The Big World in the Small: Layered Dynamics of Meaning-Making in the Everyday

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework for understanding what novelist Georges Perec has called “the rest” that we live through, the qualities of experience and meaning-making in everyday, in-between spaces, and the ways in which people make sense of the big world through the small. The work explores how common neighborhood places are essential to people's lives, and its framework of “layered dynamics” suggests ways of understanding an individual epistemology of everyday place. The paper grapples with what Doreen Massey has called a “global sense of the local” and how the meanings we make in our most common places relate to our understanding of the larger world, as well as the reciprocal process by which place helps shape us. Drawing on environmental psychology and differing theoretical conceptions of the individual, as well as innovative methods involving neighborhood tours and photographs with residents of a small neighborhood in Oakland, California, this work explores how, through emergent and often conflicting experiences, the everyday physical world around us derives a variety of individual significances. This paper suggests that these spaces are crucial for study and concern, not only for environmental psychologists and geographers but also for planners. The framework proposed here is a range of dynamic and emergent layers that let us understand the complexity of what neighborhoods are really for: as the sites where individual and place meanings are made through a reciprocal dynamic process.