From Space To Place

People are main body of the city. People’s colorful life bestows meanings onbuildings and space of the city. All kinds of construction are meant to serve peoplebetter and give them a better life. But driven by “Great Leap Forward” type ofmodernization, it brings about homogenization of landscape, fragmentation of space,mechanization of format and structure, weakening of the spatial meanings and etc.The stuffing of each entity element turns modern city into a meaningless abstractspace. The convergence of the prosperity of material construction and the structure ofspace increasingly blurs people’s sense of direction and sense of belongingness.People cannot locate itself based on personal experiences, and also cannot developemotional reliance on the space in which it exists. Consequently, a new kind of placeidentity crisis comes out along with modernization.Identification emerges in modern society. This does not deny the existence ofidentification in the past. But people did not talk about “identification” and“acknowledgement” in the pre-modern society, this is not because people did not haveidentity or they did not depend on acknowledgement from others, but these thingswere not a problem in the past, so that people did not treat them as a problem thatneeds discussion. However, the self-existence and the meaning of existence has beengreatly challenged in modern society, so the problem of identification has graduallysurfaced in all fields.Confronted with this difficulty, what kind of standards can be applied to create aplace that can help the subject develop acknowledgement of it? This articleestablishes a connection between the issue of identification and the place through thesubject “people”, and aims to emphasize the two-way identification of place andsubject. The formation of place identification is also people’s perception of theenvironment. Moreover, it is people’s protection and recapture of history, experiences,emotion, memory, meaning and etc. in the cognitive space. To solve the place identitycrisis of the subject is to restore and rebuild some meaningful places, so the subject’sbehavior attributes, functions and emotional requirement should be applied as theorientation in terms of strategies in reconstructed place identification, and thesubject’s requirement in daily life and in mental experiences in the space should besatisfied. The creation of the spiritual space of the subject should be taken seriously,and we should try to establish the places that can enable the subject to orient and toidentify.