Local Heritage, Global Context

Cultural Perspectives on Sense of Place

Rosy Szymanski, John Schofield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138248335
• eBook ISBN: 9781351921640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

'Sense of place' has become a familiar phrase, used to describe emotional attachment to a particular location. As heritage management policy and practices increasingly attempt to draw on the views and expressions of interest amongst local communities, it is important to have a better grasp of what people mean by this concept, and to assess its uses and implications. Here, a range of practitioners from NGO, agency, cultural heritage and archaeological backgrounds review the meanings of 'sense of place', and where it is useful in the context of heritage management practice. This volume breaks new ground in specifically addressing place attachment from a cultural heritage perspective, and drawing on local and national interests from a diversity of cultural situations. Illustrated with case studies from around Europe and Australia, the book addresses key themes, including the rootedness amongst communities in the past; policy-making for accommodating senses of place within planning and management, for land- sea- and city-scapes; official versus unofficial views; and the often difficult balance between planning policies that extend from regional to global scale, and local actions and perceptions.

Chapter 1
Sense of Place in a Changing World

John Schofield and Rosy Szymanski

What are we to understand by the term 'sense of place', and how can it be helpful in the context of cultural heritage practices? How can we measure or capture sense of place, and should we even try? And what happens when strongly-held and personal views come into conflict, either with each other or with those of authority? Our sense of place project, culminating now in this edited collection of ideas, examples, conversations and suggestions, will explore these and other questions through a series of applications in which sense of place is a central concern. In this introduction we describe some of the underlying principles, setting the scene for the more detailed contributions that follow.

Change

The world is changing, as the world has always changed, and as archaeologists and heritage practitioners this is something we understand only too well. We know for example that people have always reacted to change and responded to it in different ways, welcoming it or being wary and suspicious of what it might entail, fearing the unknown. Of course, change may be expected and lengthy preparations can be made for what is to come. But change can also be unexpected and traumatic. It can take us by surprise. Change happens in different ways, at different scales and at different speeds. It can be immediate or it can be gradual. Sometimes we hardly notice that it is happening — the creep of progress, the cumulative effect of which can transform and reconfigure to the point where something becomes fundamentally different, though it can be hard to establish when 'the change' occurred.

As archaeologists we often record and witness through our surveys and excavations the process of change over longer periods. But our dilemma as archaeologists operating within the heritage sector is that we can also shape the world through our heritage practices. Replacement doors and windows on properties in a protected conservation area for instance: replacing one front door may not detract from an area's character; removing two even three may not make much difference. But at some stage the degree of change does have a detrimental affect and the prevailing characteristics once sufficient to justify the conservation area are lost.

A particular concern is the potential impact of changes which have social significance, in the sense that they affect people's lives, or the quality of their lives. How might change affect or compromise a community's, or a person's sense of place? Such changes can obviously be physical (an inappropriate new building close to or instead of an older one), but they can have social impact as well, as Grenville has highlighted in her essay on ontological security (Grenville 2007). Take the example of an architecturally mundane but socially meaningful place (even a type of place) within a community, a youth club maybe, or an old cinema, any place that holds memories for members of the community and is valued as a result. If planners suggested removal of that place, to accommodate more housing for example, the community's response might be critical and perhaps hostile. Local heritage practitioners might share the community's concerns and take their side, or they might side with the planners in some cases, where they felt local opinion was misguided or where adequate mitigation was seemingly in place. The simple point here is that local perspectives do matter, and are often grounded in a strong emotional connection to the place that is threatened. Some dismiss these local concerns as merely the views of NIMBY's (Not In My Back Yard), local busy-bodies and people who merely stand in the way of progress. But as Burström et al. (2004) and others have said, this calls into question who precisely the experts are; is it the planners and heritage practitioners, qualified to take rational, objective views on the basis of experience and regional or national context, or is it the local people, who know the place and its capacity for change best of all, people who are, after all, experts at living where they do?

This book, ultimately, is about change. But it is also about recognizing, documenting, understanding and taking account of what local people value about their local environment, and the processes by, and degree to which these 'special' things can be retained amidst the inevitability of a fast-changing world.

Local

To introduce a short discussion on local-ness, we want first to consider this word 'special'. By special we do not necessarily mean iconic. We are not in the same territory here as words and values that are specifically used to justify the introduction of heritage protection measures, such as listing buildings of 'special historic interest' and monuments of 'national importance'. Rather, we are typically referring here to things (which can mean places, objects, cultural traditions, landscape components) that are valued locally, that characterize a local area, that give a place distinctive quality, that set it apart from other places. Of course, some of these places are 'special' in terms of cultural significance, national importance and so on. But more often they are not. They are ordinary, mundane, everyday places, the commonplace in national terms, but deeply ingrained with local significance and special to those who live there. Such special things need not always be tangible. As Tuan explains, 'odours can lend character to objects and places, making them distinctive, easier to identify and remember' (2005:11). Sound can also be distinctive and can evoke spatial impressions. Musical traditions can be highly localized, while a place's auditory characteristics can offer distinctive qualities. Taste can also have a close proximity to place, in local culinary traditions for example. We are talking here about things that contribute to sense of place, or – in Tuan's words, 'genius loci'. Those things need not be (and often are not) material.

All of these contribute to local character. And local is important, especially now given the 'ultimate abstraction of reference that derives from the post-modern condition that has the author him- or herself as the object of study', as Tom Conley notes in his introduction to Augé's In the Metro (2002: xvii, and cited in Harrison and Schofield 2010: 135). For Augé. 'solitude accrues as the world accelerates' and there seems little doubt the world is accelerating (cf. Glieck 1999, but cf. Edgerton 2006 for an alternative view).

The world is also one in which migration (forced and selected), diaspora and transience are now commonplace. At least in the developed world, and increasingly (for all the wrong reasons) elsewhere, people are on the move. People migrate and commute over ever-increasing distances, thus ensuring a loss of contact with the places that mean most to them, and the places they call home. Of course movement means making new connections with new places, and learning how to inhabit an unfamiliar landscape with unfamiliar mores and cultural traditions. Yet these connections can also be close, even though they are different in form and intensity to those that exist for a home or homeland. For example, the Faro Convention (Council of Europe 2009) has relevance here, with its stated aims of putting 'people and human values at the centre of an enlarged and cross-disciplinary concept of cultural heritage' and 'recognizing that every person has a right to engage with the cultural heritage of their choice, whilst respecting the rights and freedoms of others, as an aspect of the right freely to participate in cultural life.'

While 'Faro' almost certainly marks an important threshold, it is important to recognize that this whole area is fraught with tensions and difficulties. This is because, ultimately, sense of place is a personal matter: it is what individuals often think matters most, and what it is that characterizes a neighbourhood. It is something people feel strongly about. As Peter Read has explained (1996: 3),

People respond individually to locality ... and the culture with which they are familiar helps to enlarge, diminish, shape or transform it. Senses of belonging are allied to attachment and love, but the country must first become known and apprehended.

Knowing a place or landscape is relative. Knowledge can be accumulated over generations, or over weeks, days even. These familiar places and areas of landscape are also reference points which, according to Relph (1985), construct in our memories and affections, a here from which to discover the world, and a there to which we can return. Naturally enough, therefore, opinion on the value of these places and areas will vary, often significantly, and often these differences of opinion will clash, at places that some value highly and some detest or find troublesome. In the case of a rural community with a large migrant population for example, those that have lived there for generations will inevitably feel a sense of ownership of 'their' place, knowing it more intimately, and having memories and stories woven into its fabric. As a result, they will probably feel their view should prevail. But that is to deny recent migrants a say. They may not have lived there for as long, but it has nevertheless also become their place, and they too will have views and opinions about it. Those views will be shaped in part by the landscape and cultural traditions prevalent in the landscape they have come from, views (and their attendant practices) which may be at odds with those of the existing community.

This then introduces a further set of issues. How should these tensions be addressed with a view to achieving balance and resolution; and how might practitioners wanting to gather information about sense of place negotiate such complex and challenging ideas with a mixed community, and where language and cultural barriers might exist? There is also the further complication, identified by Tuan (2005: 136–7), that:

Intimate experiences lie buried in our innermost being so that not only do we lack the words to give them form but often we are not even aware of them. When, for some reason, they flash to the surface of our consciousness they evince a poignancy that the more deliberative acts – the actively sought experiences – cannot match. Intimate experiences are hard to express.

Hard, maybe, but not impossible. As Tuan goes on to say, these intimate experiences may be personal and deeply felt but they are not necessarily solipsistic or eccentric. Hearth, shelter, home or home-base are intimate places to human beings everywhere, and often form the basis for evaluating 'sense of place'. Home is the ultimate in local. Here we briefly assess these two questions under the headings 'Engagement' and 'Home', using the opportunity also to introduce the chapters that follow, and which negotiate these areas of tension and complexity with greater focus and clarity.

Engagement

A recent survey in England (Bradley et al. 2009) emphasized the importance of the historic environment as contributing to sense of place. But equally if not more important, it demonstrated the extent to which people in the UK first, understand their local environment, and second, take opportunities for engagement with it, with alacrity and enthusiasm.

But as we have seen, this is an area often fraught with tensions and difficulties. What happens when views and perspectives on a place are at odds, or even in conflict; where valued places for one set of people are loathed by another? And more straightforwardly, what methods exist for documenting and negotiating these values? Martin Thomas' study of the Macedonian community in Sydney is an example of how this can be resolved, with an approach that is inclusive, respectful and rigorous. To set the scene, he introduces Paul Stephen, a Macedonian-born Australian born in a mountainous region of Macedonia in 1936, before emigrating to Australia in 1948. Paul described the landscape of his childhood:

Martin, you're gonna make me cry now. I'm here because of that landscape. We have the most wonderful landscape. I don't remember drought. I don't. We were fairly north; we would have been about 800 to 1,000 metres above sea level. We had plains, and on our plains in fact was originally an ancient city there. We could see these beautiful mountains where the forest was from the village. It always had snow on the peaks. But he (my uncle) always said to me there's a lake there and this is where heaven is. And not until 1984 was I allowed to enter my area, and to one of my cousins I said: 'Look, I have to go to this lake." And my uncle was right, it is heaven. Because there's no tourists there. No pollution. The white ducks are still there, the black ducks are still there. I cried with happiness. It is so supreme, so silent, so beautiful, and you've got these big pines and they're huge. (Thomas 2001:7)

This attachment to a hilly, wooded landscape leads the author to a discussion of the huge Macedonian picnics that occur annually in Royal National Park, Sydney, involving large numbers of Macedonian migrants. It was the woodland, and the familiarity of woodland, that drew them to this place. The events are seen by others as 'rowdy, congested and environmentally unfriendly' (ibid. 8). Yet for Macedonians they represent an important social tradition held in a familiar landscape. Paul explained how the large picnics, where people could eat, drink and play music, were a hybrid tradition, influenced by outdoor celebrations that occurred in the homeland though inflected by the Australian context. Thomas' (2001) study identifies the tensions, before presenting a methodology for achieving some resolution, through mutual understanding. The methodology concerns approaching and engaging the various communities and negotiating and discussing the issues of use and management with them. Here two sets of values, both deeply ingrained with a sense of place, are balanced in a way that allows each community of interests to be recognized and respected.

Within cultural heritage practice some procedures and methodologies can be unduly prescriptive and mechanistic, glossing over the complexities of subjectivity and professional judgment for example. But sometimes the methods need to accommodate and embrace the complexity being addressed. As Thomas' example demonstrates, this can be achieved. In this collection of essays several examples are presented. Sue Clifford's chapter, for example, presents the innovative, ground-breaking and acclaimed work of Common Ground, demonstrating through numerous examples and approaches how community participation can be both fun and empowering. The Parish Maps for example demonstrate with extraordinary-eloquence and skill, the places and things valued by a local community. These are not prescriptive or exclusive in any sense. The maps are consensual and inclusive of all who choose to be involved. In Cornwall, Hilary Orange uses questionnaire surveys to closely examine sense of place, and how perception and experience is influenced by issues surrounding Cornish-ness. A particular emphasis here is the tension that exists between a very beautiful and predominantly coastal landscape, and the traces of ugly, dirty, noisy industry, albeit now monumentalized and incorporated into the aesthetic. Asking questions and analysing responses moves us closer to understanding Cornish-ness and sense of place amongst participants from Cornwall and elsewhere, and amongst people of different gender- and age-groups.

A more obviously geographic focus is presented by Rodney Harrison who follows a general discussion of sense of place within the context of Australian heritage practice with a review of methods such as mapping attachment and counter-mapping (generating maps that challenge order and authority). Using examples from New South Wales and also south London (UK) he describes how simple cartographic and ethno-historic practices can contribute significantly to mapping attachment. Influenced by Australian heritage practice and examples such as local community capacity building in South Wales, Ken Whittaker and Stephen Townend also focus on methodology, describing the development of Qualitative Data Analysis. This is a technique they have adopted in their role as consultants working in the UK planning system, to assess and draw out understandings of the value of the historic environment. Their chapter outlines the concern that this is a relatively new area for heritage practitioners who, until fairly recently, have focussed their attention on the physical remains of the historic environment rather than trying to tease out and negotiate the values associated with such places.

As well as discussing methods for understanding the attachments and values associated with existing, known and familiar places, the authors in this book also discuss the question of shaping the connections a community has to a place and perhaps helping them to realize a connection with the remote or unfamiliar. Anne Brakman, an archaeologist working in Maastricht, the Netherlands, was challenged by a developer to show how cultural heritage could 'enforce the quality of life' in a newly constructed settlement and attract potential home buyers. The association between quality of life and rootedness is something often discussed by government organizations and local planners but it is not easy to apply in the design of a new neighbourhood. Anne Brakman looks at ways to build connections between the past and new inhabitants and to encourage them to think of new development (and their life in that new neighbourhood) as just the latest chapter i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• List of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Sense of Place in a Changing World
• 2 Local Distinctiveness: Everyday Places and How to Find Them
• 3 Marketing Sense of Place in the Forest of Bowland
• 4 Memory and the Value of Place in Estonia
• 5 Being Accounted For: Qualitative Data Analysis in Assessing 'Place' and 'Value'
• 6 'Counter-Mapping' Heritage, Communities and Places in Australia and the UK
• 7 Exploring Sense of Place: An Ethnography of the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site
• 8 Maastricht-Lanakerveld: The Place to Be?
• 9 Between Indigenous and Roman Worlds: Sense of Place in the North-Eastern Iberian Peninsula During the Roman Period
• 10 A Scent of Plaice?
• 11 Sense and Sensitivity – Or Archaeology Versus the 'Wow Factor' in Southampton (England)
• 12 Ilhna Beltin: Locating Identity in a Fortified Mediterranean City
• 13 Topophilia, Reliquary and Pilgrimage: Recapturing Place, Memory and Meaning at Britain's Historic Football Grounds
• Index