ARTS341 :: IMAGE PRACTICE

Chapter 4 Working with Place

2008-12-02T21:25:00.001-08:00

Geraldine Pratt's example of a Filipina contract worker immediately reminds me of similar stories on creating place in a mobile world. Compared to Filipina contract workers in Vancouver, those in other Asian countries certainly bring more influence on place creation because of their mobility. I lived in the city of Hong Kong for several months and learned the special culture of Filipina contract workers there. The city is filled with hundreds of thousands of Filipina workers -- mostly because of their relatively low salary requirement and their professional skills on housekeeping. The Filipina there are not only changing their own space in the apartment of their employers, but also changing some public spaces in a unique manner. Most Filipina housekeepers have a day off on Saturday. Since housekeeping is quite a lonely job with limited human contact everyday, these workers would like to hang out on Saturday. However, they don't gather in coffee shops or pubs as most Americans would do. Needless to say, they don't have residence place to party either. To save money (or for some other reasons that I don't know), they occupy free public spaces -- streets and overpasses to have fun. They are chatting, playing cards or even sleeping at the public space and seem to be quite enjoying themselves without unnatural feeling. The government knows the importance of these Filipina housekeepers, and hence is quite compliant with such situation. Because of the large population of Filipina workers at present, the street view at some places would be totally changed on Saturday. I still remember the first time I walked down a busy street at one downtown area on Saturday morning, I was totally astonished by what I had seen -- The Filipina completely occupied half of the sidewalk space and formed a queue that measured up to several hundred meters. While bringing inconvenience to the local citizens, these Filipina workers are defintely creating unique places -- loud and crowded -- on every Saturday.

Response to Prof. David McDonald's "Spatial Inequality, Racism and Environmental Justice Movements in the Global South"

2008-11-18T18:28:00.000-08:00

The discussion mainly focused on the spatial inequality phenomenon, whether it should be counted as racism in some sense and the consequent environmental justice movements. Some noticeable findings include:
(a) People of color make up the majority (56%) of those living in neighborhoods within 3 kilometers of the nation's commercial hazardous waste facilities, nearly double the percentage in areas beyond 3 kilometers (30%).
(b) People of color make up a much larger (over two-thirds) majority (69%) in neighborhoods with clustered facilities.
(c) Percentages of African American, Hispanics/Latinos, and Asians/Pacific Islanders in host neighborhoods are 1.7, 2.3 and 1.8 times greater in host neighborhoods than non-host areas, respectively.

This brings interesting thoughts on transforming residential place of people of color. The Growing Vine Street project shows us a good example of how to turn a place ecologically and environmentally greener -- not only in the P-Patch garden they have built and all the trees they have planted there, but also in the biofiltration facilities and the solar-powered fountain. From the study findings above, we can feel that people of color are more likely to live in an environment that is exposed to more hazardous waste and pollutant. Hence, such places would potentially require more effort on utilizing those green technology in the place transformation.

Chapter 3 Reading 'A Global Sense of Place'

2008-11-02T19:07:00.001-08:00

This chapter mainly talks about opinions from David Harvey's book and Doreen Massey's paper. Harvey thinks of place more as a "conditional form of 'permanence' in the flow of space and time", and portrays place as "a deeply ambiguous facet of modern and postmodern life." He focuses on the "political economy of place construction under capitalism", and considers the mobility of capital as "the prime force for globalization and the main reason for the perceived homogenization of places around the world." Massey's paper, by contrast, questions the dominant assumptions about time-space compression and globalization. She suggests that particular places have singular unitary identities. National government and cultural elites often have the constant desire to show how places and their identities are rooted in history. And places are not about boundaries. She portrays a new 'extrovert' 'progressive' and 'global' sense of place marked by: 1. Place as process; 2. Place as defined by the outside; 3. Place as site of multiple identities and histories; and 4. A uniqueness of place defined by its interactions.

I think both discussions make sense to me. Harvey's work inspires me to think about selling cities to audience. I am involved in job hunting this semester, and have attended many companies' infomation sessions. When talking about their locations, these companies have obviously different approaches. Those located in big cities don't quite have many words on their cities, as the identities of these cities are quite familiar to most people. So you can hear people saying "Yeah, we are from the Emerald City." or "We are located at downtown Chicago.", but you really don't hear much more beyond that. Companies from smaller and newer cities, on the contrary, use considerable time introducing their cities, often with a large amount of pictures and personal experience. I think this is because they know their cities may be unknown to their audience, so they definitely want to sell their locations well at the first stage and attract people to help develop their business at those cities. So it looks to me that Massey's opinion applies to big, long rooted places better, while Harvey's opinion more suits new places with shorter history.

Chapter 2 The Genealogy of Place 2nd part

2008-10-06T11:23:00.000-07:00

In this part, the author emphasizes more on a phenomenological approach to study place. Most place researchers cited in this part view the place as a live being that evolves in a progress and is subject to change. In section 'Place, Practice and Process', there is the interesting term 'finished place'. I think I agree with Allan Pred, that places are never 'finished' but always 'becoming'. It's just so difficult for me to think about a place that is considered to be 'done' and no longer subject to change. Even if the ghost factory in the ghost town talked about in section 'Place, Openness and Change' is not a 'finished place'. The situation changes (fast), and I see reasonable possibility that the ghost town will become some place that functions in other ways. If you are traveling in China, the idea of 'finished place' will easily be destroyed. The fast growth of population makes an immediate need of expansion. People are reconstructing almost everywhere in the city, except for a few historic and cultural places that need to be preserved. Old places vanish and new places appear at a fast speed. Therefore, I think it would only make sense to label 'finished place' in a certain period, but not in the whole history.

What I don't agree with the book is that many researchers think of places like Disneyland and airport as placeless places. One of the main discussion falls on mobility, which is a typical characteristic of these places that makes place researchers classify them as non-places or placeless. However, I see the mobility as a dynamic influence on these places that in reality contributes to the progress of them. Taking airport as an example, the growing passengers flow will probably result in expansion of the place to accommodate such change. I think it makes perfect sense to consider places like Disneyland and airport still as places, but are more likely to be influenced by a group of people rather than individuals.

Chapter 2 The Genealogy of Place

2008-09-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

These pages talks about place from a relatively low level geographical meaning to high level cultural meaning, political meaning and social meaning. The genealogy of place is based on the human history. At earlier stage of human civilization, people view place just as regional area; while nowadays, people look at a place as a multi-level combination. There are many more historical issues, cultural issues and social issues left on a certain place for modern people to observe now, compared to our ancestors.

I also find the discussion on Chinatown interesting. In my opinion, the example of Chinatown varies largely from the example of West Hollywood. The formation of Chinatown has a lot to do with language and culture. Since Chinese and English are in two totally different linguistic systems, it takes huge time for a Chinese to manage speaking English when coming to settle down at north America. That's why the early Chinese here would prefer a place to assemble and talk with each other in their native language. Religion is another issue. Many Chinese believe in Buddhism, and so they would want temples and pagodas at their assembling place. With these in mind, it's easy to understand you don't find Chinatown in Japan.

Chapter 1 Defining Place

2008-09-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

Interestingly, the first thing I have noticed when reading this chapter is the impact of language on place research. In the three examples used by the author -- 'Would you like to come round to my place?', 'Brisbane is a nice place.' and 'She put me in my place.', the three 'place' words would have three different corresponding Chinese words when being translated. The Chinese translations, using different words in different circumstances, make it clearer and easier for people to grab the conceptual meaning of each sentence. However, as a consequence, the connections between the three are less obvious to observe, leaving few clues for the research on the word 'place'.

Talking about the three sentences above, the three 'place' words are like three different levels of understanding of the place concept. The author brings in this idea by quoting John Agnew's three fundamental aspects of place: 1. Location; 2. Locale; and 3. Sense of place. To me, it's like viewing a place as three floors. The first floor lies the natural ground -- the primitive 'place'. Human beings come and make use of the place as part of their lives -- making houses, granaries, warehouses ... that's the second floor. Then, people interact with each other atop the two floors, and all aspects of human civilization -- agriculture, economy, religion, culture, etc. -- start to flourish. Sometimes, people decide to rebuild a certain place by removing the top two floors and design it from the beginning. However, the model almost always works there, and place is like a cumulation of human activities.

The space and place discussion is also interesting in that it explores the reason why different people may view the same location differently. I think it also brings in the idea that we should always view a place from different angle, rather than view it as a two dimensional existance on map.

Semiotics

2008-09-22T10:04:00.001-07:00

Chapter "Signs" spends a great volume talking about sign study models. Personally, I prefer Saussure's two-part model (signifier and signified) to Peirce's three-part one (representamen, interpretant and object). I think Peirce's model attemps to break down the whole process of understanding signs into greater details, but it suffers from a lack of clear boundary between the representamen and the interpretant, and between the interpretant and the object. Saussure's model is easier to understand in this sense.

I also have some thoughts on Levi Strauss' note that "the sign is arbitrary a priori but ceases to be arbitrary a posteriori - after the sign has come into historical existence it cannot be arbitrarily changed." One example of this idea used by the article is the choice of color of traffic lights - "the original choice of red for 'stop' was not entirely arbitrary, since it already carried relevant associations with danger." In my opinion, even if a sign has already carried some historical meanings, it's still possible to force a new meaning on the sign. An example coming into my mind is the Travelers insurance company with the red umbrella logo. Many package boxes are using the umbrella icon to indicate the items inside should avoid wetness. The sign then carries a meaning of being weak to wetness. However, since Travelers is an insurance company, they certainly do not want a company logo to convey a concept of being weak. Rather, they use the umbrella logo intending to convey a feeling of well protection. I think that new meaning is well (arbitrarily) attached to the company's image through many Travelers' TV advertisements, in which the umbreall appears as a useful tool to fight against accidents.

Chapter "Denotation, Connotation and Myth" elaborates on the three layers of signification. I agree with the author that "difference between the three orders of signification are not clear-cut." To me, it makes a better sense by saying how far a layer of meaning is towards things that appear in the front, or how far it is towards those that hide far behind. In the author's three-layer concept system, myth includes all meanings that are beyond that point. It's possible to divide these meanings into more detailed layers -- it quite depends on how you observe a sign.