3. Sense of Place

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8 Design Principles Used in Creating Social Spaces

Sense of Place

The 3rd principle i am discussing in this blog is to tie in a space to its community and give it a sense of place.  People want authentic connection to one another and to the place they live.  This gives people a common connection in their place.  

A sense of place may be defined as a sense the physical location of place, the people's experience, and the locality setting.  You might say it is the relationship between the people and their environment setting.  I have long observed that people in the city will try to make their landscape look natural and more like natural landscapes.  And people in the rural areas are trying to make their wild areas look more manicured.  Their places may define what they desire as they try to make what they do not have.

It is also observed that a sense of place harkens to how someone feels when they are in a place.  My own French Camp environment has a sense of place tied to the rural south and the Natchez Trace.  It is natural, and picturesque, and full of historic feature of the area from the early years.

A sense of place may be an ethnic group that lives there, it may be a regional architecture or landscape type as shown above.  It may be a common goal of the community such as Village Homes as they center around the eco properties of their facility.  It may be a location in a town or community.  Or it may be a type of housing that they live in.

An example of this would be people living in the low Louisiana areas that are immersed in creole culture and architecture.  They identify together with a history, an architectural look, and a sense of place and history.  

Another example is a particular historical neighborhood in a city like the Italian hill in Saint Louis.  They have a history, architecture, a development pattern, an ethnic pattern.  

It is important as a designer to identify what ties the people of that locality together and what could be their sense of place in that development.  This helps the people to have connection to the landscape and the history and to have connections together.  It brings people together.  

There is a lot that could be discussed regarding this point.  But for now, we will leave it to this principle to be filled out later.