Conclusion: the placial imagination

Abstract

As I write this, I am thousands of feet in the air, hurtling eastward towards the USA. My previous and next days have been and will be spent hopscotching from airport to airport, plane to plane—a veritable tour of what Marc Auge famously called Bnon-places^ (1995). These spaces, as Auge has it, lack a grounding. They are interstitial, refusing to be tied to a set of socialities and geographies that constitute them as significant and meaningful Bplaces.^Yet, for all that, these non-places are distinct. Their designs have spatial logics. Their lived realities cohere to these logics, or do not, in concrete ways. They employ people who take a range of meaningful relationships to their jobs and their spatial environments—whether of enthusiasm or disdain. They share characteristics, but are not reducible to a singular character. If they are non-spaces, they are far from devoid of a sense of place. I am returning from a brief round of fieldwork in Bangladesh’s coastal southwest. I have been working in a series of embanked islands that have been hollowed out, first, by the devastating effects of Cyclone Aila in 2009—which breached and destroyed the embankments and subjected these spaces to a twice daily tidal inundation of salt water for years—and, second, by a vast array of relief, development, and especially climate adaptation projects. Most of these interventions have treated individuals and households as decontextualized and atomized units: braving the climate affected future alone, as opposed to as members of communities collectively facing ongoing challenges in specific historical and ecological contexts (place). In other words, these interventions have imagined these islands as abstract spaces of disaster. Yet, despite this hollowing, farmers’ collectives in these islands are working to reclaim place. They are asserting their own needs for resources such as canals for collecting rain water that might allow them to persist as peasant agriculturalists in the face of unpredictable weather and increased uncertainty. These groups reject an anodyne understanding of their islands as spaces of disaster and insist that they remain places in which lives, livelihoods, and relationships to land matter in specific and ongoing ways. I am headed home to Austin, TX—to Bmy^ place. When I arrive there, family, work, friends, and sets of familiar patterns and obligations will quickly reintegrate me into a spatiality that I know well. These patters are one aspect of a broader set of perceptions and situations that constitute my own intimate experience of place and my relationship to broader currents and flows of work in contemporary academia and social life in a rapidly growing city. These places, prima facie, share little commonality. They are radically different contexts, geographies, and historical arenas. To what extent, then, does it make sense to organize and discuss them through a set of common theoretical concepts and abstractions? How meaningful is it to speak of all of them through this common word, place? And does thinking through this concept and all of its attendant co-terms help us develop a relational understanding of these seemingly unor dis-connected locales? These are questions that are productively opened, if not conclusively answered, by authors within this symposium. All of these pieces offer reflections on terms that animate a discussion of the concept of place and its uses. Authors make little claim to a structuralist reading of the term—an attempt to understand the Bscience^ of place as * Jason Cons jasoncons@utexas.edu