Identity Theories

The importance of the Leverone Field can be better seen when the space is looked at through the lens of David Fleming’s article The Space of Argumentation and the Places journal of architecture’s article Cognitive Standards and the Sense of Campus.

David Fleming, an English professor at New Mexico State University, writes about how certain features of public spaces can lead to more important discourse in areas where these features are upheld. He believes that a good discursive community demands six specific qualities, one of which is “identity”. He states that discourse is much better in places “that we collectively identify with, that we feel we belong to, whose history we know, that have a soul, that are outward manifestations of shared values.” He believes that a community can be greatly improved if its spaces can lead to a higher sense of this identity.

Barbara Hadley Stanton, writing for the Places online journal, discusses how a sense of central campus can lead to improved cognitive performance at colleges. She talks about the amount of open space on college campuses and how these “older, core areas that symbolize the identity of the institution” are very important. She discusses the example of three decisions made at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia to move certain buildings underground simply to preserve the sense of open space that leads to central campus place. She articulates that “core campus[es] might be discounted as simply a matter of nostalgia or aesthetics. But it was so general in these three instances…and in many ways so obvious…that it may also indicate the presence of a cognitive standard which determined the actions of these universities.”

Through these descriptions of place and identity, we can see that senses of belonging and importance and be very important to a person’s actions, especially ones such as argumentation or cognitive performance.