Space and Place

What struck me about the Space and Place book was the overall discussion between human interaction and space and place. Tuan says, “Space is experienced directly as having room in which to move” (12). However, space is not really just about an actual place or a denoted area, rather it is much more. Tuan develops his argument throughout the chapters how personal, human senses interact with places to give people their personal experience and meaning attached with a space and place. As humans, we all can have different interactions even with the same place. Throughout these sections, he marks the most important term or key as experience. I particularly liked the section that discussed a birds’ eye view from a human view. Birds, because of their physical location, point of site, have different experiences with space, than we do as humans.

Throughout this book, I was reminded of my Cultural Studies class. We discussed a theory about spatial text and how it is arbitrary. If a person has an interaction with a certain place or space, it is completely arbitrary because a different person can have a completely different experience, based on his or her personal senses and past experiences. The fact that a place is the same (doesn’t change for different people) but can create different meaning for people, amazes me. When we think about how we interact, as humans, with all of our senses, with our environment, it is amazing to consider how our individual differences shape our experiences in different places. For example, if we think about a place like the ARC, it could create different emotions for different people. An athlete may gain an excited feeling from the ARC, especially a basketball or volleyball player. However, if an athlete from a different sport (that does not use the ARC arena), may not get those same excited feelings. People how do not enjoy sporting events may get negative emotions when entering the ARC. Thus, though the ARC remains the same, it is different for all people, based on personal senses and past experiences.