All places must be maintained. I'll get into how and why a later. First I need to define space and place.
Space: Any container with any dimensions.
I'll clarify this a little. A container is anywhere where something can exist. A dimension is any measurable quality. I think every quality is measurable, but if one wasn't then it wouldn't be a dimension. I'll give some examples. Inside a car - Is it a container? yea it's pretty clear things can be in it. What are its dimensions?- The obvious ones are the spacial ones (up, down, left, and right), but there's also particles per cubic inch which makes the smell and texture of the air. A car has almost countless dimensions. Another example is a on a page. Is it a container? yea it holds symbols. What are it's dimensions? It has obvious spatial dimensions (width and height) like the car but also things like color and texture and the actual symbols on the page. Anything can be a space. When something is thought of as a space, it needs to be thought of in terms of what it holds and its dimensions.
Place: Any space with some relation to at least one person. So any space that anyone knows about would be place, since knowing about is a relation. The difference between place and space is that a place is defined by its relation to people while space is defined by its parameters.
While both spaces and places do change, place changes easier than space. For example, the place inside my car changes if I sell it. My relation to it is no longer where I sit in to get to work, but the space would stay the same. Changing the space is a little tougher, if i wanted to change the space inside the my car I would have to physically change it. This isn't necessarily too difficult, but any change to space would probably change the place as well.
My final project was done in the cemetery near Rockoff. Over the past 200-300 years that the cemetery has been around, it has changed a lot. Until the early-mid twentieth century, these changes were products of some type of maintenance. The two expansions from the original Presbyterian cemetery to Cheeseman cemetery to Willow Grove cemetery have preserved the original function of the cemetery: a place to go to mourn. The more recent changes are more interesting as they have happened due to a lack of maintanance and have changed the function of the cemetery. The only way for a cemetery to remain a place of mourning is if it expands. When no new bodies enter eventually, all the friends and family of the dead die or stop visiting. The problem is that the cemetery can't expand. It doesn't have anywhere to expand to. In fact, it needs to be reduced to make way for the functions of other places. It is impossible for this cemetery to remain a place of mourning.
With its original function gone, the cemetery changes as a place. It's become a place where people go at night.
Ok it's almost 9:30am so i'm gonna try to get to the point and fix this up later.
The point is the cemetery went bad and now is a breeding ground for thugs at worst and at best aesthetically displeasing. This only happened because the town allowed a place with a very specific function evolve on its own. This caused the cemetery lose its original function and rot. Now it acts almost like a tumor harming New Brunswick as well. I am going to go as far to say that whenever a place with a specific function is neglected it will decay into some form similar to this cemetery. Personally I think the cemetery should be torn down for housing or fixed up and preserved as a museum.
What's interesting is when you compare such a tangible space to a space on the web or in a hard drive. In tangible places (like the cemetery) it is hard to control what happens there, both tearing it down and preserving it would be difficult, so it's left to sit. Places in cyberspace are much easier to control. Whenever something becomes obsolete, breaks, or loses function it is easy to immediately destroy it to stop it from taking up space, or to archive it away so it can be kept to analyze, but doesn't interact with the full system. At the same time places in cyberspace are almost exclusively affected by users. Because of this cyberspaces don't face many of the same issues that tangible spaces do.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
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