donohoe, J., ed. (2017). Place and phenomenology. New York: Roman and Littlefield. Dovey, K. (1985). The quest for authenticity and the replication of environmental meaning. In Seamon, D. and Mugerauer, R., eds., Dwelling, place and environment: Toward a phenomenology of person and world (pp. 33–49). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Erickson, R. J. (1995). The importance of authenticity for self and society. Symbolic Interaction, 18, 121–144. Fox, M. (1998). The coming of the cosmic Christ: The healing of mother earth and the birth of a global renaissance. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Golomb, J. (1995). In search of authenticity. London: Routledge. Guignon, C. (2004). On being authentic. London: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. New York: Harper and Row. Janz, B. (2005). Walls and borders: The range of place. City & Community, 4, 87–94. Janz, B., ed. (2017). Place, space and hermeneutics. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Kennedy, C. and Lukinbeal, C. (1997). Towards a holistic approach to geographic research on film. Progress in Human Geography, 21, 33–50. Light, A. (2003). Reel arguments: Film, philosophpy, and social criticism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Lukinbeal, C. (2004). The map that precedes the territory: An introduction to essays in cinematic geography. GeoJournal, 59, 247–251. Lukinbeal, C. (2005). Cinematic landscapes. Journal of Cultural Geography, 23, 3–22. Lukinbeal, C. and Zimmermann, S., eds. (2008). The geography of cinema. Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag. Magowan, K. (2003). “Blood only means what you let it”: Incest and miscegenation in John Sayles’ Lone Star. Film Quarterly, 57, 20–31. Mains, S. (2004). Imagining the border and Southern spaces: Cinematic explorations of race and gender. GeoJournal, 59, 253–264. Malpas, J. (2018). Place and experience: A philosophical topography, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Manzo, L. (2005). For better or worse: Exploring multiple dimensions of place meaning. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25, 67–86. Manzo, L. and Devine-Wright, P., eds. (2014). Place attachment: Advances in theory, methods and research. New York: Routledge. Molyneaux, G. (2000). John Sayles: An unauthorized biography of the pioneering indie filmmaker. New York: Renaissance Books. Moyers, B. (2002). John Sayles’ Sunshine State. Public broadcasting service NOW [interview with John Sayles; www.pbs.org/now/arts/sunshine.html; accessed March 2, 2022]. Mugerauer, R. (1994). Interpretations on behalf of place. Albany: State University of New York Press. Natter, W. (2002). We just gotta elminate “em”: On Whiteness and film in Matewan, Avalon, and Bulworth. In Cresswell, T. and Dixon, D., eds., Engaging film: Geographies of mobility and identity (pp. 246–270). Landam, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Nichols, D. (2009). Lone Star: History and human nature in the new West. Perspectives on Political Science, 32(2), 79–86. Pollard, J. (2005). Authenticity and inauthenticity. In Van Deurzen, E. and Arnold-Baker, C., eds., Existential perspectives on human issues: A handbook for therapeutic practice (pp. 171–179). New York: MacMillan.

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Pollard, J. (2016). To “be” or to “do.” Existential Analysis, 27, 277–286. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Relph, E. (1981). Rational landscapes and humanistic geography. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble. Relph, E. (1985). Geographical experiences and being-in-the-world. In Seamon, D. and Mugerauer, R., eds., Dwelling, place and environment: Towards a phenomenology of person and world (pp. 15–31). New York: Columbia University Press. Ryan, J. (2010). John Sayles, film maker: A critical study of the independent writer-director, 2nd edn. London: McFarland & Co. Sayles, J. (1987). Thinking in pictures: The making of the movie Matewan. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Sayles, J. and Smith, G. (1998). Sayles on Sayles. London: Faber and Faber. Seamon, D. (1979). A geography of the lifeworld. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Seamon, D. (2008). Place, placelessness, insideness, and outsideness in John Sayles’ Sunshine State. Aether: Journal of Media Geography, 3 (June), 1–19 [Ch. 11 in this volume]. Seamon, D. (2018). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routledge. Shumway, D. R. (2012). John Sayles. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Smith, J. S., ed. (2018). Explorations in place attachment. New York: Routledge. Stefanovic, I. (2000). Safeguarding our common future. Albany: State University of New York Press. Walker, M. (1999). “Everybody has his reasons”: John Sayles’ City of Hope and Lone Star, Cineaction, 49, 37–50. West, J. M. and West, D. (1999). Not playing by the usual rules: An interview with John Sayles. Cineaste, 24(4), 28–31. Whitehouse, G. (2002). Remember to forget the Alamo: The dynamics of cultural memory in John Sayles’ Lone Star. Literature and Theology, 16, 291–310. Woodford, R. (1999). Q & A: John Sayles. In Carson, D., ed., John Sayles: Interviews (pp. 239–247). Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

14 PHENOMENOLOGY AND UNCANNY HOMECOMINGS Homeworld, Alienworld, and Being-at-Home in Alan Ball’s HBO Television Series, Six Feet Under

In Not at Home, art historian Christopher Reed assembled a set of chapters arguing that domesticity, home, and at-homeness were largely suppressed in modernist art and architecture, which instead focused on “a heroic odyssey on the high seas of consciousness, with no time to spare for the mundane details of home life and housekeeping” (Reed 1996, p. 15)1 In the volume’s final chapter, Reed and co-­author Sharon Haar (Harr and Reed 1996, p. 253) contended that, in our postmodern era, domesticity, home, and at-homeness are again gaining prominence but in two contrasting ways: on one hand, as a site of inertia and repression; on the other hand, as a springboard for change and autonomy. To distinguish these two modes of postmodernist challenge to the modernist disfavor of home, Haar and Reed spoke of a postmodernism of reaction versus a postmodernism of resistance. The former refers to a turning back to nostalgia and tradition, whereas the second refers to a turning forward to empowerment, reform, and resistance of the status quo. Harr and Reed (1996, p. 259) claimed that the postmodernism of reaction replaces “politics with aesthetics” and leads to “nostalgic celebrations of the home and nihilistic ruminations on its corruption” that counter any future commitment to personal and societal reform. Ultimately, Haar and Reed (1996, p. 253) saw little positive value in a postmodernism of reaction and, instead, committed themselves to a postmodernism of resistance in which home is “not a symbol of an idealized past, but … a space in which we enact a better future.” In this chapter, I draw on Harr and Reed’s postmodernist designations to consider writer and director Alan Ball’s popular Home Box Office cable-television series, Six Feet Under, which completed its fifth and final season in 2005 (Ball and Poul 2003). In this comedy-drama, widowed mother Ruth Fisher (played by Frances Conroy); her teenage daughter Claire (Lauren Ambrose); and her two adult sons, 30-year-old David (Michael C. Hall) and 37-year-old Nate (Peter Krause), occupy the upper stories of a Pasadena dwelling that, on ground and basement levels, houses the family mortuary business run by younger son David DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-17

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and his associate, embalmer and restorative artist Rico Diaz (Freddy Rodriquez). The series has been called “one of the great family dramas of our time,” presenting “gloriously rich characters, situations, and ruminations on life and death” (Blum 2003, p. 15; Bianculli 2002, p. 123). In this chapter, I contend that, on one hand, there is much about the home life of the Fisher family that represents a postmodernism of reaction. On the other hand, I contend that in other ways—including the fact that the presence of death is always calling the world of the living into question—this series’ portrayal of contemporary inhabitation reflects a postmodernism of resistance. Drawing on the phenomenological work of philosophers Anthony Steinbock (1995) and Kirsten Jacobson (2009), I argue that Six Feet Under intimates the need for a lived mergence between reaction and resistance if home and at-homeness are to become Haar and Reed’s “space to enact a better future” (Harr and Reed 1996, p. 253). I end the chapter by considering how Six Feet Under uses the uncanny as one means to propel characters’ personal transformations and thereby points toward a more progressive mode of home and at-homeness, not only for the Fisher family but for the series’ viewers as well.2

Six Feet Under as a Postmodernism of Reaction Haar and Reed (1996, p. 257) claimed that, in a postmodernism of reaction, “the attractions of adventure and change … pale before the pleasures of stasis.” They pointed to evidence of this reactional mode in the traditionalist architectural dwelling styles of architect Andres Duany’s new urbanism; and in the dwelling phenomenologies of Gaston Bachelard and Emmanuel Levinas, grounded in what Haar and Reed (1996, p. 257) identified as the “pabulum of Heideggerian nostalgia.” They accused Bachelard, for example, of conflating dwelling with convention through his argument that the home is constituted through supportive childhood memories. In other words, “inhabited space” is “the non-I that protects the I” (Haar and Reed 1996, p. 258). There are many aspects of Six Feet Under that reflect a postmodernism of reaction. Architecturally, the Los Angeles house standing in for the Fisher home and business can easily be associated with the revival-style dwellings of new-urbanist communities like Seaside, Florida, or Kentlands, Maryland. Built at the turn of the last century in an architectural style that would correctly be labeled “Craftsman mansion,” the Fisher house is readily reinterpreted as a kind of American Victorian because of its peaked roofs, gabled dormers, prominent window bays, and generous wrap-around porch. As designed by the series’ art director Marcia Hinds-Johnson, the first-floor interior where funerals are held continues the Victorian style, with wooden paneling, flowered wallpaper, potted ferns, solid mahogany furniture, and plush, enveloping curtains (Merck 2005, pp. 61–62). The Fisher house readily reflects Bachelard’s claim in Poetics of Space that the dwelling is both a vertical and centering being (Bachelard 1964, p. 17). Bachelard (1964, p. 18) described the cellar as “the dark entity of the house, the one that

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partakes of subterranean forces.” In the Fisher house, the basement is the preparation room, where David Fisher and Rico Diaz earn their living by embalming corpses and making them presentable for open-casket viewing in the ground floor viewing spaces, euphemistically called “slumber rooms.” The second and third stories of the house are the Fishers’ living spaces; most prominently featured are the kitchen, sun porch, and dining room. The kitchen and 1950s Formica table in the middle evoke Bachelard’s centering quality of house in that many of the most significant events and exchanges propelling the series’ story lines transpire there—for example, Ruth’s learning that her husband Nathaniel is dead; or her asking older son Nate to stay on to help with family and business matters after Nathaniel’s death. As Alan Ball explained in an interview, the kitchen set was designed to create a cocoon-like atmosphere: “I wanted the kitchen to feel safe, almost like it has its own protective bubble.”3 The result is a space that seems firmly in place and unchanging. One is reminded of a nostalgic image of the solid 1950s American family, convivially gathered around a table of plenty, absolutely secure in their place.

Six Feet Under as a Postmodernism of Resistance If, however, the Fisher house suggests a kind of enveloping domesticity associated with a postmodernism of reaction, it also evokes aspects of a postmodernism of resistance in that much environmentally is not what it seems. The house may at first glance echo the nostalgia of a well-ordered Victorian household, but the architecture also suggests elements of the Victorian Gothic associated with nineteenth-­ century Gothic novels and twentieth-century horror films: steep gables, pointed arches, mullioned windows, stained glass, and the cellar “prep” room where brothers David and Nate not only conduct business but sometimes play out repressed thoughts and feelings through corpses that seem to come back to life. The Fisher kitchen may appear cocoon-like, but the sense of containment is exaggerated by faded greens and browns, out-of-fashion appliances, and interior sun porch windows looking into the kitchen, which in some scenes takes on the quality of a human “fishbowl” on display. The design aim, according to Ball, was “layers … windows looking in on windows because the family is so insulated from each other and … repressed” (Merck 2005, p. 62; Magid 2002, p. 74). If the settings of Six Feet Under evoke aspects of both postmodernist reaction and resistance, so do the characters. When we first meet the Fishers at the start of the first episode, family life seems more or less ordinary and readily exemplifying a postmodernism of reaction. Other than the unusual fact that the house contains the family-run funeral business, the situation seems typical: It’s the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 2000, and Ruth prepares a special family dinner that will include Nate, who is returning home from Seattle for the holidays. David has been reading an issue of Mortuary Management. His mother adjusts his tie as he gets ready for an early-evening funeral viewing in one of the slumber rooms downstairs. Ruth calls her husband Nathaniel, who drives his brand-new Cadillac hearse through downtown Los Angeles to meet Nate at the airport. As he lights a cigarette and

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sings along with Bing Crosby’s “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” Ruth tells him what groceries she needs and chides him for smoking: “You’ll give yourself cancer and die a slow and horrible death.” Nathaniel throws the unfinished cigarette out the hearse window, ends the call, and sings some more. Still craving a smoke, he reaches for another cigarette, his attention momentarily distracted. The hearse shoots through a red light and is t-boned and crushed by a Los Angeles city bus. Nathaniel dies instantly. For the four major characters of Six Feet Under, their family patriarch’s accidental death sets in motion a series of existential challenges that calls into question taken-for-granted ways of living and impels individual and family efforts and breakthroughs that, in the final episodes, point toward a tentative actualization of Haar and Reed’s “space in which we enact a better future” (Haar and Reed 1996, p. 253). Over the five years of the series, the Fishers demonstrate that “living fully requires one to break away from social norms that are stifling and repressive” (Fahy 2006, p. 15). Family members challenge viewers “to awaken and live with desire” (Fahy 2006, p. 15). By confronting such “unspokens” as homosexuality, unfaithfulness, adolescence, promiscuity, mental illness, drug addiction, race, and class, the characters discover new “truths” concerning more traditional “certainties” relating to family, marriage, religion, and self-worth (Fahy 2006, p. 15). For each of the major characters, this movement toward a more honest wholeness is different. As wife and mother at seventeen, Ruth never had the chance to discover who she is, and much of her story is determining whether she can find self-fulfillment as an older, independent woman. Ruth’s adolescent daughter, Claire, is a troubled teenager and struggling artist who abuses methamphetamines, falls for unstable boyfriends, has an abortion, and feels she has missed out because no one noticed her growing up. Claire’s older brother Nate left home when he was 17, partly because he and his father did not get along; much of Nate’s story follows his finding something to live for, particularly after he learns near the end of the first season that he has a congenital malformation of blood vessels in his brain (AVM) and could die at any moment. Though at first he seems the most responsible and mature member of the Fisher family, younger brother David reveals himself in the first episode as a deeply closeted gay man whose story trajectory is gradually coming out, accepting himself, and allowing others, especially his family, to accept him.

Bridging Reaction and Resistance: Homeworld/Alienworld Drawing on narrative evidence from Six Feet Under, I next ask whether a phenomenological perspective might bridge and even circumvent Harr and Reed’s interpretive dichotomizing of reaction vs. resistance. Is there a way to proceed phenomenologically so that one might portray a lived dynamic that encompasses opposites and offers them space to meet in dialogue and perhaps constructively transform themselves? The need, in other words, is to move beyond Bachelard’s domestic conservatism criticized by Haar and Reed (1996, pp. 257–258) and to

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locate ways whereby home and at-homeness both stabilize and extend understandings and actions. The recognition must be that “the house is very much of the world, that domesticity is as much an activity oriented toward the future as it is a state of mind rooted in the past” (Haar and Reed 1996, p. 258). One conceptual way to envision a comprehensive, sustaining dialectic between stasis and positive adaptation and change is presented in the work of philosopher Anthony Steinbock (1995), who drew on phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s lived reciprocality of homeworld/alienworld.4 As Husserl interpreted it, the homeworld is the taken-for-granted, tacit sphere of experiences and situations marking out the world into which each of us is born and matures as children and then adults. Always, the homeworld is in some mode of lived mutuality with the alienworld, which is the world of difference and otherness but is only provided awareness because of the always already givenness of the homeworld (Steinbock 1995, pp. 178–185). Drawing on Steinbock, philosopher Janet Donohoe (2011, p. 30) described the homeworld as “a unity of sense that is manifest in a pre-givenness of the things of the world that constitute the norm by which we judge other worlds and by which the pre-givenness of other worlds becomes given.” Norms and normativity, in this sense, refer not to some arbitrary ethical or aesthetic system of right and wrong or better and worse but, rather, to “a foundational standard to which other places are compared in terms of our embodied constitution of the world” (Donohoe 2011, p. 25). The normative significance of the homeworld extends thoroughly into one’s lived embodiment so that his or her lived spaces evoke a particular manner of comportment that “is not simply one’s comportment toward this particular place, but simply one’s comportment” (Donohoe 2011, p. 31). Steinbock (1995, p. 171) explained that the homeworld is a “normatively significant lifeworld” involving “an intersubjectively typically familiar territory in which we are ‘at home’.” In relation to the homeworld, the alienworld presents norms different from what a person in his or her homeworld takes for granted. Steinbock argued that the homeworld plays a central role in affording the identity we understand as ourselves: A homeworld is privileged because it is that through which our experiences coalesce as our own and in such a way that our world structures our experience itself. This constitutional privilege … is indifferent to whether we like it or not, or to whether it makes us happy or miserable. The point is that the norms that guide the homeworld are our norms, our way of life, as that to which we have accrued. (Steinbock 1995, p. 171) According to Steinbock (1995, p. 164), one crucial aspect of homeworld and alienworld is that they are co-constituted and co-relative in the sense that we always “carry with us the structure of our [homeworld] in the structure of our lived-­ bodies, in our typical comportment and in our practices.” We only recognize the

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presence of the homeworld when we find ourselves in worlds different from that tacit typicality and normativity. Steinbock (1995, p. 179) explained the homeworld/alienworld co-constitution and co-relativity in terms of a liminal experience: By liminal I mean not merely that home and alien are formed by positing limits, but that they are mutually delimited as home and as alien, as normal and as abnormal. For this reason they are co-relative and co-constitutive …. [N]either homeworld nor alienworld can be regarded as the “original sphere” since they are in a continual historical becoming as delimited from one another. This is the sense in which home and alien are co-generative.

Homeworld/Alienworld in Six Feet Under If the homeworld is “an intersubjective sphere of ownness” and “our world,” then, clearly, the Fisher homeworld in Six Feet Under is the unquestioned starting point and taken-for-granted world for each family member, though each character experiences and understands aspects of that homeworld differently (Steinbock 1995, p.  232). Claire, for example, sees the Fisher homeworld as largely ignoring her; much of her narrative arc is “finding herself ” in such a way that she recognizes the value of her family background but also realizes ways to move ahead that are true to who she is. Tellingly, the series’ last episode ends on the morning that Claire says goodbye to her family and drives east to New York City to try her hand at becoming a photographer. In a different way, Nate, having left home because of conflicts with his father, must come to better understand who his father was and realize that he, Nate, though threatened with AVM, has a gift for helping others, of which he makes use by becoming a partner in the family mortuary business. One way to understand the four major characters’ transformative journeys in relation to homeworld and alienworld is to relate those journeys to modes of liminal experience that Steinbock (1995, p. 179), drawing on Husserl, identified as two— what he termed appropriation and transgression. On one hand, appropriation involves situations of “the co-constitution of the alien through appropriative experience of the home.” On the other hand, transgression involves situations of “the co-constitution of the home through the transgressive experience of the alien” (Steinbock 1995, p. 179). In appropriation, we realize qualities of the homeworld through recognizing particular alienworld qualities as different from those of the homeworld. In a reciprocal way, in transgressive experiences, we encounter the alienworld and, through that encounter, recognize and perhaps accept in our homeworld potentially usable or helpful qualities of that alienworld. For the four main characters of Six Feet Under, the Fisher homeworld continually shifts and transforms itself. Throughout the series’ 5-year narrative arc, this homeworld remains a resilient whole in spite of the fact that it is exposed to a wide range of appropriative and transgressive situations and experiences. On one hand, there is a required shift in appropriation on the part of Ruth, who, remaining

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within the Fisher homeworld, comes to recognize and understand the alienworld of her son David’s homosexuality so that it is no longer seen as “other” and becomes an accepted part of her homeworld. On the other hand, David, who is mostly closeted at the start of the series, must allow himself to move out into what is at first the alienworld of gay life and transgressively shift his homeworld accordingly so that his gayness can become an accepted part of his homeworld and his family’s. Similarly, Claire moves transgressively out into the alienworlds of drug use and mentally unbalanced boyfriends but eventually discovers through the appropriative powers of her homeworld that much of the strength for her becoming a mature young adult lies in the positive familial homeworld support and love of her mother and brothers. Steinbock (1994, p. 214) described such shifts in homeworld as a “critical comportment” that “may entail the renewal of a homeworld’s norms, revitalizing and renewing its internal sense; [this process] may even demand going against the prevalent normality, replacing old norms with a new ethical normality in an attempt to realize the homeworld more fully.” One of Six Feet Under’s most effective narrative devices to facilitate such critical comportment is starting almost every episode with a death—a young army veteran succumbs to Gulf War syndrome; a biker, on his Harley-Davidson, collides with a truck when riding to work as a department store Santa; a porn star is electrocuted when her cat knocks heated hair rollers into her bath; a Thai convenience store clerk is murdered in a robbery; a Latino gang member is shot by members of another Latino gang.5 In many episodes, these funerals provide a ready mechanism for bringing unusual alienworlds in contact with the Fishers’ homeworld in ways whereby the Fishers themselves are often transformed, sometimes through appropriation; other times, through transgression. Through a preparation room encounter with the spirit of the dead pornographic-film star, for example, David comes to realize that his sexual attraction to men is normal, acceptable, and morally good, just as a similar encounter with the spirit of the dead Latino gang member gives him the courage to “be a man” (Heller 2005, p. 78). In regard to Reed and Haar’s postmodernist reaction and resistance, the broader point is that Husserl’s language of homeworld/alienworld provides one descriptive and conceptual means for rejoining the division between home as static and conservative vs. home as dynamic and in a progressive relationship with worlds beyond. The split between reaction and resistance is reintegrated dynamically through the co-constitutive dialectic of homeworld/alienworld.

Bridging Reaction and Resistance: Being-at-Home Besides Husserl’s homeworld/alienworld, another helpful phenomenological conception is provided by philosopher Kirsten Jacobson (2009, p. 356), who explored the phenomenon of “being-at-home,” which she envisioned as a tension between passivity and activity, or what I identify here as inertia and impulsion.6 On one hand, Jacobson (2009, p. 356) pointed out that being-at-home “rests in the background

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of our experience and provides a support and structure for our life that goes largely unnoticed and is significantly beyond our ‘conscious’ control.” In this sense, beingat-home parallels Husserl’s homeworld and involves a strong, inertial force present most of the time but normally outside of everyday awareness. On the other hand, Jacobson (2009, p. 356) argued that being-at-home is “a way of being to which we attain.” In other words, we may be motivated from within—i.e., impelled—to widen and deepen our world. In this sense, being-at-home incorporates a lived tension between unself-conscious stasis and self-conscious effort, and between inertia and impulsion. Jacobson (2009, p. 356) wrote: We are beings whose experience of home is that of an essential and inherent background and foundation, but this foundation has been developed through our very efforts of learning how to dwell. So, although “to dwell” is inherent to our nature, “how” to realize this nature is something to be learned. Though Jacobson used the terms “passivity” and “activity” to identify the lived tension between the home’s pre-givenness and transformative potential, I prefer “inertia” and “impulsion” because the words seem more appropriate for the lifeworld dynamics involved. From one perspective, the most essential quality of any lifeworld-as-it-is is its inertial dimension—in other words, most things and situations are taken for granted and not typically imagined otherwise (Seamon 2018). In this sense, inertia is related to Husserl’s homeworld of unself-conscious pre-givenness. This lived fact, however, does not mean that one is necessarily passive in regard to a lifeworld-as-it-is. Obviously, all sorts of efforts and actions arise in that lifeworld but because they are mostly routinized and could not usually be supposed as otherwise, they remain in the taken-for-grantedness of the lifeworld-as-it-is. In this sense, these efforts and actions are inertial. In contrast, when one makes the effort to change one’s lifeworld so that it becomes other than what it is (never an easy task) one initiated from within—there is an inner drive, or impulsion, as I’ve labeled it here. I would argue that the narrative arcs of the major characters in Six Feet Under readily illustrate this lived tension between inertia and impulsion. For example, David’s story is shedding traditional family structure, finding love, getting married, and making a family. On one hand, this story arc is conventional but, on the other hand, it is arduous and even hazardous because David is a gay man who falls in love with and eventually marries African-American security specialist Keith Charles (Mathew St. Patrick), with whom he adopts two African-American siblings (Kendre Berry and C. J. Sanders). What makes David’s story particularly progressive and praiseworthy is that his resolution of inertia and impulsion coalesce properties of both: a conventional humanist value system emphasizing family and kinship (postmodernist reaction) blends with gay and interracial marriage and interracial adoption (postmodernist resistance). In the last episode of the series, David becomes the sole proprietor of Fisher funeral home and he, Keith, and their two sons resettle in the Fisher house. We learn that one son will eventually take over

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the funeral business from David, thus a cycle of being-at-home is repeated but in a progressive way not readily predicted. As Lorena Russell (2006, p. 121) points out, “Gay, yes. Interracial, yes. But still solidly middle class, centered on the futurity of children, and conservative in many ways.” In evaluating the phenomenological interpretation of Six Feet Under offered here, one can ask how Jacobson’s concept of being-at-home compares with Husserl’s concept of homeworld/alienworld. Husserl’s understanding is useful in that the lived relationship between home and other, as interpreted by Steinbock (1995) can be understood through appropriation and transgression. The homeworld/alienworld conceptualization is less useful in that it still intimates a stasis of place: the terms “homeworld” and “alienworld” perhaps too much suggest a kind of calcified lived geography rather than a dynamic process of human-becoming-inand-through home place. Jacobson’s conceptualization of being-at-home is helpful exactly for this reason: Her presentation offers a simpler, more processual portrait of how inertial and impelling life experiences and situations can shift the lived ground of homes and absorb otherness into at-homeness.7 For a phenomenology of home and becoming-at-home, one can say that an open sense of at-homeness, grounded in family and place, allows for personal and communal transformation for which both conceptions—homeworld/alienworld and becoming-at-home—provide useful interpretive possibilities. In this sense, one of the most affecting aspects of Six Feet Under is the main characters’ transformative stories that might work as a vehicle through which television viewers recognize ways in which their own spheres of at-homeness might be impelled and transformed.

Six Feet Under and Uncanny Homecoming Throughout the episodes of Six Feet Under, the uncanny plays a central role in contributing to the potential transformation of home and at-homeness. If “uncanny” refers to unsettling moments in the homeworld when one suddenly encounters troubling experiences and understandings previously out of sight, then one recognizes that such situations fuel many of the actions, situations, and events in Six Feet Under (Freud 1919/2003, pp. 132, 148).8 Most obviously, the uncanny arises as people who die at the start of each episode often “return to life” and motivate the main characters to deal with some unsuspected or unclear aspect of themselves. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud explained how a strong emotional response can be introduced by the creative writer through “supernatural entities such as demons or spirits of the dead.” The result can be more powerful than the uncanny in everyday life: “the writer can intensify and multiply this effect far beyond what is feasible in normal experience; … he [or she] can make things happen that one would never, or only rarely experience in real life” (Freud 1919/2003, p. 157). In regularly using “dead” characters to impel the Fishers toward a more ethical, humane homeworld, the Six Feet Under writers arouse in the viewer an unexpected emotional empathy that sometimes involves humor—for example, David’s reactions

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to the “ghost” of the female porno star, who helps him understand that being gay is who he is. More often, however, these embodied spirits invoke deeper, spiritual emotions like regret, sorrow, resignation, or responsibility—for example, the rich sense of extended family and community that David feels when he, his brother, and mother are invited to participate in the Latino gang member’s funeral.9 Another significant aspect of the uncanny in Six Feet Under relates to the frequent reappearance of dead Nathaniel, Sr. (Richard Jenkins). The uncanny, Freud wrote, “is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (Freud 1919/2003, p. 124). Nathaniel’s death exposes the four main characters to unsettling aspects of their personal and family identities that must be better understood and dealt with. Nathaniel’s “ghostly” reappearance in almost every episode is an important narrative device for keeping unsettling aspects of the Fisher homeworld in sight. Through humorous or serious “after-life” encounters and conversations with his wife and children, the dead patriarch helps family members to see how their homeworlds in the past have mired them in place and how, for a more promising future, self-directed impulsion might move them ahead in transformative directions. In this regard, one of the series’ most moving scenes is at the end of episode 12, season 4, when David has been carjacked and almost murdered. Having just returned home from confronting the carjacker now in prison, David is woken by a thunderstorm and walks out onto the balcony of his and partner Keith’s apartment to watch the rain. There on the balcony is Nathaniel, who says he’s proud of his son for having the courage to face the incarcerated carjacker. “I thought it would set me free,” says David, “but it didn’t change anything …” Nathaniel explains that he’s missing the point: “You hang on to your pain like it means something—like it’s worth something. Well, let me tell you: It’s not worth shit. Let it go. Infinite possibilities and all he can do is whine.” David retorts, “But what am I supposed to do?” His father replies: “What do you think? You can do anything, you lucky bastard. You’re alive! What’s a little pain compared to that?” David says that it can’t be that simple, but his father responds, “What if it is?” and places his arm around his son, whose head slowly moves to rest upon Nathaniel’s shoulder. Through accepting his father’s understanding and love, David suddenly realizes he should be grateful for what life has given him, including psychological suffering. In its ingenious use of the uncanny to shed light on the unspoken, more hidden aspects of the Fisher homeworld, Six Feet Under offers provocative insight into Bachelard’s claim that “All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home” (Bachelard 1964, p. 4). If the homeworld is “our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the world,” then a need is to understand and transform its more repressed, awkward, and unseemly situations and meanings into productive possibilities and results (Bachelard 1964, p. 4). In this sense, Six Feet Under makes superb creative use of the uncanny to reconcile Haar and Reed’s resistance and reaction and to move both characters and viewers toward a place “to enact a better future” (Haar and Reed 1996, p. 253).

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Notes 1 This entry was originally published in Daniel Boscaljon, ed., Resisting the Place of Belonging (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 155–170). The author thanks the editor and publisher for permission to include the chapter here. 2 Commentaries on home and at-homeness include Bachelard (1964), Blunt and Dowling (2005), Mallett (2004), Manzo (2003), Moore (2000), Morley (2000), Seamon (2010), Seiden (2012), and Smyth and Croft (2006). Commentaries on Six Feet Under include Akass and McCabe (2005), Fahy (2006), Heller (2005), Lavery (2005), Merck (2005), Owens (2006), Russell (2006), and Turnock (2005). 3 Alan Ball, post-production commentary, episode 1, season 1, Six Feet Under DVD collection; also see Magid (2002, pp. 70–72, 74–79). 4 According to Steinbock (1995, p. 222, n. 5), Husserl’s discussions of homeworld/­alienworld are mostly found in manuscripts dating from 1930–1935, some of which are published in Husserl (1973). 5 There are two exceptions to all episodes’ beginning with a death: the first episode of the third season, “Perfect Circles,” in which Nate has a brain seizure but survives death; and the series’ last episode, “Everyone’s Waiting,” which begins with a birth and ends with a heartrending coda presenting how and when the major characters eventually die. 6 Also, see Jacobson (2010, 2011). 7 Jacobson was familiar with Steinbock’s discussion of homeworld/alienworld and drew on his ideas in discussing how the home shapes perceptual experience; see Jacobson (2009, p. 265). 8 Useful discussions of the relationship between the uncanny, architecture, and place include Bernstein (2008), Homans and Jonte-Pace (2006), and Vidler (1992). Lavery (2005, pp. 19–23) contended that the narrative genres present in Six Feet Under are complex; he suggested that, besides the uncanny, these genres also include the grotesque, the fantastic, and magical realism. 9 Heller (2005, p. 82) argued that these dead “only appear to the living, as manifestations of their inner questions and darker truths.” She referred to comments by Alan Ball, who explained that “They’re not really ghosts. They’re a literary device to articulate what’s going on in the living characters’ minds, so I didn’t want them to seem supernatural … When death has touched your life in such a frighteningly intimate way, your entire world becomes surreal” (Heller 2005, p. 82). In spite of what Ball claims here, one regularly feels in these encounters a certain eerie, other-world ambience that, in the moment, seems real and palpable. More so, these scenes are remarkably engaging emotionally, fostering a “suspension of disbelief ” that is memorable and rare, especially in American television programming.

References Akass, K. and McCabe, J., eds. (2005). Reading Six Feet Under: TV to die for. New York: I.B. Tauris. Bachelard, G. (1964). The poetics of space. Boston: Beacon Press. Ball, A. and Poul, A., eds. (2003). Six Feet Under: Better living through death. New York: Home Box Office. Bernstein, S. (2008). Housing problems: Writing and architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bianculli, D., 2002. Review of Six Feet Under, Daily News [New York], March 1, p. 123. Blum, D. (2003). Six Feet Under finds its footing, Wall Street Journal, February 28, p. 15. Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2005). Home. New York: Taylor & Francis. Donohoe, J. (2011). The place of home. Environmental Philosophy, 8(1), 25–40.

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Fahy, T., ed., (2006). Considering Alan Ball: Essays on sexuality, death and America in television and film writings. London: McFarland. Freud, S., ed. (1919/2003). The uncanny.The Uncanny (pp. 121–162). New York: Penguin. Haar, S. and Reed, C. (1996). Coming home: A postscript on postmodernism. In Reed, C., ed., Not at home: The suppression of domesticity in modern art and architecture (pp. 253–273). London: Thames and Hudson. Heller, D. (2005). Buried lives: Gothic democracy in Six Feet Under. In Akass, K. and McCabe, J., eds., Reading Six Feet Under: TV to die for (pp. 71–84). New York: I.B. Tauris. Homans, P. and Jonte-Pace, D. (2006). Tracking the emotion in the stone: An essay on psychoanalysis and architecture. In Winer, J. A., Anderson, J. W., and Danze, E. A., eds., Psychoanalysis and architecture (pp. 261–283). Chicago: Institute for Psychoanalysis. Husserl, E. (1973). Zur phänomenologie der intersubjektivität. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Jacobson, K. (2009). A developed nature: A phenomenological account of the experience of home. Continental Philosophy Review, 42, 355–373. Jacobson, K. (2010). The experience of home and the space of citizenship. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 48, 219–245. Jacobson, K. (2011). Embodied domestics, embodied politics: Women, home, and agoraphobia. Human Studies, 34, 1–21. Lavery, D. (2005). “It’s not television: It’s magic realism”: The mundane, the grotesque, and the fantastic in Six Feet Under. In Akass, K. and McCabe, J., eds., Reading Six Feet Under: TV to die for (pp. 19–33). New York: I.B. Tauris. Magid, R. (2002). Family plot: HBO’s acclaimed series Six Feet Under, shot by Alan Caso, ASC, bucks television conventions. American Cinematographer, 83 (11), 70–72, 74–79. Mallett, S. (2004). Understanding home: A critical review of the literature. Sociological Review, 60, 62–89. Manzo, L. (2003). Beyond house and haven. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23, 47–61. Merck, M. (2005). American gothic: Undermining the uncanny. In Akass, K. and McCabe, J., eds., Reading Six Feet Under: TV to die for. New York: I.B. Tauris. Moore, J. (2000). Placing home in context. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20, 207–217. Morley, D. (2000). Home territories: Media, mobility and identity. London: Routledge. Owens, C. N. (2006). When we living awake. In Fahy, T., ed., Considering Alan Ball: Essays on sexuality, death and America in the television and film writings (pp. 124–138). London: McFarland. Reed, C. (1996). Introduction. In Reed, C., ed., Not at home: The suppression of domesticity in modern art and architecture (pp. 7–17). London: Thames and Hudson. Russell, L. (2006). Strangers in blood: The queer intimacies of Six Feet Under. In Fahy, T., ed., Considering Alan Ball: Essays on sexuality, death and America in the television and film writings (pp. 107–123). London: McFarland. Seamon, D. (2010). Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis in the twenty-first century: The lived reciprocity between houses and inhabitants as portrayed by American writer Louis Bromfield. In Embree, L., ed., Phenomenology 2010 (pp. 225–243). Bucharest: Zeta Books. Seamon, D. (2018). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routledge. Seiden, H. M. (2012). On the longing for home. In Willock, B., Bohm, L. C., and Coleman Curtis, R., eds., Loneliness and longing: Conscious and unconscious aspects (pp. 267–279). London: Routledge. Smyth, G. and Croft, J., eds. (2006). Our house: The representation of domestic space in modern culture. New York: Rodopi.

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Steinbock, A. (1994). Homelessness and the homeless movement: A clue to the problem of intersubjectivity. Human Studies, 17, 203–223. Steinbock, A. (1995). Home and beyond: Generative phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Turnock, R. (2005). Death, limnality and transformation in Six Feet Under. In Akass, K. and McCabe, J., eds., Reading Six Feet Under: TV to die for (pp. 39–49). New York: I.B. Tauris. Vidler, A. (1992). The architectural uncanny: Essays in the modern unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

15 A PHENOMENOLOGY OF INHABITATION The Lived Reciprocity between Houses and Inhabitants as Portrayed by American Writer Louis Bromfield

“All really inhabited space,” wrote French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard (1964, p. 4), “bears the essence of the notion of home.”1 In his Poetics of Space, one of the earliest phenomenologies of homes and inhabitation, Bachelard used an approach he called topoanalysis—“the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives” (Bachelard 1964, p. 8).2 In this chapter, I contribute to topoanalysis by examining houses and inhabitation portrayed by American novelist and agricultural writer Louis Bromfield (1896–1956). Though mostly unknown today, Bromfield was regarded in the 1920s as one of America’s most promising young writers. In 1939 at the age of 42, Bromfield ended a 14-year residence in France and returned to his native rural Ohio to purchase 1,000 acres of agricultural land that he named Malabar Farm. Here, he worked to demonstrate that damaged, unproductive farmland could be reclaimed through topsoil restoration and other innovative agricultural methods. Bromfield described the Malabar experiment in several best-selling books, including Pleasant Valley (Bromfield 1945), Malabar Farm (Bromfield 1948), and Out of the Earth (Bromfield 1950).3 A pivotal theme in Bromfield’s writings was the lived relationship between human beings and the world in which they find themselves. One way in which he explored this relationship was via narrative accounts of the interconnections between houses and their inhabitants. Regularly in his novels and short stories, Bromfield depicted a lived reciprocity whereby house and inhabitants mutually afford and reflect each other, sometimes in positive ways that facilitate engagement and care; at other times in negative ways that intimate or spur personal or social dissolution. Here, I draw on Bromfield’s short story, “The Hand of God” (Bromfield 1939), to explicate this lived reciprocity and to illustrate how unfavorable relationships precipitate unfortunate place consequences. DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-18

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Houses and Inhabitants “[T]here are few things in life more interesting and revealing than the houses in which people live,” Bromfield (1945, pp. 73–74) wrote in the Pleasant Valley ­chapter describing the construction of what came to be called the “Big House,” where he and his family eventually lived at Malabar Farm. Designed by Ohioan architect Louis Lamoreux in collaboration with architectural historian I. T. Frary and Bromfield, this predominantly Greek Revival structure “was built the way a house should be built, bit by bit as we went along” (Bromfield 1945, p. 73). More so, Bromfield believed that, if a house is to facilitate wellbeing for its inhabitants, it must project a sense of living presence: “A house must, like the soil, be a living thing or it is nothing at all but walls and roof and cellar” (Bromfield 1945, p. 73).4 In speaking of the house as a “living thing,” Bromfield pointed toward an invisible ambience that is much more sensed than seen and bound as much to a house’s physicality as to the human experiences, situations, and events unfolding in and through the house. Bromfield suggested that, on one hand, the particular character of inhabitants affords a particular ambience evoked by their home: There is a kind of aura about every house I have ever entered, so strong that I believe I could tell you a great deal about the owners after ten minutes spent within the walls—whether the wife was dominant, whether the family was happy or unhappy, and almost exactly the degree of education and culture and knowledge of the person who built and furnished and lived in it. (Bromfield 1945, p. 73) On the other hand, though the character, quality, and lifeways of the inhabitants shape their house, the house contributes to the character, experience, and world of the inhabitants, partly through its nature as a physical thing and partly through the history of earlier inhabitants who have found comfort or discomfort there: Houses affect the lives and the character and happiness of people who live in them as much as all these things affect the houses themselves. I know of houses which have caused divorces and deformed the lives of children growing up in them, because they were badly planned for the personalities of the people who have occupied them. I know that almost any reader who has lived in many houses has had the experience of hating certain houses, partly because of the aura left by predecessors and partly because of the stupidity or harshness of the house itself. (Bromfield 1945, pp. 74–75)

A Basque Farmhouse One of Bromfield’s most encompassing portrayals of the lived reciprocity between house and inhabitants is his 1939 short story, “The Hand of God,” in which an

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American narrator, spends winters in France and, in many ways, Bromfield himself, documents the defilement of a graceful Basque farmhouse overlooking the tiny fishing village of Salasso on northeastern Spain’s Bay of Biscay, just a short distance from the French border (Bromfield 1939, pp. 224–256).5 Hidden by a hollow on a moor above the bay, the house is protected and solitary, making “a world of its own, high above the sea with the walls of mountains sheltering it from unfriendly north winds” (Bromfield 1939, p. 225). Built in the vernacular style of the region, the house has a low, sweeping roof of red tiles, plastered walls, and large windows with shutters opening to balconies with flower boxes of petunias, climbing geraniums, and convolvulus. On the second floor is a “marvelous big room” where the narrator dines and sits over evening coffee, enjoying the views of sea and mountains (Bromfield 1939, p. 225). The narrator had been searching for a house near the sea to rent for the summer, and the moment he sees the farmhouse he knows it had been lived in by people who have loved it. Happily, he thinks, “This is my house. I am the successor to the man who loved it” (Bromfield 1939, p. 226). The narrator remembers earlier houses in which he had planned to spend just a season but then lived there for years “because there was something … which I had been seeking, sometimes without knowing it at all” (Bromfield 1939, p. 224).6 For the narrator, this “something” is peace, which, of all things in life, he believes, is the most difficult to find. The narrator immediately recognizes that the Basque farmhouse has “peace and dignity and beauty and age” (Bromfield 1939, p. 225). All houses have personalities, and the quality of peace is central to the Basque farmhouse’s: There are houses which are cold and empty, houses which are malicious, others which are friendly, others dignified, and some, perhaps the best of all, are disheveled and merry …. The moment you came into [the Basque farmhouse], out of the hot sunshine into the cool of its big tiled entrance hall, you were aware of its personality, and the longer you stayed there, the more you knew that this was a house in which charming people had lived, people who were simple and knew the things in life which had value and those which had not. (Bromfield 1939, pp. 226–227)

“A Place which Grows about the Heart” Why does this particular house have such a powerful ambience? Partly its presence is strong, says the narrator, because the house is very old and the home place of many generations of Basques who “had gone off to places like Brooklyn and Buenos Ayres to make their fortunes and to return at last to die between the mountains and the sea” (Bromfield 1939, p. 225). Most recently, the house had been owned by Monsieur André, who loved and cared for the house until he died, leaving the dwelling to his widow, who would rent but not sell the property because she wished

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to return to the house to die. “It is a place,” she writes to the narrator, “which grows about the heart” (Bromfield 1939, p. 226). When the narrator first moves into the house with his wife and children, the villagers of Salasso distrust him because they fear he will change the house and desecrate Monsieur André’s memory. By the end of the second summer, however, the villagers become friendly, recognizing that, like Monsieur André, the narrator has “changed nothing, only striving to keep the place as it had always been ….” (Bromfield 1939, p. 226). The manner of relationship that the narrator and Monsieur André have with the Basque farmhouse is further clarified through a contrast with another of the story’s characters—the narrator’s friend Dalambure, a journalist who writes “bitter books and inflammatory articles for the Paris newspapers” (Bromfield 1939, p. 231). Though born in a village near Salasso, the journalist is said by the narrator to have “never properly belonged” (Bromfield 1939, p. 231). Dalambure suffers from “a certain restlessness and discontent”; the narrator is always irritated when the journalist visits his Basque farmhouse but never recognizes “the beauty and peace of the place” (Bromfield 1939, p. 231). The narrator has little sympathy for Dalambure because he has “little sense of things, and very little sentiment” (Bromfield 1939, p. 233). Dalambure had no emotional warmth and “almost no sensual contact with life. He was very nearly all brain and so he was always alone” (Bromfield 1939, p. 233). His house is as much a reflection of himself as the Basque farmhouse is a reflection of Monsieur André: … a gaunt house, plain and undistinguished, which by accident had a picturesque view of the canal and the harbor, although I am certain Dalambure had never noticed the view and would have been quite as content if there had been only a blank wall opposite him. It was furnished with the necessities of life and nothing in it had any charm or personality …. His concern was wholly with ideas and so to him my obsession with the house of Monsieur André was merely absurd and foolish. (Bromfield 1939, p. 233)

A House Desecrated Having rented the farmhouse for five summers, the narrator and his family must suddenly leave for America, though he hopes in time to return, perhaps to purchase the farmhouse from Monsieur André’s widow. After four years away, the narrator makes plans to return to Salasso and writes Dalambure for news about Monsieur André’s widow and the farmhouse. Dalambure replies that the widow died three years ago and the house has been sold to the Onspenskis, an unscrupulous husband and wife who swindle unsuspecting investors. Even though Dalambure warns the narrator that the farmhouse is changed in ways he will not like, he makes an appointment with the Onspenskis, thinking he can buy it back and undo the changes. As he approaches the house on his return,

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he realizes immediately that “something awful had happened” (Bromfield 1939, p.  242): “The house was no longer there, or rather the old house had been so changed that it was difficult any longer to recognize it” (Bromfield 1939, p. 242). The flowering hedge surrounding the farmhouse had been replaced with a high concrete wall that eliminated the garden’s magnificent views of sea, sky, and mountains; shutters, balconies, and flower boxes had been removed; the old plaster walls had been violated “with wide sheets of glass and harsh window frames of steel”; the orchard and kitchen garden had been destroyed, replaced by an “ugly red tennis court” (Bromfield 1939, p. 243). As the narrator leaves, Madame Onspenski asks him how he likes the changes to the house. He looks at her, “wondering that there were people in the world of so little taste and sensibility” and then replies, “Madame, you have murdered a house” (Bromfield 1939, p. 243). The narrator never returns to the Basque farmhouse, and the rest of Bromfield’s story details the Onspenskis’ exploits and eventual ruin in an insurance scandal that leads to their gruesome deaths. As for the Basque farmhouse, the narrator explains that it had a succession of short-term tenants until it was purchased by a Greek syndicate that converted it into a restaurant and “house of assignation.”

A Phenomenology of Inhabitation How, phenomenologically, might one interpret the lived relationship between inhabitants and houses as portrayed in Bromfield’s short story? A first point is the powerful way in which his account substantiates the dialectical aspect of the relationship: Qualities of inhabitants sustain qualities of house, which in turn sustain qualities of inhabitants. One can apply the phenomenological insight of psychologist Bernd Jager (1985, pp. 218–219): A house …, when properly inhabited, not merely remains something seen; it itself becomes a source of vision and light according to which we see …. To enter and finally to come to inhabit a house… means to come to assume a certain stance, to surrender to a certain style of acting upon and of experiencing the surrounding world …. The Basque farmhouse, in the very first moments of the narrator’s encounter, instantaneously projected its ambience of serenity and comfort, which the narrator would come to safeguard by taking care of the property and allowing it to hold its character and ambience. Through the narrator’s “surrendering” to the style of being that the presence of the house evoked, he engaged with and so inhabited the house, which became an integral part of his daily life and pleasures. From Jager’s perspective, one can say that the farmhouse became the “source of vision” as inhabitant and house readily fell in synch—an emotional, synergistic conjoining poignantly described by Monsieur André’s widow as “a place which grows around the heart.” If the narrator’s inhabitation of the Basque farmhouse illustrates how this lived reciprocity between inhabitant and house evolves in a positive, sustaining way, the

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situations of Dalambure and the Onspenskis illustrate how the lived reciprocity can devolve and undermine people and place. Restless, discontented, and dominated by his intellect, Dalambure manifested a stance toward his world that responded through a house that was plain, gaunt, and impersonal. “He never properly belonged,” says the narrator, because Dalambure could not fully engage with his world—unaware, for instance, of the “beauty and peace” of the Basque farmhouse. The most flagrant example of a devolving relationship between inhabitants and house is the insidious Onspenskis, who were not only ignorant of the farmhouse’s uniqueness but transmogrified its grace and beauty into hideousness. Their self-centered, grasping stance toward the world annihilated a place. “You have murdered a house,” the narrator rightly accuses Madame Onspenski. She and her husband’s destructive actions are totally opposite to Jager’s claim that to inhabit a place fully one must “come to incorporate it and to live it henceforth as ground of revelation rather than as panorama. An environment seen thus is transformed into a place which opens a perspective to the world” (Jager 1985, p. 220). Bromfield’s short story points to one other important dimension of a phenomenology of inhabitation: the lived ways in which physical and built qualities contribute to or undermine the inhabitant-house relationship. As demonstrated by the vernacular features of the Basque farmhouse, these qualities may be sustentative—the farmhouse’s protected and secluded site; its sheltered placement in relation to north winds; its low friendly hedge and large garden supporting neighborly sociability; its large windows with shutters opening to balconies with fine views of sea and mountains. These architectural and environmental features contribute to the serenity and enjoyment of the place by affording exhilarating encounters and situations automatically unfolding in and around the house through the taken-forgranted course of everyday life—for example, coming in from the hot sunshine to the cool of the tiled entrance hall; or lying on the balcony at night, looking up at the stars. The farmhouse’s physical features and associated environmental experiences allow the narrator, in Jager’s words, “to surrender to a certain style of acting upon and of experiencing the surrounding world.” The particular environmental and architectural physicality of the place contributes to the narrator’s style of being; his daily life is indebted to the farmhouse because it contributes so much to what that daily life is. The result is a world that is comfortable and gracious socially, architecturally, and environmentally. On the other hand, the Onspenskis’ disconnectedness with the farmhouse leads to the inappropriate physical and built changes that unsettle and destroy the singularity of the place: plaster walls replaced by glass sheets; shutters and balconies removed; orchard and garden converted to tennis court; the high concrete wall destroying neighborly contact and garden views. In this situation, the farmhouse can no longer be a “source of vision” because the Onspenskis do not have the organ “to see,” nor do they have the sensibility or refinement “to surrender” to the place. Their crippling, oafish character rebuffs and suffocates the hospitable ambience of the farmhouse; through their obtuseness and willfulness, they extinguish its uncommonness and magic.

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Three Place Qualities In terms of broader phenomenological themes relating to place and architecture, Bromfield’s story illustrates the lived significance of three place qualities that combine and intertwine in supportive or undermining ways (Seamon 2018 pp. 83–91). One of these place qualities is people-in-place, referring to the human worlds associated with a particular place, including human actions, meanings, and situations. Clearly, the Basque farmhouse’s earlier occupants, Monsieur André, and the narrator all understood the dwelling as it could best offer a sustaining home, whereas the Onspenskis were oblivious to the farmhouse’s uniqueness and thereby destroyed it. A second place quality is the environmental ensemble, the material and environmental qualities of place, both natural and human-made. The Basque farmhouse is a remarkable example of the everyday ways in which a physical environment, in touch with people-in-place, contributes to a pleasurable, satisfying world grounded in material and lived simplicity. In “remodeling” the Basque farmhouse, the Onspenskis replace appropriate, original elements like windows, balconies, and gardens with inappropriate modern elements like the high concrete fence and tennis court. The result is an impoverished place that has lost much of its pleasure and magic, qualities that identify a third quality of place that can be identified as common presence, a less visible feature of place referring to its material and lived “togetherness” impelled by both the environmental ensemble and people-in-place. The common presence of a place relates to its degree of ambience, character, and “life,” which originally the Basque farmhouse powerfully evoked until the mindless Onspenskis intervened and devastated the building’s atmosphere, vitality, and place presence. In relation to Bachelard’s topoanalysis, Bromfield’s story is instructive because it illustrates how all three place elements—people-in-place, environmental ensemble, and common presence—interweave in constructive or destructive ways, sometimes sustaining an agreeable, robust place or, at other times, unsettling and devastating a place when insensitive people-in-place ignore what a place is, dismantle its environmental ensemble, and thereby extinguish common presence. A “place which grows around the heart” suffocates. In Poetics of Space, Bachelard (1964, p. 4) argued that, in doing topoanalysis, the aim is to understand “how we take root, day after day, in a ‘corner of the world’. For our house is our corner of the world …. it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the world.” Bachelard demonstrated that one venue for topoanalysis is phenomenological interpretation of artistic media, whether painting, poetry, novels, or the like. In this chapter, I’ve drawn on one short story by Bromfield to identify some topoanalytic topics and themes. Though phrased in a language that is literary and imaginative rather than conceptual and discursive, Bromfield’s story of the Basque farmhouse, when examined phenomenologically, is valuable exactly because the account arises from situations and events with which readers can easily identify and thereby readily grasp. Real-world experiences ground broader conceptual understandings.

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Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented as a peer-reviewed paper for the 2008 annual conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). The paper was published in Proceedings: 2008 ACSA Annual Meeting, Houston (pp. 92–98). Washington, DC: ACSA Press, 2008. The author thanks ACSA staff associate Carol Mannix for permission to republish the chapter here. 2 Phenomenological research relating to home includes Altman and Werner (1985), Barbey (1989), Blunt and Dowling (2005), Boschetti (1993), Chawla (1995), Cooper Marcus (1995), Harries (1997), Heidegger (1971), Jager (1975, 1985), Korosec-Serfaty (1984), Mugerauer (1994), Norberg-Schulz (1985), Olivier (1977), Pallasmaa (2005), Relph (1976), Seamon (1979, 1993, 2000), and Seamon and Mugerauer (1985). 3 On Bromfield’s life and work, see Anderson (1964), Heyman (2020), and Scott (1998). On the Malabar experiment and Bromfield’s contribution to ecology, sustainable agriculture, and place studies, see Anderson (1997), Beeman (1992), Beeman and Pritchard (2001, pp. 49–53), Little (1988), and Seamon (Ch. 12, this volume). On houses in Bromfield’s fiction, see Bratton (1999). 4 On the building of the “Big House,” see Heyman (2020, pp. 154–168). 5 Bromfield’s “The Old House” is another short story in which a dwelling is central (Bromfield 1944, pp. 81–122). 6 More than likely, this farmhouse was at least partly based on a Basque dwelling where Bromfield summered in the 1920s. Heyman (2020, p. 42) explains that Bromfield rented “a house on a cliff in a humble fishing village outside the resort town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz.”

References Altman, I. and Werner, C., eds. (1985). Home environments. New York: Plenum. Anderson, D. D. (1964). Louis Bromfield. New York: Twayne. Anderson, D. D. (1997). Louis Bromfield and ecology in fiction: A re-assessment. Midwestern Miscellany, 25, 48–57. Bachelard, G. (1964). The poetics of space. Boston: Beacon Press. Barbey, G. (1989). Towards a phenomenology of home. Architecture and Behavior, 5, 1–10 [special issue on phenomenology of home]. Beeman, R. S. (1992). Louis Bromfield versus the “age of irritation.” Environmental History Review, 17, 91–102. Beeman, R. S. and Pritchard, J. A. (2001). A green and permanent land: Ecology and agriculture in the twentieth century. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2005). Home. New York: Taylor & Francis. Boschetti, M. (1993). Staying in place: Farm homes and family heritage. Housing and Society, 17, 57–65. Bratton, D. (1999). Ruined landscapes in three novels by Louis Bromfield. Comparative Culture, 5, 1–11. Bromfield, L. (1939). It takes all kinds. New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1944). The world we live in. New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1945). Pleasant valley. New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1948). Malabar farm. New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield, L. (1950). Out of the earth. New York: Harper and Brothers. Chawla, L. (1995). Reaching home. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 6 (2), 12–15. Cooper Marcus, C. (1995). The house as a mirror of self. Berkeley, CA: Conari. Harries, K. (1997). The ethical function of architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, and thought. New York: Harper & Row. Heyman, S. (2020). The planter of modern life: Louis Bromfield and the seeds of a food revolution. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Jager, B. (1975). Theorizing, journeying, dwelling. In Giorgi, A., Fischer, C., and Murray, E., eds., Duquesne studies in phenomenological psychology, vol. 2 (pp. 235–260). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Jager, B. (1985). Body, house and city: The intertwinings of embodiment, inhabitation and civilization. In Seamon, D. and Mugerauer, R., eds., Dwelling, place and environment (pp. 215–225). New York: Columbia University Press. Korosec-Serfaty, P. (1984). The home from cellar to attic. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 4, 303–321. Little, C. E., ed. (1988). Louis Bromfield at Malabar. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Mugerauer, R. (1994). Interpretations on behalf of place. Albany: State University of New York Press. Norberg-Schulz, C. (1985). The concept of dwelling. New York: Rizzoli. Olivier, M. (1977). The psychology of the house. London: Thames and Hudson. Pallasmaa, J. (2005). Encounters [esp. Part 3, “Inhabiting”]. Helsinki: Rakennustieto. Relph, E. C. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Scott, I. (1998). Louis Bromfield, novelist and agrarian reformer. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellon Press. Seamon, D. (1979). A geography of the lifeworld. New York: St. Martin’s. Seamon, D., ed. (1993). Dwelling, seeing, and designing: Toward a phenomenological ecology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Seamon, D. (2000). A way of seeing people and place: Phenomenology in environment-­ Behavior Research. In Wapner, S., ed., Theoretical perspectives in environment-behavior research (pp. 157–178). New York: Plenum. Seamon, D. (2008). Place, belonging, and environmental humility: The experience of “teched” as portrayed by American novelist and agrarian reformer Louis Bromfield. In Payne, D., ed., Writing the land (pp. 158–173). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press [Ch. 12 this volume]. Seamon, D. and Mugerauer, R., eds. (1985). Dwelling, place and environment: Towards a phenomenology of person and world. New York: Columbia University Press.

16 USING PLACE TO UNDERSTAND LIFEWORLD The Example of British Novelist Penelope Lively’s Spiderweb

In this chapter, I clarify the phenomenological concept of lifeworld by drawing on the geographical themes of place, place experience, and place meaning.1 Most simply, lifeworld refers to a person or group’s day-to-day, taken-for-granted experience that typically goes unnoticed (Buttimer 1976; Finlay 2011). One aim of phenomenological research is to examine the lifeworld directly and thereby identify and clarify tacit, unnoticed aspects of human life so that they can be accounted for theoretically and practically. Here, I discuss some key phenomenological principles and then draw on phenomenological renditions of place as one means to clarify some of the lifeworld’s social, environmental, spatial, and geographical aspects. To concretize my discussion, I draw on descriptive evidence from British writer Penelope Lively’s Spiderweb, a 1990s novel describing one outsider’s efforts to come to inhabit a place—a fictitious present-day village in the southwestern British county of Somerset (Lively 1998).

Explicating Lifeworlds As a research method, phenomenology emphasizes empathetic contact with the phenomenon being studied.2 How might phenomenologists facilitate a mode of openness in their work whereby the phenomenon is offered a supportive space in which it can present itself in such a way that it is what it is most accurately and comprehensively? Phenomenologists draw on this effort of methodological openness to better understand concrete human experience and the lived reality of everyday life. From a phenomenological perspective, the lived structure through which everyday human life and experience unfolds is the lifeworld—a person or group’s day-to-day world of taken-for-grantedness normally unnoticed and concealed as a phenomenon (Moran 2000; Seamon 1979, 2018). One aim of phenomenological study is DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-19

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to disclose and describe the various lived structures and dynamics of the lifeworld, which always includes geographical, spatial, and place dimensions. Unless it changes in some significant way, we are almost always, in our typical human lives, unaware of our lifeworld, which we assume is the way that life is and must be. This typically unquestioned acceptance of the lifeworld is what phenomenology founder Edmund Husserl called the natural attitude, because of which we habitually assume that the world as we know and experience it is the only world.3 Husserl characterized the natural attitude as “naïve” because “we are normally unaware that what we are living in is precisely given to us as the result of a specific ‘attitude’. Indeed, even to recognize and identify the natural attitude as such is in a sense to have moved beyond it” (Moran 2005, p. 55). Any lifeworld is transparent in the sense that it is normally tacit and just happens, grounded in spatial-temporal situations and events more or less regular. As I argue later in this article, one integral dimension of this lived transparency is place, place experiences, and place meanings, for which I explicate some holistic and binary dimensions. Before introducing that explication, however, I present the concept of lifeworld in a more grounded, real-world way by drawing on a novel by critically acclaimed British author Penelope Lively.

Concretizing Lifeworlds Lively’s 1998 Spiderweb provides a sobering, present-day portrait of one newcomer’s efforts to become at home in England’s West Country (Lively 1998). The novel is mostly set in Somerset, a bucolic region that, though once perhaps an integrated lifeworld grounded in history and place, has become a diverse mix of contrasting lifeworlds, more or less different because of time, happenstance, and varying life paths—in short, “people who have always been there and people who come there fortuitously” (Lively 1998, pp. 1–2) Lively recounts the efforts of recently retired social anthropologist Stella Brentwood to make a home for herself by purchasing and settling in a cottage near the small, nondescript Somerset village of Kingston Florey. From a lifeworld perspective, Stella’s story is compelling because she tries to become a lived part of the Somerset lifeworld rather than remain the detached observer that she has been her entire professional life, studying lineage and kinship in far-flung places like Egypt, Malta, and Scotland’s Orkney Islands. How, through commitment, involvement, and affection, can she draw this chosen place inside herself so that she is a part of the place rather than apart as she has always been as professional anthropologist? Early on in the novel, she realizes that, until her present efforts to make a home, she has never really felt a sense of lived connection to the communities and places she studied, which are little more than “worlds out there, richly stocked and inviting observation” (Lively 1998, p. 15). She has never really gathered herself up into place and actually lived there: “Her professional life has been that of a voyeur, her interest in community has been clinical. She has wanted

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to know how and why people get along with each other, or fail to do so, rather than sample the arrangement herself ” (Lively 1998, p. 75). In seeking finally to enter life rather than just to observe it, Stella sets herself to engage her retirement place and to embrace its lifeworld: “This is where she would now live, not just for weeks or months but for the foreseeable future. For years” (Lively 1998, p. 14). She takes long walks, studies maps, drives through the countryside, reads local newspapers, and visits old buildings and places of earlier historical times. She converses with locals, shops in the small village grocery, tries to know her neighbors, and presents a talk to the local historical society. As Somerset as a place of human life comes into focus, Stella realizes that it incorporates not one but many lifeworlds that interact and overlap through subtle lived dynamics like family ties, longevity, employment, commerce, and informal interpersonal encounters. But Stella also sees that, entwined within the more complex lifeworld of Somerset-as-place, is an unspoken, less visible mesh of individually defined lifeworlds grounding different individuals and groups in differing ways with varying degrees of place engagement and place identity. Most broadly, she identifies two distinct substrata of Somerset’s lifeworld mesh: on one hand, the all-important stratum of long-time residents deeply rooted in place; on the other hand, visitors and residents from elsewhere, like her, who “would never be truly attuned” (Lively 1998, p. 72). All these lifeworlds presuppose more or less different natural attitudes that, almost entirely pre-reflectively and unself-consciously, sustain one’s relative place status and degree of belonging: For there were two layers here, she saw. There was the basic and significant layer, which went back a long way—two, three, or more generations …. But grafted on to this layer was a further one, the layer of subsequent settlement— some of it transitory, some more permanent. Most transitory of all were the summer visitors, a valuable source of income for some, a confounded nuisance for others. Then there were the more abiding settlers—the retired, the owners of holiday cottages, the potters and woodcarvers and the weavers. These were digested, up to a point and depending upon their personal achievements in terms of participation and commitment …. But they would never be able to plug into the elaborate communication system which hinged upon intimate knowledge of how things stood, how things had changed and why, and what this implied in terms of expedient response and reactions. (Lively 1998, p. 72) How one does or does not actualize “belonging to place” is one of Lively’s central themes in Spiderweb. On one hand, Stella realizes that really belonging somewhere requires devoted engagement: “Now was the time to prove herself. Even if she could not hope to melt into the ancient levels of this place …, there were still slots into which she could fit in the wider context. Join things, she told herself sternly …. Participate” (Lively 1998, p. 76). On the other hand, she faces an unyielding

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disinterest in engaging this place: “She was comfortable enough with these surroundings, but still not certain how she had gotten here or why. In the past there had been good reason to be wherever she found herself. Now, she was where she was simply because one had to be somewhere” (Lively 1998, p. 133). The insurmountable challenge for Stella is to move from detached observer to immersed-inhabitant-in-place. Partly because of unexpected, unsettling events, she cannot find in herself the personal commitment or involvement to accept and affirm her retirement place. She is unable to intertwine her lifeworld with the lifeworld of Somerset. She cannot shift from outsider to insider, never really fits in, and eventually leaves. I return to Stella’s situation shortly, but first I examine some conceptual and lived connections between lifeworld and place.4

Place as Wholeness A key phenomenological assumption is that people and their worlds are integrally intertwined. If the concept of lifeworld offers one way to clarify this lived intimacy between people and world, another useful concept is place, which is powerful conceptually and practically because, by its very constitution, it offers a way to specify more precisely the experienced wholeness of lifeworlds.5 Phenomenologically, place can be defined as any environmental locus that draws human experiences, actions, and meanings together spatially and temporally (Seamon 2018a, p. 2). By this definition, a place can range from an environmental element or room to a building, neighborhood, town, city, or geographical region. Phenomenologists are interested in the phenomenon of place because it is a primary contributor to the spatial, environmental, and temporal constitution of any lifeworld. Human being is always humanbeing-in-place. As phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey (2001, p. 684) explains, “The relationship between self and place is not just one of reciprocal influence … but also, more radically, of constitutive coingredience: each is essential to the being of the other. In effect, there is no place without self and no self without place.” As indicated by Casey’s emphasis on lived inseparability and intertwinement— what he perspicaciously describes as “constitutive coingredience”—place is not the physical environment distinct from the people associated with it. Rather, place is the indivisible, typically transparent phenomenon of person-or-group-­experiencingplace. The phenomenologist recognizes that places are dynamic, shifting, and encountered differently by different experiencers. For example, the same physical place can invoke a wide range of place experiences and meanings existentially (as illustrated by Stella Brentwood’s progressive recognition of Somerset lifeworlds). Similarly, over time, a person or group’s experience and understandings of place may shift (for example, Stella’s efforts and eventual failure to inhabit her chosen place). Phenomenologically, place is a significant concept because, by its very constitution, it offers a way to articulate and understand the experienced wholeness of peoplein-world. Place is a phenomenon integral to human life, holding worlds together

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spatially and environmentally, and thereby marking out centers of human action, experience, and meaning that in turn make place (Casey 2009; Malpas 2018; Relph 1976; Seamon 2018a). One of the most helpful thinkers for understanding the lived wholeness of place is the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who contended that the foundation of human experience is perception, which he interpreted as the immediate, taken-for-granted givenness of the world undergirded by the lived body—a body that simultaneously experiences, acts in, and is aware of a world that, typically, responds with immediate pattern, meaning, and contextual presence (Merleau-Ponty 1962). In turn, Merleau-Ponty related the lived body to an active, motor dimension of perception—what he termed body-subject, or pre-­ reflective corporeal awareness manifested through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds (Seamon 1979, 2018a, 2018b). Drawing on the concept of body-subject, other phenomenological studies have pointed to its spatial and place versatility as expressed in more complex bodily ensembles extending over time and space and contributing to a wider lived geography. In my work, for example, I have highlighted two such bodily ensembles: first, body-routines—sets of integrated gestures, behaviors, and actions that sustain a particular task or aim, for example, planting a garden, doing laundry, setting a table, and so forth; and, second, time-space routines—sets of more or less habitual bodily actions that extend through a considerable portion of time, for example, a morning getting-up routine, or a Sunday-lunch routine (Seamon 1979). Perhaps most pertinent to the wholeness of place is the possibility that, in a supportive physical environment, individuals’ bodily routines can converge and commingle in time and space, thereby contributing to a larger-scale environmental ensemble that I have called place ballet—an interaction of individual bodily routines rooted in a particular environment, which often becomes an important place of interpersonal and communal exchange, meaning, and attachment, for example, a popular tavern, a favored local park, or a flourishing urban neighborhood (Broadway and Engelhardt 2019; Broadway, Legg, and Broadway 2018; Jacobs 1961; Rink 2019; Seamon and Nordin 1980; Watson 2009; van Eck and Pijpers 2019).

Place Ballet in Spiderweb In her novel, Lively infers direct and indirect references to place ballet. She describes how southwestern England shifts in summer as tourists and vacationers overwhelm the region. Yet “real life continues” and “People are still growing things and selling them and providing one another with services and necessities. Most of them spend most of their time in one place, contemplating the same view, locked in communion with those they see every day” (Lively 1998, p. 6). Throughout the novel, Lively sketches the life of Somerset by inserting items from the local newspaper highlighting events like fox hunts, puppy shows, livestock sales, and entertainment venues. Intimating the presence of a Kingston Florey place ballet, Lively (1998, p. 184) describes the importance of the village green as “the scene of various concurrent

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actions, most of them mutually exclusive.” Teenagers regularly hang out at one corner of the green and ignore a gathering of mothers with small children, who in turn ignore Stella and other older users—mostly “the retired, the settlers, the colonizers” (Lively 1998, p. 184). Another important site of village place ballet is the local shops, which “still had some clout as centres for the exchange of information and opinion” (Lively 1998, p. 120). As one way to learn about Kingston Florey, Stella regularly shops in the village grocery nearest her cottage—an establishment run by Molly, “a product of the place” and with whom it is “neither possible or expedient to complete any transaction without a conversation” (Lively 1998, p. 121). After two months in her new home, Stella is asked by Molly if she is getting to know her neighbors. Molly then offers an unasked-for evaluation of the “mixed lot along the lane there” (Lively 1998, p. 121). She is particularly critical of the dysfunctional Hiscox family, who will play a key role in Stella’s eventual departure from Kingston Florey: “those boys—not what you might call charmers, those two, are they? Never a civil word” (Lively 1998, p. 121). At one point in the novel, Stella contrasts her Kingston Florey encounters with her research observations in a Malta village where old men sat regularly on a bench under a tree and where, at every street corner, “there was forever a knot of talking women” (Lively 1998, p. 75). This village is a perpetual place ballet, but Stella is not sure that she would wish to live like that, even though Kingston Florey might offer similar possibilities, if only she could become more deeply engaged. Independent and detached, however, Stella finds intercourse with her new world difficult: She “retreats behind her closed door and into the protective shell of her car, from which a wave and a smile will suffice” (Lively 1998, p. 75).

Place as Binary: Homeworld and Alienworld If place can be examined phenomenologically as an environmental whole via concepts like place ballet, it also can be considered in terms of such lived binaries as here/there, near/far, center/horizon, dwelling/journey, horizontal/vertical, insideness/outsideness, and so forth (Relph 1976; Seamon 2018a, pp. 52–65). Binary relationships are significant phenomenologically because environmental and place experiences often involve some continuum of lived opposites as, for example, Stella Brentwood’s efforts as an outsider to become an insider to place. To illustrate one way in which a binary perspective might shed additional light on lifeworlds and places, I discuss Husserl’s phenomenological explication of homeworld/alienworld (Donohoe 2011, 2014, 2017; Steinbock 1994, 1995; Seamon 2013b). To clarify this lived binary, one first needs to understand the lived meanings of homeworld and alienworld separately. As Husserl interpreted it, the homeworld is the tacit, taken-for-granted sphere of experiences, understandings, and situations marking out the world into which each of us is born and matures as children and then adults. The homeworld is always in some mode of lived mutuality with the alienworld, which is the world of difference and otherness but is only provided awareness

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because of the always-already givenness of the homeworld. Phenomenological philosopher Anthony Steinbock (1995, p. 179) emphasized that homeworld and alienworld are always “co-relative,” “co-constitutive,” and “co-generative” in the sense that neither can be regarded “as the original sphere [of lifeworld], since they are in a continual historical becoming as delimited from one another.” In this situation of co-constitution and co-generation, the homeworld is that lived portion of the lifeworld wherein one is most unself-consciously who one is, largely because of the happenstance of time, place, birth factors, and familial and societal circumstances. As phenomenological philosopher Janet Donohoe (2014, p. 12) explained, the homeworld is “a unity of sense that is manifest in a pre-givenness of the things of the world that constitute the norm by which we judge other worlds and by which the pre-givenness of other worlds becomes given.” Here, norms and normativity do not refer to some arbitrary ethical or ideological system of right and wrong or better and worse but, rather, to “a foundational standard to which other places are compared in terms of our embodied constitution of the world” (Donohoe 2011, p. 25).The normative significance of the homeworld is entirely relative objectively but, subjectively, affords the taken-for-granted world view and values by which the person and group evaluate lifeworlds more or less different from their own. The homeworld incorporates one’s manner of lived embodiment, and his or her lived relationships with place evoke a particular mode of comportment that “is not simply one’s comportment toward this particular place, but simply one’s comportment” (Donohoe 2011, p. 31). In this sense, we always “carry with us the structure of our [homeworld] in the structure of our lived-­ bodies, in our typical comportment and in our practices” (Steinbock 1995, p. 164). Though still remaining in the natural attitude, we only recognize the presence of the homeworld when we find ourselves in worlds different from its tacit typicality, normativity, and taken-for-grantedness. In relation to the homeworld, the alienworld presents norms, behaviors, and situations that are more or less different from what a person in his or her homeworld takes for granted. As Steinbock (1995, p. 232) explained, the homeworld plays a central role in sustaining the identity we understand as ourselves: A homeworld is privileged because it is that through which our experiences coalesce as our own and in such a way that our world structures our experience itself. This constitutional privilege … is indifferent to whether we like it or not, or to whether it makes us happy or miserable. The point is that the norms that guide the homeworld are our norms, our way of life, as that to which we have accrued.

Homeworld and Alienworld in Spiderweb In Lively’s novel, the lived binary of homeworld/alienworld marks a central factor because Stella Brentwood ultimately fails in making Somerset a home. Stella

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describes her homeworld before retirement in terms of a “bird of passage”: “in the field she had been in the ultimate state of transience—the invisible observer, the visitor from outer space. The people in whom she was interested were there, in that place—she herself was both there and crucial apart” (Lively 1998, pp. 175, 176). In many ways, Somerset is an alienworld for Stella, particularly in the sense that it challenges her to make Somerset’s presence a part of her lifeworld, which, reciprocally, might become a small but embedded part of Somerset’s lifeworld. Unfortunately for Stella, one of her neighbors is Karen Hiscox, her husband Ted, and their two teenage sons Michael and Peter. Though Stella only makes their acquaintance superficially, this family demonstrates a profoundly dysfunctional homeworld grounded in psychosis and physical and mental abuse. Forty-something Karen Hiscox is deeply disturbed psychologically, partaking in explosive verbal attacks against people by whom she feels slighted, including her husband and sons. Michael and Peter have absorbed her upsetting ways and are “a general cargo of resentment” (Lively 1998, p. 176). They misunderstand Stella’s neighborly actions and eventually, out of misplaced spite, shoot and kill a shelter dog that Stella has recently adopted as one way to engage with her place. Lively’s novel is powerful, partly for the way it depicts these two geographically adjacent but dramatically contrasting homeworlds that have no lived sense of the other. Stella sees Michael and Peter as “poor little tykes,” whereas they see Stella as an old woman who regularly makes fun of their appearance and possessions, even though all she is attempting is to be friendly to the two teenagers by greeting them when she sees them and asking what she assumes to be pertinent, non-judgmental questions about their lives (Lively 1998, p. 194). Ironically, in trying to engage with her place through getting to know Michael and Peter, Stella unknowingly turns them against her, and they shoot the dog, which Stella has left alone in her unlocked cottage: “they’d be one up on that silly old cow forever now ….” (Lively 1998, p. 197). For much of her professional life, Stella took for granted a homeworld incorporating a detached attitude—from the places she studied and from the lifeworlds associated with those places: “The people in whom she was interested were there, in that place—she herself was both there and crucially apart. If she lived permanently anywhere, it was in a landscape of the mind” (Lively 1998, p. 176). Successfully objectifying the homeworlds of others, however, is a much different situation objectively than subjectively dissolving one’s objectifying attitude to place and becoming deeply rooted, like Stella’s garrulous postman, a Somerset inhabitant by birth who “was of this place, and knew what was what” (Lively 1998, p. 93). Yet again different is the dysfunctional insularity of the Hiscox homeworld, which takes for granted and perpetuates a damaging way of being that distrusts and despises the “alienworld” of any “different” person like Stella, for whom the Hiscox sons have no intellectual or emotional means to be interested in or trust. Once they kill her dog, Stella’s brittle lived connectedness to place is broken, and she leaves—to where, we’re not told.6

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Understanding Lifeworld and Place In this chapter, I have sought to clarify lifeworld and place and to suggest how they can be considered as lived wholes and binaries. The broader point is that there are many interpretive ways to direct phenomenological studies of lifeworld and place, and I hope this chapter points toward some promising possibilities. As I have described it here, a phenomenological understanding of lifeworld and place begins with the specific experiences of specific individuals and groups in specific times and places. The aim, however, is not idiographic descriptions of particular real-world situations. Rather, these situations are a descriptive context for exploring and locating broader patterns and structures of human experience and human life. In ending this chapter, I make one last crucial point about lifeworlds. One mistake made by newcomers to phenomenology is to objectify lifeworld by misunderstanding it as a thing that can be separated from the experiencer of which it is part. One can never say that he or she “has” a lifeworld. It would be more accurate to say that the lifeworld “has” us in the sense that the lifeworld is the always-already pregiven world in relation to which the experiencer has no choice but to be entwined and a part. Lifeworlds can change for better and worse, but always this change happens because of and via the lifeworld—for example, a young woman is able to break out of a limiting homeworld because aspects of her lifeworld opens horizons to education and a better life. The concept of lifeworld is difficult to grasp because it is always present but almost always hidden from conscious awareness. At times, when some aspect of the lifeworld suddenly shifts—for example, our car won’t start, a computer crashes, or a friend betrays us—we realize the taken-for-granted structure and connectedness of daily life. But this realization remains within the natural attitude. Most of the time, daily life just happens, and the lifeworld and natural attitude remain opaque, undisclosed, and outside the realm of conscious understanding. One aim of phenomenology is to reveal, describe, and interpret the various dimensions of lifeworld and natural attitude. Phenomenology, wrote Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. xiii), “slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, p. xiii). At the same time, phenomenological discovery is not easy or immediate because so often it reveals aspects of lifeworld and place that are “strange and paradoxical” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. xiii). One need go no further than the uncanny, inopportune adjacency of Stella Brentwood and the Hiscox family—an unpredictable and unfortunate alignment of serendipity and geography that unravels one person’s possibility for embracing place. “Fortune,” writes Lively (1998, p. 2), “can serve up some strange conjunctions.” Yet running beneath the ambiguity, uncertainty, and hazard of real-world experience are essential, invariant, non-contingent structures marked by phenomenological concepts like lifeworld, natural attitude, place, and homeworld. These lived structures always and inescapably underlie human worlds, wherever, whenever, and for everyone. A primary aim of phenomenological explication is to make these lived structures available to scholarly study, practical intervention, and deepening self-understanding.

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Notes 1 This chapter was originally published in the Brazilian geography journal, Espaço e Cultura, January/June 2021, 49, 24–43. The author thanks Associate Editor Jefferson Rodrigues de Oliveira for permission to reproduce the entry here. 2 Introductions to phenomenology include Cerbone (2006), Finlay (2011), Moran (2000), Sokolowski (2000), van Manen (2014), and Zahari (2019). 3 See Husserl’s descriptions of natural attitude and lifeworld in Husserl (1936/1970). 4 Elsewhere, I discuss Stella’s experience as it illustrates a failure to engage in place identity; see Seamon (2018a, pp. 111–113). 5 Reviews of place research include Cresswell (2015), Gieryn (2000, 2018), Janz (2005, 2017), Lewicka (2011), Malpas (2015), Manzo (2005), Manzo and Devine-Wright (2021), Moores (2012), Patterson and Williams (2005), Trentelman (2009), Williams (2014), and Williams and McIntyre (2012). Phenomenological discussions of place include Casey (1997, 2009), Champion (2018), Donohoe (2014, 2017), Janz (2005, 2017), Malpas (2018), Mugerauer (1994), Oldenburg (2013), Relph (1976, 2009, 2015, 2018), Seamon (2013a, 2015, 2018a, 2018b, 2021), Stefanovic (2000, 2008), and Tuan (2014). 6 Besides the shooting of her dog, Stella experiences awkward encounters with two close friends that also probably play a role in her leaving Kingston Florey. Even as she reports her dog missing and has not yet learned of its death, she explains to one of the friends, “I dare say … this dog business has unnerved me …. [I]t is the fate of the poor dog that would appear to have thrown me” (Lively 1998, pp. 208, 209).

References Broadway, M. J. and Engelhardt, O. (2019). Designing places to be alone or together: A look at independently owned Minneapolis coffeehouses. Space and Culture, 22, 1–18. Broadway, M. J., Legg, R., and Broadway, J. (2018). Coffeehouses and the art of social engagement: An analysis of Portland coffeehouses. Geographical Review, 108, 433–456. Buttimer, A. (1976). Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 66, 277–292. Casey, E. S. (1997). The fate of place: A philosophical history. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Casey, E. S. (2001). Between geography and philosophy: What does it mean to be in placeworld? Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 91, 683–693. Casey, E. S. (2009). Getting back into place, 2nd edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cerbone, D. R. (2006). Understanding phenomenology. Durham, UK: Acumen. Champion, E., ed. (2018). The phenomenology of real and actual places. London: Routledge. Cresswell, T. (2015). Place: An introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Donohoe, J. (2011). The place of home. Environmental Philosophy, 8 (1), 25–40. Donohoe, J. (2014). Remembering places. New York: Lexington Books. Donohoe, J., ed. (2017). Place and phenomenology. New York: Roman & Littlefield. Finlay, L. (2011). Phenomenology for therapists: Researching the lived world. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gieryn, T. F. (2000). A space for place in sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 463–496. Gieryn, T. F. (2018). Truth-spots: How places make people believe. Chicago: University of Press. Husserl, E. (1936/1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Janz, B. B. (2005). Walls and borders: The range of place. City & Community, 4, 87–94. Janz, B. B., ed. (2017). Place, space and hermeneutics. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

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Lewicka, M. (2011). Place attachment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 31, 207–230. Lively, P. (1998). Spiderweb. London: Penguin. Manzo, L. C. (2005). Exploring multiple dimensions of place meaning. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25, 67–86. Manzo, L. C. and Devine-Wright, P., eds. (2021). Place attachment: Advances in theory, methods and research, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Malpas, J. E., ed. (2015). The intelligence of place: Topographies and poetics. London: Bloomsbury. Malpas, J. E. (2018). Place and experience, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). A phenomenology of perception. New York: Humanities Press. Moores, S. (2012). Media, place and mobility. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. London: Routledge. Moran, D. (2005). Edmund Husserl: Founder of phenomenology. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Mugerauer, R. (1994). Interpretations on behalf of place. Albany: State University of New York Press. Oldenburg, R. (2013). The café as a third place. In Tjora, A. and Scambler, G., eds., Café society (pp. 7–22). New York: Palgrave. Patterson, M. and Williams, D. (2005). Maintaining research traditions on place. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25, 361–380. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Relph, E. (2009). A pragmatic sense of place. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 20 (3), 24–31. Relph, E. (2015). Place and connection. In Malpas, J., ed., The intelligence of place (pp. 177– 204). London: Bloomsbury. Relph, E. (2018). Speculations about electronic media and place. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 29 (1), 14–18. Rink, B. (2019). Place ballet in a South African minibus taxi rank. In Agbiboa, D., ed., Transport, transgression and politics in African cities (pp. 81–98). New York: Routledge. Seamon, D. (1979). A geography of the lifeworld. London: Croom Helm [Routledge Rivivals, 2015]. Seamon, D. (2013a). Lived bodies, place, and phenomenology. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 4, 143–166. Seamon, D. (2013b). Phenomenology and uncanny homecoming: Homeworld, alienworld, and being-at-home in Alan Ball’s HBO television series, Six Feet Under. In Boscaljon, D., ed., Resisting the place of belonging (pp. 155–170). Burlington, VT: Ashgate [Ch. 14, this volume]. Seamon, D. (2015). Lived emplacement and the locality of being: A return to humanistic geography? In Aitken, S. and Valentine, G., eds., Approaches to human geography, 2nd edn. (pp. 35–48). London: SAGE. Seamon, D. (2018a). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. London: Routledge. Seamon, D. (2018b). Merleau-Ponty, lived body, and place: Toward a phenomenology of human situatedness. In Hünefeldt, T. and Schlitte, A., eds., Situatedness and place (pp. 41–66). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Seamon, D. (2021). Place attachment and phenomenology: The dynamic complexity of place. In Manzo, L. and Devine-Wright, P., eds, Place attachment: Advances in theory, methods and research, 2nd edn. (pp. 29–44). New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Seamon, D. and Nordin, C. (1980). Marketplace as place ballet: A Swedish example. Landscape, 24 (October), 35–41. Sokolowski, R. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Stefanovic, I. L. (2000). Safeguarding our common future. Albany: State University of New York Press. Stefanovic, I. L. (2008). Holistic paradigms of health and place. In Eyles, J. and Williams, A., eds., Sense of place, health and quality of life (pp. 45–57). Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate. Steinbock, A. J. (1994). Homelessness and the homeless movement: A clue to the problem of intersubjectivity. Human Studies, 17, 203–223. Steinbock, A. J. (1995). Home and beyond. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Trentelman, C. K. (2009). Place attachment and community attachment. Society and Natural Resources, 22, 191–210. Tuan, Y.-F., (2014). Points of view and objectivity: The phenomenologist’s challenge. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 25 (3), 34. van Eck, D. and Pijpers, R. (2016). Encounters in place ballet: A phenomenological perspective on older people’s walking routines in an urban park. Area, 49, 166–173. van Manen M. (2014). Phenomenology of practice. London: Routledge. Watson, S. (2009). The magic of the marketplace: Sociality in a neglected public space. Urban Studies, 46, 1577–1591. Williams, D. R. (2014). Making sense of “place”: Reflections on pluralism and positionality in place research. Landscape and Urban Planning, 131, 74–82. Williams, D. R. and McIntyre, N. (2012). Place affinities, lifestyle mobilities, and qualityof-life. In Uysal, M., ed., Handbook of tourism and quality-of-life research (pp. 209–231). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Zahari, D. (2019). Phenomenology: The basics. London: Routledge.

17 MOMENTS OF REALIZATION Extending Homeworld in British-African Novelist Doris Lessing’s Four-Gated City

Of all of philosopher Edmund Husserl’s many phenomenological insights, lifeworld, natural attitude, homeworld, and alienworld are especially important because they describe phenomena typically out of sight in everyday experience yet integral to a self-conscious knowledge of human being and becoming.1 In attempting to better characterize the natural attitude and lifeworld, Husserl identified a lived reciprocity between what he called the homeworld and alienworld. One’s homeworld is the tacit, taken-for-granted sphere of experiences, understanding, and situations marking out a world that is comfortable, usual, and “the way things are and should be.” Always, the homeworld is in some mode of lived mutuality with an alienworld—a world as seen as a realm of difference, atypicality, and otherness-provided awareness only because of the always-already givenness of the homeworld.2 In this article, I draw on British-African novelist Doris Lessing’s 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City, to consider the shifting homeworld of protagonist Martha Quest, a young white African woman emigrating to battle-scarred London immediately after World War II (Lessing 1969). Throughout the novel, Quest finds herself in unfamiliar or challenging situations where the world she takes for granted is called into question. Lessing draws on these life-testing experiences to portray Quest’s shifting understandings of people and events that at first she sees as atypical, abnormal, unreal, or impossible—for example, her changing sensibilities toward family, politics, mental illness, and transpersonal experiences.3 As a novelist rather than a phenomenologist, Lessing (1919–2013) presents these shifts narratively, but one can draw on her account to illustrate how a changing, more encompassing homeworld unfolds via a progressive realization that the ambit of human worlds and human experience is vastly beyond the lifeworld and natural attitude of one person herself. Crucially, in Lessing’s account of Martha Quest’s broadening homeworld, there are sometimes sudden experiences of more intense awareness that I call here moments of realization, whereby one’s earlier, taken-for-granted, DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-20

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unquestioned knowledge falls away and one sees the world in a new way that transforms homeworld understanding by accepting aspects of human experience before seen as unreal, impossible, unbelievable, or entirely at odds with how one has assumed the world to be.4

Lifeworlds and Natural Attitudes A central aim of phenomenology is understanding the taken-for-granted givenness of the world as it is lived in an everyday manner. To know and register this unquestioned, lived-in-the-background stratum of human experience, one of the most important phenomenological contributions is Husserl’s articulation of lifeworld and natural attitude—inescapable but unrecognized features of human life that no earlier Western philosophical tradition had fully located or articulated. For sure, lifeworld and natural attitude are integral to all manner of human life, whether past or present; Western or non-Western; wealthy or poor; simple or sophisticated. In the Western philosophical tradition, however, lifeworld and natural attitude had not been explicitly identified, probed, or valued. This fact allows for the claim that Husserl “discovered” lifeworld and natural attitude. As Moran (2012, p. 44) explained, Husserl’s central focus was “the pregiven, always-taken-for-granted ‘lifeworld’, which had never before become a topic of enquiry.” The concepts of lifeworld and natural attitude are remarkably valuable. They identify aspects of human life difficult to articulate because they are taken for granted and thus typically out of sight. Moran (2012, p. 7) defined the lifeworld as “the world of the pre-given, familiar, present available, surrounding world … that envelops us and is always there as taken for granted.” The lifeworld is the unquestioned, usual unfolding of human life—the lived fact that, most of the time, one’s life simply happens in the usual way it happens and is rarely called into question, except when it becomes unusual or atypical in some way. One example is the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in which unquestioned everyday behaviors like face-to-face interactions were replaced by “out-of-the-ordinary” actions like social distancing, wearing face masks, and living in voluntary isolation. Because the virus demanded shifts in taken-for-granted understandings and actions, one realized the unquestioned “normality” of one’s usual world, though this “realization” remained within a lifeworld awareness. Suddenly, life dramatically changed, and one recognized that the world as one knew it, could be otherwise. If the lifeworld describes the taken-for-granted structure of the typical, everyday world, the natural attitude is its correlate and refers to the taken-for-granted perceptual and attitudinal field via which individuals assume that their everyday worlds are what they are and not pictured or expected to be otherwise. The natural attitude is “the unquestioned manner of accepting the existence and givenness of the world” and an attitude that is, in its very naïveté, “unknown to itself ” (Moran 2013, pp. 25, 60). As Luft (2011, p. 39) explained, “being in the natural attitude, I am unaware of being in this attitude. Hence this is exactly the reason this attitude is called natural. The natural attitude is hidden to itself ….” Or again: “I do not know of being in

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[the natural attitude], but also …, since I do not know if it as an attitude, I live in the belief that it is the only possible ‘way of life’” (Luft 2011, p. 44). In this sense, the natural attitude automatically undergirds the everyday, straightforward givenness of the world in which we find ourselves, though as with the lifeworld, we are almost always unaware of this unquestioned attitudinal presence: To call this situation “natural” would be absurd for someone living in the natural attitude, yet making this mode of daily life explicit and thematic requires that we are no longer in it. The term “natural” thus gives a thematic description of our life as it is carried out “naturally,” but the fact that this is so can only become explicit in another attitude [i.e., the phenomenological attitude]. (Luft 2011, p. 39)

Homeworlds and Alienworlds Over time, Husserl recognized that human lifeworlds can be specified more exactly. He realized that the portion of lifeworld most significant for human beings is the everyday world in which they live. He identified this portion of lifeworld as the homeworld, which refers to “the sphere in which we feel ‘just natural’, at home and at ease” (Luft 2011, p. 43). Also called by Husserl the “familiar world” or “near-world,” the homeworld is an intersubjective world that incorporates culture, tradition, and collective values. The homeworld is a typical way of living that is “accepted and familiar” and “something shared with others and, especially, with those who live in our vicinity” (Moran 2012, p. 211). As Luft explained, the homeworld “is the world of a certain family, society, people, nation with their historical tradition …” (Luft 2011, p. 43). Luft emphasized that homeworlds are naïve in the sense that they see themselves as absolute: This does not mean that one home attitude perceives itself as the only existing attitude, but as the only home attitude for itself. All other forms of life it will view as naïve or as primitive or as simply alien, that is, incomprehensible. To set the home attitude as absolute means that no other attitude will become understandable as a home attitude, but only as an alien attitude correlating to an alienworld. (Luft 2011, p. 44) Steinbock (1995, p. 232) pointed out that the homeworld is privileged because “it is that through which our experiences coalesce as our own and in such a way that our world structures our experience itself.” We always “carry with us the structure of our [homeworld] in the structure of our lived-bodies, in our typical comportment, and in our practices”; we realize the presence of the homeworld when we find ourselves in worlds different from that typicality and normativity (Steinbock 1995, p. 164). In this sense, the homeworld and alienworld are “co-­relative and co-constitutive … [N]either homeworld nor alienworld can be regarded as the ‘original sphere’,

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since they are in a continual historical becoming as delimited from one another. This is the sense in which home and alien are co-generative” (Steinbock 1995, p. 179, emphasis in original). Most broadly, the homeworld is a realm of usualness, typicality, and normality, though obviously what these taken-for-granted qualities entail vary for different homeworlds and sometimes collide in that the lived extent of any homeworld is marked by a “dark outer horizon” that points to alienworlds beyond (Luft 2011, p. 49). These worlds beyond the homeworld are different in some way—perhaps unusual, puzzling, shocking, or even threatening. Though these alienworlds may differ widely from one another, they are similar in that each has “its own alien normality with its own concordance” (Luft 2011, p. 49). Donohoe (2017, p. 430) pointed out that the alienworld “reveals to me things about my homeworld that I had taken for granted as simply being the way things are.” The homeworld is “a unity of sense that is manifest in a pre-givenness of the things of the world that constitute the norm by which we judge other worlds” (Donohoe 2011, p. 30). Importantly, these norms are not some arbitrary system of right and wrong but, rather, “a foundational standard” to which the worlds of others are compared. In relation to the broader lifeworld, Moran (2018, p. 74) explained that Every lifeworld has dimensions of homeworld and alienworld; everyone lives within horizons that lay out structures of normality and abnormality, harmony and surprise, yet these structural dimensions of experience rarely are foregrounded in intentional explication. In The Four-Gated City, Martha Quest encounters many unusual situations because of her seeking a new place in the unfamiliar worlds of England and London. Drawing on Martha’s experiences, I illustrate how moments of realization provoke questionings and revisionings of the homeworld in which Quest grew up and thought she had left behind when she emigrated to England. Already in that earlier homeworld, she encountered moments of realization that provoked her recognition of possibilities beyond the homeworld she was given by birth and upbringing. Her growing up in white Africa needs discussion before consideration of her London experience.5

A Process of Self-Discovery The Four-Gated City is the fifth and final volume in Lessing’s semi-autobiographical “Children of Violence” series that includes Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple in the Storm (1958), and Landlocked (1965).6 In her “author’s notes” at the end of Four-Gated City, Lessing (1969, p. 667) explains that this series of novels is a Bildungsroman, by which she means the story of a young person who experiences life, grows up, matures, and becomes a responsible adult contributing to society. In these five novels, the person who finds her way toward maturity is Martha Quest, a woman who grows up between World War I and World War II on a remote African farm in Zambesia—a fictitious country in white-colonial Africa.

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Lessing calls the five-novel series “Children of Violence” because she argues that the physical and human destruction of the two world wars has been the primary historical event shaping human experience in the twentieth century.7 Throughout her writings, a prime concern for Lessing is the search for the fully realized self—a possibility directly intimated by the name Martha Quest. The first four novels of the series chronicle the first half of Martha’s life in Zambesia and her attempts at broadening self-awareness and engaged societal responsibility. She grapples with finding an authentic sense of self in a white-controlled colonial culture that insists she play circumscribed roles—dutiful daughter, traditional wife, selfless mother, suspect communist, or proud white African colonialist. In the first novel of the series, Martha Quest, Lessing describes the young woman’s growing up, opposing parental concerns, and experiencing a mindless social life that ends with an ill-considered marriage. A Proper Marriage depicts Martha’s growing frustration with motherhood and marriage, which ends in divorce and Martha abandoning her young daughter to her ex-husband. In A Ripple in the Storm, Martha looks for self-realization by becoming politically active in a nascent communist party, but this hopeful possibility is largely destroyed in Landlocked, which ends with Martha’s impatient waiting to emigrate to England. Her London arrival in 1950 marks the start of the 30-year-old Martha’s uncertain efforts to secure her place as a mature human being, a theme that is the central narrative of The Four-Gated City. This novel offers a complex, fine-grained picture of shifts in Martha’s homeworld as she strives to make a life that she can accept as authentic and real. For most human beings, their homeworld is shaped by the parents, family, place, and historical moment into which one is born. Martha grows up on her Britishimmigrant parents’ small veld farm some 70 miles from the nearest town, “which was itself a backwater” (Lessing 1952, p. 6). Early on, Martha questions the division of human beings into age, gender, race, ethnicity, and social class: “[S]he could not remember a time when she had not thought of people in terms of groups, nations, or colour of skin first, and as people afterwards …. [E]ach group, community, clan, colour strove and fought away from the other, in a sickness of dissolution; it was as if the principle of separateness was bred from the very soil, the sky, the driving sun” (Lessing 1952, p. 61). At the same time, however, Martha yearns for some way whereby there might be individual and societal wholeness. While still a young girl on the African farm, she envisions an ideal city that becomes a central theme in Martha’s life, especially in The Four-Gated City: There arose, glimmering whitely over the harsh scrub and stunted trees, a noble city, set foursquare and colonnaded along its falling flower-bordered terraces. There were splashing fountains and the sounds of flutes; and its citizens moved, grave and beautiful, black and white and brown together ….. (Lessing 1952, p. 15) This question of how Martha incorporates differences into her homeworld so that, where before there was separation, there is now togetherness, a central theme

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in the five novels. As a spur for facilitating this integration, Martha experiences moments of realization that allow her to see and understand her world and herself in a deeper, more comprehensive way. These moments recur and offer a potent means for Martha’s integrating worlds of difference and absorbing them into an expanded homeworld. Martha’s first experience happens early on in Martha Quest as she walks alone in the veld and senses, in the lush vitality of the natural world, a force greater than herself yet integrating her presence with some larger whole and provoking her to see “her smallness, the unimportance of humanity” (Lessing 1952, p. 56): It was evening, and very beautiful; a rich watery gold was lighting the dark greens of the foliage, the dark red of the soil, the pale blonde of the grass …. There was a slow integration, during which she, and the little animals, and the moving grasses, and the sun-warmed trees, and the slopes of shivering silvery mealies, and the great dome of blue light overhead, and the stones of earth under her feet, became one, shuddering together in a dissolution of dancing atoms. (Lessing 1952, pp. 66–67) These moments of realization are especially prominent in The Four-Gated City and mark a central means whereby Martha’s homeworld shifts; what was “other” is assimilated into acceptance and becomes a standard whereby she verifies reality: “the measure was that experience … which was the gift of her solitary childhood on the veld: that knowledge of something painful and ecstatic, something central and fixed but flowing. It was a sense of movement, of separate things interacting and finally becoming one but greater—it was this which was her lodestone, even her conscience” (Lessing 1952, p. 260). This direct experience of a lived wholeness integrating differences contrasts sharply with Martha’s childhood homeworld’s rigid divisions between men and women, Blacks and Whites, English and Afrikaners, Jews and non-Jews, and so forth. In this sense, moments of realization are subversive in that they call taken-for-granted divisions into question and provoke Martha to see that they are not necessarily normal, ethically right, or accurate renderings of human life.8

Finding One’s Place When she arrives in England, Martha is single and unattached. She has left Zambezia to find out who she is and, at least for a time, to be different from the Martha Quest of the past. When she encounters a stranger and he asks her name, Martha responds “Phyllis Jones,” and “for an afternoon and evening she had been Phyllis Jones, with an imaginary history of wartime work in Bristol” (Lessing 1969, p. 26). Martha has a moment of realization when she sees that people “filled in for you, out of what they wanted, needed, from—not you, not you at all—but from their own needs” (Lessing 1969, p. 26). As a newcomer to a large city like London, Martha has a freedom to make herself anew: “For a few weeks she had been anonymous,

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unnoticed—free. Never before in her life had she known this freedom … without boundaries, without definition, like a balloon drifting and bobbing, nothing had been expected of her” (Lessing 1969, p. 12). One of the first Londoners Martha gets to know is Stella, a working-class woman living in the river docks of London’s South Bank. By chance, Stella spots the f­oreign-looking Martha on the wharves one day and asks her to tea. Martha ends up living with her for a month because Stella has “an unfed longing for travel and experience which was titillated every minute by the river, by the ships that swung past her windows, by the talk of foreign countries” (Lessing 1969, p. 23). Stella’s curiosity is fed by outsider Martha’s stories of home, and Martha has a moment of realization: Stella wanted Martha to talk about foreignness; and Martha, feeling that nothing in her experience could match up to such an appetite for the marvelous, made a discovery: that it was enough to say, the sun shines so, the moon does thus, people get up at such an hour, eat so and so, believe such and such—and it was enough. Because it was different. (Lessing 1969, p. 29) Eventually, Martha must decide how she is to find her place in London. This process begins with becoming a temporary barmaid and café waitress, and considering employment offers through London contacts procured through her white African friends. She turns down these reasonable job possibilities because she recognizes how quickly they would straitjacket her life as “legal secretary” or “administrator dealing with African affairs.” She has a moment of realization when, after having dinner with an attorney who wants her to work for his law firm as a liaison with African clients, she understands that “The trouble is, you have to choose a slot to fit yourself to, you have to narrow yourself down for this stratum or that” (Lessing 1969, p. 30). Because of her unwillingness to decide on her place in London’s occupational and social structure, Martha is uncertain and confused in her first several months in England: she realizes how much she needs to learn about this new country she has chosen: “so many invisible rules there are to break, rules invisible to those who lived them”—that aspect of homeworld whereby everything is as it is and not imagined otherwise (Lessing 1969, p. 31). Because of her unfamiliarity with the place, she has the unexpected realization that she is alone and recognizes that she has “never been anything else in her life” (Lessing 1969, p. 46). In her solitude, she walks the London streets for hours, “not knowing where she was unless she walked beside the river,” with “her head cool, watchful, alert,” her heart “quietened and stilled” (Lessing 1969, p. 46). Often on these walks, she experiences “a state of quiet and distance” far removed from “the humdrum of ordinary life” (Lessing 1969, p. 47). She realizes that if she walks long enough, eats irregularly, and sleeps minimally, then “her whole self cleared, lightened, [and] she became alive and light and aware” (Lessing 1969, p. 45). As the novel proceeds, moments of recognition like these

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contribute to Martha’s forging a homeworld partly shaped by her London experiences but made unique by her psychological disposition, her African-homeworld background, and her intellectual, emotional, and intuitive sensibilities. Through the contact of an African friend, Martha eventually finds a home in London when she goes to work as a live-in secretary for Mark Coldridge, a parttime novelist and prosperous entrepreneur living in a large Georgian townhouse in the elite London neighborhood of Bloomsbury. Ultimately, Martha remains as Mark’s employer for much of her adult life; the major portion of The Four-Gated City describes the shifting fortunes of the Coldridge family as largely seen through Martha’s eyes. Eventually, she becomes housekeeper and surrogate mother for Mark’s son, Francis; and Mark’s nephew, Paul, whose mother committed suicide when Collin, her physicist-husband and Mark’s younger brother, fled to the Soviet Union as a Russian spy. Other than Martha, the most central character in The Four-Gated City is Mark’s mentally ill wife, Lynda, diagnosed as schizophrenic with a history of long-term stays in mental hospitals. A few years after Martha begins working for Mark, Lynda makes the decision to return home to live in a basement apartment set up by Martha. Lynda’s experiences play a pivotal role in determining Martha’s future and in widening her homeworld in unimagined directions. Philosopher Anthony Steinbock (1994a, p. 214) points out that shifts in one’s homeworld “may entail rejecting certain presuppositions of a homeworld, its values and demands; it may entail the renewal of a homeworld’s norms, revitalizing and renewing its internal sense: it may even demand going against the prevalent normality, replacing old norms with a new ethical normality in an attempt to realize the homeworld more fully.” Martha’s growing involvement with Lynda’s situation radically shifts Martha’s homeworld and draws her into experiences and possibilities she would never have encountered otherwise.

Encountering an Alienworld In many ways, Martha’s getting to know Lynda and coming to realize that she is not really mentally ill but “different” from most “normal” people is one central message of The Four-Gated City: that human experience offers vastly more possibilities than human beings typically realize; that if one makes a sincere effort to understand others, he or she might discover aspects of human life and experience unsuspected before. Through moments of realization, Martha comes to understand Lynda’s homeworld and to use that understanding to extend her own homeworld in ways that at first she cannot imagine. One important conceptual clarification of Martha’s progressive understanding and shifting homeworld is Anthony Steinbock’s argument that human beings extend their homeworld via two sorts of lived exchanges between homeworld and alienworld—what he calls appropriation and transgression (Steinbock 1995, p. 179). In appropriation, the person involves herself in situations of “the co-constitution of the alien through appropriate experience of the home” (Steinbock 1995, p. 179).

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In other words, the person realizes valuable but unnoticed qualities of her homeworld only because exposure to an alienworld helps her to see these qualities. In contrast, transgression involves the person in situations of “the co-constitution of the home through the transgressive experience of the alien” (Steinbock 1995, p. 179). In transgression, the person moves beyond the taken-for-granted comfort of her homeworld to an alienworld that offers unexpected experiences and understandings that the person may find of value and integrate into an expanded homeworld. There are many situations in The Four-Gated City where Martha, in her dealings with the Coldridge family, draws on appropriation to clarify and strengthen her London homeworld—for example, editing Mark’s writings, becoming a surrogate mother for Francis and Paul, dealing with journalists who aim to sensationalize Mark’s “communist” connections, or becoming for a short time Mark’s lover (since Lynda refuses in any way to be his wife). In relation to Lynda, however, Martha’s homeworld shifts primarily because she has a series of realizations as to what “mental illness” really is through transgressive understandings of Lynda’s homeworld that Martha integrates into her own. Martha gradually realizes who Lynda is and why her behaviors, though seemingly atypical and “crazy,” are in fact reasonable and “sane,” once one really gets to know them. Here, I overview Martha’s growing understanding of Lynda’s situation because her process of discovery demonstrates two important points: first, that moments of realization are often pivotal for transforming, via transgression, our sense of who we are and for revising our homeworld; and second, that “alienworlds” of people seemingly different from ourselves are sometimes a gateway for self-understanding and for a radical reconfiguration of our own homeworld, provided we can set aside taken-for-granted points of view and come to see firsthand the homeworld of the other.

Realizing Another’s Experience Several times during the years that Martha works for Mark and Lynda lives in the basement, Lynda has a breakdown that returns her to a mental hospital or Mark takes care of her at home. After one such breakdown, Martha decides to attend to Lynda. During some days, Lynda is relatively sensible, but there are other days when she is “out of reach and did not hear or heard only what she chose” (Lessing 1969, p. 507). Over time, Martha comes to realize that there are features of Lynda’s apartment that disclose aspects of her illness, once Martha is more attuned to Linda’s actions. For example, all furniture in the living room is placed some three feet away from the walls to create a kind of runway space that extends along all four walls, on which to a height of about five feet are irregular rusty smudges—bloodstains from Lynda’s bitten finger ends. When Martha asks Mark for advice on how to behave during Lynda’s difficult times, He suggests that she “be as sensible as possible.” But after a few days watching Lynda, on her hands and knees crawling round and round the walls and muttering

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jumbled phrases, Martha decides to forsake reasonableness and join Lynda in her puzzling behaviors (Lessing 1969, p. 506).9 Eating and sleeping very little like Lynda, Martha notices that her seeing and hearing become much more acute. She has a pivotal moment of realization, suddenly understanding that Lynda is testing the basement walls for a thin place where she might break through and become free: When she [Lynda] pressed, assessed, gauged those walls, it was the walls of her own mind that she was exploring. She was asking: Why can’t I get out. What is this thing that holds me in? (Lessing 1969, p. 516) Over the several weeks that Lynda has her “breakdown,” Martha comes to two moments of realization: first, through firsthand experience, she understands that Lynda’s “madness” has its own validity; second, she realizes that the supposed “mentally ill” person may have atypical sensibilities and perceptions that could offer unusual and valuable insights into the so-called normal world of “sane” humanity. In this sense, Lynda symbolizes the mad, blind seer “who alone speaks the truth but is scorned by the world as a lunatic” (Knapp 1984, p. 99). For Martha, her encounter with the “ill” Lynda marks a life-changing moment of realization: Suddenly she began to understand—she realized this was one of the moments in one’s life after a period of days, or hours, of months, of years, of handling in one’s mind, brooding about, wresting with, material—then suddenly it all begins to click into place, to make sense …. [S]he understood what it was that poor Lynda was saying, what she had been saying, trying to say, poor Lynda, for years. (Lessing 1969, p. 542) As Martha gains more understanding of Lynda’s situation, she realizes that, for the many years that she has lived in the Coldridge house, “she had been a clod, and a lump, not understanding the first thing about Lynda, which was—that she never need have been ill at all” (Lessing 1969, p. 542). Growing up, Lynda had parents who did not get along, and she acquired, “before she could talk, that sharpness, the acuteness of the child with parents at loggerheads” (Lessing 1969, p. 543). She developed an “antenna for atmospheres and tensions and what was behind words” (Lessing 1969, p. 543). When she was eleven, her mother died, and her father married a woman who Lynda sensed did not like her with the result that her distress led to her being committed to the first of several mental institutions, where she was treated with, among other things, insulin and electric shocks. Eventually, she realized that the only way to escape her confinement was to pretend she was well: “She kept quiet, paid a great deal of attention to her clothes (for she noted that ‘they’ [the psychiatrists] took this as a good sign), was beautiful, and lived in a state of terror” (Lessing 1969, p. 545).

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Exploring Inner Terrain Partly with Martha’s assistance, Lynda works to forego her medications, assist with the Coldridge household, and live a more or less normal family life (though there are setbacks). At the same time, Martha has discovered through her extrasensory encounters during Lynda’s mental breakdown, that there are realms of human experience of which she had no inkling. Finding a quiet apartment where she won’t be disturbed, she uses fasting and minimal sleep to reconnect with the unusual experiences she encountered during her time with Lynda. Her aim is “to challenge her own mind” (Lessing 1969, p. 556). She is not sure what might happen: She knew there were areas she was likely to have to go through … She was more than likely to become hysterical: she had in the past [working with Lynda]. There were rewards—oh, yes, she remembered there were, though not clearly at all, except as a fact. Looking back on the time she was first in London [her long walks], and then again on the recent time with Lynda, what she remembered was an intensity of packed experience—which she longed to have again. But there was nothing in particular that she expected. (Lessing 1969, p. 557) During the several weeks in which she explores the inner terrain of her mind, body, and feelings, Martha has a series of revelatory experiences that introduce her to depths of awareness she had first encountered during her time with Lynda’s breakdown but now become much more intense (she will later say that “it was if she had crammed a dozen years of intensive living into a few weeks”) (Lessing 1969, p. 559). She comes to a profound understanding that has a deep, multivalent meaning beyond its cliché-like verbal formulation: “Living is simply a process of developing different ‘ears’, senses, with which one ‘heard’, experienced, what one couldn’t before” (Lessing 1969, p. 225). Near the end of the novel, Martha walks along a river in the English countryside, feeling herself as “a heavy, impervious, insensitive lump, that like a planet doomed always to be dark on one side, had vision in front only …” (Lessing 1969, p. 614).10 In spite of this personal lifelessness and inertia, Martha has realized, via continuing moments of realization, that the most important effort is “that one simply has to go on, take one step after another: this process itself held the key” (Lessing 1969, p. 611). In realizing what the next step must be, Martha understands that she must continue to develop her inner sensibilities and possibilities: “She thought … Where? But where, How? Who? … Then silence and the birth of repetition. Where? Here. Here? Here, where else, you fool, you poor fool, where else has it been, ever …?” Lessing 1969, p. 615).

“There is No Substitute for Experience” Phenomenological philosopher Maurice Natanson (1962, p. 97) wrote that the achievement of imaginative literature is its portrayal of “the experiential foundation

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of our world.” In smaller or larger measure, poems, short stories, and novels reflect “the big world of real life” (Natanson 1962, p. 88). In her many novelistic and short-story accounts of human lifeworlds and homeworlds, Doris Lessing provides sensitive, in-depth descriptions of human life as it has been in the twentieth century; most of her observations and conclusions continue to have bearing on our perplexing twenty-first century time. For Lessing, human experience is the alpha and omega of all real human understanding; in The Four-Gated City, she mentions at least six times that “There is no substitute for experience.”11 In this sense, Lessing’s writings parallel the phenomenological interest in lived experience, though obviously, she gives most of her attention to specific lifeworld situations and remains submerged in the naïveté of her own natural attitude, as remarkably engaged and discerning as it is. My major aim in this article has been to draw on one novel by Lessing to illustrate one person’s process through which she realizes the homeworld of another, whereby her own homeworld shifts in supportive, unanticipated ways. Partly because she attempts to discover new ways of understanding, Martha is able to accept and experience Lynda’s considerably different homeworld. For sure, Martha makes these discoveries within the natural attitude but, even so, they have colossal significance for Lynda’s future and for the trajectory of the Coldridge household. Martha’s empathy and openness are a valuable model for phenomenologists because she demands that her understandings arise from human experience and disallow any claims or demands ungrounded in Lynda’s unusual but whole homeworld. As Steinbock (1995, pp. 223–224) explained: Not everyone participates [in a homeworld] in the same way. Since normal and abnormal, home and alien are “operative concepts”—concepts that ­occur on many levels and whose contents shift depending on the context—there are many ways in which one can be normal and abnormal, familiar and unfamiliar, acquainted and unacquainted, and still be home, other, or alien. One of Lessing’s most laudable achievements in The Four-Gated City is to present an unusual situation—Lynda’s homeworld—and to make it accessible to readers, who might in the future see “mentally ill” individuals in a more informed, supportive light. In a series of articles on “renewal” written in the early 1920s, Husserl spoke of the struggle toward a “better humanity” and a “genuine human culture” (Steinbock 1995, p. 200).12 He pointed out that, for a homeworld to continue to be a homeworld, the process requires what he called a “continual renewal,” by which he meant “to do that which is the best possible at a given time and in this way to become better and better according to the present possibility” (Husserl 1989, p. 36; quoted in Steinbock 1995, p. 203).13 In all her writings, Lessing is interested in locating both the merits and faults of human life, particularly in the current day. Though she is not a phenomenologist, she contributes to Husserl’s renewal in that she presents human worlds forthrightly and points to ways whereby those worlds might be understood and helped in ways more respectful, fair, kindly, and sustaining.

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Notes 1 This chapter was originally published in a special 2022 issue of Continental Philosophical Review, focusing on the theme “varieties of lifeworld.” The issue was edited by Stefano Marino and Iulian Apostolescu. The author thanks the editors and Springer Publishing for permission to reprint the entry here. 2 Critical discussions of lifeworld, natural attitude, homeworld, and alienworld include Carr (1970), Donohoe (2011, 2017), Dorfman (2009), Held (1986), Jacobs (2013), Landgrebe (1940), Luft (2011), Moran (2012, 2013, 2018), Seamon (2013, 2018), Steinbock (1994a, 1994b, 1995), Tani (1986), Waldenfels (1998), and Walton (1997). 3 Critical discussions of Lessing’s work include Bloom (2003), Brazil et al. (2018), Fishburn (1985), Greene (1994), Knapp (1984), Maslen (2014), Moan Rowe (1994), Pratt and Dembo (1973), Rascheke et al. (2010), Ridout and Watkins (2009), Seamon (1981, 1993, 2019), Sprague (1987), Sternberg Perrakis (1999), Topping Bazin (1980), and Watkins (2010). Greene (1994, p. 1) declares that Lessing “is quite simply the most extraordinary woman writer of our time, and one of the most controversial.” Greene (1994, p. 1) quotes British novelist Margaret Drabble who explains that Lessing is “one of the very few novelists who have refused to believe that the contemporary world is too complicated to understand.” 4 The only thinker I’m aware of who has made links between Lessing’s point of view and phenomenology is English literature scholar David Sergeant (2018, p. 115), who emphasized her concern for a dynamic seeing whereby “each step arises from but transforms the one before it.” He also highlighted her interest in wholeness as understood as “a dynamic concordance between the one and the many” (Sergeant 2018, p. 115). Also see Seamon (2019). 5 The significance of revelatory experience in modernist literature has been discussed by English scholar Morris Beja (1971), who called it epiphany, which he defined as a sudden illumination “produced by apparently trivial, even seemingly arbitrary, causes” (p. 13). In focusing on Lessing’s early writings, literature scholar Nancy Topping Bazin (1980, p. 87) pointed to the importance of moments of revelation, which she described as “a sudden, unforgettable revelation of truth through something comparable to a mystical experience.” Topping Bazin pointed out that, for Lessing, these moments are crucial because they contribute to the “potential for transforming human behavior” (Topping Bazin 1980, p. 94). More so, these experiences become “the standard by which other experiences are tested” (Topping Bazin 1980, p. 94) and “the means by which one learns what is absolutely and unquestionably right” (Topping Bazin 1980, p. 95). Significantly, these experiences cannot be “described in words” (Topping Bazin 1980, p. 96), and one of Lessing’s most admirable achievements is her exceptional ability to portray the ineffable and inexpressible in powerful written descriptions that involve readers vicariously. Topping Bazin’s interpretation of Lessing’s work dovetails with Edmund Husserl’s notion of “renewal,” which I discuss in the concluding section of this chapter. 6 Lessing (1952, 1954, 1958, 1965, 1969). All page numbers refer to the Harper Perennial reprint editions. 7 In many ways, the series’ first four novels are autobiographical; the fifth novel, The FourGated City, less so. Lessing grew up on a remote veld farm in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. In the series, however, Lessing gave the country the fictitious name of Zambesia to suggest that the white African experience she pictured was similar in all the colonial African states. She wrote: “My Zambesia is a composite of various white-dominated parts of Africa and, as I’ve since discovered, some of the characteristics of white people are those of any ruling minority whatever their colour” (Lessing, 1969, p. 667). 8 In a 1984 interview, Lessing explained: “What interests me in people is not what makes them like everyone else, and what you can expect because they had this and that upbringing, but something else that can fight them out of it or make them different” (Bertelsen 1994, p. 132).

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9 My account of Martha’s experience with Lynda’s mental breakdown is considerably ­truncated; I emphasize aspects of Martha’s experience that radically reshape her own understanding of what humanness is and dramatically reconfigure her own homeworld. 10 The novel proper ends with this scene, but the book continues with a prophetic ­appendix that describes a future worldwide apocalypse brought on by nuclear and chemical contamination of large portions of the earth, including most of Great Britain. The appendix briefly describes what happens to the novel’s major characters and indicates how clairvoyance and other “paranormal” sensibilities play an important role in guiding people to safety and helping them to restart their shattered lives. I don’t discuss the appendix here because it points toward a phenomenology of dramatically ruptured lifeworlds, natural attitudes, and homeworlds—a topic beyond the range of this article. This appendix foreshadows Lessing’s foray into space fiction, including her five-volume “Shikasta” series (1979–1983). 11 Lessing (1969, pp. 122, 218, 360, 391, 464, 572). 12 For a discussion of these articles, see Steinbock (1994b, 1995, pp. 199–208). By invitation of a Japanese journal, The Kaizo [renewal], Husserl wrote five articles, though only three were published; see Husserl (1981, 1989). On Husserl’s understanding of renewal, see Allen (1981) and Moran (2018, pp. 26–27). 13 Husserl wrote of “increasing success in actualizing genuine and enriching values …. Something new must happen. It must take place within us and be carried out by us, as members of humanity who live in this world, forming the world and being formed by it” (Husserl 1981, p. 326).

References Allen, J. (1981). Introduction to Husserl’s “renewal: Its problem and method.” In McCormick, P. and Elliston, F. A., eds., Husserl: Shorter works (pp. 324–325). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Beja, M. (1971). Epiphany in the modern novel. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Bertelsen, E. (1994). Acknowledging a new frontier [interview with Doris Lessing, originally 1984]. In Ingersoll, E. G., ed., Doris Lessing: Conversations (pp. 120–145). Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review. Bloom, H., ed. (2003). Doris Lessing. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House. Brazil, K., Sergeant, D. and Sperlinger, T., eds. (2018). Doris Lessing and the forming of history. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Carr, D. (1970). Husserl’s problematic concept of the lifeworld. American Philosophical Quarterly, 7, 331–339. Donohoe, J. (2011). The place of home. Environmental Philosophy, 8, 25–40. Donohoe, J. (2017). Hermeneutics, place, and the environment. In Janz, B., ed., Place, space and hermeneutics (pp. 427–436). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Dorfman, E. (2009). History of the lifeworld from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty. Philosophy Today, 53, 294–303. Fishburn, K. (1985). The unexpected universe of Doris Lessing. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Greene, G. (1994). Doris Lessing: The poetics of change. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Held, K. (1986). Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world. In Welton, D., ed., The new Husserl: A critical reader (pp. 32–62). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, E. (1981). Renewal: Its problem and method. In McCormick, P. and Elliston, F. A., eds., Husserl: Shorter works (pp. 326–331). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Husserl, E. (1989). Erneuerung [Renewal: Its problem and method]. In Nenon, T. and Sepp, H.-R., eds., Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), vol. XXVII. Boston: Kluwer.

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Jacobs, H. (2013). Phenomenology as a way of life? Husserl on phenomenological reflection and self-transformation. Continental Philosophy Review, 46, 349–369. Knapp, M. (1984). Doris Lessing. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing. Landgrebe, L. (1940). The world as a phenomenological problem. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1, 38–58. Lessing, D. (1952). Martha Quest. New York: Harper Perennial. Lessing, D. (1954). A proper marriage. New York: Harper Perennial. Lessing, D. (1958). A ripple from the storm. New York: Harper Perennial. Lessing, D. (1965). Landlocked. London, New York: Harper Perennial. Lessing, D. (1969). The four-gated city. New York: Harper Perennial. Luft, S. (2011). Subjectivity and lifeworld in transcendental phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Maslen, E. (2014). Doris Lessing. Tavistock, Devon, UK: Northcote/British Council. Moan Rowe, M. (1994). Women writers: Doris Lessing. London: Macmillan. Moran, D. (2012). Husserl’s crisis of the European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Moran, D. (2013). From the natural attitude to the life-world. In Embree, L. and Nenon, T., eds., Husserl’s Ideen: Contributions to phenomenology, vol. 66 (pp. 105–124). Dordrecht: Springer. Moran, D. (2018). What is the phenomenological approach? Revisiting intentional explication. Phenomenology and Mind, 15, 72–90. Natanson, M. (1962). Literature, philosophy and the social sciences. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Pratt, A. and Dembo, L. S., eds. (1973). Doris Lessing: Critical studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Rascheke, D., Perrakis, P. S. and Singer, S., eds. (2010). Doris Lessing: Interrogating the times. Athens: Ohio State University Press. Ridout, A. and Watkins, S., eds. (2009). Doris Lessing: Border crossings. London: Continuum. Seamon, D. (1981). Newcomers, existential outsiders and insiders: Their portrayal in two books by Doris Lessing. In Pocock, D.C.D., ed., Humanistic geography and literature (pp. 85–100). London: Croom Helm. Seamon, D. (1993). Different worlds coming together: A phenomenology of relationship as portrayed in Doris Lessing’s diaries of Jane Somers. In Seamon, D., ed., Dwelling, seeing and designing: Toward a phenomenological ecology (pp. 219–246). Albany: State University of New York Press. Seamon, D. (2013). Phenomenology and uncanny Homecomings: Homeworld, alienworld, and being-at-home in Alan Ball’s HBO television series, Six feet under. In Boscaljion, D., ed., Resisting the place of belonging (pp. 155–170). Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Seamon, D. (2018). Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and placemaking. New York: Routledge. Seamon, D. (2019). Atmosphere, place, and phenomenology: Depictions of London place settings in three writings by British-African Novelist Doris Lessing. In Griffero, T. and Tedeschini, M., eds., Atmosphere and aesthetics (pp. 133–146). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sergeant, D. (2018). Lessing and the scale of environmental crisis. In Brazil, K., Sergeant, D., and Sperlinger, T., eds., Doris Lessing and the forming of history (pp. 1–270). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sprague, C. (1987). Rereading Doris Lessing. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Steinbock, A. (1994a). Homelessness and the homeless movement: A clue to the problem of intersubjectivity. Human Studies, 17, 203–223.

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Steinbock, A. (1994b). The project of ethical renewal and critique: Edmund Husserl’s early phenomenology of culture. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 32, 449–464. Steinbock, A. (1995). Home and beyond: Generative phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sternberg Perrakis, P., ed. (1999). Spiritual exploration in the works of Doris Lessing. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Tani, T. (1986). Life and the life-world. Husserl Studies, 3, 57–78. Topping Bazin, N. (1980). The moment of revelation in Martha Quest and comparative moments by two modernists. Modern Fiction Studies, 2, 87–98. Waldenfels, B. (1998). Homeworld and alienworld. In Orth, W. and Lembeck, K.-H., eds., Phenomenological studies (pp. 72–88). Munich, Germany: Alber. Walton, R. J. (1997). World-experience, world-representation, and the world as an idea. Husserl Studies, 14, 1–20. Watkins, S. (2010). Doris Lessing: Contemporary world writers. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

18 LOOKING AT A PHOTOGRAPH André Kertész’s 1928 Meudon: Interpreting Aesthetic Experience Phenomenologically

In this chapter, I draw on a photograph by the eminent Hungarian-American photographer André Kertész (1894–1985) to point toward a phenomenology of aesthetic encounter.1 Shown in figure 1, this photograph is Kertész’s frequently published 1928 image of Meudon, a Parisian, working-class suburb (Figure 18.1)2. Drawing on my own interpretive experience of the photograph as well as student responses, I delineate a continuum of lived encounter ranging from partial seeing to deeper aesthetic insight. Making use of the progressively intensive designations of philosopher Henri Bortoft (2012), I highlight a spectrum of aesthetic experience that extends from limited assimilation to a more comprehensive and engaged participatory understanding. The key question I address relates to the range of aesthetic experience that Kertész’s photograph evokes. What modes of encounter and understanding does Meudon afford, and do those modes point to any broader phenomenological themes or patterns? This question points toward a hermeneutic phenomenology of the aesthetic encounter, and the complex matter of how and in what lived ways this photograph (or any artwork) is experienced and understood (Davey 1999). From the very first moment I saw Meudon almost 30 years ago, I was struck by how Kertész was able to portray visually a gathering of individual lifeworlds coalescing in the single lifeworld of this one stretch of nondescript street in a Parisian suburb. Shortly, I return to a lifeworld interpretation of the photograph but, first, I examine student responses to Meudon. What do others “see” the first time they encounter this photograph?

Student Responses to Meudon Devising means to get at individuals’ aesthetic and emotional reactions to an artwork is difficult (Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson, 1990; Elkins, 2001). One simple device is a seeing exercise I use to introduce students to phenomenological looking DOI: 10.4324/9781003328223-21

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André Kertész, Meudon, 1928. Copyright © Estate of André Kertész. All rights reserved. FIGURE 18.1 

and describing. I provide a series of distinguished photographers’ images for which I ask the students to look at and generate (as quickly and as viscerally as possible) a list of single words and short phrases that describe their experience of looking at and seeing. I provide the students only about 30 seconds per image so that they will more likely record immediate “sightings” of what they see. My instructions run as follows: “Don’t think about the photograph—just jot down what comes. And don’t worry about whether what you’re seeing or saying is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. There are no correct or incorrect sightings—what you see is as correct as what anyone else sees.” From a phenomenological perspective, the aim of the exercise is to facilitate what phenomenologist Herbert Spiegelberg (1982, p. 680) described as “the pristine innocence of first seeing.” Table 18.1 presents 74 student responses to the Meudon photograph. These descriptions were provided in January 2013, by second-year Kansas State University

262  Places, Lived Emplacement, and Presence TABLE 18.1  Descriptors of Meudon provided by 74 Kansas State University Architecture students,

January 2013; arranged by number of words and phrases provided in students’ descriptions. One Descriptor (4) 1. street 2. industrial 3. forlorn 4. train Two Descriptors (8) 5. dirty, old 6. tense, dramatic 7. industrial, poor 8. train, old town 9. shadowy, industrial 10. rundown, industry 11. factories, industrialization 12. clustered, broken Three Descriptors (10) 13. wet, road, train 14. busy, old, dirty 15. urban, rundown, industrial 16. industrial, busy, depression 17. arcade, aqueduct, dissolution 18. activity, people, old 19. misplaced, destruction, dismal 20. wreckage, construction, industrial 21. terrible, hope, despair 22. industrialism, modernism, industry

Four Descriptors (20) 23. train, people, destroyed, dirty 24. messy, empty, tall, old 25. busy, town, historic, gray 26. active, growing, lively, dirty 27. hardship, work, industrial, dirty 28. loud, dirty, hectic, unsafe 29. hat, chimney, bridge, store 30. arches, village, people, train 31. chaos, arch, contrast, war zone 32. dump, depressed, motion, gray 33. train, bridge, industrial, poverty 34. train, town, construction, journey 35. old, congested, dirty, unproportional 36. damaged, smoke, ruins, displacement 37. houses, construction, alleyways, bridge 38. sprawl, chaotic, downtown, urbanization 39. arch, left building, train, man with package 40. slums, war zone, pollution, depression 41. industrial, bricks, train, progress 42. bridge, train, man, newspaper

Five Descriptors (15) 43. ruins, hat, train, people, building 44. chaos, madness, confused, hurt, anger 45. overseas, old, building, bearing, people 46. busy, fast, work, winter, neighbors 47. broken, narrow, tall, weight, scale 48. ruins, dead, disintegrating, chaos, dirty 49. train, arch, building, construction, hat 50. grungy, smoke, invention, progress, hope 51. train, industry, depleted, dirty, factory 52. arch, train, people, men, chimney 53. dismal, train, dirty, movement, humanity 54. busy, rundown, hazy, hustle, bustle, 55. train, smoke, man and package, olden, shabby 56. city, busy, train, dirty, mismatched 57. cityscape, train, buildings, man and package, friends walking Six Descriptors (8) 58. bridge, arch, street, bustle, train, top hat 59. industrial, dirty, smoke, package, city, railway 60. train, dirty, man in hat, old, bridge, windows 61. urban, steam, industrial, man-made, hard, rough 62. destruction, pieces, tall, narrow, weight, heavy 63. train, smoke, buildings, people, bridge, destruction 64. industry, dirt, old, workforce, construct, development 65. rundown, industrial, dirty, old, historic, working class Seven Descriptors (6) 66. train, danger, chaos, building, dirty, dark, smoke 67. train, bridge, smoke, city, buildings, people, construction 68. arch, people, window, brick, train, smoke, bundle 69. harsh, imposing, towering, enclosing, dirty, dark, deprived 70. urban, ruin, wrong, train, pollution, project, discrepancies 71. old, train, city, raised path, aqueduct, train, package Eight Descriptors (1) 72. bridge, construction, train, business, alley, top hats, steam, brick buildings Nine Descriptors (1) 73. industry, bridge, urban, confused, short, small, waste, gray, dirty Ten Descriptors (1) 74. old, smoke, road, men, buildings, windows, train, arch, brick, dirt

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architecture students taking my required lecture course, “The Designed Environment and Society.” Most of these students were 19 or 20 years old and about half each male and female. In considering aggregate counts of the photographic descriptions, one notes that the 74 students provided a total of 322 words or short phrases to describe the photograph for an average of 4.35 descriptors and a median of four descriptors per student. Four students provided only one descriptor, and three provided eight, nine, or ten. Of the 322 descriptors, there were 135 unique words and phrases, a count indicating that many students provided the same descriptors. As indicated by the word cloud of Figure 18.2, the most frequent descriptor was “train” (used 29 times), followed by “industry” or “industrial” (19 times); “dirty” (18 times); “old” (14 times); “bridge” (11 times), “people,” and “building” or “buildings” (10 times); “smoke” (9 times); and “construction” (8 times). In consolidating the descriptions indicated by the 74 student responses, I identified three major categories, that is, descriptors relating to: • material and environmental qualities (e.g., “brick,” “train,” “bridge,” “street,” “industrial”); • human and place activity (e.g., “people,” “busy,” “hustle and bustle,” “friends walking in distance”); • an evaluation of the scene and situation (e.g., “dirty,” “old,” “dramatic,” “forlorn,” “rundown,” “messy,” “war zone,” “depressed,” “hope among pit of despair,” “chaotic,” “hurt,” “falling apart”).

dump

sprawl

windows

industrialism

These three descriptive categories are revealing in two ways. First, one is struck by the many evaluative descriptors that picture Meudon in a negative light. “Dirty” and “old” are most often used (18 and 14 times, respectively), but there are many other depictions ranging from environmental unpleasantness, on the one hand (“forlorn,”

destroyed wreckage dirt journey grey arches dark

depressed

people lively

buildings modernism

chimney

busy

loud brick

awful

urban

broken

trrible

shadowy

construction

hardship messy activity empty misplaced factories active congested growing unproportional motion urbanization

FIGURE 18.2 

displacement

zone gray

train bridge street

town

cold pit

dirty

smoke

ruins

work

bustle weight

arch

war

rundown

tall

narrow

old industrial city

poor

road

hat industry

destruction

arcade

wet

chaos

depression hope

dismal

package alley building

village

forlorn

progress

houses poverty

damaged contrast despair tense

steam

downtown

alleyways capitalism unsafe industrialization chaotic clustered hectic confused historinc dramatic dissolution aquedust store

pollution

Word cloud of students’ single-word descriptors of Kertész’s Meudon.

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“terrible,” “unsafe,” “depressed,” “war zone”); to environmental disorder, on the other (“chaotic,” “broken,” “falling apart,” “dead,” “depleted,” “rundown”). Second, and perhaps more striking, is the finding that few of the descriptions relate to the experience of the photograph itself. Some of the responses are probably evoked by the aesthetic power of the image (“dramatic,” “contrast, “cityscape,” “hope,” “humanity,” “front and back mismatched,” “imposing,” “discrepancies”). Most entries, however, immediately move to the place scene itself and delineate either physical and environmental features of Meudon, or reactive descriptors, mostly negative or entropic. In shifting attention from single descriptors to students’ descriptive clusters, one notes a related pattern. Some of the descriptive chains focus entirely on material and environmental qualities—e.g., “train, arch, building, construction, hat” (no. 49) or “old, smoke, road, men, buildings, windows, train, arch, brick, dirt” (no. 74). Other descriptors incorporate only evaluative qualities—e.g., “dirty, old” (no. 5) or “misplaced, destruction, dismal” (no. 19). A third group of descriptors incorporate both material and evaluative qualities—e.g., “train, people, destroyed, dirty, cold” (no. 23): or “dismal, train, dirty, movement, humanity” (no. 53). In terms of evocative imagery, five of the most expressive descriptions are: • • • • •

no. 21—“terrible, hope, despair”; no. 35—“old, congested, dirty, unproportional” [sic]; no. 44—“chaos, madness, confused, hurt, anger”; no. 48—“ruins, dead, chaos, dirty”; no. 69—“harsh, imposing, towering, enclosing, dirty, dark, deprived.”

Most strikingly, of the 74 responses, there is only one that seems fully relatable to the aesthetic aspect of the photograph rather than to the physical or expressive qualities of Meudon as a place. This description is no. 6, in which the student succinctly describes the photograph as “tense, dramatic,” a depiction intimating the mysterious ordinariness of the Meudon scene. Other than this one response, the student descriptions give much more attention to Meudon as a place rather than to the aesthetic experience of Meudon as an artistic photograph. Does this emphasis on situational context rather than on aesthetic experience indicate that these students are insensitive or uneducated aesthetically? That the photograph itself is to blame and without aesthetic power or presence? That delineating in words the non-verbal quality of aesthetic encounter is inappropriate to art works? I think there is another way to understand the findings here but, before I bring that understanding forward, I highlight my responses to the Meudon photograph.

Meudon and Lifeworld Table 18.2 presents my two encounters with Meudon. I first discovered this photograph in 1986 when I began studying Kertész’s oeuvre (Seamon 1990). As a way to familiarize myself with his photographs, I set myself to write visceral reactions to images from throughout his professional career. Coincidentally, one of the

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photographs I wrote about was Meudon. As preparation for writing this article, I produced the second description in Table 18.2, though I had forgotten I had written the earlier account and only ran across it accidentally when I decided to review my old files relating to Kertész. In contrast to the student descriptions of the photograph, what strikes me about my two accounts is that they mostly ignore the specific physical and evaluative aspects of Meudon as a place and instead emphasize the photograph’s power in portraying lifeworlds visually. Immediately, Meudon reminded me of phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schutz’s description of lifeworld: “That province of reality which the wide-awake and normal adult simply takes for granted in the attitude of common sense” (Schutz and Luckmann 1973, p. 3). For me, Meudon is a visual introduction to phenomenology in that one not only encounters a world’s lived moment but also TABLE 18.2  Author’s two descriptions (1986 and 2013) of André Kertész’s 1928

photograph Meudon. 1. Written summer, 1986 The critics give this photograph much attention, though it might at first glance be considered ordinary—even uninteresting and pedestrian. The key to the photograph’s power for me is many worlds. Kertész manages to show in one time and place how so many worlds can be going on: the world of the train passing over the trestle; the world of the man in the foreground, carrying some sort of painting or parcel; he seems the most alone of the people in the photograph. There are other worlds: three men walking at the far end of the street; a woman and girl on the left sidewalk; three women walking behind man. I wish I could capture the sense of world here. It has to do with time passing: something like that T. S. Elliot poem about people just doing their daily routines as the world suddenly comes to an end. It is that: multiple worlds in time, daily passing—a series of events and lives and people-in-place—their lives unfolding but not necessarily related or connected. Just present in time and place in a unique moment that Kertész literally “captures.” 2. Written summer, 2013 If I am asked to generate a list of words and phrases for Meudon, I write “life, people, train, trestle, coming, going, together, a moment of life, a moment in time, a lifeworld of place and lifeworlds of people.” Why does this photo remain so alluring to me? I think because it draws one into this world and these worlds. We have one world but multiple worlds: (1) man with package; (2) three men walking at far end of street; (3) woman and girl on sidewalk, left; (4) three women behind man with package; (5) train headed elsewhere. Perhaps the photo says that we are all apart and a part of? There is a wholeness to the scene in spite of the separated people and lifeworlds. In spite of the physical apartness among all these people, there seems to be a spatial collapse in that the train seems as much a part of this place as the people actually there. There is the sense that the lived quality of all these different worlds coalesces into a moment that captures the unfolding of each personal life and the history of Meudon as a place. There is also the quality of lived space whereby the materially separable parts of the place all cohere and are whole existentially. The lifeworld as time/place taken-for-grantedness is portrayed photographically. We see “lifeworld.”

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senses the habitual unfolding of this world in moments before and after. One recognizes the lifeworld of this stretch of street and the lifeworlds of the several people carrying out typical lives (or atypical lives—we can’t know just from this one image). Though he knew nothing directly about phenomenology or the notion of lifeworld, Kertész offers in Meudon a photographic rendition of what phenomenologist Edward Casey (2009, p. 327) referred to when he wrote that “lived bodies belong to places and help to constitute them” just as, simultaneously, “places belong to lived bodies and depend on them.” Through picturing an instant in the mundane history of a place, Kertész illustrates the phenomenological principle where individual bodily actions and encounters contribute to the particular constitution of a place as, at the same time, those actions and encounters contribute to the person or group’s sense of lived involvement and identification with that place. As Casey (2009, p. 327) explained, lived bodies and places “interanimate each other.” This interanimation is significant because it suggests that habitual, unself-conscious corporeal familiarity is one way by which individuals and groups actualize a taken-for-granted involvement with place (Seamon 2013b, 2014).

Reconciling Encounters? At least for me, much of the artistic power of Meudon is its photographic and visual portrayal of Casey’s interanimation of lived bodies and lived places. Clearly, there are other ways to express the aesthetic force of the photograph but, however one provides an explication, one can agree with critics who recognize Meudon as one of the great images in twentieth-century photography (e.g., Greenough, Gurbo, and Kennel 2005, pp. 75–76; Westerbeck and Meyerowitz 1994, pp. 174–175). The question I ask next is how my interpretation of the photograph can be so different from that of my students. Is there some way to locate this difference phenomenologically so that both modes of “seeing and describing” can be placed experientially and hermeneutically? There are several phenomenological pathways for interpreting these contrasting accounts (e.g., Berleant 1971; Cloonan 1979; Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson 1990; Davey 1999; Dufrenne 1953/1973; Elkins 2001; van Manen 2014). Here, I draw on philosopher Henri Bortoft’s continuum of seeing and understanding marked out progressively by modes of encounter that he identifies as assimilation, appropriation, and participatory understanding (Bortoft 2012, pp. 106–107). Each of these ways of seeing and interpreting generates and responds to contrasting ways of understanding. I argue here that the student descriptions of Meudon relate more to Bortoft’s assimilation, whereas my descriptions relate more to participatory understanding. How does Bortoft describe these modes? In an assimilation mode, one encounters an unfamiliar text (like the Meudon photograph) and interprets it in terms familiar to the interpreter. In other words, the interpreter understands the text via things and thematics that he or she already knows. This mode of seeing is present in the majority of the student descriptions of Meudon: The students see an old, decrepit streetscape having little to do with today’s world. Words like “industry,”

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“smoke,” “forlorn” and so forth suggest that the students relate the image to a past historical time that has few significant connections with their own present-day lives or experiences. For most students, the photograph appears to work more as a historical vignette than as an independent artwork with aesthetic and artistic force. Opposite of assimilation is what Bortoft speaks of as participatory understanding, whereby we accept that we may not know what the text is about, but we make an effort to be open and allow its potential meanings to work on us. We seek to be receptive to unsuspected sightings and understandings—Spiegelberg’s “pristine innocence of first seeing.” As Bortoft (2012, p. 106) explains, We find ourselves being addressed by the text and experience a reversal in the direction of meaning over which we have no control. This is no longer a subject-centred experience, but one in which the subject is transformed by the encounter with meaning instead of using it for her own purposes. This usually begins with a failure to understand. We are “pulled up short by the text,” as [hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg] Gadamer [1989, p. 168] puts it, when we feel that we cannot understand it, or that it seems to be saying something unexpected …. For me, working with Kertész’s photographs has involved a deepening recognition of their visual and aesthetic insights. In this sense, I have worked to hold contact with Bortoft’s participatory understanding. When I first discovered Kertész’s work in the early 1980s, I felt there was something profoundly significant in the way his photographs somehow spoke phenomenologically. At first, I could not see what this significance was, but I worked, mostly through carefully looking at and writing about specific images, to encounter their presence. Over time, I concluded that Kertész can be labeled a “photographer of the lifeworld” because so many of his images powerfully present unique moments whereby ordinary (and occasionally extra-ordinary) worlds come forth (Seamon 1990). I realize this is only my interpretation, and I hope it has been guided by a progressively strengthening participatory understanding of which Bortoft speaks. In this regard, he quotes hermeneuticist Richard Palmer’s definition of phenomenology, which emphasizes a way of looking whereby the phenomenologist is gently engaged by the phenomenon, the reality of which can gradually come to reveal itself: [Phenomenology entails] letting things become manifest as what they are, without forcing our own categories on them … [T]he very essence of true understanding is that of being led by the power of the thing to manifest itself … Phenomenology is a means of being led by the phenomenon through a way of access genuinely belonging to it … Such a method … is not grounded in human consciousness and human categories but in the manifestness of the thing encountered, the reality that comes to meet us. (Quoted in Bortoft 2012, p. 105; originally in Palmer 1969, p. 128)

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Widening and Deepening Interpretation In the interpretation of Meudon offered here, I have not discussed Bortoft’s third mode of encountering the text, which he labels as appropriation and defines as a way of interpreting through which the interpreter recognizes the freshness or unusualness of the text but converts that uniqueness into an understanding that only arises from and serves his or her own personal concerns. These concerns may or may not appropriately relate to the author’s original aims or to the potential meanings of the text. As Bortoft (2012, p. 106) explains: We make [the text] our own, so that it is no longer just something left over from the past which is to be reconstructed in the present, but which is used by being accommodated to the present in order to enlarge our understanding of our own interests …. In appropriation, the subject makes the meaning her own, without reducing it to what she already understands (which would be assimilation), but she does so only in a way that expands rather than transforms her understanding. In other words, in appropriation, the self-centred subject controls use to which the meaning is put, and hence understanding is under the control of the subject. In relation to the interpretation of Meudon I have proposed here, one might argue that my understanding involves appropriation rather than participatory understanding, since I’ve described the photograph largely in the phenomenological terms of lifeworld. In responding to this concern, I would first make the point that Bortoft’s modes of textual encounter involve a lived continuum—that none of the three are “pure” but, experientially, overlap and shift as the interpreter practices and matures in his or her interpretive sensibility. In addition, different interpreters will discover different meanings that are “the work’s own possibilities of being that emerge as the work explicates itself, as it were, in the variety of its aspects” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 118; quoted in Bortoft, 2012, p. 109). In this sense, there is not one legitimate interpretation but many. Over time, the same interpreter may interpret the same text in different ways. Over time, the same text may be interpreted by different interpreters in different, even contradictory, ways. In this chapter, I have contrasted my interpretation of Kertész’s Meudon with those of my students because this contrast offers a real-world context in which to illustrate Bortoft’s assimilation, appropriation, and participatory understanding. His identification of these three modes is useful because it helps one to understand how seeing and interpretation can vary so much from interpreter to interpreter, and why some interpretations seem more attuned to the text than others. A major aim in my teaching is to introduce new ways of looking and seeing and to prompt students to realizing that one’s intensity of seeing, interpreting, and understanding can always be widened and deepened. I introduce students to looking and seeing via the “short-descriptor” exercise used for Meudon because it provides a helpful start for students’ becoming more engaged with what they see and understand. Aesthetic

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experience is difficult to describe directly, and this exercise offers one simple, accessible means to articulate what one encounters.3 This looking-and-seeing exercise is one of several that I introduce in my courses. Once students gain facility with describing photographs via words and phrases, I  then introduce a second exercise in which students look at other photographs with the aim of describing more fully what they see and experience, first, in full sentences; and, later, in full paragraphs. Once they have practice with this more comprehensive explication, I then have them explore specific phenomena and texts—for example, the appearance of colors as seen through a prism (Bortoft 1996; Goethe 1970; Seamon 2005; Seamon and Zajonc 1998); or the way that a building evokes particular expressions of motion, weight, and substance via its floors, walls, and roofs (Thiis-Evensen 1989). My broadest aim is to introduce phenomenological and hermeneutical understanding via experiential exercises that evoke looking, seeing, and awareness in ways whereby there is a progressive movement from Bortoft’s assimilation, through appropriation, toward a more deeply engaged participatory understanding. By contrasting my interpretation of Kertész’s Meudon with that of my students, I have sought to indicate the lived nature of these three modes of encounter as Bortoft presents them. The interpretations offered involve only one text and, therefore, my claims regarding these modes of encounter are tentative and open to additional interpretive evidence. In spite of these limitations, I hope my commentary offers some insight into why looking, seeing, and understanding can involve such a wide range of interpretive possibilities. Ultimately, the aim of phenomenological and hermeneutic study is to find ways in which the phenomenon or text can be given space to be as fully present as possible. Bortoft describes this potential clarity and depth of encounter as an interpretive reversal in which, rather than our participating in and appropriating the text’s meaning, that meaning participates in and appropriates us. He calls this experience an “event of understanding,” which both sustains and is sustained by a “hermeneutic reversal.” He writes: Understanding which participates in meaning clearly goes beyond both assimilation and appropriation …. We do not understand in a vacuum. We always already understand, and it is this already-understanding that is “pulled up short” by the text and found to be inadequate. The text calls our already-understanding into question, with the effect that, when the meaning of the work participates us [sic], our understanding is transformed—not consolidated or expanded—so that we understand differently …. In the event of understanding … it is not so much we who appropriate the meaning, but we ourselves who are appropriated by the meaning of the work. So we are participated by the meaning that we participate in—this is the hermeneutic reversal. (Bortoft 2012, pp. 106–107)

270  Places, Lived Emplacement, and Presence

Notes 1 This chapter was originally published in Academic Quarter [Akademisk Kvarter], vol. 9 (Autumn 2014), pp. 322–335. The author thanks Ann Starbæk Bager, head of the editorial board, for permission to include the chapter here. 2 Scholarly discussions and interpretations of Kertész’s work include Borhan (1994), Frizot and Wanaverbecq (2010), Greenough, Gurbo, and Kennel (2005), Phillips, Travis, and Naef (1985), Scott (2007), Seamon (1990), and Westerbeck and Meyerowitz (1994). 3 I was introduced to this “short-descriptor” exercise in a seminar taught by Henri Bortoft, who explored a wide range of practical means for intensifying the encounter with phenomena, including the remarkable phenomenological methods of Goethean science (Bortoft 1996, 2012, 2020; Seamon 2005, 2013a; Seamon and Zajonc 1998). The aim of the short-descriptor exercise is to lay out the terrain of the phenomenon as it is as a whole. The assumption is that single words and short phrases provide an interpretive means for “sighting” and understanding the particular phenomenon—in the present case, Kertész’s Meudon. One useful variation on this exercise is to envision the phenomenon or text (e.g., Meudon) as a spiral on which one places—closer to and farther away from the spiral’s center—each word and phrase. This spiral exercise is useful in that it provides an interpretive means to “sight” the more and less central aspects of the phenomenon’s constitution or the text’s meanings.

References Berleant, A. (1971). The aesthetic field. Springfield, IL: C. C. Thomas. Borhan, P., ed. (1994). André Kertész: His life and work. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Bortoft, H. (1996). The wholeness of nature. Edinburgh: Floris Books. Bortoft, H. (2012). Taking appearance seriously. Edinburgh: Floris Books. Bortoft, H. (2020). Seeing and understanding holistically: Goethean science and the wholeness of nature. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 31(2), 20–36. Casey, E. (2009). Getting back into place, 2nd edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cloonan, T. F. (1979). Phenomenological psychological reflections on the mission of art. In Giorgi, A., Knowles, R. and Smith, D. L., eds., Duquesne studies in phenomenological psychology, vol. 3 (pp. 245–277). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Robinson, R. E. (1990). The art of seeing. Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum Press. Davey, N. (1999). The hermeneutics of seeing. In Heywood, I. and Sandywell, B., eds., Interpreting visual culture (pp. 3–29). London: Routledge. Dufrenne, M. (1973). The phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press [originally 1953]. Elkins, J. (2001). Pictures and tears. New York: Routledge. Frizot, M. and Wanaverbecq, A.-L. (2010). André Kertész. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gadamer, H. (1989). Truth and method. London: Sheed and Ward. Goethe, W. von (1970). Theory of colours. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press [originally 1810]. Greenough, S., Gurbo, R. and Kennel, S. (2005). André Kertész. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press/National Gallery of Art. Palmer, R. (1969). Hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Phillips, S. S., Travis, D. and Naef, W. J. (1985). André Kertész of Paris and New York. New York: Thames and Hudson. Schutz, A. and Luckmann, T. (1973). The structures of the life-world. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Scott, C. (2007). Street photography. New York: I.B. Tauris. Seamon, D. (1990). Awareness and reunion: A phenomenology of the person-environment relationship as portrayed in the New York photographs of André Kertész. In Zonn, L., ed., Place images in the media (pp. 87–107). Totowa, NJ: Roman and Littlefield. Seamon, D. (2005). Goethe’s way of science as a phenomenology of nature. Janus Head, 8 (1): 86–101. Seamon, D. (2013a). Encountering the whole: Remembering Henri Bortoft (1938–2012). Phenomenology & Practice, 7 (2), 100–107. Seamon, D. (2013b). Lived bodies, place, and phenomenology: Implications for human rights and environmental justice. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 4 (2) 143–166 [Ch. 2, this volume]. Seamon, D. (2014). Place attachment and phenomenology: The synergistic dynamism of place. In Manzo, L. and Devine-Wright, P., eds., Place attachment: Advances in theory, methods and research (pp. 11–22). New York: Routledge. Seamon, D. and Zajonc, A., eds. (1998). Goethe’s way of science: A phenomenology of nature. Albany: State University of New York Press. Spiegelberg, H. (1982). The phenomenological movement. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Thiis-Evensen, T. (1989). Archetypes in architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Manen, M. (2014). The phenomenology of practice. London: Routledge. Westerbeck, C. and Meyerowitz, J. (1994). Bystander: A history of street photography. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

APPENDIX Other Selected Works by David Seamon (1978–2022)

Books 2018 2001

1998 1993 1985

1984

1980 1979

Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds and placemaking. London: Routledge. Frederic Church’s Olana: Architecture and landscape as art, main essay by J. A. Ryan, with contributing essays by F. Kelly, D. Seamon, and K. Zukowski; D. Seamon, general editor. Hendersonville, New York: Black Dome Press. Goethe’s way of science: A phenomenology of nature, co-edited with A. Zajonc. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Dwelling, seeing, and designing: Toward a phenomenological ecology, editor. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Dwelling, place and environment: Toward a phenomenology of person and world, co-edited with R. Mugerauer. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985; reprinted by Columbia University Press, New York, 1989; reprinted with a new editors’ introduction by Krieger Press, Malabar, Florida, 2000. Environmental perception and behavior: Inventory and prospect, co-edited with T. Saarinen and J. Sell. Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Geography Series, No. 209. The Human experience of space and place, co-edited with A. Buttimer. London: Croom Helm; reprinted, Routledge “Revivals,” 2015. A geography of the lifeworld: Movement, rest and encounter. London: Croom Helm; New York: St. Martin’s Press; reprinted, Routledge “Revivals,” 2015.

Appendix  273

Journal Articles and Chapters in Edited Collections 2022 2021

2021

2021

2021 2020

2019

2019

2017

2017

2017

2016

2016

2016

Architecture and phenomenology, in D. Lu, ed., Routledge companion to contemporary architectural history (pp. 218–229). London: Routledge. Humanistic geography, encyclopedia entry co-authored with T. Larsen in D. Richardson, ed., International encyclopedia of geography [online]. NY: Wiley. DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0412.pub2. Place attachment and phenomenology: The dynamic complexity of place, in L. Manzo and P. Devine-Wright, eds., Place attachment: Advances in theory, methods and research, 2nd edition (pp. 29–44). New York: Routledge. Sense of place, encyclopedia entry in D. Richardson, ed., International encyclopedia of geography [online]. NY: Wiley. DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352. wbieg2116. Setting forth a canon of the Gurdjieff work, Postscripts, 12, 261–387. Understanding the esoteric through progressive awareness: The case of Gurdjieff’s law of three as elaborated by J.G. Bennett’s six triads, Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, 20, 81–107. Atmosphere, place, and phenomenology: Depictions of London place settings in three writings by British-African novelist Doris Lessing, in T. Griffero and M. Tedeschini, eds., Atmosphere and aesthetics (pp. 133–146). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Christopher Alexander’s theory of wholeness as a tetrad of creative activity: The examples of A new theory of urban design and the nature of order, Urban Science, 3 (2), 1–13. doi:10.3390/urbansci3020046. A phenomenological and hermeneutic reading of Rem Koolhaas’s Seattle Central Library, in R. Conway Dalton and C. Hölscher, eds., Take one building: Interdisciplinary research perspectives on the Seattle Central Library (pp. 67–94). London: Routledge. Hermeneutics and architecture: Buildings-in-themselves and interpretive trustworthiness, in Bruce Janz, ed., Hermeneutics, space, and place (pp. 347–360). New York: Springer. “Seeing the world with fresh eyes”: Understanding aesthetic experience via Gurdjieff’s phenomenology of human being, Religion and the Arts, 21, 150–175. Christopher Alexander and a phenomenology of wholeness, in K. Pontikis and Y. Rofè, eds., In pursuit of a living architecture: Continuing Christopher Alexander’s quest for a humane and sustainable building culture (pp. 50–66). Champaign, Illinois: Common Ground. Qualitative approaches to environment-behavior research: Understanding environmental and place experiences, meanings, and actions, co-­authored with H. Gill in R. Gifford, ed., Research methods for environmental psychology (pp. 115–135). New York: Wiley/Blackwell. Thinking, longing, and nearness: In memoriam Bernd Jager (1931–2015). Phenomenology & Practice, 10 (1), 48–59.

274  Appendix

2015

2015

2015

2015 2014

2014

2013 2013

2012

2012

2011

2010

2010 2010 2009

Lived emplacement and the locality of being: A return to humanistic geography? in S. Aitken and G. Valentine, eds., Approaches to human geography, 2nd edn. (pp. 35–48). London: Sage. The Phenomenological contribution to interior design education and research: Place, environmental embodiment, and architectural sustenance, in J. Asher Thompson and N. H. Blossom, eds., The Handbook of Interior Design (pp. 417–431). Oxford, UK: Wiley/Blackwell. Situated cognition and the phenomenology of place: Lifeworld, environmental embodiment, and immersion-in-world, Cognitive Processes, 16, 389–392. DOI 10.1007/s10339-015-0678-9. Understanding place holistically: Cities, synergistic relationality, and space syntax, Journal of Space Syntax, 6, 32–43. Physical and virtual environments: Meanings of place and space, in B. Schell & M. Scaffa, eds., Willard & Spackman’s Occupational Therapy, 12th edn. (pp. 202–214). Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams & Wilkens. Place attachment and phenomenology: The synergistic dynamism of place, in L. Manzo and P. Divine-Wright, eds., Place attachment: Advances in theory, methods and research (pp. 11–22). New York: Routledge. Encountering the Whole: Remembering Henri Bortoft (1938–2012), in Phenomenology & Practice, 7 (2): 100–107. Environmental embodiment, Merleau-Ponty, and Bill Hillier’s theory of space syntax: Toward a phenomenology of people-in-place, in R. Bhatt, ed., Rethinking aesthetics: The role of body in design (pp. 204–213). New York: Routledge. “A jumping, joyous urban jumble”: Jane Jacobs’s death and life of great American cities as a phenomenology of urban place, Journal of Space Syntax, 3 (fall), 139–149. Place, place identity, and phenomenology, in H. Casakin, ed., The role of place identity in the perception, understanding, and design of the built environment (pp. 3–21). London: Betham Science Publishers. Seeing and animating the city: A phenomenological ecology of natural and built worlds, in I. Stefanovic, ed., The natural city (pp. 231–256). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis in the 21st century: Examples from American writer Louis Bromfield. In L. Embree, ed., Phenomenology 2010 (pp. 225–243). Bucharest: Zeta Books. Phenomenology. In B. Warf, ed., Encyclopedia of geography, vol. 4 (pp. 2165– 2169). London: Sage. Relph, Edward (1944–). In B. Warf, ed., Encyclopedia of geography, vol. 5 (pp. 2410–2411). London: Sage. Existential geography, co-authored with J. Sowers. In R. Kitchin and N. Thrift, eds. International encyclopedia of human geography. vol. 3 (pp. 666–671), Oxford: Elsevier.

Appendix  275

2008

2007

2007

2006

2005 2004

2002 2001

2000

2000

1997 1996

1994 1994

Place and placelessness by Edward C. Relph, co-authored with J. Sowers. In P. Hubbard, R. Kitchen, and G. Valentine, eds., Key texts in human geography (pp. 43–51). London: Sage. A lived hermetic of people and place: Phenomenology and space syntax, in A. Sema Kubat, ed., Proceedings, 6th International Space Syntax Symposium, vol. 1, pp. 1–16. Istanbul: ITU, Faculty of Architecture. Karsten Harries’ natural symbols as a means for interpreting architecture: Inside and outside in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea, co-authored with E. Mulugeta Assefa. In Wolkenkuckucksheim, 12(1), 1–7. Interconnections, relationships, and environmental wholes: A Phenomenological ecology of natural and built worlds, in M. Geib, ed., To renew the face of the earth: Phenomenology and ecology (pp. 53–86). Pittsburgh: Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University. Goethe’s way of science as a phenomenology of nature, Janus Head, 8 (1), 86–10. Grasping the dynamism of urban place: Contributions from the work of Christopher Alexander, Bill Hillier, and Daniel Kemmis, in T. Mels, ed., Reanimating Places (pp. 123–145). Burlington, Vt: Ashgate. Physical comminglings: Body, habit, and space transformed into place, Occupational Therapy Journal of Research, 22 (winter), 42S–51S. Olana after Frederic Church, co-authored with K. Zukowski, in Frederic Church’s Olana: Architecture and landscape as art (pp. 67–74). Hendersonville, NY: Black Dome Press. Concretizing Heidegger’s notion of dwelling: The contributions of Thomas Thiis-Evensen and Christopher Alexander, in E. Führ, ed., Building and dwelling [Bauen und wohnen] (pp. 189–202). Munich: Waxmann Verlag GmbH. A way of seeing people and place: Phenomenology in environment-­ behavior research. In S. Wapner, J. Demick, T. Yamamoto, and H Minami, eds., Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research (pp. 157–178). New York: Plenum. Behavioral geography [and Phenomenology], in L. Embree, ed., Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (pp. 53–56). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. To open feeling: Phenomenology, emotional experience, and humane habitats, Laboratorio di Geografia e Letteratura [Studies in Geography and Literature], 1 (1), 15–21. The life of the place: A phenomenological commentary on Bill Hillier’s theory of space syntax, Nordisk Arkitekturforskning, 7 (1), 35–48. A Thiis-Evensen interpretation of two churches by Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, co-authored with Y. Lin, in R. M. Feldman, G. Hardie, and D. G. Saile, eds., Power by design: EDRA Proceedings 24 (pp. 130–142). Oklahoma City: Environmental Design Research Association.

276  Appendix

1993

1992

1991 1990

1990 1989 1987 1987

1987

1987 1985

1984 1984

1984 1984

Different worlds coming together: A phenomenology of relationship as portrayed in Doris Lessing’s Diaries of Jane Somers, in D. Seamon, ed., Dwelling, seeing and designing: Toward a phenomenological ecology (pp. 219– 246). Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. A diary interpretation of place: Artist Frederic Church’s Olana, in D. G. Janelle, ed., Geographical Snapshots of North America (pp. 78–82). New York: Guilford Press. Humanistic geography, in G. S. Dunbar, ed., Modern Geography: An Encyclopedic Survey (pp. 81–82). New York: Garland Publishing. Awareness and reunion: A phenomenology of the person-environment relationship as portrayed in the New York photographs of André Kertész, in L. Zonn, ed., Place images in the media (pp. 87–107). Totowa, New Jersey: Roman and Littlefield. Gurdjieff’s presentation of emotions: Toward a phenomenology of affective experience, Humanistic Psychologist, 18 (Autumn), 279–300. Humanistic and phenomenological advances in environmental design: The case of genius loci, The Humanistic Psychologist, 17 (Autumn), 280–293. Phenomenology and the Clark experience, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 7, 367–377. Phenomenology and environment-behavior research, in G. T. Moore and E. Zube, eds., Advances in environment, behavior, and design, vol. 1 (pp. 3–27). New York: Plenum. Phenomenology and vernacular lifeworlds, in D. Saile, ed., Architecture in cultural change (pp. 17–24). Lawrence, Kansas: School of Architecture, University of Kansas; reprinted in The Trumpeter, 8 (Fall 1991), 201–206. Christopher Alexander and the nature of architecture, co-authored with G. J. Coates and S. Siepl, Orion Nature Quarterly, 6 (Spring), 20–33. Reconciling old and new worlds: The dwelling-journey relationship as portrayed in Vilhelm Moberg’s “emigrant” novels, in D. Seamon and R. Mugerauer, eds., Dwelling, place and environment: Towards a phenomenology of person and world (pp. 227–245). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Emotional experience of the environment, American Behavioral Scientist, 27, 757–770. Heidegger’s notion of dwelling and one concrete interpretation as indicated by Hassan Fathy’s architecture for the poor, Geosciences and Man, 24 (April), 43–53. Phenomenologies of place and environment, Phenomenology and Pedagogy, 2, 130–135. Philosophical directions in behavioral geography with an emphasis on the phenomenological contribution, in T. Saarinen, D. Seamon, and J. Sell, eds., Environmental perception and behavior: Inventory and ­prospect (pp. 167–178). Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Geography Series, No. 209.

Appendix  277

1984

1983 1982 1982 1981

1980 1979 1978

Toward a phenomenology of place and place-making: Interpreting landscape, lifeworld and aesthetics, co-authored with G. J. Coates, Oz, 6, 6–9. Creativity: Center and horizon, in A. Buttimer, ed., Creativity and context (pp. 54–64). Lund, Sweden: Gleerup. Heidegger, environment and dwelling, Environment and Planning A, 14, 419–423. The phenomenological contribution to environmental psychology, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2, 119–140. Newcomers, existential outsiders and insiders: Their portrayal in two books by Doris Lessing, in D. C. D. Pocock, ed., Humanistic geography and literature (pp. 95–100). London: Croom Helm. Market place as place ballet: A Swedish example, co-authored with C. Nordin, Landscape 24 (October), 35–41. Phenomenology, geography and geographic education, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 3 (Autumn), 40–50. Goethe’s approach to the natural world: Implications for environmental theory and education, in D. Ley and M. Samuels, eds., Humanistic geography: Prospects and problems (pp. 238–250). Chicago: Maaroufa Press.

INDEX

Page numbers in bold indicate tables, page numbers in italic indicate figures and page numbers followed by n indicate notes. Africa 244, 247, 249, 256n7 Alaska 7, 9, 194–202; economic scenarios 202–205; see also Limbo Alexander, C. 6, 118, 133–134, 138, 143–145; see also pattern language; wholeness Alexander, J. 170 Alice, M. 166 alienworld 214, 215–216, 218, 237–240, 246–247, 251–253; see also homeworld; Husserl, E.; lifeworld Ambrose, L. 210 Amelia Island, Florida 165, 178n3 American Beach, Florida 165, 178n3 Anderson, D. D. 184, 192n7 apocalypse 257n10 appropriation 8, 190, 215, 251, 266, 268, 269; see also Bortoft, H.; Steinbock, A. Archetypes in Architecture 130–131; see also Thiis-Evensen, T. Architectural Forum 153 architecture 6, 122–124; and archetypes 129–131; and atmosphere 128–129; building lifespan 125–127, 135n6; high-road buildings 126–128; low-road buildings 126–127; and space syntax 132–133; and time 125; user groups 124–125; and wholeness 132–134 architectural education 137–138, 142–144 assemblage 78

assimilation 8, 266, 267, 269; see also Bortoft, H. Atheneum, Boston 128 at-homeness 7, 42–44, 78–80, 210–211, 223–224, 227–229; see also Jacobson, K. atmosphere 8, 122, 128–131, 134; see also common presence; sense of place authenticity 194–195, 196–201, 207n3 Bachelard, G. 211, 219, 223, 229 Ball, A. 7, 116–117, 210–211, 212, 220n3, 220n9; see also Six Feet Under Barral, M.-R. 35n5, 64n10 Barry, J. 42–43 Bassett, A. 166 Bay of Biscay 225, 230n6 behavioral geography 10n3, 53, 58 behaviorist approach 53–57, 64n4, 64n9 Behnke, E. 98, 120 being-at-home 216–218 Beja, M. 256n5 belonging 188–189 Bentley, I. 48 Biesta, G. 150n1 Bildungsroman 247 Bloomsbury, London 251 body choreography 59–60 body-routines 20, 59–60, 90–93, 235–236 body schema 35n5, 35n6; see also body-subject

Index  279

body-subject 6, 20–24, 31–33, 35n5, 56–58, 90–96, 98, 109n6, 109n9, 157–158, 208–209 Bollnow, O. 62 Borgmann, A. 10n2 Bortoft, H. 8, 260, 266–269, 270n3; three modes of encounter 266–269 Boscalion, D. 220n1 Boston 128 Boys, J. 77 Böhme, G. 128 Bradford, G. 128 Brand, S. 126–128 Brown, A. 76 Bromfield, L. 7, 181–182, 184–188, 190, 191n2, 191n3, 191n4, 192n7, 223–224, 229, 230n3, 230n3, 230n4, 230n5, 230n6; and alternative agriculture 181–182, 191n3; Basque farmhouse 224–227; Big House 224; and environmental humility 190–191; “The Hand of God” 223–225; houses as places 7, 223–227, 230n3, 230n4, 230n5, 230n6; “The Pond” 185–188; and Pulitzer Prize 191n2; and teched 181, 183–185, 167–169; and three place qualities 229; “Up Ferguson Way” 182–183; Zenobia Ferguson 182–184, 185, 191n5 Burmester, L. 198 Buttimer, A. 2, 4, 5, 10n4, 10n5 Carmona, M. 119, 120n4 Casey, E. 1, 4–5, 21, 88–89, 93, 102, 155–156, 175, 235, 266 Center for Disease Control (CDC) 30–31 Central Park, New York City 113, 114 Cerbone, D. 100 Chicago 22, 27–30; heat wave 27–28, 36n8 Chicago School of Ecology 27–28, 35n6 “Children of Violence” series 247, 248 City of Hope 165, 178n4 Citizen Kane 177 Clark University, Graduate School of Geography 2–4, 10n3 Clay, G. 153 Cobbs, B. 166 cognitive map 53, 64n5, 64n6 common presence 8, 202; see also atmosphere; genius loci; sense of place community 59–64 Conroy, F. 210 corporeality 138 cosmopolitanism 80 Counted, V. 207n1

Covid 19 119, 245 creation, place 140, 141 Dark Age Ahead 30, 31 Death and Life of Great American Cities 22–26, 152–154, 155; four conditions 24–26, 156–157; and street ballet 22–24, 157–158; see also Jacobs, J. de Leon, P. 172 Deleuze, G. 32 Delrona Beach, Florida 165, 166, 171 De Syllas, J. 132 Diaries of Jane Somers 43–44 Disneyworld 165, 171, 197 diversity, urban 8, 22–26, 152 Donohoe, J. 134n1, 214, 238, 247, 256n2 Drabble, M. 256n3 Duany, A. 211 Durrell, L. 129 Early Autumn 191n2 eidetic reduction 18 Empire State Building, New York City 113 Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology 5 Environmental education 137–138, 148–149, 150n9, 150n10 environmental embodiment 5, 15, 19–20, 22–25, 157–158; see also Merleau-Ponty, M. environmental encounter 98–101, 110n12 environmental ensemble 8, 229 environmental experience groups 54–60, 64n7, 64n8 environmental psychology 10n3, 53, 58 environmental humility 190–191, 192n8; and Goethean science 192n8; see also Relph, E. epiphany 256n5 epoché 17–18, 52, 52–53; of the natural attitude 18; see also phenomenology existential insideness 62–63, 125, 167–169; see also Relph, E. existential outsideness 63, 125, 167, 170–174; see also Relph, E. Exley Plantation 166, 171, 176 Falco, E. 166 The Farm 191n2 Ferguson, Z. 182–183, 185, 191n5 Finlay, L. 69–70 first-person explication 87, 93–94 Flint Hills, Kansas 109n10 Florida 7, 165–166, 175–176, 178n3

280  Index

Foran, A. 150n1 Four-Gated City 7, 244–245, 247–254, 256n6, 256n7, 257n10; characters 244, 247–255; see also Lessing, D. Fowler, M. 43–44 France 181 Frary, I. T. 224 Freud, S. 218–219 Gallagher, S. 101–102 Gans, H. 155, 156, 159n4 Garcia Marquez, G. 6, 87, 91–93, 102 Gattava, A. 120n1 gayness 213, 216, 217, 219 genius loci 129; see also atmosphere; common presence; place; sense of place A Geography of the Lifeworld 5, 64n8, 64n11, 71; see also Seamon, D. Gieryn, T. 34, 159n4 Giorgi, A. 52, 66, 67, 72–73, 80n2 Global capitalism 1, 173, 174–175, 199, 203 Goethean science 192n8 Golden Nugget 200–201, 203 Grand Central Station, New York City 113 Grant, J. L. 160n5 Green Bay Tree 191n2 Greene, G. 256n3 Greenwich Village, New York City 60, 153–154, 159n4, 160n5; see also Jacobs, J. Griffero, T. 128 “Ground Zero” New York City 115 Guattari, F. 32 Guenther, A. 76–77 Haar, S. 210, 211, 213, 216, 219 Hall, M. C. 210 “The Hand of God” 223–227 Hanson, J. 124 Harries, K. 80n3 hazard 194, 205–206 Heart of the City 113–116 Heat Wave 22, 27–31, 36n8, 40, 45–47; see also Klinenberg, E. Heidegger, M. 70, 211 hermeneutic reversal 269 Heyman, S. 191n3, 230n6 Hillier, B. 26–27, 118–119, 124, 132–133; see also space syntax Hinds-Johnson, M. 211 Hockett, C. F. 61 homeworld 5, 7, 10n4, 40–41, 43–44, 213–216, 237–239, 245–253, 255; see also alienworld, Husserl, E., lifeworld

houses, as places 7, 211–213, 223–229, 230n2, 230n4, 230n6 Howard, P. 150n1 Hudson Street, New York City 60, 153–154; see also Jacobs, J. humanistic geography 2, 4 Husserl, E. 3, 5, 9–10, 16–19, 35n3, 48n2, 74, 137, 214–216, 217, 218, 220n4, 233, 237–238, 241n3, 244–247, 255, 256n5; and renewal 9, 255, 256n5, 257n12, 257n13; see also phenomenology Hünefeldt, T. 108 identity, place 141, 142, 224 immersion-in-world 39, 42–44; see also lived emplacement impulsion 216–218 inertia 216–218 inauthenticity 194–195, 197–199, 206, 207n3; see also authenticity; Limbo insideness 7, 80, 125, 167–170; see also outsideness; Relph, E. intensification, place 141, 142 interaction, place 141, 142 interanimation: of place 15, 21, 266; see also Casey, E. intercorporeality 120 Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) 67, 73–74, 80n2 Intertwinings 6, 120n1 Jacksonville, Florida 165 Jacobs, H. 137, 149 Jacobs, J. 6, 8, 9, 22–26, 30–31, 34, 47–48, 60, 61, 91, 236; four conditions for urban diversity 23–26, 155–157; and Klinenberg, E. 30–31; phenomenological interpretation of 152–159; and space syntax 26–27; street ballet 22–24, 155–157; studies of her work 159n3 Jacobson, K. 211, 167–118, 220n7 Jager, B. 217–218 Jenkins, R. 219 Jim Crow 165, 178n3 Jones, L. 80n3 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 5, 35n1 Juneau, Alaska 195 Kaizo 257n12, 257n13; see also Husserl, E. Kansas 109n10, 205 Kansas State University 261 Kemmis, D. 34

Index  281

Kent, F. 115 Kertész, A. 260, 266, 267, 268–269, 270n2; see also Meudon Kidder, P. 158 King, A. 172 Klinenberg, E. 8, 22, 27–31, 36n8, 45–46, 47–48; and Jacobs, J. 27, 30–31 Kogl, A. 32 Krause, P. 210 Kristofferson, K. 201 Landlocked 247, 248 Lamoreux, L. 224 Laurence, P. 153 Lea, J. 76 Le Corbusier 153 Lessing, D. 7, 43, 244, 247–248, 255, 256n3, 256n4, 256n5, 256n7, 256n8, 257n10; interest in wholeness 256n4; see also Four-Gated City Lewis, P. 129 Life Takes Place 6, 8, 229 lifeworld 3, 10, 15–19, 40–41, 45–46, 52–53, 88–89, 122–124, 137–138, 154, 232–235, 250, 245–246, 266–268; see also homeworld; natural attitude; phenomenology; place Limbo 7, 194–195, 204, 206; characters 195–196; definitions of 196–197; developers in 197–199; overview 194–196; presentation of nature 204–205; film trailer 196, 207n4; uncertainty in 202–206; unemployed locals 199–201; see also Sayles, J. liminal 215 Lincoln Beach, Florida 165, 167, 169–171, 173, 175 Little, C. E. 185 lived body 5, 9, 15, 19–20, 21, 87, 89, 157–158; see also lived emplacement; Merleau-Ponty, M. lived emplacement 78–80, 157–158 lived obliviousness 39, 47–48 lived space 62 Lively, P. 7, 232, 233, 236, 238, 239; see also Spiderweb locality 78–80 Lofland, L. 117 Log 76–78 London 43, 149, 244, 247–250 Lone Star 165, 178n4, 194 looking and seeing exercises 260–261, 262, 263, 268–269, 270n3 Luft, S. 246, 247, 256n2

Malabar Farm 181, 191n3, 223–224, 230n3 Malabar Farm 223 Malpas, J. 1, 4, 10n4, 79, 88–89, 156, 175; see also lived emplacement; place Mansfield, Ohio 181 marketplace 63–64 mental illness 251–253, 257n9; see also The Four-Gated City Martinez, V. 195 Massey, D. 31–32 Mastrantonio, M. E. 195 Matewan 178n4, 207n5 McDonald, J. 166 Meadowcreek (Arkansas) 144–148, 145, 146, 147, 150n7, 150n8 Menomini 61 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City 113, 116 Mediapolis (on-line journal) 6, 159n1 Mehta, V. 48 Merleau-Ponty, M. 5, 19–20, 35n5, 57, 64n10, 87–91, 96–98, 100–103, 108n4, 108n5, 109n6, 109n8, 109n9, 109n11, 119; body-subject 90–91; perception 89–90; see also lived body; lived emplacement Meudon 7, 260, 261, 266–268; author’s interpretation 264–266, 265; students’ interpretations 261–264, 262, 263 mobility 10n1, 31–33, 78–80 Moore, G. T. 58 Moran, D. 35n3, 35n4, 69, 101, 245, 246, 256n2, 257n12 Morley, J. 21–22, 66, 67, 73 Moses, R. 153 motion 130 movement 51, 64n3; definition 51; habitual nature of 54–56; larger-scaled expressions 59–62; phenomenology of 52–56 Mr. Smith 191n2 Mrs. Parkington 191n1 Mugerauer, R. 175 Mumford, L. 153 mystical experience 256n5 National Safety Council 135n3 natural attitude 3, 10n4, 15–19, 52–53, 88, 122–123, 137, 232–233, 240, 244–246, 255; see also Husserl, E.; lifeworld; phenomenology Nesting 119 New Urbanism 211 New York City 22, 24, 113–116, 118, 153, 157–158; see also Jacobs, J.

282  Index

New York Times 59 Nordin, C. 63–64 North End, Boston 60 North Lawndale, Chicago 27–30, 33–34, 45, 48; see also South Lawndale, Chicago Norwood, B. E. 76–78 noticing 109n11 Ohio 181, 191n3, 223 Old Buccaneer Days 169, 175 Olmsted, F. L. 171 One Hundred Years of Solitude 87, 91–93 Otero-Pailos, J. 135n4 organized complexity 160n5 Out of the Earth 223 outsideness 125, 167, 170–173, 175–176; see also insideness, Relph, E. Overvold, G. 3 Ozark Mountains 6, 8, 144–148 Paley, J. 66, 67, 70–71 Pallasmaa, J. 128, 129 Palmer, R. 267 Paris 8, 260, 266 participatory understanding 8, 266–269 Passion Fish 194 pattern language 6, 118–119, 133–134, 138, 143–148, 145, 146, 147; see also Alexander, C. Payne, D. G. 191n1 pedagogy 137, 142–145, 150n9; and design 142–144, 150n10; and phenomenology 137–139; and place 137, 139–143, 150n9 people-in-place 8, 9, 229 perception 19–20, 89–90, 109n11, 110n12, 236 perceptual field 90, 100, 109n9 phenomenological attitude 137–138, 246 phenomenological geography 51 phenomenological reduction 18; eidetic 18; transcendental 18; see also phenomenology phenomenology 2–6, 15–22, 50–53, 64n2, 66–74, 135n5, 137–139, 150n2, 152–154, 241n2, 260–268; of aesthetic encounter 260–266; definition 51, 52, 66, 137, 177, 181, 232, 240, 267; disagreements as to focus 66–68; disagreements as to insight 70–72; disagreements as to interpretive breadth 72–74; and environmental education 144–145, 148–149, 150n9; evaluating 74–75; evaluative criteria 74–75; and human-immersion-in-world 3; and

pedagogy 137–138, 148–149, 150n8; of place 20–22, 31–34, 42–46, 87–89, 101–103, 139–142, 150n4, 153–154; of wholeness 132–136 Phenomenology of Perception 87, 89, 90, 97, 102; see also Merleau-Ponty, M. Picnic 205 place 1, 4–8, 20–22, 39–40, 42, 45–48, 78–80, 87–89, 101–194, 108n3, 122–124, 165–167, 205, 229, 240, 241n5; and architecture 123–124, 133–134; caring for 185–191; definitions 21, 42, 235; in city 154–158; as immersion-in-world 4–5, 235–236; lived inurement of 2, 6–8, 235–236; and Merleau-Ponty 87–89, 90–91; phenomenology of 221–222, 31–35, 40–42, 87–89, 101–103, 139–143, 150n4, 154–159, 232–236, 240; as six processes 140–143, 142; and technology 1, 5, 10n2; and three aspects 8–9, 229; as wholeness 132–134, 235–236; see also Casey, E.; homeworld; lifeworld; Malpas, J.; Relph, E. Place and Experience 79 Place and Placelessness 4–5, 155, 167, 169; see also Relph, E. place-as-process 139–141, 142 place attachment 78–80, 185–189 place ballet 5, 22, 60–62, 74, 91, 92–93, 157–158, 236–237; see also body-subject; body routines; Jacobs, J.; time-space routines place-based education 140–143, 150n8, 150n9 place processes 140–143, 142 150n5 place creation 141, 142 place identity 141, 142 place intensification 34, 141, 142 place interaction 141, 142 place realization 141, 142 place release 113, 141, 142 place serendipity 6, 113–120, 128–129 place, and wellbeing 5, 42–48 place, spirit of 128–129 Plantation Island, Florida 165–168, 171, 172, 175–176 Pleasant Valley 223, 224 Poetics of Space 211, 219, 223, 229 “The Pond” 185–188 postmodernism of reaction 210–213, 219 postmodernism of resistance 210, 212–213, 219

Index  283

post-phenomenology 5, 76–77 primary uses 24–25, 30–31, 156; see also Jacobs, J.; secondary uses progressive sense of place 31–32 A Proper Marriage 247, 148 The Rains Came 191n2 realization, moments of 244–245, 247–249, 251, 252–254, 256n5 Reed, C. 186, 210, 211, 213, 216, 219 relationality 138 Relph, E. 2, 4, 10n6, 62, 63, 125, 129, 167, 169, 190; see also place; Place and Placelessness renewal 9, 255, 256n5, 257n12, 257n13; see also Husserl, E. responsive environment 48 Return of the Secaucus Seven 165 reverence for life 190, 192n7 A Ripple in the Storm 247, 248 Robinson, S. 119, 120n1 Rodrigues de Oliveira, J. 241n1 Rodriquez, F. 211 rootedness 78–79 Russell, L. 218 Ruzzon, D. 120n1 Sabar, A. 113–117 Saevi, T. 150n1 Sayles, J. 7, 9, 165–167, 170–172, 174–177, 178n2, 178n4, 178n6, 178n7, 194–195, 196–198, 205–206, 207n2, 207n4, 207n5, 207n6, 173, 175, 176, 178, 180–182; and human interconnections 146–147, 174–176; see also Limbo; Sunshine State Schlitte, A. 108n1 Schutz, A. 265 Schweitzer, A. 190, 192n7 secondary uses 25, 156; see also Jacobs, J.; primary uses Seamon, D. 8, 58, 64n7, 64n8, 64n10, 64n11, 272 The Secret of Roan Irish 178n7, 207n5 Sergeant, D. 256n4 serendipity, in place 6, 113, 115–116, 119–120 situatedness 87, 108n1 Six Feet Under 7, 116–117, 210–211; architecture of Fisher house 211–212; characters 210–211, 212–219; deaths at start of episodes 116–117, 218; homeworlds and

alienworlds 215–216; kitchen as center 211–212; as postmodernism of reaction 211–212; as postmodernism of resistance 212–213; and the uncanny 218–219 Slater, P. 62 Smith, J. A. 66, 67, 72, 73 Social Life of Small Urban Spaces 117 Somerset 7, 233, 236, 238, 239 South Lawn (Little Village), Chicago 27–31, 33, 45–48; see also Klinenberg, E.; North Lawn, Chicago South Pacific 185, 186 space syntax 118–119, 132–133, 135n7 spatial behavior 53–59; behaviorist approach 53, 56; cognitive approach 53–55; definition 53 spatial cognition 53–55, 64n5, 64n6 spatiality 138 Spiderweb 7, 232–239; portraying lifeworlds 232–235, 240–241; and place 235–237, 240–241; homeworld and alienworld 237–240; see also Lively, P. Springsteen, B. 206, 207n6 Statue of Liberty, New York City 113, 116 Steinbock, A. 214–216, 220n7, 238, 246–247, 251–252, 257n12 Steenburgen, M. 171 Stefanovic, I. L. 40 St. Patrick, M. 217 Straithairn, D. 195 street ballet 23, 30, 54–55, 157–158; see also Jacobs, J. Sunshine State 7, 165–167; characters 165–173; insiders 167–170; outsiders 170–173; as phenomenological insight 176–177; and place 173–176; see also Sayles, J. synaesthetic perception 90 substance 130 teched 182–185, 188–191, 192n7; definition 182–184 temporality 138 time-space routines 20, 59, 91, 92–93, 236; see also place ballet Times Square, New York City 113, 115 Tomaney, J. 80 Toombs, K. 109n8 topoanalysis 223, 229; see also Bachelard, G. Topophilia 4

284  Index

Topping-Bazin, N. 256n5 transgression 215, 216, 251–252; see also Steinbock, A. Tuan, Y.-F. 2, 4, 10n5 uncanny 210, 218–219, 220n8, 220n9 “Up Ferguson Way” 182–183, 190, 191n5 van Manen, M. 66, 67, 68–69, 71, 73, 74, 80n2, 138–139, 148; existentials 138–139 Wachterhauser, B. 74–75, 80n3 Waite, R. 166 Ward, B. 63 Washington Square Park, New York City 113, 114, 116

Watts, F. 207n1 weight 130 wellbeing 39–40, 46–47; definition 39, 46–47 Wexler, H. 205, 207n5 wholeness 132–133, 235–236; Alexander, C. 133–134; architectural 132–134; and phenomenology 181; and place 122, 181, 256n4 Whyte, W. 117–118 windows 131 Woodard, C. 170 World War I 247 World War II 247 Wright, T. 169 Zahavi, D. 66–69, 80n2