It is at least imaginable that while there would always be real physical areas, there might be no physical places, but only virtual places.

Imagine that people lived their whole lives perceiving virtual images (perhaps because of some vast plague that crippled ordinary interaction, or because of a nefarious situation such as in the movie The Matrix). In the physical world there would be machinery that supported the virtuality, and technically relevant areas, but no physical places in my sense unless there were engineers working there. Granted that people caught in such a virtuality might not be living as rich and complex lives as we would like, it still seems wrong to deny that they would be performing actions "in" the virtuality.

Index
virtual examples
Place theory outline

(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001