Place as text

OK, this is just part one in a series of two. (Number two comes tomorrow, predictably enough.)

This is not really very profound but I think it is an interesting thing to look out for.

I think there are

grammars of place

, some of which are highly set in cultures and others which emerge over time.

An example of a highly rigid grammar of place is the way we set out our tables for eating with knives and forks, glasses etc positioned, there is right and wrong, evolved over time. It is based on etiquette and a notion of aesthetics.
The way the place is set up influences behaviour of those who interact with the place, those who 'enter the scene'. (There is always a sense of Drama and of 'scene by scene' at a dinner party.)


There is also the kind of grammar of place which is to do with arranging stuff in sets; such as we always see in shop displays,




or even spontaneously, the way people park ther cars or bikes in syntactical arrangements.

Somehow I find myself reading such displays from left to right and across then down the rows. Things are organised in groups, like lexical sets.



When things are not neat and in rows we are quite surprised. This chaotic pile of broken dolls looks like carnage; it is quite a challenge to our sense of order and it reads in a particular way I think.




Sometimes , places beocome texts because of the writing we put in the place and this writing starts to actually consitute the place, even controlling behaviour - an obvious example being marks on the road, traffic signs etc.

(This crossing sign is additionally interesting as the 'Ampelmann' is from East Germany and is a collectors' item!)

Sometimes the writing is just IN the place and does not quite turn the place into a text I don't think. But in the example below, a section of the Berlin wall is used to display pieces of information about Nazi Germany and the Cold war. It is both 'text in place' and 'place as text'.


The way we read a place or a text can change over time - such as the Roman Colosseum or Forum. Now we see the forum as an artefact, as a historical text. We read it for clues about previous lives but also it stands as Rome today; Rome as a place to read.

I have already shown (as has Guy) the way houses have become texts over the Christmas period, linking out to other signs to do with Christmas, and linking with other houses that do the same.

My thing on Parkour showed the cityscape being used in different ways, thus revealing the cultural constraints we unconsciously presume about the way we should use the environment - we have notions about the right and wrong way to travel round places. If we involve ourselves in free running, we begin to see Place as Playground, or as something with a range of affordances or potential, waiting to be discovered. Freerunners unsettle and redefine our notions of urban environments and we can begin to read it differently. We interact with it in new ways.



And finally, light heartedly, we can change the way we read a place by the way we behave in it. Here is my sister as a Charlie's Angel, running in front of a church doorway, transforming holy place to an intertextual reference.




Can we descibe all this as urban tapestry?

And is my blog a place?