The Chapter Four of Place called Working with Place deals with the researches of a place and different practices that has to do with place. This chapter begins with talking about the creation of a place. A few of the examples being discussed here include a Filipina contract worker in Vancouver who made her employer's room into a place by rearranging it. Another example provided is how Latin America Black communities attempt to create place in rainforests by associating place with ecology. Despite saying these, Escobar asserts that a place should not just have ecological in it but should also be recognized on the glob al scale.
The book than moves on to talk about memories and histories of a place, and how memories can be preserved in buildings/place. Although places are often created by winners and served to preserve their memory, some like New York's Lower East Side Tenement Museum preserved memories for the weak and how landlords use minimal bulding codes to take advantage of the immigrants. Some other place like the Ellis Island Immigration Museum captures the success of immigrants and is later changed to portray the memory of the poor and dispossessed. Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz Poland is being used by the communist regime to portray the Western aggression against Eastern Europe by referring to the victims as people instead of Jews. Starting from the 70s this concentration was given the theme of Catholic sufferage when people start to erect crosses on the compound and referring several victims as Catholic. Another way of how people manipulate the meaning of a place to suit their taste is the Angel Island Immigration Station in an Francisco Bay. One of the functions of the station was to house Chinese immigrants who were being denied of entry of the U.S.A. because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. By tying this station to national pride and idealogy, locals have partially successful to bring attention to this station.
Home is the next element that this chapter talks about, and it again used New York's Lower East Side to demonstrate how people have reconstructed and advertised a place to suit their purpose. It talks about how the coming of middle class people and the remodification of rundown houses raises land price and attracts businesses and middle/upper class people to move in. This place is than advertised as a frontier where the extreme poor and wealthy meets. The dangerous atmosphere of living in a "dangerous" community attracts the interest of young people. Among the people who are interested in this are people interested in neotraiditionalism, which aims at creating households different from regular suburbs by focusing on the history of the place. One of the examples of this neotraiditional housings focused on building style of the 18th Century Spanish missionaries. The building companies, in order to build a Spanish missionary styled "place", starts to propagate the stories of these missionaries and exclude the other side of the story. The naming of a place also hat it's affect in excluding other elements.
Regions and nations as places is the next thing being talked about in this book. Nation states, according to Peter Taylor, is the creation of imagined communities where people with nothing in common believe they are somehow linked together. Throughout the history, different regions in a national state of tried to have their own way of political organization. To do this, these people have to build their own set of customs and traditions.
This book moves on to talk about how a place needs a definition of what's in and out of a place. One of the examples of out of place of sexuality out of place. Both the homosexual and heterosexual people can be out of place depends on where they are and more importantly how others think of this place. Because of the different degree of acceptance of homosexuality, homosexuals show different degrees of openess in different places. Not all homosexual people fits the stereotypical homosexual codes however, as lipstick lesbian dresses in an extremely femine way. Governments have used the out of place of homosexuality against their enemies, including those women who sit outside the US Air Force to protest the cruise missiles in the base that are "out of place" in the United States. The existance of lower and private prostitutes also stimulates different replies. While private prostitutes are "accpted" because privacy has to do with sexuality expression, public prostitutes cause public panick. Homelessness is another out of place characteristic. Homelessness has a sense of lack of morale to it. The idea of homelessness, at least in the western world, is first being formed in the Elizabethan times when peasants are freed and serve no masters. These people are terrifying because they are unpredictable and are nomads. People have attempted to keep homeless people out of places they don't belong including train station and parks. Homelessness is associated with city and not with suburbs, or rural area. For that reason, rurals are seem as an escape from city problems and sometimes places for homeless people to sleep without being harassed. Another group of people that are seemed to be dangerous and out of plac are ther refugees. While refugees used to refer people such as the protestants escaping catholic and wealthy elites leaving their home, it isn't till the late 19th century that refugee was associated with poor people. The strengthen of national sovereignty and national identities in Europe caused the production of refugees as out of place people. Most of the political statements against refugees seemed to be associated with "out of place".
