Place-Making

Place-making is defined as the process of “mak[ing] places out of spaces not just by physically altering them but also via the social and mental process of making them meaningful” (van Dooren 67).

It is an “ongoing social process” because each day that you live in and engage with a place, the more personal investment you have in it, and the more that you care for it (Emmet and Nye 24). By experiencing your life in a certain place you make connections to it that give you a need to nurture it. This is why our childhood homes and places where we grew up are so important to us. The memories from that period of immense growth in ourselves coincides with the growth and change of the place and anchors our hearts there. When these places of our past are disturbed or destroyed it can be devastating, and it’s a feeling that all people can bond over (Emmet and Nye 24). When the places we love are gone we feel a dysphoria and a severing of our past from reality.
There are different ways of place-making and conceptualizing place, like how in Western cultures we tend to think of place as a commodity to be bought and sold where the traces of the previous owner can be eliminated with each new sale (Emmet and Nye 23). The idea of an “interior landscape” which is influenced by the exterior landscape but is also contingent on the “moral, intellectual, and spiritual development of a person” is something really important to aboriginal place-making (Emmett and Nye 27).Thinking of ourselves as connected to the land rather than owners of it is important for how we treat the environment.

Though humans definitely engage in place-making, animals do too, in different ways. Van Dooren in studying the Little Penguins of Manly Point came to realize just how complex and real an animal’s place-making can be (68). They return to the same nesting places each year, and it is this act of breeding that ties them there (68). In thinking of complex ways that other animals lay down roots in a place, we can imagine all of our lives as similar and important and worth protecting which is why place-making has been so important for environmental activism.

 

Works Cited:
van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. Columbia University Press, 2014.
Emmett, Robert S., and David E. Nye. The Environmental Humanities : A Critical Introduction, MIT Press, 2017.

Further Readings Bibliography:
Byrne, Denis and Heather D. Goodall. Placemaking and Transnationalism : Recent Migrants
and a National Park In Sydney, Australia. (2013).
Hanlon, James, et al. Everyday Landscapes: Past and Present, Presence and Absence. Material Culture, vol. 43, no. 2, Fall 2011, pp. 1–5. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asu&AN=525466678&site=ehost-live&scope=site.