Phenomenological Encounters with Place: Cavtat to Square One

Journal of Environmental Psychology (1998) 18, 31–44  1998 Academic Press Article No. ps980062 0272-4944/98/010031+14$30·00/0 Journalof ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY PHENOMENOLOGICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH PLACE: CAVTAT TO SQUARE ONE INGRID LEMAN STEFANOVIC Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Canada Abstract This essay aims to provide a phenomenological reading of two distinct communities. One is an organic settlement, the town of Cavtat, situated on the Adriatic coast. The other — central Mississauga — is situated near Toronto, Canada, and is typical of many North American suburban developments. Following a discussion of the significance of the notion of implacement for phenomenology, each community is surveyed in turn. Despite obvious spatial and temporal differences between the two settlements, the paper concludes by identifying converging images of significance — images that may help to illumine, in a preliminary way, some essential moments in the evolution of sense of place.  1998 Academic Press Introduction As far back as 1954, Martin Heidegger engaged us in a re-thinking of the essence of Being-at-home, by raising the question of the meaning of dwelling. He formulated the question this way: ‘Today’s houses,’ he wrote, ‘may be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light and sun, but — do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?’ (Heidegger, 1971 [1954], p. 145–6). Heidegger concluded that ‘the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses . . . The real dwelling plight,’ he resolved, ‘lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell’ (1971, p. 161). That the process of comprehending the essential significance of Being-at-home in our human settlements is never complete, suggests that we must continue to explore ways of building which evoke a sense of place, a sense of belonging to the built environment. Heidegger’s own reflections on the meaning of dwelling have already been enlarged through the phenomenological writings of thinkers such as Edward Relph, Christian Norberg-Schultz, Robert Mugerauer and Edward Casey. Relph (1976) describes the phenomenon of place in terms of a dialectical relation between existential outsideness — that is, feelings of alienation and separation from an environment to which we feel that we do not belong — and insideness, whereby we possess an unselfconscious immersion in place. Norberg-Schulz (1980) speaks of genius-loci, the spirit of place as a qualitative, ‘total phenomenon, which we cannot reduce to any of its properties . . . without losing is concrete nature’ (p. 8). Mugerauer (1994) and Casey (1993, 1997) explore, each along unique pathways, the philosophical assumptions and cultural displacements which affect contemporary theory and practice in urban design. Numerous examples of phenomenological investigations of place take up Heidegger’s challenge to continue to explore the meaning of building as dwelling, and the field continues to grow (Bachelard, 1958; Tuan, 1974; Seamon & Mugerauer, 1985; Seamon, 1992). Many of these writings show that we may learn more about the meaning of dwelling and sense of place through a phenomenological description of ´ specific settings (Nogue i Font, 1985; Dozio & Noschis, 1983; Violich, 1983). Taking up the Heideggerean challenge to continue to ‘ever learn to dwell’, this paper engages in a phenomenological reading of two, very distinct places: a small town on the Adriatic coast and a modern suburban development in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), in Ontario, Canada. The places are clearly disparate: one, centuries old, the other, less than two decades; one, an organic settlement built by locals, the other the 32 I. L. Stefanovic product of high-tech construction; one, small-town scale, while the other melts effortlessly into Toronto’s seemingly boundless, metropolitan sprawl. Despite the disparate images, however, the settlements are drawn together in my own imagination for a number of reasons. While I have not been a permanent resident in either community, my degree of familiarity with each is comparable inasmuch as I consider myself to be more than simply a frequent visitor. Regular, extended visits to Cavtat have immersed me in its social and cultural milieu to such an extent that at times, Cavtat has seemed to me to be a second home. Mississauga straddles my permanent residence in Oakville, and once again, it is a social, cultural and even physical extension of the place that I call home. In a sense, then, this paper reflects a personal journey to two, particularly special places of being-at-home. More significantly though, each community epitomizes for me two, very common images of dwelling. Cavtat, on the one hand, captures the essence of the organic settlement that planners so often seek to emulate and learn from (Alexander et al., 1987). It reflects a scale, tenor and image of a building form that emerges from the oneiric remembrances of settlements of the past. Mississauga, on the other hand, symbolizes suburbia. It stands, as we shall see, as an icon, principally of the present. Both images reverberate, to my mind, and will find their meaning in planners’ images of the future — although a discussion of how this is so takes us to a larger project beyond the limits of this paper. In any case, setting up a traditional comparison of such distinct communities — one which seeks to produce an inventory of similarities and differences of specific design characteristics or physical components of urban form — will not be our task. Rather, the aim will be to engage in a phenomenological reading of each settlement individually in the hope that each place on its own may guide us to some further insights into the ontological foundations of dwelling.1 In such a reading, the phenomenologist does not seek to derive categorical evidence of universal truth claims. As with all phenomenological projects, this reading cannot be a conclusive, systematized product, but rather, a step along the way in our investigations of places. Hermeneutic deconstructions of interviews with residents; phenomenological interpretations of literary or artistic moments in the history of each settlement; phenomenological descriptions of key landmarks or essential pathways; further interior reflection — are all examples of tasks that might yet be meaningfully pursued. In uncovering converging themes, the more unassuming task of the present paper is to shed some light and enlarge our understanding in a modest but constructive way, of some essential moments in the human perception of place that may not be self-evident at first glance. Certainly, the preliminary, phenomenological reading of the present paper is not the end of the story, but rather, another moment in the chronicles of uncovering sense of place. The Phenomenon of Place Before embarking upon a reading of these settlements, it may be helpful to briefly address the theme of place as informed by phenomenology. Ted Relph’s work on Place and Placelessness has been credited as the pioneering work in the phenomenology of place (Seamon, 1987). Many geographers, architects and planners have seen the positive possibilities of synthesizing concepts of human identity and belonging in built environments through the notion of place (Hough, 1990; Massey, 1994; Jackson, 1994). On the other hand, the term has not been immune to criticism. Some have argued that place is no more than a passing academic fad (Clay, 1983). The venerable critic, Amos Rapoport (1994) contends that ‘place is never clearly defined and hence vague; when definitions are found, they are illogical’. In response to Rapoport, perhaps the reason that place has not been clearly defined is not because of sloppiness on the part of place theorists, but rather, because sense of place cannot, in principle, be conclusively delineated in bounded concepts but only tentatively signified. Place is more than mere physical or spatial location, capable of being translated into neatly bounded, compartmentalizing definitions. Gaston Bachelard (1958) reminds us that ‘a house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space’ (p. 47). That the qualitative experience of place extends beyond the objective boundaries of geometrical space is immediately evident when I recognize how in walking along a street, the friend whom I approach is meaningfully closer to me than the sidewalk upon which I walk, and to which I am physically closer. Human beings are not simply materially placed within a world, nor do they simply occupy space. On the contrary, the human subjectivity is actively immersed in the environment, interpreting, intuiting, sensing, responding Phenomenological Encounters with Place: Cavtat to Square One emotionally and intellectually, and meaningfully assigning signification in a complexity of ways. Similarly, the settlements which human beings build are more than mere physical artifacts to be calculatively measured and objectively ordered. ‘I am the space where I am’, remarks Noel Arnaud, recognizing how our environments constitute more than a mere background or container of human activities, but instead, are the very incarnation of our existence (cited in Bachelard, 1958, p. 47). Perhaps because our culture has become mesmerized with time and our new-found technological capacity to traverse the world at high speeds, places are often seen to be no more than particular geographical locations left behind. Michael Hough (1990) reminds us that the ‘understanding of places increasingly becomes a matter of specific experiences — the airport one leaves and the airport where one arrives — with no link between experiences’ (p. 101). Or it may be that our recent ability to communicate with one another instantaneously around the globe makes us think that places are nothing other than mere abstractions of cybernetic space. In both cases, genuine sense of place comes to be forfeited in favor of the geometrical coordinates of spatial location and the quantifiable measures of clock time (Stefanovic, 1994a). Yet, one cannot be without being-in-place. To be, Heidegger has told us, is to be in-the-world. ‘The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling’ (Heidegger, 1971, p. 147). Edward Casey (1993) enlarges upon this theme when he writes: ‘To exist at all . . . is to have a place — to be implaced . . . To be is to be in place . . . The point is that place, by virtue of its unencompassability by anything other than itself, is at once the limit and the condition of all that exists’ (pp. 14–15). On the most fundamental, ontological level, humans are implaced and in this sense, place constitutes the condition of the possibility of human transcendence in the world. It follows that special places are more than merely lone points of geographical interest, but that they may reveal something essential about human ways of being-in-the-world. Husserl’s (1962) description of the phenomenological method as eidetic signifies an approach that moves through the concrete particulars to discover that which is essential to the phenomenon under investigation — that without which the phenomenon no longer is what it is. In this sense, a phenomenological reading of place cannot consist of a cumulative description of discrete objects, but rather, it must attempt to lay bare what Bachelard (1958) refers to as ‘the pri- 33 mary virtues, those that reveal an attachment that is native in some way to the primary function of inhabiting’ (p. 4). In seeking to ‘lay bare’ the concrete gathering of meaning within human settlements, the phenomenological task is one of illumining essential moments of taken-for-granted settings which seamlessly interweave to constitute sense of place. Moving beyond quantitative measurement of empirically measurable facts, a phenomenological reading might include descriptions of phenomena arising from interior reflection, hermeneutic explication of narrative accounts, interpretation of artistic and literary portrayals, and mindful first-hand observation of settings — which will be the task of the present paper (Kruger, 1979; Seamon, 1982; Stefanovic, 1994b). The notion of ‘reading’ human settlements may, perhaps, sound unorthodox to some and also untrustworthy as an approach to understanding sense of place. Ellen Eve Frank (1979) responds to such concerns when she reminds us that ‘architects explicitly intended buildings to be symbolic, to stimulate trains of association, to be read; it was assumed that buildings would influence the people living in them; and choice of style — whether Gothic, Palladian, Venetian, Norman, Doric or whatever — was meant to indicate a political or national preference as well as to suggest something about the nature or state of industry, civilization, moral or religious values’ (p. 257). In the same vein, John Ruskin reminds us ‘how much less the beauty and majesty of a building depend upon its pleasing certain prejudices of the eye, than upon its rousing certain trains of mediation in the mind’ (Frank, 1979, p. 239). Frank (1979) argues that the layman ‘has lost the art of reading monuments’, and her work is a compelling testimony to the need to recover this lost art (pp. 255ff). While ‘the alphabet has gone out of use’, the idea of reading places suggests that environments are meaningful to us at a variety of levels. Phenomenologically, one seeks to decipher some of these meanings and, in Jim Cheney’s (1993) words, to ‘tell the best stories we can. The tales we tell of our, and our communities’ ‘storied residence’ in place are not tales of universal truths, but of local, bioregional truth’ (p. 33). It may be possible to illuminate essential elements of being-in-place; but this can only happen by way of discerning descriptions and a careful listening to the messages communicated by distinct places, rather than through any totalizing discourse. Further to these reflections, then, let us move to a phenomenological reading arising from this 34 I. L. Stefanovic author’s first-hand description of Cavtat (pronounced ‘Tsavtat’), a town nestled along the shores of the Adriatic coast southeast of Dubrovnik. Here is a town that radiates a sense of place within the emergent revelation of the landscape, the built form, the human perspective, and the ensuing patterns of dwelling that congeal within this very special setting. Dwelling in Cavtat2 Built on the ruins of the medieval Epidaurus, a profound sense of history and tradition sustain the tenor of the town of Cavtat, from the original stone walkways underfoot, to the ageless embrace of the sea along the ‘riva’. Typically, my experience is that both citizen and tourist will locate the town in terms of its proximity to the more widely known Dubrovnik, only 9 nautical miles away. A part of the ‘Republic of Dubrovnik’ from 1426, Cavtat sustains a symbolic connectedness to this larger city. Indeed, from the time that one enters the town, one never feels stifled within a single, autonomous environment, but on the contrary, the outside world remains clearly accessible: fishing boats, yachts, and the wide open sea guide one’s imagination to worlds well beyond the border of the settlement. This is important, because one is made to feel that the strong emotional power of place within the town itself, is not attained at the expense of a broader context of settlements: the interplay of insideness and outsideness is preserved pre-thematically within an urban design which shelters and protects, but also arouses oneiric visions of settlements beyond. So the sea forms a link to larger centers, and at the same time, at the seaside walkway and port, a clearly formulated center of significance for the town itself, is constituted.3 Indeed, the center of the town is highly legible, and helps to provide a sense of orientation and a strong sense of place from the moment one approaches. Either end of the town center is clearly demarcated by the belfries of the churches of St Nikola and St Vlaho. Together with the mausoleum on the hill, there is almost a sense in which the settlement is anchored by these sacred landmarks, as the settlement appears to fan outwards and upwards along the coast. (Figures 1 and 2). Of primary importance is the main walkway hugging the port, between the two churches, and always busy with patrons to the outdoor cafes and shops. Bella Leman’s wall plaque (Figure 3) provides an artistic portrayal of the centrifugal gather- ing force of the harbor walkway known as the ‘riva’. Less significant are the walkways ‘behind’ the hill, towards ‘Tiha Bay’. Further along towards a huge hotel complex, one still considers oneself to be in Cavtat but only very peripherally. Significantly, a small tourist guide of Cavtat makes no mention of this area of Tiha at all (Kercelic, 1965). No matter how religiously inclined or disinclined residents of Cavtat may be, the three spiritual landmarks invoking the centrality of place testify to a depth of tradition and an awareness of the belonging together of finitude, dwelling and human destiny. The Mausoleum, with its cemetery of rows of pure, white headstones, is approached gradually at the end of a lengthy climb uphill along stone steps, and the reward is a panoramic treasure-view of sky, water and sun (Figure 4). One epitaph reads, in translation, ‘Everywhere on earth have I sought the divine; and ultimately, here have I found it’. Certainly, our contemporary settlements cannot and should not pretend to aspire to the spiritual presence of sacred buildings built six centuries ago, but nonetheless, Cavtat stands as a reminder of the need to rethink the role which sacred places (strictly speaking, religious or otherwise) play in our cities today.4 Beyond the sense of a wholeness of the settlement, anchored in a clear center, a presentiment of time and the significance of human mortality pervades the sense of place. In an era which denies death, our cities often aspire to ideals of timeless perfection: the glittering highrise reflects an image of undying newness and rational order (Campbell, 1993; Stefanovic, 1994a). History and time, however, pervade the town of Cavtat. Underfoot, the stone walkways are eroded by the years of human passage. The mausoleum overlooking the settlement and lands beyond it, testifies to the finitude of human existence, and the communal family graves remind one of the meaning of kinship beyond individual concerns, as well as the continuity of past and future generations. The rhythm of the sea, of the daily work patterns centered around the cycle of the sun — the opening of the market at sunrise; the closing of the shops in the noonday sun — bear witness to a non-linear vision of time, one which Erasim Kohak describes as ‘an experiential, ‘natural’ temporality in the rhythm of the season and of human life, with the possibility of ‘natural’ time reference . . . Primordially, human experience is . . . set within the matrix of nature’s rhythms which establishes personal yet non-arbitrary reference points: when I grow weary, when the shadows lengthen, when life draws to a close . . .’ (Campbell, 1993, p. 26). Phenomenological Encounters with Place: Cavtat to Square One FIGURE 1. Aerial view of Cavtat. FIGURE 2. Landmarks of the St Vlaho and St Nikola churches, as well as the mausoleum on the hill (far right). 35 36 I. L. Stefanovic FIGURE 3. Wall plaque of Cavtat. Courtesy: N. Bella Leman. FIGURE 4. The Cavtat Mausoleum by I. Mestrovic: ‘. . . a panoramic treasure view of sky, water and sun . . .’ Phenomenological Encounters with Place: Cavtat to Square One 37 FIGURE 5. Cavtat: ‘. . . the belonging of the human being to a settlement of proportion, balance, and harmony with the natural environment as well.’ In Cavtat, the humane scale of the buildings — seldom more than two or three stories high — and the secondary importance of the car in this settlement of walkways, help to remind one of the humane roots of human settlement itself, as they successfully attest to the belonging of the human being to a settlement of proportion, balance, and harmony with the natural environment as well (Figure 5). In this regard, the local government has done well to encourage architectural modification of the facades of the buildings that utilize local materials. One is reminded of the meaning of dwelling, described by Martin Heidegger as a belonging of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. ‘Earth,’ he has written, ‘is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal’ (Heidegger, 1971, p. 149). The giveness of existence, and the ties of the mystery of creation to the grace of nature are illumined within the settlement of Cavtat. The primal elements — sky, water, earth — permeate the urban design. From the solid stone buildings, to the hillscape visions of sea and sky as one descends the stairway streets, to the infusion of greenery within the courtyards and along the ‘riva’ — the wonder of dwelling is reflected in a sense of organic rootedness of place. This is not to say that these elements are explicitly visible within Cavtat, for the communication is much more subtle. Indeed, perhaps the foundation of the presence of this place comes from that which is left unsaid. I would submit that one of the most essential elements in the creation of a sense of place consists in the retention of mystery within the settlement. Inasmuch as human beings are finite, knowledge of phenomena cannot ever be complete and exhaustive; something always yet remains to be seen or understood. In the words of Paul Ricoeur (1967): ‘Primal finitude consists in perspective or point of view. It affects our primary relation to the world, which is to ‘receive’ objects and not to create them. It is not exactly synonymous with ‘receptivity’ itself, which consists in our openness to the world. It is rather a principle of narrowness or indeed, a closing within the openness. Neither is this finite openness synonymous with corporeity which mediates our openness to the world. It consists more in the role of the body’s zero origin, in the original ‘here’ starting from which there are places in the world.’ The very structure of being human is one which is grounded in finite perspective and receptivity to the 38 I. L. Stefanovic world: I do not create the world itself, although I may create within the world. In this respect, my knowledge of the world is not infinite, is never complete, but it consists of the interplay of ‘revealedness’ in understanding, and ‘concealedness’ because of the perspectival nature of my understanding. In the words of phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard (1958), the person in essence, is ‘halfopen Being’ (p. 222). In this respect, the settlement in which human beings can be seen to dwell, in the ontological sense in which Heidegger meant this term, must retain a sense of mystery, as well as disclosure of meaning. This is where Cavtat manages to speak to the very essence of being human within the interplay of its hidden and visible spaces of dwelling. Within the clear transition from the public space of the ‘riva’, to semi-public, narrow, pedestrian walkways, to semiprivate courtyards and ultimately to private spaces within the homes, one moves towards increasing gradations of intimacy. There is an abiding sense that there is ever-more to be explored within this settlement. Unexpected corners, alleys, doors left slightly ajar, semi-visible terraces and courtyards, half-opened shutters, lace curtains behind aged window panes, high stone walls securing the pedestrian streetways — all invite the imagination to roam pre-thematically, measurelessly. Full revealedness or full concealedness would deaden the effect. Not unlike the heightened sensuality of a seductively semi-clothed body, rather than one fully present in its nakedness or one fully absent as wholly covered, the human settlement which preserves the interplay between revealedness and concealedness inspires the oneiric wonder of the human imagination, and in this regard, remains ever engaging and alive, precisely because it mirrors the essential structure of human understanding itself. Indeed, inasmuch as such understanding is never static, but is defined in terms of a projection towards a futural horizon of possibilities, the settlement which seeks to be genuinely humane, will not impose closed, inflexible designs on social activities, but, on the contrary, will seek to guide spontaneous human interaction. In most cases, there are multiple routes to one’s destination within town in Cavtat, and a variety of options for human encounter. ´ In the myriad of outdoor cafes and restaurants, waiters accept your $1·50 for cappuccino and, then, miraculously let you be, until you summon them for the bill some two or more hours later. Lingering, chatting with friends, people-watching, outdoor reading, children playing soccer or fishing — are all regular occurrences along the ‘riva’. Unlike planned parking lots, the streets and piazzas accommodate cars when needed — but then, they return to be spaces for people when the cars recede. Homes ´ interact with cafes, which interact with places of business, which interact with children’s play areas, in a spontaneous evolution of ‘mixed use development’! The compulsion to perform only a single set of activities within a fixed space is absent and the result is a sense of liberation from the pressures of performing activities in only one, pre-regulated way. In summary, a phenomenological reading of Cavtat reveals that its sense of place may be grounded in the following themes: (1) The interplay of insideness/outsideness: While Cavtat preserves its strong sense of identity and place, it also arouses oneiric visions of settlements beyond, and sees itself in such context. (2) Anchorage in a clear center: One is never at a loss to recognize Cavtat’s center along the ‘riva’, anchored by the St Nikola and St Vlaho churches and their belfries. (3) Reflective of time and human finitude: The human scale of building and spatial design remind one of the significance of human life to the town, while the cemetery and mausoleum overlooking the town, as well as the rhythms of the life of the community, reflect the conjoining realities of human finitude and historical passing. (4) The grace of the earth: The givenness of creation of earth, sky, and water, permeating the design of Cavtat, serve as a reminder that not everything is created by human ingenuity, or is manipulable by human engineering, but that we must sometimes stand in wonder at the sheer grace of the natural world itself. (5) The interplay of mystery and disclosure: Much of what can be said to sustain the sense of place comes from that which is left unsaid. Cavtat reminds us of the need to preserve a sense of both the hidden as well as visible spaces of dwelling, reflecting the human essence as ‘halfopen Being’. (6) Dwelling within spontaneity and possibility: Sense of Place arises within a recognition of the ontological ground of human freedom. This leads to the need to avoid urban design which compels human beings to perform only a single set of activities within a fixed space. While Cavtat preserves these six elements of the ontological presence of place, nevertheless, there is Phenomenological Encounters with Place: Cavtat to Square One and always has been an undercurrent of vitriolic passion which ruptures any equation with a utopian ideal. Parts of Cavtat have been bombed in the recent war in the former Yugoslavia. Memories of my last, two-month visit in 1990, just prior to the war, include also a strange, insidious, whispering hatred among the residents that pierced the atmosphere of the town. The emotional power within the settlement of Cavtat would appear to sustain an element of risk and destructiveness as well. The sense of time, finitude, spontaneous social interaction, possibility and mystery indicate that there is more to human understanding than mere rationality, but that in addition, there are primaeval origins in the void as well. This certainly adds to the emotive presence of place, but perhaps we should be aware that there may be costs to be paid sometimes for this as well (Violich, 1993, 1996). As the gunfire recedes, we bear testimony once again to the Heideggerean remembrance of the genuine essence of dwelling. In the words of Norberg-Schulz (1980): ‘Heidegger related the German ‘wohnen’ to ‘bleiben’ and ‘sich aufhalten’ . . . Furthermore he points out that the Gothic wunian meant to ‘be at peace,’ ‘to remain in peace.’ . . . Heidegger uses these linguistic relationships to show that dwelling means to be at peace in a protected place . . . (p. 22). Toronto’s Mississauga5 We move now to a second personal journey — to a contemporary settlement, the recently constructed city-scale, suburban development of Mississauga, part of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in Ontario. The City Center consists principally of the large, ‘Square One’ shopping mall (Figure 6) and the City Hall (Figure 7). The area that I investigate is made legible in everyday conversation in terms of its proximity to ‘Square One’. In a genuine sense, the community is anchored here, just as Cavtat is anchored along its ‘riva’. The fact that the City Center is defined by the huge, commercial Square One mall reflects the consumerist society that sustains it. The architectural design of the City Hall is meant to be reminiscent of a barn and silo. It looms majestically on the landscape, as if to definitely secure the utopian picture of a rural alternative to the urban, concrete jungle. The primary mode by which one moves through this community is, as with most suburbs, the automobile. The houses bear witness to this fact in the front-and-center garage design of their homes (Figure 8).6 It is a simple task to be critical of such a 39 settlement, and such critiques abound (Hayden, 1984; Jackson, 1985; Calthorpe, 1991, 1993). Aesthetically, there is little to attract one to spend close to half a million dollars for a home: saplings sparsely interspersed between the asphalt, wide streets accommodating cars but oblivious to pedestrians, sterile high rises looming upward in barren fields, waiting to be bulldozed for future development — hardly appealing images. Yet, many people do invest such amounts of money to live in Mississauga, and the community functions as a viable, meaningful home for Torontonians. What is the appeal of place here? Inventories of cultural preferences of suburbanites have identified a number of criteria that appeal to residents of suburbia (Berry, 1981). From a ‘love of newness’ to freedom and mobility symbolized by the car, the suburb has been seen to embody the firm sense of destiny epitomized in ‘The American Dream’. While academics decry the unsustainability of suburbia, however, these communities continue to appeal to a large segment of the North American population. Can a first-person, phenomenological reading of Mississauga provide some clues to essential moments of being-at-home in a suburb? Dolores Hayden (1984) has written how ‘ . . . a civilization has created a utopian ideal based on the house, rather than the city or the nation’ (p. 18). Certainly, as I make my way through Mississauga, I note how each house seems to turn its back to the street: the main entrance is in a state of recession, far behind the garage, so that the facade of the home and a significant part of the front yard accommodate the car. The larger backyard appears to be the protected, social nexus for the family gatherings. In some sense, one might say that the community as a whole turns its back to the city as well. Overall, the image is hardly of the urbane, cosmopolitanism of Toronto but, on the contrary, the picture of Mississauga is of a peculiar, rural ideal (ironic in light of the destruction of agricultural lands to accommodate suburban sprawl). The myriad of crescents and dead-ends, appear to want to dispel any sense of urbanity which might be imposed by the surrounding metropolis of Toronto. Wide main streets are clearly automobile-centred. At the same time, each house is designed as if to say: dispense with the automobile and the outside world to which it connects, immediately at the start of the private lot, and then move inside or to the private, usually fenced back yard. In the yard, we can contemplate nature in solitude, away from the necessary chaos of the city to which we must return ultimately but which for now, 40 I. L. Stefanovic FIGURE 6. Square One shopping mall. FIGURE 7. Mississauga City Hall. Phenomenological Encounters with Place: Cavtat to Square One FIGURE 8. 41 Being-at-home in Mississauga. can be excluded from our family’s world. In the suburb is where we plant our flowers, cultivate our plants and trees, tend to our manicured lawns, and barbecue summer meals. This is our — and especially our children’s — refuge from the harried world, suppressed for the time being. Inside the standardized, but spacious home, cathedral ceilings in the main entrance halls seem to elicit a vision of grandeur. The sense is that the human being matters here, has a dignified presence within the confines of the home. More than mere utilitarian functions are well served within this technologically sophisticated dwelling place. Private bedrooms for the children, play areas segregated from wood-panelled dens — all offer the resident a legible, spatial organization to support freedom of choice for a range of activities. The house is spacious but designed with postmodern touches of wood, archways, and bay windows to provide a sense of enclosure and quasi-historical reminders of receding traditions. In all of this, I am reminded of the words of Gaston Bachelard (1958) who reflected how ‘our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word . . . And always, in our dreams, the house is a large cradle . . .’ (p. 4, 7). Similarly, Pater muses upon how ‘the quiet spaciousness of the place is itself like a meditation, an ‘act of recollection’, and clears away the confusion of the heart’ (Pater cited in Frank, 1979, p. 32). In Mississauga, there is a clear sense of home as haven, as a refuge from the outside world. Each single detached house appears fully self-contained, guarding carefully the privacy of interior and backyard spaces. The streets — essentially empty of people — have clearly not been designed in any major way for pedestrian use. On the contrary, they signify that the foundation of living is not to be found within the public realm but within the home itself. The house is meant to secure — to cradle — the sense of Insideness as shelter, and as a center for dwelling. Overall, the image of the settlement as a whole is of the nonthreatening: the homogeneity from one identical garage to the next seems to signify that nothing is unexpected. No risks are implied by virtue of enigmatic spatial patterns to disrupt the notion of a perfectly ordered, and safe community. The message, indeed, is of a secure environment, of shelter, of refuge, of insideness and a cradling against any threats from the outside world. 42 I. L. Stefanovic Not only do spatial images of security and control present themselves to the mind, coinciding temporal images are communicated as well. Things appear to move more slowly here than in the city. In a sense, one feels that time stands still. From house to saplings to recently poured asphalt, the overriding image is of newness. Any hint of intuition of the past is frozen in discreet, architectural gestures of traditions gone by. For instance, the unused, artificial shutter, the wooden details, the bay windows aim to recover some sense of warmth elicited by historical houses, but as discreet moments, they are solitary remembrances of eras and time frames no longer genuinely accessible in today’s harried world. Similarly, there is little sense of futural projection within this ordered community, aiming to exclude any sense of diversity or possibility. If the future is constituted as a horizon of possibilities, as an essential openness, this means that with genuine futurity comes uncertainty and vulnerability (Heidegger, 1962, Division Two). Images of exposure and defenselessness are subdued within Mississauga. Quite the contrary, there is a pervading sense of control and security, as discussed above. Indeed, the present appears to be fully secured in the tidiness of a manicured environment, preserving an image impervious to substantive change. There is a sense of belonging here that arises precisely in spite of Toronto the urbane. Mississauga seems to want to stand as the alternative to high density, high stress living. In the community symbolized by the free enterprise of Square One, one is free to move where one pleases with the high mobility offered by the car; one is free to purchase every commodity at will in the central core; one is free to withdraw into the cocoon of one’s private home and yard and exclude unwelcome aspects of today’s hectic world. One is free to dream in peace. In summary, a phenomenological reading of this suburban community reveals the following: (1) Anchorage in a commercial center: Square One shopping mall provides a commercial and entertainment center for the community at large. Its City Hall stands out from the landscape to visually concentrate the image of the center from afar. (2) Point-oriented relation of inside to outside community: The automobile — central to the house and community design — constitutes the locus for geographical point-to-point interaction with the cosmopolitanism of Toronto. Otherwise, there appears to be a sense that Mississauga’s community identity is distinctive precisely by virtue of providing an escape from the urbanity of the large city. (3) The rural ideal preserved: The City Hall, adjacent to Square One and visible from many vantage points as one approaches the community by car, looms large as a symbol of a silo in an agricultural field. Despite the high level of technical unsustainability of suburbs, the community message at its core is that the quiet sense of the earth is to be preserved here. (4) Privacy and enclosure: Backyards ensure a sense of shelter from the outside world. Interiors of homes encapsulate the sense of refuge, shelter and protection within. (5) Reflective of time as the present: The past is secured in architectural features reminiscent of a past era, frozen in discreet images. The future as sheer possibility and openness implies risk that is absent, overall, from this community which projects an image of security in full presence. (6) Freedom as autonomy: From images of free enterprise to free mobility, the tyranny of urbanization and high density living is denied in favor of the sovereignty of the individual. Closing Reflections Despite a wide divergence of community structures, there is some convergence of images in our descriptions of Cavtat and Mississauga that may shed light on the appeal of genuine sense of place. The notion of center finds strong expression in both communities. In Cavtat, that centeredness along the seaside is such as to oneirically draw the imagination to settlements beyond, such as Dubrovnik. In Mississauga, the city center is a nexus point, which leads to a sense of self-enclosure and self-sufficiency in a relation of some contention with Toronto the urbane. Both communities appeal, in their own ways, to the significance of nature within the built environment, as they do to preserving a sense of self-identity and enclosure. Both settlements refer to the larger scale of environments within which they are situated, although Cavtat does so in a less exclusionary manner than does Mississauga. Each community respects the structure of being human as freedom, although philosophically, the conceptions of freedom supported by the two environments are arguably quite different.7 Finally, each community cannot but reflect a temporal vision within its spatial organization. To be sure, time is elicited quite differently in Cavtat than in Mississauga. The latter settlement favors the present over past and future more readily than does Phenomenological Encounters with Place: Cavtat to Square One the former. The predominance of the ekstasis of the present here is not a trivial occurrence: the static, utopian vision of the garden community was meant to consecrate the notion of homecoming once and for all. Heidegger has suggested that in the modern epoch, we flee from the belonging of past, present and future towards the certainty and ultimately unauthentic sense of assurance symbolized by a fixed present. The suburb appears to my mind, as the final incarnation of the contemporary need to deny a genuine awareness of depth of meaning grounded in our finitude and in the flux of primordial time. It is in this latter sense that the suburb is unsustainable, as rooted in a fixed, idealized myth of shelter. The poet warns us that ‘perfection is dangerous because it is deceptive. Art slips back while bearing, in its distribution of tone, or harmony, the look of a high civilization towards barbarism. Recovery must be by a breaking up, a violence . . .’8 Perhaps the image of the city is of too much change, too much exposure, but genuine sense of place may, arguably, be found only within a sustainable balance in the interplay between insideness and outsideness. This may mean that the goal for architects and planners is to facilitate human settlement patterns that spatially enhance a sense of home as center, as haven, within a nonthreatening but still diverse and vibrant neighborhood context. Ellen Eve Frank (1979) sums it up for us when she concludes that: [a]rchitecture provides, then, not only a design establishing conditions of inside and out, but one making possible a direction of influences and soul growth. As home, it suggests origins of feelings or moods as well as the beginnings of perceptual clarity: the distinctness between inner and outer yields to a fusion or blurring, which is how growth starts . . . (p. 40). Notes (1) ‘Ontology’ refers to the study of the meaning of Being, as the ground of individual beings or entities. Rather than sectorally investigate components of place in a reductionist vision, an enquiry into the ontological foundations of place aims at a description of place that is holistic and non-positivist. (2) This description of Cavtat is adapted from an earlier version of this paper, entitled ‘Dwelling in Cavtat: A Phenomenological Reading of Place’, Environmental Theory Arena, Summer 1995, 3, No. 2, pp. 4–9. (3) On the issue of the significance of centers of significance in urban design, see Alexander et al. (1987). 43 (4) For further phenomenological reflections on sacred space, see Eliade (1961) and Engel (1985). 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