For Aristotle, place or topos is not the abstract, absolute points expressed by a Cartesian grid extendingout into infinity.
Rather place is that which holds and contains; it has a sense of rightness and belonging which every being innately knows. The proper place for the heavy is down (or in the center) as all earthy and heavy things are pulled toward a center. The proper place of the light is up or out, as air and fire travel upward or away, relative to earth and water.
Place was indeed relative in the sense that place was identified by and best known by its proper objects and their relation to other objects and places. The place of earth is made known in its relation to water which rests upon the earth, and air which rests over water and earth.
The old saying, that there is no place like home could be amended by Aristotle to say that there is no place without home. Home is what makes place ultimately a place, not the mere proximity of beings, but beings ordered to their organized areas and spheres of rest and activity.
Further, we know place by seeing elements tend to their proper areas of activity. Consider the sky. When it is empty, it is the brass sphere, impersonal and sometimes hollow, seeming even meaningless.
But see a cloud make its way across the heavens, see the sun lend its beauty to that cloud, or even more, see a bird wing its way through the air, and sudden our souls know that such is a place for life, that to inhabit such a realm is life, and we can suddenly wish to know it, to see it, to join ourselves to it and rest in it.
The flight of the bird, the progress of a cloud, the beauty of the sun remind us that every place in heaven and under heaven has its own glory, and this stirs our soul with longing to inhabit the whole cosmos.
Perhaps only because a bird flies through the air do we also long to fly. Because the universe is not abstract extension, but a home for life and beings differentiated and wondrous each in their own way, our soul, which is made to know, not only recognizes each place as home, but the cosmos as itself a home. The soul finds that it longs to inhabit every aspect of the cosmos, to wing it with all that is knowable in the deeps, in the heights, in the whole of the heavens, earth, and seas.
Same & Other 