To not be considered mobile, one must firmly be rooted in nature. This idea of Harries is intriguing. The first thing that I started to think about was how the physical and psychological aspects of being rooted are very different. Harries seems to think that the physical roots are the thing that allow an object to be inmobile. Although physically able to be moved, the psychological roots attached to an object are what really determine its mobility. The experiences and memories of a place allow the feeling of mobility and that is what really matters to the users. Even a building that is clearly mobile, in the physical sense, can have an extremely strong set of roots from the community it is placed in. Later in this reading, Harries does bring up "that place and with it proximity and distance are less and less a determining factor of our lives." That seems to relate to my initial thoughts after reading the first idea. Place is so much more than where and how it located. I started to wonder if I would love my childhood home as much if it was moved to a new location. My answer surprised me. I would be more attached to the land and the location than the actual building. If that home was situated in an urban setting, it wouldn't be that same home. Although I started thinking of public spaces that would create a sense of place for the whole community, the idea of my home being moved was much harder to take. The community may still gather at the town square even if the objects around it had changed. If the location of my home changed, it wouldn't feel like home. It was the physical space in that exact location that created my place.
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Annie, I can relate to the sense of homelessness. I grew up in Ann Arbor, which is a great city to live and grow up in. However, my parents moved during my second year of college. So in a sense my home moved too. But I no longer feel "at home" at my parents house, it's just where I go at holidays to be with family. When I go back to Ann Arbor, I don't feel at home either, the new residents painted my house a bad color, and many of the people on my street who I used to know no longer live there. When I go to Ann Arbor to see friends it's no better, I am frustrated by the change in the buildings downtown, or a one way street that has been switched to make it "easier" to navigate downtown. I think we become attached not only to a specific place, but also a specific time. The loss of either, can create a sense of homelessness. Perhaps thats why I usually say that I grew up in Michigan, and still consider Michigan home, even though I haven't lived there in nearly 10 years, Its so large an area, that I don't think it can be lost.
I have one particular place that I still think of as "home." I only lived there for four years in my mid-30s, and I haven't been there for eight years, but it's where my heart still goes. The physical landscape caught me instantly; the streetscape was busy and diverse; my apartment on the second floor of a house on the elevated north side of town allowed me to look out southward at the bay and the fog and the Coast Range and see the days change.
Since I left there in 1998, I've lived at seven different addresses in four different cities. Some were better than others, but nothing before or since has ever been like that for me.
Also, FYI, let me be more complete about my residential history.
1958-1976 -- one house in Muskegon Michigan.
1976-1978 -- one dorm room at Michigan Technological University, with summers back in the same house.
1978-1983 -- Amarillo, Texas (one of the biggest mistakes of my life), five different addresses.
1983-1991 -- four different addresses in Oakland.
1991-1994 -- one address in Milwaukee.
1994-1998 -- one address in Arcata, California.
1998-2000 -- two addresses in San Luis Obispo, California.
2000-2002 -- two addresses in Oakland.
2002-2006 -- two addresses in Durham, North Carolina.
2006-present -- one address in Medford, Massachusetts (plus my partner's home in Vermont).
So that's a total of ten different cities (if you count Oakland twice), with 21 unique living arrangements. There is a certain freedom that I've been allowed, but the rootlessness/homelessness is powerful and painful.
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