Place Peripheral

Place-Based Development in Rural, Island, and Remote Regions

Kelly Vodden, Ryan Gibson, Godfrey Baldacchino

• Publisher: ISER Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781894725255
• eBook ISBN: 9781894725354
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Geografía humana

Place Peripheral examines community and regional development in rural, island, and remote locales from a place-based approach. This is a timely edited collection, addressing themes that are receiving considerable attention in Canada and internationally as local communities, scholars, researchers and public policy analysts strive to better understand and apply place-based strategies in rural and remote regions. The volume and its contributors examine place-based economic development strategies, recognizing the broader and deeper significance, meanings, and attachments often associated with place and also interrogating such relationships as may exist between sense of place, cultural and social development, and environmental stewardship.

PART I: UNDERSTANDING AND NEGOTIATING PLACE

CHAPTER 2

Matters of Place: The Making of Place and Identity

Jen Daniels, Godfrey Baldacchino, and Kelly Vodden

INTRODUCTION

. . . if there is anything to the notion of attachment to place, if cherishing a neighbourhood in which one has spent a significant part of one’s life is a meaningful concept, if sense of place and identity are at issue, then the demolition of places large and small inevitably represents an immense cost in human terms.

Friedmann (2010: 156)

Place is a key factor influencing individual and social behaviour, modes of living, and well-being (Halseth et al., 2010). Place-based development frameworks address this empirical imperative by their sensitivity to the existing assets and challenges experienced in a place. Some scholars and development practitioners recognize that “competitive advantage” comes from assets and resources nested in place. Others are drawn to place and place-making in response to fears of homogenization under such forces as globalization, urbanization, commodification, and the general “horrors of placelessness” (Friedmann, 2010: 150).

And yet, how are notions of place operationalized in place-based development and what are the social and political ramifications of how place is defined and used? How might various conceptions of place inform understandings and practices of place-based development? Even more critically, what are the ramifications, both intellectual and material, of ignoring, or at best, not fully exploring, the role of a more expanded and nuanced notion of place? This chapter first explores these concerns through an investigation of various notions of place; it particularly examines how identity is involved in place-making and creating individual and collective sense(s) of place, and likewise, how place is involved in identity-making. It then considers the significance of these place- and identity-making processes for development policy and practice.

CONCEPTIONS OF PLACE

Coe et al. (2007: 16) suggest that place refers to “somewhere in particular,” a location or space that has history and holds meaning. While place often is conceived of as a country, a region, a municipality, a neighbourhood, or some other spatially determined entity, several authors caution against simply collapsing place into space (e.g., Casey, 2001; Entrikin, 2001); understanding place requires acknowledging deeply embedded processes. Defining place and understanding connections between place and individual and collective identities is far from simple. In terms of empirically assessing place meanings and the emotional attachments to place, there are various approaches across disciplines. Friedmann (2010) describes a growing literature on place by diverse authors: from geographers to anthropologists, from psychologists and sociologists to landscape architects, planners, and philosophers (e.g., Bachelard, 1964; Chandler et al., 2003; Salamon, 2003; Davenport and Anderson, 2005; Escobar, 2008; Easthope, 2009).

Distinguishing between space and place, space is conceived of within geography as a highly abstract entity most commonly understood and applied in the form of cartographic representations and co-ordinate points, while place is a much richer concept, redolent with meaning and affect. Halseth et al. (2010) argue that “championing” place over space is by no means a recent concept in geography; nor is it new within research on place-based development. Understanding the policy implications of such a difference, however, remains largely unexplored. Accordingly, “space-based analyses tend to be transformed from their descriptive roots to proscriptive objectives, and in the process they come to represent these trends and relationships as inexorable . . . driving us to futures we all must share and over which we have limited influence” (Halseth et al., 2010: 3). Opening up place meanings, then, is an important first step in exploring the potential policy implications of analyses that are based on agency-in-place (rather than space), thus also helping to avoid the observed deterministic pitfalls of the latter (e.g., Baldacchino et al., 2009).

The construction of place is substantiated through multiple, concurrent processes, including economic, social hierarchical relations (e.g., gender, class, race), and biophysical factors (e.g., Massey, 1994; Harvey, 1996; Escobar, 2008). Harvey (1996) argues that there is an inherent tension in place construction through political-economic frameworks that conceptualize place as commodity. A place’s assets, often argued as one component of what makes a place unique, may be promoted by entrepreneurs and local economic development actors in an attempt to ensure a continuation of place with minimal personal, affective, or similar valorization (Harvey, 1996). Increasing mobility of capital in recent decades has intensified efforts to sell a place. Not only can this pit one place against another, in altogether unsustainable modes of competition; such a strategy of trying to “differentiate [places] as marketable entities ends up creating a kind of serial replication of homogeneity” (Harvey, 1996: 298). It is therefore fruitful to critique attempts to (re)invent place with questions about the motivations to do so and with an eye on the implications of any resulting changes.

Massey (1994) and Cresswell (2002) emphasize the importance of mobility in the perception and performance of place, particularly in the context of a globalized world. Mobility, Massey (1994) asserts, is fundamentally influenced by the movement of capital — money, as the idiom suggests, makes the world go around — which determines who and what moves and does not, influencing our individual and collective sense of place. But capital alone is insufficient; it cannot adequately describe the differences, for example, between women’s and men’s experiences of place, or those between people of different race, culture, and sexual orientation. Cresswell (2002) demonstrates that recent conceptualizations of place have gained increasing traction in contemporary cultural theory through shifting focus from “rooted” and otherwise essentialist place identities towards those that are more fluid, boundless, and indeed performative in nature. “Mobilities” scholarship in the last decade insists that identities are situated through networks of people, things, and ideas in flux, and that analysis should not start “from a point of view that takes certain kinds of fixity and boundedness for granted [but rather] start with the fact of mobility” (Cresswell, 2011: 551).

In terms of the biophysical element of places, Escobar (2008) posits that landscapes have agency, and maintains that the place assemblage is not simply a social construction. He argues that landscapes are not passive to the kinds of lives people and other beings make in them. Conversely, the external world is highly relevant in the “kind of distinctions humans make . . . [and] different places have different things to offer humans to work with and live in and this has everything to do with how humans construct places” (Escobar, 2008: 42). Landscapes, and the biological and physiological entities contained therein, are key components of territory, which in turn, as Escobar (2008) argues, is the embodiment of people’s uses, practices, and work in the world — and, ultimately, is the embodiment of their relationship with/in it. Places, then, are co-productions between people and environments. An important feature of place, as conceived by human geographers and post-colonial authors, is that place cannot be limited to geographic locality. It stands that the increasing interconnection and interdependence between places marks not “the end but [rather] the beginning of geography” (Paasi, 2004: 536). Thus, in human geography, place must be positioned in a context where “there is no pure ‘local’ just as there is no pure ‘universal’ as all things are interconnected and diffuse in meaning, intention and power” (Bowers, 2010: 204). Places are assemblages of relations. Ultimately, people (and other living things) are connected in ways that extend beyond a spatial location. At the same time, the global does not exist without the local, as every global phenomenon that exists is in some way rooted in a locality, with local origins and/or “touching down” points (Massey, 2004; Sassen, 2007). Thus, the relational and territorial are interconnected and do not present an irreconcilable dichotomy, as they are too often portrayed (e.g., Escobar, 2008).

One approach to understanding sense of place is through analysis of human–environment interactions. In their study of governance of the Niohrara River in Nebraska, for example, Davenport and Anderson (2005) demonstrate that examining residents and other river users’ diverse perceptions of sense of place provided a framework for informing decisions. They identify four central tenets related to human–environmental relationships in the literature: (1) place manifests physical characteristics as well as social processes; (2) people assign meanings to and derive meaning from place; (3) some place meanings evoke strong emotional bonds, which influence attitudes and behaviours within the context of those places, and; (4) place meanings are maintained, challenged, and negotiated in the context of natural resource management and planning (Davenport and Anderson, 2005).

If places have multiple meanings that transcend the physical and the locational, then investigating these multiple meanings of place is critical to developing a more nuanced and better-grounded understanding of place politics (e.g., Cheng et al., 2003; Yung et al., 2003; Davenport and Anderson, 2005). In political ecology, the role of place is also increasingly seen as fundamental in tackling the complexity of socio-environmental problems. One of the central arguments here is the environmental identity and social movement thesis, which argues that “changes in environmental management regimes and[/or] environmental conditions have created opportunities or imperatives for local groups to secure and represent themselves politically” (Robbins, 2004: 15). Thus, understanding the conceptualizations of place, and the identities lurking within, is pivotal to these movements, providing an additional lens to investigate place in place-based development (e.g., Escobar, 2008; Howitt, 2001; Neumann, 2010). Howitt (2001) asserts that perceiving places as complex sites, produced by multiple scales of interactions between human and non-human agents, helps to unsettle and reframe resource development. Such a turn “for place” is subversive: it guides the examination of those power relations and assumptions that surround such loaded terms as “progress,” “planning,” “management,” “capacity-building,” and even “periphery,” all in the name of that equally loaded term, “development.”

PLACE AND IDENTITY

In their analysis of individual and social identity and of place meanings, Cheung et al. (2003) discuss the well-documented evidence of personal and collective identity construction through places. Individuals’ deep-seated emotional and impassioned responses to particular resource and development policies, as well as the social and cultural meanings that may be shared by a group towards a particular place, are important markers of identity. They conclude that “natural resource politics is as much a contest over place meanings as it is a competition among interest groups over scarce resources” (Cheng et al., 2003: 87). Although place is also created through processes of day-to-day life and practice, this opens the discussion of place-making as deeply political work. Given the political stakes involved, these authors stress that negotiations around meanings of place must include a wide set of people, especially those who would normally not be included in management and development decisions.

Markey (2010) states that Canadian development policy and practice often adopt a neo-liberal perspective, such that individuals are deemed to be relatively autonomous and capable of acting independently from those people and places around them in their own rational best interest. Such policies completely disregard the role of identity and place on a person’s or a group’s decisions and well-being. In Aboriginal constructions of identity, for example, the “place of place [has a] vital link in the chain of meaning” (Bowers, 2010: 217), affecting people’s decisions on how to conduct themselves and their ability to heal and learn, and to experience culture and fulfillment (e.g., Kelly and Yeoman, 2011). The research by Chandler et al. (2003) on suicide rates in Aboriginal communities demonstrates that identity construction plays a central role in personal persistence and cultural continuity, which can contribute to lower overall rates of youth suicide these communities.

Many studies of identity point to similar challenges and draw parallel conclusions as they relate to the multiplicity of identities. Bowers (2010) offers a conceptualization of identity as expressed in the Mi’kmaq saying Msit Nogma, that is, All My Relations. He states “this way of knowing deeply connects the local, familial, tribal, regional, global, and cosmic ecologies into a wholistic/ecology of identity” (Bowers, 2010: 206). Here, identity is grounded in the day-to-day — the places where we eat, sleep, relax, and perform ceremony (Bowers, 2010). Place identity, in this way, also can be viewed from the lens of individual/landscape co-production, and as an interconnected, intermeshed knot, where individual components cannot (or perhaps, should not) be treated in isolation. Bowers (2010) asserts, along with other authors (e.g., Howitt, 2001; Rose, 2004), the urgency of articulating this “deep ecology” of identity by reflecting on the practices within communities and grappling with the complexities and interconnectivity of, in this case, Indigenous ontologies. These complex performances or ontologies of place and identity are not exclusive to Aboriginal communities. Woods (2010), for example, describes an emerging literature on the practice and performance of rural identities.

One common theoretical approach to understanding human–environmental relations and the creation (or co-production) of places and place identities is through phenomenology: this proffers an investigation into how abstract spaces become places through people’s interactions and experiences in the world (Buttimer, 1976; Harvey, 1996; Davenport and Anderson, 2005). A person’s relationship with a space, particularly the relationship between one’s body and the world, involves a baseness and a tactility that require phenomenologists to “reveal an attachment that is native in some way t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Françoise Enguehard and Michael Clair
• Preface by David J.A. Douglas
• Introduction
• Part I: Understanding and Negotiating Place
• Part II: Place-Based Development in Practice
• Postscript
• Index
• Author Index