Skjulte fortellinger/Hidden stories
Dealing with non-space
And every time a place or the concept of “place” is defined, there are inevitably left-overs which do not fit into the current idea of what a place is. When a place is recognised for instance by the amount of social activity that is going on, or when there is an aesthetic criterion like the harmony of landscape and building, that recognition inevitably also excludes phenomena at hand that does not fit into the picture. This type of exclusion, i.e. this cognitive production of “non-place,” may be explicitly declared, for instance as an investigative delimitation of what to regard as placial when performing an anthropological study. But it may also turn out as an unpredicted consequence of the fact that a certain type of focus is kept when a place is studied.
Gunnar Sandin: Dealing with non-place in exploitation, belonging and drifting
