Writing in Place: Part 2 Grant Revell

Connecting Love & Place

Introduction

Some years ago, landscape architect colleague Richard J. Weller (RIP) spoke passionately about the meaning of “aesthetics”. He would define such phenomena as a “structural inquiry of culture and nature—as opposed to taste, fashion or style.” Weller would tease out this “structural inquiry” by the cultural processes of design. He would theorise and analyse site design opportunities when confronted by the human, and not-so-human conditions of his loving Mother Earth. His designs, often expressed so deeply within the brutal Australian condition, allowed us to come to grips with the pervasive philosophical problem of Australia itself. Weller would teach design like he was a living museum curator or say a Renaissance librarian—his references often complex, exhaustive and theoretically challenging. But he gave generous reason and form to those historical readings and their hopeful debates. He knew that nature, as we might know it, was a depleting set of life-worlds, and that everything in his world-view was culture apart from his strong enduring interests of whether there is such a thing as the non-human world. Beauty, as he would explain, was an aesthetic much deeper than just the visual or the scenic response to place. And animals have been encultured since time immemorial.

For many, Richard Weller was our Mozart as he became the oculi for amplifying how landscape design could never come from him; rather through him. He would scour his own exhaustive library to ricochet deep thinking until it all came back home to landscape. He was interested in skilful listeners who could also debate. And sensory landscape was his vessel; it was his crucible where he would alchemise his thoughtful magic—a true critical artist. Importantly though, he was never comfortable with the cultural phenomenon of “sensing place”. He thought it was far too slippery for humans to determine and quantify certain qualities or values of place as some democratised solution or mechanism for desirable community planning and design. Weller was more interested in the cultural problem of why wouldn’t we recognise the performance of place, good or bad, as a means to appreciate one distinctive living place from another. This nuance of recognising place is important when other scholars like Tasmania’s Jeff Malpas would emphasise the critical importance of how we interact with those individualised qualities of being within place—and not of place.

Weller was more Aristotle by theorising place as “the where of something” which is more about how we might exist—whereas the “sensing of place” focusses on how certain places (cultural conditions or habitats) are given particular meanings by humans or non-humans. And meanings of course are suitably inter-subjective just like the relationships we bring to place. And with the help of Weller’s expansive concepts of “structural aesthetics”, and with the wisdom of writers like Nick Riggle— we now can ask—“why and how is love connected to the aesthetic values of place (or somewhere)?”1

Why Love (not beauty)?

So a love of or within place is meant to be an intersubjective and definitely personal aesthetic. And that is why this community project—Loving Place—Loving Walyalup-Fremantle—openly encourages a gestalt of individual aesthetics. Like art itself—it is supposed to be a deeply personal choice of individuality. A choice that matters to existence. The aesthetic emotions of love do let us think and feel for “the where of something”. If love is important for life-world existence then where might these emotional places or their experiences be for Walyalup-Fremantle? And how and where might the forensic flâneur of Walyalup-Fremantle for example, find this love aesthetic?

For many wannabe project gifters, this offer has been difficult. Interestingly, they seem to draw the line between their reckoning of what is public, personal or private in their own understanding of their place. Many wannabe gifters simply can’t come out on place. I have obviously asked gifters to be extremely personal, but many unfortunately think I have asked them to be private. As film-maker, story-teller and place flâneur Wim Wenders explains—

Only personal stories matter and rarely concern other people … and the only things worth talking about are those that are drenched in experience and based on one’s very own knowledge of the world.

Wenders finds fact or fiction in those “drenchings”, often surprising us all in their radical personal authenticity of place2.

For me, connecting love with the aesthetics of place is relational and I have found loving inquiries and experiences in the way love is relational to the landscape readings and experiences of Hope (Thomas Berry); to Joy (Margit Brünner); to Melancholy (Jackie Bowring); to Truthfulness (Marcia Langton) and then to the expansiveness and inclusivity of Place itself (Ed Casey and Jeff Malpas). Of course, within a more immediate and contemporary reckoning, we can add to that list, including landscape constructs of “respect”; “empathy”; “reciprocity” and “happiness”; et al. But it is the sum of those aesthetic emotions, and many others, that provide me with the untethered and expansiveness of “the where of something”. The where of “love” can be found in the everyday aesthetic living of Walyalup-Fremantle, defined by the individual. So my project tells us. But I confess now, as I might be over generous with my personal importance for the “love of life” and its practical influences on shaping and or constructing critical public place-making.

Writer Nick Riggle explains the likely connections between beauty and love, which is important to both landscape and place studies. Beauty, for example, is now a well-worn 18th C trope of landscape value often confused with an over-arching nostalgic, sentimental or even romantic emphasis on landscape beauty, or scenic beauty, to be more precise. As a social construct the connected idea of beauty and landscape can be considered irrelevant. Yet we hang onto it insistently. Moreover, if beauty is indeed the object of love for certain landscapes or places then it is time than beauty defined itself, rather than just be “beautiful”. Or as Riggle continues, where aesthetic properties for the love of place, for example, might be better discerned and explained in non-aesthetic terms that go deep into human life and human interests. (Riggle, 2025:1)

To simply ask a Walyalup-Fremantle voyeur, or the like, to gift a “loving” image or story strikes at the possibilities that participants can engage in this deeper interest for human life within a special place called Walyalup-Fremantle. To narrate the happenstance of how the voyeur might personally be in love with Walyalup-Fremantle, and how that non-aesthetic expression is possibly mirrored by image or story intrigues me as a landscape architect and urban planner. To enable a free “counter-archive” of such expressions is of course the main aim of this project. To be “counter,” as such, allows its own voices to speak back to the living social and physical histories of Walyalup-Fremantle in search of its public good. It remains to be seen how this discourse of place-making is non-aesthetic, but I trust it is inclusive of the down-trodden, the lost or forgotten, the hidden and the uncelebrated moments and values of the vernacular or the endemic. It has already identified places that are incredibly vulnerable.—where their own existence is left hanging in the balance of urban progress.

So it is little wonder that Gloria Turnip (see list of stories) recognises the personal freedom of Walyalup-Fremantle in her gift to this public project. She explains the itinerary of site existence and the weird and wonderful experiences that one can enjoy from comprehending this place peripatetically. Her own place-worlds of freedom and love of “movement” or “connection” in Walyalup-Fremantle can, I think, be a special experience to many.

So if we can describe or portray the personal loving character of Walyalup-Fremantle in specific terms then we may well have a public counter-archive that is useful. Like saying “this is beautiful” we have a chance to describe the existence and importance of love by expanding on its likely aesthetic. It is loving not because of its desirable sexy appeal, for example, but because of its powerful or vulnerable resistance to change, or as gifter Turnip has suggested in its ability to be humble and permeable and to be “a place of all the other people and characters we have been (or want to be)”. The specific loving aesthetic of place potentially becomes the story told or untold—process driven rather than quantified into urban objects. To therefore design with this ethos of place becomes an important tenet for urban designers. Rather than filling up spaces physically we have have the abilities to stand back and observe its socialised performances of the already. Or in some cases it might mean we take things away from place to allow these social experiences to expand in their own right. To edit place, to get rid of the clutter rather than add to it, can be a powerful yet subtle urban design manoeuvre.

Like the project gifts from Tony Blackwell, love can be found in the honest grittiness of place, its fractured imperfections, impurities and its delicate second-hand surprises rather than say its smoothness, newness or shininess of consumptive perfection. Walyalup-Fremantle is old and soiled, and in many places longs for its further age and maturity and not in its expendable youthfulness of commercial change and entertainment for change-sake. Walyalup-Fremantle could look to very old cities around the world to appreciate how it might be radically authentic to its vulnerable love of heritage and its time-less understanding of its own shared or private Aboriginality. In that way, I feel that Walyalup-Fremantle is certainly loving; for it is not really beautiful—and for many we love it because of that.

Love of place can therefore be evidence of moral action in our crazy and uncertain times. This love becomes political and responsible to ask further questions about place and indeed how we might best fall in love with place. It starts to embody a certain care and respect for how we embrace change in our public or personal urban environments. Making loving personal choices for the public good becomes a loving aesthetic in its own right. It tries hard to maintain resilience, openness, respect its elderly and very young, avoid toxicity, provide nourishment and companionship and to remain healthy. For that is, as an urban designer, the affect of what I am truly after. And yes, some semblance of urban renewal or historic preservation can embrace those vital concerns. Overall, they could be human-life affirming values for loving Walyalup-Fremantle.

In the vastness of knowing and contributing to the life of Western Australia, and in some ways as a tribute to the philosopher Heidegger, Walyalup-Fremantle plays an important role of making many places out of huge spaces3. And a respectful knowing of diverse yet specific Aboriginal Australia would reinforce that.

Finally, and weirdly enough, if I was ever to fall in love with another place like Walyalup-Fremantle then I would probably do that blind-folded, experiencing first-hand the texts from R. J. Weller and putting the legacy of his structural inquiry of loving aesthetics into worthwhile practice. It remains to be seen if this loving place project lives up to those affirmations.

  1. “Connecting Beauty and Love”, Nick Riggle, 2025, in: King, Alex (ed.), Art and Philosophy: Essays at the Intersection (Oxford, 2025; online edn, Oxford Academic, 5 May 2025), https://doi.org/10.1093/9780191815423.001.0001, accessed 13 May 2026. ↩

  2. Wim Wenders, “Instant Stories”, Thames and Hudson, 2017:13. ↩

  3. See: “The fate of place: a philosophical history.” Edward S. Casey; University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997. ↩