Problematising Place

The relationship between flow and place is complicated, not least because its characteristic merging of action and awareness unsettles everyday experience of an individualised self that is located in place, but such experiences are rarely articulated in explicitly spatial terms. While this is unsurprising, given flow’s psychological underpinnings, it leaves our concepts and models of flow underappreciating the spatial qualities of flow, while flow research that does engage with matters of space and place can be constrained by how it employs certain spatial concepts. Part II seeks to remedy this, by bringing flow scholarship into closer alignment with contemporary geographical theorising. Specifically, proposals in the flow literature that green spaces are inherently more conducive to flow than other types of spaces, and the implicit assumption that place influences flow but not vice versa, are challenged. Subsequently, diverse accounts of spatial experiences during flow are explored by comparing flow in artistic practice and virtual environments, through which flow and presence are configured as distinct yet related phenomena characterised by signature combinations of self, temporal and spatial transformation. Ultimately, flow is proposed to be generative of space and place, whereby the merging of action and awareness constitutes flow as space, which facilitates relocation to or generation of a different place: Flow as place.