Place Identity

The production register (Wentling 2017). The fifth cluster source gives place identity its house-scale mechanism and its community-scale goal. The mechanism: when the exterior is standardized, identity migrates indoors — at Irvine Ranch, buyers "had no expectation of owning a home that looked any different from the others around them," so "the only means for them to establish a sense of homeowner identity would be inside the home. Thus, today's new houses are sold from the inside" (Wentling 2017, p. 40; see identity-of-the-interior); and the multifamily corollary — "The threshold design issue to address in designing multifamily housing is the address… many prefer the former, because it gives a home a uniqueness and an identity" (p. 201). The goal: "the real goal is to create a sense of place, a feeling that people can connect to and belong to the physical environment that forms the community" (p. 77) — with Gertrude Stein's Oakland verdict ("there is no there there") as "what could apply to most of our new communities as well" (p. 78), and the two-ingredient definition (physical environment + people, p. 78). Where Dovey theorizes identity's manufacture and closure, Wentling names the positive programme — diversity of housing types, styles and open space as "a distinctive, individual character" (p. 78) — the practitioner's counter to the covenant. See neighbourhood-character, suburbanism.

Stub note: created at the Becoming Places ingest; deepened at the Wentling ingest.

Definition

Place identity names the wrapping of identity into place — "the slippery ways in which who we are becomes wrapped up with where we are" (Dovey 2010, blurb) — and, against the tradition that treats it as stable, its unfinishedness. Dovey's book-level thesis: "so much of the thinking about 'place' treats it as a somewhat static concept. Places are identified with what does not change; their 'sense of place', 'character' or 'identity' is seen as relatively stable… Yet just as human identities are in a continuous process of change, I am interested here in the various ways in which places come into being" (p. 3). The wiki's founding account is thus an anti-essentialist one: place identity is produced, not primordial; it is "provisional and unfixed," "outward-looking, defined by multiple identities and histories, its character… from connections and interactions rather than original sources and enclosing boundaries" (Dovey glossing Massey, pp. 5–6). Its dark twin is equally part of the definition: the fixed, bounded identity "defined through counterposition against the Other who is outside" (Massey quoted, p. 5) — the identity that nationalism, marketing and gated communities manufacture and defend.

The concept's two engines are Deleuze and Bourdieu: identities are produced from flows of desire and stabilized as territories (assemblage), while the habitus locks identity into "a sense of one's place in the world" (p. 31). The book's thread-formula names the identity-in-becoming across its cases: "closed becomes open, interior becomes landscape, character becomes caricature, illegal becomes legal, hotel becomes brothel, public becomes private – and vice versa in each case" (blurb). And the design trap is codification: place identity reduced to a checklist of characteristics "closes down the authentic production of place" (p. 25) — see neighbourhood-character.

Key Thinkers

• Kim Dovey — the concept's principal theorist in this wiki: place identities in states of becoming; the four-suburb study of identities defended (Camberwell, Fitzroy) and manufactured (Beacon Cove, Caroline Springs); Monas as the national-identity monument and its fenced void.
• Doreen Massey — the progressive sense of place: an "open, global and progressive sense of place" against the Heideggerian enclosure; "places are cases" of multiple identity; the anti-essentialist ground Dovey endorses while preserving a "provisional ontology of place."
• Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari — the production-side: identity as stabilized becoming; territorialization as "a form of becoming at home in the world."
• Pierre Bourdieu — the stabilization-side: habitus as "a sense of one's place"; the distinction mechanisms through which place identity signals class.
• Emily Stokes-Rees — the museum register: "visitors… participate in the creation and maintenance of collective national identity" — the institutional manufacture of place identity at national scale.

Related Concepts

• becoming — the ontology beneath the concept: identity as relative point of stability in a field of becoming.
• neighbourhood-character — the concept's design-codified form, and its caricature when reduced to characteristics.
• assemblage — the identity-bearing unit: place identity as the territorialized assemblage's expressive dimension.
• habitus — the internalized identity: "sense of one's place" as social hierarchy embodied.
• site-of-memory — the memorial form: the monument as stabilized national identity (Monas; the house museum).
• ideology — the masked form: place identity naturalized as essence is ideology's most successful effect ("no words").
• elective-belonging — the resident-side mechanism: belonging elected through cultural capital vs accumulated through residence.
• postcolonial-identity — the national-scale register: Merdeka Square's "ambivalent and Janus-faced" nation (Bhabha via Dovey).
• gentrification — the identity-undermining process Fitzroy's defenders resist ("defending Fitzroy against more of themselves").

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's founding source: the blurb's wrap and the book's thread-formula; the Massey engagement (pp. 5–6); the four suburbs' identities defended and manufactured (Ch. 5, pp. 57–78); "The identity of the place can be defined by its slippages" (Bangkok, p. 167); Monas/Merdeka as national identity stabilized and fenced (Ch. 10); the injecting-zone identity trap ("Having a fix in public also fixes ones identity," p. 150).
• Symbiotic spaces (Stokes-Rees 2018) — the museum as the national-identity manufacture at exhibitionary scale.
• The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the suburb-scale identity formation: elective vs accumulated belonging in a planned place.
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the production register: the Irvine Ranch mechanism (identity migrates indoors when the exterior is standardized; "today's new houses are sold from the inside," p. 40); "address vs anonymous" in multifamily design ("The threshold design issue… is the address," p. 201); and the community-scale goal — "the real goal is to create a sense of place, a feeling that people can connect to and belong to the physical environment that forms the community" (p. 77), with Stein's "there is no there there" verdict on the stock-plan suburb (p. 78) and the two-ingredient definition (environment + people, p. 78)
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — the making of place as architecture's ultimate task: 'Architecture is the making of place and the making of memory' (p. 172), against the homogenising force of the road, the highway, and cyberspace (pp. 166–69).

Open Questions

• Is "place identity" one concept or two — the resident's identity-through-place and the place's identity-as-character? Dovey's suburbs show them sliding into each other ("slipping easily from spatiality to sociality"); can the slide be theorized without collapsing the two?
• Dovey preserves a "provisional ontology of place-as-becoming" against Massey's purely constructionist open place. Is the ontology needed for the politics (ontological security) or does it reopen the essentialist door Massey closed?
• The binary-flip formula runs in both directions ("and vice versa in each case"). What distinguishes a becoming that liberates (illegal becomes legal: Gondolyu) from one that expropriates (public becomes private: the fenced square; the POPS)?