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Not all links make places

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Home steps (Maine)

Neighborhood link (bridge in York Mill Park, England)

The Yanaka neighborhood in Tokyo

English countryside

A local place can include a network of links, but not all networks of links are local places. Not all networks offer unified and embodied landscapes of action. It is the trajectories of action that define a dense set of nodes as a place. Places can be nested within one another, just as a place is made up of sub-areas, but not all networks of places form a larger place. My house has rooms each with a distinctive grammar for actions and roles appropriate to that kind of room, but in addition the house as a whole has its own embodied grammar and embodied dimensionalities for actions that take place in the house as a whole. The place that is a neighborhood is made up of smaller places such as my yard, my house, the corner store, and so on. This is a different kind of inclusion from the way that a large nation might be made up of places. My neighborhood is perceived and lived as a unified landscape for action, oriented from my position here. The nation is perceived not as a single place but as a network of such oriented places that can be reached by following links that extend beyond the action horizons of this place.

There are few if any embodied actions that take the space of the whole nation as an oriented and embodied field of social possibility. There are collections of actions (for example, voting) and more general actions (for example, selling or persuading) that could take the national network as their field, but these are not as concretely embodied and do not have the same place-dimensionality. (A defensive war might make the space of the nation into a unified place with embodied dimensions.) There are certainly systemic effects that take the space of the nation as their field of connection, but those are not necessarily actions in places.

It is tempting to look for some hierarchy of actions from the most local and concrete to the most general and abstract, but even if you find such a hierarchy it does not necessarily correlate with a corresponding hierarchy of places.