This is my journal of research on Topophilia while working on my MA.
National Trust / University of Surrey research
Have emailed Natasha Meredith at Uni of Surrey to find out possibility of using brain scans/images for my work (26 Sept) – she is on mat leave so emailed contacts on her out of office.
Need to contact this guy if I don’t hear back: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/bertram-opitz
https://nt.global.ssl.fastly.net/documents/places-that-make-us-research-report.pdf
Came across this which is pretty mind blowing – researchers in the States used fMRI to map the brain activity when subjects where looking at an image – they tried to recreate the image from the brain activity:
https://www.photoconsortium.net/two-research-that-will-change-photography-forever/ and academic paper about this which is mentioned https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/28/12/4136/4560155
Place cells and sense of place in neuroscience
https://www.placeness.com/2015/10/
This site is by Edward Relph – who is a leading academic on this – found this email for the website: placeness@gmail.com
- The Intelligence of Place: Topographies and Poetics, Jeff Malpass (Chapter 10, Place and connection by Edward Relph)
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251484582_Place_and_Placelessness_Edward_Relph
- John Zeisel, “A Sense of Place,” New Scientist 4 March 2006, 50-51
- The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
- Topophilia : a Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Yi Fu Tuan
- Place and voluntary activity in inter-war England: topophilia and professionalization, Pendlebury, John ; Hewitt, Lucy E.
- Place attachment: advances in theory, methods and applications, Lynne C. Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright.
Ideas for including people in the images:
https://www.positive-magazine.com/topophilia/
Bristol Photo Festival
Description of the theme:
A Sense of Place
To photograph a place is to describe a location that has been shaped, nurtured and even contested. It can define the frontier between nature and culture and hint at the complexities of ownership and access. It can be attended by competing narratives and polarised histories, whether they lean left or right.
It can shape our understanding of the world and the qualities that come to define us and it can be about belonging, about appreciation and knowing a place so well that it is like no other. The components of cultural landscape elements play a significant role in defining the sense of place. These components are people, landform, water bodies, climate, economy, social, political which influence on the identity of place.
http://www.bristolphotofestival.org/
Barnaby Irish
https://www.elliotthalls.com/barnaby-irish-1
http://digitalinsides.org/about/
https://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/music-of-the-hemispheres/media/mariabrain_horizontal.jpg
https://laurakrasnow.com/fmri/1
Jim Mortam – Norfolk towns in ‘Small Town Inertia’
https://smalltowninertia.co.uk/
In Beauty and Photography, Robert Adams talks about three key elements of landscape photography.
Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: a geography, autobiography and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact – the affection for life.
Robert Adams: Beauty and Photography
https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/mao-archive-helen-chadwicks-viral-landscapes-1989/
https://peopleplacespace.org/toc/section-3/
Place Attachment
ALTMAN, Irwin. and Setha M. LOW. 1992. Place Attachment. 1st ed. 1992. New York, NY: Springer US.
Place attachment subsumes or is subsumed by a variety of analogous ideas, including topophilia (Tuan, 1974), place identity (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff, 1983), insidedness (Rowles, 1980), genres of place (Hufford, Chapter 11), sense of place or rootedness (Chawla, Chapter 4), environmental embeddedness, community sentiment and identity (Hummon, Chapter 12), to name a few.
Topophilia “can be defined broadly to include all of the human being’s affective ties with the material environment” (Tuan, 1974, p. 93). “Topophilia takes many forms and varies greatly in emotional range and intensity…. [It includes] the fondness for place because it evokes pride of ownership or of creation (p.247)”
“Place is seen as a centre of felt value, incarnating the experience and aspirations of people. Thus it is not only an arena for everyday life … [it also] provides meaning to that life. To be attached to a place is seen as a fundamental human need and, particularly as home, as the foundation of our selves and our identities. Places are thus conceived as profound centres of human existence. As such, they can provide not only a sense of wellbeing but also one of entrapment and drudgery. To be tied to one place may well enmesh a person in the familiar and routine” (Eyles, 1989, p. 109).
https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/harvey-cushing/media/8052
https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/08/24/health/20100824brain.html
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cushing-tumor-registry-cushing-whitney-medical-library
Cushing Tumor Registry – Cushing/Whitney Medical Library/Yale University
Louise Chawla – Ecstatic Places
LOUISE CHAWLA. 1990. ‘Ecstatic Places’. Children’s environments quarterly 7(4), 18–23.
Awoiska van der Molen
https://www.awoiska.nl/
While reading Lauren Elkin’s ‘No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute she mentions two books by Georges Perec:
- Species of Spaces
- An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
Excerpt from
Patrizio M. Martinelli (2020) Fragments and Visions of a Spatial Discourse: Re-Viewing Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, Architecture and Culture, 8:1, 143-163, DOI: 10.1080/20507828.2020.1714323
As a necessary premise to this novel, he wrote Species of Spaces, a book that is a collection of essays, a list of descriptions, a sort of dictionary, a journal of memories, a notebook of written sketches, the origin of other books.15 Species of Spaces is all of this and more. It’s a book about space, about the different scales of space (furniture, architecture, city, landscape), each one related to man. This is what interests Perec: not the empty space that we very often see photographed in architectural books and magazines, but the space that is closer to our experience and actions. The space for people, the space filled with life: “We live in space, in these spaces, these towns, this countryside, these corridors, these parks… This is how space begins,”16 Perec tells us in the first pages of the book, with an empty page (the empty space) filled by words little by little (concepts, persons, actions), like ancient maps where names mean cities and places (where people live), and lines describe movements (of people) in time and space.
Delving deeper into Species of Spaces, there are three lenses through which Perec describes the spaces we live in. The first of these relates to his interest in the banality of everyday life. His reflections, which began with his involvement in the journal Cause Commune, directed by Paul Virilio, are actually on the common, unremarkable, simple events of ordinary life, on what Virilio calls the infraordinary, rather than the extraordinary.17 Perec says that very clearly: he wants to speak about the common things, “track them down and give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them finally speak of what it is, of what we are (…) not the exotic anymore, but the endotic.”18 Endotic is a neologism coined by Perec, the “en-” meaning “in” or “within,” contrasting with “ex” meaning “out of” or “from,” related to the infraordinary and hence to that family of words with the Latin prefix “in” that includes interior, intimate, inside, internal: the space inside and the space in-between, both domestic and urban – the spaces of our everyday lives.19
The second lens is that through which Perec analyses the objects and spaces of our own experience, the places where we live our ordinary lives: the bed, the bedroom, the apartment, the apartment building, the street, the city, the countryside. To describe them, Perec uses a dialectical juxtaposition between scientific, analytical, objective dissection (that often takes the form of the list and of the diagrammatic inventory)20 focused on methodologies and scientific speculations, and a narrative based on free-floating digressions, on sequences of drifting and meandering that capture his imaginative musings and reflective discourses, autobiographical experiences and memories. Objective versus subjective. Abstraction versus evocation. Rational versus irrational (memories, fantasies, inventions). What you can see and measure versus what you cannot see or quantify (what is behind, beneath, beyond). The rational aspects of Perec’s poetics come from his belonging to the Oulipo movement, whose program was to maximize the conscious control of literary expression (through constraints, mathematical and geometrical structures, etc.) against the romantic and surrealistic emphasis on irrationality, genius, inspiration, spontaneity.21 On the other side, it is interesting to recall how Perec dealt with the realm of the unconscious in his 1973 book La Boutique obscure, which collects the dreams he dreamt between May 1968 and August 1972. As Bellos has pointed out, “unlike his other books … it had its roots not in a literary project but in a personal routine which was itself part of a development that led to the decision to undertake a course of psychoanalysis.”22 This is one of the strategies of the artist (architect, designer), his or her capacity to move in different realms, dimensions, and directions, between the rational and the imagination, between abstraction and memory, between the reality of the present and hopes and dreams for the future.
The third important lens, which might relate Perec’s work more directly to that of designers, is framing. He was aware of the powerful tool of the frame: as mentioned, in Species of Spaces he describes Antonello da Messina’s painting “St Jerome in his Study,” represented inside the frame of a window. Not only framing space, though: the time-frame in the chapter “The Apartment” describes life inside the domestic interior hour by hour. Indeed, the whole structure of Life: A User’s Manual is represented by a compound frame (for space and time): the building without façade that keeps all the apartments and all the lives of its inhabitants together, within which the search for “what’s going on” continues behind the (removed) wall.23