Why place?

This week reading seems to ask us whether place is really meaningless or not in terms of creating and maintaining community in this networked society made by individual links. As the Chicago School noticed, the urbanization process has been producing serious social changes. From individual life to societal institutions, it has given a profound impact on society as a whole. In addition, communication technologies have been also accelerating social changes. Especially, the development of transportation and communication media helps individuals overcome the limits of communication due to space and time. At the same time, those external impacts have been finally reorganizing individual and collective life in contemporary society to the extent that individuals are able to organize groups regardless of the limitation of space. Under this complex social change, many are skeptical about the role of place for communal life. However, let us think over the fundamental driving force of this drastic social change. Even all sorts of high-tech communication media, which enable us to communicate without the limitation of time and space, are produced in specific places by capitalists’ calculation of cost-benefit.

I think, as Molotch et al. and Gieryn claim, that place is still important to shape the characteristics of collective life. Furthermore, it significantly affects to create community nowadays. However, I don’t want to insist the importance of place for community with only political economic concern and interactive impact of physical environment settings. Most of all, I’d like to emphasize the fact that we are still living on the coordinate of time and space in this post-modern era. We have to arrange our time and move here to there for our everyday life. We are to run into our neighbors whoever we like or not. In the most realistic sense, if we don’t trust neighbors and then don’t interact with one another, the real estate value is more likely to decrease. It affects our personal assets as well as quality of life. (But, you know what? I am living in a student housing.^^) The simple answer is that we have to build community with our neighbors for our quality of life. It is a normative necessity to make “desirable” community in the place where we live.