Beyond Psychogeography

This short post is about how people relate to the places in their lives. It’s complicated. What exactly are they relating to? And should we care? Many people don’t; each home, town or holiday destination is just a staging post in a life which mainly revolves around their work, family, or other connections.

At the outset, I should stress that this isn’t about nationalism or patriotism; those are a different kettle of fish. See my older post here: Link:  Your Land is My Land

Lots of people write about lots of places in lots of contexts; some are passing through, some with feet rooted in the soil, while others are seeking refuge. Most express a claim of belonging somewhere, often with a sense of pride, often based purely on association. It’s a bit like a football supporter being proud of a team which they will never, never play for. [Geek Note # 1]

In London, around 40% of the people were born outside the country, and many more come from places within Britain, so it’s probably not the best place to think about all this. I am a native Londoner; it’s home, and I like it, but I don’t see what there is to be personally proud of because my sole contribution to the city, apart from supporting the pubs, has been a role in creating some unremarkable buildings. People might have thanked me if I hadn’t. 

The Oxford English Dictionary gives us a word, Topophilia, for “love of, or emotional connection to, a particular place or physical environment”. It sounds like a disease, but it first appeared in an introduction W. H. Auden wrote to a book by John Betjeman. Auden stressed the historical rather than the physical landscapes and Betjeman dealt in nostalgia; but the term is now mainly encountered as part of the wider academic discipline of Human Geography or Environmental Psychology.

The guru of Topophilia is an American geographer called Yi-Fu Tuan. His eponymous book, and the academic papers he and others later wrote, offered practitioners advice on how to promote and foster the sense of place and belonging he valued. All of this is worthy enough, even though many of the supporting studies are statistically dodgy. But to me, a lot of this seems technocratic and as dry as dust. It involves a level of abstraction that I simply don’t want to approach, a bit like inventing a scoring system to rank artworks. [# 2]

In the Town Planning system, these ideas are manifest in the activity of ‘place making’, a part of the design process which normally means trying to build into schemes some of the things that contribute to the good life, such as open space, a bit of greenery and a means of escape, and a limit to the extent to which intrusions such as (other people’s) cars can spoil them.

Developers certainly know how to harness the ideas in their search for sales and profits. That is why they describe their product as a home in an urban village or quarter rather than a house on an estate.  

Most of these efforts by the Topophiliacs are descriptive. They don’t meet my objective of unpicking the emotional bond that ties people to places and gives them a feeling of belonging.

Psychogeography is another strand of investigation into the relationship between us and the places we inhabit. It started in France as a subversive political tool that grew out of dissatisfaction with the way capitalism imposed itself on, inter alia, the public domain, taking its cue from the Situationist movement. 

In Britain it has taken on more of an occult air, weaving history and myth into a reading of the landscape, which offers you a glimpse of an ’other-world’ and invites you to see significance and even bizarre beauty in places that might otherwise seem bland and drab. 

If you have read my earlier post on psychogeography, you will know that I am not a fan. It might have some attractions as a hobby but has little explanatory power because it is essentially voyeuristic, placing you outside the world you observe rather than being an intrinsic part of it. So it doesn’t answer my questions about the nature of our relationship with places. 

It then occurred to me that part of the problem might be that I'm looking for those answers in the wrong places. Like the man with the hammer, I was looking for a nail. Quite simply, the sense of place and belonging arises from a rich mixture of experiences and feelings that do not readily lend themselves to faux-scientific investigation by planners, architects or policy makers. It might be better to start by thinking about the ‘people’ part of the equation. 

It is hard to be precise about this. In the territory of the emotions, it can be difficult to find words that correspond with our thoughts, so we struggle to define the whats and whys of belonging. Maybe places are the boxes of our experiences and life stories, some placed conveniently for frequent access and others stored away for an infrequent rummage?

My problem is that I know quite a bit about landscapes and planning, but a lot of those emotional issues seem to come to rest in what the psychologists call ‘attachment theory’. I am very much stronger on the geography bit than the psyche bit, so I will trust the Wikipedia editors on this one, mainly because what they say makes sense to me.

Environmental psychologists (they exist!) distinguish between two sorts of connection. The first is ‘rootedness’, which is based on unquestioned association; it is the voice of the farmer saying that this land has been in the family for generations or the longshoremen in places in the dockland communities where jobs were handed down through generations. It is a ‘sense of place’ moulded by people from the clay of their experience and associations. 

The second is a preference for one type of place over another. Do you prefer the Cairngorms or the Costas? Some places might be beautiful, some offer peace, quiet and others companionship and good times. All this points to the difficulties involved in analysing this kind of thing, because people’s feelings and their memory of those experiences change over time and what the Wikipedia article referenced below sees as the ‘exaggerated focus on social aspects by environmental psychologists’.[# 3]

This is the point where I distance myself from Tuan. The psychologists move the whole question of the people/place relationship out of the reach of geographers by placing the primary emphasis on the importance of a basic human ‘need to belong’ to a group rather than a place. The latter is incidental, probably more so as people become more mobile. (This was near the top of Maslow’s famous ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, only topped by sustenance, shelter and safety; and way above self-esteem and actualisation). [#4] 

Yi-Fu Tuan 

They see two key varieties of belonging: continuing interactions within groups, and secure, caring relationships. You need both: neither on its own is enough. Exclusion from groups or uncertainty about your acceptability is stressful.

The point was well made in a recent article by Bryce Elder, an Australian and long-time resident of London and a journalist for the Financial Times. He described how he is tired and frustrated by the physical reality of London, but can’t find anywhere to compare with the people you get to associate with. He quoted James Boswell, who, some 250 years earlier, had said that what kept him in London was its role as a ‘gathering point and not a museum’. 

Boswell's Coffee Houses

Maybe this is the driver behind the baleful ballads of Irish immigrants (I love ‘The Mountains of Mourne ’, which are near where my Grandfather left as an emigrant, or the ‘saudade’ in the Fado sung in Portuguese bars). Odds are, the place they emigrated to offered them a more materially comfortable life than the place they left. Although their songs were ostensibly about missing the towns and landscapes of home, their real loss was the communities and families left behind. 

Fado 

The point is that belonging isn’t about place so much as the people, the psyche rather than the geography. And it varies from person to person and over time. In many places, the communities that people value have nothing to do with place; they follow their family, their interests, their work or even their budget. Disentangling it all is nigh on impossible, and I am not going to try. As far as the potential impact of designers and planners is concerned, comfort and convenience might be within their gift, but a sense of belonging is not. You can shift traffic and scatter some grass seed, but you can’t design serendipity or plant memories.

One reason for this post was that I had earlier drafted a piece arguing that the Cornish identity, self-defined in part by their ‘Celtic’ relationship with Brittany, was inauthentic. I haven’t posted it, simply because I decided that my argument was wrong-headed. (If I do, it will be much changed). The ‘place’ plays a part in belonging but, in and of itself, it is a small part. If the Cornish want to promote ties between peoples, hurrah, and my argument that their justification rests on shallow foundations is a mere quibble.

I looked elsewhere for insights. 

John Betjeman

John Betjeman is the poet of London’s Metroland, and many other places besides. You get his sense of loss when he invites ‘friendly bombs to rain on Slough’ because ‘it’s not fit for humans now’. A similar nostalgia is exercised by A.E. Housman in ‘Blue Remembered Hills’ and Hilaire Belloc, in ‘The South Country’, walking with ‘the men that were boys when I was a boy’. There are any number of novelists and old popular songs sung in the same key. [ # 5]

These poets and writers use words which in isolation tell us little but which collectively conjure up insights and images that we can relate to in ways that we (or at least I) can struggle to articulate because they are not slaves to the dictionary or technocratic pedantry. This isn’t so much psycho-geography as quantum-geography; I guess they are right, but have absolutely no idea why. 

GEEK NOTES 

[# 1] Edward S Casey (The Fate of Place) tracks philosophising about space vs place back to Aristotle, name-checking almost every other ‘Natural Philosopher’ en route.

[# 2] Yi-Fu Tuan ‘ Topophilia’. Various writers have tried to knot the identity of places and self-identity. A superficial reading didn’t convince me that they were onto anything worthwhile. See:

Harold Proshansky” Place-Identity: Physical Environment and the Socialisation of the Self

or

Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space. This feels like an attempt to psychoanalyse the design of the home!

[# 3] If you want (a lot) more, this is the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_attachment

[# 4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

[# 5] If you like this stuff, you might also enjoy W.G. Sebald's ' The Rings of Saturn ’. It’s actually set in Suffolk. Or the introspection in ‘The Living Mountain’ by Nan Shepherd. Full disclosure. I couldn’t summon up the will to finish it.