No-Place(s) and Main Street(s)
A critique of capitalist geographies
Ordering Spaces
Human history is a long collection of stories about places that are told in other places. Understanding the implications of place in history requires we understand the making of places, both then and now. Only through the process of remaking spaces can we truly understand how they were created in the time we seek to remember.
To depict place as a noun, a “thing” with a known boundary or definition, is a common error in geography. Place boundaries are flexible, and they are often of varying types of geographies (points, lines, polygons, and three-dimensional spaces). Capitalist modes of production also produce the places of a capitalist society.
A place is a process, a relation between things in a given space, and therefore, it has no distinct boundaries or definitions. From a phenomenological perspective, places are impossible to reduce “to the things themselves” (zur Sachen selbst) because they relate to things beyond themselves.
Language of place
The origins of the word place are in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root *plat, which meant roughly “to spread.” From this, the term came to mean “broad” to the Greeks, who named it plateia. Later, the Latin language…
