index
Social creation
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The floors linked by an escalator can be socially defined as one or more places; so too with other modes of linkage.
Discontinuous places are social creations. The business traveler's almost identical hotels and planes can form part of a single grammatically defined expanse. On the other hand, the almost identical islands visited on a cruise are defined as separate places by the grammar of a cruise. Individual psychological reactions do not create places. A depressed person who experiences separate locations as "all the same" does not create a unified social place. It is not what I experience or do but what the social norms make available to be experienced or done. A discontinuous place will only be a unified place for certain groups involved in certain trajectories of action across the spaces involved. In this discontinuous places do not differ from ordinary places whose contours change with different groups of users, though such changes may be less obvious when the place's architectural unity is strong.