One afternoon in the fall of 2015, I gathered the cards on which people had added their own neighborhood stories from the Intersection | Prospect Heights box in El Castillo de Jagua, a restaurant on Flatbush Avenue. On one card, I read María's story. “I had never been to Prospect Heights. A friend and I came to a Dominican restaurant for the first time,” she wrote. “It's pouring cats and dogs outside, so we got inside and had hot soup. Being from Venezuela, the hot food and the Spanish music made us feel a bit like home. So yes, our first impression of Prospect Heights is heavy rain, puddles and “‘home.’” 1
María's story brought me back to a familiar theme about what it means to find home, to feel you belong, about what that does to a person's sense of themselves. And I realized that the way home shapes our sense of self, the way individuals are always becoming, hadn't been central to my thoughts until I began a graduate program in environmental psychology. Until then, what I had cared about were places, stories, culture, connection. I thought about how people shaped places and why they were important, but never really about what places did to shape each of us individually.
To my mind, psychology was about experiments in labs, divorced from lived reality. Clearly I was wrong. When I began reading about psychology that had an environmental perspective, an ecological perspective, psychology that considered how individuals navigated places, how places impacted not just how those people were part of something larger, but how they saw themselves, I felt like a piece of the puzzle slipped into place. This “ecological” way of thinking about people as never separate from their contexts, places, and histories is powerful. How people's selves develop, are fed, and are nurtured by places changes the ways they are able to go out into the world.
When I think about what it means to become oneself, I think about time and context, about our physical bodies not just disembodied minds, and about what it means to situate all this in a cyclical way of making and being made by place. Knowing oneself, becoming oneself, always happens in place—we are never in a vacuum—so it is also important to understand how we know place, how we perceive it: place and self together. Psychologist Kurt Lewin's concept of the life space as “the person and the psychological environment as it exists for [them]” is particularly important. Who you are and what is defined as your life space is a shifting identity; you are always experiencing the world as yourself in a given temporally specific situation.2 The parallel theory of place identity, which comes from a more cultural and ecological perspective, was first theorized by environmental psychologist Harold Proshansky as “those dimensions of self that define the individual's personal identity . . . [through] conscious and unconscious ideas, feelings, values . . . and behavioral tendencies relevant to a specific environment.” 3
As people, we're thinking, feeling bodies moving through the world, and each of our bodies experiences things from a specific perspective. What psychologist James J. Gibson called ecological optics made sense when I thought about how my eyes in my head that see from the height of a 5′3″ person and how my body that likes to walk shape my understanding of the world—and how other people's bodies are quite different. Maybe it was because I'd always thought about photography that way—changing the height at which I held my camera to get a different perspective—that it was satisfying to think that this photographic way of thinking might have some bearing on understanding ourselves as individuals.
Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception—which admittedly misses the many other important kinds of sensory perception—stresses the embodied aspect of how we know the world (which changes for different people, and over the course of one person's life).4 Perceiving our environment is not simply about its shapes, its colors, how the light bounces off it, but about the use we each can put those things to—in a pinch, how any given place or object helps us survive, what each part of our world affords us. When I teach about this idea, which Gibson calls affordances, I stand behind the classroom desk to talk about how it's solid and grey, how it can hold many books, how culturally it's a site of authority, and so on, but—and here I jump up on the desk—were a tiger to enter the room, it might afford me help in a very different way. Yet it's not a full theory to me without psychologist William Ittelson's parallel theory: that not only do we perceive things for their physical qualities that (could) enable our survival, but we also perceive them for the emotional connections to places and the way those might be just as essential for a different kind of survival.5 These theories of environmental perception matter because they help us see what it is to be a person in the world—not only a member of a group, but an individual as well. The physical everyday world of homes, streets, neighborhoods, stop signs, cars, freeways, and bus fare affords us ways to get places, to stay dry, to get food—but maybe they afford us something even more sustaining; sometimes they tell us stories, teach us who we are, help us become more ourselves.
As my tour guides took me on walks, I saw how they understood their neighborhoods, and how their understandings of places were part of their ongoing process of becoming themselves. First, I saw how some places conveyed to my tour guides a sense of freedom, not through knowledge or words, but through how their bodies felt. And that sense of embodied freedom—of feeling viscerally, powerfully free—was clearly central to their capacity to feel like themselves.
Second, I saw that there were places that helped people build their belonging in the world—through the reinforcement of, or education in, a set of values while also making themselves feel valued. Of course, I saw this sense of belonging get built in home spaces—people often talked about “feeling at home”—but it was not only in residential spaces; very often home was not about where someone slept but, just as for María at El Castillo de Jagua, it was where they worked, shopped, met people they knew, or recognized something of themselves out in public.
The following chapters explore these two kinds of placework that help people become themselves: one chapter about that embodied freedom—in the words of Ulysses, “I be all over”; the next about home spaces that foster a sense of belonging through shared values and being valued—in the words of Julia, “landing someplace safe”; and finally, a third chapter about some more surprising spaces where values and being valued intersect—in David's words, “probably the supermarket.”