Abstract:
A contemporary understanding of embodied human thought processes leads to an awareness that experience is primarily imaginative and context-dependent. Place, as an imaginative experience, is therefore characterized as much by presence as by absence, leading to an obscurity or porosity of identity. This porosity presents an obstacle for the identity of contemporary public place, giving rise to the question: How can a public experience of place, always already porous in experience, afford shared and meaningful experience? One way, it seems, is through the imagination.