Space, place and scale… and time.

I whish to add this dimension because it seems to me that we experience space and place through time. If Heidegger says that to live is to “live there” and in English “there” means only there in the spatial dimension; on the other hand in French “there” is translated by “là” which mean there in space but also in time. Therefore to live is to live there, to be present, spatially and temporally.


Moreover, time profoundly affects our experiences, it partly allows to transform space into place. It is by spending time at a certain place that you become an authentic people.
It is by the speed of the time spending that our experience will be pleasant or not and so the experience of the place. Just take a class room as an example, if you are not tired and the lecture and lecturer interesting, you will have a pleasant experience of the place, and you would even go back the next week. Rather than if the lecture is boring and the lecturer depressed and you are bored, the time will pass so slowly that your experience of this place will be totally different. As Relph also said it: “every geographical space also has innumerable forms because our moods and purposes change and because the season and climate vary” (Relph 1971, 17).
Furthermore as it has been seen this semester, the increasing acceleration of communication means (Internet, high speed train, etc.) are in a certain way, emptying (destructing) space. A lot of theories try to analyse these effects like the “tunnel effect” theory or the “key nodes” one.

Finally, I couldn’t fill more space because I didn’t have time; Do you see how both concepts practically interact?!