Because they spread out norms and expectations, places can be sites of both oppression and liberation. When the grammar of a place assigns appropriate trajectories for actions and roles for people, it can make some people invisible, or confine them to diminished roles. Place norms can also degrade our possibilities even if there is no oppression of one group by another, since the quality of actions and roles available in the place may be less than is needed for our flourishing, even if no one among us is differentially oppressed.
Places are not the origin of oppression, but they lay it out. Social roles and values fill the landscape. Once there are places for everything and everyone is in his or her place, grammatically defined relationships can seem normal and inevitable.
Creating a new kind of place, or creating a rift in the continuity of social places, can mount powerful challenges to accepted definitions, because such acts alter our perceived landscape of possibilities. I am urging that we increase the structural and lived complexity of places; this is not by itself enough to undo oppression, but it can make both connections and absences more evident, and so encourage the creation of new possibilities.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001