Role and goals of ontological analysis in understanding space and places

Abstract

Places are landscapes as seen from far away, places are cities lived from inside or cities imaged from outside: are they ecological ecosystems too? We intend to focus our attention on lived places. Physical places are complex entities. Nonetheless, we should first distinguish a concept of space from a concept of place. Each of these concepts has different declinations and for each declination there is a possible definition. From a cognitive or a designer’s perspective space is instead conceived as something different, at least not explicitly a 3-dimensional subspace (Freksa et al., 2014). A place is an interpreted space, a reasoned space, a space with feelings, a result of an aesthetic fruition of a physical space. We can define physical space as a set of mental images, spaces of representation, and the architecture of cognitive processes in vision theory. The essence of place lies in the quality of being somewhere specific, knowing that you are "here" rather than "there" (Rapoport, 1977) for example enclosure becomes a very important aspect of place-making which also seems, in some way, to be related to the concept of territory.