Gertrude Stein’s “there is no there there” has been used as a description for placeless spaces.  By contrast, place has some kind of "there" going on.  But what is this?  What exactly is “place”?  There are lots of ways to think about it.  Here we’ll be thinking about “place” in terms of our urban outdoors. 

When we get that Helena “sense of place” out there, what’s going on? What are we sensing? Is it urban design — deliberate “place-making” on somebody’s part?  Is it a lucky accident?  Something else? 

This is an unruly bunch of questions, as is to be expected when thinking about something as ill-defined as “place”. 

Unruly questions, though, can be fun, and even if they don’t lead to a hard-set definition, they can, in the case of Helena’s urban outdoors, lead to something useful — a shared, or at least better clarified and articulated vision and use of a Helena-specific, vocabulary and frame of reference — a basis, maybe, for practical understanding.