This week we began thinking about place-making and how this relates to elements of our environment that we interact with everyday. We found ourselves in a fairly lengthy philosophical discussion of location versus place. While many students could define Location--”it’s a specific spot on the earth”, “a coordinate”, “an address”--everyone had difficulty trying to define Place and how it differed from Location. WIth great hesitancy, students shared thoughts like “a place is...bigger than a location” and “a place is somewhere you go” and “a place can be anywhere, but a location doesn’t change”. At first, many students wanted to define Place as a building because they saw it as something you experience. Just as you walk into a building, a place can be inhabited, and that makes it different than location. In the end, we had the working definitions of Location as where something is and Place as what something is like.
With this working definition, we returned to the mental maps we made last week and compared them to a Google Maps perspective of Summers-Knoll. How were these similar and different? Did we forgot to include certain elements on our maps? Did we show items on our maps that were not seen in the satellite image? How did both reveal the location of our school? Using a traced version of the Google Maps satellite image, we set out on a walk to make a new map that focused on SK as a place. In other words, our intention in this new map was to represent what specific features of our landscape and built environment (on SK property) made this specific location meaningful and unique to us. As we walked the property, students chose to include a variety of elements on their map. Examples include the ditch that students love to run around after school, a tree by the basketball hoops that students love to climb, the wetland area behind the soccer field, and more. We will return to these maps next week as we continue to think about place-making.
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