Losing The Sense Of Place:Space In Contemporary Cultural Conflicts

In the era of globalization,there are more close connections among different regions,both economically and politically.These regions are following the same logic in the operation of capital.But at the same time,people in different regions often come into conflicts and even terrorist incidents.So the split is a noticeably serious question in the contemporary time.People feel depressed,lost and drunk,and the appeals of protecting the local characteristic,which are fast disappearing,are becoming louder.Global,region and local belong to three different spatial scales.The researchers analyzed a variety of circumstances about the space.They studied from different aspects,with different methods,and have made much process.In the 1960s,humanist geographers opened up a new path of research which had different basic of methodology from empiricism.They paid more attention to what the place is to the man's growth and his daily life.The perspective of research was switched from the natural environment to human's practices.By the 1980s,a part of geographers learned from political science,sociology and other disciplines,and turned their space researches to human society and cultural studies.They put the place and space into the system of power and capital and reinterpret the value of space in the social structure and production,in order to criticize the global capitalist system,which brought the competition,oppression and hegemony.After two turns,space research is not limited to one discipline and its connotation is becoming more diverse.Chinese researchers follow the path of the development of space theory and translation and explain those spatial theories,combining with the practical problems in the modern China.These studies mainly follow the train of critical thinking.They disclose the power structure and capital control in the social space.Then they call for people protecting and inheriting their local culture.Correspondingly,the feeling of losing the land is also frequently present in all kinds of narratives and discussions,and the whole space takes on a complex emotion.Here the land means the place where people grew up and always keep in his memory.However,it does not mean that the place is stable and closed,and excludedall contradictions.The so-called sense of belonging and identity is not a single and essential concept.The feeling of losing the land is a kind of complex expression of emotions.And it means that there are some problems between people and place.In this case,the researches,which discussed the space from critical thinking,are limited when facing the emotional relationship between people and space.Firstly,the space is not only includes the complex relations of the ethics,the identity,the class,and so on,but also means the language,psychology and cultural construction that has been carried on in a long time.So the space theory should be humanized and concern about man's experience,man's daily life,emotions.Space maintains the sense of identity among different people brings people a sense of belonging and also embodies the cultural memory and imagination.Secondly,in age of electronic information,people's spaceexperiences include both the virtual experiences and the physical experiences.And the two superimposed together,sometimes parallel to each other,sometimes with the cross.The sense of loss about space expresses people's emotional needs and expectations in the era of globalization.Wandering mind is trying to find the space that can bring them sense of belonging and identity.The spatial aesthetics show the complexity of space.It is an aesthetic space that contains emotional experience,an open space that is rooted in history and also a shared space.And it thinks about how different space experiences realize their own value and gain the recognition from the equal dialogue.