Place Ballet as Place Making

Abstract: In his seminal book, A Geography of the Lifeworld, the humanistic geographer David Seamon transforms Jane Jacobs’ evocative idea of a street ballet into a central theoretical concept, ‘place ballet’, intended to capture a way in which we experience our environments. In this paper, I will seek to define ‘place’ and ‘place ballet’ in Husserlian phenomenological terms, by drawing upon ideas such as “fulfillment” and “constitution”, so as to provide an explication of Seamon’s concept of place ballet, thereby addressing what I regard as tensions in Seamon’s discussion.