By Jack Cumming
Recently, I’ve been intrigued by the new usage of place as meaning what we used to call “a happy place.” The concept of “sense of place” emerged from humanistic geography, with scholars like Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph popularizing it in the 1970s. If “humanistic geography” is not a term that often crosses your mind, you’re in good company.
Home Is Where You Belong
This reframing of the word “place” as in “sense of place” is consistent with the increasing invention of social scientific jargon. Call me old-fashioned, but I have trouble adapting to usages like “sense of place” when “belonging” is still a perfectly good word. My happy place is where I feel at home, or where I once felt at home.
For me, personally, that happy place was an apartment I lived in for 22 years at 380 Riverside Drive, around the corner from Columbia University. I’ve tried to see how that fits into the architectural and location planning use of the “sense of place” terminology. It doesn’t.
I loved owning my apartment. My neighbors were a true community, always willing to help each other. In short, 380 Riverside is the opposite of what most people think of when they think of New York City. California, in contrast, can be very isolating, with many people living in what are called “tract homes,” which carpet landscapes with look-alike single-family houses. That reminds me of a song.
Thinking of senior living leads me to wonder if the villas that are common at some CCRCs are a throwback to that isolation concept of property ownership, with a house centered in a plot. The neighbors might be seen, but most often they get in their cars and drive away.
Staying Home
Across the street from the CCRC where I live now, there’s a Starbucks, and a group of friends from the neighborhood gather there every morning to visit with each other. They are not CCRC residents. They seem happy. Is that “sense of place?” I thought of that while reading … again … Ryan Frederick’s interesting book, “Right Place, Right Time: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Home for the Second Half of Life.” The book develops processes and suggestions that can help people evaluate options so they can decide whether a change of locale and living circumstances is right for them. This can be very relevant for older people who are tiring of home maintenance and who want a more convenient living arrangement.
Patrick Fitzgibbons takes a more quantitative approach. He describes his motivation in these terms.
As I was applying to jobs on the East Coast of the US during my senior year of college, I began to do research if there was an optimal place for me to live. I looked into livability, economic, education, and loads of other data to join together. I created a scoring matrix to rank cities using the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) with varying weights of how much I cared about each factor from the data. I used the Bureau of Labor Statistics to look at industry growth and pay in different cities and cross referenced that with the rankings. I also wanted to understand how affordable different parts of the country were, the final question to help me understand where might be the best place to live.
Yep, that’s a quantitative approach. Ryan Frederick and Patrick Fitzgibbons were both trained as engineers, which suggests that they were attracted to quantitative decision-making from the outset. You may be more of an emotional, qualitative decision maker. I know that I am.
It’s Personal
A decision to get married, for instance, doesn’t lend itself to a matrix of options (unless, perhaps, you’re a contestant on Bachelor in Paradise). You know it when you feel it. I loved that building in New York because it was built to be fireproof with stone, coal ash, concrete, steel, and plaster. I didn’t feel safe in the suburbs because, when I was a boy, a neighbor burned her house down after falling asleep while smoking in bed. Feeling safe is something that is hard to quantify, though senior housing is wise to address it.
“Sense of Place” has become a buzzword among architects of late. If you envision a new senior living community, architects may regale you with talk of their ability to design a building with which residents and prospective residents will have an emotional connection. The “sense of place” terminology has the same magic for architects as “artificial intelligence” has for technology salespeople. Maybe it is AI; maybe it’s just new garments for an old system. Likewise, for “sense of place.”
More recently, the “sense of place” terminology has found its way from architecture into marketing as marketers try to find what residents love about collective living. Touting those positives can entice new move-ins. Such probing can be positive if the product offerings are adapted to avoid those aspects of residential living that provoke negative emotions. Changing the offering goes beyond the marketing silo though.
Unfortunate Parallel
That brings up an unfortunate similarity in phrasing. “Sense of place” can be confused with another common recent usage, “shelter in place.” New residents quickly grow inured to loud alarm signals that have no meaning. Moreover, they are instructed to stay put if fire or other danger threatens. Some wryly call it “burn in place.” “Shelter in place” has an unfortunate similarity of phrasing with “sense of place.”
Just recently, I came across a newly emerging jargon along the same lines. The jargon was “third place” as in “Third Places Aren’t Gone. We Just Stopped Going.” Digging down, it turned out that “third place” means a happy place which isn’t home or work. It’s a third place. That’s a bit like the similar jargon, “third age,” but that’s something that goes beyond “place.” Merriam-Webster tells us that “place” is “physical.” Maybe that’s why architects, with their preoccupation with space and materials, like it so much.
It can be tempting to adopt jargon from the social and data sciences as a way to sound and feel erudite. Still, for the sake of clarity and relationship, people, including prospects and board members, will better understand you if you use the tried-and-true usages of belonging, convenience, safety, peace of mind, and the like.
