Food for Thought: Restaurants and Place Making

摘要

A bare geographic space is like a brand-new home that hasn’t been lived in yet. As people begin to inhabit these spaces, they build into it to make it representative of themselves, much like we design and set up our houses to turn them into homes. This is how a place goes from just being a location to something that has a deeper meaning to its inhabitants. We look to create into the spaces we inhabit our own little corner of what is familiar to us, so that we can call a space our own. This is the essence of what place making is, and it happens through a variety of ways. Place making has been studied in the past by numerous scholars. This article takes a look at place making on a college campus, with the main focus being on place making for ethnic minority communities. It questions the strengths and benefits of place making, as well as what detrimental effects can be there when a group is denied the ability to practice place making. Four groups that have been chosen for the study: the Indian community, the Chinese community, the Japanese community and the African American community. While the article looks at the strengths of place making as a whole, special emphasis has been placed on restaurants as the agents of place making for reasons outlined later in the paper.