Places.

This is  a picture of a train travelling between Teignmouth and Dawlish, these towns are very significant for me, as they are the first towns that i lived in. They're dirty, rough, plagued by a failing tourist industry, yet as a child i felt differently. These were the places i made friends, the places i took my first tentative steps, the places i first fell over in the street, anyway you get the point. It has been said that "home" is a point of departure, for me that means, whatever i have seen, experienced  and lived through, this place will always be home, for all it's faults and it's fairly  non - descript setting it will always hold some  sort of significance.To me this is very definition of "place" somewhere that has a very specific meaning and historical significance to it. it represents my "roots" if you will. even so i do challenge the theory of "non place" in the sense that non places describes areas of transience i.e. ; airports, subways, shopping centres etc. but i almost feel like Dawlish train station is  part of my home, yes the urine soaked, grey, damp, station where crazy hobos dwell and train arrive when they want to, it's a strange idea that something like this is something that you can regard as "home".
It's interesting to think that  as people with actual homes that we retire to regularly, how a homeless person makes that choice or even if they can. I can't imagine how it must feel to think of your home, your point of departure , to where you are now, if you don't have one. De Certeau said " space is a practised place, what we do in it give it it's significance.". This is certainly true if you think about how, subways and stations are seemingly  non threatening during the day, they serve their said purpose, yet in the evening, the minute, you see people there that aren't usually there, passing through or hanging around in groups, the place seems to take on a more ominous atmosphere, simply because it's being used for something other than what it's meant for.


















Marc Auge talks about the theory of "super modernity" which i mentioned in an earlier blog, and maybe that gives an explanation as to why as a society our definitions of home are changing. i.e. the world is getting more populated, cities are getting bigger and stretching out wider. We're being slowly  consumed by cashpoints, b billboards, franchise restaurants, shopping centres etc, they are meeting the needs of the consumer in us all, "supply and demand" is very much part of the lexicon of modern living, we're willing to let those that supply take up more space, appropriate the land that we once knew as home to make space for more advertisements, more buildings that are there to facilitate the research that decides what we "need" as consumers. I always like to say  that as  the unique character that we imbue into the places we call home slowly fades away as office spaces grow larger, McDonald's spreads wider and shopping centres have more air conditioning we will lose our ability to know what "home " really is, the space that we call our gets smaller, our back door is slowly becoming everyone's back door.  Just like everyone else i let this happen, it shows that i saw a train station as part of my home, where my parents saw the villages they grew up in, the fields they played in homes, spot the difference?, What in the name of Bill Murray  are my children going to recognise as home?. It's a scary thought, this is why people hang around where they're not supposed to, because In a  world that is meant to meet their needs and give them what they want, they have no place to go. It's scary that you can watch a work of fiction like Blade Runner and what you see is in the city scenes is becoming a very strong reality.