The Human Experience of Space and Place

Abstract

Phenomenology strives for the actualization of contact. As a way of study it seeks to meet the things of the world as those things are in themselves and so describe them. Geography studies the earth as the dwelling place of man. As one of its tasks, it seeks to understand how people live in relation to everyday places, spaces, and environments. A phenomenological geography borrows from both fields of knowing and directs its attention to the essential nature of man’s dwelling on earth. The fact that all people are located in a world which is in part geograph­ ical is an irreducible characteristic of human existence. Be it small as an apartment or expansive as the ocean surrounding his ship at sea, as commonplace as a neighborhood or as strange as a distant country, man is housed in a geographical world whose specifics he can change but whose surrounds in some form he can in no way avoid. A phenomen­ ological geography asks the significance of people’s inescapable immer­ sion in a geographical world. What are people as beings in a geographical world? What is the nature of human experience in the context of that world?