Question

What is meant by “the importance of place” in early American science?

Answer 1

An understanding of place is fundamental to the concept of livability, including transportation-related aspects of livability. People live in places, move within and between places, and depend on the movement of goods to and from places. The individual characteristics of places are vital in determining quality of life. The internal structure of places and the differences between places also matter greatly in terms of socioeconomic inequality. However, it is difficult to measure what matters about places because their nature depends on both physical and social characteristics. They not only have a location, territorial domain, and natural environment, but also are social constructs, shaped by human behavior and interactions. One must avoid the temptation to think of place only as a location or a piece of territory, despite the fact that many data are collected and presented for a specific territory, especially territory delimited by political boundaries. A place is distinguished by its people, markets, governments, and institutions, as much as it is by its physical landscape and natural resources, transportation systems (including streets and roads), buildings, and boundaries. Like livability and sustainability, place is an ensemble concept.

A definition of place that recognizes the importance of location or territory and people has implications for the interpretation of livability nd for the kind of data needed for place-based decision making. We may observe—in data or analysis—a fixed territory over time, but we are seldom observing a fixed collection of people. Even if we agree on how to measure livability for people who lived in Northam in 1990, and then for people who lived there in 2001, the collection of people is different at the two times, and the changes we describe are not necessarily relevant for every person there in 1990 or in 2001. A change in an indicator might not even be relevant for most of the people who lived there at either time, if the composition of the population changed rapidly. Interpretation is complicated even more if we rely on statistical averages to measure livability, as we do frequently in practice.

Recovery is an important but understudied phase in the disaster management cycle. Researchers have identified numerous socio-demographic factors that help explain differences in recovery among households, but are less clear on the importance of place, which we define as a household's locality and local governance. In this paper, we examine the influence of place on disaster recovery through a study of the 2013 Colorado floods.

Places as Groups of Nodes in Networks

One way to think of place, both as location or territory and as people, is to start with the idea of nodes in networks. All persons participate in economic and social networks, and move—temporally and spatially—in and out of nodes in the networks. A node is a spatial and temporal cluster of interactions and common experiences, and it occurs wherever people meet together to work, buy and sell, study, talk, receive health care, cheer for a champion that represents them, or enjoy or fear the natural environment, for example. Then a person’s place—his or her “here” or a community that he or she “belongs to”—is a group of nodes in which a person frequently spends time that are near each other spatially. We think of these places both as territory, which encloses the group of nodes, and as people, who occupy the same nodes with great frequency.

The terms “frequently” and “near” are dependent on the context of the question. A person is involved in many different nodes and places, at different scales; for example, he or she is involved in the home, neighborhood, town or city, metropolitan area, state, country, and world. There is no fixed answer to how best to group the nodes into meaningful places. All are relevant to the person’s sense of identity and quality of life, and all are territories for which we need data in order to answer important questions. These places exist at multiple scales ranging from the micro (the home as a node and thus a place important to the vast majority of people) to the macro (the nation-state, or perhaps even group of nations as in Europe). Thus, one might care a great deal about one small place, with several interactions every day in a few square miles, and also care about a larger place, with only a few interactions each month in a territory of thousands of square miles. To repeat, the meaning of frequently and near vary with the question at hand.