The Emotion Revealer of the “Being-there”: Conceptual, Methodological and Empirical Elements
This article offers a synthesis of work carried out over the past two decades on the topic of the relationship with space, particularly in its affective dimension. It shows that knowledge of the affective relationship to space, defined as the joint result of the interaction between experiences (practices, thoughts, missed acts, emotions, etc.), their reprocessing through memories and projections, anticipations, allows us to grasp the construction of a “being there” defined as the synthesis, on one hand, of the qualitative evaluation that the individual makes of his situation at a given moment in relation to his trajectory and, on the other hand, the assessment of his ability to control distances between his location and places and therefore the links that matter to him. This “being there” means, with regard to what an individual is and/or wishes to become, always maintaining a triple dynamic balance between being in the right place and at the right distance, between the active part of “doing with” and its passive part, between a valued, devaluing, assumed or rejected past and a desired or feared future.