Practiced Place (Space vs. Place)

Definition

Michel de Certeau's bipolar distinction between place (lieu) and space (espace), and his formula for their relation. Place is "the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence" — it excludes two things being in the same location; "the law of the 'proper' rules in the place," each element occupying its own "proper and distinct location"; "a place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability." Space "exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables" — "composed of intersections of mobile elements," "in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it," the effect produced by operations that "orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function." The relation is linguistic: "in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization" — dependent on conventions, situated as an act of a present, modified by successive contexts, with "none of the univocity or stability of a 'proper.'" Hence the condensing formula: "In short, space is a practiced place." The canonical examples: "the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers"; an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of the place that is the written text. The distinction is explicitly aligned with Merleau-Ponty's separation of 'geometrical' space ("a homogeneous and isotropic spatiality") from 'anthropological space' — "there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences" — but de Certeau converts the phenomenological pair into a theory of stories: "stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places."

Key Thinkers

• Michel de Certeau — the distinction's author ("Spatial Stories," The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984; Intimus reprint 2006): place as the law of the 'proper', space as practiced place, and narrative as the labor of transformation between them.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the phenomenological antecedent: 'geometrical' vs 'anthropological' space in Phenomenology of Perception (pp 324–44, as cited by de Certeau); space as existential, existence as spatial.
• Liz Teston — the design-disciplinary reception: de Certeau "describes space as an area that is stimulated by people," place as "an area of stasis, where everything is ordered, identifiable, and codified" — the distinction Marc Augé dialecticizes into place/non-place.
• Tom Conroy — the clarification for the everyday cluster: place as the organized product of the dominant order; space "produced by the creativity of the people using the resources of the other."

Related Concepts

• Space — the concept's parent field: de Certeau's place/space pair is one of the wiki's competing accounts of what "space" is (phenomenological, political, poetic, practiced).
• Strategy and Tactic — the political pair: place is the "proper" (propre) locus that strategies require; space is what tactics practice without ever owning. The law of the 'proper' is strategy's home ground.
• Narrative Space — stories as the transformation's medium: narrative structures as "spatial syntaxes," the travel story as the pre-organizer of walks.
• Non-Places — Augé's place/non-place dialectic extends this distinction into supermodernity's transit spaces (via Teston).
• Spatial Metaphors — the metaphorai: stories as vehicles that "traverse and organize places" — narrative as the spatial metaphor's active form.
• Everyday Life — the field where the practicing happens: "spatial practices concern everyday tactics."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Spatial Stories (de Certeau 1984/2006) — the founding source: the place and space definitions (pp 79–80), "In short, space is a practiced place" (p. 80), the Merleau-Ponty derivation (p. 80), the two determinations (objects vs operations, pp 80–81), and stories' transformative labor (p. 81).
• The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau 1984) — the fuller book from which the excerpt comes: walking in the city as a "space of enunciation"; strategies bound to a "proper" place vs tactics without one — the political application of the same distinction.
• Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the design-disciplinary reception: de Certeau "describes space as an area that is stimulated by people," place as "an area of stasis, where everything is ordered, identifiable, and codified, and anthropological space as an experiential place within a contextual setting" — the distinction Augé dialecticizes.
• Culturally 'Doped' or Not? (Conroy) — place as the organized product of the dominant order; space as "produced by the creativity of the people using the resources of the other" (Conroy's gloss on de Certeau).
• Event-space: A performance model for spatial design (Hannah 2018) — the concept's epigraph and its evental extension: de Certeau's "Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities" (the chapter's opening epigraph, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 118) supplies the performed-space premise on which the event-space thesis is built — Hannah reads the operations that practice space as performances, extending the practiced place into the evental ("our banal everyday environments can be perceived and utilized as continually fluctuating performances"). See event-space, spacing, spatial-dramaturgy.
• 'House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — the concept's domestic object-register: "we must beware of simply 'reading off' meanings uncritically, without looking at how objects are used in practice" (p. 226) — the practiced-place rule applied to the home: the "family home" the house-builders design "carries important symbolic meanings which are built-in to the very design of the house. This constrains but it does not determine the way in which the house is used, or the meanings which the consumers attribute to it" (p. 226). Where de Certeau's walkers transform the planned street into practiced space, Madigan & Munro's households practice the planned house: the built place's meanings are renegotiated through use, Bourdieu's habitus supplying the mechanism de Certeau's narrative operations leave open ("the complexity of this interaction between the physical and the intellectual, the objective and the subjective," p. 226). The domestic interior as the practiced place the design professions plan but never finish (see habitus, domestic-interior, everyday-life).
• Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — the occupation register: practiced place as the only narrative a square-less city has. Solomon's thesis is de Certeau's formula turned political: "In a city in which formal urban spaces do not embody narratives, their occupation tends to do so instead." The practicing is documented at scale — the HSBC atrium encampment ("for almost a year until they were forcibly cleared by court bailiffs"), the Scholarism occupation of the LegCo lawn ("spilling out over the footbridges, access roads, and other interstitial urban spaces"), the Umbrella Movement's "temporary urbanism of barricades, stages, tents, and other informal structures." Where de Certeau's practice is walking and telling, Solomon's is camping: the practiced place as the political form the place-less city permits — and its place/space reversal is volatile, since "interior urbanism can make public life easier to snuff out, but at the same time allows it to waft" (interior-urbanism, public-sphere, power-and-space).
• Domestic Doyennes: Purveyors of Atmospheres Spoken and Visual (Turpin 2003/2006) — the concept's conversational, aristocratic form: "Here, conversation created its own social space with carefully marked boundaries as French women began redefining the criteria for inclusion and exclusion into the strata of the social elite" (p. 369) — the salon as the practiced place before the planned place: a social space generated by a practice (talk), with its boundaries drawn by the practice's own rules (inclusion/exclusion, the etiquette of the gathering) rather than by urban planning. The register also supplies the interior's inverse case: where de Certeau's walkers practice a street that exists without them, Turpin's salon has no form the practice does not make — the Chambre Bleu's "architectural proportions" (p. 370) merely housing what conversation had already spaced. The closest source on this page to a practiced place without a place (see conversation, salon, event-space).
• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the concept's marker-field form, and the bridge from practicing to milieu: "The marker (wall, road, line, border, post, sign) is static, dull, and cold. But when lived (encountered, manipulated, touched, voiced, glanced at, practised) it radiates a milieu, a field of force, a shape of space" (p. 392) — the practicing that makes space, de Certeau's formula, here given its radiance-theory: the practiced place emits a field. The register's trace-side: "In and of themselves markers are traces of movement that has passed. 'To live means to leave traces,' as Benjamin once wrote" (p. 392) — the practiced place as what movement deposits; and its de Certeau lineage confirmed at the culture level, de Certeau & Giard's "Culture is judged by its operations, not by the possession of products" (quoted p. 394) — culture itself as practiced place. The subtlest register on this page: the marking needs no street and no plan — "a coat saves the seat… posture opens and closes spaces" (p. 392). See milieu, home, trace.
• The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the place-building-over-time register, and the marker's identifying work: attachment in a planned welfare-state suburb is "the mature sense of place that develops over time when people build social capital and 'collect' biographic memories" (p. 547) — place as the slow product of practice, not of the plan that delivered the place; the practice lodges in the plan's leftover detail, the "interior road systems and 'micro-places'" (p. 547; see micro-places, social-capital). The register's marker-case is perfect for this page: in the tæt-lav rows "the houses were so homogeneous on the outside that some children had problems finding their way home" — "In order to make him [her son] recognize where he was supposed to enter, we sat his snow-sleigh on the outside" (p. 546). Ann's snow-sleigh is Wise's marker in miniature: a practiced deposit (the child's sled) that converts an unmarked, homogeneous place into an inhabitable one — the practiced place doing the identification the design could not. And the community-through-problems testimony ("The problems were common for all… And that created a feeling of community," p. 546) shows practicing happening through shared trouble, not only through walking and telling. See home, habit, everyday-life.
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's assemblage-theoretical recasting and its rhizomatic-practice register. Dovey's place/practice claim runs the de Certeau line through Deleuze: "All places are assemblages" of practices, and what de Certeau calls the practiced place appears as the rhizomatic practices of everyday life that "tend to cut across the idealized nationalist symbolism of the square" (p. 153) — the infiltrations of Merdeka Square (beggars, vendors, prostitutes, homeless sleeping "under the trees and using the fountains for washing," p. 161) as the practiced place undoing the monument's proper. The register's richest form is Ban Panthom: "loose parts, loose practices and loose meanings" (p. 167) — the practiced place as slippage, where "Functions slip from house to shop to factory; from sidewalk to restaurant to shrine to car park" (p. 182) — and the Yogyakarta kampung where "the public space network [is] saturated with individual inscriptions shaping its identity in both the short and longer term" (p. 94). Dovey also supplies the concept's design-practice pole: children's play, laundry networks, hawker schedules as the practiced place's ordinary machinery — and its political limit, when the practicing is fenced out and the place purified (p. 162). See loose-parts, place-identity, becoming.
• source-notes/berger-2018-death-of-the-architect
• source-notes/brooker-2018-dialectics-of-appropriation
• source-notes/dubbeldam-2006-thing-shapes
• source-notes/perec-2006-the-apartment

Open Questions

• If space exists only in the practicing, can it be designed at all — or does design only ever produce places that await transformation into spaces by occupants?
• Is the place/space pair a dichotomy or a spectrum — are there stable hybrids (the museum route is at once codified place and practiced space)? De Certeau himself says there are "passages back and forth" between the two determinations.
• What is lost in de Certeau's translation of Merleau-Ponty's embodied perception into narrative operations — is the body's spatial experience (Merleau-Ponty) adequately carried by the story's operations (de Certeau)?
• How does the practiced-place thesis sit with Norberg-Schulz's genius loci — place as character-laden stability to be visualized by the architect? Does "space is a practiced place" undercut the visual program or give it its lived content?
• De Certeau names the map/itinerary distinction, bornage and enunciative focalization as the elementary forms of practices organizing space — the excerpt stops before developing them; the wiki's treatment of the pair (and of walking as enunciation) rests on the book's other chapters.
• Solomon's register makes the practiced place political (occupation as narrative where "formal urban spaces do not embody narratives") — but is camping a de Certeauan tactic (practicing without owning) or a claim of the proper (an encampment's own law of the 'proper', with supply depots and stages)? The Umbrella Movement's "lack[ of] clear central planning" and smartphone coordination suggest a third form — the networked practiced place — that the place/space pair may not yet name (public-sphere).