Gieryn TF A Space For Place in Sociology

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June 16, 2000 12:30 Annual Reviews AR105-20
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2000. 26:46396

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A SPACE FOR PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY

Thomas F. Gieryn
Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405;
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e-mail: gieryn@indiana.edu
Key Words place and space, built environment, architecture,

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material culture, design

Abstract Sociological studies sensitive to the issue of place are rarely labeled
thus, and at the same time there are far too many of them to fit in this review. It may be
a good thing that this research is seldom gathered up as a sociology of place, for that
could ghettoize the subject as something of interest only to geographers, architects,
or environmental historians. The point of this review is to indicate that sociologists
have a stake in place no matter what they analyze, or how: The works cited below
emplace inequality, difference, power, politics, interaction, community, social move-
ments, deviance, crime, life course, science, identity, memory, history. After a prologue
of definitions and methodological ruminations, I ask: How do places come to be the
way they are, and how do places matter for social practices and historical change?
INTRODUCTION
This may or may not be a propitious moment to review the sociological literatures
on place. We have been told about the transcendence of place (Coleman 1993),
the placelessness of place (Relph 1976), cities without a place (Sorkin 1992),
and how place becomes, with modernity, phantasmagoric (Giddens 1990). Tech-
nological revolutions in transportation and communication, it is said, have all but
eliminated the drag once imposed by location and distance on human interaction
and on the flow of goods, capital, or information. Social life now moves through
nodes in one or another network, through points of power or convergence or trans-
lation but not anchored at any place necessarily. The places we build appear as
clones of places elsewhere: suburban tracts, shopping malls, freeway interchanges,
office complexes, and gussied up old neighborhoods vary less and less. As places
lose their distinctiveness, place loses its reality and significance, some believe. The
uniqueness of New York, New York, gets packaged for reassembly in Las Vegas,
next to pyramids and the Eiffel Tower. Disneyland is in France.
Could it be that place just does not matter anymore? I think it does. In spite of
(and perhaps because of) the jet, the net, and the fast-food outlet, place persists
as a constituent element of social life and historical change (Friedland & Boden
0360-0572/00/0815-0463$14.00 463
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464 GIERYN
1994). And that significance is measured by an enduring tradition of robust socio-

logical studies of place that remains invisible only because it is rarely framed that
way. Sociologists have given the appearance of not being interested in place
perhaps preferring to leave the matter to specialists from geography, or fearing
that environmental determinism would rob social and cultural variables of their
explanatory oomph, or worrying that the particularities of discrete places might
compromise the generalizing and abstracting ambitions of the discipline (Agnew
1989, Entrekin 1991). My task is to reveal the riches of a place-sensitive sociology
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and propel it forward.
I begin with some definitional necessities and illustrate these with one soci-
ological study that takes place for all that it is worth. Next I consider the so-
ciology of how places come to be, and, after that, how place matters for social
life. Rather than pursue an exhaustive review of work on place from collateral
disciplines of geography (Gregory 1994, Soja 1989), architecture and planning,
environmental psychology, anthropology (Lawrence & Low 1990, Low 1996),
environmental history, and philosophy (Casey 1997), I have instead been cava-
lier in choosing books and articles that inform themes and issues already some-
where on the sociological agenda. Wherever available, I cite only the good trail-
head to a path of inquirythat is, something recently published with a long
bibliography.
GROUND RULES
Some definition of place is needed if only to restrict the domain of work under
review. But more: the definition offered here is designed to bring together sev-
eral literatures now rarely connected. For present purposes, place will have three
necessary and sufficient features:
(1) Geographic Location

A place is a unique spot in the universe. Place is the distinction between here and
there, and it is what allows people to appreciate near and far. Places have finitude,
but they nest logically because the boundaries are (analytically and phenomeno-
logically) elastic. A place could be your favorite armchair, a room, building, neigh-
borhood, district, village, city, county, metropolitan area, region (Entrikin 1989,
1991), state, province, nation, continent, planetor a forest glade, the seaside, a
mountaintop. This gradient of place is one reason why it is difficult to appreci-
ate what sociologists in particular have written about place because the discipline
chops up the phenomena into incommunicado bits: urban sociology, rural soci-
ology, suburban sociology, home, the environment, neighborhood, workplaces,
ecology. To pursue place itself is to ask what these places of varying scale have in
common and how they differ.
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PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 465
(2) Material Form

Place has physicality. Whether built or just come upon, artificial or natural, streets
and doors or rocks and trees, place is stuff. It is a compilation of things or objects at
some particular spot in the universe. Places are worked by people: we make places
and probably invest as much effort in making the supposedly pristine places of
Nature as we do in cities or buildings (DuPuis & Vandergeest 1996, Schama 1995).
Sociologists are again alive to the significance of material culture in social life. A
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thriving literature on technology (not just on its social effects but its physical guts)
has generated concepts and theories for discussing places as assemblages of things
(Bijker et al 1987, Latour 1996, MacKenzie 1990). Social processes (difference,
power, inequality, collective action) happen through the material forms that we
design, build, use, and protest (Habraken 1998).
(3) Investment with Meaning and Value

Without naming (on toponyms: Feld & Basso 1996), identification, or representa-
tion by ordinary people, a place is not a place. Places are doubly constructed: most
are built or in some way physically carved out. They are also interpreted, narrated,
perceived, felt, understood, and imagined (Soja 1996). A spot in the universe, with
a gathering of physical stuff there, becomes a place only when it ensconces history
or utopia, danger or security, identity or memory. In spite of its relatively enduring
and imposing materiality, the meaning or value of the same place is labileflexible
in the hands of different people or cultures, malleable over time, and inevitably
contested.
What Place is Not

To define place this way excludes several phenomena potentially of keen inter-
est to sociologists. First, place is not spacewhich is more properly conceived
as abstract geometries (distance, direction, size, shape, volume) detached from
material form and cultural interpretation (Hillier & Hanson 1984). Space is what
place becomes when the unique gathering of things, meanings, and values are
sucked out (de Certeau 1984, Harvey 1996; for contrasting definitions: Lefebvre
1991). Put positively, place is space filled up by people, practices, objects, and
representations. In particular, place should not be confused with the use of geo-
graphic or cartographic metaphors (boundaries, territories) that define conceptual
or analytical spacesas the title of this piece makes plain (also: Gieryn 1999).
Neither is place to be found in cyberspace: virtual it is not, at least for pur-
poses of this review. Websites on the internet are not places in the same way
that the room, building, campus, and city that house and locate a certain server
is a place (S Graham 1998, Purcell 1997). Still, it is fascinating to watch geo-
graphy and architecture become the means through which cyberspace is reck-
oned by designers and users (Boyer 1996, Jones 1998, King 1998, Mitchell
1995).
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Second, place is not just a setting, backdrop, stage, or context for something else
that becomes the focus of sociological attention, nor is it a proxy for demographic,
structural, economic, or behavior variables. Nothing of interest to sociologists is
nowhere (Casey 1993): Everything that we study is emplaced; it happens some-
where and involves material stuff, which means that every published piece of so-
ciology legitimately belongs in this review. No: in much research, pseudo-places
are identified only as a means to bound the unit of analysis (as when a survey
asks questions of respondents who happen to live in Kalamazoo or Kankakee,
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but nothing more is said about those cities). Place is equally irrelevant to studies
that compare Kalamazoo and Kankakee in terms of behavior patterns, structural
changes, or attitudesif nothing more is hypothesized about the effects of the
geographic location, material form, or attributed meanings of the two cities. A

sensitivity to place must be more than using two places simply to get a com-
parative wedge. The strong form of the argument is this: place is not merely a
setting or backdrop, but an agentic player in the gamea force with detectable
and independent effects on social life (Werlen 1993).
In the same way, place must be more than (say) racial proportions of neigh-
borhoods, unemployment rates in cities, birth rates in nation-states. Here, place
becomes a stand-in for clusters of variables located in spaces chosen for their
analytic utility but generally denuded of architecture, landscape, and actors own
narrations. Perhaps the classic example from sociology is the census tract, used so
effectively in research on the persistence of poverty, violence, and residential seg-
regation in urban neighborhoods (e.g. Bergeson & Harman 1998, Jargowsky 1997,
South & Crowder 1999). If the census tract is simply a bundle of analytic variables
used to distinguish one neighborhood from another in terms of its economic or
demographic features, then it is not place. Such studies become place-sensitive as
they feed in information about relative location of the census tract in a metropolitan
area, the patterns of streets or significance of particular buildings like churches or
markets, and the perceptions and understandings of the place by people who might
live there or not.
Working Metatheoretical Premises

A sociology informed by place will be most effective, I think, if it is neither reduc-
tionist nor determinist. That is, the three defining features of placelocation, ma-
terial form, and meaningfulnessshould remain bundled. They cannot be ranked
into greater or lesser significance for social life, nor can one be reduced down
to an expression of another. Place has a plenitude, a completeness, such that the
phenomenon is analytically and substantively destroyed if the three become un-
raveled or one of them forgotten (Entrikin 1991, Sack 1997, Thrift 1996). This
anti-reductionism precludes geographical fetishism and environmental determin-
ism, just as it precludes an unbridled social constructivism. If you build it, they will
come is good Hollywood (or Iowa), but bad social theory; equally bad is If you
perceive it so, it is thus. Place is, at once, the buildings, streets, monuments, and
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open spaces assembled at a certain geographic spot and actors interpretations, rep-
resentations, and identifications. Both domains (the material and the interpretive,
the physical and the semiotic) work autonomously and in a mutually dependent
way (Bourdieu 1990).
Antideterminism applies as well to the analytical relationship between place
and the other ontological realms that sociologists routinely study: behavior, belief,
institutions, change. Place saturates social life: it is one medium (along with his-
torical time) through which social life happens. The analogy is to gender: to code a
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respondent male or female is not the same as grasping how social institutions (and
places) are gendered. The task ahead is to see all social phenomena as emplaced,
as being constituted in part through location, material form, and their imaginings
(Appadurai 1996). Put more tractably, place stands in a recursive relation to other
social and cultural entities: places are made through human practices and institu-
tions even as they help to make those practices and institutions (Giddens 1984).
Place mediates social life; it is something more than just another independent
variable (Abu-Lughod 1968).
Exemplar
To bring this flighty prolegomena down to earth, consider Childerley. Bells (1994)
ethnographic study of a pseudonymous exurban English village in Hampshire
(pop. 475) epitomizes a sociology sensitive to place. Its topics read like the table
of contents from an intro text: values, morality, class, gender, deviance, power,
change, culture, politicsbut these are all emplaced, and we learn about them in
and through Childerley. Almost every chapter starts out by situating the reader
there: Childerley . . . is best known for the Horse and Hound, a genuine sixteenth-
century pub at the end of the village. Visitors come from miles away to take a pint
of good ale in front of its huge fireplace, ten feet wide and five feet deep, and to
soak in the ambiance of the head-bashingly-low timbered ceiling and rude board
tables and benches (Bell 1994:27). Incidental detail? Hardly. Pubs (along with
council houses, tied cottages, manor housesand how fireplaces or televisions are
differently arranged therein) (Halle 1993) contribute to the reproduction of class
distinctions in Childerley: the Horse and Hound is favored by the moneyed, the
Fox (described as a bit grotty) is favored by ordinary working-class folks. Even
the concepts that Bell devises to analyze class in Childerley are place-terms: the
moneyed are front-door people (formal, distanced, individualistic), the ordinary
folks are back-door (local, informal, group-oriented, experiential).
But social class is distrusted among residents of Childerley, and it is rarely
chosen by them as a legitimate source of identity and motivation or seen as a guar-
antee of morality and sinceritytoo easily polluted by materialist self-interest,
they might say. Bell finds instead that place itselfChilderley the village and even
more the nature found in the surrounding pastoral countrysidebecomes the in-
terpretive frame through which people there measure their lives, evaluate others,
take political positions, and just make sense. The countryside itself becomes a
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moral rock (1994:8) for Childerleyans, as they see themselves in and from this
good place (where patient, sincere, and friendly people respect nature on a first-
name basis), distant from the evil metropole. People are ranked and trusted by how
authentically country they are, though not everyone agrees on its determinants.
For ordinary folks, the country village that Childerley was imagined to be has
been lost to gentrifying arrivistes from London who build huge new homes and
want to clean the place up. Place is as vital for securing tradition as for manifest-
ing class difference: The stories we tell take place in places, and most ordinary
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Childerleyans live right in the setting of most of their lifetimes accumulated sto-
ries (Bell 1994:170). Geographic location, material forms, Childerleyans repre-
sentations of their homethese are the means through which readers learn about
inequality, morality, capitalism, and other squarely sociological matters.

A space for place in sociology is not to be found in a sociology of place, with

its own ASA section and specialty journal. Rather, it will come from sociological
studies of anything and everything that are informed by a sense of placeas
with Childerley (which was chosen as exemplar not because the village evokes
nostalgia or tradition but because it is one of many sites where battles over the
authenticity and even existence of the local are waged). How do geographic
locations, material forms, and the cultural conjurings of them intersect with social
practices and structures, norms and values, power and inequality, difference and
distinction? There are two ways to answer this question: the first is explore how
places come into being, the second is to find out what places accomplish. In the Real
World, the construction of places and their social achievements or consequences
are tough to disentangleso consider it an arbitrary distinction good only for
immediate organizational ends.
PLACE-MAKING
The making of placesidentifying, designating, designing, building, using, inter-
preting, rememberinghas been examined in three sociological literatures, only
sometimes brought together: upstream forces that drive the creation of place with
power and wealth; professional practices of place-experts; perceptions and attribu-
tions by ordinary people who experience places (and act on those understandings).
Powers Behind Places

Most research has been done on how urban places come to look the way that they
do, with less on the powers shaping rural areas (on rusticity: Ching & Creed 1997,
Cloke & Little 1997, Summers 1986), small towns (Hummon 1990), individual
buildings and lightly built landscapes (Bantjes 1997). An enduring debate over
factors driving the location and built form of cities pits urban ecologists vs. politi-
cal economists (Feagin 1998, Flanagan 1993, Frisbie & Kasarda 1988, Gottdeiner
1994, Gottdeiner & Feagin 1988, Hughes 1993, Walton 1993). Urban ecologists
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see cities as the result of a survival of the fittest, shaped by competitions for ef-
ficient locations among individuals and corporate actors of diverse means and
powers to control the physical terrain in a self-interested way. Natural processes
of competition and mobility lead to segregated niches of homogeneous activities
or demographic characteristics. The spatial arrangement of these natural areas
central business district, residential, manufacturing, warehouseshave been de-
scribed as a set of concentric zones, sectors that slice through the concentric zones
and as a spatially distributed multiplicity of nuclei or centers (reviewed in Wilson
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1984). More recent ecological perspectives (Hawley 1986) have explored patterns
of ethnic segregation, changing population densities, decentralization and subur-
banization, and sought to identify empirically socioeconomic and ethnic factors
that underlie differences among residential niches (Berry & Kasarda 1977).
Political economic models of place-making find nothing natural about the

architecture of urbanity: cities assume material forms (and cultural meanings)
congruent with economic interests and political alignments in a resolutely capital-
ist world (for socialist alternatives: Blau 1999). The natural physical environment,
technology, transportation, and the individual choices of self-interested actors are
less consequential than the pursuit of profit (through production of goods and ser-
vices, ormore immediatelyinvestments in land) and political complicity with
such enlargements of wealth (Lefebvre 1991). Capitalist industrial strategies are
unavoidably territorial strategies, as geographic patterns in production and con-
sumption create places of growth and decline (Clarke 1992, Storper & Walker
1989). Simultaneous decay in the urban core and sprawling suburbs (Baldassare
1992) is traced back, for example, to selective capital investments by banks and
government (Harvey 1973) or to economic restructuring and the rise of high tech
industries (Castells 1977) that find it more profitable to locate in (and spawn)
edge cities (Garreau 1991), or to legal structures that set in motion economic
competitions among fractured municipal sovereignties (Frug 1999). Theme parks
represent a double commodification, as the place itself is consumed by tourists as
they also consume schlock: Sea World is a like a mall with fish (Davis 1997:2;
on themed places generally: Gottdeiner 1997, Wright & Hutchison 1997). Glob-
alization of economic activity (Cox 1997, Knox 1993) has not made place unim-
portant but rather has given rise to new kinds of places such as the global city
(AD King 1996, Knox & Taylor 1995, Sassen 1991) and dependent cities in the
third world (Smith 1996), or total makeovers of extant places like Times Square
(Reichl 1999), or massive changes among existing cities such as the tilt toward the
American Sunbelt (Scott 1988).
A kind of structural determinism haunts these ecological and political eco-
nomic models, leading them both to overlook the play of agency and contingency
in place-making. Metropolitan areas are not shaped by faceless forces of natu-
ral succession-and-competition or capitalist logics of accumulation: people and
groups organized into coalitions actively accomplish places, and the process is
never the same from here to there (Logan & Molotch 1987). Growth machines of
place-entrepreneurslocal rentiers, politicians, media, and utilitiespursue ever
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more intensive land-use so that greater amounts of exchange-value may be ex-

tracted from commodified property (Rudel 1989). They sometimes face resistance
from community organizers more concerned about the use-value of place, who
oppose growth because of its detrimental consequences for neighborhood quality
of life or environmental health. The struggle between those who produce places for
profit and those who consume it in their daily rounds is played out against a global
struggle among places for the wherewithal to grow. Cities compete nationally and
globally for investors, jobs, spectacles, state-supported places like military bases
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(Hooks 1994), cultural treasures, shoppers and tourists by differentiating them-
selves from the rest. Artists drawn to Lower Manhattan by initially cheap digs in
lofts soon found themselves in the midst of intense economic development, which
has remade Soho into a tourist-and-shopping destination with astronomical rents

(Zukin 1982). A century-old residential neighborhood in Brussels is transformed

(not without opposition) into an administrative home for the European Commu-
nity (Papadopolous 1996). On-the-ground case studies of Atlanta (Rutheiser 1996),
Beijing (Sit 1995), Berlin (Ladd 1997, Strom 1996), Dallas (Fairbanks 1998), Los
Angeles (Davis 1990, 1998, Dear et al 1996, Hayden 1995, Keil 1998, Scott & Soja
1996), Houston (Feagin 1988), Miami (Croucher 1997, Portes & Stepick 1993)
Milwaukee (Orum 1995), and Minneapolis-St. Paul (Orfield 1997) put human
faces on the winners and losers in these layered struggles over place-making.
Place-Professionals
From a different perspective, urban growth machines become clients for pro-
fessions whose bailiwick is the design of built-places: architects (Blau 1984,
Brain 1989, Cuff 1991, Gutman 1988, Sarfatti Larson 1993, Zeisel 1975); ur-
ban and regional planners (Boyer 1983, Cherry 1974, Forester 1989, Gans 1968,
Hall 1988, Perin 1977, Sandercock 1998, Suttles 1990); landscape architects
(Mukerji 1997); interior designers (Fehrenbacher-Zeiser 1996); cartographers
(Buisseret 1998, G King 1996, Pickles 1995, Thrower 1996); surveyors, historic
preservationists (Barthel 1996); even public relations specialists with expertise in
promoting a place (Gold & Ward 1994). Design-experts mediate the relationship
between political, economic, or mobilized powers and the built-places that they
desire. Interests and agendas of diverse clients are filtered through a profession,
a culture, and a discipline of design. The design of a place may involve plan-
ners, architects, policymakers, financial institutions, patrons, regulatory agencies,
potential users, developers, engineers, and variously interested audiences. It is, at
once, the making of a place and the negotiation, translation, and alignment of polit-
ical and economic interests, technical skills and imperatives, aesthetic judgments
and societal futures (Stieber 1998). The finished places that we see, inhabit, visit,
and suffer are as much the consequence of decisions made by place-professionals
as of the wishes of clients upon whom they depend for their livelihood.
The practice of architecture (for example) situates place-making within a pro-
fession that must defend its jurisdiction or market niche (Brain 1991), legitimate
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its cultural authority, socialize its members, standardize its procedures, and reward
its heroes and (infrequently: Hughes 1996) heroines. Buildings take shape as in-
dividual draftpersons seek promotion to project architects and then partners, as
design firms hustle clients by specializing in a particular building type or by pro-
moting a signature style, and as the profession patrols its porous boundaries from
encroachments by engineers, developers, amateurs, and U-design-it software. All
of these strugglesmelded with emergent constraints from clients preferences
and budget, local building codes, the terrain of the physical siteget materialized
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in the built-form of a place. For instance, suburban shopping malls (Crawford
1992, Gottdeiner 1995, 1997; Zukin 1991, 1995) have a certain sameness to them
not only because capitalist logic demands that the same retail chains locate in al-
most every one of them, but also because developers buy architectural plans from
a small number of bureaucratically organized firms who save considerable time

and money by hiring draftpersons to crank out (routinized by computer-assisted
design) an effective and low-risk one-size-fits-all mall.
This routinization, standardization, and rationalization of design practice that
makes architecture firms efficiently profitable and professionally accountable also
raises questions about what it is exactly that architects provide. Architects survive
because there are innumerable ways to translate function (selling goods) into
built form (a mall). The professions marketability depends upon convincing
clients that architects alone possess the creative skills and artistic judgments nec-
essary for making this transit from idea or need to place. Architects sell style,
whichwhen built-inbecomes the look or feel that people associate with a place.
Most everybody notices at some level that the big-box suburban mall landing like
a spaceship in a sea of parking is not the same as the postmodern confection like
Bostons Quincy Market or Baltimores Harborplace that is contextualized into
the surrounding urban fabric and decorated with appropriate historical referents.
The stylistic turn from modernism to postmodernism [which has yielded vastly
different places (R King 1996, Ley 1989)] is not just about changing tastes (or
changing political economies: Harvey 1990); it is also about architects seeking to
convince clients that they have hit upon a better way to move function to form
amidst the changing political economy of urban areas (Ellin 1996). As the failed
urban renewal programs of modernism gave way to gentrifying city neighborhoods
(Ley 1997), postmodern emporiums became right not only for selling but for other
social goals such as growing community or attracting capital.
A Sense of Place
Places are endlessly made, not just when the powerful pursue their ambition
through brick and mortar, not just when design professional give form to func-
tion, but also when ordinary people extract from continuous and abstract space a
bounded, identified, meaningful, named, and significant place (de Certeau 1984,
Etlin 1997). A place is remarkable, and what makes it so is an unwindable spiral
of material form and interpretative understandings or experiences.
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Something in the built-form of a place encourages people to distinguish this

building or that patch of ground from its overlookable backdrop. Urban environ-
ments are designed and built in ways that either enhance or prevent their im-
ageability and legibility (Lynch 1960). The perceived contrast between a place
and its surrounding unidentified spaces may be achieved through continuity (when
the architectural homogeneity of buildings in a neighborhood lead people to see
it as Beacon Hill or Seaside), or through uniqueness (when a landmark stands out
as utterly unlike any other thing in town, like New Yorks Flatiron Building or
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the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington) (Milgram et al 1972). Research
on mental (or cognitive) mappinghow individuals identify and locate a place
when asked to map itsuggests that places emerge along paths (linear streets) or
nodes (transportation transfer points), and they are bounded by imposing physi-
cal edges (waterfront, building facades that wall an open space) (Downs & Stea
1973, Peponis et al 1990). When asked to describe their apartment, New Yorkers
presented either a map (giving the location of adjacent rooms) or a tour (moving
the respondent through space) (Linde & Labov 1975).
But mental maps drawn by naive geographers also measure what people bring
to the material forms they inhabit (Tuan 1974, 1977). Foremost, perhaps, is prag-
matic utility: people identify as places those spots that they go to for some partic-
ular purpose or function. The sequence of places along ones daily rounds (home,
shopping, employment, entertainment) is often the core cartographic feature of
subjective cityscapeswith identified districts and landmarks then grafted on as a
means of orientation (Pred 1990). The egoistic particularity of mapped-out places
(Jameson 1984:90) suggests that such representations will vary among individu-
als in terms of their biographical characteristics and experiences: research shows
considerable racial and ethnic differences in how people choose places to put on
their maps (Lewis 1996). Also, people recall more easily places that they associate
with momentous events in their lives (literatures on cognitive mapping, and envi-
ronmental psychology generally, are reviewed in Kitchin 1994, Sundstrom et al
1996).
A sense of place is not only the ability to locate things on a cognitive map,
but also the attribution of meaning to a built-form or natural spot (Rotenberg &
McDonogh 1993, Walter 1988). Places are made as people ascribe qualities to
the material and social stuff gathered there: ours or theirs; safe or dangerous;
public or private; unfamiliar or known; rich or poor; Black or White; beautiful
or ugly; new or old; accessible or not. Rankings of city neighborhoods in terms
of perceived desirability and quality of life are key variables in place stratifica-
tion models used to explain patterns of residential dispersion of racial and ethnic
groups in metropolitan areas (Alba & Logan 1993, Farley et al 1994, Harris 1999,
Lindstrom 1997, South & Crowder 1998). Advantaged groups (and individuals)
seek to put distance between themselves and the less advantaged. The very idea
of neighborhood is not inherent in any arrangement of streets and houses, but
is rather an ongoing practical and discursive production/imagining of a people.
Locality is as much phenomenological as spatial, achieved against the ground
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of globalization or nationalization (Appadurai 1996, Crain 1997, Koptiuch 1997,

Lippard 1997).
Meanings that individuals and groups assign to places are more or less embed-
ded in historically contingent and shared cultural understandings of the terrain
sustained by diverse imageries through which we see and remember cities (Boyer
1994). Cultural geography (or metageography) studies the (often implicit) spa-
tial representations and images through which people arrange their behavior and
interpretations of the social world (Anderson & Gale 1992, Basso 1996, Norton
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1989, Sopher 1973). To shift ground: the familiar seven-continent spatialization
of the earths prominent land masses has been described as a myth (Lewis &
Wigen 1997) that gets reproduced, transmitted, learned, and assumed as factbut
not among all peoples at all times, and with heavy ideological freight. Is North
America a place, or Africa? Conventional demarcations among continents are

not based on any consistently applied decision-rule: Europe and Asia are not com-
pletely divided by water; not all islands are continentsMadagascar isnt. More-
over, the homogeneities implied by gathering up social practices, demographic
distributions, cultural beliefs, built-environments, and physical topography onto
one continent are belied by obvious internal differentiation (what else does sub-
Saharan Africa share with Mediterranean Africaor Mexico with Canada and the
United Statesapart from sitting on the same continental land mass?)
These culturally reproduced images of places are thus arbitrary but real in their
consequencesfor what people do to the land, as they make (or destroy) places.
Nomadic hunting and gathering lifestyles of Native Americans in New England did
much less to reduce the diversity of flora and fauna of this place than the agricultural
lifestyles of the colonists who carved up the land into parcels of privately owned
property (Cronon 1983). Navaho beliefs that Arizonas Black Mesa is a sacred place
did not prevent the Peabody Coal Company from strip mining it for coal starting
in 1970 (Kelley & Francis 1994). Whether Native American understandings of
places are consistently in tune with ecologically sound noninvasive practices is a
matter of dispute (Krech 1999, Stea & Turan 1993). So much is at stake in these
diverse images and experiences of a place, and it becomes a sociological truism
to say that such symbolic constructions will be forever precarious and contested
(Griswold 1992, Hiss 1990, Laclau 1990). The Bastille, for example, started out
as a profane place, and became by turn, a sacred place, a liminal place, and finally
a mundane place (Smith 1999).
WHAT PLACE DOES
If place matters for social life and historical changehow? Scattered literatures
suggest that place: stabilizes and gives durability to social structural categories,
differences and hierarchies; arranges patterns of face-to-face interaction that con-
stitute network-formation and collective action; embodies and secures otherwise
intangible cultural norms, identities, memoriesand values like the American
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474 GIERYN
Dream (Whitaker 1996). These consequences result uniquely (but incompletely)

from material forms assembled at a particular spot, in part via the meanings that
people invest in a place.
Emplacing Difference and Hierarchy

Fundamental social classifications take on an imposing and constraining force
as they are built in to everyday material places. The kinship structure of simple
?
societies is secured as it is spatialized in the geographic arrangement of villages
and dwellings (Durkheim & Mauss 1963), and the interior allocation of spaces
in the Kabyle house corresponds to basic dichotomies in the Berber cosmogony:
male/female, wet/dry, high/low, light/dark (Bourdieu 1990). This structuralist tra-

dition says little about agency and choice in the planning of places (Pearson &
Richards 1997). Instead, seeking theoretical escape from artificial oppositions of
the objective and subjective, Bourdieu suggests that the architectural and geo-
graphic form of places is generated (self-reproduced) by not-fully-conscious-or-
strategic practices and symbolic logics that are (at the same time) embodied in and
structured by the resulting material arrangements of buildings.
Place sustains difference and hierarchy both by routinizing daily rounds in
ways that exclude and segregate categories of people, and by embodying in vis-
ible and tangible ways the cultural meanings variously ascribed to them. The
spatial division of labor between home and work has profound consequences for
womens identities and opportunities (Ahrentzen 1992, Hayden 1981, Hayden
1984, Nippert-Eng 1995, Wright 1981). What it is to be female is constructed
in part through idealized qualities (domestic security, family stability) ascribed
to the home (Benjamin 1995, Cieraad 1999)which has been traditionally (and
for many is still) a womans place (Massey 1994). Gendered segregations via
the geography and architecture of built-places contribute to the subordination and
spatialized social control of women, either by denying access to knowledge and
activities crucial for the reproduction of power and privilege or by limiting mobility
more generally within places defined as unsafe, physically threatening, or inap-
propriate (McDowell 1999, Spain 1992, Weisman 1992, Wilson 1992; in Africa:
Moore 1986, Prussin 1995). Racial, ethnic, and class segregations are achieved
via restrictive land-use zoning that requires homes to be of a certain size or value,
especially in suburbs (DeSena 1990, Haar 1996, Kirp et al 1995, Wilson 1998).
Class differences and hierarchies are reproduced through segregated class-specific
localities of residence and consumption, geographic patterns of relocation that
differentially affect labor and capital, and place-shaped capacities for working-
class mobilization or expression (Thrift & Williams 1987). Still, at the same time
that ethnic enclaves segregate, they also provide conditions of ethnic solidarity,
community, and economic advance (Zhou 1992).
Places reflect and reinforce hierarchy by extending or denying life-chances to
groups located in salutary or detrimental spots. Most of the literature on ethnic
enclaves has focussed on segregated urban neighborhoods whose physical, social,
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and cultural deterioration (whether due to the exodus of middle-class minorities

or to racist real estate practices) has made it difficult for residents to better their
conditions (Massey & Denton 1993, Oliver & Shapiro 1995, Wilson 1996). How-
ever, the point may be generalizable: being in the wrong place at the wrong time
imposes costs on ethnic minority populations, as Clark (1998) has shown for sev-
eral European minorities in the seventeenth century. The fate of these groups was
a contingent matter of place: those located in regions strategically in between two
international powers at war suffered greater persecution and violence. The situa-
?
tion is not all that different for long-time residents of supposedly declining urban
neighborhoods, who are compelled by gentrification to relocate elsewhere when
they are given offers that they cannot refuse (Zukin 1987).
Power-Vessels and Strongholds

Places have power sui generis, all apart from powerful people or organizations who
occupy them: the capacity to dominate and control people or things comes through
the geographic location, built-form, and symbolic meanings of a place. The array
of building-types is, on this score, also a catalog of how places differently become
terrains of powers (Markus 1993). Spatializations of normal/pathological, often
accompanied by architectures of enclosure, display, segregation, surveillance, and
classification, give an impersonal and autonomous power over docile subjects
to hospitals, prisons, asylums, schoolsthe Panopticon (Foucault 1979). Power-
spots vary in form and function: the co-location of exclusive clubs and corporate
headquarters create local and comfortable places where interlocking directorates
can assemble informally and plot moves (Davis & Greve 1997, Kono et al 1998).
The command of heights has strategic advantage in ground warfare: places of
high ground afford a wider view of adversaries maneuvers, inhibit their uphill
attack, and facilitate construction of powerful defensive strongholds (Clausewitz
1976). The aestheticization of politics means that Mussolinis fascist power is
inscribed even on the sewer plates of Rome (Falasca-Zamponi 1997:98). Still, the
hold of a place on power is never permanent or absolute: as markets and capital
go global, rusted steel mills and ghostly impoverished towns stay behind (Pappas
1989, Zukin 1991).
Domination over nature is housed in buildings that becomefor this reason
places of social power too. Scientific laboratories are places where wild creatures
are tamed, enculturated by insertion into artificial territorial regimes that create
purified and workable objects of inquiry (Knorr Cetina 1999). From their domi-
nation over nature, laboratories dominate society as they become obligatory pas-
sage points standing between desperate people and their panacea. For example,
the vaccine for anthrax was uniquely emplaced at Pasteurs Parisian laboratory,
which became a center of calculation with the power to move a healthier France
toward enlarged and enthusiastic patronage of science (Latour 1988). The power of
laboratories as truth-spots depends considerably upon sequestrations achieved
architecturally, walls and doors that exclude or inhibit people, and pollutants that
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476 GIERYN
might challenge or compromise the cognitive authority of experimental science

(Galison & Thompson 1999, Gieryn 1998, Gutman 1989, Shapin 1998).
The exercise of political power is also intimately connected with place: geogra-
phy and built environments organize political behavior such as voting or activism
(Sellers 1998), spaces become the focus of government development policies, and
control of territory is one measure of effective state sovereignty (Agnew 1987).
Place enables power to travel, to extend its reach over people and territory. This
can result from standardizations of the land itselfgridding the countryside, vil-
?
lage, and city in a high modernist way, or even just mapping it (Kain & Baigent
1992)that facilitate state control over its people (Holston 1989, Price 1995,
Rabinow 1989, Scott 1998, Sennett 1970). Or such power can merely be dis-
played in a kind of architectural chest-thumping: Louis XIVs straight-jacketed

gardens at Versailles demonstrated for all to see the capacity of the French state
for material domination over the land and, thus, its prowess to control people
(Mukerji 1997). Imposing monuments or government buildings erected all over the
colonies extended imperial power, in part by asserting with superior engineering
or decor that indigenes simply lacked the civilization to do the same for themselves
(Anderson 1983, Metcalf 1989, Vale 1992, Wright 1991, cf. Carter 1988, Robinson
1989). Such power can also be symbolized and reproduced through distinctive
building-types or stylesthe bungalow in India (King 1995)that materialize
colonization. In all these cases, the absolute (power) becomes local through its em-
placement (Deleuze & Guattari 1986). These architectural and geographic power-
moves sometimes meet resistance: recent construction of modern and globally
typical factories for making silk in Hangzhou could not deter workers subversive
practices grounded in long-standing traditions (e.g., commandeering open spots
on the shop-floor for long breaks) (Rofel 1997; cf. Baldry 1999).
Proximity, Interaction, Community

Places bring people together in bodily co-presencebut then what (Boden &
Molotch 1994, Sennett 1994)? Put crudely, the possibilities are twoengagement
or estrangement (Sennett 1990)and debates over the conditions making for one
or the other outcome constitute perhaps the most celebrated and enduring contribu-
tion of sociologists to the study of place (reviewed in Choldin 1978, Fischer 1975).
Urban places have been described as the locus of diversity, tolerance, sophistica-
tion, sociation, public participation, cosmopolitanism, integration, specialization,
personal network-formation (Fischer 1977, 1982), coping, frequent spontaneous
interactions, freedom, creativityi.e., community (as a coming together in local
collective projects requiring civil negotiations of differences that are inevitable)
(Young 1990). But urban places have also been described as the locus of anonymity,
detachment, loneliness, calculating egoism, privatization, formalized social con-
trols, segregations, individualism, withdrawal, detachment, parochialism, discon-
nections, isolation, fear, seclusion, mental illness (Halpern 1995)i.e., the last
place on earth one would expect to find community.
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Whether or not community results from the gathering up of people into proxi-
mate face-to-face interactions dependssociologists routinely sayon their number,
their differentiations along lines of class, race, ethnicity, taste or lifestyle, and the
cultural beliefs they share (Wellman 1979). But is there a place effect as well,
in which the tight coupling of geography, built-form, and subjective topological
understanding mediates the effects of size, demographic patterns, and values on the
possibility or achievement of community? Enough studies suggest that the design
and serial construction of places is at the same time the execution of community
?
(in one or the other sense of that word) (Hummon 1990, Kunstler 1996, Suttles
1972).
Engagement can be built-in. At the scale of individual buildings, Allen (1977)
found that the rate of innovation in high-tech R&D organizations could be enhanced
by designing facilities to maximize chance interactions (e.g., by forcing everybody

to use the same stairwell, open and inviting enough to encouraging lingering talk).
In the same way, the built-form of cities may help to explain outbreaks of cultural
effervescence and creativity (Hannerz 1992). Ordinary neighborhood residents
may be brought together in unplanned interactions when individual dwellings are
compactlybuilt rather than widely dispersed, or when front porches and stoops
permit seamless moves from home to a pedestrian-friendly street (Festinger et al
1950, cf. Logan & Spitze 1994). Presence of perceivedly public places such as
parks, plazas (Moore 1996), squares, libraries, agoraowned by no one (legally
or informally), inviting and accessible to allfosters mingling of diverse people
who dont already know each other and provides a setting for spectacles and com-
munal celebrations (Carr et al 1992, Lofland 1998, Rowe 1997, Sarkis 1997). If
those public places are designed effectivelyproviding comfortable places to sit,
movable chairs, water, street food, maybe something erotic (Young 1990)more
people will be drawn to them (Whyte 1980). Or perhaps the places most conducive
to community are not designed at all (Cline 1997), but are disorderedand lose
much when they are purified (Jacobs 1961, Sennett 1970). Places like neighbor-
hood bars, restaurants (Ferguson 1998), corner stores, churches, and clubs provides
spots for informal engagements and organizational meetings, often among people
who already know each other (Oldenburg 1989). Giving residents a stake in the
process of place-makingNew Urbanist planners involve residents in char-
rettes, where strategic design decisions are made collectivelyleads to greater
civic interest and participation in subsequent public policy deliberations (Brain
1997, Brain 1998, MacCannell 1999).
So, too, can estrangement be built-in. Residential development that sprawls
further and further away from city centers creates the need for mobile pods of
seclusion if they are connectable only by private car traveling at high speeds (de
Boer 1986, Sorkin 1999). Conversion of once public places into private or semi-
public onesshopping malls replace Main Street and the town square (consider
what Benjamin said of European urban arcades from a century ago: At the exit
. . . I breathe more easily; the street, freedom, the present! Buck-Morss 1989:38),
new neighborhoods are gated (Blakely & Snyder 1997), the grid of residential
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478 GIERYN
streets is selectively closed offrestrict the range and diversity of people with
whom one is likely to interact on daily rounds (Lofland 1998). The borders among
ethnic (or class) enclaves in the urban mosaic often become impassable (Massey
1985, Young 1990; but see Sigelman et al 1996). The spatial specialization of
functionmagnet places like stores, workplaces, office parks, or civic centers are
distanced from residential neighborhoods, which are then differentiated by the
property values of their homesfurther segregates denizens along lines of race,
class, ethnicity, age, and gender (Lofland 1973). These patterns are inspired by nar-
?
rations of place that in effect legitimate the resulting homogeneous enclavesfor
example, when suburbs are envisaged through imageries of romantic pastoralism
or unique historical heritages (Bridger 1996, Dorst 1989), and thus as escapes
from the risks, pollutions, and undesirables simultaneously planted in The City.
When community does arise inside such enclaveswealthy burb or gentrify-

ing neighborhoodit tends to be defensive, exclusionary, and protectionist (Frug
1999), and works against a more inclusive public sphere.
Places Spawn Collective Action

Goulds rich studies of Parisian insurrections in 1848 and 18701871 epitomize a
place-sensitive perspective on collective behavior (Gould 1995). Haussmanns re-
building of central Paris between these two uprisings changed the identity-contours
along which protest was organized. In 1848, most workers were residentially clus-
tered by trade or craft in neighborhoods replete with cabarets and cafes where
they mobilized and schemed: networks forged in the workplace and reinforced
in neighborhood centers of sociability organized insurgency along class lines. By
1870, Haussmanns boulevards had fractured some of these neighborhoods and,
more importantly, pushed many workers out to peripheral areas just annexed as
part of Paris. In these outlying areas, workers from different trades along with
others from different classes formed a new collective identity based on the neigh-
borhood itself: they were drawn to local public meetings, where they organized
their neighbors into active resistance against the French state. Neighborhood ties
became the via media of recruitment and mobilization for the Paris Commune.
In the twentieth century, the red belt of Paris moved even further out into sub-
urbs such as Bobigny, where the combination of radical politics and neighborhood
attachments is sustained (Stovall 1990).
Place was equally consequential in the 1989 Beijing student revolt. The fine
structure of campus architecture and of surrounding streets shaped patterns of
mobilization. Here, the built environment was not a source of collective identity
but rather structured the spatial distribution and flow of activists (Zhao 1998).
Community organization of racial groups in Los Angeles was affected by the spatial
patterns of tertiary residential streets (Grannis 1998). In the case of Swedish trade
unionists between 1890 and 1940, spatial proximity in itself inspired collective
activism (Hedstrom 1994). On different occasions, place provided a site where
numbers of participants could and would gatherLeipzigs Karl Marx Platz for
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East German protests in 1989 (Opp & Gern 1993), Groveland Church for political
rallies in a Chicago African-American community (Pattillo-McCoy 1998).
Place can become the object of collective action, as in NIMBY [not in my
backyard] movements (Norton & Hannon 1997) or protests grounded in charges
of environmental racism (Bullard 1990). Saving Owens Valley from thirsty Los
Angeles (Walton 1992; for Arizona: Espeland 1998), saving Black Corona
(a neighborhood in Queens, New York) from an intrusive elevated train line
(Gregory 1998), saving the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis from
?
urban renewal (Stoecker 1994), and saving Manhattans Lower East Side from
gentrification (Abu-Lughod 1994) became rallying cries for protest movements.
Other studies call attention to the locations of places, in geographic space, as
factors in collective action. In the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, villages

that were neither too close to the center of political power nor too isolated were more
prone to peasant uprisings (Barkey & Van Rossem 1997). In eighteenth century
England, political autonomy and solidarityleading eventually to emerging rights
of citizenshipwere more common in pastoral areas than in arable lands more
tightly controlled by ruling elites (Somers 1993, cf. Brustein & Levi 1987). And,
in a quite different way, place affects media coverage of collective action: public
events are more likely to receive coverage if they occur on the customary beat of
reporters (Oliver & Myers 1999).
If places spawn collective action, so too can they become its contraceptive.
As public spaces in cities are privatized, stigmatized, avoided or destroyed, the
effect is chilling on the possibility of mobilization and public protest. Streets and
sidewalks, squares and markets, increasingly give way to pedways and skyways,
malls and arenas that are constructed with material (locks), legal (armed guards
and surveillance cameras), and semiotic (informal codes that announce appropriate
users and uses) devices that discourage public displays of political activism (Boddy
1992, Davis 1990, Winner 1992). In a very different way, identities grounded in
attachment to local communities or neighborhoods can inhibit an individuals
commitment to collective actionas Bearman (1991) found for deserters from the
Confederate Army who stopped thinking about themselves as generic Southerners.
Normative Landscapes (Resistance, Transgression, Control)

Place is imbricated in moral judgments and deviant practices as well. Conduct
appropriate backstage is often not permissible out front (Goffman 1959). Tags
of graffiti artists violate legal norms when sprayed on the sides of subway cars
or public walls, but they become legitimate art when moved inside a gallery or
museum (Lachmann 1988). Openly gay behavior may be expected and approved
in Castro Valley, San Francisco (Castells 1983; for Stockholm, M Graham 1998;
for lesbians in Northhampton, Massachusetts, Forsyth 1997), but not (it seems) in
rural Wyoming. Whether a workers strike is legal or not, and how police respond
to it, depends much on its geography (Blomley 1994). Constructions of behavior,
appearances, or even people as deviant depend upon where they happenbut as
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480 GIERYN
these three examples illustrate, to engage in out of place practices is also a form
of resistance (de Certeau 1984, Pile & Keith 1997) against forces imposing a ter-
ritorialized normative order (Cresswell 1996). Still, just as place is caught up in
definitions of deviance, so deviance on occasion defines place: sites of mass mur-
ders, terrorist violence, atrocities, or natural tragedies are variously memorialized,
erased, sanctified, stigmatized, or merely rectified (Foote 1997, Gregory & Lewis
1988).
Place also plays a role in shaping rates of behavior generally considered de-
?
viant or criminal no matter where they occur. Environmental criminologists sug-
gest that the geographic location of various social activities and the architectural
arrangements of spaces and building can promote or retard crime ratesmainly
crime against property (Brantingham & Brantingham 1990). City blocks with bars
or public schools have higher rates of burglaries than elsewhere, and a study in
Vancouver found that the number of streets leading in to a block was directly
proportional to the rate of property crimeconvenient access and egress seems to
enable some forms of street crime (Felson 1994). Likewise, property crime rates
may be lowered if places are designed to avoid large unassigned public spaces
(with nobody interested enough to watch over them), to separate schools from
shopping malls, to remove walls and shrubbery that make good hiding places
(Jeffery 1971; on defended neighborhoods: De Sena 1990, Green et al 1998).
On some occasions, places are designed and constructed explicitly to clean up vice
and other disorderly practicesas was the case with George Pullmans model vil-
lage in Chicago, which nevertheless failed to avert the destructive strike of 1894
(Buder 1967, Smith 1995, cf. Littmann 1998; on company towns: Crawford 1995;
on model villages and planned communities: Buder 1990). Debate rages on over
whether environmental factors affect crime rates net of other social, demographic,
or economic variables (Birkbeck & LaFree 1993, Ekblom 1995, McCarthy &
Hagan 1992). Interestingly, however, places perceived by people as dangerous
often do not match up with the geographic distribution of crime: in an ethni-
cally mixed urban neighborhood, residents typically defined narrow and closed-off
streets as more dangerous than open and busy spaces, even though only one quarter
of the neighborhoods robberies happened there (Merry 1981). But even percep-
tion of ones neighborhood as dangerous increases the frequency of symptoms of
depression, anxiety, oppositional defiant disorder among adolescents (Aneshensel
& Sucoff 1996).
Social control is also territorialized, in both its formal and informal guises.
Police squad cars in Los Angeles maintain order in part by patrolling boundaries
and restricting accessthey use place as a means to decide who and what prop-
erly belongs where (Herbert 1997). The same tactics are used by gang members
seeking to establish and control their turf (Venkatesh 1997, White 1990). Pub-
lic places provide the circumstances for the most degrading forms of informal
social control: on-the-street harassment of women or racial minorities is surely
one way to keep disadvantaged groups in their place (Duneier & Molotch 1999,
Feagin 1991, Gardner 1995). Offices have become open, facilitating surveillance
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and bureaucratic control (Hatch 1990). What Venkatesh writes of gangs and their
territories holds as well for formal policing, public harassment, and crime gener-
ally: On the one hand, the formal qualities of a built environment exert a powerful
effect on individuals by shaping the possibilities for their behaviors. On the other
hand, individuals produce their space by investing their surroundings with quali-
tative attributes and specified meanings (1997:90).
?
Place Attachment: Identity, Memory, Loss
The formation of emotional, sentimental bonds between people and a place brings
together (in yet another way) the material formations on a geographic site and the
meanings we invest in them (Altman & Low 1992, Gupta & Ferguson 1997). Place
attachments result from accumulated biographical experiences: we associate places

with the fulfilling, terrifying, traumatic, triumphant, secret events that happened
to us personally there. The longer people have lived in a place, the more rooted
they feel, and the greater their attachment to it (Elder et al 1996, Herting et al
1997). Other research shows that place attachment results from interactive and
culturally shared processes of endowing rooms or buildings or neighborhoods with
an emotional meaning. The good times shared by friends at a university coffee
shop (Milligan 1998) or a Chicago cafeteria (Duneier 1992) formed the basis
for tight bonds of group affiliationthen disrupted when the special place was
shut down. Generally, involvement in local public activities (shopping, politics)
increases attachment to ones neighborhoodi.e., community sentiment (Cuba
& Hummon 1993, Hummon 1992). But the attachment to places also depends
some on the geography and architecture of the places themselves. Residents of
neighborhoods near prominent landmarks, or with easily defined edges, or with
better quality housing stock, are more likely to have stronger emotional bonds
to where they live. Because of these kinds of attachments, sociologists should
perhaps add place to race, class, and gender as a wellspring of identity, drawn
upon to decide just who we are in an always unsettled way (Keith & Pile 1993).
Place attachment facilitates a sense of security and well-being, defines group
boundaries, and stabilizes memories (Halbwachs 1980) against the passage of
time (generally: Logan & Molotch 1987; among children: Chawla 1992, Marcus
1992; among the elderly: Reed et al 1997, Rubinstein & Parmelee 1992). Per-
haps for this reason, mnemonic places (Zerubavel 1997) are specifically designed
and constructed to evoke memories, trigger identities, and embody histories. Na-
tional monuments commemorating wars or centennials or atrocities (Barber 1972,
Sarfatti Larson 1997, Spillman 1997, Wagner-Pacifici & Schwartz 1991) inspire
patriotism, at least in theory (on place and contested national identities: Borneman
1997, Gupta 1997, Zelinsky 1988), just as sacred places become the destination
of pilgrimages because of their mythic or symbolic connection to the transcen-
dent (Barrie 1996, Friedlander & Seligman 1994, Hecht 1994). In these cases,
built places give material form to the ineffable or invisible, providing a durable
legible architectural aide-memoire (on national identities: Cerulo 1995, Radcliffe
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482 GIERYN
& Westwood 1996). They might also be home to ghosts (Bell 1997) andas
with cemeteries (Sloane 1991)we go to such places to visit those who are no
longer.
The loss of place, it follows, must have devastating implications for individual
and collective identity, memory, and historyand for psychological well-being
(Fullilove 1996). To be without a place of ones ownpersona non locatais to
be almost non-existent, as studies of the homeless imply (Dordick 1997, Rossi
1989, Snow & Anderson 1993, Wolch & Dear 1993, Wright 1997). Among the
?
problems of those discharged from total institutions (mental hospitals, prisons) is
the difficulty of reattaching to a placefinding a home, a neighborhood, a commu-
nity, often amid local opposition to the deinstitutionalized (Dear & Wolch 1987,
Taylor 1989). Effects of displacement vary (Brown & Perkins 1992) depending
upon whether the dislocation is forced, as in natural disasters (Erikson 1967), ur-
ban renewal (Gans 1962) and political exile (Bisharat 1997, Malkki 1995, Portes
& Stepick 1993); or voluntary, as in job relocations and tourism (MacCannell
1976)and on whether the displacement is temporary or permanent (on migrant
workers: Mitchell 1996; on immigrant ethnic communities: Kasinitz 1992). The
immense literature on diasporas calls attention to idealizations of homelands that
(sometimes) never were, as part of the affirmation of ethnic or tribal solidarity and
continuity (Appadurai 1996, Cohen 1997, Naficy 1999, Safran 1991, Sorenson
1992). One can be displaced even without going anywhere: victims of residential
burglaries report (for some time thereafter) a violation of their personal space and
a loss of security (Brown & Perkins 1992), and the same loss of meaning is re-
ported by those whose sacred places are desecrated (de Certeau 1984), by Native
Americans whose homelands have been made invisible (Blu 1996) and by people
in regions of the United States chronically marginalized, exploited, forgotten, and
unforgettable like West Virginia coal country (Stewart 1996).
CONCLUSION
Review articles typically end by looking ahead to questions and problems most
in need of research tomorrow. This is impossible, mainly because the books and
articles reviewed here as exemplifying a place-sensitive sociology do not add up
to a neat propositional inventory of empirical findings about the social causes
and effects of place. It is difficult to spot the most vitally overlooked gaps when
the domain of study is as unbounded as the one discussed hereplace matters
for politics and identity, history and futures, inequality and community. Is there
anything sociological not touched by place? Probably not.
An alternative conclusion came to mind while spending a week in Maastricht,
Holland, where I had been invited to give a series of lectures. It is a place not
exactly like the place where I had earlier gathered up and studied the books and
articles needed for what I have written so far. The difficulties in imagining just
what a place-sensitive sociology might become next were obvious as I struggled
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to see how Maastricht differed from Bloomington, Indiana, or how they might
be alikeand why those differences or similarities might matter for the thinking
I was doing. As a sociologist, it was easy for me to start demographically: how
many people lived in each place, and how are the two populations differentiated
by age, race, gender, occupation, SES, religion, ethnicity? I could just as easily
put into words historical tidbits about them: the treaty to create a European Union
was signed at Maastricht in 1992, Hoagy Carmicheal composed Stardust at the
Book Nook on Bloomingtons Indiana Avenue in 1929. And it was no sweat to
?
theorize Maastricht and Bloomington as instances of global capitalism or urban
sprawl or liberal democratic regimes or town-gown relations. Still, neither numbers
nor words nor abstract concepts seemed sufficient to capture the sociologically
significant characteristics of Maastricht and Bloomington as places.

Maybe a place-sensitive sociology is not a set of empirical findings at all or

even a distinctive kind of explanatory model, but rather a way to do sociology in
a different keya visual key.
Figure 1 Street in Maastricht.
I walked down this street in Maastricht a dozen times and forced myself to
wonder how I knew that I was not back in Bloomington. Surely I could measure
the width of the lane between buildings (noting that no street in Indiana is that
narrow), or tell a story about the absence of front lawns, or theorize medieval
vs. twentieth-century architectural styles. But so much is lost in this translation
of street scene to measurement or narration or abstraction. What I lacked were
tools to analyze place in its given two and three dimensions. I am a victim, per-
haps, of trained incompetence in a discipline that cultivates statistics and words as
means to grasp the social. Sociologists could become more adept with maps, floor
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484 GIERYN
plans, photographic images, bricks and mortar, landscapes and cityscapes, so that
interpreting a street or forest becomes as routine and as informative as computing
a chi-square. That visualizing (I think) is the next step.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For helpful readings of earlier drafts, I thank Clem Brooks, Laurel Cornell, Roger
Friedland, Mark Gottdeiner, Eric Graig, Christopher Henke, Steven K. Herbert,
?
Jason Jimerson, Magali Sarfatti Larson, John R. Logan, Harvey Molotch, Martin
Murray, Susan H. Roschke, Saskia Sassen, Sheldon Stryker, Indermohan Virk and
Sharon Zukin.
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Abu-Lughod J, ed. 1994. From Urban Vil- Appadurai A. 1996. Modernity at Large:
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Yorks Lower East Side. Cambridge, MA: Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press
Blackwell. Ahrentzen SB. 1992. Home as a workplace in
Agnew JA. 1987. Place and Politics: The Geo- the lives of women. See Altman & Low 1992,
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Annual Review of Sociology
Volume 26, 2000
CONTENTS
COHABITATION IN THE UNITED STATES: An Appraisal of
Research Themes, Findings, and Implications, Pamela J. Smock 1
DOUBLE STANDARDS FOR COMPETENCE: Theory and Research,
Martha Foschi 21
THE CHANGING NATURE OF DEATH PENALTY DEBATES,
Michael L. Radelet, Marian J. Borg 43
WEALTH INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES, Lisa A. Keister,
Stephanie Moller 63
CRIME AND DEMOGRAPHY: Multiple Linkages, Reciprocal Relations,
Scott J. South, Steven F. Messner 83
ETHNICITY AND SEXUALITY, Joane Nagel 107
PREJUDICE, POLITICS, AND PUBLIC OPINION: Understanding the
Sources of Racial Policy Attitudes, Maria Krysan 135

RACE AND RACE THEORY, Howard Winant 169

STATES AND MARKETS IN AN ERA OF GLOBALIZATION, Sen
Riain 187
VOLUNTEERING, John Wilson 215
HOW WELFARE REFORM IS AFFECTING WOMEN''S WORK, Mary
Corcoran, Sandra K. Danziger, Ariel Kalil, Kristin S. Seefeldt
241
FERTILITY AND WOMEN''S EMPLOYMENT IN INDUSTRIALIZED

NATIONS, Karin L. Brewster, Ronald R. Rindfuss 271
POLITICAL SOCIOLOGICAL MODELS OF THE U.S. NEW DEAL,
Jeff Manza 297
THE TREND IN BETWEEN-NATION INCOME INEQUALITY, Glenn
Firebaugh 323
NONSTANDARD EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS: Part-time, Temporary
and Contract Work, Arne L. Kalleberg 341
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF IDENTITIES, Judith A. Howard 367
SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES: Ecological and Institutional
Dimensions, Richard Arum 395
RACIAL AND ETHNIC VARIATIONS IN GENDER-RELATED
ATTITUDES, Emily W. Kane 419
MULTILEVEL MODELING FOR BINARY DATA, Guang Guo,
Hongxin Zhao 441
A SPACE FOR PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY, Thomas F. Gieryn 463
WEALTH AND STRATIFICATION PROCESSES, Seymour Spilerman
497
THE CHOICE-WITHIN-CONSTRAINTS NEW INSTITUTIONALISM
AND IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIOLOGY, Paul Ingram, Karen Clay
525
POVERTY RESEARCH AND POLICY FOR THE POST-WELFARE
ERA, Alice O'Connor 547
CLOSING THE ""GREAT DIVIDE"": New Social Theory on Society
and Nature, Michael Goldman, Rachel A. Schurman 563
SOCIALISM AND THE TRANSITION IN EAST AND CENTRAL
EUROPE: The Homogeneity Paradigm, Class, and Economic , Linda
Fuller 585
FRAMING PROCESSES AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: An Overview
and Assessment, Robert D. Benford, David A. Snow 611
FEMINIST STATE THEORY: Applications to Jurisprudence,
Criminology, and the Welfare State, Lynne A. Haney 641
PATHWAYS TO ADULTHOOD IN CHANGING SOCIETIES:
Variability and Mechanisms in Life Course Perspective, Michael J.
Shanahan 667
A SOCIOLOGY FOR THE SECOND GREAT TRANSFORMATION,
Michael Burawoy 693
AGENDA FOR SOCIOLOGY AT THE START OF THE TWENTY-
FIRST CENTURY, Michael Hechter 697
WHAT I DON'T KNOW ABOUT MY FIELD BUT WISH I DID,
Douglas S. Massey 699
FAMILY, STATE, AND CHILD WELL-BEING, Sara McLanahan 703
GETTING IT RIGHT: SEX AND RACE INEQUALITY IN WORK
ORGANIZATIONS, Barbara F. Reskin 707
WHITHER THE SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF CRIME, Robert J.
Sampson 711
ON GRANULARITY, Emanuel Schegloff 715

HOW DO RELATIONS STORE HISTORIES?, Charles Tilly 721

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June 16, 2000 12:30 Annual Reviews AR105-20

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2000. 26:46396

A SPACE FOR PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY

Key Words place and space, built environment, architecture,

material culture, design

1994). And that significance is measured by an enduring tradition of robust socio-

(1) Geographic Location

PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 465

(2) Material Form

design, build, use, and protest (Habraken 1998).

(3) Investment with Meaning and Value

What Place is Not

geographic location, material form, or attributed meanings of the two cities. A

Working Metatheoretical Premises

PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 467

inequality, morality, capitalism, and other squarely sociological matters.

A space for place in sociology is not to be found in a sociology of place, with

Powers Behind Places

PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 469

Political economic models of place-making find nothing natural about the

more intensive land-use so that greater amounts of exchange-value may be ex-

has remade Soho into a tourist-and-shopping destination with astronomical rents

(Zukin 1982). A century-old residential neighborhood in Brussels is transformed

PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 471

a small number of bureaucratically organized firms who save considerable time

Something in the built-form of a place encourages people to distinguish this

PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 473

of globalization or nationalization (Appadurai 1996, Crain 1997, Koptiuch 1997,

America a place, or Africa? Conventional demarcations among continents are

WHAT PLACE DOES

Dream (Whitaker 1996). These consequences result uniquely (but incompletely)

Emplacing Difference and Hierarchy

male/female, wet/dry, high/low, light/dark (Bourdieu 1990). This structuralist tra-

PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 475

and cultural deterioration (whether due to the exodus of middle-class minorities

Power-Vessels and Strongholds

might challenge or compromise the cognitive authority of experimental science

played in a kind of architectural chest-thumping: Louis XIVs straight-jacketed

Proximity, Interaction, Community

PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 477

by designing facilities to maximize chance interactions (e.g., by forcing everybody

When community does arise inside such enclaveswealthy burb or gentrify-

Places Spawn Collective Action

PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 479

factors in collective action. In the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, villages

Normative Landscapes (Resistance, Transgression, Control)

PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 481

attachments result from accumulated biographical experiences: we associate places

PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 483

significant characteristics of Maastricht and Bloomington as places.

Maybe a place-sensitive sociology is not a set of empirical findings at all or

Figure 1 Street in Maastricht.

PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 485

Aldershot: Avebury ory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural

Bergesen A, Harman M. 1998. Immigration, Entertainments. Cambridge: MIT Press

Class and Environmental Quality. Boulder, side Cultures: Otherness, Marginalization,

CO: Westview. and Rurality. London: Routledge

PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY 487