7 Seattle Central Library as place

‘Place’as a research phenomenon has occupied scholars in such fields as sociology, anthropology, and human and cultural geography for decades. 1 Of late, it has also proven a useful concept for understanding the multifaceted dimensions of libraries, how they are perceived and used by different stakeholders but most specifically, library users. Difficulties lie, however, in how ‘place’is understood and operationalized by different researchers. Such confounding inhibits our knowledge of libraries’ roles in society. In this chapter we address two primary frameworks for understanding libraries as ‘place’by drawing upon findings from a field study of the newly constructed central building of the Seattle Central Library. Early approaches to understanding ‘place’tended to focus on describing its characteristics. Geographer Fred Lukermann, for example, in the 1960s–as highlighted by Relph–characterized ‘place’as being where (1) location is fundamental,(2) nature and culture are involved,(3) spaces are unique but interconnected and part of a framework of circulation,(4) spaces are localized, and (5) spaces are emerging or becoming, and have a historical component (Relph, 1976, p. 3). While this framework is useful for an