Senses of Place: Senses of Time

G.J. Ashworth, Brian Graham, Brian Graham

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351901123
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Scienze sociali
• Thema: Geografia umana

Bringing together case studies from Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany and Mexico, this book examines the link between senses of place and senses of time. It suggests that not only do place identities change through time, but imagined pasts also provide resources which the present selects and packages for its own contemporary purposes and for forwarding to imagined futures. The reasons behind the creation of place image are also explored, setting them within political and social contexts. In its three main sections - Heritage in the Creation of Senses of Place; Heritage and Conflicting Identities; and Heritage and the Creation of Senses of Place - the book examines the creation of place identities at the urban, rural, regional and international scales. It questions how senses of place interact with senses of ethnic/cultural identity, what the roles of government, media, residents and tourists are in creating senses of place, and how and why all these variables change through time.

THEAM I:
CREATING SENSES OF PLACE FROM SENSES OF TIME

Introduction to Theme One

The Editors

The first block of chapters introduces the central idea of senses of place in relation to senses of time. It raises the relation between place identity and social group identity and between the individual and the communality. The process of identification of people with places and the role of heritage, as a contemporary use of pasts, is the leitmotif of all five chapters.

Huigen and Meijering’s [2] initial assertion that identities are ascribed to places and are not an inherent characteristic of them is neither new nor surprising. None the less, it is still of central importance to the themes of this book. The focus of their case study of De Venen where, as in many other such regions in Europe, identity has been challenged by changing economic, social and settlement circumstances. A local identity, based upon an agricultural economy and a rural society, is changing inevitably as that economy and society itself alters. The demise of the conditions that shaped the old identity is clear but the consequences of these changes for a new representation of belonging are not yet apparent.

Simon’s analysis of another Dutch region, the Waterland area of North-Holland [3], views the problem of place identity from the position of the place-makers, those who, for one reason or another, wish to establish strong senses of identification between peoples and their localities. This goes further than merely fostering senses of belonging among local residents. It may entail the commodification of places for consumption externally through the creation of marketable place products from previously non-marketed resources. In the case of Waterland, a particular rural identity is being used in the marketing of various agricultural products. If places can becomes products in this way, then they can also be part of a branding process where the product is so strongly associated with the place as to incorporate presumably attractive representations of the region into the product itself. Here, the attempt is made to associate largely agricultural products with an imagined set of regional characteristics that are assumed to convey desirable qualities. Even senses of time are evoked so that, by association, the products and producers acquire attributes of continuity, reliability, and craftsmanship, all of which are incorporated into the product brand. The process can of course be reversed as places may use local products as an element in their local identity, projecting themselves as the homeland of a well-established product. The boundaries between the promotion of commercial enterprises and the place marketing by official bodies become blurred as their goals and methods converge. Similarly the distinctionbetween place identities intended for external consumers and those for internal consumption becomes more difficult to discern as the two markets interact.

The naming of places is both a necessary means of recognition and communication but also a fundamental means of laying claim to territory. The process of naming is more than a value-free description of a point in space, being a means of expressing and fostering senses of place and linking these with selected aspects of the past. Using the example of rural Northern Ireland, Reid [4] examines the relationships between identity and memory through the naming of local places. She acknowledges that naming can be part of broader processes of inclusion and exclusion when linked to particular historical narratives in a divided or unagreed society. While local names may be indicative of diverse cultural influences, they can also be suborned to interpretations that reject pluralist notions of consociation in favour of singular ethnic figuring of space and place. Clearly, this does occur in Northern Ireland where the material marking of placenames in the actual landscape can be part of a broader claim to ethnic territoriality. But in her analysis of the Townlands Campaign in Northern Ireland, Reid shows, too, that the marking of local place remains of such fundamental importance that the process and its associated practices may themselves encourage divided peoples to join together in order to protect and perpetuate their named localities.

If, as argued in the previous chapters, place identity is expressed intentionally or incidentally through aspects of the material built environment, or even through the naming of place, then the obvious question arises as to what happens to these environments when identities alter because of the dynamics of social change through time. Monuments, for example, are endowed with various meanings and their erection or designation is a deliberate act of collective commemoration designed to convey particular messages. The content of these transmissions can be both official – in the sense of promoting statist ideology – or unofficial – in the sense of representing difference or even resistance to the state – depending on the provenance of the monument. While these statements may be self-evident, the reaction of monuments to social change is less predictable. There are a number of possibilities. Existing monuments may be removed and replaced; they may be re-designated and their meanings reinterpreted to express new meanings; or they may simply become ignored and rendered all but invisible, their meanings lost through being irrelevant or unreadable. Whelan [5] examines these more general issues in the context of the city of Dublin which, in little over a century, has been projected through its monumental landscape as an Imperial showcase, the provincial capital of a constituent British kingdom, the capital of a Catholic Gaelic nationalist republic and, more recently, a multicultural European city. She demonstrates how particular aspects of Dublin’s cultural landscape, chief among them public statues, street names, architecture and urban design initiatives, have served as significant sources for unravelling the geographies of political and cultural identity in Ireland. While once again these processes have resonances of the issues raised by Reid in Chapter 4 concerning the naming and claiming ofplace, significantly the most recent monument to be erected in the city, the ‘Spire of Dublin’, is almost definitively postmodernist in its utter simplicity, ahistorical nature and complete lack of any political association, all of which allow a multiplicity of readings of its symbolic place. Its only meaning may be the absence of meaning.

The final chapter in Part One is somewhat different, being the description and application of a technique of spatial analysis. McMullan [6] confronts and attempts to solve the problem that much of the substance of the other chapters in this book involves disparate forms of qualitative data, which are often considered unsuited to quantitative analysis. While the advent of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) permits far more precise quantitative analysis of place, most cultural and many historical geographers remain resistant to the methodology. This negates the ways in which GIS can be used to integrate the qualitative and the qualitative in a finely differentiated spatial mesh, which seems readily attuned to the increasing emphasis and focus on, and internalization of, the local. Heritage as we have defined it, is of course incapable of being mapped but the resources, actual and potential, from which it is composed, can be investigated through cartographical analysis. McMullan demonstrates the ways in which GIS can be used to enhance data collection, description and analysis in an ethnological research project concerned with folk practices in Ireland. She demonstrates how GIS can overcome the interpretative barriers involved in the interpretation of paper-based ethnological maps and argues that resistance to the methodology is itself a function of academic perceptions rather than a comment on the value of the methodology for research in cultural geography and heritage studies.

Chapter 2
Making Places: A Story of De Venen

Paulus P.P. Huigen and Louise Meijering

Introduction

This study attempts to trace the evolution of the identity of De Venen. For this purpose, the ‘identity’ of De Venen is defined as the ideas that exist about the area known by that name. This area is located in the Green Heart of the Randstad conurbation in The Netherlands (see Figure 2.1). We will outline existing perceptions of De Venen that define not only what the area is, but also what it should be. Furthermore, we will describe how the identity of De Venen will evolve in the future. The aim of this study is to indicate the path that the place identity of De Venen may follow over time. Place identity is a central concept in this chapter. We will therefore first set out our vision of the concept by exploring six characteristics of place identity. These will then be applied and discussed in relation to the development of the De Venen area.

In the 1990s, a remarkable change took place in academic and policy debates on rural areas in The Netherlands. Until the 1990s the idea prevailed that, in economic and cultural respect, rural areas in the north and east of The Netherlands were lagging behind the urban agglomerations (especially the Randstad conurbation in the western Netherlands). There was deprivation in these areas and the idea was that this situation could be resolved by involving them in the development of the national agglomerations. To achieve this, part of the development activities had to be transferred to the more ‘peripheral’ areas. This ‘overspill strategy’, introduced in the First Policy Document on Spatial Planning in the Netherlands (Ministerie van Volkshuisvesting en Bouwnijverheid, 1960), was developed into plans designed to ensure that rural areas were incorporated into national and international networks. This included establishing infrastructural links to the national agglomerations. The vision underlying the ‘overspill strategy’ can be described as a traditional approach to area development.

Thinking on area development changed in the sense that a new vision, the ‘identity strategy’, evolved in addition to traditional development ideas. The basic idea was that the qualities of rural areas and their identities should be taken as thestarting point, rather than the situation in the national agglomerations. Area development would be realized by strengthening and profiling those qualities and identities, instead of copying developments in the national agglomerations (European Conference on Rural Development, 1996; Provincie Groningen, 2000; Raad voor het Landelijk Gebied, 1999a; 1999b). The call for greater recognition of local characteristics and identity in area development was not only related to the ‘peripheral’ areas (that is, areas outside the urban agglomerations) but also rural areas within the Randstad conurbation under pressure from spatial demands. These areas were pictured as ‘green’ and undeveloped areas. Cities, too, experience a growing need to emphasize their identity in the face of overwhelming ‘McDonaldization’ and the accompanying trend towards uniformity. As this example illustrates, the increasing emphasis on regional identity can be partly explained as a reaction to the process of globalization (Giddens, 1998; Harvey, 1989). Globalization, which can be defined as the interrelationships between different places that evolve through common processes of economic, political, cultural and environmental change, has led to increased mobility of people, goods and information. Furthermore, we increasingly feel that we live in a progressively more unstable and uncertain world. This feeling of insecurity is being fed by the increasing amount of information about other, strange places and people and societies that becomes available in the globalization process. This perception in itself has led to a growing desire for stable, certain places with a coherent identity (Massey, 1995). People are searching for a point of reference in their own environment, which regional, local or place identity can provide (Van der Borgt et al., 1996; Massey, 1995).

It is not always clear what exactly is meant by ‘place identity’. Sometimes it is described in terms of culture, particularly local music, folklore (for example, traditional costumes) or culinary specialities. Often, a place derives its identity from the landscape or built environment. Place identity is also derived from regional economic activities (horticulture in the ‘greenhouse city’, port activities in Rotterdam, dairy farming in the Green Heart) or products (cheese from Leerdam, Gouda and Edam). That identity is used for ‘place marketing’, in tourism and attracting new residents or investors. A place has to have a ‘face’ to succeed in marketing terms. Heritage may be the outstanding place characteristic, which is related to the ‘face’ of a place. This summary of the various approaches to and uses of the term ‘place identity’ shows that it is not a completely transparent concept. Therefore, we shall first explore this concept.

The Concept of Place Identity

In this study, the term ‘place’ is a synonym for a region or area. In all cases it denotes spatial entities above the local level of varying size. A region or area can contain several places. Although policymakers use the term place identity indifferent, often implicit senses and contexts, the academic world appears to have reached a broad consensus on six aspects of place identity (Groote et al., 2000).

First, place identity is a social construct. It is not ‘something out there, waiting to be discovered’. It is not an objective or natural ‘given’, but something that is attributed to a place by people. We refer to the process of attributing an identity...