Place contra space in a morally just landscape

Abstract

Michel de Certeau's work provides a provocative means of distinguishing the concepts of space and place in relation to that of the just landscape, while at the same time challenging the common tendency to identify landscape with the rural rather than the urban. de Certeau's landscape analysis takes its point of departure in the contrast between the map-like view of Manhattan from the World Trade Center and the place-creating practices of the pedestrians below. Since that time, the World Trade Center has become ‘Ground Zero’ and it is theoretically challenging to look at what this transformation of a monumental mark in the landscape to an equally monumental zero means for de Certeau's analysis, particularly in relation to the epistemology of nothingness. The larger significance of de Certeau's decidedly urban approach to landscape emerges in the work of the anthropologist John Gray who has made novel use of de Certeau's theory to interpret the place identity of borderland Scottish sheepherders. Gray's analysis can be applied to other rural landscapes, such as the sæter landscapes of Norway. The depth of de Certeau's argument, however, can easily be missed due to terminological confusion in translating his French into English.