Sense of Place

11 Key excerpts on "Sense of Place"

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  Sense of Place, Health and Quality of Life

  • Allison Williams, John Eyles(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  rootedness, which is an unconscious experience and thus a more deeply ingrained phenomenon. Therefore, there is a component of awareness attached to Sense of Place, and according to Tuan (1980), Sense of Place can be “achieved and maintained”, which is not the case for rootedness (4). Moreover, Relph (2006) states that Sense of Place is a dynamic construct such that it tends to vary as a function of time and culture. Forestry scientists Williams and Stewart (1998) realized the significance of Sense of Place and synthesized the work of scholars from a variety of fields to better define the concept. Based on their comprehensive definition, Sense of Place is an umbrella concept that captures the essence of the relationship people form with places; as such, it encompasses the following elements:

  1. the emotional bonds that people form with places (at various geographic scales) over time and with familiarity with those places;

  2. the strongly felt values, meanings, and symbols that are hard to identify or know (and hard to quantify), especially if one is an “outsider” or unfamiliar with place;

  3. the valued qualities of a place that even an “insider” may not be consciously aware of until they are threatened or lost;

  4. the set of place meanings that are actively and continuously constructed and reconstructed within individual minds, shared cultures, and social practices; and

  5. the awareness of the cultural, historical, and spatial context within which meanings, values, and social interactions are formed

  (Williams et al. 1998, 19)

  This detailed conceptualization, together with those already presented, consistently portrays Sense of Place as the product of the relationship between people and places. Individuals establish relationships with a variety of different places throughout their lives and the quality or strength of these relationships can vary (Manzo 2003). Sense of Place can be positive or negative, weak or strong (Relph 1976; Eyles 1985 and Manzo 2003). Furthermore, it should be noted that Sense of Place varies depending on a number of factors, such as the nature of the place itself and time; these and other factors will be further examined.

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  Understanding Ordinary Landscapes

  • Irving Rouse(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  It combines an approach to aesthetics (based on work dealing with the Sense of Place from the humanities, architecture, and landscape traditions in geography and environmental psychology) with an approach to poli-tics (based on work on space in the social sciences and economic geography) and suggests how both apply to the history of urban landscapes. Ill 112 DOLORES HAYDEN The Sense of Place Place is one of the trickiest words in the English language, a suitcase so overfilled that one can never shut the lid. It carries the resonance of homestead, location, and open space in the city as well as a position in a social hierarchy. The authors of books on architecture, photography, cultural geography, poetry, and travel rely on Sense of Place as an aesthetic concept but often settle for the per-sonality of a location as a way of defining it. Place for such authors may engage mellow brick in an eighteenth-century building, the sweep of the Great Plains, or the bustle of a harbor full of sailboats, but such images can easily become clichés of tourist advertising. In the nineteenth century and earlier, place also meant the right of a person to own a piece of land, or to be a part of a social world, and in this older sense, place implies more political history. Phrases like knowing one s place or a woman s place still have both physical and political meanings. People make attachments to places that are critical to their well-being or dis-tress. An individuals Sense of Place is both a biological response to the surround-ing physical environment and a cultural creation, as the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has argued. 2 From childhood, humans come to experience and know places through all five senses, sight as well as sound, smell, taste, and touch. Extensive research on perception shows the simultaneous engagement of several senses in orientation and wayfinding.

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  Key Concepts in Planning

  • Gavin Parker, Joe Doak, SAGE Publications Ltd(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  genius loci . We prefer to use Sense of Place as it encapsulates physical or observable factors as well as intangible and personal perceptions and values of place. It also becomes confusing to deploy both terms when they clearly have considerable overlap. For both concepts, particular buildings, sites, artefacts, aspects of the natural or created environment, historical figures, or recorded actions and events that have been committed to memory or emphasised, may create a shared understanding of place. A local degree of consensus or assertion of the relative significance of elements of place character and identity may have built up over time, possibly through the actions of local and national elites. Areas that are said to have a strong Sense of Place are likely to have an identity and character that is experienced and enjoyed by local inhabitants and visitors. The Sense of Place may be enhanced, reconstructed or otherwise portrayed by novelists, musicians or artists, too. Some places may have been accorded some special status to reflect some of these features and this may act to reinforce that particular construction of place and Sense of Place (such as CAs or protected areas, e.g. NPs).

  Sense of Place implies some potential for emotional attachment or reaction and designers have tried to replicate or retain features of the built environment that are likely to provoke positive feelings, or maintain certain continuities with existing place identity. Emotional ties may include relationships with particular features, stories and folk-memory. These can relate to personal memory of places, often associated with events, to people and interaction with the place as a setting for experiences (for example, where a lasting personal experience takes place such as the setting of a childhood holiday, or the street corner where one experiences a first kiss). Understandings of Sense of Place recognise that place-making or shaping can be instrumental in community development and shaping some aspects of quality of life. Much of this thinking has influenced parts of the UK government’s urban renaissance

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  Sense of Place and Place Attachment in Tourism

  • Ning Chris Chen, C. Michael Hall, Girish Prayag(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Place and I

  Sense of Place and place identity

  Introduction

  Sense of Place and place attachment are multidimensional and multidisciplinary concepts with both encapsulating the social and natural meanings of place (Massey & Jess, 1995; Stedman, 2003). Different from other place-related concepts such as place satisfaction, Sense of Place and place attachment go through personal emotions, experiences, and values, and thus are more personal and linked to the individual (Chen & Dwyer, 2018). A Sense of Place reflects not only the place but also the person. The powerful meanings and values derived from the history, culture, physical characteristics (such as climate and geography), community, stories, and narratives of a place usually have significant impact on one’s behaviours (Carter et al., 2007). These influences constantly interact with people’s sense of themselves, and their collective group belonging, and where their Sense of Place is fostered. In this process, individuals reflect on themselves through their own lenses of the external physical and social world, and build their understandings about themselves.

  Their place-based personality and identity are built, via defining and redefining who they are related to the place and in the place, as well as the rules of inclusion and exclusion. Place identity, as discussed in Chapter 2 , is determined in creating Sense of Place in biological, psychological, social, and cultural senses (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff, 1983). Accordingly, one’s Sense of Place is based upon the outcome of his/her identification with places, and thus reflects an identity aspect of Sense of Place. As Lengen and Kistemann (2012, p. 1162) observed, such cognition ‘includes memories, feelings, attitudes, values, preferences, behavioural concepts and experiences, which are associated with the variety and complexity of the physical setting and define the existence of personhood’.

  Place identity strongly reflects the correspondence of self to place. It is developed upon one’s Sense of Place (Jorgensen & Stedman, 2001). Further, as discussed in earlier chapters, Sense of Place is fostered through physical interactions, narratives, and storytelling, which are easily related personally and which thus drive an identification process with place (Dominy, 2001). As such place identity answers three key questions regarding a Sense of Place: ‘Who am I?’, ‘What am I?’, and ‘What do I do?

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  Changing Senses of Place

  Navigating Global Challenges

  • Christopher M. Raymond, Lynne C. Manzo, Daniel R. Williams, Andrés Di Masso, Timo von Wirth, Andrés Di Masso(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  This critique arose as part of a ‘humanistic’ subfield of geography (Tuan, 1974) where Sense of Place was presented as a corrective to the dominance of quantitative ‘spatial science’ in geography, which critics argued diminished the concept of place to mere technical or locational considerations and emptied places of essential meaning, affect and identity (Cresswell, 2013). Instead, drawing on the philosophical approaches of phenomenology – which seeks to uncover the essence of things – Sense of Place offered a way of asserting the essential nature of place as a source of stable people– place bonds, meanings and identities in the face of the mid-twentieth-century transformations of modernisation, urbanisation and commercialisation (Relph, 1976). The highlighting of places’ authentic and essential qualities responded to a presumed human need to have roots in stable and coherent places, and to give moorings to our identities. Likewise, Sense of Place attracted particular attention within architecture, planning and related fields as a way to reveal the authentic 2 Senses of Place in the Face of Global Challenges experience or character (or spirit) of a place, often premised on the idea that places have essential or genuine meanings, which through commodification and globalisa- tion are at risk of being lost (Dovey, 2016; Norberg-Schulz, 1980). A pivotal feature of this humanistic conception of Sense of Place was to assume stability and seden- tarism as the normal or preferred condition of people–place relations (Di Masso et al., 2019). The humanistic-phenomenological approach began to lose favour with the advent of more critical and constructionist thinking in the social science in the 1980s. This pushed Sense of Place concepts towards so-called progressive-relational approaches, often associated with radical, post-structural geographers (e.g. Cresswell, 2013; Antonsich, 2011; Pierce et al., 2011; Massey, 2005, 1991).

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  Sensuous Geographies

  Body, Sense and Place

  • Paul Rodaway(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Each approach provides important insights but they all tend to separate out the physical, social, cultural and aesthetic dimensions of human experience. The present study seeks to offer a more integrated view of the role of the senses in geographical understanding: the senses both as a relationship to a world and the senses as in themselves a kind of structuring of space and defining of place. Therefore, the current study is more eclectic in method, drawing on each of these perspectives in conjunction with phenomenological reflection and the introduction of ideas from recent postmodern writing. Of course, the very act of focusing on the senses is full of presuppositions and constitutes an abstraction. It presumes that distinctive senses can be identified and that their role in geographical experience can be discussed meaningfully individually and separate from the emotional dimensions of experience. Sensual and emotional geographies are closely connected, as is well demonstrated in the writings of Yi-Fu Tuan. However, here we concentrate on sensuous geographies and leave emotional geographies for another project. Everyday experience is multisensual, though one or more senses may be dominant in a given situation. These abstractions are an analytical device to enable us to highlight often taken-for-granted and hidden dimensions of geographical experience. Here, geography is understood as earth (geo-) drawing (-graphe), that is, a description of the earth and human experience of it, considering issues of orientation, spatial relationship and the character of places. ‘Sensuous geography’ therefore refers to a study of the geographical understanding which arises out of the stimulation of, or apprehension by, the senses. This is both an individual and a social geography, a physical and a cultural geography. Sense and Senses This is not a perception geography, nor an experiential geography, but a geography of the senses

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  Creative Representations of Place

  • Alison Barnes(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In human geographic terms, the term place belies one of the most complex ideas within the discipline, with contemporary understandings of place positioning it as a meaningful location, defined in three fundamental, interlinked ways with location one constituent part of this triumvirate. For Agnew (2005), place is also discussed in relation to locale, which is essentially the setting and scale for our everyday actions and interactions. Locale differs from location in that it is not about position, rather it is a focus on the material, visual form of a place. The third aspect of this definition is that place is also framed within the idea of a Sense of Place and in this understanding every place is particular and therefore singular. The concept of a Sense of Place relates to a sense of belonging and participation (Agnew 2005: 89). It therefore relates to the way people feel about places and how places play a role in the construction of personal identity and that of particular groups related to a specific place in some way. A similar proposition is offered by Gieryn (2000), who suggests that location is complemented by both material form and meaningfulness. He also states that these three elements cannot be judged as one more important than the other and nor can they be separated. The ‘completeness’ of place is destroyed if one were to be discarded (Gieryn 2000: 466).

  It is immediately apparent from these two more fleshed out conceptions of place that people and place are inextricably linked. Unlike space, which can be literally defined as unoccupied, place is populated and both those occupying place − and place itself − are reciprocally constructed. Rather than being a subset of space, place is therefore ‘the counterpoint of space’ (Anderson 2010: 41). When moving somewhere new, whether that be a house or flat, or a desk within a workplace, we personalise our territory, we add our own possessions, we decorate to our own tastes − we transform an address or spatial location into our own place. When we think of a place important to us often the first things that come to mind are our childhood home or the place of our birth − places that are usually linked with a sense of belonging and meaningfulness, places that play a part in defining our identity. More often than not, we develop close emotional ties to these places, regardless of their different scales. Incrementally, they become imbued with meaning which often lasts long beyond the actual time we may spend living somewhere. We don’t think of the dimensions of these spaces (in fact we often misremember these, imagining childhood spaces as bigger than they actually were), rather we often remember these meaningful places through the sound of a squeaky cupboard door, the smell of our favourite meal being cooked, or the touch of a particular surface. The framing of a house or particular childhood places in this way could be described as nostalgic or romantic, and as we will see ideas of home have often been conflated with ideas of safety and security even though reality can often be different. However, this type of experiential reading of place has its roots in theoretical work developed by humanistic geographers several decades ago. In turn, their approach was rooted in the work of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and place was seen as a way of being in the world, as ‘a universal and transhistorical part of the human condition’ (Cresswell 2015: 35)

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  People and Place

  The Extraordinary Geographies of Everyday Life

  • Lewis Holloway, Phil Hubbard(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  What is it that makes you feel that these places are uniquely special? What can you say about the genius loci of these places – i.e. what is their unique ‘spirit of place’? What do you bring to these places in your encounters with them? How does your ‘Sense of Place’ affect the ways that you behave and the things that you do in these places? We mentioned above that humanistic geography is at least partly a reaction to the quantification of geography during the 1960s. Part of that reaction was to look backwards in time, to earlier traditions of regional geography which emphasized careful description of the character of particular regions (see Chapter 1). For example, David Ley’s (1981) humanistic writing drew on the work of French regional geographers such as Vidal de la Blache who were writing at the start of the twentieth century about the distinctive genres de vie (ways of life) which bound people to their homes. Importantly, this ‘home’ was regarded as the synthesis of the physical (the environmental characteristics of a region) and the social (the ways in which people lived and organized their lives). While Ley (1981, 221) was critical of the way that regional geographers seemed to promote environmental determinism, he found great value in the way that a home place was conceptualized as having ‘both materialist and idealist attributes; it was both a thing and an idea’. What he stressed here was the inseparability of the ‘real’ (material) attributes of a place and its ‘imagined’ idealized attributes. Ley was thus strongly opposed to the naturalist assumption that social phenomena could be studied in the same way as physical phenomena – by looking for general laws or rules and explanations of cause and effect. Clearly, quantitative (positivist) geography, with its laws of spatial science, could be seen as adopting this naturalist perspective

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  Public Places Urban Spaces

  The Dimensions of Urban Design

  • Matthew Carmona(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Moving from inside to out, personal or group engagement with space gives it meaning as a ‘place’, at least to the extent of being different from other places. Sense of Place is, however, more than this. Lynch (1960: 6) defines ‘identity of place’ as that which provides “individuality or distinction from other places … the basis for its recognition as a separable entity”. For Relph, this acknowledges that each place has a ‘unique address', without explaining how it becomes identifiable. He argued ‘physical setting’, ‘activities', and ‘meanings' constitute the three basic elements of place identity. But, rather than sensing place through simply residing in these elements, this feeling comes instead from human interaction with the elements (i.e., it is phenomenological).

  The Dutch architect Aldo Van Eyck emphasised this succinctly in his famous description of place: “Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion.” The impact of occasion is dramatically demonstrated by contrasting a sports stadium full of people with the same stadium empty.

  Drawing on Relph's work, Canter (1977) saw places as a function of ‘physical attributes', ‘activities' and ‘conceptions', while drawing from the perspective of urban geography, Koch and Latham (2011) identify essentially the same tripartite framework – ‘materiality’, ‘inhabitation’ and ‘atmosphere’ – in their case as a heuristic framework for understanding public space. Building on Relph and Canter's ideas, Punter (1991) and Montgomery (1998) located the components of Sense of Place within urban design thought (

  4.18

  ). Such diagrams illustrate how design can contribute to and enhance the potential Sense of Place. While useful in simplifying and organising our notion of place and Sense of Place, we must also be careful not to simplify or reduce the concept of place. As already argued, real places are complex and messy.

  Adapted from Montgomery 1998.

  4.18

  Sense of Place

  Montgomery's diagram illustrates how urban design actions can contribute to, and enhance, the potential Sense of Place.

  The contribution of each of Relph's three components to Sense of Place identity varies. In particular, the significance of the physicality of places has often been overstated – activities and meanings associated with places may be as or more important in creating Sense of Place. Any individual's conception of place will have its own variation of Relph's three components of place.

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  Soul of Society

  A Focus on the Lives of Children & Youth

  • Mary Nicole Warehime(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Group Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  Indeed, this poetic analysis conveys that as youth get older, their levels of hope, and idealism toward existing social constructions of the environ-ment decrease, and emotions of sadness and pessimism, cynicism, and apathy increase. This important finding suggests that more direct, relevant engagement with local places is needed at earlier ages once children enter school, in order to combat disempowering constructions of social and environmental realities and support the development of constructive, empowered place attitudes and values in the long term. 58 MAGGIE LA ROCHELLE AND PATSY EUBANKS OWENS CONCLUSION In our view, the point made by the poetry is that authentic senses of place and place relationships are living entities. The phrase “Sense of Place” could risk passivity, “a sense” being something not necessarily limited by time and space, but deceptively static as either present or not present. This con-strues Sense of Place as though it were a criterion that one meets once and then carries around all the time in perpetuity: a box to be checked, which leads to the possibility of mistaking places, especially natural or naturalized places, as static and unchanging also. If Sense of Place is constant in any way, it is as an ability; like a muscle of the body that must be worked and stretched to continue developing or else atrophy. Because of this, the pas-sivity of instructional approaches to education makes them hard-pressed to achieve constructive Sense of Place education because the mode of instruc-tion used renders our view of the environment, and thus our identities within that view, generalized, and static. If there is a theoretical moral here, it is in the practical details of day-to-day relationships. We are reminded of Catharine MacKinnon’s statement, echoed by bell hooks: “We know things with our lives and we live that knowledge, beyond what any theory has yet theorized” ( hooks, 1994 ).

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  Computing Geographically

  Bridging Giscience and Geography

  • David O'Sullivan(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • The Guilford Press

    (Publisher)

  The ambiguity and relational fluidity that attaches to place per se is not attached to the cartographic representa- tion of place, which generally remains wedded to the simple locations of points and polygons (Payne, 2017). There has been only limited car- tographic work exploring how to map ill-defined areas associated with toponyms (but see Brindley et al., 2018). Most energy has been devoted to working with new attributes—or new kinds of attributes—in the object-attribute tuple, while the geographical objects themselves remain the familiar points or areas in standard spatial relational databases. This often involves adding data such as photographs, sounds, user comments, hyperlinks, and so on to more or less conventional spatial data. An excellent overview of the thinking behind these approaches is pro- vided by Purves and Derungs (2015) who echoing Goodchild (2011) bemoan the elusive nature of place, but pragmatically settle on three con- cepts emphasized by Agnew (2011): location, locale, and Sense of Place. These refer, respectively, to specific locations in (absolute) space; to kinds of place (such as home, work, forest, and so on) which might not be fixed in space; and to feelings of attachment or belonging (or not) relative to meaningful places. The last of these is closely related to the ideas of Tuan (1977) and Massey (1991a), while this threefold notion of place also 102 PLACE AND MEANING IN SPACE closely mirrors theoretical ideas about where queries in information the- ory (Shatford, 1986). Purves and Derungs therefore adopt this threefold definition as “a basic framework to move beyond the much criticized, and still predominant, reduction of place to a name and a set of coordinates” (2015, p. 77).

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