essay on sense of place

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Step-by-step guide on writing a captivating descriptive essay about a place.

When it comes to descriptive writing, there is an ocean of possibilities that lies before us like an uncharted territory waiting to be discovered. One such avenue that beckons us to embark on a literary journey is the realm of describing a place. In this captivating genre, we have the opportunity to transport our readers to a specific location, immerse them in its sights, sounds, and sensations, and create an experience that will linger in their minds long after they put down our words.

Perhaps you have stumbled upon a tucked-away village nestled amidst rolling hills, or chanced upon a bustling metropolis pulsating with energy. Maybe it is a secluded beach, where the soft sand caresses your feet and the salty breeze carries the whispers of the waves. Regardless of the place, to paint a vivid picture with words, we must utilize our skills to evoke the atmosphere, bring out the essence, and capture the essence of the locale.

Throughout this step-by-step guide, we will delve into the art of writing a descriptive essay about a place. We will uncover the secrets of choosing the ideal location, gathering sensory details, and employing vivid language that will transport our readers and ignite their imaginations. So, let us begin this adventure and uncover the hidden treasures that await us in the enchanting world of descriptive writing.

Choosing the Perfect Setting

One of the key factors in writing a descriptive essay is selecting the ideal setting to portray. The setting serves as the backdrop for the events and experiences that will be described in the essay. It plays a vital role in creating a vivid image in the reader’s mind and capturing their interest.

When choosing the perfect setting, it is essential to consider the specific details that will help bring the place to life. These details can include the location, time of day, weather, and the overall ambiance of the place. By carefully selecting these elements, the writer can create a sensory experience that allows the reader to feel as if they are truly present in the described location.

Choosing the perfect setting is a crucial step in writing a descriptive essay. It sets the stage, creates a visual image, and immerses the reader in the described location. By carefully considering the location, time of day, weather, and ambiance, the writer can craft a compelling and sensory experience for their audience.

Gathering Research and Inspiration

Exploring the essence of a specific location requires careful research and a keen eye for detail. Before you start writing a descriptive essay about a place, it is essential to gather relevant research and seek inspiration to create a vivid and engaging portrayal.

Start by delving into books, articles, and online resources that offer information about your chosen place. Look for historical facts, geographical details, and anecdotes that can add depth and context to your essay. Note down interesting tidbits and unique features that make the place stand out.

Additionally, immerse yourself in the experiences of others. Read travel blogs, watch documentaries or interviews, and browse through personal experiences shared by people who have visited or lived in the place you are describing. Pay attention to their descriptive language and how they capture the atmosphere and essence of the location.

While conducting your research, take the opportunity to gather visual inspiration as well. Look for photographs, paintings, or sketches that depict the place. Study the colors, textures, and overall composition, and think about how these visual elements can help you convey the atmosphere and mood in your writing.

Don’t limit yourself to online research alone – visit the place if possible or explore through virtual means such as online tours or interactive maps. Immerse yourself in the sounds, sights, and smells of the place, and pay attention to the small details that often go unnoticed.

By gathering research and seeking inspiration, you will have a solid foundation to create a descriptive essay that transports your readers to the place you are describing. It will allow you to paint a vivid picture with words and evoke a strong sense of familiarity and connection in your readers.

Describing the Senses: Sight, Sound, Smell, and More

When it comes to writing a descriptive essay about a place, it is important to engage the reader’s senses and create a vivid image in their mind. By skillfully incorporating descriptive language, you can effectively convey the sights, sounds, smells, and other details that make a place unique and memorable.

The sense of sight plays a crucial role in bringing a place to life on the page. Describe the vibrant colors that dominate the landscape, the architectural details that catch the eye, and the play of light and shadow that creates an atmosphere in the place. Paint a picture with words and immerse your reader in the visual experience of being there.

Sound is another sense that can transport your reader to the place you are describing. Capture the cacophony of a busy city street, the rhythmic crashing of waves on a beach, or the melodic chirping of birds in a tranquil forest. By using descriptive language to convey the soundscape of a place, you can make the reader feel like they are standing right there, immersed in the auditory environment.

In addition to sight and sound, smell is a powerful sense that can evoke strong emotions and memories. Describe the pungent aroma of exotic spices wafting through a bustling market, the earthy scent of freshly fallen rain in a forest, or the intoxicating fragrance of flowers in a lush garden. By bringing the sense of smell to the forefront of your description, you can transport your reader to a place in a way that is both visceral and emotionally resonant.

But the senses don’t stop there. Consider incorporating tactile sensations, such as the rough texture of weathered stone or the softness of a sandy beach. Taste can also play a role, as you describe the flavors of local cuisine or the tang of salt in the air near the ocean. By engaging multiple senses in your description, you create a more immersive and rich experience for your reader.

Describing the senses is a powerful tool in writing a descriptive essay about a place. By skillfully using language to convey the sights, sounds, smells, and other sensory details, you can transport your reader to the place you are describing and create a lasting impression.

Concluding with Impact: Emotions and Reflections

As we reach the end of our journey through the process of writing a descriptive essay about a place, it is important to consider the lasting impact that a well-crafted conclusion can have on the reader. The conclusion is the final opportunity to leave a lasting impression, and by evoking emotions and prompting reflection, we can ensure that our essay resonates with the reader long after they have finished reading.

One effective way to conclude with impact is to appeal to the reader’s emotions. By using descriptive language and vivid imagery, we can paint a final picture that elicits specific emotions in the reader. Whether it is a sense of awe and wonder, nostalgia and longing, or even fear and suspense, tapping into the reader’s emotions can create a powerful connection and leave a lasting impression.

In addition to evoking emotions, the conclusion should also provide an opportunity for reflection. By summarizing the main points and themes discussed throughout the essay, the reader is encouraged to take a step back and consider the broader implications of the place being described. This reflection can deepen the reader’s understanding and create a sense of resonance as they contemplate the significance of the place in their own lives.

Finally, it is important to remember that the conclusion should leave the reader with a sense of closure. This can be achieved by circling back to the introduction, perhaps referencing a key detail or anecdote mentioned at the beginning of the essay. By creating a sense of full circle, the reader is left with a satisfying conclusion and a lasting impression.

In conclusion, the final section of a descriptive essay about a place is a crucial opportunity to make an impact on the reader. By appealing to emotions, prompting reflection, and providing closure, we can ensure that our essay has a lasting effect and leaves the reader with a sense of connection and resonance.

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A Sense of Place

A sense of place is defined in different ways by different people. For instance, some people describe it as a collection of meanings, feelings, and beliefs experienced by individuals or groups residing in a particular locality. In contrast, others define it as the knowledge and experience of a specific place (Silberbauer 21). In my opinion, a sense of place is the strong feeling of being connected to a particular place held by an individual or a community. A sense of place attracts individuals to feel connected to their locations and environments, from home to nation. Generally, the sense of place is important since it keeps me connected to the geographical place I live and the experiences I derive from this environment.

A sense of place greatly affects my life and the experiences I derive from the environment as well as affects my future choices. For instance, I have adapted to the culture of Naples, Florida. I am connected with the social interactions from the community members, where people, including me, gather to share ideas that would regulate the living standards of my community. As I live in my community, I usually interact with neighbors as we help each other. In this case, I am motivated to ask for help whenever needed. I also feel free to help my colleagues in the community if they ask for help from me. I am also connected to the religious culture of our community since people worship. In this case, religion has shaped my community by changing it to be a sacred place. Our community incorporates peaceful people, which makes me feel connected to the place (Silberbauer 11). This community may be led by peaceful leaders who preach peace. Thus, I am fully connected to the area and always willing to live in my community. Having a sense of place and being highly connected to my place, I think of living in my community for a long time and following the steps of older people as well as obeying those in authority to ensure that I grow morally.

Flora and fauna in Naples, Florida, influence living standards. Most of the animals in Naples live in water. (Kauffman and John 12). The waters accumulating in the city offer recreational facilities where we go for enjoyment during our free time, perhaps on weekends and during the vacation. Animals that live in water, like fish, offer food to the people in the area. Moreover, Naples has a wide range of markets offering us shopping options. We visit arts, culture, and recreational centers with our families for enjoyment. The plants keep my environment beautiful and safe, motivating me to live in my area and continue protecting the environment. After a long day, I relax in a calm shed under a tree. It is also enjoyable to live in an environment that is protected. Naples has wildlife parks that attract tourists, improving the city’s economy since the tourists pay for their visits.

In conclusion, a sense of place is the connectedness to an area where people feel comfortable as they live hence making appropriate future decisions. My sense of place is defined by my good environment, where the environment is protected in Naples, Florida. The area has good arts, recreational centers, and good shopping centers.

Works Cited

Kauffman, James M., and John Wills Lloyd. “A sense of place: The importance of placement issues in contemporary special education.”  Issues in educational placement . Routledge, 2019. 3–19.

Silberbauer, George B. “A sense of place.”  Key issues in Hunter-Gatherer research . Routledge, 2020. 1-25

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PLACENESS, PLACE, PLACELESSNESS

A website by edward (ted) relph exploring the concept of place, sense of place, spirit of place, placemaking, placelessness and non-place, and almost everything to do with place and places, sense of place: an overview.

In this post I offer a general overview of the range of different ideas about sense of place. Some of its important variations, such as a poisoned sense of place and a global sense of place, I intend to cover in more detail in future posts. I list some references at the end. Topics are:

• Sense of Place as a Distinctive Aspect of Somewhere (=Genius Loci)
• Sense and Nonsense of Place
• Sense of Place as a Faculty for Distinguishing and Appreciating Places
• Variations in Sense of Place over Time
• Different Types of Sense of Place
• Drudgery, Oppression and a Poisoned Sense of Place
• GIS and Measurement of Sense of Place
• A Global Sense of Place
• Sense of Place as a Phenomenological Bridge between Person and World
• Sense of Place as a Neurological Bridge between Self and World

A Pragmatic Sense of Place

A Commercial/Retail Sense of Place

I intend to discuss some of these (e.g. Genius Loci, Poison Sense of Palce, Global Sense of Place, Phenomenological and Neurological ideas) in more detail in subsequent posts.

Introduction ‘Sense of place’ has become a popular, feel-good buzz phrase. Google it and you will be directed variously not only to sites on architecture, urban design, and geography but also to  sense of place essay writing services  (these descriptive essays are common writing assignments based on a particular location where students feel they belong). Making Sense of Place is a group of historical consultants in the U.S. that provides interpretations of cultural and natural history. The essayist on American landscapes, J.B. Jackson wrote dismissively that: “Sense of place is a much used expression, chiefly by architects but taken over by urban planners and interior decorators and the promoters of condominiums, so that now it means very little.” And at an international scale there is a new (since 2013), energetic organization based in Malaysia with the clever name SoPlace  that is dedicated to “Mainstreaming Place in the Urban Century” by using a range of social media and hosting conferences that it describes as “World Summits of Sense of Place” with presentations by academics, designers, planners and policymaker , and has plans until 2021 for further SoPlace summits. The aim of SoPlace is to mobilize “the global sense of place fraternity for mainstream impact.”

I came upon this advertisement in a magazine in a waiting room, and was not sure whether ‘sense of place’ here refers to what she is thinking or the chair.  In fact, it’s the chair – Matteo Grassi design and make chairs.

In spite of this diverse enthusiasm about sense of place it is not altogether clear what it means. It is often used in two apparently contradictory ways. One refers to a human faculty that grasps the distinctive subtleties of different bits of the world and helps us to find our way around; the other is about particular qualities of bits of the world. So sense of place can be variously regarded as something in our heads, or as a property of landscapes.

My inclination is to understand sense of place from a phenomenological perspective – as a fundamental aspect of everyday life and a connection between person and world. Somewhat to my surprise this idea of sense of place as connectedness or togetherness is getting reinforcement from the research of neuroscientists.

Furthermore, like almost everything to do with place, sense of place shifts across enormous scales – from direct experiences of grandma’s kitchen (a recommended topic for sense of place essays) to an appreciation of the entire globe (as in SoPlace Summits).

And while it is almost always regarded as altogether positive, it is important to remember that sense of place can contribute to negative, exclusionary, even xenophobic attitudes, and ambiguity nicely captured by John Milton in Paradise Lost Book 1:

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Sense of Place as a distinctive aspect of somewhere (equals genius loci) The phrase sense of place is often used to refer to the quality that makes somewhere distinctive. It is the environmental equivalent of saying somebody has a strong personality. For example, Robert Fulford and John Sewell wrote a short book about Toronto in 1971 titled A Sense of Time and Place which was liberally illustrated with photographs of old buildings and streets. It often turns up in tourist and promotional literature with much the same meaning, which is not altogether felicitous.  J.B.Jackson, the essayist of American landscapes, remarks in his book A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (1994) that: “Sense of place is a much used expression, chiefly by architects but taken over by urban planners and interior decorators and the promoters of condominiums, so that now it means very little. It is an awkward and ambiguous translation of genius loci.” 

Stall at Ballard Street Market in Seattle in 2014 – sense of place as a property of things and environments.

Genius loci or spirit of place is derived from the belief that particular places have their own spirits or gods. It was a common notion in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, referred to, for instance, by Alexander Pope and John Dryden. D.H. Lawrence wrote in 1918 that: “All art partakes of the Spirit of Place in which it is produced.” This expression seems to have declined in usage, perhaps as the world became increasingly disenchanted in the 20 th century, and is being pushed aside by the less sacred term “sense of place.”

Jackson is right that this is an awkward and ambiguous expression because it attributes “sense” – a human and animal faculty – to unfeeling bits of geography.

Sense and Nonsense of Place Landscape architect Grady Clay was even more outspoken when he wrote about “sense and nonsense of place.” He suggested that ‘sense of place’ is “a sociological invention” and he concocted a table of “Buzzwords for the manufacture of a  ‘Sense of Place’ found in contemporary real-estate advertisements”: for example

• Luxurious       waterfront     estate            mint-condition Spacious         prestigious    location         close-to Elegant           English           landmark       historic ambience Stately            Classic            enclave           panoramic vista

There is no undoing the development of language, but I do think using it as a naive substitution for spirit of place is unfortunate and best avoided.

Sense of Place as a faculty for distinguishing and appreciating places This is the most common usage. It refers to a human faculty that pulls together and arranges information from the senses of sight, smell, touch, hearing, and also calls on memory and imagination. It is a living ecological relationship between a person and particular place, a feeling of comfort and security, similar to what environmental psychologists consider place attachment. Ian Nairn, for example, has written: “It seems a commonplace that almost everyone is born with the need for identification with their surroundings and a relationship to them. So sense of place is not a fine art extra, it is something we cannot afford to do without.”

From a broader perspective sense of place is an element of most social and cultural experiences. It is what Erskine Caldwell was driving at when he declared that there would be “nothing to write about if people had no fixed places of living.” In a cultural context sense of place is usually shared by others living in the same bit of the world and is an essential part of regional and local enthusiasms.

An Exhibition of Works by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama in the art gallery in Matsumoto, the city where she grew up

Two installations by Yayoi outside the Matsumoto Gallery – in her distinctive polka dot stye

It is, furthermore, an intersubjective feeling,an innate faculty possessed in some degree by everyone and recognizable to others who live elsewhere. This was captured well in the Hawaiian Airlines inflight magazine for August 2014 which had an article on watershed reclamation projects on the Islands that are being used to restore traditional agriculture and ecosystems. Place in Hawaii is closely tied to watersheds and the article had this to say. “Hawaiians have a deeply anchored sense of place, of ‘my place’ and ‘your place.’ They take of their place, and respect your place, and know the difference.” This is not going backward but tapping into ancestral memory to promote ecological humility and responsibility.

But it is also a sense that can be enhanced through critical attention to what makes places distinctive, how they have changed and how they might be changed. As a critical approach to an appreciation of the distinctive personalities of different environments, the critical enhancement of sense of place is an aspect of education in Geography, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design.

Variations in Sense of Place over Time Sense of place is constant neither over the course of individual lifetimes nor over the course of history. For young children geographical experience is constrained, mostly to house and immediate surroundings, so sense of place is tightly focused with few comparisons; for adults place experience are extensive, regional, even global, with numerous comparisons; for the elderly sense of place become increasingly constrained as mobility declines.

Poster at Bloedell Gardens in the Olympic Peninsula, 2014

Sense of place has varied over the course of history, especially as technologies of communications have changed. Tad Homer Dixon has noted that until about 1800 most people lived in rural areas, met only a few hundred people in their lifetimes and communicated by walking and talking. Indeed this was partly true of the area of South Wales where I grew up in the 1950s, and still applies to many parts of the world. Geographically focused lives lead to close and intense associations with places, not always pleasant but inescapable. With the advent of railways, the telegraph, radio,motor vehicles, air travel, and the Internet, sense of place has been spread-eagled across the world.

Joshua Meyerowitz’ book No Sense of Place discusses the impact of electronic communications and he suggests that: “Where one is, has less and less to do with what one knows and experiences.” Lives in the 21 st century are increasingly multi-centred and transnational. Sense of place is now comparative rather than rooted.

Different Types of Sense of Place John Eyles’ book Senses of Place (Silverbrook Press, Warrington, 1985) was an investigation of what people think of where they live, based on many interviews he conducted in the town of Towcester in the Midlands of England. The results allowed him to differentiate several different senses of place. The most important were:

• Social – dominated by social ties and interactions
• Apathetic or acquiescent – little interest in place
• Instrumental –place regarded either as a means to an end or as preventing opportunities
• Nostalgic – dominated by feelings about the past

Substantially less important were the following, which are usually treated in discussion of sense of place as essential:

• Environment

My guess is that this ranking would not apply in other situations. For instance in the Cascadia region of North-West North America, where I now live, mountains, ocean and forest feature so prominently that the environment is fundamental to many people’s sense of place. But regardless of whether Eyles’ conclusions apply outside the town where he did his case study, his work is important because it shows that sense of place is not some sort of universally consistent response to the world.

Schmuel Shamai tried something similar to Eyles in the early 1990s. He argues that sense of place is something that can be measured. He subjected his questionnaire survey data of Jews in Toronto to various statistical tests that allowed him to identify seven levels of sense of place:

• not having a sense of place
• knowledge of being located in a place
• belonging to a place
• attachment to a place
• place devotion/allegiance
• involvement in a place
• sacrificing one’s life for a place

Drudgery, Oppression and A Poisoned Sense of Place Place experiences can be negative as well as positive. For teenagers in a small town or women subjected to domestic violence a sense of place is about being trapped somewhere rather than belonging to it.

Escaping place. This movie (which I have not seen and about which I know nothing) has a title lifted from the 1965 song by Eric Burdon and The Animals (We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do).

Sense of place can also contribute to exclusionary attitudes and practices. The psychologist Marc Fried, who in the 1970s wrote about uprooted communities in Boston, has more recently commented on “pathologies of community attachment” as disorders of place attachment. He suggests that they can be contagious, leading to territorial competition, warfare, even genocide.

I have written about these pathologies of place attachment as “a poisoned sense of place” in my essay on “Sense of Place” in Ten Geographical Ideas that Have Changed the World . This is the result when sense of place turns sour and becomes exclusionary. Much of what is positive in sense of place depends on a reasonable balance . At one extreme, when that balance is upset by an excess of placeless internationalism the local identity of places is eroded. At the other extreme, when that balance is upset by excessive commitment to place and local or national zeal, the result is a poisoned sense of place in which other places and people are treated with contempt. In its mildest forms this is apparent in nimbyism and gated communities. In its extreme forms, as Fried suggests, it is revealed ethnic nationalist supremacy and xenophobia. It was apparent, for example, in the place cocoons that Europeans took to protect themselves from the local contexts of their colonies that they found distasteful, thus bits of Britain were reproduced in India, and a Spanish way of life was exported to Latin America. At its most extreme it was manifested in Nazi Germany and the attempts at ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia, where obsessive love of national landscape and culture led to brutal attempts to purify the homeland by removing whatever and whomever was considered not to belong.

GIS and Measurement of Sense of Place Agarwal has attempted to develop a computational theory for sense of place that will “enable the identification of minimal parameters for simulating sense of place in place-based models.”   On the basis of 50 interviews she proposes that sense of place is a mechanism through which individual conceptualizations of place are grounded in a collective notion and develops a model for a “cognitive ‘sense of place’ as follows:

• SoP c can be expressed as < environmental knowledge : spatial familiarity : neighborhood : boundaries : k>,  where k represents any symbolically important element that has been omitted within the constraints of the experiment. the meanings of place and its links in the real world. Sense of place is shown to be a representation of ontological commitments in the real world for the formation of a place.”

I am not sure what to make of this except to note that sense of place is topic that can be approached from many different angles and it is wise not to assume that the angle you or I prefer is the only one with some measure of legitimacy.

Global Sense of Place Doreen Massey, a geographer, suggests that it is necessary to rethink places as particular moments in intersecting social and economic relations – in effect as nodes in open and porous networks that are global in their reach. She further argues that we need a progressive or global sense of place – a global sense of the local – which is adequate to an era of space-time compression. This understands each place as a focus of a distinct mixture of both wider and more local social relations, and which interact with the accumulated history of a place. This political economic view of places as nodes in systems of networks has been widely accepted in academic geography.

Sense of Place as a Phenomenological Bridge between Self and World A reasonable and balanced sense of place connects person and environment; it is phenomenological bridge based in direct experiences of the world. Our senses respond to places and places are informed by how we sense them. This experiential connection is at the heart of Feld and Basso’s 1996 edited book Senses of Place . They are anthropologists interested in active processes of sensing places. Their aim is to move beyond “facile generalizations about places being culturally constructed” to an understanding of the ways in which places naturalize different worlds of sense. The essays in their book “…locate the intricate strengths and fragilities that connect places to social imagination and practice, to memory and desire, to dwelling and movement.” Basso’s own chapter on places in the Apache landscape is an account of how the Apache are alive to the world around them, and how places inform their comprehension of the world. Their experience of sensing places is both reciprocal and incorrigibly dynamic: “when places are actively sensed, the physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind.”

Sense of Place as a Neurological Bridge between Self and World A similar notion of sense of place as a connection between person and world has begun to emerge in the work of neuroscientists who have identified “place cells” in the hippocampus that store memories of specific places, and “grid cells” that orchestrate these memories in ways that allow us to find our way around. Neuroscientists have been careful to point out that there is nothing like a map of places in the brain; instead experiences of places are actively organized in neural processes in our brains. It appears to be a failure of these processes that leads to dementia and Alzheimer’s and a person’s failure to find their way around. In other words, from a neurological perspective sense of place is simultaneously both in the world and in the brain. It requires a togetherness of environment and experience.

A diagram from Nature illustrating the neurological sense of place in rats developed by Edvard and Britt Moser (Nobel Prize winners 2014). Similar processes are known to happen in humans, and it is the failure of these that contributes to Alzheimer’s. What I think is significant is that this research has revealed processes that are simultaneously in the brain and in the environment.

There has always been a practical aspect to sense of place that translates it into buildings, landscapes and townscapes. It involves all means of planning, making, doing, maintaining, caring for, transforming, restoring and otherwise taking responsibility for how somewhere looks and functions. I have argued in several essays that the solutions to current challenges such as those of climate change, terrorism and inequality cannot lie with comprehensive, top-down, technical approaches alone. In addition to larger scale diplomatic and political answers it is necessary to have policies and practices that reflect locally distinctive conditions and meanings. These will require fostering a sense of place that blends an appreciation of local identity and difference with a grasp of widely shared processes and consequences, and then seeks locally appropriate local courses of action. I have referred to this as a pragmatic sense of place. It is necessary part, I think, of what will be needed to meet the multiple environmental and social challenges of the present century.

References Agarwal, Pragya 2005 “Operationalizing ‘Sense of Place’ as a cognitive operator for semiotics in place-based ontologies” in A.G. Cohn and D,M. Mark (eds) Spatial Information Theory (Berlin: Springer-Verlag).

Clay, G.1994 Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America’s Generic Landscapes, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)

Eyles, John 1985 Senses of Place (Warrington: Silverbrook Press)

Feld. S and Basso K. H. (eds) 1996 Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press)

Fried, Marc 2000 “Continuities and Discontinuities of Place” Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20, 193-205

Fulford, R and Sewell J (n.d but about 1971) A Sense of Time and Place (Toronto: City Pamphlets)

  Jackson J.B. 1994 A sense of place, a sense of time , (New Haven: Yale UP)

Massey D 1994 Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)

Meyerowitz, Joshua, 1985 No Sense of Place : The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (London: Oxford UP)

Relph, E. 1997 “Sense of Place” in Ten Geographical Ideas that Have Changed the World , ed Susan Hanson, Rutgers University Press

Relph, Edward, 2007 “Spirit of Place and Sense of Place in Virtual Realities”, in Champion, E. (ed) Techne : special edition on Real and Virtual Places, 32-48

Relph, Edward, 2008 “Coping with Social and Environmental Challenges through a Pragmatic Approach to Place” in Eyles, J. and Williams, A., (eds) Sense of Place, Health, And Quality of Life (Aldershot: Ashgate)

Relph, Edward 2008 “A Pragmatic Sense of Place” in Vanclay, F., Higgins, M., and Blackshaw, A., (eds) Making Sense of Place: Exploring concepts and expressions of place through different senses and lenses (Canberra: National Museum of Australia)

Shamai, Schmuel 1991 “Sense of Place: An Empirical Measurement” Geoforum , Vol 22, No 3, pp. 347-358

Some other Sense of Place books not mentioned in this post:

Harwell, Karen and Reynolds, Joanna, 2006 Exploring a Sense of Place: How to Create your own local program for reconnecting with nature

  Heise, Ursula K., 2008 Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

  Gussow, Alan and Wilbur, Richard 1997 A Sense of Place: The Artist and the American Land

  Steele, Fritz 1981 The Sense of Place

Stegner, Wallace, 1989 A Sense of Place

Sense of Place

Jennifer adams, new york city.  david greenwood, thunder bay.  mitchell thomashow, seattle.  alex russ, ithaca.  26 may 2016.

6 Comments Join our conversation

Different people perceive the same city or neighborhood in different ways. While one person may appreciate ecological and social aspects of a neighborhood, another may experience environmental and racialized injustice.

A place may also conjure contradicting emotions—the warmth of community and home juxtaposed with the stress of dense urban living. Sense of place—the way we perceive places such as streets, communities, cities or ecoregions—influences our well-being, how we describe and interact with a place, what we value in a place, our respect for ecosystems and other species, how we perceive the affordances of a place, our desire to build more sustainable and just urban communities, and how we choose to improve cities. Our sense of place also reflects our historical and experiential knowledge of a place, and helps us imagine its more sustainable future. In this chapter, we review scholarship about sense of place, including in cities. Then we explore how urban environmental education can help residents to strengthen their attachment to urban communities or entire cities, and to view urban places as ecologically valuable.

Sense of place

  Research and scholarship around the relationship between “place” and learning reflects diverse perspectives, many of which are relevant to urban environmental education. Education scholars point to the need for people to develop specific “practices of place” that reflect embodied (perceptual and conceptual) relationships with local landscapes (natural, built, and human). Further, some scholars and researchers have used a lens of mobility—the globalized and networked flow of ideas, materials, and people—to build awareness of the relationship between the local and global in the construction of place in urban centers (Stedman and Ardoin, 2013). This suggests that understanding sense of place in the city generates an added set of situations and challenges, including dynamic demographics, migration narratives, and complex infrastructure networks, as well as contested definitions of natural environments (Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2006). One critical question is how we think about sense of place in cities when places and people are constantly on the move. Given rural-urban migration, sense of place today includes where a person came from as much as where she now finds herself. In one study in a large, urban center in the U.S., Adams (2013) found that notions of “home” and identity for Caribbean-identified youth were largely constructed in the northeastern urban context in which they found themselves either through birth or immigration. Such dimensions of place relationships are vital for thinking about meaningful and relevant urban environmental education.

Understanding sense of place in the urban context would be incomplete without a critical consideration of cities as socially constructed places both inherited and created by those who live there. Critical geographers such as Edward Soja , David Harvey , and Doreen Massey draw on a Marxist analysis to describe cities as the material consequence of particular political and ideological arrangements under global capitalism. Critical educators (e.g., Gruenewald, 2003; Haymes, 1995) have drawn upon critical geography to demonstrate how cities are social constructions imbued with contested race, class, and gender social relationships that make possible vastly different senses of place among their residents. For example, Stephen Haymes (1995) argued that against the historical backdrop of race relations in Western countries, “in the context of the inner city, a pedagogy of place must be linked to black urban struggle” (p. 129). Although Haymes was writing twenty years ago, his claim that place-responsive urban education must be linked to racial politics resonates today with the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. and ongoing need for environmental educators to be in tune with the political realities that so deeply inform a given individual’s sense of place. This also resonates with the notion that different people may ascribe different meanings to the same place. The complexity of meaning surrounding urban places and our understandings of such contested meanings make a powerful context for personal inquiry and collective learning.

In the U.S., Tzou and Bell (2012) used ethnographic approaches to examine the construction of place among urban young people of color. Their results suggest implications for equity and social justice in environmental education, such as the damage that prevailing environmental education narratives could do to communities of color in terms of power and positioning. Further, Gruenewald (2005) suggests that traditional modes of assessment, such as standardized tests, are problematic in place-based education; instead, we need to redefine education and research as forms of inquiry that are identifiably place-responsive and afford a multiplicity of approaches to define and describe people’s relationships to the environment.

Sense of place and urban environmental education

Although not always explicitly stated, sense of place is inherent to many environmental learning initiatives (Thomashow, 2002). A goal of such programs is nurturing ecological place meaning , defined as “viewing nature-related phenomena, including ecosystems and associated activities, as symbols” of a place (Kudryavtsev, Krasny and Stedman, 2012). This approach is prevalent in bioregionalism, the “no child left inside” movement, community gardening, sustainable agriculture, as well as in natural history, place-based, and other environmental education approaches. Place-based education has goals important to urban life, including raising awareness of place, of our relationship to place, and of how we may contribute positively to this constantly evolving relationship, as well as inspiring local actors to develop place-responsive transformational learning experiences that contribute to community well-being.

Nurturing a sense of place

With the global population increasingly residing in cities, ecological urbanism requires new approaches to understanding place. How does sense of place contribute to human flourishing, ecological justice, and biological and cultural diversity? Using a theoretical basis from literature described above, we offer examples of activities to help readers construct field explorations that evoke, leverage, or influence sense of place. (Also, see a relevant diagram in Russ et al., 2015.) In practice, urban environmental education programs would combine different approaches to nurture sense of place, perhaps most prominently place-based approaches (Smith and Sobel, 2010), which teach respect for the local environment, including its other-than-human inhabitants, in any setting including cities.

Experiences of the urban environment

Making students more consciously aware of their taken-for-granted places is an important aspect of influencing sense of place. Focusing on places students frequent, educators can ask questions like: “What kind of place is this? What does this place mean to you? What does this place enable you to do?” Hands-on activities that allow students to experience, recreate in, and steward more natural ecosystems in cities could be one approach to nurture ecological place meaning. Another activity could use conceptual mapping to highlight places and networks that are important to students, for example, related to commuting and transportation, the internet, food and energy sources, or recreation. Maps and drawings also might focus on sensory perceptions—sights, sounds and smells—or locate centers of urban sustainability. Such maps can help students learn about specific neighborhoods, investigate the relationship among neighborhoods, or create linkages between all the places they or their relatives have lived. Further, mapping activities may help students recognize how their own activities connect to the larger network of activities that create a city, as well as allow them to reflect on issues of power, access, and equity in relation to environmental concerns such as waste, air pollution, and access to green space.

Other observational and experiential activities to instill sense of place might include: (1) exploring boundaries or borders, for example, space under highways, transition zones between communities, fences and walls; (2) finding centers or gathering places and asking questions about where people congregate and why; (3) following the movements of pedestrians and comparing them to the movements of urban animals; (4) tracing the migratory flows of birds, insects and humans; (5) shadowing city workers who are engaged in garbage removal or other public services as they move around the city; (6) observing color and light at different times of the day; (7) observing patterns of construction and demolition; and (8) working with street artists to create murals. All of these activities could serve to develop new meanings and attachments to places that may or may not be familiar to people. The activities build on seminal works related to urban design, including Christopher Alexander’s “Pattern Language,” Randolph T. Hexter’s “Design for Ecological Democracy,” Jane Jacobs “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre’s “How to Study Public Life,” and the rich material coming from New Geographies , the journal published by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Social construction of place meanings

Activities that allow people to explore and interpret places together could contribute to developing a collective sense of place and corresponding place meanings. Participatory action research and other participatory approaches raise young people’s critical consciousness, influence how they see themselves in relation to places, and build collective understandings about what it means to be young in a rapidly changing city. For example, photo-voice and mental mapping used during a participatory urban environment course allowed students, many of them from marginalized racial and ethnic groups, to experience a shift from viewing a community as a fixed geographic place to a dynamic, socially constructed space, and to describe how they experience and understand urban phenomena such as decay, gentrification, and access to green spaces (Bellino and Adams, 2014). These activities enabled students to expand their notions of what it means to be urban citizens, and to transform their ecological identities in ways that prompted them to take steps towards imagining environmentally, economically, and culturally sustainable futures.

Further, ecological place meaning can be constructed through storytelling, communication with environmental professionals, interpretation, learning from community members, and sharing students’ own stories (Russ et al., 2015), as well as through representation of places through narratives, charts, music, poetry, photographs, or other forms that encourage dialogue and reflection about what places are and how they can be cared for (Wattchow and Brown, 2011). Other social activities, such as collective art-making, restoring local natural areas, or planting a community garden, could contribute to a collective sense of place that values green space and ecological aspects of place. New socially constructed place meanings can in turn help to promote community engagement in preserving, transforming, or creating places with unique ecological characteristics (e.g., fighting to keep a community garden safe from developers), and create opportunities to maintain these ecological characteristics (e.g., group-purchasing solar power). Environmental educators who are able to engage with a community over time can watch these initiatives take root and grow, and can observe individual and collective changes in sense of place.

Developing an ecological identity  

In addition to paying attention to social construction of place, environmental educators can nurture ecological identity, which fosters appreciation of the ecological aspects of cities. Humans have multiple identities, including ecological identity, which reflects the ecological perspectives or ecological lens through which they see the world. Ecological identity focuses one’s attention on environmental activities, green infrastructure, ecosystems, and biodiversity, including in urban places. Ecological identity in cities can be manifested in realizing one’s personal responsibility for urban sustainability, and feeling oneself empowered and competent to improve local places (Russ et al., 2015). Urban environmental education programs can influence ecological identity, for example, by involving students in long-term environmental restoration projects where they serve as experts on environmental topics, by valuing young people’s contribution to environmental planning, respecting their viewpoint about future urban development, and recognizing young people’s efforts as ambassadors of the local environment and environmental organizations (e.g., through work/volunteer titles, labels on t-shirts, or workshop certificates). Even involving students in projects that allow them to become more familiar with their community from an ecological perspective goes a long way towards adding an ecological layer to their identity and perception of their city (Bellino and Adams, 2014).

The environmental education challenge presented in this chapter is how to embed deeper meanings of place and identity in dynamic urban environments. Because urban settings tend to be diverse across multiple elements, ranging from types of green space and infrastructure to global migration, there are countless ways to proceed. In addition, while environmental educators can design and facilitate experiences to access and influence people’s sense of place, it is also important for educators to have a strong notion of their own sense of place. This is especially critical for environmental educators who may not have spent their formative years in a city. Such persons may have a sense of place informed more by frequent and ready access to natural areas, and less by access to urban diversity and the density and diversity of people found in an urban environment. It is important for all urban environmental educators to engage in reflective activities that allow them to learn about their personal sense of place, including what they value about the natural, human, and built environment. Demonstrating one’s own continued learning, and learning challenges, will greatly aid in the process of facilitating other learners developing sense of place in diverse urban settings. Through sharing their own experiences with places, all learners can deepen our awareness of and sensitivity to our environment and to each other. Such awareness and receptivity to place can positively influence collective and individual actions that help create sustainable cities.

Jennifer Adams, David A. Greenwood, Mitchell Thomashow, and Alex Russ New York, Thunder Bay, Seattle, and Ithaca

This essay will appear as a chapter in  Urban Environmental Education Review , edited by Alex Russ and Marianne Krasny, to be published by Cornell University Press in 2017. To see more pre-release chapters from the book, click  here .

This essay also appears at the North American Association of Environmental Educators  site . References

Adams, J.D. (2013). Theorizing a sense of place in transnational community. Children, youth and environments, 23 (3), 43-65.

Basso, K.H. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Notes on a Western Apache landscape. In Feld, S. and Basso, K.H. (Eds.), Senses of place (pp. 53-90). Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Bellino, M. and Adams, J.D. (2014). Reimagining environmental education: Urban youths’ perceptions and investigations of their communities. Revista Brasileira de Pesquisa em Educação de Ciências, 14 (2), 27-38 .

Gruenewald, D.A. (2005). Accountability and collaboration: Institutional barriers and strategic pathways for place-based education. Ethics, Place and Environment , 8 (3), 261-283.

Gruenewald, D.A. (2003). Foundations of place: A multidisciplinary framework for place-conscious education. American Educational Research Journal, 40 (3), 619-654.

Haymes, S.N. (1995). Race, culture, and the city: A pedagogy for Black urban struggle . SUNY Press.

Heynen, N., Kaika, M. and Swyngedouw, E. (2006). In the nature of cities: Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism . New York: Routledge.

Kudryavtsev, A., Krasny, M.E. and Stedman, R.C. (2012). The impact of environmental education on sense of place among urban youth. Ecosphere, 3 (4), 29.

Kudryavtsev, A., Stedman, R.C. and Krasny, M.E. (2012). Sense of place in environmental education. Environmental education research, 18 (2), 229-250.

Russ, A., Peters, S.J., Krasny, M.E. and Stedman, R.C. (2015). Development of ecological place meaning in New York City. Journal of environmental education, 46 (2), 73-93.

Smith, G.A. and Sobel, D. (2010). Place- and community-based education in schools . New York: Routledge.

Stedman, R. and Ardoin, N. (2013). Mobility, power and scale in place-based environmental education. In Krasny, M. and Dillon, J. (Eds.) Trading zones in environmental education: Creating transdisciplinary dialogue (pp. 231-251). New York: Peter Lang.

Thomashow, M. (2002). Bringing the biosphere home: Learning to perceive global environmental change . Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Tzou, C.T. and Bell, P. (2012). The role of borders in environmental education: Positioning, power and marginality. Ethnography and Education , 7 (2), 265-282.

Wattchow, B. and Brown, M. (2011). A pedagogy of place: Outdoor education for a changing world . Monash, Australia: Monash University Publishing.

About the Writer: David Greenwood

Dr. David A. Greenwood is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Education at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, where he now lives in the forest with all of its wildlife.

About the Writer: Mitchell Thomashow

Mitchell Thomashow devotes his life and work to promoting ecological awareness, sustainable living, creative learning, improvisational thinking, social networking, and organizational excellence.

About the Writer: Alex Russ

Alex Kudryavtsev (pen name: Alex Russ) is an online course instructor for EECapacity, an EPA-funded environment educator training project led by Cornell University and NAAEE.

About the Writer: Jennifer Adams

Jennifer D. Adams is an associate professor of science education at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research focuses on STEM teaching and learning in informal science contexts including museums, National Parks and everyday settings.

6 thoughts on “ Sense of Place ”

I would like to see more about the tools for articulating, preserving and/or creating sense of place as related to the topics discussed in this essay. The work of Kevin Lynch and William Whyte in particular. An important aspect of urban planning is helping a community articulate a desired sense of place and to use urban design and landscape architecture to help create, preserve and reinforce it.

love it and it gives sense and meaning to many concepts . thank you

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I’m writing a capstone for my EMBA on the social values impact of long term infrastructure projects utilizing the Public Private Partnerships method. This came about when I observe that much of the literature review on the performance assessment of P3s are based on value for money. The Canadian Auditor General’s report and PPPCanada’s annual report do not include social impact assessment. Your write up on Sense of Place is a breath of fresh air. – E. Rustia, P.Eng.

can you make a topic outline of this ?

Thank you for this article it summaries sense of place, place making and place meaning beautifully for me.

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How to Write a Sense-of-Place Essay

Kori morgan.

From backyards to childhood homes to first apartments, places play a significant role in shaping our memories. In a sense-of-place essay, authors paint a vivid picture of an important place in their lives for readers. Unlike a narrative essay, sense-of-place essays are shorter and focus on providing an in-depth look at a particular setting rather than telling a story. Using specific detail, conveying emotion and reflecting on the place's importance will help you effectively share your favorite settings with readers.

Explore this article

• Brainstorming

1 Brainstorming

A good way to begin thinking of topics is to make a list of meaningful places from your past. You might find yourself recalling family gatherings at your grandparents' old farmhouse, your elementary school classroom or a lakeside beach where you went swimming as a child. You can then select a place that holds particular significance or vivid memories for you, and make another list of everything you remember about it, such as sounds, particular smells or prominent colors and textures.

The Purdue Online Writing Lab states that good descriptive essays instill "a sense of familiarity and appreciation" in readers. In a sense-of-place essay, this is accomplished through imagery, the portrayal of sensory details. You can use your list of important aspects of the place for ideas of what to bring to life in your setting. If you were writing about your grandmother's kitchen, for example, you might write about the smoky scent of turkey dinner, while a description of your backyard could include the stained glass appearance of sunlight streaming through the trees.

A sense-of-place essay also makes readers feel the emotion associated with your chosen setting. This is done through tone, the portrayal of the author's attitude toward the subject. Description plays a key role in establishing tone. For example, if you were describing your favorite amusement park, the details of bright colors, up-tempo carnival music and children's laughter would convey a carefree tone, while a graveyard would carry a somber tone with details of cold, gray headstones and faded silk flowers.

4 Reflection

A good way to end your essay is by reflecting on why the place you've chosen is so important to you. Discussing what you learned there, what the place means to you and its impact on your life will complete the picture you've created. In an essay on your grandmother's kitchen, you might talk about how being there taught you the value of service to others, while an essay about your backyard might illustrate your nostalgia for the innocence of childhood. By the conclusion, readers should clearly understand the significance of this place in your memory.

• 1 Purdue Online Writing Lab: Descriptive Essays
• 2 University of Vermont: "Sense" of Place

About the Author

Kori Morgan holds a Bachelor of Arts in professional writing and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and has been crafting online and print educational materials since 2006. She taught creative writing and composition at West Virginia University and the University of Akron and her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals.

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Doreen Massey’s Concept of a Global Sense of Place Critical Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
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Introduction

Analysis of doreen massey’s concept of a ‘global sense of place’, reference list.

In the recent past, geographers and scholars have applied various concepts related to networks and place making as they strive to comprehend and explain the current political processes and communal transformation. One of those geographers is Doreen Massey. Her concept of ‘global sense of place’ has had a substantial impact on how people construe the issue of place development.

Having understood Massey’s concept, the discussion in this paper will relate her concept to the question of place development and especially, the issue on how to increase social as well as economic development of an ethnically divided community.

In the discussion, it will be noted that all the place-descriptions observed by the disparate domestic actors represents a particular ‘global sense of place’, although the results of this method of place-making still remains complex to seize empirically.

By comparing ideas from personal surveillance and conceptual assessment, Massey comprehensively addresses issues relating to globalisation as well as time-space solidity. In an article that is often cited by various geographers and scholars, Massey introduces a different understanding of place that includes globalisation in a constructive manner.

In explanation, she contradicts previous concepts developed by David Harvey as well as other Marxists who often portrayed the negative effects of globalisation. Massey globalised Kilburn Hill Street in North London and observed how various domestic ideas could be viewed as an expression of domestically interacting ‘global’ developments as well as flows (Massey 1991).

From her observation, she infers that place ought to be considered as dynamic domestic and international, social as well as economic relations. Although she concurs that there is an element of specificity in place made of certain collections of social connections, she asserts that factors such transformation human behaviours and relations with a foreign culture can actually affect a given place.

According to Massey, a community is not made up of individuals who reside close to each other but instead it is composed of persons who have similar interests or challenges. In comparing the relationship between geography and social connections, Massey asserts that individuals who live in a particular area are likely to share views and challenges with people residing in other areas in the world, foreigners (Massey 1991).

Massey concept has raised various debates as scholars try to understand how global can be seen as locally-based as well as how one can construe that, in relation to the meaning of place. One of the commonly debated issues involves places with ethnically disparate residents as portrayed in Kilburn Street.

The main question revolves around the influence of the sense of place founded on the reasoning that there is global in the local coupled with how it can assist local societies to introduce mutual programmes aimed at fortifying the socio-economic status of the entire community (Massey & Jess 1995).

Another debate revolving around ethnically disparate communities that have adopted a wider scope is the significance of entrepreneurship particularly in the case of retail trade and health care services. In the case of immigrants, entrepreneurship gives them an opportunity to improve the socio-economic status within their native community and in the foreign location.

It is normally intricate for first generation immigrants to get employment because of cultural disparities and lack of relevant qualifications. However, subsequent immigrants find it easy to practice entrepreneurship because they are aware of the culture, resources, and legal procedures in the host country.

Hence, self-employment can act as a means of survival for people residing and operating in a given place. Subsequently, it can help in improving the socio-economic position of a whole neighbourhood (Featherstone 2003).

In reference to Massey’s concept, the discussion in this paper will examine the link between ethnic entrepreneurship and place development and how three clusters of participants that is, entrepreneurs, retail traders and domestic lawmakers as well as foreign expert can combine their skills to create a foundation for the community investments plans.

The paper uses a neighbourhood similar to Kilburn Street, which has developed to an ethnically diverse place and it has become a core part is municipal reconstruction plans.

In essence, the discussion in this paper acts as an evaluation of Massey’s rational accomplishment as well as try to combine Massey’s opinions on the extensive debate on self-employment and its relation to place into developing a place with multi-ethnic community (Adams, Hoelscher & Till 2001).

In her explanation of space and place, Massey infers that spatial relations ought not to be viewed with uncertainty. Every place is composed of various distinct qualities that are difficult to comprehend within a rigid local surrounding. These qualities evolve from the combination and intertwining series of incidents as well as processes, normally transpiring at a scope broader that the place in question (Mayer 2008).

By including the aspect of ‘global’ in the definition, Massey succeeds in escaping the ‘endogeneity trap’ that has challenged several contemporary geographers. These series of combination and intertwinement, which Massey refers to as trajectories, affect places in two major forms: introducing types of investments as well as culture and redefines construed histories and spatial relations.

These trajectories assist local participants to create a sense of place as well as participate in movements of place-making. In essence, trajectories are crucial components of place-making (Massey & Jess 1995).

By recognising the fact that trajectories have diverse effects in place, an individual develops an authentic candidness about the future.

It is important to note that when addressing the issue of space and society, theoretical frames do not create neutral notion because they are entrenched in social as well as political compositions that are initiated through policy making, communicated and eventually emphasised by academic analysts.

Scholars have observed that there is no single description of a town because different people may describe it by underpinning certain features and ignoring others. Hence, every trajectory embodies how various practices are influenced by wider transformations and trends (Featherstone 2003).

By understanding the relationship between sense of place and trajectories, one adopts clear perspective when it comes to handling the issue of place. The sense of place explains how a place is related to other parts of the globe through the trajectories.

Massey emphasises that understanding the relationship between trajectories and sense of place helps one to understand the numerous developments and narratives that influence place-making. This concept neutralises the contemporary idea that the trajectories of place combine to form a certain product in given time.

Instead, Massey’s conception provides that the trajectories integrate to form particular union as well as spatial relations hence, creating a product and political manifestations (Massey & Jess 1995). From the relationship of trajectories and sense of place, one can deduce that the former provides a place with resources as well as semiotic factors such as business investments and population transformation that nourish the sense of place.

On the other hand, the latter influence how the trajectories are adopted and shared within the local area. A ‘global sense of place’ in this situation provides even a better way of creating ample reactions to trajectories that occur in a wider scope such as those involving foreign investments, migration or even global drug peddling.

Thus, a society that draws its information from ‘a global sense of place’ is at a upper hand when it comes to handling problems or opportunities that occur at non-domestic scales, but affect the local residents (Massey 1991).

The idea of trajectory underpins the semiotic as well as material features of the globe. It begins it observation from a practical point view, which is an essential component of place-making. Thus, trajectories are often disclosed and categorised according to the features of a given place. Nonetheless, the idea does not define a type semiotic structure where particular components and associations prevail.

In trajectories, what is of essence is the development of an integrated effect on place-making rather than uniting diverse network (Adams, Hoelscher & Till 2001). In reference to Massey’s article, we apply the concept of a ‘global sense of place’ to an ethnically divers Dutch community in Willemskwartier. Most of its residents are immigrants who took over the houses, which were initially inhabited by native citizens.

Historically, the area has faced various social and environmental predicaments such as joblessness, increased rate of crime and environment dilapidation because of poor physical environment (Swyngedouw 2004).

The neighbourhood grew to host several small enterprises that gave an opportunity for illegal business such as global narcotic trade. The growth of drug peddling led to the emergence of violent groups who have caused a lot of mayhem in the neighbourhood.

The mounting problems drew the attention on the government and it initiated several mitigation policies including a series of urban planning programmes, which acts as a good trajectory to analyse (Massey 2004).

Another substantial factor to consider as a trajectory is the recent development of entrepreneurship in the neighbourhood with entrepreneurs from different ethnic groups accelerating economic growth in the community. A majority of these entrepreneurs are immigrants from Turkey who adopted the Dutch culture and have adequate knowledge of the community’s resources (Spaan, Hillmann & Van Naerssen 2005).

The high population of Turkish entrepreneurs signal their desire to venture into retail business. The policy of multiculturalism has played a major role in raising the number of immigrant entrepreneurs in the community. The cultural outlook on place-making, which considers how the residents interact in issues relating to community development, also provides another trajectory (Razin 2002).

The development of the Dutch urban programmes has been dominated by logical planning as well as policies because of the emphasis given to communication. One of the main planning programmes include the standard zoning, which monitors the allotment of residential houses, retail premises as well as business areas through accurate estimation and prediction.

Another popular programme is the land-use plan that was initiated in 2006 to promote the constructive attitude on ethnic entrepreneurship and thus permitting mixed purposes. Other programmes have also been adopted to check the growth of the hospitality industry, which has attracted several investors.

The huge investment in the hospitality industry has led to the introduction of laws that entrepreneurs from venturing into the industry. Furthermore, the government sought other means to handle the issue no within the standard regulatory framework.

This action created opportunities for novel types of events as well as enticements to complement the urban planning trajectory. Moreover, the government has also made an effort to fight drug peddling and illegal groups though the deployment of law enforcers and expropriation (Featherstone 2003).

The second trajectory, viz. ethnic entrepreneurship, can play a significant role in improving the status of a given place, in this case Wilemskwartier. The trajectory is based on narratives characterised by policy and academic issues, showing how migrant entrepreneurs improved the socioeconomic status of the community.

Various scholars have asserted that the duty of immigrant investors should be associated with the opportunities as well as challenges that develop from domestic organisational and market environment (Lin 1995). Most of the entrepreneurs who conduct business in Wilemskwartier invest their capital in the neighbourhood although they do not reside there.

The decision to invest their capital in the area was inspired by the data they received about the neighbourhood through social connections. Their social relations with the inhabitants, they learnt how to conduct business in the area successfully, which in itself is a manifestation of the concept of a ‘global sense of place’. The large numbers of Turkish and Moroccan shops are evident across the streets.

The original intention of these entrepreneurs was to serve their own community but the demands of their products and services increased as native and other immigrants developed an interest in services. In a bid to satisfy this massive number of clients, the entrepreneurs have been compelled to expand their services to cater for all Dutch-speaking clients (Lin 1995).

The entrepreneurs have been successful mainly because of the strong personal as well as social relations when it comes to establishing and seeking workforce for the enterprises. The third trajectory develops from the manner in which the neighbourhood handled the social, cultural, as well as economic affiliations.

Although the authorities were initially hesitant to accept the inhabitation of the immigrants, they eventually welcomed their existence. Their attitude changed when the immigrant begun paying taxes and participating in domestic politics (Adams, Hoelscher & Till 2001).

Analysing the Willemskwartier through the Massey’s concept of ‘global sense of place’, one can infer that the place has challenges and opportunities that are not only affected by local communities but also global factors. Moreover, the area also shows how trajectories unite with various spatialities and at times even clash.

In reference to the community in Willemskwartier, one can extract the ‘political’ in two primary levels: trajectory and place. The urban planning projects initiated by the government are correlated to the first, second, and third trajectory (Massey 2004).

The developments witnessed in Willemskwartier reveal that the resurgence of an ethnically disparate society entails the merging of ethnic uniqueness, economic integration, as well as modernisation of traditions. Moreover, for geographers to identify trajectories and create conjectural initiatives, it is important to consider the hypothetical concepts that relate to the trajectories.

From the discussion in this paper, one gets to understand the relationship between global influences, spatial relations, and trajectory. Geography is a matter of theory and thus various geographers such as Harvey, Massey, and Watts have given various definitions of space and even as people struggle to understand their concepts, it is important to question their presuppositions.

Adams, P, Hoelscher, S & Till, K 2001, Textures of place, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis.

Featherstone, D 2003, ‘Spatialities of transnational resistance to globalisation: the maps of grievance of the Inter-Continental Caravan’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers , vol. 28 no. 4, pp.404–421.

Lin, J 1995, ‘Ethnic places, postmodernism, and urban change in Houston’, Sociological Quarterly , vol.36 no.4, pp.629-647.

Massey, D 1991, ‘A global sense of place’, Marxism Today, vol.8 no.2, pp 24-29.

Massey, D 2004, ‘Geographies of responsibility’, Geographiska Annaler, vol.86 no.5, pp.5-18.

Massey, D & Jess, P 1995, A Place in the World? Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Mayer, M 2008, ‘To what end do we theorise sociospatial relations’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol.26 no.4,pp. 414-419.

Razin, E 2002, ‘The economic context, embeddedness and immigrant entrepreneurs’, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research , vol.8 no.2, pp.162-167.

Spaan, E, Hillmann, F & Van Naerssen, A 2005, Asian migrants and European labour markets: patterns and processes of immigrant labour market insertion in Europe, Routledge, Abingdon.

Swyngedouw, E 2004, ‘Globalisation or Glocalisation? Networks, Territories and Rescaling’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs , vol.17 no.1, pp. 25-48.

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IvyPanda. (2019, July 1). Doreen Massey’s Concept of a Global Sense of Place. https://ivypanda.com/essays/doreen-masseys-concept-of-a-global-sense-of-place/

"Doreen Massey’s Concept of a Global Sense of Place." IvyPanda , 1 July 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/doreen-masseys-concept-of-a-global-sense-of-place/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Doreen Massey’s Concept of a Global Sense of Place'. 1 July.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Doreen Massey’s Concept of a Global Sense of Place." July 1, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/doreen-masseys-concept-of-a-global-sense-of-place/.

1. IvyPanda . "Doreen Massey’s Concept of a Global Sense of Place." July 1, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/doreen-masseys-concept-of-a-global-sense-of-place/.

Bibliography

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Studies on Seamus Heaney

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The sense of place in Seamus Heaney’s poetry

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1 "The Sense of Place" is the subject, and the title, which Seamus Heaney chose for a lecture given in the Ulster Museum in January 1977 and which is reprinted in Preoccupations 1 . Much of what I have to say will be, of course, based on that lecture, although I won’t, I hope, be guilty of plagiarism since Heaney’s illustrations of his theme are taken from other poets: Wordsworth, Yeats, Kavanagh, Montague, Hewitt or, more briefly, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon and not from his own work which will be my main, if not my sole, concern.

2 Seamus Heaney is quite aware that the sense of place and "the relationship between a literature and a locale with its common language" are not a "particularly Irish phenomenon" 2 but, he asserts, "the peculiar fractures in our history, north and south, and... (the) possession of the land and possession of different languages" have rendered them more important and significant in Ireland.

3 "To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from", Carson McCullers stated, and what is true everywhere of the man in the street is perhaps truer still for the poet who, even if he comes from peasant stock, has been forced to swap the plough for the stars. Yeats’ insistence on being rooted, whether when referring to himself or to John Millington Synge, Heaney equating the spade and the pen:

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it. 3

4 have always struck me, personally, as typical instances of wishful thinking.

5 But mad Ireland, -- more than any other country, -- is bound to hurt her poets into making sure that they belong, and where they belong.

6 It is not only a question of historical fractures. Many scholars, — including myself 4 , have insisted, before Heaney, on the inevitable link between soil or landscape and the creative imagination in Ireland. One of the conferences of IASAIL (Galway, 1976) was devoted to "Place, Personality and the Irish Writer" and in the published proceedings of that conference 5 , Pr. A. Norman Jeffares, among others, stresses the fact that part of the distinctiveness of what he calls Anglo-Irish literature is the constant preoccupation of the authors with the physical entity of Ireland, something typical of Gaelic nature poetry, as Heaney himself reminds us in another essay of his (The God in the Tree) 6 , but which is transferred very early to Irish literature in English as evidenced, say, in Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village 7 . The Irish landscape, as Heaney tells us in A Sense of Place, after recalling a phrase by John Montague 8 , is composed of places steeped in association with the older culture, -- whether the world of the ancient epics or the fairy universe of thorntrees or various symbols of the other world, -- or connected with more modern instances of poetic reconstitution, or both, like Ben Bulben or Knocknarea; it comprises sites that are truly "sacramental" - those, for instance, that are linked with the wanderings of the patron-saint of Ireland, and it is no accident that the setting of the second part of our poet’s last collection, Station Island (1984) should be St. Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg, already used by William Carleton, Sean O’Faolain and others.

7 But the historical fractures have, evidently, played their part: the little room left to the natives may very well have had an influence on their topographical minuteness even when, like Joyce, they had left the country to become town-dwellers generations ago. His father used to say of him: "If that fellow was dropped in the middle of the Sahara, he’d sit, be God, and make a map of it". Also the linguistic dispossession -- the changes of place names -- of which Brian Friel, Heaney’s friend, has made such an extraordinary dramatisation in his 1980 play: Translations 9 set at the period of the Great Famine when British authorities out of love for the sister-island - this is, at least, what the commanding officer said - decided to standardise, and therefore anglicize, all such names, to make up an ordnance survey. In Friel’s work, another English officer (whose sympathy for Ireland will prove fatal) remarks, however, that "something is being eroded" 10 and recites the litany of Gaelic words with love. Heaney, in his turn, finds in the name of his native farm (referred to, for instance, in the introductory poems of North 11 with its double possible etymology for the second term ( Mossbawn = bawn: the name the English colonists gave to their fortified farmhouses or ban, gaelic for "white")" a metaphor of the split culture of Ulster" 12 , and it is hardly necessary to insist on his propensity to recite the place-names of his province and express his delight in them:

Strangford, Arklow, Carrickfergus Belmullet and Ventry Stay, forgotten like sentries. Shoreline 13 Anahorish My "place of clear water"... Anahorish, soft gradient of consonant, vowel-meadow... Anahorish 14

8 and the linguistic awareness is to be found in many other poems as well, in Broagh 15 , in A new Song 16 , whenever the river Moyola is mentioned, for instance. The Antaeus-like delight of the dispossessed is obviously shared by both Heaney and Joyce, and the former’s "astonishing number of place names... dotted about his work" (I quote from Blake Morrison who has had the courage to draw up a list 17 ) "make a good large-scale map of Ireland a useful thing to have to hand when reading him" as it is with the dinnseanches , the old Celtic poems which, as Heaney tells us in Preoccupations again 18 , "relate the original meanings of (these) names and constitute a form of mythological etymology".

9 The nature of Seamus Heaney’s interest for places is undoubtedly to be found in such ancestral practice, as well as in the dispossession and in the political desire to repossess; in instinct as well as culture. The latter distinction he makes in A Sense of Place:

I think there are two ways in which place is known and cherished, two ways which may be complementary but which are just likely to be antipathetic. One is lived, illiterate and unconscious, the other learned, literate and conscious 19 .

10 Patrick Kavanagh represents for him the first group, John Montague the second. He does not state, however, where he places himself.

11 Yet, we can easily find the answer elsewhere, apart from his practice, for instance in his preface to Sweeney Astray:

My fundamental relation with Sweeney ... is topographical. His kingdom lay in what is now south County and north County Down, and for over thirty years I lived on the verges of that territory, in sight of some of Sweeney’s places and in earshot of others -- Slemish, Rasharkin, Benevenagh, Dunseverick, the Bann, the Roe, the Mournes - (The litany again!). When I began work on the version, I had just moved to Wicklow, not all that far from Sweeney’s final resting ground at St. Mullins 20 .

12 The departure point is not the literary connection, but the fact that the places have been linked with Heaney’s abode or abodes. The connection comes only after, as it does, for that matter, with Station Island. In the beginning is the flesh. And I am under the impression that it may remain to the end.

13 For if anything can be described as nearly obsessive in the place-poetry of our author, it definitely is the male-female relationship, the male attitude of the poet towards the female earth or country, or spot: bogland whose "wet centre is bottomless" 21 is called elsewhere:

insatiable bride. sword-swallower,

14 and the narrator carries on:

I found a turf-spade hidden under bracken, laid flat, and overgrown with a green fog As I raised it the soft lips of the growth muttered and split a tawny rut opening at my feet like a shed skin the shaft wettish as I sank it upright... 22

15 Among countries described, it is not only Ireland that is shown to partake of feminity. In Night Drive:

Italy Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere 23

16 not to mention the feminine allusion in the verb "to bleed" used a few times before describing a harvesting machine:

A combine groaning its way late bled seeds across it work-light.

17 But Ireland is, of course, foremost in descriptions of the type, in Ocean’s Love to Ireland 24 , in Act of Union where England speaking asserts:

And I am still imperially Male, leaving you with the pain, The rending process in the colony,

The battering ram, the boom burst from within... No treaty I foresee will salve completely your tracked And stretchmarked body, the big pain That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again 25 .

18 as it was in Traditions where her "guttural muse" was "bulled" by English poetry,

while custom, that most sovereign mistress’ beds us down into the British isles 26 .

19 And for more limited spots, there is of course the "old spongy growth from a drain between two fields" which Heaney once saw a man clearing out and which inspired him with the poem Undine 27 spoken by the freed water personified as a nympha poem which is entirely made up of one prolonged sexual metaphor:

He slashed the briars, shovelled up grey silt To give me right of way in my own drains And I ran quick for him, cleaned out my rust. He halted, saw me finally disrobed, Running clear, with apparent unconcern. The he walked by me. I rippled and I churned Where ditches intersected near the river Until he dug a spade deep in my flank And took me to him. I swallowed his trench Gratefully, dispersing myself for love Down in his roots, climbing his brassy grain - But once he knew my welcome, I alone Could give him subtle increase and reflection He explored me so completely, each limb Lost its cold freedom. Human, warmed to him.

20 More than the fact that this may be, in Heaney’s words, "a myth about agriculture, about the way water is tamed and humanized when . . . (it) becomes involved with seed", an explanation to which he did not seem to attach extraordinary importance ("it is as good as any", he said), what matters is the real human metamorphosis emphasised in the last line. Seamus Heaney does not go all the way towards pantheism as his master Wordsworth did in Tintern Abbey but he certainly courts a form of "pancosmism" in which the beauteous forms of the larger world assume the shape of his beloved creatures.

21 In Fosterage, the poem from North dedicated to Michael Mc Laverty, Heaney quotes the saying:

Description is revelation 28

22 the phrase applies wonderfully well to him.

23 Seamus Heaney’s involvement with Irish places and landscape (although he does not seem to like the latter word:

I don’t think of (the territory that I know) as the Irish landscape. I think of it as a place that I know is ordinary, and I can lay my hand on it and know it, and the words come alive and get a kind of personality when they’re involved with it 29 .

24 does not bind him to the peculiar limitations from which they suffer but he manages each time to find a way out.

25 There is, first of all, the danger of excessive regionalism, which Heaney is far from being alone to fear: Irish writers would not have emphasised so heavily the universality of the local otherwise, from Yeats’ "the grass-blade carries the universe upon its point"; Joyce’s: "If I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities in the world. In the particular is contained the universal; "Patrick Kavanagh’s "Parochialism" is universal; it deals with the fundamentals" 30 .

26 Seamus Heaney evidently shares Derek Mahon’s search for "a voice which, whilst remaining true to the ancient intonations, (has) something to say beyond the shores of Ireland" 31 . The shores of Ulster might have appeared more problematic at any rate before the recent poetical flowering but surely not the West, since Synge’s Riders to the Sea. Is it on account of that already recognised universal quality that Heaney chooses the Aran Islands as the setting of his least parochial place-poem?

The timeless waves, bright sifting, broken glass, Came dazzling around, into the rocks, Came glinting, sifting from the Americas To possess Aran. Or did Aran rush To throw wide arms of rock around a tide That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash? Did sea define the land or land the sea? Each drew new meaning from the wave’s collision. Sea broke on land to full identity 32 .

27 But in Shoreline 33 , the Northern coast is seen to partake in the general seascape of Ireland as a whole. And anyway, outside Ireland, the particular problem which I have raised would probably never arise at all...

28 The Irish landscape is more limited than the seascape:

We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening - Everywhere the eye concedes to Encroaching horizon, Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye Of a tarn. Our unfenced country Is bog that keeps crusting Between the sights of the sun 34 .

29 The Irish landscape, particularly if compared to the American one as sung by Theodore Roethke, is limited horizontally on the surface, but not vertically in depth, for there is the bog, another of Heaney’s obsessions, he tells us in an interview by James Randall 35 . The bog is linked up with the instinctive sense of place which I have been trying to foreground ("The smell of turf-smoke, for example, has a terrific nostalgic effect on me. It has to do with the script that’s written into your senses from the minute you begin to breathe") but it introduces an archeological dimension and archeology seems to have a certain fascination for Irish writers from the North: beside Heaney with his diggings, soundings or trial pieces recovered from Viking Dublin, we find Brian Friel again, this time with Volunteers 36 , a play inscribed to Heaney. Bogland, with the objects that can be exhumed from it, or even the buried corpses like the Iron Age Jutland Tollundman whom P. J. Glob’s The Bog People revealed, thus adds memory to the landscape. The landscape could itself offer an image of history, as in Gifts of Rain 37 where such words as "lost fields", "uncastled", "planted", "cropping", "crops rotted", conjure up the Irish past. But the underground allows better to unravel the successive layers of history and consciousness, some happy, most others sinister, which are essential parts of Ireland’s history and pre-history but in some ways also common to the rest of Europe:

Some day I will go to Aarhus

30 Heaney says in The Tollund Man 38 -- he did --

Out there in Jutland In the old man-killing parishes I will feel Unhappy and at home 39 .

31 Bogland, in other words, not only brings depth into Seamus Heaney’s landscape. It also adds to its width: North, as the collection of the name showed, ceased to be Northern Ireland alone to include Scandinavia as well, there are several ways of joining the European Community.

32 But, as with all his Irish predecessors, there would have been no broadening process for Heaney if it had not started in the motherland to which his thoughts come back even when "westering in California" six thousand miles away, to which he will cling even when, in his later poetry, he learns

to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth.

33 and he comes to favour the inner world more than the external one.

Notes de bas de page

1 Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations, Selected Prose, 1968-1978, London and Boston, Faber and Faber, 1980, 224 p. 131-149.

2 Ibid., 136.

3 Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist, London, Faber and Faber, 1966, 57, p. 14; Selected Poems (SP), 1965-1975, London and Boston, Faber and Faber, 1980, 136 p., 11.

4 Patrick Rafroidi, L’Irlande et le Romantisme, Lille, PUL, Paris, Editions Universitaires, 1972, XX, 783 p., 338 sq.... (English translation: Irish Literature in English, The Romantic Period, Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1980, 261 sq.)

5 Andrew Carpenter ed., Place, Personality and the Irish Writer, Gerrards, Cross, Colin Smythe, 1977, 199 p., "Irish Literary Studies, 1."

6 Preoccupations, 181-189.

7 See my paper: "Goldsmith ou la Géographie du Coeur", Etudes Irlandaises, IX, 1984, 97-105.

8 "A manuscript which we have lost the skill to read", Preoccupations, 132.

9 1981 for the publication in London by Faber and Faber, 70 p.

10 Ibid., 43.

11 Seamus Heaney: North, London, Faber and Faber, 1975, 73 p., 8; SP, 98.

12 Preoccupations, 35.

13 Seamus Heaney, Door into the Dark, London, Faber and Faber, 1969, 56 p.; SP, 52.

14 Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out, London, Faber and Faber, 1972, 80 p., 16; SP, 58.

15 Ibid., 27; SP, 66.

16 Ibid., 33; SP, 70.

17 Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney, London and New-York, Methuen, 1982, 95 p., 41.

18 Preoccupations, 131.

20 Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray, a version from the Irish, Deny, Field Day Publications, 1983, XX, 77 p., IX.

21 "Bogland", Door into the Dark, 56; SP, 54.

22 "Kinship", North, 41-42; SP, 120-121.

23 Door into the Dark, 34,; SP, 37.

24 North, 46.

25 Ibid., 49-50; SP, 125-126.

26 Wintering Out, 31; SP, 68.

27 Door into the Dark, 26; SP, 34. The prose quotations come from "Feeling into Words", Preoccupations, 52-54.

28 North, 71; SP, 134.

29 Heaney, in a television inteview with Patrick Garland: "Poets on Poetry", The Listener, XC, 2.328, 8 nov. 1973, 629.

30 Quoted in Preoccupations, 139.

31 "Poetry in Northern Ireland", Twentieth Century Studies, IV, nov. 1970, 89-93.

32 "Lovers on Aran", Death of a Naturalist, 47; SP, 25.

33 Door into the Dark, 51; SP, 51.

34 "Bogland", Door into the Dark, 55; SP, 53.

35 James Randall,"An Interview with Seamus Heaney", Ploughshares, V, 3, 1979, 7, 22, 17-19.

36 First performed 1975, London and Boston, Faber and Faber, 1979, 70 p.

37 Wintering Out, 23; SP, 63.

38 Wintering Out, 47-48; SP, 78-79.

39 My italics.

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books . Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

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2 Sense of Place: Humanistic Geography, Literature, and Spatial Identity

• Published: October 2022
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‘Sense of place’, a buzzword in the sphere of modern humanistic geography, has been interpreted differently by different critics. To some it is the idea or feeling of a place in the mind of people living on it. It may also stand for some typical traits that a place displays and some places do not. The idea of a certain place cannot inherently be positive always—there are feelings like fear of living in a place or hatred for a particular place. Again responses to a certain place can be different to two different individuals given their social, cultural, or political positions. Through a study of Seamus Heaney’s representation of Northern Ireland in his poetry, the chapter seeks to locate the idea of sense of place in literature.

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Thoreau's sense of place : essays in American environmental writing

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Sense of Place - Essay:

Abstract: This easy asks the question what is identity and how does a sense of place / belonging relate to this concept? It is argued in this essay, that it’s via the processes of memory and belonging / place attachments, that we attain an individual / social identity. This process has been analysed within the context of memory and via a belonging / place attachment contextual processes.

Related Papers

Allison Stern

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate how powerful experiences of place shape one’s sense of self. The human–place relationship is germane to today’s rapidly changing global landscape of political instability, conflict, climate change, population growth, and lack of opportunity, all of which are increasing human displacement, migration, and mobility. Further exploration of place identity is thus relevant to addressing these issues. This interdisciplinary study examined the literature in sense of place, sense of self, place identity, and transformative experiences. The research question was: How do powerful experiences of place form, inform, and transform one’s sense of self? This qualitative study used Finlay and Evans’s (2009) phenomenological Relational Approach. The data sources were in-depth interviews with 8 participants, selected through purposive and snowball sampling. Interview were conducted in 2 parts. The first part uncovered participants’ essential descriptions and meanings of powerfully transformative experiences of place. 6 themes emerged: (a) natural elements and geography, (b) community, roots, and belonging, (c) aliveness, wholeness, and the cycle of life, (d) freedom, adventure, and escape, (e) possibility, becoming, liminality, and the unknown, and (f) enchantment, the sacred, and coherence. Data from the second part were categorized by how experiences formed, informed, or transformed participants’ sense of self and life path. 5 dimensions of experiences were also noted: peak, plateau, nadir, epiphany, and liminal states. Further analysis revealed 4 larger patterns. The first pattern was an opposing tension of forces between participants’ sense of self-continuity and change, based on 3 meta themes of The Known, The Unknown, and The Balancing Present. The second pattern related to participants’ seeking similar place experiences. The third pattern noted variations in dimensions of experiences across the lifespan. The fourth pattern pointed to participants’ felt-sense of coherence and spirituality. This study contributes to a greater understanding of how powerful experiences of place form, inform, and transform individuals’ relationships with themselves, others, and the larger world. Implications indicate a need for the cultivation of greater awareness of the people–place relationship toward a more coherent partnership. Further research into co-affecting factors influencing place identity formation and development is needed.

Bernardo Hernandez

Journal of Environmental Psychology

Maria Lewicka

Psyecology: Revista Biling??e de Psicolog??a Ambiental

Tomeu Vidal

Charis Anton

This study explores the relationships between place of residence, living in a threatened place and the subsets of place attachment: place identity and place dependence. Six hundred participants living in south-west Western Australia in rural and urban areas with varying degrees of bushfire risk responded to surveys asking about their reasons for living in their local area, their place attachment and their socio-demographic details. MANOVAs revealed a significant effect of place of residence on place identity with rural residents reporting higher place identity than urban dwellers. Urban dwellers reported lower place dependence than rural dwellers except when they lived in a fire prone area, in which case their place dependence was on par with that of rural residents. Socio-demographic predictors of both place identity and place dependence to the home and local area were also explored, these included length of residence, education, and owning one’s home.

Judith Phillips , Nigel Walford

The aim of this paper is to explore how heritage contributes to 'sense of place' and how engagement with heritage can aid social sustainability. These are relationships tacitly accepted and little discussed in the literature. The paper draws on an analysis of in-depth interview data collected amongst individuals engaging with heritage in the rural northern uplands of the UK. The paper identifies within the environmental psychology literature a framework for investigating sense of place which is then used to analyse the interview data. Cultural heritage is found to contribute to sense of place as a source of pride and by supporting feelings of distinctiveness and senses of continuity across time. Engaging with heritage moreover develops belonging through forms of social capital thereby building stronger communities. The paper concludes that as a process of 'memory talk', as an expression of cultural distinctiveness or in its built or natural physical form, heritage contributes to sense of place by providing a network of references helping individuals place themselves in the past and the present. Using theories of social capital, it is possible to see that engaging with heritage can potentially aid social sustainability.

Andrés Di Masso , John Dixon

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