Changing Senses of Place: Navigating Global Challenges 1108477267, 9781108477260

Table of contents :
01.0_pp_i_ii_Changing_Senses_of_Place
02.0_pp_iii_iii_Changing_Senses_of_Place
03.0_pp_iv_iv_Copyright_page
04.0_pp_v_vi_Dedication
05.0_pp_vii_x_Contents
06.0_pp_xi_xvi_Contributors
07.0_pp_xvii_xviii_Foreword
08.0_pp_xix_xix_Preface
09.0_pp_xx_xx_Acknowledgements
10.0_pp_1_18_Introduction
11.0_pp_19_76_Climate_Change_and_Ecological_Regime_Shifts
11.1_pp_21_31_Coral_Reef_Collapse_and_Sense_of_Place_in_the_Great_Barrier_Reef_Australia
11.2_pp_32_42_Navigating_the_Temporalities_of_Place_in_Climate_Adaptation
11.3_pp_43_52_The_PlaceSubjectivity_Continuum_after_a_Disaster
11.4_pp_53_64_Changing_Sense_of_Place_and_Local_Responses_to_Bengalurus_Disappearing_Lakes
11.5_pp_65_76_Place-Making_for_Regional_Conservation
12.0_pp_77_128_Migration_Mobility_and_Belonging
12.1_pp_79_91_Exploring_Senses_of_Place_Through_Narratives_of_Tourism_Growth_and_Place_Change
12.2_pp_92_102_No_One_Is_a_Prophet_at_Home
12.3_pp_103_115_Place_Detachment_and_the_Psychology_of_Nonbelonging
12.4_pp_116_128_Sense_of_Place_in_Urban_China
13.0_pp_129_168_Renewable_Energy_Transitions
13.1_pp_131_143_Farming_Landscapes_Energy_Landscapes_or_Both
13.2_pp_144_155_Auto-Photography_Senses_of_Place_and_Public_Support_for_Marine_Renewable_Energy
13.3_pp_156_168_A_Life_Course_Approach_to_the_Pluralisation_of_Sense_of_Place
14.0_pp_169_206_Nationalism_and_Competing_Territorial_Claims
14.1_pp_171_181_Ethnocentric_Bias_in_Perceptions_of_Place
14.2_pp_182_192_Sense_of_Place_Between_Spatial_Justice_and_Urban_Violence_in_Palestine
14.3_pp_193_206_The_Political_Ecology_of_Place_Meaning
15.0_pp_207_244_Urban_Change
15.1_pp_209_220_Uncovering_Competing_Senses_of_Place_in_a_Context_of_Rapid_Urban_Change
15.2_pp_221_233_Gentrification_and_the_Creative_Destruction_of_Sense_of_Place
15.3_pp_234_244_Looking_at_the_Urban_Invisibles
16.0_pp_245_284_Technological_and_Legal_Transformations
16.1_pp_247_258_Electronically_Mediated_Sense_of_Place
16.2_pp_259_270_A_Dynamic_View_of_Local_Knowledge_and_Epistemic_Bonds_to_Place
16.3_pp_271_284_Social_Media_and_Experiences_of_Nature
17.0_pp_285_328_Design_and_Planning_Strategies_for_Changing_Senses_of_Place
17.1_pp_287_300_Local_Senses_of_Place_in_a_Global_World
17.2_pp_301_312_Urban_Experimentation_and_the_Role_of_Senses_of_Place
17.3_pp_313_328_Domestic_Matters
18.0_pp_329_347_Conclusion
18.1_pp_331_347_Navigating_the_Spaciousness_of_Uncertainties_Posed_by_Global_Challenges
19.0_pp_348_358_Index

Citation preview

Changing Senses of Place Navigating Global Challenges Global challenges ranging from climate change and ecological regime shifts to refugee crises and post-national territorial claims are rapidly moving ecosystem thresholds and altering the social fabric of societies worldwide. This book addresses the vital question of how to navigate the contested forces of stability and change in a world shaped by multiple interconnected global challenges. It proposes that senses of place is a vital concept for supporting individual and social processes for navigating these contested forces and encourages scholars to rethink how to theorise and conceptualise changes in senses of place in the face of global challenges. It also makes the case that our concepts of sense of place need to be revisited, given that our experiences of place are changing. This book is essential reading for those seeking a new understanding of the multiple and shifting experiences of place. Christopher M. Raymond is Professor in Sustainability Science, Sustainability Transformations and Ecosystem Services at the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS), Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, and Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki, Finland. He serves as Coordinating Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Values Assessment. He has published extensively on the multiple values of nature. Lynne C. Manzo is an environmental psychologist and Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. Her research focuses on place attachment, displacement, social justice and the politics of place. Daniel R. Williams is a Research Social Scientist at the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. He has published extensively on place-based conservation, adaptive governance of landscape change, and the science of practice in wildfire and climate adaptation. Andrés Di Masso is Associate Professor at the Departmental Section of Social Psychology, University of Barcelona, Spain. His work focuses on place-discourse, power and the everyday politics of people–place relations. He has contributed innovative theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches to place attachment, sense of place and place identity. He leads an international network on social change (GRICS). Timo von Wirth is Assistant Professor at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences and the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, the Netherlands. His work addresses the dynamics and contestations of places in transformation. He has published extensively on the role of place in sustainability transitions, on the relationship of place attachment and urban change, and on the advancement of measuring the quality of life in urban contexts.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Changing Senses of Place Navigating Global Challenges Edited by

CHRISTOPHER M. RAYMOND University of Helsinki

LYNNE C. MANZO University of Washington

DANIEL R. WILLIAMS USDA Forest Service, Colorado

ANDRÉS DI MASSO University of Barcelona

TIMO VON WIRTH Erasmus University Rotterdam

Published online by Cambridge University Press

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108477260 DOI: 10.1017/9781108769471 © Christopher M. Raymond, Lynne C. Manzo, Andrés Di Masso and Timo von Wirth 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Raymond, Christopher M., editor. | Manzo, Lynne, editor. | Williams, Daniel R. (Research social scientist), editor. | Di Masso, Andrés, editor. | von Wirth, Timo, author. Title: Changing senses of place : navigating global challenges / edited by Christopher M. Raymond, University of Helsinki, Finland, Lynne C. Manzo, University of Washington, Seattle, Daniel R. Williams, USDA Forest Service, Colorado, Andrés Di Masso, University of Barcelona, Timo von Wirth, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021009275 (print) | LCCN 2021009276 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108477260 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781108769471 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Human geography. | Nature – Effect of human beings on. | BISAC: NATURE / Ecology Classification: LCC GF50 .C43 2021 (print) | LCC GF50 (ebook) | DDC 304.2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009275 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009276 ISBN 978-1-108-47726-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Changing Senses of Place Navigating Global Challenges Global challenges ranging from climate change and ecological regime shifts to refugee crises and post-national territorial claims are rapidly moving ecosystem thresholds and altering the social fabric of societies worldwide. This book addresses the vital question of how to navigate the contested forces of stability and change in a world shaped by multiple interconnected global challenges. It proposes that senses of place is a vital concept for supporting individual and social processes for navigating these contested forces and encourages scholars to rethink how to theorise and conceptualise changes in senses of place in the face of global challenges. It also makes the case that our concepts of sense of place need to be revisited, given that our experiences of place are changing. This book is essential reading for those seeking a new understanding of the multiple and shifting experiences of place. Christopher M. Raymond is Professor in Sustainability Science, Sustainability Transformations and Ecosystem Services at the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS), Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, and Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki, Finland. He serves as Coordinating Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Values Assessment. He has published extensively on the multiple values of nature. Lynne C. Manzo is an environmental psychologist and Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. Her research focuses on place attachment, displacement, social justice and the politics of place. Daniel R. Williams is a Research Social Scientist at the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. He has published extensively on place-based conservation, adaptive governance of landscape change, and the science of practice in wildfire and climate adaptation. Andrés Di Masso is Associate Professor at the Departmental Section of Social Psychology, University of Barcelona, Spain. His work focuses on place-discourse, power and the everyday politics of people–place relations. He has contributed innovative theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches to place attachment, sense of place and place identity. He leads an international network on social change (GRICS). Timo von Wirth is Assistant Professor at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences and the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, the Netherlands. His work addresses the dynamics and contestations of places in transformation. He has published extensively on the role of place in sustainability transitions, on the relationship of place attachment and urban change, and on the advancement of measuring the quality of life in urban contexts.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Changing Senses of Place Navigating Global Challenges Edited by

CHRISTOPHER M. RAYMOND University of Helsinki

LYNNE C. MANZO University of Washington

DANIEL R. WILLIAMS USDA Forest Service, Colorado

ANDRÉS DI MASSO University of Barcelona

TIMO VON WIRTH Erasmus University Rotterdam

Published online by Cambridge University Press

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108477260 DOI: 10.1017/9781108769471 © Christopher M. Raymond, Lynne C. Manzo, Andrés Di Masso and Timo von Wirth 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Raymond, Christopher M., editor. | Manzo, Lynne, editor. | Williams, Daniel R. (Research social scientist), editor. | Di Masso, Andrés, editor. | von Wirth, Timo, author. Title: Changing senses of place : navigating global challenges / edited by Christopher M. Raymond, University of Helsinki, Finland, Lynne C. Manzo, University of Washington, Seattle, Daniel R. Williams, USDA Forest Service, Colorado, Andrés Di Masso, University of Barcelona, Timo von Wirth, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021009275 (print) | LCCN 2021009276 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108477260 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781108769471 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Human geography. | Nature – Effect of human beings on. | BISAC: NATURE / Ecology Classification: LCC GF50 .C43 2021 (print) | LCC GF50 (ebook) | DDC 304.2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009275 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009276 ISBN 978-1-108-47726-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Changing Senses of Place Navigating Global Challenges Global challenges ranging from climate change and ecological regime shifts to refugee crises and post-national territorial claims are rapidly moving ecosystem thresholds and altering the social fabric of societies worldwide. This book addresses the vital question of how to navigate the contested forces of stability and change in a world shaped by multiple interconnected global challenges. It proposes that senses of place is a vital concept for supporting individual and social processes for navigating these contested forces and encourages scholars to rethink how to theorise and conceptualise changes in senses of place in the face of global challenges. It also makes the case that our concepts of sense of place need to be revisited, given that our experiences of place are changing. This book is essential reading for those seeking a new understanding of the multiple and shifting experiences of place. Christopher M. Raymond is Professor in Sustainability Science, Sustainability Transformations and Ecosystem Services at the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS), Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, and Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki, Finland. He serves as Coordinating Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Values Assessment. He has published extensively on the multiple values of nature. Lynne C. Manzo is an environmental psychologist and Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. Her research focuses on place attachment, displacement, social justice and the politics of place. Daniel R. Williams is a Research Social Scientist at the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. He has published extensively on place-based conservation, adaptive governance of landscape change, and the science of practice in wildfire and climate adaptation. Andrés Di Masso is Associate Professor at the Departmental Section of Social Psychology, University of Barcelona, Spain. His work focuses on place-discourse, power and the everyday politics of people–place relations. He has contributed innovative theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches to place attachment, sense of place and place identity. He leads an international network on social change (GRICS). Timo von Wirth is Assistant Professor at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences and the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, the Netherlands. His work addresses the dynamics and contestations of places in transformation. He has published extensively on the role of place in sustainability transitions, on the relationship of place attachment and urban change, and on the advancement of measuring the quality of life in urban contexts.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Changing Senses of Place Navigating Global Challenges Edited by

CHRISTOPHER M. RAYMOND University of Helsinki

LYNNE C. MANZO University of Washington

DANIEL R. WILLIAMS USDA Forest Service, Colorado

ANDRÉS DI MASSO University of Barcelona

TIMO VON WIRTH Erasmus University Rotterdam

Published online by Cambridge University Press

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108477260 DOI: 10.1017/9781108769471 © Christopher M. Raymond, Lynne C. Manzo, Andrés Di Masso and Timo von Wirth 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Raymond, Christopher M., editor. | Manzo, Lynne, editor. | Williams, Daniel R. (Research social scientist), editor. | Di Masso, Andrés, editor. | von Wirth, Timo, author. Title: Changing senses of place : navigating global challenges / edited by Christopher M. Raymond, University of Helsinki, Finland, Lynne C. Manzo, University of Washington, Seattle, Daniel R. Williams, USDA Forest Service, Colorado, Andrés Di Masso, University of Barcelona, Timo von Wirth, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021009275 (print) | LCCN 2021009276 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108477260 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781108769471 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Human geography. | Nature – Effect of human beings on. | BISAC: NATURE / Ecology Classification: LCC GF50 .C43 2021 (print) | LCC GF50 (ebook) | DDC 304.2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009275 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009276 ISBN 978-1-108-47726-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

This book is dedicated to the late Professor Gregory G. Brown, who touched the lives of the senses of place community in so many special ways. For details of his legacy, see: https://participatorymapping.org/greg-brown-archive/tribute/

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Contents

List of Contributors Foreword Guy M. Robinson Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Senses of Place in the Face of Global Challenges

page xi xvii xix xx 1

Christopher M. Raymond, Daniel R. Williams, Andrés Di Masso, Lynne C. Manzo and Timo von Wirth

Part I 1

Climate Change and Ecological Regime Shifts Coral Reef Collapse and Sense of Place in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

19 21

Georgina G. Gurney, Nadine A. Marshall, Matthew I. Curnock, Petina L. Pert and Lauric Thiault

2

Navigating the Temporalities of Place in Climate Adaptation: Case Studies from the USA

32

Dan Murphy and Daniel R. Williams

3

The Place–Subjectivity Continuum after a Disaster: Enquiring into the Production of Sense of Place as an Assemblage

43

Héctor Berroeta, Laís Pinto de Carvalho and Jorge Castillo-Sepúlveda

4

Changing Sense of Place and Local Responses to Bengaluru’s Disappearing Lakes

53

Ailbhe Murphy, Johan Enqvist and Vanessa A. Masterson

5

Place-Making for Regional Conservation: Negotiating Narratives of Stability and Change William P. Stewart and Nicole M. Evans

Published online by Cambridge University Press

65

viii

Part II 6

Contents

Migration, Mobility and Belonging Exploring Senses of Place Through Narratives of Tourism Growth and Place Change: The Case of the Faroe Islands

77

79

Christopher M. Raymond, Laura N. H. Verbrugge, Nora Fagerholm, Anton S. Olafsson, Eyðfinn Magnussen and Tobias Plieninger

7

No One Is a Prophet at Home: Mobility and Senses of Place in West Africa

92

Alice Hertzog

8

Place Detachment and the Psychology of Nonbelonging: Lessons from Diepsloot Township

103

Ursula Lau, Kevin Durrheim and Lisa S. Young

9

Sense of Place in Urban China: Multiple Determinants of Rural–Urban Migrants’ Belongingness to the Host City

116

Xu Huang

Part III 10

Renewable Energy Transitions Farming Landscapes, Energy Landscapes or Both? Using Social Representations Theory to Understand the Impact of Energy Transitions on Rural Senses of Place

129

131

Richard C. Stedman and Roberta S. Nilson

11

Auto-Photography, Senses of Place and Public Support for Marine Renewable Energy

144

Patrick Devine-Wright and Bouke Wiersma

12

A Life Course Approach to the Pluralisation of Sense of Place: Understanding the Social Acceptance of Low-Carbon Energy Developments

156

Etienne Bailey

Part IV 13

Nationalism and Competing Territorial Claims Ethnocentric Bias in Perceptions of Place: The Role of Essentialism and the Perceived Continuity of Places

169

171

Maria Lewicka and Olena Dobosh

14

Sense of Place Between Spatial Justice and Urban Violence in Palestine Sahera Bleibleh

Published online by Cambridge University Press

182

Contents

15

The Political Ecology of Place Meaning: Identity, Political Self-Determination and Illicit Resource Use in the Manas Tiger Reserve, India

ix

193

Dhananjaya Katju and Gerard Kyle

Part V 16

Urban Change Uncovering Competing Senses of Place in a Context of Rapid Urban Change

207 209

Lynne C. Manzo and Richard Desanto

17

Gentrification and the Creative Destruction of Sense of Place: A Psychosocial Exploration of Urban Transformations in Barcelona

221

Andrés Di Masso, Víctor Jorquera, Teresa Ropert and Tomeu Vidal

18

Looking at the Urban Invisibles: Appropriation of Space and Senses of Place by People Living in the Streets

234

Tadeu Farias and Raquel Diniz

Part VI 19

Technological and Legal Transformations Electronically Mediated Sense of Place

245 247

Edward Relph

20

A Dynamic View of Local Knowledge and Epistemic Bonds to Place: Implications for Senses of Place and the Governance of Biodiversity Conservation

259

Paula Castro

21

Social Media and Experiences of Nature: Towards a Plurality of Senses of Place

271

Anton S. Olafsson, Maja S. Møller, Thomas Mattijssen, Natalie M. Gulsrud, Bas Breman and Arjen Buijs

Part VII Design and Planning Strategies for Changing Senses of Place 22

Local Sense(s) of Place in a Global World: Towards a Normative Framework for Spatial Planners

285

287

Karen Puren and J. Ernst Drewes

23

Urban Experimentation and the Role of Senses of Place: An Illustrative Case from Rotterdam, the Netherlands Timo von Wirth and Niki Frantzeskaki

Published online by Cambridge University Press

301

x

Contents

24

Domestic Matters: IKEA Catalogues, the Good Home and the Changing Aspirations of Urban Chinese

313

Gladys Pak Lei Chong and Yiu Fai Chow

Part VIII Conclusion 25

Navigating the Spaciousness of Uncertainties Posed by Global Challenges: A Senses of Place Perspective

329

331

Lynne C. Manzo, Daniel R. Williams, Christopher M. Raymond, Andrés Di Masso, Timo von Wirth and Patrick Devine-Wright

Index

Published online by Cambridge University Press

348

Contributors

Etienne Bailey School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, University of Surrey, UK Héctor Berroeta Centre for Territorial Vulnerability and Informality Research, School of Psychology, University of Valparaíso, Chile Sahera Bleibleh Architectural Engineering Department, College of Engineering, United Arab Emirates University, United Arab Emirates Bas Breman Wageningen Environmental Research, the Netherlands Arjen Buijs Wageningen University and Wageningen Environmental Research, the Netherlands Jorge Castillo-Sepúlveda School of Psychology, University of Santiago, Chile Paula Castro Centre for Research and Social Intervention, University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal Gladys Pak Lei Chong Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong Yiu Fai Chow Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong Matthew I. Curnock CSIRO Land and Water, Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press

xii

List of Contributors

Laís Pinto de Carvalho Centre for Territorial Vulnerability and Informality Research, School of Psychology, University of Valparaíso, Chile Richard Desanto Independent artist/landscape designer, Seattle, Washington, USA Patrick Devine-Wright College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, UK Andrés Di Masso Research Group in Interaction and Social Change, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, Spain Raquel Diniz Centre for Humanities, Letters and Arts, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil Olena Dobosh Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Poland J. Ernst Drewes Urban and Regional Planning Group, North-West University, South Africa Kevin Durrheim School of Applied Human Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Johan Enqvist Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden Nicole M. Evans Prairie Research Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Nora Fagerholm Department of Geography and Geology, University of Turku, Finland Tadeu Farias Faculty of Education, Federal University of Goiás, Brazil Niki Frantzeskaki Centre for Urban Transitions, Faculty of Health, Arts and Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press

List of Contributors

xiii

Natalie M. Gulsrud Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Georgina G. Gurney Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Australia Alice Hertzog Transdisciplinarity Lab, ETH Zürich, Switzerland Xu Huang School of Geography, Nanjing Normal University, China Víctor Jorquera Research Group in Interaction and Social Change, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, Spain Dhananjaya Katju Department of Recreation Park and Tourism Sciences, Texas A&M University, USA Gerard Kyle Department of Rangeland, Wildlife and Fisheries Management, Texas A&M University, USA Ursula Lau Department of Psychology, University of Johannesburg, South Africa Maria Lewicka Institute of Psychology, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland Eyðfinn Magnussen Faculty of Science and Technology, University of the Faroe Islands, Faroe Islands Lynne C. Manzo Department of Landscape Architecture, College of Built Environments, University of Washington, USA Nadine A. Marshall CSIRO Land and Water, Australia Vanessa A. Masterson Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden

Published online by Cambridge University Press

xiv

List of Contributors

Thomas Mattijssen Wageningen Economic Research, the Netherlands Maja S. Møller Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Ailbhe Murphy Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden Dan Murphy Department of Anthropology, University of Cincinnati, USA Roberta S. Nilson Department of Natural Resources and Cornell Center for Conservation Social Sciences, Cornell University, USA Anton S. Olafsson Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Petina L. Pert CSIRO Land and Water, Australia Tobias Plieninger Faculty of Organic Agricultural Science, University of Kassel, and Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, University of Göttingen, Germany Karen Puren Urban and Regional Planning Group, North-West University, South Africa Christopher M. Raymond Faculty of Biological and Environmental Science, Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, and Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, University of Helsinki, Finland Edward Relph Division of Social Sciences, University of Toronto, Canada Teresa Ropert Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Subjectivity and Social Change, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Chile Lisa S. Young Department of Psychology, Rhodes University, South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press

List of Contributors

xv

Richard C. Stedman Department of Natural Resources and Cornell Center for Conservation Social Sciences, Cornell University, USA William P. Stewart Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, USA Lauric Thiault National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris Sciences et Lettres University, France, and Laboratoire d’Excellence ‘CORAIL’, French Polynesia Laura N. H. Verbrugge Water and Development Research Group, Department of Built Environment, Faculty of Engineering, Aalto University, Finland Tomeu Vidal Research Group in Interaction and Social Change, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, Spain Timo von Wirth Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands Bouke Wiersma Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, the Netherlands Daniel R. Williams Rocky Mountain Research Station, United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, USA

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Foreword

The study of sense of place has featured prominently in social science enquiry for 50 years. First pioneered by Yi-fu Tuan and Edward Relph in the 1970s, humanistic geography highlighted people’s attachment to particular places, especially when faced with dramatic transformations associated with urbanisation and new technologies. Subsequent enquiries have increased our understanding of the meaning of place to individuals, and how this evolves over time and is challenged by lifestyles further transformed by globalisation. The scope of these studies has embraced disciplines as diverse as planning, architecture and psychology, among others, reflecting a myriad of human experiences associated with place and with evolving and competing senses of belonging. Hence, this book situates multiple senses of place and manyfold challenges associated with belonging and identity against the backdrop of globalising tendencies and the complexities of contemporary life. The studies in this book acknowledge advances in conceptualising senses of place and highlight fruitful avenues for future enquiry. Individual chapters critique how senses of place are being navigated, against a daunting list of global challenges: climate change, global culture, changing patterns of migration and mobility, the transition towards renewable energy, ongoing territorial conflicts, the rise of global cities, the quickening pace of technological change and the challenges posed to design and planning. Yet, throughout the impress of globalising forces, individuals strive to attach meaning to places, investing emotions and seeking identities that, in turn, researchers seek to understand and analyse. Various aspects of this analysis are captured herein, from consideration of the practices through which people interact with and physically transform places to ways in which people contest the subjective meanings and ownership of places. Many of the 25 individual chapters challenge the once-popular view that place attachment is essentially static, arguing instead that as places are transformed in response to global challenges, so senses of place may mirror the place dynamic. The notion that individuals are ‘rooted’ in place is challenged not only by the rapidity of change in the character of places themselves, but also by dramatic shifts in the circumstances of many individuals. Some chapters emphasise the increasing ‘placelessness’ that can occur through dislocation associated with migration and changing mobilities. Christopher M. Raymond and his colleagues have assembled a collection of essays that represent state-of-the-art thinking on senses of place. Collectively, the essays

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demonstrate that places present multiple ‘faces’ to their inhabitants and that, chameleon-like, they acquire new characteristics as they are buffeted by a complex mixture of global and local forces. The authors employ various theories to help understand these senses of place, addressing the complexities associated with dynamic materialities, representations and performative practices. While individual places may retain unique local facets, these are increasingly overlain by the impress of globalisation in its many forms. Indeed, competing forces strive to shape the nature of places and often bring about sudden changes that alter individuals’ relationships with a particular place. Individuals in any locale encounter only certain aspects of the global and the local: contrast the experience of a homeless person with that of a rich entrepreneur. Nevertheless, those aspects inform their lives and shape their sense of place. Changing Senses of Place is a tour de force, provoking the reader to think more deeply about how we view place and the challenges faced by globalisation in its many forms. The volume provides vital guidance on how we might navigate an increasingly uncertain and precarious future. Guy M. Robinson Department of Geography, Environment and Population, University of Adelaide Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge

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Preface

The final versions of most of the chapters that appear in this book were written in the spring of 2020 while many, if not all, of the authors were shuttered inside their homes, practising social distancing to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. This extraordinary new reality clearly served to put a fine point on the theme of this book: navigating changing senses of place in the face of global challenges. It emphasises a core concept of the book – that our sense of ontological security should not be taken for granted, and it largely depends on how we navigate senses of place at multiple scales. We all now have a much more intimate understanding of what this means for people we know and love. Home has become a very central but sometimes problematic actor in our struggle for ontological security. Being confined to home also demonstrates how much our senses of place are also (im)mobilised. We miss out on many activities that connect us to one another. The gathering places we have relied on are deemed toxic. We cannot travel to visit or hug our children, grandchildren or elderly parents. We miss out on celebrating key life events – birthdays, graduations, recitals, weddings, honeymoons and even funerals. At best, we seek to replace some of these rituals and celebrations by using the tools of social media. It is no longer an academic abstraction to think about how having a secure home, neighbourhood or country contributes to a sense of security and well-being; how having effective government, competent leadership and a strong public sector contributes to the well-being of all. We see from our living rooms how this global challenge is experienced so differently depending on where we were born, our postcode or country code; our economic, employment or immigration status; or the strengths or inequities within our healthcare and employment systems. It redefines essential workers within our food systems, healthcare systems and distribution systems. We, the privileged authors and editors, mostly stayed home and continued to do our work and receive our pay cheques, although we cannot say that our work was essential, at least not in any immediate way. Yet we hope in some measure that the contents of this book can help policymakers to make the most of the lessons that come from facing an existential global challenge that has reimagined how we occupy space, mobilise our lives and activate our senses of solidarity.

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the many authors for their dedication and commitment to the writing and refining of their chapters, as well as the generous and timely support offered by Cambridge University Press, in particular Aleksandra Serocka, during the multiple phases of the development of this book. The compilation of this book resulted in many late-night (or early-morning) discussions and deliberations among the editors, which in some instances took us away from our private lives. We therefore would like to thank the love, commitment and tolerance of our friends and families. In particular, Christopher Raymond would like to acknowledge his father, John Raymond, for the many engaging discussions on relationality and ‘reality’, which provided a fertile starting ground for some of the ideas presented in this work. The editors hope this volume will be both an inspiration and a cornerstone text for new and established scholars on senses of place, encouraging a paradigm shift in how we conceptualise, assess and navigate the plurality of ‘senses’ in the face of global challenges.

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Introduction Senses of Place in the Face of Global Challenges Christopher M. Raymond, Daniel R. Williams, Andrés Di Masso, Lynne C. Manzo and Timo von Wirth

It is now well established that humans are the most powerful influence on the environment. The scale, pace and intensity of human activity is fundamentally altering earth’s climate system (IPCC, 2014) and driving global biodiversity and ecosystem decline (IPBES, 2019). Simultaneously, new forms and patterns of mobility are emerging and accelerating in a world driven by globalised market forces, new technologies, media transformations and related cultural trends of late modernity (Stokols, 2018; Boccagni, 2017; Cresswell, 1996). Indeed, during the final stages of preparing this volume we are experiencing a global pandemic of COVID-19 that is reshaping society – from the way we travel to how we relate to one another (see the Preface). While many of the global challenges addressed in this volume are not new, they are accelerating to such a degree that they are challenging our sense of ‘ontological security’ in the world, a concept that has been useful in international relations research, and most recently climate change research, to articulate relationships between identity and security (Farbotko, 2019; Kinnvall, 2004). Our expectations for the stability and continuity of our habitats and lifestyles are increasingly being challenged. Management and governance systems, designed for twentieth-century problemsolving, are no longer up to the task of addressing the coalescence of multiple global challenges and their synergistic effects on everyday life (Elmqvist et al., 2019; Biermann et al., 2012). Individuals and groups must face the challenges of environmental change, migration, technological transformations, energy transitions and changing nationalist agendas, among other global forces, concurrently within their life worlds. This book addresses the vital question of how to navigate the contested forces of stability and change in a world influenced by multiple interconnected global challenges. We propose that senses of place is a pertinent concept for supporting individuals’ navigation of these contested forces. The book is a timely addition to recent compilations advancing theories, methods and applications of place and place attachment (Manzo and Devine-Wright, 2021) in that it strives to deal with the multiplicity of global challenges and justify how and why they force us to consider plural, dynamic and rapidly changing forms of sense(s) of place. We encourage scholars to rethink how to theorise and conceptualise changes in senses of place in the face of global

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challenges that are rapidly moving ecosystem thresholds and altering the social fabric of global societies. We make the case that our concepts of sense of place need to change, or to be conceptually revisited, given that our experiences of place are changing. People–place bonds are increasingly configured within a dense and changing web of relations: between self and others; between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of a given locale; between the past and present of a place; between the material (e.g. the body, architecture, objects) and the immaterial (e.g. discourse, affect, memories); among the cultural meanings, economic dynamics and biographical experiences of a given environment; between institutional regulations and the quotidian needs and desires of heterogeneous populations; between capacities for collective agency and political structures. In this introduction, we provide a short historical context for the varying and evolving understandings of sense of place, emphasising a shift from its essentialist origins to more progressive and plural understandings. We then make the case for resignifying existing sense of place constructs to account for interfaces between changing senses and changing places. After presenting the ontological and conceptual bases of senses of place, we present the core contributions and insights from the book. In the conclusion to this volume, we reflect on the scholarly contributions in each section of the book and critically discuss ‘how we navigate’ multiple and changing senses of place in the face of global challenges. We consider different governance and planning options for navigating plurality and change in the twenty-first century, identify crucial research gaps and recommend important future research directions for place scholarship.

Sense of Place in Historical Context The term ‘sense of place’ was first popularised in the 1970s, in large part as a reaction against high modernist thinking and the attendant hubris that humans could exert masterful control over the world and human affairs through science, technology and instrumental thinking (Williams and Miller, 2021). This critique arose as part of a ‘humanistic’ subfield of geography (Tuan, 1974) where sense of place was presented as a corrective to the dominance of quantitative ‘spatial science’ in geography, which critics argued diminished the concept of place to mere technical or locational considerations and emptied places of essential meaning, affect and identity (Cresswell, 2013). Instead, drawing on the philosophical approaches of phenomenology – which seeks to uncover the essence of things – sense of place offered a way of asserting the essential nature of place as a source of stable people– place bonds, meanings and identities in the face of the mid-twentieth-century transformations of modernisation, urbanisation and commercialisation (Relph, 1976). The highlighting of places’ authentic and essential qualities responded to a presumed human need to have roots in stable and coherent places, and to give moorings to our identities. Likewise, sense of place attracted particular attention within architecture, planning and related fields as a way to reveal the authentic

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experience or character (or spirit) of a place, often premised on the idea that places have essential or genuine meanings, which through commodification and globalisation are at risk of being lost (Dovey, 2016; Norberg-Schulz, 1980). A pivotal feature of this humanistic conception of sense of place was to assume stability and sedentarism as the normal or preferred condition of people–place relations (Di Masso et al., 2019). The humanistic-phenomenological approach began to lose favour with the advent of more critical and constructionist thinking in the social science in the 1980s. This pushed sense of place concepts towards so-called progressive-relational approaches, often associated with radical, post-structural geographers (e.g. Cresswell, 2013; Antonsich, 2011; Pierce et al., 2011; Massey, 2005, 1991). From a relational perspective, humanistic geography wrongly conceived sense of place as a product of a bounded, localised, fixed and subjectively experienced idea of place. Among a more critical school of human geographers, phenomenology was notably inattentive to social structure and power and the implied insularity and stability of sense of place (Harvey, 1996). Challenging the essentialism (stability) underlying the phenomenological perspective, human geographers have instead characterised sense of place as a progressive, extroverted, relational, networked, fluid, and culturally and politically constituted phenomenon (Di Masso et al., 2019; Raymond et al., 2017b; Cresswell, 2015; Massey, 2005). The sense of place discourse has been built largely on a legacy of valorising stability and rootedness and presuming this is a desired end state (Williams and Miller, 2021; Di Masso et al., 2019; Lewicka et al., 2019). The tendency for people to seek spatial moorings for ontological security and a sense of continuity (Lewicka et al., 2019) is supported by substantial empirical evidence. At the same time, we challenge the assumption that this is necessarily true in all contexts, places and moments in time, and recognise that there has been movement from an essentialist to a more progressive perspective on place and place change in the mainstream sense of place literature. This relational view is increasingly important in areas such as migration, refugee studies and the impacts of mobility on everyday life (Di Masso et al., 2019; Seamon, 2017), and has made significant inroads in areas of environmental planning (Horlings, 2018) and ecosystem management (Raymond et al., 2017b). From a relational perspective, the question is not what sorts of stable and authentic meanings, emotions and identities are attached to a place, but how we can conceptually or empirically understand how people go about fashioning their world into meaningful places. This fashioning involves both material and embodied practices through which people interact with and physically transform places (e.g. building homes, streets and cities), as well as the socio-political and discursive practices through which they make and contest places, their subjective meanings and their ownership (Stenner et al., 2012). Such placemaking actions vary from the everyday acts of individual consumers (e.g. buying local, or patronising a regional shopping centre) to the potentially more consequential and deliberate acts of communities, corporations and government agencies (e.g. developing and promoting tourist regions, or gentrification and urban renewal projects).

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Why Senses of Place? As an underlying premise of this book, the global challenges and transformations that once animated early geographers have since greatly accelerated, intensified and expanded in scope and scale to become truly global challenges (Steffen et al., 2015). This dynamism has made the more relational, fluid and plural conception of senses of place ever more salient for addressing these contemporary challenges. Various sense of place concepts are now deployed across ever wider spheres of scholarship as conceptual tools for grappling with rapid and large-scale social and environmental change (e.g. Schlosberg et al., 2020; Quinn et al., 2018; Stewart et al., 2013). By ‘pluralist conception’, we mean an epistemic attitude that is sensitive to the multiple knowledge-production strategies and conceptualisations that try to account for how senses of place are forged nowadays, and which acknowledges the varied and rapidly changing panorama of place experiences featured in today’s globalised (globally sensed) world. Taking up a pluralist conception in this book is especially fitting because rapid changes to social and environmental conditions disrupt and/or reshape people’s bonds to various places, provoking place-related conflicts and placeprotective behaviours, and highlighting the politics of place. Pluralising sense of place offers scholars a powerful lens for translating these large and complex global challenges into multiple consequences relevant to local communities. It does this by helping to ground the interactions between societies, nature and technologies at a place-based, localised scale where the interdependencies of aspects of systems can be made traceable. In addition, recognising multiple senses of place offers a way to integrate the interacting material transformations of the ‘great acceleration’ (Steffen et al., 2015) with the changing and competing senses of belonging and identity that contribute to culture, society and a sense of well-being. For example, in regard to ecological regime shifts, we see how coral reef collapse in the Great Barrier Reef off Australia has heralded substantial changes in senses of place (Gurney et al., Chapter 1), and how the disappearing urban lakes of Bengaluru, India, are transforming senses of place as well as the stewardship of places (Murphy et al., Chapter 4). Also, pluralising sense of place reminds us that what we are considering is much more variable, contested and fluid than is often recognised. By proposing a plural sense of place, we do not seek to replace earlier conceptions – the need among many for secure moorings – but it does cause us to rethink how we can accommodate those needs within more spatially complex ways of living in the world. As the world churns, anchoring ourselves and feeling secure becomes ever more problematic, because we are living in a time when various forces can contest or undermine our established relationships to places. The question before us is whether and how contemporary life empowers us to create new connections, and to think anew about dynamic and unfolding connections and ways of being emplaced. The ways we accomplish this are becoming more diverse, contested and context-dependent. Thus, one of the challenges of a volume such as this is navigating the differences in the meaning and use of the concept. In service of that goal, we want both to emphasise the underlying

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complexity of sense of place and to direct the reader to some of the key characteristics of the concept and how they pertain to the present volume – particularly, with regard to our choice to refer to senses of place.

Changing Senses and Changing Places In this volume, we consider change in regard to both senses of place and places themselves. When considering senses, we mean the myriad ways in which people understand, interpret and interface with the world, which involve multiple sensibilities, physical senses and embodied identities. Changing places refers to the new patterns of socio-spatial relations and experiences of ‘placeness’ that surface or are resignified, rescaled or revalued. Accelerating global challenges change and reshape existing configurations of people–place relations, which gain in richness, complexity, interconnectedness and, above all, plurality and dynamism (Di Masso et al., 2019). We present several global challenges that signify substantial place change, from climate change and ecological regime shifts, to human migration and mobility, technological transformations, urban change and nationalist and territorial claims. For example, Lewicka and Dobosh (Chapter 13) propose a third way of understanding place bonds as ‘place continuity’, a concept that articulates place continuity and change, and recognises places as having a ‘multi-layered history’. This new concept of narrative continuity is juxtaposed to the essentialist tradition, which assumes that one’s traits remain the same despite the passage of time. Also focusing on the role of temporality in pluralising place experiences, Murphy and Williams (Chapter 2) show how climate change adaptation must transcend the usual limitations of a static, place-focused approach, to examine instead the plurality of and disjuncture between different chronological dimensions (past–present–future, rhythm, speed) that articulate climate change adaptation as a temporal reaccommodation of sense of place. In this volume, we do not suppose a singular character of any place; nor do we wish to be nostalgic or romantic about an unchanging past in our treatment of change. Indeed, we are witnessing the dire consequences of responding to the perceived threats that change presumably heralds with ‘defensive and reactionary responses’ such as antagonism to immigrants and newcomers (Massey, 1991, p. 24). In Part II on migration, mobility and belonging, we see changing senses of place emerge in urban China through rural-to-urban migrants’ different senses of belonging to the host city (Huang, Chapter 9); in Part V on urban change, we see how processes of gentrification in Barcelona are transforming people’s subjective understandings of place change (Di Masso et al., Chapter 17), and how unhoused people living on the streets in Chile are altering senses of place through public space appropriation (Farias and Diniz, Chapter 18). In this array of cases, we see ‘more progressive and outward-looking’ senses of place emerge than in previous considerations of responses to place change, which were more ‘self-closing or defensive’ (Massey, 1991, p. 24). To demonstrate how people–place bonds dynamically change over time, Raymond et al. (2017a) propose that people–place bonds can be conceived as a dynamic web of

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relations that connect mind, body, culture and the environment and have the potential to change with context (see also Manzo, 2005). This view resonates with Cresswell’s (2004) argument that ‘places need to be understood as sites that are connected to others around the world in constantly evolving networks which are social, cultural and natural/environmental’ (p. 43). As Massey (1994) puts it, places are networks of interconnections, leading to an ‘extroverted’ notion of place. In this volume, we demonstrate how these synergistic relations are manifested within global challenges: for instance, climate change reshapes local forms of biodiversity (e.g. coral reefs), urban changes following ‘global city’ patterns (Sassen, 1991) erode previously established place attachments at the neighbourhood level (e.g. gentrification) and forced transnational migration rebuilds exclusionary borders and confinement areas separating ‘us’ and ‘them’ (e.g. asylum-seeking). From this relational and ‘extroverted’ perspective, places do not have singular unique identities but multiple, contested ones that are continually reproduced through discourse and practice. Places are not so much fixed entities as the result of flows, mobilities and power relations. Nor are they bounded localities (as was typical of humanistic phenomenology), but permeable entities constituted from constellations or networks of local and global connections grounded in concrete places, practices and performances. As people adapt to living in the flux of a globalised and mobilised world, senses of place are often multicentred, and are deployed more like rhizomes than roots for organising a sense of identity across multiple places and scales over one’s life course. Relational senses of place have also drawn from assemblage theory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) to conceptualise place as a complex, dynamic constellation of materiality, representations and performative practices, and to accentuate the interrelated socio-spatial processes of gathering, collective or distributed agency, emergence and provisionality (Cresswell, 2015; Di Masso and Dixon, 2015).

Changing Senses of Place: Overview of Chapters Drawing on the ideas and arguments presented in this book, we understand senses of place as the plurality of place-related meanings, interpretations and values that are continuously produced, contested, negotiated, reconstructed and embodied by individuals and among collectives of people in relation to changing physical, social, political and ideational environments. These dynamic people–locational bonds are nested or embedded in other places of smaller or larger scales, and are contextualised with reference to different time–space relations. When places change, we open up possibilities for people’s senses to change too, while recognising the tension with our yearnings for fixity in an increasingly uncertain world that is facing multiple global challenges. Addressing the nexus of senses of place and accelerating global challenges promises to uncover the consequences of and responses to place changes in our everyday lives. Following our initial arguments to pluralise ‘senses’ and problematise ‘place’ in the light of global challenges, we provide the following synthetic insights concerning the conceptualisation of senses of place.

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Senses of Place Operate as Boundary Objects Sense of place has been applied in various cross-disciplinary discourses, spanning research on socio-ecological systems (Masterson et al., 2017), sustainability transitions studies (Frantzeskaki et al., 2018) and biodiversity conservation (Hausmann et al., 2016). It has many of the hallmarks of a boundary object (MacGillivray and Franklin, 2015) in that it offers the necessary ambiguity of being simultaneously concrete and abstract, allowing different interpretations of purpose and value, in order to be useful to scholars from different epistemic communities (or disciplines) (Star and Griesemer, 1989). Boundary objects allow interpretive flexibility while retaining a common theme, can take abstract forms such as shared concepts among different epistemic communities (or disciplines) and can materialise as artefacts. Senses of place, then, act as catalysts that facilitate the collection and coordination of knowledge, which is subsequently distributed in different knowledge communities (Trompette and Vinck, 2009). Boundary objects have been described as ‘playing a pivotal role in initiating and facilitating change as they are considered to be an important means of transforming knowledge and changing practice across specialist knowledge domains’ (Oswick and Robertson, 2009, p. 179). Sense of place is embedded in particular social contexts – that is, it is located at the nexus of very specific power relations (Star, 2010) – and it has an important role in mediating different visions of sustainability (Chapin and Knapp, 2015). We contend that the pluralisation of sense to senses of place magnifies the importance of place as a boundary object, in terms of dealing with not only place contestations but also different temporal and geographical scales of people–place relations. Murphy and Williams (Chapter 2) propose that different boundaries and ontological understandings of place as time can lead to various frictions in plural settings, yet beneficially, these time–space boundaries can illuminate plural visions for desired futures in response to climate change. In regard to rapid tourism expansion in the Faroe Islands, Raymond et al. (Chapter 6) make the case for the pluralisation of sense to senses of place by exploring the tensions and dynamic connections between the place narratives of Faroese residents and boundary-spanning organisations (also known as ‘brokers’) such as Visit Faroe Islands. Drawing on the narratives of residents and those presented in the Faroe Islands’ Tourism Strategy 2018–2025, the authors find that multiple sets of senses of place emerge from narratives that represent different (sometimes in-between) standpoints on tourism growth and development, and from attempts by brokers and other powerful actors to filter and sort dominant meanings.

Senses of Place Reflect Multiple Layers of Place Contestation Previous work has demonstrated that people experience different place interpretations, leading to places being sources of contest, struggle or stigma (e.g. Di Masso and Dixon, 2015; Manzo, 2014). Global challenges may multiply and intensify disputes

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between different place interpretations, mobilising a plurality of altered place meanings and values through which people make sense of their environments and their physical transformations. For example, some chapters in this volume highlight how urbanisation, gentrification and commodification pressures lead to multiple, sometimes coexisting, and at other times competing or contested place meanings that need to be continually formulated and negotiated among groups of people (Manzo and Desanto, Chapter 16; Di Masso et al., Chapter 17). Manzo and Desanto argue that competing discourses regarding urban development and the ethos of the city can cause a falsely homogenised sense of place, and can underrepresent the senses of place of marginalised voices in society. Di Masso et al. show how gentrification, among other capitalist processes in Barcelona, can reconfigure senses of place to support placebased profitable value. In these chapters, senses of place are channelled and forged through the capital-driven promotion of ‘seductive urban atmospheres’ – that is, urban landscapes aesthetically and semiotically designed to simulate authentic experiences of place that become objects of symbolic consumption. Gentrification can lead to conflicted senses of place within the individual, represented through ‘subjective knots’ such as ambivalence, hesitation, dilemmatic talk, contradiction and discursive collapse. Similarly, Farias and Diniz (Chapter 18) suggest that urban change and the commodification of urban space in Brazil leads to contradictory place meanings whereby streets are perceived as either ‘humanising’ or ‘alienating’. Such contradictory meanings of life on the streets are mediated by class structure, among other social and racial inequalities. Message framing can also raise contestations between senses of place. Stedman and Nilson’s (Chapter 10) study of energy transitions in a rural area shows that technological innovations, economic impacts and aesthetic criteria may function as opposing meaning-making frames, raising political tensions within a community awaiting environmental change. Relatedly, senses of place often become rearticulated and resignified as they are ‘nested’ in places at varying scales, such that people’s ways of inhabiting a locale are strongly dependent on their relationship to broader areas, countries or global regions. Devine-Wright and Wiersma (Chapter 11) explicitly problematise the traditional focus of sense of place research on an a-priori scale of place when assessing the importance of place for people in communities that are shifting to renewable energy. According to these authors, senses of place are today more plural because places might be felt and thought of in the frame of a broader area, compared with external spaces or vis-à-vis smaller-scale places. Multiple chapters in this book cover controversial elements of sense of place with respect to nationalist conflicts, social injustice, political violence, racial tensions and the commodification of urban space. Lewicka and Dobosh (Chapter 13) foreground how different ways of constructing the history of a place lead to more or less ethnocentric representations of that place, as well as to different place identifications and attachments. Bleibleh (Chapter 14) reveals how senses of place emerge through emotionally ambivalent bonds with place by Palestinians under siege, and the importance of including the political aspects of power relations in the physical and social construction of senses of place. Katju and Kyle (Chapter 15) demonstrate through

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research on place belonging and the politics of self-determination how cultural and religious assimilation have shaped, altered, engendered and contested the identities of place and people of many communities in Assam, India.

Senses of Place Are Re-channelled Through Globalisation and Technological and Legal Transformations Globalisation and associated processes of cultural adaptation have a powerful role in reshaping identities (e.g. Castree, 2004). Chong and Chow (Chapter 24) suggest that advanced media technology in representations of domestic space, combined with intensifying transcultural flows, can lead to a valorisation of ‘cultural odourlessness’, meaning the absence of national traits in cultural products. Sense of place is problematised as something that is deliberately constructed as a culturally fluid, global identity by using this strategy of cultural odourlessness. Innovations in technology and governance (law, policy, coalition-building) can also radically change the way in which we understand and negotiate senses of place. Senses of place can become re-channelled as affective and imaginary experiences, both felt and signified through different technologically mediated sensory streams (Bork-Hüffer, 2016; Jenkins et al., 2016). Technology plays various roles in unifying the experiences of places. Relph (Chapter 19) discusses how electronic media have transformed sense of place, arguing that they have not altered its neurological (i.e. brain functions telling you where you are) or ontological (i.e. having an essentially place-bound bodily existence) aspects, but they have strongly changed its personal (i.e. memories, experiences), social (i.e. knowing and being known somewhere) and public (i.e. ideological) dimensions. Olafsson et al. (Chapter 21) point to the multiple ways that social media can facilitate affective and cognitive socio-ecological interactions in relation to different types of experiences of nature. However, technology’s contribution to an individual’s senses of place cannot be considered in isolation from the couplings between social, ecological and technological systems. Equally, legal transformations, such as the proclamation of new nature protection directives across the European Union, challenge us to rethink the relationships between people and place. Castro (Chapter 20) introduces the concept of ‘epistemic bonds’ (comprised various forms of local knowledge, and processes for local stakeholders’ involvement in legal processes) and asserts the powerful role of these bonds in criticising and in some cases resisting ecological changes. New laws can lead to new constructions and understandings of place, which affect people–place relationships but also affect the reception of the laws in question. However, policy frameworks can be developed to enable the expression of local senses of place. Drawing on the case of a rural World Heritage Site in South Africa, Puren and Drewes (Chapter 22) develop an alternative policy framework that supports the pluralisation of local senses of place through global policy. Rather than the top-down creation of global policy, they propose that policy development processes should align with the principles of democracy, subsidiarity, participation, integration, proportionality and precautionarity. This

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framework enables a plurality of senses of place to emerge spontaneously from the bottom up, as opposed to their being categorised or universalised.

Senses of Place Help Us to Understand the Assemblages Between Social, Ecological and Technological Systems, Including Individual, Social and Institutional Processes Globally, scholars have been drawing upon the socio-ecological systems perspective, mainstreamed through concepts such as resilience, planetary boundaries and social values for ecosystem services (Raymond et al., 2014; Rockström et al., 2009; Folke, 2006), as a way to respond to global challenges such as climate change, flooding and biodiversity loss. Sense of place has provided a means of exploring the subjectivity of socio-ecological systems, particularly the role of multiple place meanings in building resilience and transformative capacity (Masterson et al., 2019, 2017; Stedman, 2016). Chapters in this volume draw upon the socio-ecological systems perspective in various ways. Increasingly, there is recognition that social and ecological systems are dynamically coupled with technological systems (McPhearson, 2020; McPhearson et al., 2016). With respect to technologically mediated futures, three main couplings are in need of critical examination: (1) social–ecological couplings, which refer to the linkages between access to and experience and management of urban green areas and technologies; (2) technological–social couplings, referring to the economic opportunities and constraints associated with urban sustainability solutions and issues of inclusivity, empowerment, social justice and cohesion, including safety and security related to multiple groups that use and manage smart or green solutions; and (3) ecological–technological couplings, referring to the different ways in which technologies can strengthen feedback between nature and people. Berroeta et al. (Chapter 3) draw on assemblage theory to demonstrate how senses of place are generated within a complex and dynamic network of influences and reciprocal variations between subjective, social and spatial (including technological) aspects. Based on a material-semiotic approach, they reveal a ‘variable and unstable constellation’ of subjective, social, spatial, technological and political elements of place among victims recovering from a natural disaster in Chile. After a disaster, victims’ senses of place become reconstructed through interactions between historical and personal aspects (the relationship that individuals establish with space) and collective processes (government policies, or the overall modification of the surroundings and neighbourhood). Olafsson et al. (Chapter 21) argue that senses of place emerge from dynamic couplings between society, ecology and technology. This plurality is essential to deal with the multiple ways in which social media engage people with place. DevineWright and Wiersma (Chapter 11) explore the concept of ‘place–technology fit’, implying that the acceptability of certain technologies is dependent on how they are interpreted symbolically. They show how auto-photography can be used as a visual method to explore the heterogeneous, multiscaled and constructed nature of place. Von Wirth and Frantzeskaki (Chapter 23) reflect upon the role of urban experimentation in

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the co-generation of senses of place for a case in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. They find that new senses of place tend to be an outcome of discourses about the qualities of iconic buildings, as well as the outcome of social interactions, practices and constructions evolving in-between actors. Active urban experimentation provides a crucial arena for understanding the interactions among people, urban environments and technologies on a localised scale, and opens up possibilities for negotiating shared visions for transformations towards urban sustainability.

Senses and Places Emerge from and Are Changed by Different Temporal Dynamics One of the core arguments of this book is that place scholars need to be open to new and sometimes unfolding senses of place that emerge in response to global challenges. A deeper consideration of the plurality of senses of place demands a consideration of the temporal dynamics of place. Previous works highlight that sense of place can change in response to the physical qualities of place (Marshall et al., 2019), and that diverse temporalities might challenge the utility of place as a platform for collaborative adaptation (Devine-Wright, 2013; Lyon and Parkins, 2013). However, this book reveals that there are different temporal layers to place, resulting in different responses to environmental change. Drawing on a longitudinal study, Gurney et al. (Chapter 1) show how people develop heightened senses of environments that become threatened by rapid environmental change. The perceived impacts of coral reef decline along the Great Barrier Reef between 2013 and 2017 heightened senses of pride, identity, attachment and biodiversity, while more tangible senses such as lifestyle, aesthetics and scientific value decreased. Murphy and Williams (Chapter 2) find that residents adopt different visions for and positions on climate change adaptation depending on their ontological understanding of time–space dynamics, which in turn challenges a singular, monistic notion of ‘sense’. The temporalities identified by these residents were: working in place, where inhabitants interpreted the consequences of climate change through their work; sense of historical trajectory, where inhabitants interpreted consequences through narratives of the ‘golden past’; and temporalities in the fundamentals of nature, where inhabitants narrated impacts through different ontological understandings of the nature of time. Similarly, Murphy et al. (Chapter 4) report that senses of place are informed by both historical dynamics and present socio-ecological realities. Given that communities can have ‘collective memory’, old and new meanings of places can be held simultaneously. Stewart and Evans (Chapter 5) develop a framework for place-making, showing tensions between stability and change in ways that facilitate adaptation to shifting ecological regimes. One pole is anchored in global and national issues, such as climate change; a second axis is related to multiscalar structural conditions; and a third is related to the creation and maintenance of shared social values. An alternative important axis identified by Bailey (Chapter 12) concerns how senses of place evolve temporally across an entire life course.

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Interpersonal relations and wider socio-economic, cultural and political forces combine across the life course to inform different senses of place and residential mobility decisions.

Senses of Place Necessarily Recognise Nonbelonging and Translocality This volume expands our understanding of senses of place to the consideration of issues of nonbelonging and translocality, particularly with respect to issues of vulnerability in the global South, in developing countries and among indigenous people (Ganapathy, 2013; Castree, 2004; Raffles, 1999). Drawing on insights from Diepsloot, an informal settlement near Johannesburg, South Africa, Lau et al. (Chapter 8) reveal that narratives of nonbelonging and belonging are mutually constitutive: settlement residents tell stories of nonbelonging in order to belong. The state of nonbelonging therefore needs to be considered ‘as a state in its own right and not simply the absence of belonging’. Hertzog (Chapter 7) claims that place research in the global North has privileged singular connections to particular places and overlooked the translocal nature of many migrants’ lives, particularly those in Africa. Senses of place in situations of transnational migration cannot be understood in isolation from how the place of origin, the destination and third spaces knit multiple, local and larger-scale subjective and social ties, thereby informing an ‘extroverted’, multiscalar experience of sense of place. Drawing on cases from urban China, Huang (Chapter 9) suggests that migrants’ ties with both their place of origin and their destination cities are crucial to shaping belongingness. Farias and Diniz (Chapter 18) highlight the multiple ways that spaces are appropriated under a capitalist logic in Latin America, and through a dialectical approach they challenge us to ask: ‘what are the meanings and senses of the city when we think about a population that lives a contradictory process of invisibility and perverse visibility?’ They suggest that a detailed exploration of the dialectic of appropriation–alienation enables researchers to better understand the senses and meanings of people whose daily lives are on the streets.

Senses of Place Promote Post-Normal Science Grounded in Epistemic Pluralism Our onto-epistemological frameworks must shift with the changing tides, literally and figuratively, as we come to terms with myriad experiences of a ‘new normal’ in regard to place research. We need onto-epistemological (critical) pluralism in place research (Patterson and Williams, 2005, 1998) in addition to pluralism in these ‘new normal’ times, requiring a democratised, inclusive approach to science, as reflected in recent approaches to knowledge co-production in sustainability science (e.g. Tengö et al., 2017). This problematisation of senses of place also means going beyond the traditionally empirical and uncritical, towards a more flexible, reflexive and responsive way of understanding the complex dynamics among multiple coexisting spatial practices and

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experiences. In this volume, we endorse the conceptual plurality and epistemic diversity of senses of place wherein senses of place research can support the practice of postnormal science and the democratisation of knowledges grounded in epistemic pluralism (building on Williams, 2018, 2014). It is our contention that producing knowledge about sense of place demands a dynamic approach that equates clarification, comprehension and explanatory potential with epistemological divergences, theoretical dialogue and conceptual contestation (Mitchell, 2009; Miller et al., 2008) – that is, an approach grounded in a plural conception of senses of place as constantly in flux. Pluralising and changing senses of place is part of an attempt to accommodate within one realm of discussion the multiple and shifting experiences of sensing place that feature in today’s globalised world. As decolonial thinkers point out (Escobar, 2018; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018), a ‘pluriversal’ (as opposed to ‘universal’) approach to human knowledge must be necessarily grounded in the acknowledgement of the strictly situated and local nature of human experiences, processes and epistemologies. Plural knowledge about senses of place must mirror plural realities of sensing and making sense of place. Throughout the book, the relational, dynamic and networked character of senses of place is discussed from different epistemological angles. Some scholars emphasise the discursively constructed and (re)narrated character of senses of place, which translates into particular spatio-temporal configurations. Manzo and Desanto (Chapter 16) refer to a constellation of place interpretations, meanings and values being continually formulated and negotiated, and they offer a pluralistic and discursive perspective on power and place, drawing upon work by Di Masso et al. (2014) and Williams and Stewart (1998). Di Masso and colleagues (Chapter 17) frame senses of place as placebased, experiential assemblages (Di Masso and Dixon, 2015) that are regularly reconfigured and narrated. Relph (Chapter 19) emphasises a particular sensuous plurality to understand senses of place as ‘a synaesthetic faculty that unifies the various experiences of places registered by sight, hearing, smell, movement, touch, memory, imagination, purpose and anticipation’. Chapters by Hertzog (Chapter 7) and von Wirth and Frantzeskaki (Chapter 23) also put more emphasis on relational and networked aspects. While Hertzog refers to senses of place as articulated moments in networks of social relations that may occur on different scales from the place itself, von Wirth and Frantzeskaki conceive place as a relational process involving stability and change, building on three constitutive dimensions: meanings and narratives of place; person–place practices and experiences; and new relations between people and place, and between people in the place. Affective and embodied aspects come into play as well when we try to frame senses of place. Hence, Olafsson et al. (Chapter 21) understand senses of place as comprising embodied place encounters together with affective and cognitive factors connected to place. Such affective and cognitive articulations may manifest in different ways of constructing place representations. Lewicka and Dobosh (Chapter 13) argue for a conceptual lens that articulates place continuity and change grounded in the assumption that places have multi-layered histories. In line with our argument for pluralisation and the attempt to accept multiple, competing and coexisting understandings of senses of place, Bleibleh (Chapter 14) refers to

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contrasting feelings of home that combine security and threat, renewal and nostalgia. Following arguments by Hay (1998), senses of place emerge through rootedness in place and processes of self-continuity, while at the same time being a socially constructed ‘quasi state of mind’. In summary, the chapters in this book present a diversity of approaches to conceptualising senses of place in the face of global challenges. In our conclusion, we will turn to the question ‘how do we navigate the diversity of senses of place from the perspective of the researcher and the researched?’ We will consider the navigational capacities necessary for governing the new or increasing speed or severity of global challenges, and we will provide recommendations for future research on senses of place to account for identified knowledge gaps.

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MacGillivray, B. H. and Franklin, A. (2015) ‘Place as a boundary device for the sustainability sciences: concepts of place, their value in characterising sustainability problems, and their role in fostering integrative research and action’, Environmental Science and Policy, vol. 53, pp. 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2015.06.021 Manzo, L. C. (2005) ‘For better or worse: exploring multiple dimensions of place meaning’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 67–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j .jenvp.2005.01.002 Manzo, L. C. (2014) ‘Exploring the shadow side: place attachment in the context of stigma, displacement, and social housing’, in Manzo, L. C. and Devine-Wright, P. (eds), Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 178–190. Manzo, L. C. and Devine-Wright, P. (eds) (2021) Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, 2nd edn, London, Routledge. Marshall, N., Adger, N., Benham, C., et al. (2019) ‘Reef grief: investigating the relationship between place meanings and place change on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia’, Sustainability Science, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 579–587. Massey, D. B. (1991) ‘A global sense of place’, Marxism Today, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 24–29. Massey, D. B. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Massey, D. (2005) For Space, London, SAGE Publications. Masterson, V. A., Stedman, R. C., Enqvist, J., et al. (2017) ‘The contribution of sense of place to social-ecological systems research: a review and research agenda’, Ecology and Society, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 49–63. Masterson, V. A., Enqvist, J., Stedman, R. C. and Tengö, M. (2019) ‘Sense of place in social-ecological systems: from theory to empirics’, Sustainability Science, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 555–564. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00695-8 McPhearson, T. (2020) ‘Transforming cities and science for climate change resilience in the Anthropocene’, in Hölscher, K. and Frantzeskaki, N. (eds), Transformative Climate Governance, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 99–111. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-4 9040-9_3 McPhearson, T., Pickett, S. T. A., Grimm, N. B., et al. (2016) ‘Advancing urban ecology toward a science of cities’, BioScience, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 198–212. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biw002 Mignolo, W. D. and Walsh, C. E. (2018) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Miller, T. R., Baird, T., Littlefield, C., et al. (2008) ‘Epistemological pluralism: reorganizing interdisciplinary research’, Ecology and Society vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 46. https://doi.org/10.5751 /ES-02671-130246 Mitchell, S. (2009) Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy, London, University of Chicago Press. Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980) Genius Loci, New York, Rizzoli. Oswick, C. and Robertson, M. (2009) ‘Boundary objects reconsidered: from bridges and anchors to barricades and mazes’, Journal of Change Management, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 179–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/14697010902879137 Patterson, M. E. and Williams, D. R. (1998) ‘Paradigms and problems: the practice of social science in natural resource management’, Society and Natural Resources, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 279–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941929809381080 Patterson, M. E. and Williams, D. R. (2005) ‘Maintaining research traditions on place: diversity of thought and scientific progress’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 361–380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2005.10.001

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Part I

Climate Change and Ecological Regime Shifts

Globally, societies are grappling with the increasing impacts of climate change and ecological regime shifts, including biodiversity loss, rapid degradation of coral reefs, changing water regimes, drought, and more frequent and extreme bushfires. This part demonstrates that such place changes also change the emotional and intangible elements of sense of place, inspiring a heightened sense of place and challenging dominant views about the fixity of sense (Chapter 1). Managerial responses to climate change and ecological regime shifts can be further grounded in different time–space dynamics or temporalities of place that challenge a singular, monistic notion of ‘sense’ and open us to a range of other senses of place, including those grounded in the past, present and future (Chapters 2 and 4), or with reference to working in place or fundamental assumptions of the nature of being (Chapter 2). Past memories of place can be used by community activities or land managers in promoting social exchange about desired notions of place among different stakeholder groups and in navigating forces of stability and change in regional landscapes (Chapter 4). Equally, place-making activities can be seen as milieus where global narratives meet local narratives, in some cases promoting stability and in other cases asserting change, supporting a patchwork or mosaic of land-uses and often dynamic or contested place meanings (Chapter 5). The multiple senses can emerge by exploring the multi-layered dimensions of people–place bonds in the face of perceived threats like climate change and their intersections with different perceptions of time–space dynamics, including understandings of stability and change. Chapters in this section approach the exploration of changing senses of place using a socio-ecological system’s perspective, emphasising the couplings (including tensions, relationships and interdependencies) between the ecological, structural and social dimensions of place, considered from the lenses of both stability and change (Chapters 1, 4 and 5). Additionally, multiple senses of place can be explored using a material-semiotic approach involving investigating the symbolic, corporeal and geographical elements of practices and effects (Chapter 3). Berroeta and colleagues (Chapter 3) use the notion of assemblage as a conceptual tool to understand how senses of place are generated dynamically among subjective, social and spatial aspects, at the same time within

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a relationship between individual experiences of place and social and institutional processes. Collectively, these chapters draw attention to how climate change and ecological regime shifts not only affect the physical qualities of place. Rather, place change is dynamically interrelated with conative, cognitive and affective meanings across different temporal and geographical scales, opening up new and fertile grounds for understanding senses of place as a relational process of meaning-making.

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Coral Reef Collapse and Sense of Place in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia Georgina G. Gurney, Nadine A. Marshall, Matthew I. Curnock, Petina L. Pert and Lauric Thiault

1.1

Introduction Natural places are critical to the psychological maintenance of contemporary society (Marshall et al., 2018). They are more than a simple background against which to carry out everyday lives. People become who they are because of the environment within which they live: they develop identities, pride, traditions, feelings of belonging, meanings of self and a sense of community; environments can shape aspirations, experiences, knowledge and understanding (Biedenweg et al., 2017; Masterson et al., 2017; De Miglio and Williams 2016; Devine-Wright, 2013). Natural places provide constantly evolving opportunities for spiritual and intellectual engagement, the development of special relationships, economic prosperity, day-to-day significance and well-being (Marshall et al., 2018; Gurney et al., 2017). Accordingly, while ecosystems contribute to making human life possible, they also contribute to making life worth living (Costanza et al., 1997). However, ecosystems are currently under unprecedented threat from a range of drivers, particularly climate change. While climate change is a global phenomenon, its physical impacts are experienced most acutely in the special places where people live and work and with which they associate significant meanings (Adger et al., 2013; Devine-Wright, 2013). What these changes mean for local people and their relationships with places is only just beginning to be examined (Adger et al., 2013, 2011). Understanding the influence of place change on people–place bonds is critical because of the role that these bonds play not only in people’s sense of well-being (Biedenweg et al., 2017; De Miglio and Williams, 2016) but also with respect to people’s attitudes, values and behaviours (Larson et al., 2013; Manzo and Perkins, 2006). Indeed, studies have demonstrated the link between people–place bonds and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour (e.g. Goldberg et al., 2018; Stedman, 2002) and have suggested that shared bonds may play a key role in fostering collective action (Manzo and Perkins, 2006). The literature on sense of place provides a useful lens with which to examine how people–place relationships are affected by place change arising from key drivers such as climate change. Sense of place is an overarching construct comprising the meanings

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that describe the qualities of places and the attachments people have to those places (Masterson et al., 2017; Tuan, 1977). Place meanings form the descriptive dimensions of sense of place, while place attachment forms the evaluative component (Stedman, 2016) and is often conceptualised with the two subdomains of place identity and place dependence. The vast majority of existing literature on sense of place has focused on the degree or magnitude of attachment (Stedman, 2008), leading to a one-dimensional view of people–place bonds (i.e. more or less attachment). However, recent scholarship has drawn attention to the need for a multidimensional approach to sense of place that pays attention to place meanings and recognises different types of attachment. For example, Wynveen et al.’s (2010) study of the place-related meanings ascribed to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) by recreational visitors uncovered 10 key place meanings: escape from the everyday, sense of connection to the natural world, aesthetic beauty, safety and accessibility, abundance and diversity of coral and other wildlife, lack of built infrastructure/pristine environment, unique natural resource, facilitation of desired recreation activity, curiosity and exploration, and experiences with family and friends. Similarly, Marshall et al. (2019) examined place attachment, place identity and five place meanings that residents, domestic and international tourists, tourism operators and commercial fishers held in regard to the GBR, with place meanings related to, for example, its value for aesthetics and lifestyle. Gurney et al. (2017) identified four types of attachment to the GBR, which consisted of different configurations of place identity, dependence and indirect dependence. Importantly, these attachment types spanned local, national and international communities, which suggests that in an age of mobility, new types of people–place relations are emerging that transcend geographical boundaries and do not require ongoing direct experience to form (Gurney et al., 2017). Indeed, Di Masso et al. (2019) discuss how social change in the form of increased mobility is shifting our understanding of people–person bonds, from a presumption of fixity and stability to a recognition of the fluidity of those bonds. Therefore, as these studies suggest, there is a need to shift from approaching sense of place as a singular, static person–place relationship, in order to better account for the dynamic and multidimensional nature of person–place bonds, which is increasingly evident in the current era of rapid global environmental and social change. In this chapter, we use Australia’s GBR as a case study to examine the multidimensional and dynamic nature of sense of place, and specifically how it is impacted when the place in question undergoes significant biophysical change. The GBR is the world’s largest living structure, spanning 344,000 km², including approximately 2,900 individual reefs and stretching for 2,300 km along the Queensland coast in north-eastern Australia (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2009). It has high biodiversity, supporting more than 9,000 species, including 600 species of hard and soft coral, 133 species of sharks and rays, 30 species of marine mammals and up to 2,000 species of fish. The GBR was listed as a marine park in 1975 in response to a direct threat from oil drilling, and was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1981 in recognition of its ‘outstanding universal value’. This was a period when public affinity with the GBR drove decision-makers to protect the ecological and aesthetic values of the region,

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culminating in the establishment of a parliamentary act (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act, 1975) to provide legislative protection of core environmental values. Today, Australians regard the GBR as Australia’s ‘most inspiring’ national landscape (Goldberg et al., 2016), with 90 per cent of Australians recognising its outstanding beauty and being proud of its World Heritage Area status. Recent ecological monitoring shows that the coverage of live coral across all regions of the GBR has undergone a steep decline to an extent not previously observed in the historical record (Mellin et al., 2019; Hughes et al., 2018, 2017). It is suggested that this decline is the result of a combination of multiple cumulative threats, including poor water quality due to land-based run-off, multiple mass outbreaks of coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish, illegal fishing and, most importantly, climate change-induced mass coral bleaching and associated mortality (Mellin et al., 2019; Hughes et al., 2018, 2017). The GBR has experienced three severe coral bleaching events over the past five years (during the summers and autumns of 2016, 2017 and 2020). Thermal stress during marine heatwaves disrupts the relationship between corals and their algal symbionts, causing corals to lose their colour and in some cases die (Hughes et al., 2018). For example, in 2016, 50 per cent of the GBR’s reefs experienced extreme bleaching (i.e. more than 60 per cent of corals were bleached), which resulted in the loss of approximately 30 per cent of the GBR’s corals (Hughes et al., 2018). Together these threats have resulted in a downgrading of the overall outlook for the GBR from ‘poor’ (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2014) to ‘very poor’ (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2019). The 2016 and 2017 mass coral bleaching events were widely publicised in the media, both locally and internationally, and many local residents will have experienced these events directly. Hence there is evidence of abrupt place change along the GBR triggered by global processes of environmental change in the form of climate change. The cultural impact of significant ecological changes is only beginning to emerge (Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018; Barnett et al., 2016; Adger et al., 2013). In regard to the GBR, for example, Benham (2016) documented how residents in Gladstone, a port city in the southern GBR region, reported feelings of grief in response to the impacts of the local inshore environment’s rapid industrialisation, including the loss of important fishing and recreational areas. This was enhanced by a sense of loss from the corresponding damage to the identity of Gladstone as a coastal place. Interestingly, Curnock et al. (2019) reported that the value that domestic and international tourists placed on the GBR had increased significantly between 2013 and 2017, despite widespread knowledge of coral reef decline. They found that while protective sentiments towards the GBR increased, a corresponding decline in optimism and self-efficacy to protect the GBR also transpired. Tourists expressed ecological grief through significant increases in negative sentiments such as fear, anger, disgust and sadness associated with the GBR’s health and outlook, but also reported significantly higher levels of place attachment, place identity and pride around the GBR. In another study, Marshall et al. (2019) reported extremely high levels of grief among local residents, tourists, tourism operators and commercial fishers in response to mass coral bleaching and associated mortality. They observed

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that the majority of all residents, tourists and tourism operators had already entered a period of significant mourning, and they suggested that this response was mediated by place attachment and meanings (Marshall et al., 2019). Specifically, the extent to which individuals reported ecological grief appeared to be dependent on their levels of place attachment, place identity and meanings attributed to the GBR. These findings imply that individuals and communities experience ecosystem decline and loss within places that are meaningful to them. However, they do not clearly help to explain how people’s sense of place is affected by ecological change. The contribution that we offer readers of this book is to carefully examine the ways in which people’s sense of place is affected as a result of climate change-induced coral bleaching and related ecosystem decline within the GBR. Using place attachment, place identity and the five meanings related to the GBR identified by Marshall et al. (2019), we examined whether sense of place was affected by mass coral bleaching in 2016 and 2017 by analysing data on people–place bonds collected in 2013 and 2017. Our aim was to quantify changes and surmise what they might mean for the development of stronger insights into sense of place when environmental quality is disturbed (Raymond et al., 2017).

1.2

Methods

1.2.1

Survey Design Drawing on Marshall et al. (2019), we examined whether place attachment, place identity and the five meanings attributed to the GBR changed over time. Place attachment, place identity and the five meanings were operationalised using 10-point Likert scale statements (Table 1.1). The same survey statements were used in both 2013 and 2017 (with one exception, namely the indicator of place attachment).

1.2.2

Survey Administration A mixed-methods approach was used to collect survey data. Local residents and tourists were surveyed using face-to-face methods across 14 major population centres along the GBR coastline. We employed and trained roughly 45 casual staff for each sampling period and deployed them in public places such as parks, shopping centres, marketplaces, airports, marinas, sporting areas, festivals, information centres, museums, jetties, caravan parks and lookout points. We used a mix of convenience sampling and quota sampling (Bryman, 2012) in which we attempted to capture an approximately representative sample of people across demographic categories such as age, gender and income. A limitation of our sampling approach was a bias towards English-speaking people. Interviewers were equipped with an Apple iPad Mini loaded with an iSurvey application. Residents were defined as people who lived within the reef catchment, that is, east of the Great Dividing Range from Bundaberg to Cape York (Marshall et al., 2016). In 2013, a total of 3,151 local residents were surveyed, and a response rate of over 53 per cent was obtained. In 2017, a total of 1,870 local residents were surveyed, and

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Table 1.1 Sense of place (comprised of place attachment, place identity and meanings) associated with the GBR region and tested using survey statements from the Social and Economic Long-Term Monitoring Programme for the GBR Sense of place elements

Description

Place attachment

The emotional and physical bond between person and place, which is influenced by experiences, emotions, memories and interpretations. It often provides a reason for people to live in a specific area (Adger et al., 2013; Devine-Wright, 2009). Survey statement (2013): ‘I live here because of the GBR.’ The feeling of belonging to a place or social group with its own distinct culture and common social values and beliefs (Gurney et al., 2017; Marshall et al., 2012; Adger et al., 2011). Survey statement: ‘The GBR is part of my identity.’ The sense of pride about a place or its status, such as a World Heritage Area designation. It can be linked to a signal of high social status (Marshall et al., 2016). Survey statement: ‘I feel proud that the GBR is a World Heritage Area.’ The aesthetic value that an individual attributes to aspects of an ecosystem. Aesthetic responses are linked to both the characteristics of an environment and culturally or personally derived preferences (Klain et al., 2014; Pike et al., 2011; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Survey statement: ‘The aesthetic beauty of the GBR is outstanding.’ How people are emotionally inspired by biodiversity and other measures of ecosystem integrity in a particular place (Marshall et al., 2016). Survey statement: ‘I value the GBR because it supports a variety of life, such as fish and corals.’ The expression of ‘visible’ culture that has evolved around a natural resource or ecosystem. It describes the extent to which people’s lives revolve around a natural resource, and how people interact with it for recreation (Marshall et al., 2018; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Survey statement: ‘I value the GBR because it supports a desirable and active way of life.’ The value that people associate with learning opportunities in the past, present and future; the legacy and appreciation of ecosystems and natural resources that have been inherited from the past, and their sense of continuity across time (Klain et al., 2014; Negi, 2010). Survey statement: ‘I value the GBR because we can learn about the environment through scientific discoveries.’

Place identity

Place meaning: pride in place

Place meaning: appreciation of place aesthetics

Place meaning: appreciation of biodiversity of place

Place meaning: appreciation of lifestyle conferred by place

Place meaning: appreciation of scientific value of place

Notes: participants were asked to rate how strongly they agreed with each statement on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 = strongly disagree and 10 = strongly agree. Table adapted from Marshall et al. (2018), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0).

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a response rate of just over 50 per cent was obtained. A description of the population sample across residents can be found elsewhere (Marshall et al., 2019, 2018); they were effectively representative of the Queensland population in terms of age, gender, income and education.

1.2.3

Data Analysis We used analyses of variance to identify whether place attachment, place identity and the five meanings showed statistically significant differences between 2013 and 2017.

1.3

Results We found that residents’ sense of place was fairly strong in both 2013 and 2017: most elements scored above 8 on the 10-point scale, with the exception of place identity (Table 1.2). Sense of place changed between 2013 and 2017, with attachment, place identity and two meanings showing increases (pride and biodiversity) and three meanings decreasing (lifestyle, aesthetics and scientific value). However, the change for scientific value was not significant.

Table 1.2 Change in sense of place (place attachment, place identity and five place meanings) between 2013 and 2017 Sense of place elements Place attachment

Place identity Pride Aesthetics Biodiversity

Lifestyle Scientific value

Survey statements

Mean (SE) 2013

Mean (SE) 2017

p-values

2013: I live here because of the GBR 2017: I love that I live beside the GBR The GBR is part of my identity I feel proud that the GBR is a World Heritage Area The aesthetic beauty of the GBR is outstanding I value the GBR because it supports a variety of life, such as fish and corals The GBR supports a desirable and active way of life I value the GBR because we can learn about the environment through scientific discoveries

4.82 (0.054)

8.85 (0.045)

NA

6.43 (0.050) 8.97 (0.032)

6.64 (0.065) 9.19 (0.037)

0.012* 0.000*

9.10 (0.026)

9.00 (0.037)

0.025*

9.07 (0.027)

9.18 (0.035)

0.010*

8.45 (0.033)

8.23 (0.045)

0.000*

8.48 (0.034)

8.41 (0.046)

0.239

Notes: *Statistical significance at p < 0.05. Bolded mean 2017 values represent positive change. Given that different survey questions were used to operationalise place attachment in 2013 and 2017, we did not statistically compare values between years.

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Discussion We found that residents’ sense of place changed between 2013 and 2017, with place attachment, place identity and two meanings showing increases (pride and biodiversity) and three place meanings showing decreases (lifestyle, aesthetics and scientific value). We suggest that GBR place change wrought by climate change-induced bleaching heightened the more emotional and intangible elements of sense of place (e.g. pride and place identity) but had a negative effect on the more instrumental elements of sense of place (e.g. lifestyle and aesthetics). The physical aspects of GBR place change, in the form of dead coral, increased algae and associated changes in fish composition, had immediate impacts on aesthetics and people’s ability to enjoy recreational activities associated with a GBR lifestyle. These physical changes to the reef and their effects on instrumental place meanings may have sensitised people to the more intangible aspects of sense of place, such as pride, place identity and attachment. We note, however, that the particularly large observed increase in place attachment was likely because of the differently worded survey questions used in 2013 and 2017. While the survey question in 2013 related to living in the region because of the GBR, the question used in 2017 was much less specific and related to enjoying living beside the GBR. We suggest that as iconic environments are perceived to be threatened, people develop a heightened sense of place around them. That is, if a place is threatened, and indeed already impacted, then some elements of sense of place appear to be intensified or amplified. It may be that, like tourists, local residents become very aware of how special their place is (Curnock et al., 2019; Fenton et al., 1998). However, in our case, local residents were already very appreciative of the GBR before the coral bleaching events occurred (Marshall et al., 2018); the devastating climate change events simply seemed to enhance local residents’ sensitivity about their already highly valued ‘place’. Importantly, place meanings related to lifestyle and aesthetic appreciation, which perhaps are more ‘tangible’ sentiments, significantly decreased between the survey times, suggesting that local residents were aware that these elements had been negatively impacted by the recent mass coral bleaching events. Further exploration of the mechanisms underpinning the observed changes in sense of place is required to unequivocally attribute these changes to physical changes to the GBR associated with coral bleaching. Nevertheless, recent research (which drew on the data set used here) on perceptions of threats to the GBR provides support for our hypothesis, showing that climate change became the most frequently reported threat across all stakeholder groups in 2017 compared with 2013 (Thiault et al., 2020). Further, the vast majority of our sample in 2017 expressed grief as a result of coral bleaching (i.e. ‘solastalgia’ (Marshall et al., 2019)), and this suggests that the unprecedented bleaching events of 2016 and 2017 significantly affected people’s bonds with the reef. However, whether it was the physical change to the GBR associated with bleaching or, for example, the media representations of those events that directly influenced these changes in sense of place is an unanswered question, and represents a fertile area for future research.

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Our results demonstrate the need to shift from approaching sense of place as a singular, static person–place relationship, to better accounting for the dynamic and multidimensional nature of person–place bonds, which is increasingly evident in the current era of rapid global environmental and social change. The dynamic nature of sense of place is evident in the observed changes in people’s bonds with the GBR over time. Our results support the concept of sense of place as relational and fluid, and thus concur with Massey’s (1994) notion of the global or progressive sense of place, in which people–place bonds are constantly rearticulated. This approach to place also concurs with the conceptualisation of bonds with places as ‘assemblages’ (Cresswell, 2015), whereby people’s connection with a place is viewed as an emergent property of a complex system that is subject to change as that system shifts. Indeed, our results suggest that people’s bonds with the GBR can be thought of as an event arising from the current state of the GBR conceptualised as a socioecological system. Thus, our results challenge a notion of people–place bonds premised on fixity, stability and low dimensionality, instead suggesting the need to consider the dynamics and multidimensionality of these bonds – properties that are increasingly evident in the current era of rapid social and environmental change.

1.5

Conclusion Given the accelerating social and environmental change that is evident across the globe, understanding how this change affects people’s relationship with places is of pressing importance. However, since people–place bonds have traditionally been viewed as static and unidimensional, the understanding of how these bonds can shift in response to social and environmental change remains embryonic. In this chapter we have examined how place attachment, place identity and five meanings given to the GBR by local residents changed over a four-year period (2013–2017) during which the reef suffered consecutive years of unprecedented climate changed-induced mass coral bleaching. We found that place attachment, place identity and two place meanings increased (pride and biodiversity), while three place meanings decreased (lifestyle, aesthetics and scientific value). We have suggested that GBR place change heightened the more emotional and intangible elements of sense of place (e.g. pride and place identity) but had a negative effect on more instrumental place meanings (e.g. lifestyle and aesthetics). The apparent fluidity of the strength of place attachment, place identity and meanings observed here suggests the need for a shift from approaching sense of place as a singular, static person–place relationship, in order to better account for the dynamic and multidimensional nature of person–place bonds. As Masterson et al. (2017) suggest, complex socio-ecological systems such as the GBR are constantly evolving, resulting in plural and dynamic people–place relationships. Key next steps in advancing an understanding of people–place relations as dynamic include: (1) identifying whether there are differential impacts on the different elements of sense of place as socio-ecological systems evolve and change in a range of ways; (2) examining whether some elements of sense of place are more stable than others; and (3) elucidating whether increases in sense of place as a result of degradation of that place, as seen here, can be harnessed in public engagement and stewardship efforts.

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Acknowledgement This research was undertaken as part of the Social and Economic Long-Term Monitoring Programme for the GBR, which was funded by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Australia.

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Masterson, V. A., Stedman, R. C., Engvist, J., et al. (2017) ‘The contribution of sense of place to social-ecological systems research: a review and research agenda’, Ecology and Society, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 49–63. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-08872-220149 Mellin, C., Matthews, S., Anthony, K. R. N., et al. (2019) ‘Spatial resilience of the Great Barrier Reef under cumulative disturbance impacts’, Global Change Biology, vol. 25, no. 7, pp. 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14625 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis, Washington, DC, Island Press. Negi, C. S. (2010) ‘Traditional culture and biodiversity conservation: examples from Uttarakhand, Central Himalaya’, Mountain Research and Development, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 259–265. https://doi.org/10.1659/MRD-JOURNAL-D-09-00040.1 Pike, K., Johnson, D., Fletcher, S. and Wright, P. (2011) ‘Seeking spirituality: respecting the social value of coastal recreational resources in England and Wales’, Journal of Coastal Research, vol. 10061, pp. 194–204. https://doi.org/10.2112/SI61-001.14 Raymond, C., Kytta, M. and Stedman, R. (2017) ‘Sense of place: fast and slow – the potential contributions of affordance theory to sense of place’, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1674, pp. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01674 Stedman, R. C. (2002) ‘Toward a social psychology of place predicting behaviour from place-based cognitions, attitude, and identity’, Environment and Behaviour, vol. 34, no. 5, pp. 561–581. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916502034005001 Stedman, R. C. (2008) ‘What do we “mean” by meanings? Implications of place meanings for managers and practitioners’, in Kruger, L., Hall, T. and Stiefel, M. (eds), Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management, Portland, Pacific Northwest Research Station, PNW-GTR-744, pp. 61–82. https://doi.org/10.2737/PNW-GTR-744 Stedman, R. C. (2016) ‘Subjectivity and social-ecological systems: a rigidity trap (and sense of place as a way out)’, Sustainability Science, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 891–901. https://doi.org/10.1007 /s11625-016-0388-y Thiault, L., Curnock, M. I., Gurney, G. G., et al. (2020) ‘Convergence of stakeholders’ environmental threat perceptions following mass coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef’, Conservation Biology. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13591 Tuan, Y.-F. (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Wynveen, C. J., Kyle, G. T. and Sutton, S. G. (2010) ‘Place meanings ascribed to marine settings: the case of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park’, Leisure Sciences, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 270–287. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490401003712705

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Navigating the Temporalities of Place in Climate Adaptation Case Studies from the USA Dan Murphy and Daniel R. Williams

2.1

Introduction Current trajectories of global climate change call for a dramatic rethinking of the ways in which human communities navigate their relationships with each other and the natural world. In lieu of global mitigation efforts, communities, governments and other resource managers around the world are consequently being forced to adapt their livelihoods, values and practices to a rapidly changing climate. As scholars increasingly recognise, responding to the impact of dramatic changes across scales, landscapes and communities requires substantial collaboration, and many have identified ‘place’ as a potentially powerful collaborative tool for aiding stakeholders in navigating the global challenge of climate adaptation (e.g. Masterson et al., 2019; Chapin and Knapp, 2015; MacGillivray and Franklin, 2015; Wilbanks, 2015; Devine-Wright, 2013; Fresque-Baxter and Armitage, 2012). At the same time, both climate change social scientists and scholars of place are calling for a deeper appreciation of the plurality of senses of place and a more robust understanding of how these pluralities create synergies as well as frictions that challenge the facilitative efficacy of place as a boundary concept (Williams, 2018; Castree et al., 2014; Devine-Wright, 2013; Hulme, 2011). Reconciling this call for pluralism with the urgency of adaptive action requires a deeper engagement with how these pluralities play out in particular places. In this chapter, we aim to explore one highly overlooked dimension of this global challenge: the temporality of ‘place’ in climate change adaptation. Global climate change has disrupted both scientific and popular understandings of natural climate cycles and stationary models of environmental change. Concurrently, a substantial body of literature has sought to explore the temporal dimensions of the climate crisis (for a review, see Pahl et al., 2014). However, little scholarship has explored the plural temporalities of sense of place in the context of climate change or sought to understand how diverse temporalities might challenge the utility of place as a platform for collaborative adaptation (for exceptions, see Marshall et al., 2019; Devine-Wright, 2013; Lyon and Parkins, 2013). In order to explore these dimensions of time in place-focused adaptation efforts, we draw on a series of case studies that utilise scenario-based futures methods – here

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represented by the communities in the Arctic, Rocky Mountain and Appalachian regions of the USA. In them, we interrogate the temporal elements of sense of place, such as the temporalities of practice, social time, directionality, calendrical time and temporal ontologies, as well as their implications for understanding the plural forms of place-focused futuring represented by scenarios. By doing so, we also explore the challenges of implied temporalities and the unconscious ways in which particular temporalities of place come to power over others through climate adaptation planning.

2.2

Adaptation Planning, Scenarios and the Temporalities of Place A considerable body of literature has explored the impacts and vulnerabilities of social groups and landscapes around the world to global climate change as well as potential responses through mitigation and adaptation (see IPCC, 2014). In addition to the loss of structures, livelihoods, physical health and the material environment, there has been a more recent and increasing focus on the threat that climate change poses to place(s) around the world and, as Tschakert et al. (2017, p. 1) note, how climate change-induced loss is ‘often given meaning through lived, embodied and place-based experience’. For example, disruptions of the people–environment relationships that constitute place can threaten the loss of a sense of ‘security-in-place’ or ontological security in ways that undermine individual mental health and community bonds (Marshall et al., 2019; Agyeman et al., 2009). Consequently, place is acquiring substantial attention as a potential platform for collaborative adaptation planning, given that climate change impacts across scales, landscapes and resource values. This perspective frames place as a ‘boundary object’ (also ‘device’ or ‘concept’); in other words, an idea or thing that permits collaboration or ‘coordination without consensus’ (for an introduction, see MacGillivray and Franklin, 2015). A primary way this perspective on place has been used in climate adaptation planning is through the use of scenarios. We define these as qualitative narratives, whether visual or textual, of ‘plausible’ futures that run the gamut from science-heavy normative scenarios of singular futures (e.g. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emission scenarios) to multiple, ‘out-of-the-box’ or ‘wild card’ scenarios unbounded by the rigours of risk and probability (for a review, see e.g. Bengston, 2019). Scenarios are simply a formalised and extended version of everyday anticipatory planning in which we imagine a future, create a context for that future, and develop a decision or action pathway through which to achieve some goal or avoid some consequence. Scenarios are particularly helpful when future contexts are highly uncertain (meaning less predictable) and/or highly complex (i.e. multitudes of drivers, actors, social forces, etc.). Given these attributes, scenarios are increasingly utilised at the local scale because they present a unique platform for implementing collaborative, ‘participatory’, stakeholder-driven processes that can incorporate place. However, in a recent critique, Vervoort et al. (2015) argue that much of current scenario design does not rest on plural visions of the world and/or ways of being in the world (i.e. senses of place). Unpacking scenario processes, as Rickards et al. (2014,

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p. 599) argue, exposes them as ‘non-innocent, historically specific, and performative framing acts’. In short, scenario-based adaptation planning can often reproduce a static, monolithic conception of place rather than represent and engage diverse senses of place. Moreover, the diverse temporalities in senses of place are important because time is ‘baked into’ the practice itself and as such remains largely unquestioned. Consequently, following Yusoff and Gabrys (2011, p. 518), we believe it is incumbent upon applied scholarship to critically unpack ‘the political and temporal logics that underpin current scenario trajectories and examine the descriptive crafts that produce them as spaces for imagination’. This lacuna is critical, first because adaptation is necessarily temporal, indexing past, present and future, and second because it leaves the call to pluralism dangerously incomplete. In adaptation, time is often treated as an unvarying, fixed and universal measure of climatic, ecological and social change, as modern conceptions of time are rooted in a mechanistic, Newtonian world view. In contrast, attending to plural senses of place and time can reveal dissonant, discordant and disjunctive temporalities, thereby uncovering potential sources of disagreement, dispute and friction over adaptive futures more broadly. Foregrounding temporality in the application of place as a boundary concept, therefore, becomes critical to a robust reformulation of climate adaptation planning.

2.3

Case Studies The data described below are derived first from three scenario-based research projects developed over a number of years as a collaboration between social scientists from the US Forest Service research programme and university researchers, including the authors. The first set of scenario projects consisted of a pilot in communities in Montana’s Big Hole Valley, Colorado’s Grand County and south-east Ohio. The authors and their collaborators developed a future-oriented climate change vulnerability assessment protocol referred to as ‘multi-scaled iterative scenario-building’ or MISB (for a full description, see Murphy et al., 2016). The protocol consists of a series of in-depth one-on-one interviews, focus groups and community-wide discussions, with a central set of scenarios that are developed iteratively through rounds of interview feedback, thereby creating progressively more complex yet place-based narratives of future change. A second set of data comes from published scenariobased research conducted by an unaffiliated team of researchers from the University of Alaska in the Huslia region of the far north-west interior of the state. This project utilised scenarios to explore future vulnerabilities to health and subsistence from increased wildfire frequency and severity due to climate change. Each case study exhibited similarities and differences in how individuals and groups perceived the unfolding future of climate change impacts and responses. In Montana, residents expressed significant concerns around the long-term viability of a ranching-based community, given the threats to water and deep uncertainty about the future actions of and relationships with federal agencies in land management. In

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Colorado, participants described substantial concerns regarding cross-scale climate challenges with decision-makers and stakeholders outside of their immediate communities, particularly around water rights, as well as the impact of lost snowpack on winter tourism. In Ohio, as discussed below, climate change impacts were not perceived by participants as substantially place-altering or place-threatening, and participants’ concerns were decidedly limited to local disaster management. In Alaska, the researchers noted a substantial and marked reluctance of Koyukon communities to engage with the scenario process because of the ontological status of weather and climate in the Koyukon knowledge system. Here, however, we use the results from the scenario processes to explore the ways scenarios illuminate diverse senses of place and time, and how the plurality of time in particular poses challenges or presents opportunities in fostering collaboration.

2.3.1

Working in Place One of the primary ways in which participants rooted themselves to place was through work. As is well established by place scholars, the practice of work generates a connection to place through the material interactions inherent in the labour process (Cresswell, 2015). In rural environments such as those in our case studies, much of that work is directly connected to the surrounding landscapes, such as in ranching, agriculture or mineral extraction; but it is also connected through repeated interactions with the material world, whether through recreation or simply being in place. This tempo and rhythm of work extends out to planning, foresight and interpretations of probability (or risk) and possibility (or uncertainty). In other words, different kinds of work generate diverse senses of place, which in turn constitute diverse ways of interpreting and forging futures. Time horizons, for instance, are thresholds of memory (i.e. past) and foresight (i.e. future), and these can be different depending on the kind of change that is temporalised and, as we see here, the individual or group interpreting that change (or its potential). The initial base scenarios of climate change, which were generated by the natural science members of the study team, described conditions at a 20- to 30-year time horizon. This scale was chosen because current global scenarios tend to describe changes anywhere from 50 to 100 years ahead, beyond the future of most participants’ lifetimes, and because changes within shorter timescales were too driven by weather rather than climate. In Colorado, however, we found many participants struggled to envision changes to place 20 years out, while in Montana this proved to be manageable. Interviews with residents of Grand County, Colorado (see Wyborn et al., 2015) expressed an array of livelihoods and place values, but with a strong core focused on the roles of tourism, landscape aesthetics and second or amenity homeownership in the local economy. Some participants engaged in ranching and other agricultural or natural resource livelihoods, but most were invested in the tourism industry, and a substantial number of participants owned and operated small businesses. They expressed difficulty imagining the 20- to 30-year timescale described in the scenarios and could offer little in terms of the impact on their business strategies or practices at that timescale,

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favouring instead a much shorter five-year time horizon. Although they were invested in maintaining the status quo landscape aesthetic, their short-sightedness was rooted in how small businesses operate, including day-to-day challenges and short-term financial planning. Most small business owners are invested temporarily, given limited success rates, and must remain flexible in the near term to the point of exit. As one business owner stated: I’m not thinking five years down the road. There’s just too much that can happen . . . I think if you’re conservative most of the time, with the way that you spend at least early on in the season, making sure that it’s gonna work . . . then you start making some improvements . . . but if you’re not gonna make it, you can hold back the improvement as well. (Business owner interview, 2013)

Additionally, because small business owners in this area are dependent on a more recent upsurge in tourism, most were transplants from other regions of the state and country and had not yet built up a reservoir of familiarity and memory in Grand County. This disjuncture between business time horizons and those required to adapt to long-term climate change challenged our capacities to leverage scenarios into planning. In contrast, community members in Montana, particularly ranchers, were significantly more capable of envisioning the 20- to 30-year timescale presented in the scenarios. Partly this was due to the fact that many residents of the Big Hole Valley are long-term residents from multigenerational families, some of which arrived in the late nineteenth century. This depth of social and ecological memory exceeds an individual lifespan or even, in contrast to Colorado, a much shorter stage of a life course (e.g. retirement). The expanded temporal horizons of Big Hole residents, however, were also generated by a ranching livelihood, which is deeply entangled with long multigenerational histories rooted in place and community. The activities of ranching are not simply instrumental means to a short-term end, but rather reproduce the landscape and community, which sustains connections to both past and place (Figure 2.1). The everyday interactions with water irrigation, haying and calving are not simply the utilitarian means to an economic return; they are intimate, repeated encounters with the spaces that aggregate to form a deep temporal connection beyond one’s immediate present. As such, the temporal horizons of ranching are long-term, with annual herd planning nested within longer time cycles extending out to generational change. These temporalities, in contrast to Colorado, meshed with the planning cycles needed for climate adaptation.

2.3.2

Golden Pasts, Golden Futures Another way that temporal senses of place impacted on how participants engaged with the scenarios concerns how place-based narratives structure the flow of time, and how the narrativisation of time operates as a lens through which participants navigate and make sense of potential future climate change impacts. In other words, as participants considered the implications of the future climate change described in the scenarios,

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Figure 2.1 A beaverslide hay stacker is an important marker of place identity in the Big Hole Valley. Figure credit: USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.

they interpreted those changes and their repercussions through their own sense of the historical trajectory of each place. Research on the psychology of time in climate change has found, for instance, that conservative individuals tend to perceive futures through narrativised ‘golden pasts’ (Pahl et al., 2014). These studies describe how politically conservative individuals discount future climate change because their understanding of past environments is rooted in a static perception of nature. However, in our research in Montana and Ohio we found that despite a general conservative political leaning among participants, interpretations of future changes, described below, were largely viewed through their particular sense of place as opposed to a politically motivated or mediafocused one. In contrast to the psychological research, anthropological approaches to time have explored, for example, how place-based narratives of past or possible social and environmental change strongly shape interpretations of the future – demonstrating the rootedness of temporal narratives. In Montana we found that individuals – in fact, most participants – interpreted all scenario descriptions through what some call ‘declensionist’ narratives of the past (i.e. marked by decline). Here, participants elaborated on a long history of social and environmental decline in the Big Hole, including a gradual process of depopulation brought about through economic crises and the consolidation of ranches, while environmental descriptions elaborated dramatic shifts in average seasonal temperatures, fire frequency, reduced snowpack, declines in river flow and significant impacts to wildlife and fisheries. For many, the Big Hole was best exemplified by its storied pioneer past and the decades of economic and social growth in the early twentieth century. This period was remembered as one of stable seasonality, plentiful snowpack and river flow, less frequent and severe fire events and abundant and accessible wildlife. Moreover,

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the communities, where people were employed in the timber and milling industry and cattle and sheep ranching, were sufficient to support a robust population of single families. Towns had access to post offices, restaurants, groceries, newspapers, police and other social services. This period was for many a high point or golden age for the Big Hole Valley, and this past was mobilised to memorialise and celebrate their communities. Consequently, as participants analysed the scenario descriptions of climate change, they unfortunately found continual decline, and their responses were couched in this narrative of the valley’s historical trajectory of decline. In contrast, residents of south-east Ohio, in the region surrounding the Wayne National Forest, interpreted the future climate change impacts described in the scenarios in a nearly converse way. Even though many of the details in the scenario descriptions matched the range of environmental and ecological threats described in Montana, Ohio residents perceived these changes quite differently. As residents conveyed, the landscape of the region has experienced regeneration and renewal over the course of the latter twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. By the 1900s the entire region was largely devoid of natural forests due to the immense needs for wood and charcoal in the iron smelting industry. Moreover, as coal mining became dominant through the middle of the twentieth century, the economic and social impacts were exacerbated by significant environmental problems such as acid mine drainage (AMD). Participants described how, as children, they would colour streams orange in their schoolwork due to the toxic pollution from AMD. Yet with the establishment of the Wayne National Forest in 1934 and the diminished power of the extraction industry, the forests of the region regenerated and now provide substantial land cover in the region even beyond public lands. For many, the temporal trajectory of ecological change had been one for the better, and the future climate impacts contained in the scenarios did not present a radical departure from the trajectory. Shifts away from northern trees such as eastern cedar or maple to southern species did not cause deep concern as long as there were still forests. As one participant noted: Overall things are really improving in south-east Ohio, things are up. When the Wayne National Forest bought up all the land, the abandoned coal mine land . . . it was poor quality, the environment was denuded and dead. I see this trend continuing on despite what’s described in the scenarios. (NGO interview, 2015)

2.3.3

Wind Is a Person The linkages between temporality and sense of place can also precede the positioned subject and their ability to make sense of the world through fundamental assumptions about the nature of being. In other words, prior to one’s positioned view of the world or epistemological attempts at understanding it, one must necessarily make ontological claims about the nature of that world. These ontological claims make assumptions about not only the nature of things but also the metaphysics of space-time that constitute them. Time, again, is a quality or perception of change and fundamentally depends on the agency of ‘things’, some of which may be conscious and sentient and

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some of which may not. As a considerable body of research in anthropology demonstrates, diverse cultures around the world ascribe such consciousness and sentience to objects, things and processes, which contrasts with the strong nature–culture dualism rooted in Western science. Ontological disjunctures in collaborative settings, then, are not simply disagreements about whose knowledge more closely represents the world, but rather concern the nature of the world itself. Natcher et al. (2007) describe a scenario-based climate change project conducted in the Huslia region of north-west interior Alaska with Koyukon communities, and the series of critical ontological disagreements they faced. The goal of their project was to understand climate change impacts on health and subsistence through increasingly severe and frequent threats from wildfire. However, early on they faced considerable pushback on their assumptions about the nature of time. As they note: ‘Because much of the discourse used in futures research is grounded in a linear conception of time, the use of futures research may impose future-oriented behaviour on those who do not necessarily share the same temporal orientation’ (Natcher et al., 2007, p. 114). As the authors further note, ‘aspects of the environment represent the transformed embodiments of formerly human spirits that are imbued with consciousness’ (p. 119). Koyukon residents of Huslia, they found, hold that features and qualities of their environment are not only driven by spirits but are constituted by them. For example, the earth spirit sinh taala’ and the wind spirit alts’ eeyh doyeega were particularly salient in discussions of potential fire or shifting wind patterns. These spiritual emanations of place not only populate the landscape with non-human agents, but also formulate a sense of place through individual orientations to time. For Koyukon people, human agency, itself deeply connected to the activities of hunting and gathering, inhabits an immediate present, while the distant future is an uncertain realm governed by the spirits, where environmental change is not a random occurrence but is caused by the moral desires of the spirits themselves. Consequently, for the residents of Huslia, temporal orientations are not categorised into past, present and future, but are rooted in their significance and relation to the immediate present. Even seasonality, divided into 4 main seasons and 16 transitional seasons, varies from person to person depending on their own experience with events such as salmon runs or ice break-up. In contrast, the distant future, which includes things we might call ‘climate’, is given over to the spirits and is socially suppressed and minimised to prevent a tendency towards accumulation (e.g. through saving) and inequality. Because of the critical entanglement of spirits, livelihood and social cohesion, the moral ordering between people and spirits is transmitted through ‘distant time stories’ that instruct Koyukon people in the proper relations with the spirit world. To speak of these spirits in the ways represented by the climate scenarios was perceived as arrogant and presumptuous, and any attempt to tame these spirits through such futures methods ‘places research participants in situations that are potentially offensive to a sentient world – a world that can be highly sensitive, vindictive, and dangerous’ (Natcher et al., 2007, p. 114). The ontological claims about the nature of time and being that are packaged in climate adaptation scenarios, themselves a particular universalising sense of place, essentially scuttled the engagement and discussion envisioned by the researchers.

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2.4

Discussion Each of these scenario-based projects clearly illuminates the critical role of time in understanding the challenges of place-based collaboration in climate adaptation, and they highlight the positional, epistemological and ontological axes of friction that can emerge in diverse, plural settings. Critical to adaptation, these differences articulate in uneven ways with scenario-based climate adaptation planning. The time horizons favoured by ranchers, for instance, were amenable to the 20- to 30year timescale chosen by the researchers in consultation with natural scientists. Small business owners, on the other hand, perceived the future through substantially shorter time horizons that were not favourable to the aims of the project. This raises a series of questions about the utility in this instance of scenario methods based on singular or universal time horizons in contexts marked by diverse senses of place and time. It is also evident that place-based temporal narratives of past and current social and ecological change shape how people make sense of future social and ecological change brought about by a changing climate. In Montana, senses of place marked by declensionist narratives of social and ecological decline might in fact make residents more likely to embrace adaptation efforts, in order to reverse those narratives or return to some ‘golden past’. Conversely, in Ohio, the residents of the region did not perceive the described changes as particularly threatening, which may work to reduce the urgency and initiative to collaborate, and may make residents less motivated to take steps to respond to climate change and find more adaptive futures. This raises questions about how climate change is narrativised in particular places, how those narratives connect to particular senses of place, and how they articulate with or counter broader global narratives of climate change. Lastly, and in a more fundamental sense, the pushback from Koyukon residents of Huslia, Alaska demonstrates how the temporalities of climate science, rooted in Newtonian world views and the singular, linear vision of Western time, are at odds with other claims about the nature of the world. This raises substantial questions not just about collaboration in adaptation, but also about broader matters of justice and whose place and times count. Further, senses of place do not simply shape and filter perceptions of future climate change impacts; they too are threatened by a changing climate and the outcomes of adaptation decisions and actions. In each of these cases, the climate change impacts described in the scenarios not only threaten the ways people connect with their places but also their means to understand and come to know their places, whether through ranching, recreation, or subsistence-based knowledge systems created over millennia. Understanding how this sense of vulnerability further filters and shapes the ways participants and stakeholders understand and perceive future climate change is critical.

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Conclusion Despite these problematic findings, we still consider sense of place critical to successful collaboration in the context of climate adaptation, but only in its particular application to specific times and spaces – that is to say, in its plurality. In this sense, plural senses of future place function not to traverse boundaries but rather to illuminate them. Many of the boundaries that plague collaboration across cultures, communities and plural visions of the world can at times lie hidden behind the assumptions of a universalising, objectivist ‘view from nowhere’ world view. But they can also be hidden by universalising, objectivist views of the past, present and future. Yet given the future-oriented practice of climate change adaptation and the widespread use of techniques such as scenarios in those practices, sense of place narrowly conceived in its spatial elements is insufficient to operate as an effective boundary concept. Rather, sense of place must be understood through the dynamic and diverse temporalities that constitute it, necessitating a shift in understanding from ‘sense’ to ‘senses’ of place. Moving forwards, it is critical to craft new forms of adaptive practice that can recognise and account for this plural sense of time and place.

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Lyon, C. and Parkins, J. (2013) ‘Toward a social theory of resilience: social systems, cultural systems, and collective action in transitioning forest-based communities’, Rural Sociology, vol. 78, no. 4, pp. 528–549. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ruso.1201 MacGillivray, B. and Franklin, A. (2015) ‘The position of place in governing global problems: a mechanistic account of place-as-context, and analysis of transitions towards spatially explicit approaches to climate science and policy’, Environmental Science and Policy, vol. 53, pp. 1–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2015.06.021 Marshall, N., Adger, W. N., Benham, C., et al. (2019) ‘Reef grief: investigating the relationship between place meanings and place change on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia’, Sustainability Science, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 579–587. Masterson, V., Enqvist, J. P., Stedman, R. C. and Tengö, M. (2019) ‘Sense of place in social-ecological systems: from theory to empirics’, Sustainability Science, vol. 14, pp. 555–564. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00695-8 Murphy, D., Wyborn, C., Yung, L., et al. (2016) ‘Engaging communities and climate change futures with multiscaled iterative scenario building’, Human Organization, vol. 75, no. 1, pp. 33–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.17730/0018-7259-75.1.33 Natcher, D. C., Huntington, O., Huntington, H., et al. (2007) ‘Notions of time and sentience: methodological considerations for Arctic climate change research’, Arctic Anthropology, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 113–126. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/arc.2011.0099 Pahl, S., Sheppard, S., Boomsma, C. and Groves, C. (2014) ‘Perceptions of time in relation to climate change’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 375–388. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/wcc.272 Rickards, L., Ison, R., Fünfgeld, H. and Wiseman, J. (2014) ‘Opening and closing the future: climate change, adaptation, and scenario planning’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 587–602. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/c3204ed Tschakert, P., Barnett, J., Ellis, N., et al. (2017) ‘Climate change and loss, as if people mattered: values, places, and experiences’, WIREs: Climate Change, vol. 8, no. 5, pp. 1–19. http://dx.doi .org/10.1002/wcc.476 Vervoort, J. M., Bendor, R., Kelliher, A., Strik, O. and Helfgott, A. E. R. (2015) ‘Scenarios and the art of worldmaking’, Futures, vol. 74, pp. 62–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2015.08.009 Wilbanks, T. J. (2015) ‘Putting “place” in a multi-scale context: perspectives form the sustainability sciences’, Environmental Science and Policy, vol. 53, pp. 70–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.envsci.2015.04.009 Williams, D. R. (2018) ‘Spacing conservation practice: place-making, social learning, and adaptive governance in natural resource management’, in Marsden, T. (ed.), The SAGE Handbook of Nature, vol. 1, London, SAGE, pp. 285–303. Wyborn, C., Yung, L., Murphy, D. and Williams, D. R. (2015) ‘Situating adaptation: how governance challenges and perceptions of uncertainty influence adaptation in the Rocky Mountains’, Regional Environmental Change, vol. 4, pp. 669–682. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007 /s10113-014-0663-3 Yusoff, K. and Gabrys, J. (2011) ‘Climate change and the imagination’, WIREs: Climate Change, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 516–534. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/wcc.117

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The Place–Subjectivity Continuum after a Disaster Enquiring into the Production of Sense of Place as an Assemblage Héctor Berroeta, Laís Pinto de Carvalho and Jorge Castillo-Sepúlveda

3.1

Introduction Existing approaches to risk as a social construction suggest that in order to reduce the probability of disasters occurring, we must address the systemic vulnerabilities that cause them (Evans and Reid, 2014; Lavell and Maskrey, 2014; Wisner et al., 2003). Addressing vulnerabilities requires tackling the root causes of the risks that are produced by different degrees of exposure to threats, social inequalities, structural crises and environmental injustice (Fernández et al., 2019). A recent report on the human impacts of climate hazards identified several problems affecting millions of people around the world. Heatwaves, forest fires, sea-level rise, hurricanes, floods, drought and a lack of clean water have impacted on various aspects of health, food, water, infrastructure, economy and society (Mora et al., 2018). Extracting processes and the economic development model intensify the growing threats of climate change in Latin America, accelerate the emergence of disasters (Fernández et al., 2019), increase the frequency and intensity of disasters, and expose populations to greater risks. This complex context demands new ways of understanding humans’ relationship with the environment in order to identify alternative ways of dealing with disasters. Previous psychosocial studies on disasters have focused mainly on the psychological effects linked to the magnitude of the destruction, the demographic and social characteristics of the inhabitants (Norris et al., 2002), the effect on material losses, and the impact on people–place bonds (Sanders et al., 2004). These studies have shown that socio-natural disasters play a key role in people’s sense of place (Berroeta et al., 2017; Cox and Perry, 2011), affecting place identity and place attachment (Ruiz and Hernández, 2014) even during the reconstruction process (Silver and Grek-Martin, 2015), and encouraging resistance dynamics even though these are a source of stress, pain and disorientation (Scannell et al., 2016). Place attachment, place identity and place dependence are the main concepts used in examining post-disaster reconfigurations of sense of place, understood through three different epistemological lenses: empirical-positivist (Hernández et al., 2014; Vidal et al., 2010), phenomenological (Altman and Low, 1992) and discursive (Di Masso et al., 2014). These three approaches have been useful in

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understanding the cognitive, emotional, biographical, group-related, performative and ideological aspects of sense of place. However, they still neglect how multiple and contested senses of place emerge and evolve as dynamic configurations of a plurality of place-related aspects that include materiality, embodiment, institutional regulations and affective practices, added to cognitions, emotions, discourses and values. On the one hand, empirical-positivist and phenomenological approaches have tended to view the individual as a subject that is relatively autonomous from spatial transformations, making strict distinctions between the physical conditions of space and its related subjective implications, and considering sense of place as a static construct referring to an inner development of one’s experience of place. On the other hand, the discursive approach has tended to reproduce the theoretical divide between sense of place as an exclusively subjective entity and as an exclusively discursive practice. In addition, the bulk of research on sense of place related to environmental transformations, including disasters, tends to dodge the fact that place experiences are strongly produced by political and ideological processes associated with the qualities of affected spaces and the social, material and legal conditions of the new habitats. The impact of a disaster on sense of place goes beyond the individual level: it results in socio-cultural, socio-economic and political changes (Miller and Rivera, 2010) that shape a new socio-spatial framework created by the disaster (Cox and Perry, 2011). Hence, there is a need to contribute novel theoretical conceptualisations that account for the multiple aspects and dynamic processes that shape post-disaster experiences of place, both pluralising and changing senses of place as a lens through which environmental transformations are studied. In this chapter, we propose a fourth epistemological approach to understand the changing senses of place resulting from socio-environmental disasters. The materialsemiotic approach involves investigating the practices and effects – which are simultaneously symbolic, corporeal and geographical – that characterise the production of new senses of place in post-disaster contexts. Specifically, we use the notion of assemblage as a conceptual tool to understand how senses of place are generated within a complex and dynamic network of influences and reciprocal variations between subjective, social and spatial aspects, articulating at the same time the relationship between individual experiences of place and social and institutional processes. To present, discuss and illustrate this material-semiotic approach, we will draw on some of the results of a study conducted in Chile addressing multiple case studies of post-disaster situations. Specifically, we analyse the case of the great fire of Valparaíso (12–16 April 2014), considered one of the largest disasters in Chilean history. The disaster affected more than 11,000 people living in an area spanning 1,042 hectares, located in the higher hills of the city of Valparaíso and characterised by precarious infrastructures and an impoverished population. We used several qualitative data production techniques: spatially referenced narrative interviews with 16 neighbours (Berroeta and Vidal, 2012), 8 walking interviews in which participants produced photographs (Drew and Guillemin, 2014; Evans and Jones, 2011) and conversation groups to discuss the meanings of their photographs. Thematic analysis was performed to integrate and analyse the data (Braun and Clark, 2006). We have selected results that make it possible to explore an analytic view of assemblage.

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Assemblage Theory and the Material-Semiotic Approach In a material-semiotic approach, an assemblage is an ensemble of parts that mesh together well (DeLanda, 2016). The verb ‘assemble’ encompasses a range of meanings, including ‘to arrange, to dispose, to fit up, to combine, to order’ (Law, 2004, p. 41). An assemblage is made of different things which are put in relations and enact some local reality in that process. In this sense, an assemblage consists of multiple, heterogeneous parts linked together to form a whole: an arrangement that creates agency and in which agency is possible (Müller, 2015). For actor–network theory (Latour, 2005), every element of an assemblage acquires its qualities and capacity to act in relation to other elements that mediate it, expand it or enable it to act. Entities – human or non-human – and their capacity to create action or be sensitive to the process of affection are a production of an arrangement of relations in which all of them emerge – including identity, legitimacy, memory and any other processes or aspects, such as sense of place. For example, processes of territorial and housing reconstruction after a disaster such as an earthquake or fire are only possible when humans and other elements share their capacities or possibilities, or any processes that appear to be evident only when an interaction occurs. Human agency is a distributed agency provoked by a meshwork composed of different natures that goes beyond the somatic resources of the individual (Callon, 2007). In other words, an assemblage is a mode of ordering heterogeneous entities that assume some expression and/or agency to work together for a certain period (Müller, 2015). Building on this theoretical approach, we consider sense of place as an assemblage – that is, a variable and unstable constellation of subjective, social, spatial, technological and political elements, among others. As stated by Di Masso and Dixon (2015) – who propose the concept of place-assemblage as an analytic tool to overcome the discourse– space dualism that characterises the constructionist study of the subjectivity–environment relationship – material aspects are always penetrated by pre-reflective forces that constantly rearrange sense of place as a lived experience. Place-assemblages emerge and evolve as emplaced subjectivities and practices unfold within a set of entwined discourses, material artefacts and corporealities that connect over time. In this amalgam of elements, each works as the condition of possibility for the others to happen, including the institutional, economic, cultural and political conditions that restrict or legitimise place-related meanings, circumstances and practices. This perspective therefore encourages a pluralistic and dynamic conceptualisation of senses of place.

3.3

The Assemblage of Senses of Place after a Disaster From an assemblage approach, environmental disasters, as a form of environmental transformation, are overall compositions in which establishing the limits between human society, institutions, culture, technologies, economy and nature itself becomes difficult (Rodríguez-Giralt et al., 2014). In this frame, the new senses of place

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produced after a disaster are configured through the assemblage of multiple scales – collective processes that make reconstruction possible (governmental policies or the overall modification of the surroundings and the neighbourhood), and the scale related to historical and personal aspects (the relationship that individuals establish with space) – which influence how victimhood itself is assessed. Extract 1 We talked when the fire was over. My mother had worked hard to get a house with everything: three bedrooms, a living room, toilet and kitchen, a garden and a barbecue area. She got all that after many years, and we all made an effort. So, after the fire, she said: ‘Hell, having to go through all that again. . .!’ She was scared. She said: ‘No, you know? Let them [government agencies] take care of it.’ (Man, Cerro La Cruz, 26 April 2019)

Extract 1 shows how disaster victimhood expresses itself in specific ways that are linked to both the collective and the personal level. Materiality as a whole – that is, infrastructural, spatial and even technical conditions – progressively configures how sense of place occurs in reconstruction, in both its general and specific dimensions. History and space become inextricable parts of a fabric that generates both simultaneously: family history is associated with space inasmuch as it is signified, valued and adopted in relatively stable forms due to the actions of the people involved; likewise, space and its presence – that which is done for and on behalf of individuals – emerge as an argument that supports the expression of emotions linked to the disaster, and as a complex element that transforms how subjectivity is performed and how it performs social, affective and political links. Subject and space are assembled, forming an emotional relationship. In other words, the sense of place that emerges here is a heterogeneous articulation that is not pregiven, but rather is produced through the assemblage of spatial conditions, personal and community histories and institutional criteria. Regarding the subjective aspects that have traditionally defined sense of place, they are conventionally understood to be discursive or symbolic components of a place bond. From our perspective, these symbolic aspects are only part of one of the processes that configure that bond and the place itself. The same notion of meaning can be redefined as the study of how this meaning is built, taking its ‘original nontextual and nonlinguistic interpretation [of] how one privileged trajectory is built, out of an indefinite number of possibilities’ (Akrich and Latour, 1992, p. 259). Defining meaning as a trajectory of linguistic or social elements, as well as material, technical or spatial ones, encourages us to redefine the traditional ways of exploring sense of place as a set of processes imbued with an exclusively social or psychological meaning. Instead, we should regard them as an assembled experience of complex becomings whose reality is defined through heterogeneous relationships between nature, society, culture and materiality on a common plane, produced by a temporal and emplaced articulation of material, psychological, discursive and technical practices. Therefore, we understand the space–subjectivity relationship from the perspective of a relational ontology, since, as proposed by Massey (2005), this relationship is constructed upon the basis of multiple trajectories that occur simultaneously and dynamically. This multiplicity makes it possible to recognise other voices and histories, thus challenging the hegemony of a single world view.

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The process whereby the damage to the inhabited infrastructure is assessed models the expression of victimhood, which is crystallised in what it means to be a fire victim: an experience shaped through the interaction of institutional, social, technical and spatial processes. In this respect, one of the key moments for initiating governmental measures and actions for the benefit of victims requires a combination of several elements: a description of the spatial conditions after the fire, narrations of people who lived in the area, and gestures of legitimisation of these narratives issued by government or institutional representatives, such as fire department or municipality officials. Extract 2 You need to speak to the fireman, the department is in the Customs Office, that’s where his office is. And there you should ask him to give you a document certifying that your house burned down, including the date and all the details. And you need to get it signed by that gentleman. (Woman, Las Cañas hill, 26 April 2019) The papers . . . well, this is a survey of the residents done by SERVIU [Housing and Urbanisation Services] . . . All of them. They signed you up and that gave you the right to get reconstruction aid, money from the government. (Man, Las Cañas hill, 26 April 2019)

In Extract 2, the neighbours’ entitlement to victim status, which is grounded in official documents, emerges within a dynamic assemblage process in which meaning-making practices are articulated, mediated and transformed by technical elements. Certificates or documents contain spatial conditions and the history of a place (e.g. ownership or its prior regulation before government officials), thus contributing to how victimhood becomes real in several institutional and local settings. In the extract above, discursive aspects are insufficient for conveying the concrete reality associated with spatial transformations resulting from a fire. Even if a document is understood as a discourse, it cannot be reduced to the set of words that one can read. Its materiality makes a difference in the course of action and the possibilities for the people affected to reinhabit the place. The acknowledgement of the reality of the victims of the fire is a product of the assemblage of discourses, technical elements (i.e. certificates or documents – Figure 3.1) and the subjective and spatial processes taking place. Thus, a certificate guarantees that a certain event happened and imbues it with some stability that enables it to operate in various settings, making other processes possible and enabling new relationships to be formulated in the post-disaster trajectory. In other words, the official document works by reshaping sense of place, as it participates in the social construction of a new collective of people labelled disaster victims, which involves the redefinition of their bonds with institutions, space and other residents. By mediating the foundation process for the reformulation of home reconstruction modes, the document contributes to the generation of new capabilities and legitimacies for sense of place. In sum, the sense of place associated with the experience of being a victim results in an assemblage that is produced in the interaction between territorial conditions, the history of the person and place, the person’s previous links with urban regulation bodies and new links with government bodies that are materialised in documents.

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Figure 3.1 Fire certificate, a municipality-issued document confirming that a person is a fire victim. The document is anonymised and indicates that the Community Development Directorate of the Municipality of Valparaíso certifies that on 13 April 2014, the Municipal Emergency Team attended a house fire with total destruction that affected the property of Mr X, located in Cerro Las Cañas. This is why Mr X is registered as a victim. The certificate was issued at the request of the applicant and was to be presented to CHILQUINTA and ESVAL (companies that provide electricity, sanitation and water services in Valparaíso).

3.4

Discussion As we have briefly discussed in our case study, the senses of place produced by disaster are reconfigured through the assemblage of multiple scales. On the one hand, there is a set of collective processes associated with reconstruction, such as political decisions, community actions and environmental transformations; on the other hand, there is a set of aspects of the relationship that people establish with space that reshapes the meaning of narratives, experiences, identifications, affects or personal resources. The nature of

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place is complex and dynamic: it is constituted of multiple scales that are articulated in a network of social relations (Massey, 2005) that are not limited to a single space. The meaning-making practices that create a sense of place out of shifting combinations of symbolic, spatial, material and institutional processes are permanently rearticulated and can only be understood by focusing on articulation (i.e. the action of assemblage). In this respect, the descriptions of the spatial conditions after the fire, the accounts of people who lived in the area, and the gestures of legitimation in narratives issued by government or institutional representatives, all show the assemblage processes that produce a new sense of place after the disaster. This analysis of senses of place as assemblages enables the overcoming of the usual dualisms in the exploration of the person–environment relationship, which view the latter in terms of an interaction between ontologically bounded entities. In consequence, models such as the people–person–place framework (Scannell and Gifford, 2010) can hardly capture the experience of sense of place in its ontological complexity, temporal dynamism and scale-embedded nature. Sense of place escapes dualist frameworks when understood as an indissoluble, unstable and permanently emerging place-assemblage, including multiple scales, artefacts and aspects that produce placeness (e.g. artefacts of a technicalpolitical nature, such as documents, certificates, surveys and measurements). This notion of assemblage operates at the ontological, methodological and analytical levels. This situation poses an evident challenge when it comes to examining the emergent interaction between the material characteristics, embodied relationships and linguistic constructions that produce sense of place. In our study, this involved qualitative strategies that employed discursive, emplaced, mobile and visual techniques, as well as an analytic procedure focused on emergent meaning frameworks (Di Masso and Dixon, 2015). To understand senses of place as assemblages, we need to take into account the variability of senses of place on the geographical and temporal scales, accepting that assemblages have a contingent and historical identity – with multiple compositions – where a translocality operates (Greiner and Sakdapolrak, 2013). Senses of place can become components of other assemblages, thus constituting larger assemblages, or can become linked to other assemblages that affect the composition of their relations. This can be illustrated in our study by showing how the state’s rationality affects how sense of place reconstruction trajectories are constituted. In our view, it is essential to consider the applied implications of adopting this approach to analyse post-disaster transformation and reconstruction processes. Most programmes and actions to recover from disaster have followed strictly technical criteria, without benefiting from local knowledge, out of a homogenised view of the affected subjects – a fetishistic representation of the victims of disasters (Fernández et al., 2019) – thus reproducing relationships of oppression and inequality. Therefore, considering senses of place as assemblages is a chance to address environmental problems more comprehensively (Wiesenfeld, 2001) by prioritising actions that give residents a leading role, understand aspects of power and territorial struggle, and highlight the technical-political deficits of the reconstruction or relocation policies experienced by residents.

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3.5

Conclusion The multiple changes in sense of place associated with a socio-natural disaster must be interpreted as a process that cannot be reduced to a single dimension or aspect of placeexperience or practice. Novel theoretical approaches and analytical perspectives are needed, extending and problematising the phenomenological, socio-cognitive and constructionist-discursive approaches that have commonly been applied in the study of sense of place. Such perspectives fragment sense of place into different components (cognitive, affective or dispositional), making invisible collective and institutional aspects of various scales that participate in the production of sense of place, and they have a powerful impact on the perpetuation of the social and spatial vulnerabilities that condition disasters. We have proposed a material-semiotic approach that redefines sense of place as an assemblage, that is, an interweaving set of affective, discursive, material, corporeal and institutional practices and their dynamic and situated rearticulations. These complex relations occur in a translocal way (Greiner and Sakdapolrak, 2013), so senses of place can be reinterpreted as person–place relational trajectories shaped by activities that are neither local nor global but occur within both daily spatial practices and institutional policies and guidelines that make up the place as a habitable territory. Therefore, government policies dealing with disasters and their aftermaths must be extremely sensitive to the heterogeneity of aspects and processes through which postdisaster senses of place are reassembled.

Acknowledgement This project was supported by funding agency grant ANID-FONDECYT REGULAR 1181429.

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Rodríguez-Giralt, I., Tirado, F. and Tironi, M. (2014) ‘Disasters as meshworks: migratory birds and the enlivening of Doñana’s toxic spill’, Sociological Review, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 38–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12123 Ruiz, C. and Hernández, B. (2014) ‘Emotions and coping strategies during an episode of volcanic activity and their relations to place attachment’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 38, pp. 279–287. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2014.03.008 Sanders, S., Bowie, S. and Bowie, Y. (2004) ‘Lessons learned on forced relocation of older adults’, Journal of Gerontological Social Work, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 23–35. https://doi.org/10.1300 /J083v40n04_03 Scannell, L. and Gifford, R. (2010) ‘Defining place attachment: a tripartite organizing framework’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j .jenvp.2009.09.006 Scannell, L., Cox, R., Fletcher, S. and Heykoop, C. (2016) ‘“That was the last time I saw my house”: the importance of place attachment among children and youth in disaster contexts’, American Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 58, pp. 158–173. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12069 Silver, A. and Grek-Martin, J. (2015) ‘“Now we understand what community really means”: reconceptualizing the role of sense of place in the disaster recovery process’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 42, pp. 32–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.01.004 Vidal, T., Valera, S. and Peró, M. (2010) ‘Apego al lugar, identidad de lugar and movilidad residencial en estudiantes de grado’, Psyecology, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 353–369. https://doi.org/10 .1174/217119710792774799 Wiesenfeld, E. (2001) ‘La problemática ambiental desde la perspectiva psicosocial comunitaria: hacia una Psicología Ambiental del cambio’, Medio Ambiente y Comportamiento Humano, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–19. Wisner, B., Blaikie, P., Cannon, T. and Davis, I. (2003) At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters, 2nd ed., New York, Routledge.

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Changing Sense of Place and Local Responses to Bengaluru’s Disappearing Lakes Ailbhe Murphy, Johan Enqvist and Vanessa A. Masterson

Rapid and novel social-ecological changes are becoming a prominent feature of the Anthropocene, not least with the progression of climate change. Cultural, political and personal perspectives impact on people’s experiences of and responses to such changes (Adger et al., 2011), creating spatially differentiated impacts. This mosaic makes understanding behavioural responses to social-ecological change a complex but critical area of research (Plummer et al., 2020; Masterson et al., 2019a). In the paradigm of conventional natural resource management, environmental impacts are often framed as ‘simple problems’ that can be moderated through technical interventions; however, this ignores the inherent complexity of the interactions between human value systems and decision-making on the one hand, and changing biophysical processes on the other (Collins, 2014). Such oversimplification risks creating policy and management decisions that are inflexible, short-sighted, and overlook the political implications of inevitably subjective ideas around how to adapt to social-ecological change (Artelle et al., 2018). One way of better integrating social dimensions into environmental management is offered in the sense of place literature (Larson et al., 2013; Davenport and Anderson, 2005). Sense of place is the meanings that describe what a place is (Stedman, 2008) and the attachments people feel for a place based on these meanings (Brehm et al., 2013; Tuan, 1977). Scholars increasingly draw attention to the fact that along with their biophysical properties, ecosystems may carry subjective meanings that can differ from person to person (Masterson et al., 2017; Adger et al., 2011) or importantly change over time (Enqvist et al., 2019; Krasny et al., 2014). Such changes in sense of place inform stakeholder opinion and may influence environmental behaviour, so understanding them can help us to identify potential sources of conflict as well as areas of common ground when navigating change (Ingalls et al., 2019; Masterson et al., 2019b; Chapin and Knapp, 2015). Crucially, researching shifts in how people experience sense of place provides a way to capture the subjectivity inherent in perceiving ecological changes as positive or negative, as well as what constitutes appropriate action when mediating place-based concerns (Stedman, 2016). This chapter responds to calls to engage with the non-linearity and dynamism of sense of place (e.g. Masterson et al., 2017; Tidball and Stedman, 2013) by studying the relationships between sense of place, changes to a place and place-based behaviour.

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Using insights from a case study on citizen-led lake restoration (Murphy et al., 2019), we explore different pathways for change in sense of place, presenting sense of place as a non-static relationship between people and place that may give rise to modified environmental behaviours over time. We also highlight sense of place as more than just a variable to be measured and studied academically, but a tool activist groups and communities use to craft narratives for change (Yung et al., 2003) and nurture public attachment to urban social-ecological systems.

4.1

Case Study: Social-Ecological Restoration of Bengaluru’s Urban Lakes Southern India’s hydrological systems rely heavily on summer monsoons, but climate change is predicted to cause more extreme anomalies including both floods and droughts (Sharmila et al., 2015). The rapidly growing city of Bengaluru, where the predominant water supply comes from a river 100 km away, faces growing water scarcity. Remnants of an ancient irrigation system of human-made lakes are a potential supplementary water source (Figure 4.1), as they help to recharge groundwater levels that supply local wells. However, over 800 lakes have been lost to urbanisation, and many of the circa 210 that remain are negatively impacted by chemical pollution, eutrophication from untreated sewage, encroachment from development, and blocked in-/outlets (Nagendra, 2016). These complex social-ecological dynamics produce a range of different perceptions regarding the lakes’ role in the city, from essential

Bengaluru’s lake network and location of study sites

Jakkur

Bengaluru

A

Chinnappanahalli

Hosakerehalli

Mestri

Puttenahalli Akshayanagara

Studied lake Typical neglected lake

0

B

10

20

kilometers

Figure 4.1 Bengaluru’s lake maintenance is largely neglected by the authorities (a). In a few cases (b), the efforts of local residents have had a positive impact. Figure credit: A. Murphy.

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for replenishing groundwater levels and sustaining over 400,000 borewells (Enqvist et al., 2016), to antiquated landscape features most useful for housing development or illegal dumping of construction debris and solid waste. Controversy is also exacerbated by an ongoing dispute around government decisions to retroactively reclaim built-on lake beds and canals, resulting in haphazard bouts of home and business demolition in the name of conservation (Chandran et al., 2016). Governance and access rights for Bengaluru’s lakes have been continuously reinvented over the past century (Table 4.1), causing shifting and often contested boundaries between government and local stakeholders (Nagendra and Ostrom, 2014). These shifts have shaped people’s attitudes towards and ability to nurture a bond with the lakes. For example, state-led restoration of some lakes into primarily recreational spaces has sidelined fishers and agricultural users, who traditionally played an important part in lake maintenance (Nagendra, 2016). However, a growing number of citizenled lake restoration initiatives are now using historical precedents to support the idea of lakes being managed as living, resource-rich commons with multiple ecological functions. This has resulted in formally recognised partnerships between residents and government agencies, which since 2010 have jointly managed a selection of lakes as multifunctional communal spaces (Murphy et al., 2019). Given the shifting views on Bengaluru’s lakes, this study investigates what factors influence the changing sense of place and the decision to actively respond to ecological degradation. We interviewed active members of lake groups, their collaborators from local urban ‘villages’, and representatives from governmental departments and NGOs. Interviews (n = 41) were semi-structured and focused on changing personal relationships to local lakes as well as approaches to lake management. Interviewed lake group members (n = 22) also completed a survey to rank how place meanings and attachment statements have changed in importance over time (for details, see Murphy et al., 2019). Below, we reflect on how these findings complement earlier scholarship on changing sense of place and place-protective behaviour (Figure 4.2 a, b).

4.2

The Now and Then of Sense of Place Bengaluru’s lake activism demonstrates that sense of place forms through intersecting temporal processes. A strong catalyst for engaging in lake restoration among interviewees is the disruption between current social-ecological conditions and pre-existing historical conceptualisations of lake meanings. Many interviewees spoke about the centuries-old lake network as a feature of Bengaluru’s landscape that had made it known up until the 1970s as India’s ‘air-conditioned city’, ‘famed for migratory waterbirds’. Despite presentday degradation, these conceptualisations survive as a sense of place based on the lakes’ natural and social history from precolonial times, before centralised lake management. Keeping alive these historical place meanings of the lakes – for example, as bird habitats, community spaces and irrigation tanks for agriculture – helps to motivate protection despite negative press about present-day lake pollution and land-use controversies (Figure 4.2). It also helps to bridge social boundaries by inspiring upper- and middle-class urban

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Table 4.1 Historical progression in Bengaluru lake governance and place meanings History of lake governance

Shifting place meanings

1. Village commons (pre-1800s). Managed as a commons by adjacent village communities (as early as 870 CE). Maintenance responsibilities assigned according to caste/trade in exchange for access rights to natural resources, e.g. fish, grazing land. Lakes typically constructed by villagers or local rulers for agricultural purposes by damming small streams. Cascading lake chains constructed by using differences in local elevation and linked out- and inflow between lakes. 2. British occupation (1800s–1950s). Military use against the British: restricting artillery movement, poisoning troops’ water supplies. Management transferred to officers appointed by the British. Lake construction continued as a strategy to support growth of the city. Specialised local knowledge of lake maintenance eroding, but maintained in pockets. 3. Centralised governance (1960–1980s). Following Indian independence, all lakes declared state property; new main water supply sourced from river 100 km outside the city. Official discourse about lakes as health hazards; breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Dozens of lakes drained to eradicate malaria. Land used for bus stands, golf courses, shopping centres, residential areas, etc. Network destroyed, lakes become disconnected, increasing risk of seasonal flooding. Lake upkeep less prioritised; sewage from denser settlements starts entering lakes. 4. Government-led restoration (1980s–1990s). Lake restoration deemed necessary, resulting primarily in creation of recreational parks. Shift away from lakes as resource-rich community spaces. Negative ecological impact due to impervious surfaces, disconnected wetlands and canals, ‘soup bowl’ designs with stagnant water that prevents seasonal drying of lake beds. Other empty lakes seen as poor land prone to flooding become open spaces for rural migrants and the urban poor to establish semi-permanent settlements. 5. Protests (2000s). Unable to restore and maintain over 200 lakes, the government investigates privatisation and entrance fees. Public protests. Local activists file public interest litigation; court rules that lakes should remain accessible to all.

Irrigation – food production – wet season fishing – dry season grazing – brickmaking from lakebed silt – cooperation and sharing – morning dips for worship and purification – wildlife – drinking water

Battlegrounds – property of foreign rulers

Sites of pollution – health hazards – locations for property development – disconnected water bodies – flooding threats – breeding grounds for mosquitoes

Recreation, walking, jogging – perennial water – increased nearby real-estate value – restricted access for traditional livelihood-based uses (fishing, washing, fodder collection)

Lakes under threat – commercialisation – gentrification – restricted public access – socioeconomic exclusion

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Table 4.1 (cont.) History of lake governance

Shifting place meanings

6. Co-management opportunity (2010s). First memorandum of understanding formalises comanagement of a lake by the municipality and a local resident group. Experiments to recharge local groundwater by connecting lakes to waste water treatment plants and wetland filtration systems. Lake beds and boundaries designated as no-build zones, causing controversy. Using old village lake maps, municipality demolishes homes and businesses built where canals previously connected lakes. Public outcry halts demolition; meanwhile, large property developments continue on and around lakes, without legal consequences.

Community empowerment – tree planting – recreation – shramadhan – fishing – returning waterbirds – water recycling – important water source – temperature regulation to mitigate hotter summers – land and lake conservation disputes

Source: information compiled from Murphy et al. (2019) and Nagendra (2016).

residents to engage with remaining lake villagers about their memories of the lakes’ place in community life before rapid urbanisation.1 This cross-class interaction increases as the growing information technology sector’s employees populate new apartment complexes in the peri-urban areas where lakes still remain. Such sharing of memories gradually helps to foster more socially inclusive lake restoration where the needs of peri-urban fishermen and farmers are considered and facilitated: History enriches! You can always think something that happened yesterday is not interesting. But when you know something is age-old and there is a history attached, that history is interesting. These are things we need to document. Like last week we did an interview with a ninety-three-year-old person here. One of his grandsons is part of the lake group. So this granddad used to be a sanbog, which during the British period were like accountants . . . for villages around the lake. He was able to tell us about the lake at that time. (ID 71, lake group founder)

Collective memories of culturally symbolic, ‘place-associated’ ecosystems have inspired similar civic restoration efforts in other cities. Examples include New York’s Billion Oyster Project, which engages citizens in the restoration of the city’s oyster beds (Krasny et al., 2014), and the Princess Vlei wetland rehabilitation in Cape Town, used to strengthen local cultural and ecological heritage (Ernstson, 2011). These movements indicate that reversing ecological degradation can be greatly facilitated by drawing on place-based social-ecological memories (sensu Barthel et al., 2010). 1

Spatially, Bengaluru’s urban area has grown more than 10 times since 1949 (Ramachandra and Kumar, 2008). Many village communities have been engulfed by urban suburbs. The movement of middle-class communities into peri-urban areas is often facilitated by the conversion of lake farmland into layouts for apartment complexes, a process that involves government agencies buying out local farmers in the area. Hence, agricultural village communities are transitioning to new forms of employment, such as construction work, house cleaning and chauffeuring. Newcomers often refer to these people as villagers or ‘localites’.

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b

a

Place

Place attachment Sense of place Place meanings

c) Behaviour creates new place meanings

Place-protective behaviour

Physical features Social constructs

d) A richer set of meanings strengthens commitment

e) Actions to influence public sense of place

Figure 4.2 Sense of place has sometimes been reduced to simply mean place attachment, assumed to strengthen place-protective behaviour and by extension to positively impact on the place itself (a). A better understanding of the literature treats sense of place as consisting of both place meanings and attachment, which influence the direction and strength of place-protective behaviour respectively (b). In this study, we show how place-protective behaviour itself can enrich sense of place, e.g. by creating more place meanings (c), and how this broader understanding of a place further strengthens people’s commitment to protect it (d). Lastly, our study shows examples of place-protective behaviour that aims to change sense of place rather than the place itself, through narratives that influence public opinion about a site (e). Together, these feedbacks exemplify how any changes in place, sense of place and behaviour can influence the whole system and create dynamic, sometimes self-reinforcing relationships. It should be noted that the arrows do not represent absolute forces of change, as in a causal diagram; rather, they represent potential pathways for change stemming from or acting upon sense of place, thereby illustrating the dynamic nature of people–place relationships and the need to consider their temporal dimension.

Keeping such memories alive within a place helps to prevent new place meanings from replacing old ones during ecological change – that is, the ‘shifting baseline effect’ (Pauly, 1995). Retaining historical meanings can enable local people to notice and respond to undesirable ecological change (Masterson et al., 2017; Keilty et al., 2016). A shifting baseline effect can already be discerned among some Bengaluru residents, for instance when we compare two interviewees’ descriptions of the same lake: Before, I used to farm when the lake was big and had gardens. I used to feel happy. Wherever I went, I’d be like, ‘No, I have to go back to the lake!’ But now I don’t have interest, I don’t even want to see it. Now it’s small, it’s dirty. (ID 83, lake villager, age 55, born next to the lake) When I came, the lake was dry. I was part of the revival team from a dump yard to a lake overflowing. This whole year I saw the water level rising from the bed. So, now I love coming here, working here, helping out in whatever way possible. (ID 96, lake group member, living in lake surroundings since 2013)

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These quotes exemplify how one stakeholder group are experiencing a reduction in place meanings while another group are expanding their lake-based meanings through their efforts to protect it (Figure 4.2c). The physical and ecological changes of the lake have created a ‘disruption’ of attachment (Brown and Perkins, 1992) for this villager and likely other stakeholders, triggering an interruption of a sense of well-being and continuity. This disruption suggests that villagers hold a fixed/immutable notion of place that is in tension with the more fluid notions of place (Di Masso et al., 2019) experienced by lake group members, for whom attachments appear more contingent on the possibility of improved ecological change. Contrasting lake group members with villagers offers a reminder that place can become bounded by the grief and nostalgia of long-term stakeholders witnessing negative changes to their environment, while newcomers can be inspired by the narrative of memories as imaginative resources to actively change sense of place (Cresswell, 2015; Albrecht et al., 2007). It confirms that place attachment alone cannot be assumed to be a predictor of place-protective behaviour (Enqvist et al., 2019). Instead, the meanings linked to place attachment need to be understood in order to assess how changes will threaten or enhance it (Figure 4.2). Temporal variability in local actors’ sense of place is therefore important for both understanding perceptions of socialecological change and predicting behavioural responses to environmental degradation.

4.3

Changing Sense of Place and the Approach to Active Land Management There is an increasing trend in environmental governance literature to explore the potential of civic participation and collaborative approaches in protecting natural resources and ecosystem integrity (Andersson et al., 2017; Svendsen and Campbell, 2008). However, the relationships among ideologies, management types, resources and outcomes within such collaborations are not yet well understood. Sense of place concepts can help by unpacking what people consider important in a place, and whether and how this ultimately influences and guides their decisions when they engage in management and respond to change. In Bengaluru, part of the lake groups’ success lies in their approach to management. Many expressed frustration at having to collaborate with the ‘project culture’ of municipal authorities, which focuses on timelines and end dates. For lake groups, lake restoration is not a project but an ‘ongoing process’ in which they need to ‘invest thought, not money’. Members shared a common ethic towards civic duty and the lakes as places where one could contribute to the local community and environment through the practice of shramadhan: Shramadhan is an Indian word for service. Shrama means physical, dhan is donation . . . You donate your body to do work . . . Normally we have three ways of contributing. We call it tanu, dana, mana. Tanu means with body. So what can you do with your body? Rake, clean, cut, all that. Mana means mentally. You’re an intellectual, you’re an expert, then you say, ‘Ok! I have expertise, I will contribute that to the lake. I will give my advice.’ Dana is monetary. Some

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people may have money and may not be able to do the rest. So each can do a combination of whatever they want at the lake. (ID 71, lake group founder)

In the surveys, where interviewees were asked to rank the importance of different lake meanings such as ‘type of nature found here’ or ‘community events that take place here’, one of the most highly ranked meanings associated with restored lakes was ‘work that I do here’ (Murphy et al., 2019). This behaviour-induced place meaning (Figure 4.2c), interviewees explained, was important because it captured how lakes are places to express communal responsibility. They worried that younger generations did not share the same attitude of seeing public land as ‘an extension of one’s garden’. Inculcating a sense of duty among the youth was highlighted as a major raison d’être of their groups: It’s our responsibility as citizens of this locality! [The government] may give investment, but who will maintain it? We are the government! We cannot expect someone from outside to come and work here. So I caught hold of some youngsters. One day I was working in this place all alone. Some four or five young people came, ‘What are you doing uncle?’ they asked. I said I am cleaning up this area. ‘Shall we join you?’ they said. And that is how the movement started! Now we’re a fifty-strong team! (ID 8, lake group founder)

Here again, the collective memory of lake maintenance traditionally being a civic activity and the meaning of lakes as ‘sites of communal responsibility’ have helped to cultivate an active response to lake deterioration and inspire a sense of place enriched by notions of agency and the right to engage in public land management (Figure 4.2d).

4.4

The Effect of Changing Citizen–State Relationships on Sense of Place The Bengaluru case demonstrates that citizen–state relationships regarding lake management have affected and still affect people’s sense of place regarding the lakes, and also that different stakeholders’ perceptions of urban lakes shape their responses to restoration. In the face of the ecologically degraded status of the city’s lakes, lake group founders have actively worked to reconstruct place meanings that inspire and mobilise collective action in local communities (Figure 4.2e). In this way, the current co-management scheme has been facilitated by a strategic sharing of place among residents’ lake groups, who want to improve their neighbourhood environments, local authorities, who want to ensure that the lake restorations they invest in are maintained, and politicians, who want to improve the image of Bengaluru as a ‘world class’ city. However, the need to gain politically powerful actors as allies can considerably affect how place meanings are constructed and thus what ‘kind of place’ one ends up with, as one group realised when it was approached by a local politician offering to put in INR 80 million (eight ‘crores’ in Indian vernacular): This has divided our group considerably, as some people feel we should agree to this investment [and others are] saying ‘We don’t want eight crores’ . . . The design of the lake would [proceed] from a context of ‘How do I spend eight crores?’ rather than ‘What does the community and lake

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need?’ This internal debate within the group has delayed progress at the lake for the last year! (ID 29, lake group founder)

This example illustrates how a temporary strategic alliance can shift the perspective that place meanings are articulated from, especially when different actors are positioned in uneven power relations (Zhang, 2018; Massey, 2004). Competing with the ‘hijacking’ of place meanings diverts attention from ecological or community interests towards political ones, as efforts are expended to promote a place as evidence of a person’s qualifications to improve the city’s image, rather than to strive towards social-ecological restoration. As a result, attempts to respond to ecological cues of deterioration can be chronically delayed by place-based politics and the different claims being made over place meanings. It is therefore critical to understand how citizen–state relationships shape the temporality of place meanings on the ground when assessing the relationship between sense of place dynamics and responses to environmental challenges. However, in comparison with Ingall et al.’s (2019) exploration of competing narratives of place that can lead to violent conflict, this study largely exemplifies a constructive compromise being forged between citizens and state bodies as they learn to co-govern the lakes together. Using the lens of sense of place to pay closer attention to the factors that generate compromise versus contestation in other scenarios of co-governance could highlight important insights to guide other collaborative initiatives in the future.

4.5

Conclusion This chapter elucidates different pathways of change in sense of place in response to shifting social-ecological dynamics. In Bengaluru, sense of place in relation to urban lakes is changing and evolving as historical social-ecological dynamics blend with present-day social-ecological realities. This is shaped by obvious factors such as urbanisation, climate change and changing demographics, as well as by the reinvention of historical uses as they clash with modern activities. Changing sense of place is furthered by activists’ work to restore lakes as sites of communal responsibility. Through their active manipulation of lake meanings, they are generating a sense of place that can be collectively harnessed for conservation in the face of ecological deterioration. Importantly, the exchange of memories and place meanings between different stakeholder groups helps to facilitate this. We suggest the role that stakeholder inclusiveness/communication plays in changing sense of place during adaptation to change warrants further research. This case study and its historical background also illustrates how changing citizen–state relationships can significantly change the meanings a place holds. However, the influence of broader political contexts on sense of place in relation to local ecological spaces is rarely emphasised. Collectively, these findings suggest that changes to place influence sense of place, which in turn influences how we engage in those places, potentially changing the character of such places further (Figure 4.2). More research is required to understand

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whether this may be a reinforcing relationship. Our findings certainly suggest that considering the non-linear dynamics of sense of place within a wider system of other complex social and environmental processes would lead to greater understanding of how communities experience and engage with environmental change.

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Ramachandra, T. V. and Kumar, U. (2008) ‘Wetlands of Greater Bangalore, India: automatic delineation through pattern classifiers’, Electronic Green Journal, vol. 26. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.5070/G312610729 Sharmila, S., Joseph, S., Sahai, A. K., Abhilash, S. and Chattopadhyay, R. (2015) ‘Future projection of Indian summer monsoon variability under climate change scenario: an assessment from CMIP5 climate models’, Global and Planetary Change, vol. 124, pp. 62–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2014.11.004 Stedman, R. C. (2008) ‘What do we “mean” by meanings? Implications of place meanings for managers and practitioners’, in Kruger, L., Hall, T. and Stiefel, M. (eds), Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management: General Technical Report, Portland: USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. Stedman, R. C. (2016) ‘Subjectivity and social-ecological systems: a rigidity trap (and sense of place as a way out)’, Sustainability Science, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 891–901. https://doi.org/10.1007 /s11625-016-0388-y Svendsen, E. S. and Campbell, L. K. (2008) ‘Urban ecological stewardship: understanding the structure, function and management’, Urban Ecology, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–32. Available at http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cate/vol1/iss1/4/ (accessed 13 October 2020). Tidball, K. and Stedman, R. (2013) ‘Positive dependency and virtuous cycles: from resource dependence to resilience in urban social-ecological systems’, Ecological Economics, vol. 86, pp. 292–299. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.10.004 Tuan, Y.-F. (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Yung, L., Freimund, W. A. and Belsky, J. M. (2003) ‘The politics of place: understanding meaning, common ground, and political difference on the Rocky Mountain Front’, Forest Science, vol. 49, no. 6, pp. 855–866. Zhang, A. Y. (2018) ‘Thinking temporally when thinking relationally: temporality in relational place-making’, Geoforum, 90, pp. 91–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.02.007

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Place-Making for Regional Conservation Negotiating Narratives of Stability and Change William P. Stewart and Nicole M. Evans

After two centuries of sustained agricultural, industrial and residential development, only fragments of the original tallgrass prairie remain in Illinois. Less than one percent of the Prairie State is, in fact, native prairie. Nowhere can the modern traveler enjoy the sweeping vistas that greeted early settlers to northern Illinois – vast grasslands dotted with bison, drained by meandering prairie creeks, and home to an impossible diversity of plants and animals . . . we allow the living prairie to fade from memory at our peril. The ecologists tell us of prairie’s high biodiversity value. Farmers and ranchers appreciate its economic value generated from deep soil and tall grasses. And do not overlook its influence on our common culture and values. Consign the prairie to history and we lose part of ourselves, part of what made – and still makes – the American Midwest and Illinois (the Prairie State) so special. (National Forest Foundation, 2019, p. 1)

Restoring a prairie in central Illinois evokes a shared narrative about an idyllic past. Midewin, an 18,000-acre tallgrass prairie restoration in northern Illinois, takes its name from the Pottawatomie word for ‘healing society’, reflecting expectations that restoring this landscape will make the present healthier and the future more sustainable. Although there have been two centuries of landscape change within the US Midwest connected to waves of farming, industry and residential expansion – with each of these waves leaving a visible impact – restoration of native prairie appears to turn back time and attempts to recreate a place of long ago. On one hand, it is puzzling to add another layer of change (restoration of a native ecosystem) to a landscape that has withstood two centuries of development and then characterise the newest layer of change as a stabilising and enduring part of ‘our common culture’. In what way can change be considered something that brings stability? On the other hand, engaging a restoration narrative with a process that ends with an imagined landscape of the past allows some people to see it as becoming what it once was. The busyness of two centuries of development makes the restoration of a past ecosystem even more appealing – as if the landscape had been beaten and bruised for two centuries and is now coming back to ‘rest forever’. Landscapes are constantly changing, through human action and dynamic relations among structures and functions of ecosystems. As ecological regimes shift, human connections to the environments of everyday life also evolve. Our success in adapting to such changes is tied to flexibility in our senses of place to engage and expand spatial and temporal scales. This chapter develops a framework for place-making at a regional

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level that characterises tensions between stability and change in ways that facilitate adaptation to shifting ecological regimes. Regionality is directed at understanding relationships between flows of capital and culture from a system of local sites to a global network (Cresswell, 2013). As such, regionality is not a fixed condition but a constant state of becoming through actors who construct and negotiate its boundaries and qualities (Allen et al., 1998). Regions are distinct from site, national and global levels, as they are less clearly defined by socio-political boundaries such as property ownership or nationhood, and negotiate forces of stability and change at a variety of small and large scales. Region is an important scale to address during land-use and conservation planning (Snyder, 1995), yet place is generally framed at a spatial scale aligning with individual perception and human action. Lewicka (2011) identified the scale of place tied to home, city and neighbourhood as being personally experienced, which helped to explain why regional or larger spatial scales were ‘not favorite objects of research in place’ (p. 212). The production of regional places brings visibility to a temporal scale in that tensions between global and local forces become part of shared lived experiences known through first-hand engagement, social networks and public discourse. Temporality leads to a collective set of narratives about relationshipbuilding that give rise to various senses of place about a region (Jones, 2009). At the scale of a site, place is perceived through one’s lived experience with it. When one moves from site to regional scale, place becomes complicated due to the limitations of human perception to make sense of, and feel belonging to, the whole of a landscape (Tuan, 1975, p. 158). Rather than a defined set of land-use practices at any given site, the mosaic of regional land-use practices is comparatively mixed and tied to a diversity of stakeholders. Within agricultural landscapes of the American Midwest, place-framing needs to account for the many vectors of change that influence land uses, as well as to recognise forces of stability that guide the future in ways that connect to the past. Regional and temporal scales entangle place within an evolving set of voices and forums, a diversity of land-use practices across interconnected sites, and a plurality of visions of what will be (Stokowski, 2002). ‘Place-making’ is appropriate for the discursive and interactive processes characterised by regional conservation and is distinguished from ‘place’, which lacks the anticipatory orientation of creating public and regional senses of place that are not already articulated or shared. Whereas sense of place refers to the social meanings signalled by environments and the emotions evoked by them (Gieryn, 2000), place-making is about a process that evolves across time, space and groups. Places are always becoming in ways that are connected to the multiple and sometimes competing aspirations of individuals, groups and organisations (Massey, 2005). The production of regionality embodied in creating senses of place is a key opportunity to assert conservation practices as linked to a network of other conservation practices across a landscape.

5.1

Importance of Regional Conservation Regional conservation presents challenges distinct from managing a given protected area or local site. A regional set of land uses typical of the American Midwest

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encompasses a mixture of towns, agricultural lands and industrial uses in ways that are beyond the boundaries of any one jurisdiction, set of perceptions or timescale. Multifaceted shifts in ecological regimes related to climate change, water pollution and biodiversity engage many segments of society, and require approaches that understand interrelations between humans and their environments at a regional scale distinct from the scales of parcel, site, neighbourhood or town. Biodiversity restoration, habitat corridors and sustainable agriculture all require regional collective impact to effect long-term change (Kania and Kramer, 2011). However, solutions to environmental problems are often constrained by reductionist approaches that assume smaller-level considerations can be aggregated and scaled up to larger levels, taking on the neoclassical economic assumption of instrumentally focused actors at all levels (Weintraub, 2010). Increasing scale is a project of creating scalability in a world that is mostly nonscalar (Tsing, 2012). Non-scalar means things transform as they expand, taking on new materials and relationships. Hence, the move from site-based to regional conservation becomes problematic due to its lack of scalability. Regional values can be wholly different or contradict individual utility (Kenter et al., 2015), and individuals may have preferences for landscape-level growth that do not flow from a collection of local concerns. A growing body of literature has suggested evidence for non-scalability of place relations, including Brown et al. (2015), who found that home place attachment did not map closely to larger-scale landscape values. While literature exists that examines the forces that produce locality (Appadurai, 1996), nationality (Anderson, 1983) and globality (Massey, 1994), if solutions to environmental problems are being addressed on regional scales, we need to understand ways in which regional places are produced. Although ecologists have been at the forefront of understanding and advocating the value of regional conservation, the general public and professionals linked to community planning are still learning the relevance of regional geographies (Hultman and Hall, 2012). A challenge of mixed-use landscapes is the lack of a collective set of regional senses of place other than an unpredictable mosaic of land uses. Such a mosaic could be perceived as unique in that it lacks any distinctive pattern. During interviews and focus groups with leaders in Will County, Illinois, which encompasses Midewin Prairie, some interviewees optimistically painted the disjointed growth as rendering ‘something for everyone’ in its diversity of uses (Strauser et al., 2018). However, another rendering is that it presents a confusing set of guidelines for future development and has grown in piecemeal fashion. Either of these interpretations suggests a future in which conflicts over regional senses of place will increase due to competing visions of compatible development that come with unpredictable or unwanted landscape change. An unresolved point is related to the unnoticed value of a regional ecosystem that functions and provides beneficial services to human communities (Daniel et al., 2012). A challenge of regional conservation is to build intelligible senses of place from a mosaic of land uses that seemingly compete with one another. Regional senses of place do not deny individual place meanings tied to home, work and family, which

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have been the focus of much of the work on place (Lewicka, 2011). Such personalised place meanings are an inherent part of our humanity (Relph, 1976). At the regional level, the unit of analysis is a collective set of communities that share a landscape and their socio-ecological relationships holding potential to produce conservation-friendly senses of place.

5.2

Place-Making for Regional Conservation Place-making is a compelling framework to understand the community-based dynamics of mixed-use landscapes. Pierce and colleagues (2011) define place-making as ‘the set of social, political and material processes by which people iteratively create and recreate the experienced geographies in which they live’ (p. 54). Williams (2014) indicates that place-making is focused on ‘how people fashion their world into places’ (p. 78), and evokes a socio-political framing of place-making as being discursively produced and recreated. In this sense, place-making emphasises the action and anticipation of material and social assemblages of meaning, compared with place and its concern for meanings, emotions and attachments. The promise of embracing regional place-making for conservation is to create a growth trajectory of comparative stability and ordered change. Although conflict within the collection of public values of mixed-use landscapes generally pits agricultural and industrial production against conservation benefits, when conducted in a strategic manner, regional place-making seeks compatibility across a dynamic set of governance policies and organisational practices. The purposeful development of regional place meanings would be directed at its multiscalar nature to adapt new ways of understanding, with consequences that create innovative forums for decisionmaking (Flint, 2013). In the process, the intimacies of knowing any given site may connect to larger geographies of social and ecological relationships (Stewart et al., 2013). Place-making for regional conservation enhances ecological, structural and social connections across a landscape. Figure 5.1 positions regional place-making for conservation initiatives as negotiating tensions between three axes of change and stability that reflect global and local forces. Several scholars have identified the tensions associated with the axes in Figure 5.1, albeit not within a framework of regional placemaking. The contribution of Figure 5.1 is to bring together these three global–local tensions and position regional place-making as a centre space where tensions on both sides are worked out. The first set of tensions are connected to ecological conditions and their relationships with human communities. One pole is anchored in global and national issues, such as climate change or hypoxia at a river delta; the other pole is linked to the particular challenges of site-based conservation. In mixed-use landscapes, such challenges are often tied to restoring a native ecosystem from former agricultural or industrial land, or to particular concerns about local open space. Both poles hold possibilities to effect change as interventions to reduce the threats to ecosystem

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Global and national environmental priorities

Structural

National policies that direct growth and change

Social

Cultural heritage linked to nation and state

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Site-based conservation challenges

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Organisational networks related to local land-use practices

Community identity

Figure 5.1 Place-making for regional conservation requires negotiation along three axes of tension. Ecological axis: two poles that characterise ecological conditions and relationships, with one directed at global and national environmental priorities, and the other at local ecology associated with its site-based conservation challenges. Structural axis: two poles of a societal structure that direct growth and change, with one anchored on global markets and national institutions, and the other being community-based organisational networks relevant to local land-use practices. Social axis: two poles that characterise the development of shared social and cultural values, with one tied to heritage linked to nation and state, and the other based on beliefs about origin and pride in local community identity. Place-making for regional conservation asserts itself in ways that negotiate tensions and compatibilities across these three axes.

services, or create stability by reinforcing the status quo of a socio-ecological regime. For ‘site-based conservation challenges’, many communities support local conservation initiatives through a park system or environmental protection staff, and may have particular priorities for conservation (Barrett et al., 2017). The second horizontal axis in Figure 5.1 is related to multiscalar structural conditions. The structural axis refers to institutional and organisational contexts in which land-use decisions are made. At one pole are global markets and national policies that incentivise growth and guide national priorities for landscape change. The other pole contains organisational networks with direct relationships to site-based decisionmaking. These networks are reflected in community-based norms and local patterns of land-use practices. Both poles hold possibilities to effect change (e.g. to build capacity for production) or stability (e.g. to maintain institutional and organisational power dynamics). For example, Welsh (2004) characterises local discussion forums as gaining power since the 1990s compared with federal policy and institutional strategies, and recognises the tension between national and local political networks to advance an agenda for conservation. Referring to them as ‘participatory localism’, Welsh characterises several national environmental interest groups as struggling to adapt to shifting structural changes and the ‘devolution’ of decision-making regarding land-use policy.

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The third axis in Figure 5.1 is directed at creation and maintenance of shared social values. The social axis reflects vectors of change and stability that envision the future of a regional landscape, and is aspirational due to its implementation as a regional dialogue about ‘who we are and how we envision ourselves growing together’. At one pole is cultural heritage – in all its complexity – tied to national and state narratives of progress, oppression or triumph. A dominant narrative for mixed-use landscapes of the American Midwest is embedded in a progressive agricultural ideology about cultivating land to feed a hungry nation and world. The other pole on the social axis is community identity with its idiosyncrasies tied to shared perceptions of origin, traditions and local pride. Both poles hold possibilities to effect change by aggregating across communities to fit a regional level, or conversely to adapt regional heritage to align with a national identity. For example, Cronon’s (1991) depiction of the urbanisation of Chicago – the metropolitan area encroaching upon Midewin Prairie – portrays the interaction between the national drive to settle the American West and the creation of Chicago’s regional identity tied to commodity flows from the western frontier in the nineteenth century. Evolving across almost two centuries, Chicago’s heritage as a national clearing house and distribution centre for commodities continues to be the underlying growth narrative for Will County (Bushey, 2019). The ideal positioning of regional place-making serves as a proactive force of negotiation across the tensions of global and local forces. If not proactive at the regional level, national and global forces may overpower communities who otherwise might frame themselves as hapless victims of outside influence. Such a framing has increasingly been applied to understand rural development (Salamon, 2003). However, another option for growth could be that community-based forces muster forceful resistance due to a strong localised sense of place, and have been effective at negotiating outside forces. Although the latter is more compelling than the former option, it leaves open the effectiveness of regional senses of place in creating a healthy and sustainable community. The remainder of this chapter provides insight into tensions related to stability and change encountered in processes of regional place-making.

5.2.1

Place-Making Asserts Narratives of Stability Place implies stability. Many scholars have characterised sense of place through the lens of nostalgia for days gone by (Denevan, 1992). A sense of stability is provided through ties to a heritage that seemingly has not changed (Chhabra et al., 2003). An everyday illustration of the stability of place is the context of tourism, where the past is often constructed in settings that appear timeless and unchanged (Buzinde and Santos, 2008) – not that these settings are timeless or unchanged, but they convince visitors and appear credible as remnants of unchanging pasts. Many rural Illinois towns with a growing tourism industry have faced centuries of change, yet are marketed to visitors and newcomers as having a simpler way of life, suggesting an air of timelessness and stability (Salamon, 2003). Although it may appear that such places are fending off forces of change to maintain a way of life, some localities have made strategic decisions about what should be stable

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and what should change (Lowenthal, 2015). Several regions have deliberately engaged in landscape-level dialogues that call for some characteristics to change, yet also brand themselves as a ‘revival of vernacular traditions’ (Harvey, 1997). For example, Illinois rural areas are home to enclaves of Amish people, who purposely identify themselves with a landscape and culture of a bygone era (Harasta, 2014). Many of these Amish people have recognised their inability for future growth with a farm-centred production of agriculture, and through entrepreneurship have enhanced their home-based manufacturing of household items such as quilts, crafts, plants and baked goods. Some have taken advantage of a globalising world that hungers for the simpler times of a culture focused on family, faith and farming (Harasta, 2014). Although they have changed their structural connections to the outside world through the development of tourism and the relative shrinkage of agricultural exchange, their social-ecological relationships of diversified family farming have remained relatively stable (Mitchell, 1998). The commercial prosperity of many Amish enclaves has left them with a sustainable future – albeit one that has been strategic about selecting elements of the past to bring to their future. A second thread of stability in regional place-making is the enhanced visibility of interconnections across communities and institutions. Such connections have generally been there in nascent forms. Stakeholders are familiar with one another by coming together for regional conservation planning in ways that formalise their relationships. Prell et al.’s (2009) social network analysis of stakeholders in a mixed-use landscape documented several categories of relationships, including weak/strong ties and central/ peripheral positioning. The authors concluded that the effectiveness of natural resource governance would be improved through representation of federal agencies within regional collaborative forums (p. 513) as a way to implement their collective vision. To realise their aspirations, stakeholders expanded their decision-making forums to represent local and national organisations. Including more voices at the table could be characterised as change, yet the focus on achieving a collective vision brought a sense of stability to the effort.

5.2.2

Place-Making Asserts Narratives of Change ‘Making’ something is about building or changing something that otherwise would not be there. Outside of conservation circles, production of regionality is not a dialogue that has engaged community stakeholders at large. Interconnections across a regional set of events and places are essential in place-making for conservation. Conservation organisations, planners and other land-use professionals have understood cultural and ecological connections across seemingly disparate nodes of the landscapes, yet other stakeholders and community leaders generally have not given thought to such connections. Regional place-making activities, such as community visioning sessions, help residents move from seeing themselves as individuals to seeing themselves as connected to a larger region. Physical manifestations on the landscape with linkages such as rivers, transport corridors and prominent geological features are shared elements that may serve to reframe place meanings into a regional whole. For example, Evans

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et al. (2019) studied a mixed-use landscape in the American Midwest and found that a widely shared concern for water quality fostered a sense of regional togetherness and primed stakeholders to think about their regional senses of place. In Will County, a wide variety of forces shaping the county, including industrial development, intermodal centres, highways and residential sprawl, made it difficult for leaders to see themselves as united or to find common goals around which to rally. Piecemeal growth lacked connections to regional senses of place, resulting in missed opportunities to build coherence and senses of regional belonging (Strauser et al., 2018). Regional place-making is aspirational, and it is difficult to disentangle the ‘is’ from the ‘ought’. Place-making requires a collective imagination to envision a future for the communities within the landscape of the current day. When one views place-making as a narrative, the descriptive aspects of place may become indistinguishable from the aspirational aspects. A storyline emerges that begins with the current landscape and aspires to some future state of conditions and relationships. However, the challenge for regional place-making is moving from a set of individual narratives of growth to a set of regional narratives shared by stakeholders. The starting point may be surprisingly problematic in that stakeholders could have difficulty in developing compatibility across a set of place meanings from which to envision their collective future, and may be inclined to frame differences in terms of complete conflict or total incompatibility, rather than a plurality in need of synthesis (Davenport and Anderson, 2005). Place-making is experienced as action narratives of creating the future, complete with roles for people, organisations and communities. Such action narratives reflect aspirational aspects of place in which ‘what is changing about the landscape’ gets entangled with ‘what should be changing about the landscape’. Cresswell (2004) approaches this distinction in the context of evaluating landscape features that are ‘in place’ and ‘out of place’. Although hoped-for place meanings may not be framed as prescriptive, partly because regional governance is weak and rarely comes with enforcement power, they may become normative in ways that account for the idiosyncrasies of a locale yet signal connections to a region. Because of the flexibility and creative formats for regional planning, landscape-level place-making holds potential for socio-ecological connections to be collectively envisioned, implemented into practice and experienced as transformed senses of place (Wallace et al., 2010). Cresswell (2004) has tied collective development of senses of place to creation of public memory as a process of debate across varying interests. He appreciates the potential for ‘a new kind of place that could be born out of a contested process of interpretation’ (p. 90). Aspirational forces of regional conservation could become normative and shape the conditions and relationships of the landscape (Wallace et al., 2010). Regional placemaking is sensitive to ways in which landscapes and people communicate. Several studies have focused on the capacity of landscapes to communicate human intentions. In a study of mixed-use landscapes, Morse and colleagues (2014) examined the communicative potential of environmental features by framing the production of regionality as due to the contagious influence of individual land-use practices across a landscape. The aspirational quality is due to the regional dynamic of socio-spatial

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systems of meanings that are ongoing and always becoming (Massey, 2005). If implemented in ways that build relationships across a landscape, land-use practices could communicate guidelines for what is ‘in place’ and ‘out of place’.

5.3

Discussion The two points of this chapter are that (1) conservation of native ecosystems is about negotiating the creation of regional senses of place across the communities of a landscape, and (2) regional senses of place are embodied in narratives of both stability and change. Aggregating across geographical and temporal scales may be easy for farm bureaus concerned with trends in countywide annual yield in bushels of corn. For conservationists, however, regional place-making is not a technical issue of aggregating across scales; rather, it is a narrative-building process that starts with regionality and works to bundle relationships linking people to their broader landscapes. At the heart of building such connections lies a set of narratives that envision a healthy future, requiring capacity to work through conflicts and guide development from a regional perspective. Regional place-making is where global narratives meet local particularities in ways that integrate and prioritise narratives linked to stability and change. In Figure 5.1, although the tensions associated with ecological, structural and social vectors of stability and change are portrayed as independent of one another, there are points of interdependence across the three axes. Several of these connections happen naturally or without strategic regional governance, yet many go unnoticed and neglected due to the lack of voices to represent regional perspectives in mixed-use landscapes. However, regional political representation may be growing stronger; Cresswell (2013) characterised regionalism as once having been viewed as reactionary and nostalgic, yet he observed the previous two decades as experiencing an ‘apparent resurgence of the region as a political and cultural force’ (p. 71) reframed as progressive and liberatory. Conservation initiatives may be poised to take advantage of a prospective resurgence in governance that negotiates regional identities to assimilate pluralism in senses of place and reflect aspirations for both change and stability. Place-making that adapts to shifting ecological regimes implies a need to educate and promote connections between communities and their landscapes. Conservation education, often cast as transferring ecological and environmental knowledge, is also directed at creating dialogue to learn about social and organisational connections to the land. Likewise, festivals or other events that celebrate the harvest and beauty of a landscape are opportunities to recognise regional intradependencies among people and their landscape along ecological, structural and social dimensions.

5.4

Conclusion What do regional senses of place look like? They are a grouping of communities that share similar narratives about their interdependencies and reflect a dynamic set of

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societal forces and tensions that render their landscape. Regional place-making is not derivative of either the global or local, having the potential for agency and responsibility distinct from a regional set of socio-ecological relationships. As in the narrative of the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, regional place-making anticipates a healthier and more sustainable future. A world of grass and flowers that stretched around me, rising and falling in gentle undulations, as if an enchanter had struck the ocean swell and it was at rest forever. (Eliza Steele as she looked out of her stagecoach within the vicinity of current-day Midewin, July 1841, cited in National Forest Foundation, 2019, p. 21)

Acknowledgement This research was supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture/United States Department of Agriculture, grant number 2016-68006-24836.

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Prell, C., Hubacek, K. and Reed, M. (2009) ‘Stakeholder analysis and social network analysis in natural resource management’, Society and Natural Resources, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 501–518. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.463.10.1080/08941920802199202 Relph, E. (1976) Place and Placelessness, London, Pion. Salamon, S. (2003) Newcomers to Old Towns: Suburbanization of the Heartland, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Snyder, G. (1995) A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds: New and Selected Prose, Washington, DC, Counterpoint. Stewart, W. P., Williams, D. R. and Kruger, L. E. (2013) ‘Conclusion: from describing to prescribing – transitioning to place-based conservation’, in Stewart, W. P., Williams, D. R. and Kruger, L. E. (eds), Place-Based Conservation: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 235–248. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5802-5_18 Stokowski, P. A. (2002) ‘Languages of place and discourses of power: constructing new senses of place’, Journal of Leisure Research, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 368–382. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0022 2216.2002.11949977 Strauser, J., Stewart, W., Evans, N., Stamberger, L. and van Riper, C. (2018) ‘Heritage narratives for landscapes on the rural–urban fringe in the Midwestern United States’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, vol. 62, no. 7, pp. 368–382. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26 .1.463.10.1080/09640568.2018.1492908 Tsing, A. L. (2012) ‘On nonscalability: the living world is not amenable to precision-nested scales’, Common Knowledge, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 505–524. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-1630424 Tuan, Y.-F. (1975) ‘Place: an experiential perspective’, Geographical Review, vol. 65, no. 2, pp. 151–165. Wallace, B., DiMatteo, A., Hurley, B., et al. (2010) ‘Regional management units for marine turtles: a novel framework for prioritizing conservation and research across multiple scales’, PLoS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0015465 Weintraub, E. R. (2010) Neoclassical Economics: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Available at www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NeoclassicalEconomics.html (accessed 6 May 2020). Welsh, M. M. (2004) ‘Reaction of the national environmental groups to devolution’. Society and Natural Resources, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 293–304. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920490278647 Williams, D. R. (2014) ‘Making sense of “place”: reflections on pluralism and positionality in place research’, Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 131, pp. 74–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.land urbplan.2014.08.002

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Part II

Migration, Mobility and Belonging

Ubiquitous twenty-first-century mobilities constitute one of the key global challenges to the hegemony of a fixed and singular notion of sense of place. Each of the four chapters in this section in some way problematise multiple, contested senses of place in the context of various forms of migration and mobilities and highlight the role such flows play in navigating place-based meanings, identities and sense of (non)belonging. The mobilities discussed in these chapters range from local versus touristic resignification of place meanings in the Faroe Islands to intra- and transnational migrations and the ensuing tensions these mobilities engender over senses of belonging and nonbelonging to places. This pluralisation of sense of place serves to accommodate the differing power relations and perspectives on place as experienced by tourists, recent migrants, itinerant workers and the under-housed, as well as long-term residents and governmental authorities, all of whom are in various ways contesting and remaking senses of place as a consequence of mobilities. The ways sense of place is treated in this section foreground the inherent tensions and politics of place-belonging. First, scholars have increasingly argued that place-making should be understood in a broader context in which migration and mobility serve as a critical nexus around which the meanings of place are created and contested. For example, Chapter 6 identifies different place narratives (accessibility, hospitality, sustainability, capability) that challenge Faroese residents and the tourism authorities as they seek to reconcile a rapid growth in international tourism. Migration processes also weave together various types of places (ancestral, ethno-cultural, occupational, etc.) at various spatial and temporal scales and across various social, economic and cultural conditions. This suggests a dialectical understanding of the interplay of sense, identity and belonging across places subject to mobilities and migrations. From this perspective, mobilities reembody the meanings of home and homeland as extended across life courses and life spaces. Second, mobility is re-presented as a potentially adaptable and positive experience with respect to belongingness and identity. Accordingly, belongingness need not be thought of as bonding to a single place (e.g. hometown), but should consider at least the possibility of a sense of belongingness to both one’s place of origin and place(s) of domicile, occupation or visitation. Here the tendency to focus on attachment to specific

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places has occluded observations of the multiple fluid senses of place (or even nonplace) often cultivated by migrants and people on the move. As these chapters show, migration does not necessarily result in weakening of migrants’ bonds with places and in fact raises critical questions about the role of strong people–place bonds in navigating the vagaries of living in new places. Third, another important way in which the mobilities perspective undermines fixed, sedentarist thinking about sense of place is that it bolsters a much-needed postcolonial critique of the senses of place produced in the global North. It challenges the normalisation of rootedness and a fixed, stable territorialisation of identity and belongingness. The colonial history of Africa (Chapter 7), for example, ‘has shaped senses of place in both the heart of the empire as well as the colonial outposts’ (p. 94). However, much of the work on sense of place and migration has fixated on migrants’ sense of place relative to their country of destination. This chapter, along with Chapter 9’s examination of belongingness in rural-to-urban migration in China, suggests academic work on sense of place has ignored ongoing relationships with other places with places of origin, transit or even a diasporic homeland. Rather, studies of tourists’ and migrants’ multi-sited senses of place contribute to place change occurring not just in new settings where they visit or reside, but through translocal, multi-sited social networks and practices such as remittances, which can render communities more resilient. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, by highlighting the nexus between mobilities and various forms of belonging and nonbelonging, these chapters remind us of the ways in which belonging is often a form of privilege derived from a place-based form of ontological security. This is especially evident in Chapter 8 on nonbelongingness and the struggle to ‘not belong to non-places’, which criticises the almost exclusive focus of sense of place research in the point of view of those who feel attached, safe and positively belonging to their place of residency. This chapter shows precisely how impoverished populations in informal settlements might experience place detachment and disidentification, expressed as disembodied ways of inhabiting the place, fear of crime and anxieties tied to the everyday horrors of death at ‘home’. Given how environmental, economic, political and technological changes are likely intensify in the twenty-first century, collectively these chapters illustrate the important role senses of place are likely to take as both part and parcel of these challenges but also as ways to understand, respond and adapt to them.

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6

Exploring Senses of Place Through Narratives of Tourism Growth and Place Change The Case of the Faroe Islands Christopher M. Raymond, Laura N. H. Verbrugge, Nora Fagerholm, Anton S. Olafsson, Eyðfinn Magnussen and Tobias Plieninger

6.1

Introduction Since 2014, the Nordic region as a whole has experienced a steady tourism growth rate of 6–9 per cent per year (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2019). On remote islands, this growth has resulted in interconnected environmental and social impacts, in some cases including the destruction of habitat and ecosystems, and the weakening or loss of community values and traditions (Cook et al., 2019). The Faroe Islands – a small archipelago in the middle of the North Atlantic located 320 km north-west of Scotland, midway between Norway and Iceland – is an exemplary case of the challenges remote island communities face. New forms of infrastructure such as roads, sea tunnels and bridges mean that residents are no longer bound to their home villages out of necessity. They have a choice to stay or leave, leading to changes in village demographics and social ties (Hovgaard and Kristiansen, 2008). Equally, visitors and immigrants now have more opportunities to access remote places, as evidenced by rapid increases in visitation over the past decade (Statistics Faroe Islands, 2019), leading to new forms of impact on natural and agrarian ecosystems (Plieninger et al., 2018). Often, tourism impacts are presented in juxtaposition with the benefits of tourism, such as population growth, employment and increased revenue for the state (Kurniawan et al., 2019). Such differing claims raise important questions concerning how place is created, reproduced and defended among locals (Cresswell, 1996), and how differing place meanings become ‘normal’ or ‘correct’ through signs, presentations or other forms of communication (Rickard and Stedman, 2015). More fundamentally, place scholars need to question whether all meanings are (or ought to be) normalised and corrected into one dominant sense of place, or whether we should cater for multiple possible senses of place represented by individuals or groups with different place experiences, environmental connectedness and levels of power and interest. In this chapter, we make the case for the pluralisation of sense into senses of place by exploring the tensions and dynamic connections between the place narratives of Faroese residents and boundary-spanning organisations (i.e. organisations that broker interactions across various actors) such as Visit Faroe Islands. We highlight four tensions regarding the interplay between sense of place, desired resource management

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futures and place-protective behaviour that emerged from 255 open-ended responses to a public participation geographic information systems survey administered to residents on the Faroe Islands in 2017 (Plieninger et al., 2018). We used thematic analysis techniques to identify themes and subthemes in the data, which we draw upon in supporting data extracts in our narrative. The survey was conducted in Faroese and responses were translated into English. Additionally, we applied document analysis techniques to identify core place meanings communicated in the Faroe Islands’ Tourism Strategy 2018–2025 (Visit Faroe Islands, 2019). We offer an advancement on previous work discussing the multiple, contested and power-related frames of place meaning (e.g. Di Masso et al., 2011; Manzo, 2005) by drawing on a social-ecological rather than constructionist or critical realist perspective.

6.2

A Social-Ecological Perspective on Senses of Place In the last decade, we have seen a shift from unidirectional understandings of place and mobility to a more progressive, complementary understanding. Sense of place has been seen as contradicting mobility insofar as sense of place represents fixity, localism and restricted opportunities, while mobility represents cosmopolitan openmindedness (see overviews by Lewicka, 2011; Gustafson, 2001). Challenging an essentialist view of place (building on Massey, 1993), we recognise the potential for complementary experiences (Lewicka, 2013; Gustafson, 2009) that combine a willingness to travel with strong bonds to one’s place of residence (Di Masso et al., 2019). Here, we move from a complementary understanding of mobility and place to a social-ecological understanding, in recognition that the interplay between mobility and sense of place has consequences for resource conservation, use and management. Following Stedman (2016), sense of place is composed of evaluative statements of place attachment and descriptive statements of place meaning. Place attachment is generally referred to as an emotional bond between individuals/groups and their environment (Low and Altman, 1992) and can be seen as fundamentally evaluative statements about a given place (e.g. good/bad). In contrast, place meanings tend to be seen as fundamentally descriptive statements (e.g. what kind of place is this?) and as analytically distinct (i.e. what kinds of meaning are associated with different strengths of attachment?) (Masterson et al., 2017; Stedman, 2016). These evaluative and descriptive layers of sense of place are dynamically related to one’s understanding of system variability, and of behaviours to maintain, protect and enhance sense of place (Stedman, 2016). System variability includes what phenomena are noticed by residents (e.g. how the physical condition of trails on an island is changing) and the impact of this variability on place experience (e.g. how changing trail conditions affect primary production or the scenic beauty of the landscape). Behavioural responses manifest from individual meanings assigned to the natural environment and its changes over time, and from meanings that are transmitted and negotiated through various oral and written communications. For the purpose of

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simplicity, here we focus on the dynamics among place meanings, understandings of system variability and behavioural responses. What defines a desirable system is a normative statement. Tensions can therefore arise between different place narratives, highlighting the important role of power relations in sense of place (Masterson et al., 2019). Value and meaning are not inherent in any space or place but are rather created, reproduced and defended by different groups (Cresswell, 1996), leading to certain meanings being privileged over others (Stokowski, 2002). Indeed, previous research on migration and mobility shows how the social constructions of place are contested, transgressed and resisted by those who feel their views are excluded (Cresswell, 2008; Williams, 2001). Tourism plays an important role in negotiating the tension between, on the one hand, the preservation of traditional meanings of places, and, on the other hand, the transformation of places and the ‘thinning’ of their meaning (Williams, 2001). However, sense of place scholars often ignore the fact that power relationships are constantly changing, in part due to changing mobility patterns. Recent research on tourism on Nordic islands reveals that public tourism agencies work as powerful brokers of interactions among different levels of public-sector actors and tourism entrepreneurs (Petridou et al., 2019). Equally, local residents can galvanise (active or passive) resistance to tourists or can endorse tourism, and can inhibit and constrain tourism by blocking the entry of tourists into regions. Therefore, it is important to understand how boundary organisations create and communicate ‘in-between’ narratives. In this chapter, we consider sense of place through narratives. We focus on the place meanings, perceptions of system variability, and strategies to manage behaviour embedded in different narratives regarding tourism growth and development on the Faroe Islands. We assert that sense of place needs to be pluralised into senses of place in order to allow space for the multiple sets of dominant, often contested place meanings in a geographical locale that form through connections between individuals and communities, as well as individual connections to ecosystems undergoing rapid change. The multiple sets of senses of place emerge from narratives representing different standpoints on tourism growth and development, and attempts by brokers and other powerful actors to filter and sort dominant meanings.

6.3

Background to the Faroe Islands, Tourism Growth and Impacts The Faroe Islands are an archipelago of 18 small islands in the middle of the North Atlantic. Their land area covers 1,399 km2, comprising steep mountains, upland hills, valleys, spectacular cliffs and narrow fjords. The Faroe Islands had 52,199 registered inhabitants on 1 February 2020 (Statistics Faroe Islands, 2020). Around 41 per cent of inhabitants live in the capital Tórshavn and its surroundings. In total, there are 114 villages on the Faroe Islands, of which 57 have fewer than 100 inhabitants. Faroese residents’ identity is strongly linked to the landscape, particularly the unique topography of the islands, which is characterised by open rangelands and sea

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cliffs up to 754 m high (Gaini, 2011), as well as unique coastal ecosystems and wildlife (Plieninger et al., 2018). Topography is in turn strongly linked to the language used to describe places (Wylie et al., 2016). As there was no written Faroese language until the middle of the nineteenth century, the ‘ballad’ (Faroese kvæði) survived over the centuries through oral traditions such as poems, tales and songs. Chanting is still popular, especially in combination with the traditional Faroe circle dance (Sørensen et al., 2018). Particular traditions including pilot whale hunting, fowling of seabirds and sheep farming continue to be practised, and are considered an important cultural heritage as well as a social institution that is significant for the domestic economy (Sørensen et al., 2018). Faroese people are also well connected to places abroad in this globalised world. For example, young adults often move to study or work abroad, and many of them later return for family or employment reasons (Faber et al., 2015). In terms of tourism, the Faroe Islands have experienced a rapid 50 per cent growth since 2013 in air and sea arrivals and departures, and related overnight stays both outside and inside the capital area, which have produced a similar growth in tourism revenue (Statistics Faroe Islands, 2019). On 1 April 2017 the total population exceeded more than 50,000 inhabitants for the first time, and out-migration has been replaced by in-migration (Figure 6.1). Tourism growth is projected to increase annual revenue from €32.7 million in 2016 to €81.0 million by 2025, providing a range of employment opportunities (Visit Faroe Islands, 2019).

Figure 6.1 Index numbers of key development trends on the Faroe Islands from 2008 to 2018 (data from Statistics Faroe Islands, 2019). Note that tourism-related numbers for overnight stays and tourism revenue only are available from 2013 to 2018.

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Rapid tourism growth on the Faroe Islands creates multiple opportunities and challenges. Visitors frequently describe the natural environment as ‘exotic’ or ‘different’ (Ankre and Nilsson, 2015), which are also prominent terms in the marketing strategy. Marketing further focuses on semi-tangible assets such as culture, cuisine, film, music, Faroese identity, friendly people or ‘the unknown’. The main challenges include the high seasonality of visitation, very short shoulder seasons, the small scale of tourism establishments, and high accommodation and living costs. The increasing numbers of tourists have led to crowding in some of the more spectacular sites, such as the island of Mykines, which is famous for its high cliffs and birdwatching. Another major challenge concerns the ecological impacts of rising visitor numbers, including damage to bird nests and trail erosion. Currently there is no legal basis for cohesively regulating visitors and their impacts (Jóhan Helgason, personal communication, 13 September 2019). Visit Faroe Islands is the islands’ official tourist board, organised under the Ministry of the Environment, Industry and Trade, the Government of the Faroe Islands. Its objective is to develop and market the Faroe Islands as a tourist destination. The destination experience marketed to tourists is mostly visual and focused on the outstanding experiences and unspoilt nature the islands offer. In 2019, Visit Faroe Islands presented a new perspective on tourism development towards 2025 that aims to preserve the islands by evolving (a ‘preservolution’) (Visit Faroe Islands, 2019). Additionally, the recent development of various bridges and tunnels has created tensions among residents concerning access: the interest in shielding areas from human influence is often opposed to interests in decreasing isolation, obtaining access to attractive sites, and supporting the movement of merchandise (Ankre and Nilsson, 2015). In the following sections, we explore the tensions between the place narratives of residents (based on the survey from 2017) and boundary-spanning organisation of Visit Faroe Islands.

6.4

Tensions Between Place Meanings

6.4.1

Extending the Freedom to Enjoy Nature to All versus Limiting Access The formal right to access or use private land on the Faroe Islands belongs to landowners. But this restriction has not been observed for several decades, and practically speaking residents and visitors have had the opportunity to venture wherever they like. However, tensions have emerged regarding how to apply this right to visitors in the light of tourism growth. Some people extend the practised right to walk freely in nature to all, including visitors to the islands. This comes with the caveats that the practice needs to be organised and care needs to be taken to not harm animals and fields, for example. ‘Our country is so peaceful and everyone should be able to experience this peace, the beautiful nature, the friendliness, but within reason. They should know that the terrain can be steep and they should not go out by themselves’ (female, aged 57). This view contrasts with the promotional texts on the Visit Faroe

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Islands (2016) website, where tourists are encouraged to ‘go off the beaten path and explore magnificent and untouched nature’. The other perspective makes specific reference to the Faroese people and their right to access nature, for example by expressing the wish that ‘the nature in the Faroe Islands is always free for all Faroese people’ (male, aged 49). Some people express a fear that newly introduced fees for tourists will also apply to Faroese people, limiting their access to nature. ‘I wish that nature first and foremost is conserved for the Faroese people and that tourists can be limited to a certain amount of people a year. There are way too many now, and we already see the effects. I also wish that it will keep being free for Faroese people to walk out in nature wherever they want’ (female, aged 28). This tension between extending the freedom to roam and limiting access also manifests within individuals: those who believe that all people should be able to enjoy Faroese nature simultaneously worry that their own experience of nature will be diminished, because what they value is unspoilt nature where they can be alone. ‘As many people as possible should be able to get the same joy out of the Faroese landscape as I have. But it is also my greatest concern that too many tourists will use Faroese nature, and they will limit my freedom to use nature’ (male, aged 48). The effect of tourism in very small villages extends beyond experiences of nature; it may also disturb people’s daily lives, not only because tourists can outnumber a population of perhaps 12 residents, but especially in terms of privacy during family events (e.g. funerals). This dualistic view of tourism is also reflected in the ‘preservolution’ perspective of the Faroe Islands’ Tourism Strategy 2018–2025, which recognises that ‘tourism affects every one of the 50,000 inhabitants that call our 18 North Atlantic islands their home’ (Visit Faroe Islands, 2019, p. 2). On one hand, the strategy seeks to preserve the islands’ natural environments, distinctive culture and people for generations to come. On the other hand, it wishes to welcome more visitors to experience the Faroe Islands.

6.4.2

Hospitality for All versus Exclusivity Rapid tourism development on the Faroe Islands has changed the ways that islanders relate to guests. In Faroese society, visitors are traditionally approached with openness, inclusiveness, hospitality and friendliness. However, tourists are increasingly considered a resource that can be capitalised on for individual profit-making, the development of business opportunities, and the fostering of integrated development at local and national scales. Many residents on the Faroe Islands emphasise that tourists are welcome, and that they are pleased to see visitor numbers growing. As one respondent puts it: ‘Our gems are for EVERYONE’ (male, aged 52). Respondents highlight that Faroese people are proud to show their beautiful country to others, that continued hospitality increases the Faroe Islands’ reputation in the world, and that they want tourists to have enjoyable and meaningful experiences in their country. Some lament that many outer regions are experiencing depopulation, and consider that tourism may offer economic incentives for residents to stay and maintain local society: ‘Good that more people come to our

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land. Friends are moving away’ (female, aged 27). However, many residents also point to the need for respect towards nature and Faroese society on the visitors’ part, and for tourism to be better organised. Some are afraid that Faroese hospitality may decline as a consequence of the nuisance generated by tourism, leading to shallower and more impersonal social relations. The counternarrative that arises in many comments is that tourists create costs to Faroese society, and that they do not leave enough money behind. Many respondents therefore hope for a better economic return on tourism: the number of tourists should be reduced, while the profit generated by tourism should be increased by making the Faroe Islands a more exclusive tourist destination that receives only those who are willing to pay for a more expensive and exclusive trip: ‘I don’t think we should have too many tourists, but rich tourists. People that are ok with paying for their experience’ (male, aged 48). However, some respondents are dubious about seeing visitors in terms of business opportunities alone, and therefore, for example, ‘worry about the Faroese mentality of only working for one’s own good and not thinking about the rest of society’ (male, aged 54). The Faroe Islands’ Tourism Strategy 2018–2025 does not consider these views to be mutually exclusive. It states that ‘we . . . have a desire and responsibility to welcome visitors to experience our beautiful islands and distinct culture’ (Visit Faroe Islands, 2019, p. 2), but it also calls for tourism to make a ‘bigger economic contribution to society’ (p. 20) and announces that quality tourism will be preferred over the quantity of tourism – with quality tourists understood as those visitors that show a high willingness to pay.

6.4.3

Responding to Tourism Through Place-Protective versus Place-Adaptive Strategies Place-protective views are embedded in concerns about tourism’s impacts and changes to place-based values, such as the value of hiking in the mountains for tranquillity, solitude and wildlife experiences. It is commonly suggested that controls and permissions should be put in place in order to protect and conserve these place values. A respondent noted: ‘I worry that tourism destroys the clean and unspoiled nature that we brand ourselves on. I worry that we need to modify ourselves to tourism instead of the other way around’ (female, aged 28). This view was shared among multiple respondents, leading them to call for the protection and conservation of places by controlling tourists’ access to the different islands: ‘I wish that tourism gets more controlled in time and space. So that we can have time with and without tourists. If tourism grows, we as Faroese will change. We will get more impersonal and shallow. I like traditions and peace, and this doesn’t fit well with tourists that can go wherever they want’ (female, no age reported). Such views have led to landowners enforcing their own regulations. For example, a fee of €10 is now required from anyone (Faroe Islanders and foreigners alike, including children) who wishes to take the walk at Saksun (Visit Faroe Islands, 2019).

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In contrast, pragmatic views about the increase in tourism are also present. These respondents call for new adaptive management practices to steer, manage and govern tourism (such as new recreational facilities, fees, new policies, more guiding, etc.). The following quote expresses the need for adaptive management in terms of more organisation and new facilities to steer and manage visitors, to make a better income and minimise ecological impacts: ‘Organise so that people leave more money behind. Make more paths and resting spots that people can use instead of destroying nature’ (male, aged 38). The Faroe Islands’ Tourism Strategy 2018–2025 mainly aligns with place-adaptive management responses, such as new visitor facilities in problem areas, improved wayfinding, signposts and such. New place-protective measures are espoused, including the calculation of vulnerable areas’ capacity for tourism, and a nature preservation fee and travel tax on all types of visitors to raise funds for nature protection and visitor management.

6.4.4

Concentrating versus Distributing the Impacts of Tourism Tourism is currently heavily focused in Tórshavn, where the majority of tourists stay. Although the number of tourists arriving on the Faroe Islands increases year on year, not all locals experience this increase negatively; some want to welcome more tourists. The idea of distributing tourism to the outlying islands receives particularly high support. Similarly, residents seek an equal distribution of economic profits across the islands from tourism, enabled by better infrastructure and services such as toilet facilities, marked trails, signposts and restaurants. Besides the economic benefits, tourism development across the islands could also foster new forms of relationship between locals and tourists to share/foster collective meanings of places: ‘I think that the Faroe Islands can take many more tourists. We can tell stories about many places around the islands, so that people can get a better experience and get an understanding of the special places that they are visiting’ (male, aged 37). Conversely, many residents believe that some places should be left unspoilt. Distributing tourism across the islands entails the risk of losing tranquillity in nature, which is essentially connected to locals’ experiences of Faroese landscapes: ‘Too many tourists and we lose the peace in nature. I am afraid we will lose ourselves in all the tourists . . . It is so nice and peaceful at night when they have all left’ (female, aged 49). People’s concerns also relate to the capacities of small villages to manage tourists, making it challenging to see the constructive/positive side: ‘Small villages risk being overtaken by tourism’ and ‘I also worry that the different small places with many tourists are not able to control the pressure and possibilities of tourism. They don’t see the possibilities, but are irritated by the tourists’ (male, aged 37). One of the cornerstones of the Faroe Islands Tourism Strategy 2018–2025 is the promotion of tourism across all the islands and all year round, to create ‘opportunities to explore the islands seamlessly’ (Visit Faroe Islands, 2019, p. 26). This fourth tension, however, highlights that this political goal will push the locals to navigate their preferences for tourism at different geographical locations and scales.

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Synthesis: From Contested Place Meanings to Multiple Senses of Place The four tensions identified in the narratives reveal important insights regarding the pluralisation of sense into senses of place (Table 6.1). Two senses of place emerge from the contrasting place meanings and associated understandings of system variability and behavioural responses to change (Figure 6.2). The first sense of place emphasises the protection of traditional Faroese values and customs, including the freedom to roam and the welcoming of guests, although some people take the strong position that the Faroe Islands should be for Faroese people

Table 6.1 The multiple senses of place identified in the narratives Sense of place 1: protection of Faroese traditional values and customs

Sense of place 3: bridging the Sense of place 2: tensions between tradition and Tensions between openness to place narratives adaptation and change adaptation

Extend the universal right Nature is conserved for the Faroese to walk freely in nature people first and to all, including foremost. visitors to the islands. Worry that tourism Faroe Islanders are destroys the clean peaceful and friendly, and unspoilt nature and the landscape is that we brand beautiful and wild. ourselves with. Provide more paths and resting places that people can use instead of destroying nature. The Faroe Islands are for everyone. Visitors are approached with openness, inclusiveness, hospitality and friendliness by Faroese society.

Visitors can be capitalised on to make individual profit and develop business opportunities. Desire only to receive tourists who are willing to pay for a more expensive and exclusive trip. Desire to charge fees to visit tourism hotspots.

The Faroe Islands are open to Extending the freedom to enjoy tourists all year round, but nature to all versus visitor pressure needs to be limiting access. reduced at certain locations. Visit Faroe Islands markets the Responding to tourism through country as ‘unspoiled, place-protective unexplored, unbelievable’. versus placeTourism can be managed adaptive strategies. sustainably and responsibly with e.g. new visitor facilities in problem areas, improved wayfinding, signposts, etc. Tourism is promoted across all the islands. Visitors need to make a bigger Hospitality for all versus exclusivity. economic contribution to society. Quality tourism is preferred over quantity.

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Table 6.1 (cont.) Sense of place 1: protection of Faroese traditional values and customs

Sense of place 2: Sense of place 3: bridging the openness to tensions between tradition and Tensions between adaptation and change adaptation place narratives

People should be free The place is clean and to enjoy nature, but unspoilt, but ecological within reason. impacts are increasing. There needs to be Fear that too many an equal people will explore distribution of Faroese nature, economic profits limiting local freedoms across the islands to use it. Desire to from tourism, concentrate tourism in enabled by better a few selected areas. infrastructure and Desire to steer visitors services. away from sensitive sites to manage ecological impacts.

Concentrating the Visitor numbers are impacts of tourism increasing, but the impacts in a few places can be mitigated by capacity versus distributing assessments combined with those impacts the strategic development of across the islands. infrastructure.

3. Brokers (e.g. tourism boards or companies) create new standpoints by filtering and sorting the dominant place meanings, place attachments, perceptions of system variability and strategies to manage behaviour.

1. Tourism growth and associated impacts promoted discussion on how a place ought to be represented and protected.

Place attachment

Place meanings Sense of place 1

Perceptions of system variability and strategies to manage behaviour 2. People share narratives on tourism growth which can be clustered into dominant standpoints. Standpoints connect place meanings, place attachment, perceptions of system variability and strategies to manage behaviour.

Place attachment

Place meanings

Sense of place 3 (bridging)

Senses of place

Sense of place 2 Perceptions of system variability and strategies to manage behaviour

4. Senses of place refers to the multiple sets of dominant, often contested, place meanings in a geographic locale. They are embedded within narratives reflecting a wider socio-ecological context where humans are both part of and actively shaping the ecosystem they depend on. Powerful actors like brokers can influence senses of place to achieve political objectives.

Figure 6.2 Social-ecological systems representation of senses of place on the Faroe Islands.

only. The second sense of place emphasises openness to change. One’s place identity is built around the realisation that Faroese people need to ‘modify’ themselves to tourism. This may mean letting go of values around freedom and openness, and adopting new forms of site management and regulation to steer tourists and protect

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natural resources from further degradation. A third sense of place emerges when brokers seek to blend irreconcilable positions for commercial gain (Figure 6.2). This is exemplified by the broker of Visit Faroe Islands, which attempts to bridge these contrasting positions. Emphasis is placed on the strategic management of tourists to protect natural resources and maximise profits.

6.6

Conclusion Drawing on a social-ecological perspective, this chapter has demonstrated the need to shift from sense to senses of place in order to accommodate the multiple narratives of people–place relationships that are embedded in different standpoints on mobility and place change. Residents and brokers adopt different senses of place in order to respond to the social and ecological pressures wrought by mobility, and the potential economic benefits of tourism growth and development. Concurrently, important relationships exist among place meanings, understandings of system variability and behavioural responses. Thus, senses of place emerge as a result of dynamic and complex relationships between different types of narrative about place that are constantly unfolding in response to social-ecological change.

References Ankre, R. and Nilsson, P.-A. (2015) ‘Remote yet close: the question of accessibility in the Faroe Islands’, in Baldacchino, G. (ed.), Archipelago Tourism: Policies and Practices, Farnham, Ashgate, pp. 137–145. Cook, D., Saviolidis, N., Davíðsdóttir, B., Jóhannsdóttir, L. and Ólafsson, S. (2019) ‘Synergies and trade-offs in the Sustainable Development Goals: the implications of the Icelandic tourism sector’, Sustainability, vol. 11, no. 15, art. 4223. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11154223 Cresswell, T. (1996) In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Cresswell, T. (2008) ‘Place: encountering geography as philosophy’, Geography, vol. 93, pp. 132–139. Di Masso, A., Dixon, J. and Pol, E. (2011) ‘On the contested nature of place: “Figuera’s Well”, “the hole of shame” and the ideological struggle over public space in Barcelona’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 31, pp. 231–244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2011.05.002 Di Masso, A., Williams, D. R., Raymond, C. M., et al. (2019) ‘Between fixities and flows: navigating place attachments in an increasingly mobile world’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 61, pp. 125–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.JENVP.2019.01.006 Faber, S. T., Nielsen, H. P. and Bennike, K. B. (2015) Sted, (u)lighed og kønen kortlægning af udfordringer og best practices i relation til køn, uddannelse og befolkningsstrømme i Nordens yderområder, Copenhagen, Nordisk Ministerråd. Gaini, F. (ed.) (2011) Among the Islanders of the North: An Anthropology of the Faroe Islands, Tórshavn, Faroe University Press.

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Gustafson, P. (2001) ‘Roots and routes’, Environment and Behavior, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 667–686. https://doi.org/10.1177/00139160121973188 Gustafson, P. (2009) ‘Mobility and territorial belonging’, Environment and Behavior, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 490–508. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916508314478 Hovgaard, G. and Kristiansen, S. (2008) ‘Villages on the move: from places of necessity to places of choice’, in Bærenholdt, J. O. and Grånas, B. (eds), Mobility and Place: Enacting Northern European Peripheries, Farnham, Ashgate, pp. 61–74. Kurniawan, F. Adriantoa, L., Bengen, D. G. and Prasetyod, L. B. (2019) ‘The social-ecological status of small islands: an evaluation of island tourism destination management in Indonesia’, Tourism Management Perspectives, vol. 31, pp. 136–144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tmp.2019.04.004 Lewicka, M. (2011) ‘Place attachment: how far have we come in the last 40 years?’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 207–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010 .10.001 Lewicka, M. (2013) ‘Localism and activity as two dimensions of people–place bonding: the role of cultural capital’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 36, pp. 43–53. https://doi.org/10 .1016/j.jenvp.2013.07.002 Low, S. M. and Altman, I. (1992) ‘Place attachment: a conceptual inquiry’, in Altman, I. and Low, S. M. (eds), Place Attachment, New York, Plenum, pp. 1–12. Manzo, L. (2005) ‘For better or worse: exploring multiple dimensions of place meaning’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 25, pp. 67–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2005.01.002 Massey, D. (1993) ‘Power geometry and a progressive sense of place’, in Bird, J., Curtis, B., Putnam, T. and Tickner, L. (eds), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, London, Routledge, pp. 60–80. Masterson, V. A., Stedman, R. C., Enqvist. J., et al. (2017) ‘The contribution of sense of place to social-ecological systems research: a review and research agenda’, Ecology and Society, vol. 22, no. 1, art. 49. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-08872-220149 Masterson, V. A, Enqvist, J., Stedman, R. C. and Tengö, M. (2019) ‘Sense of place in social-ecological systems: from theory to empirics’, Sustainability Science, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 555–564. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00695-8 Nordic Council of Ministers (2019) Nordic Tourism Policy Analysis, Copenhagen, Nordic Council of Ministers. https://doi.org/10.6027/Nord2019-008 Petridou, E., Olausson, P. M. and Ioannides, D. (2019) ‘Nascent island tourism policy development in Greenland: a network perspective’, Island Studies Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, pp 227–244. https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.94 Plieninger, T., Áargarð av Ranab, H., Fagerholm, N., et al. (2018) ‘Identifying and assessing the potential for conflict between landscape values and development preferences on the Faroe Islands’, Global Environmental Change, vol. 52, pp. 162–180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j .gloenvcha.2018.07.006 Rickard, L. N. and Stedman, R. C. (2015) ‘From ranger talks to radio stations: the role of communication in sense of place’, Journal of Leisure Research, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 15–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/00222216.2015.11950349 Sørensen, J., Roto, J. and Tunón, H. (2018) ‘Faroe Islands (Føroyar)’, in Tunón, H. (ed.), Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Nordic Coastal Ecosystems: An IPBES-like Assessment, vol. 2: The Geographical Case Studies, Copenhagen, Nordic Council of Ministers, TemaNord, p. 532. Statistics Faroe Islands (2019) Statbank [Online]. Available at https://statbank.hagstova.fo/ (accessed 14 September 2019).

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Statistics Faroe Islands (2020) ‘Steady population rise continues’ [Online]. Available at https:// hagstova.fo/en/news/steady-population-rise-continues (accessed 14 April 2020). Stedman, R. C. (2016) ‘Subjectivity and social-ecological systems: a rigidity trap (and sense of place as a way out)’, Sustainability Science, vol. 11, pp. 891–901. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-016 -0388-y Stokowski, P. (2002) ‘Languages of place and discourses of power: constructing new senses of place’, Journal of Leisure Research, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 368–382. https://doi.org/10.1080/00222 216.2002.11949977 Visit Faroe Islands (2016) ‘Come and experience what the Faroe Islands have to offer’. https://visitfaroeislands.com/?lang=da (accessed 14 April 2020). Visit Faroe Islands (2019) Join the Preservolution: A Sustainable Tourism Strategy Towards 2025, Tórshavn, Visit Faroe Islands. Williams, D. R. (2001) ‘Sustainability and public access to nature: contesting the right to roam’, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, vol. 9, pp. 361–371. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669580 108667408 Wylie, J., Haugen, E. and Margolin, D. (2016) The Ring of Dancers: Images of Faroese Culture, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

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No One Is a Prophet at Home Mobility and Senses of Place in West Africa Alice Hertzog

7.1

Local Strategies and Global Challenges In south Benin, mobility plays a central role in navigating everyday life in the city. The local expression ‘no one is a prophet at home’ suggests that home is a place one must depart from in order to succeed. As one young Beninese man explained, ‘When you stay in your own milieu, no one respects you, but when you leave and come back, the children run to welcome you!’ Such departures and returns reflect the translocal strategies at play in West Africa, as people move in and out of urban areas, seeking to leverage the benefits of mobility in order to improve their livelihoods. This chapter examines sense of place through the lens of West African mobility. Current patterns of migration, mobility and belonging are heavily intertwined with transformations of the urban environment, in terms of both growth and increased diversity. Drawing on insights from south Benin, it asks how these processes are transforming and shaping senses of place in African cities. It pays particular attention to how this is unfolding in a postcolonial context, and the contribution postcolonial approaches can make to the field of place research. While migration and urbanisation hold significant opportunities for development, they have also been positioned by the international community as salient global challenges. This is the case, for example, with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals on orderly migration (Goal 10.7) and inclusive cities (Goal 11). Since the colonial period, migration and urbanisation in West Africa have been positioned as fundamentally problematic. For Mbembe and Nuttall (2004, p. 353), the ‘African city itself has been perceived as an emblem of irresolvable conflict’, and it is considered to be ‘populated by misunderstood and deviant, and therefore dangerous forces and masses’ (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 2005, p. xxviii). Migration to the city is often blamed for urban poverty, with governments trying to reduce or control rural–urban migration, to the detriment of both migrants and other low-income residents (Tacoli et al., 2015). In addition, there is an increasing preoccupation with West African migration to Europe or North America (Collyer, 2019; Bakewell and Jónsson, 2013; Schmitz, 2008), although in fact approximately 70 per cent of sub-Saharan African international migration remains within the African Union (Landau and Kihato, 2018).

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As people move into, through and out of urban areas, African cities undergo significant changes, and place identity and place attachments are reconfigured for both host populations and new arrivals. Given the geographies of urban growth and mobility patterns, academic conceptualisations of sense of place are set to be challenged as they seek to account for people–place bonds in new and rapidly shifting environments. While sense of place has been called out as an abstract, somewhat fuzzy concept (Shamai and Ilatov, 2005; Shamai, 1991; Barker, 1979), it can be concisely defined as the way in which people experience and feel about a particular setting (Najafi and Shariff, 2011), or in short ‘the lens through which people experience and make meaning of their experiences in and with place’ (Adams, 2013, p. 47). As such, sense of place shares many features with place identity, place dependence and place attachment (Low and Altman, 1992) and can be considered an umbrella concept for other place-related concepts. It is often presented as a multidimensional concept, a psychosocial structure that represents and organises ‘beliefs, emotions and behavioural commitments’ (Jorgensen and Stedman, 2001, p. 233) or describes people’s relationships with places, expressed through emotions, biographies, imagination, stories and personal experiences (Basso, 1996). Having set out the dual global challenges of migration and urbanisation, the chapter first turns to address the necessary widening of its theoretical lens in order to incorporate postcolonial perspectives. Then, drawing on national census data, ethnographic observations and interviews conducted in Benin, it questions how sense of place plays out in migrants’ host and home localities. It suggests that when they arrive in town, new migrant households do better than host populations. It then turns to look at how migrants maintain a sense of place back home, illustrating the multiple senses of place that often accompany translocal lives. Finally, it presents the implications such findings hold for practitioners and how they can inform transformations in the governance of mobility and urbanisation.

7.2

An Extroverted Sense of Place In the early 1990s, the Marxist geographer Massey (1991) penned an essay titled ‘A global sense of place’, on the progressive potential of sense of place in an increasingly mobile world. It argued that claiming a sense of place is all too often associated with reactionary opposition to newcomers in a context of rising nationalism and antagonism to outsiders. It asks whether, in an era of globalisation, it is not possible instead for a sense of place to be ‘progressive; not self-enclosing and defensive, but outwardlooking’ (Massey, 1991, p. 24). In line with this call, this chapter conceptualises sense of place beyond the scale and boundaries of the place itself. It adopts an extroverted sense of place and questions a focus on sedentary roots in order to consider the various links and networks established between home and host localities. An extroverted sense of place is one that recognises place bonds beyond the current place of residence, but also one that problematises sense of place from outside the habitual sites of place research.

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Place research provides a clear understanding of place meaning as a social construction that enables subjective and fluid notions of home across cultures (Manzo, 2005). Place attachment literature also recognises the highly influential role of cultural place meaning (Scannell and Gifford, 2010), along with social, ethnic or religious backgrounds (Shamai and Ilatov, 2005; Canter, 1977). However, at the risk of becoming inward-looking, the theorisation and application of sense of place has drawn principally on European and North American experiences. Rarely does this field of investigation venture outside the confines of such case studies. Studies on cultural variation have focused on minority groups residing in the West, for example Hispanics and African Americans in the USA (Virden and Walker, 1999; Taylor, 1989; Johnson, 1988), or Indigenous groups such as the Maori in New Zealand (Hay, 2009) or the Apache in the USA (Basso, 1996). However, place research has struggled to address sense of place in postcolonial contexts. ‘Postcolonial’ here refers both to places that have been colonised, along with the spatial and temporal aftermath of that colonisation, and to a school of thought that seeks to challenge the dominance of Western knowledge production. As such, ‘postcolonialism demands more globally informed, rather than western-centric knowledge’ and an increased sensitivity to how place is experienced in other cultures (McEwan, 2019, p. 31). It is, as Roy (2011, p. 308) highlights, both an ‘urban condition’ and a ‘critical, reconstructive methodology’. Urban and migration studies have both employed postcolonial thought in an attempt to decolonise scholarship and move beyond Western mindsets. As a result, much of what is currently known about urban mobility in West Africa has been informed by postcolonial thought. A postcolonial perspective is all the more relevant in place research, given how senses of place have been globally disrupted by imperial history. With regard to urbanisation and migration, colonial instruments reshaped senses of place, whether by imposing new languages, drawing up borders, controlling population flows, reordering land, restricting citizenship, renaming localities, imposing political structures or planning new cities. As Myers (2011, p. 30) notes, colonialism led to a ‘normative reordering of African spatiality’, the legacy of which remains still present 60 years after national liberations, as postcolonial powers continue to replicate colonial tactics. As such, sense of place in West Africa continues to be shaped by colonialism and cannot be untangled from this history. A postcolonial perspective is necessary in this context but is also valid for the study of place in the West, as colonialism modified senses of place at the heart of the empire as well as in the colonial outposts. Furthermore, such a perspective helps to avoid adopting Western perspectives on place as universal and helps make explicit certain underlying biases. The sedentary bias is one such marker of the colonial enterprise and its attempt to shape people–place bonds. This bias was acted upon by colonial administrators, who sought to keep Africans ‘in their place’ (Bakewell, 2008) and control personal and household mobility. A postcolonial approach requires moving beyond a research agenda that has focused on positive bonds to stable places, expressed through rootedness in residence and community and privileging connections to the place of residence (Manzo, 2003, 2005). Place attachment research has traditionally valued long and deep

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experience and involvement in the place, focusing on emotional connections based on belonging, attachment and commitment (Shamai, 1991), length of residency (Tuan, 2011; Relph, 1976), experiences among various generations (Pred, 1986), family activities, memories, continuity and familiarity (Lalli, 1992). Such preoccupations reflect Western epistemologies of place bonds, and do little to account for the translocal lives experienced elsewhere. The focus on attachment to a specific place has overlooked the multiple senses of place often cultivated by migrants and people on the move (Gustafson, 2001). However, much of the work on sense of place and migration has been concerned with migrants’ sense of place in their country of destination (Shamai and Ilatov, 2005; Shamai, 1991). It has in turn remained blind to ongoing relationships with other places – for example, places of origin or transit, or even a diasporic homeland. This, as Huang (current volume) suggests, is also the case for internal rural–urban migration. Narrowing the prism of sense of place to arrival locations overlooks the translocal nature of many migrant lives that cultivate relationships in multiple places simultaneously. To do so requires resituating the current place of residence as one of the potential loci of attachment, but not necessarily the principal or most significant (Manzo, 2003). There is a need, as Di Masso et al. (2019) have suggested, to move away from ‘sedentaristic’ assumptions in order to consider the various ways in which fixities and flows are articulated. This implies more relational and multi-sited senses of place that are spread across various moorings. Below we consider how migrants anchor themselves in the city, and the consequences of their mobility for their households’ developmental well-being.

7.3

At Home in the City? Urban Migrants in West Africa Investigating people–place bonds of migrants in postcolonial contexts opens up new horizons for sense of place research. What follows will present empirical findings on migrant households residing in urban settings in south Benin. It looks first at their place of residence in the arrival cities. It demonstrates that in urban settings, migrant households with weaker place bonds are more successful at accessing urban resources. In comparison with households with longer residency, they perform better on a wide range of development indicators. This questions how useful strong people–place bonds are for navigating the vulnerabilities of contemporary African cities, and suggests that a strong attachment to the current place of residence does not appear to produce development benefits. Our findings in Benin align with studies in the region over the last 40 years that demonstrate that locals fare no better than new arrivals in the city (Beauchemin and Bocquier, 2003). What this highlights in turn is that urban integration problems concern everyone, both migrants and natives – questioning the assumption that ‘the native-born are “well adjusted” to their place of residence since they have lived there all of their lives’ (Goldscheider, 1983, cited in Beauchemin and Bocquier, 2003, p. 6). In the postcolonial city, even those with deep roots and strong place bonds struggle to access

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urban amenities. The status of urban migrants in West Africa lies therefore in stark contrast to the status of migrants in Europe who, arriving from less affluent countries, are often employed in low-skilled jobs and reside in more disadvantaged neighbourhoods. In Benin these findings are confirmed, drawing partly on data collected during the 2013 census, which surveyed over 10 million people (INSAE, 2013).1 The census provides nationality, place of birth, previous residence and current residence, as well as various individual household indicators of development and well-being. Findings showed that even compared with their urban peers, more recent arrivals in urban areas were better off. We defined recent arrivals as all households where the head of household had moved into the commune within the last five years. These households had overall better employment opportunities, higher levels of education and improved housing conditions, and owned a wider range of material goods. For example, recent arrivals were more likely to have attended school and be literate in French, with 47 per cent of urban migrants reading and writing compared with 38 per cent of urban natives. Urban migrants were almost twice as likely to be in formal employment as non-migrants (15 per cent versus 8 per cent), and the heads of migrant households in urban areas reported higher monthly incomes than natives (US$82 versus US$68). On top of living in sturdier homes, new arrivals also reported having improved access to urban infrastructure and modern amenities. This included, for example, individual access to the electricity and water grid, the use of a flush toilet, private waste disposal and cooking with gas. New arrivals also owned a higher number of consumer goods; this was the case for all consumer goods, including televisions, generators, motorbikes, mattresses, fridges and computers. The only two exceptions were bicycles and pirogues. This counters common understandings of migrants as a disadvantaged category that need assistance to integrate into the urban setting. Here it was quite the opposite, and despite not having strong people–place bonds, new arrivals were quite proficient at setting up a home in the city. In this postcolonial setting, claims of being an autochthon do not align with wealth or power, and being a local does not appear to put anyone at a great advantage. Colonialism disrupted local sense of place, for example shifting the urban hierarchy with the foundation of the economic capital Cotonou. For Ciavolella and Choplin (2018), French colonial authorities undermined local Indigenous senses of place; for example, in the city of Porto Novo a sacred forest was turned into a botanical garden (Juhé-Beaulaton, 2009), while in Cotonou a cathedral was built on a site belonging to a local chief (Ciavolella and Choplin, 2018). Urban planning separated Europeans from natives and weakened the authority of well-established local communities, taxing them and demolishing their settlements. These communities remain to this day on the margins, living in slums and precarious neighbourhoods (Ciavolella and Choplin, 2018). Furthermore, rootedness and strong bonds to an urban locality do not shield households from the numerous uncertainties of everyday life in African cities. Life 1

Census RGPH4, conducted in 2003 by the Institut National de la Statistique et de l’Analyse Economique (INSAE) under the Ministry of Development, Prospective and Economic Analysis.

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in the towns and cities along the corridor is unpredictable. The rising coastline and seasonal floods, state-sponsored demolition and the absence of formal cadastres all pose threats to private property. In these postcolonial cities, inequality is high, and employment, especially in the aftermath of the economic crisis of the 1980s, remains largely informal. Both new arrivals and permanent established residents are exposed to the fluctuations and volatility of everyday urban life in West Africa. In this context, households that can cultivate people–place bonds in multiple settings spread risks across various locations rather that tying assets down in one location, making mobile households more resilient in the face of shocks and crisis.

7.4

Building a Sense of Place: Remittance Housing Migrant households in south Benin draw on translocal networks to navigate the city. They live in better houses than sedentary residents, but do not necessarily consider themselves at home. As people on the move navigate the West African city, the home remains a key factor of sense of place. However, that home is not necessarily in town or in the current place of residence – it can be a home back in the family village, or in another, third place. Relationships and networks are maintained with these places through a series of practices and beliefs: participating in ceremonies, returning to the village for retirement, sending remittances and responding to social obligations. As in many other places in the world, migrants in West Africa build houses back home, using bricks and mortar in their absence to lay claims to their place of origin. In doing so they cultivate an extroverted sense of place, one that draws on locations outside their current place of residence and builds on links and networks to maintain bonds with places elsewhere. On a global scale, this extroverted sense of place is producing new urban forms as people invest in housing in their places of origin. This takes the form of remittance landscapes in Mexico (Lopez, 2015) or neoliberal suburbs in the Philippines (Ortega, 2016) as migrants seek to build a home from home (Boccagni, 2017). Here migrants’ multi-sited sense of place contributes to urbanisation occurring not just in bounded settings where they reside, but through translocal, multi-sited practices. The most tangible manifestation of this extroverted sense of place in West Africa is the production of remittance housing (Melly, 2016; Lessault et al., 2011; Tall, 2009; Pellow, 2008), which has transformed the ‘urban landscape of the countryside as much as that of metropolitan areas’ (Gaibazzi, 2015, p. 33). In an interview, a leader of the Nigerien community in Cotonou explained how his compatriots who had migrated to cities in south Benin were reinvesting in housing back home in the Sahel: When you leave your home to come in exodus to a country, the first thing you do is to build back home; you make a roof for yourself at home. All of the Nigeriens who are here, their first preoccupation is to build. It’s the diaspora that’s building the country – they even build housing estates. Ah oui! At Niamey, all along the market it’s built by the diaspora from Lomé. The first preoccupation of the immigrant is to build back home. It can only be beneficial for him. He can

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house his family, or if the family already has a roof, he can rent it out. Et voilà! (Nigerien community leader, Cotonou, Benin, 8 November 2017)

By building remittance housing, Nigeriens in Benin are cultivating a sense of place elsewhere, and in doing so activating and maintaining various networks. This resonates strongly with Massey’s call for a sense of place that links places to places beyond them as a distinct combination of wider and more social relations. Remittance housing in this sense upholds networks of relations – for example, housing one’s wider family – and maintains a claim to belong not in the arrival city, but in one’s place of origin. This enables a novel way of problematising space–time assumptions, and shifts the lens from focusing on migrants’ integration in the arrival city to how they navigate sense of place despite absence from their place of origin. Cultivating a sense of place is a serious financial investment for West African migrants. A survey of 1,508 households conducted in Benin in 2012 concluded that 23 per cent of remittances were intended for construction projects (INSAE, 2012). Construction projects heavily outweigh the share of remittances used for education (6 per cent) or health costs (4 per cent) and are only second to everyday consumption (30 per cent). Building remittance housing is often a project drawn out over many years, and an ongoing process rather than a one-off event. People build incrementally, and migrants’ money is sent back to purchase a plot and slowly accumulate materials. As such, it is a process that activates people–place bonds over extended time periods. As one Beninese migrant who had left to work in Nigeria explained: I would buy construction materials, tiles, doors and other stuff. I knew I’d be coming back after ten or fifteen years – which didn’t happen, I lost my job earlier. But I’d saved some money for the house that I built – my objective was to do a big apartment, but I didn’t have enough, so to not waste what I had, I built three rooms and a big sitting room . . . My brothers helped me out, I told them I wanted to accomplish myself and become free. (Return migrant from Nigeria, Porto Novo, Benin, 12 March 2017)

A stint abroad enabled this man to build a house back home and ‘become free’. The construction site is a place where belonging and recognition are produced, enabling heads of households to be recognised as established members of society. Building a house responds to multiple needs beyond simply providing a place of residence. Purchasing plots of land enables buyers to speculate on rising land prices in the region, and for many residents who are unbanked and mistrust local financial institutions, it also provides a means to lock in capital. Finally, in the absence of social welfare, constructing property back home often serves as a security net and retirement plan. However, many such houses remain unfinished and are uninhabited, with halfcompleted concrete structures scattered around the landscape. Building a sense of place is often hard work for migrants in West Africa, and requires sturdy resolution. Such remittance houses are clear and tangible manifestations of the translocal bonds migrants cultivate with places they no longer inhabit, or places they intend to one day inhabit. As such, they demonstrate how an extroverted sense of place is acted upon, and the consequences this has on the built environment.

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7.5

99

Conclusions This research was conducted in collaboration with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and its Global Programme Migration and Development in order to deepen joint understandings of the current interplay between migration and urbanisation in West Africa. On the basis of this collaboration, two specific implications can be drawn. The first is that in urban settings, migrants are often doing just as well as, if not better than, natives. In terms of policy this would point to a case of positive deviance, where the factors enabling migrant households to succeed could inform mainstream policies for nonmigrants. Second, remittance housing is often decried by development practitioners as non-productive investments or individual vanity projects. Practitioners could gain from considering the various other functions that such housing projects enable within local cultures. This requires a shift from judging remittance housing as empty investments and unproductive ventures, to a recognition of the role it plays in regulating emotional bonds to places left behind in the search for improved opportunities in town. In West Africa, migrants’ multiple senses of place are called upon in times of crisis, and their ability to send money home renders communities more resilient. This makes it a fertile field from which to start pluralising senses of place. Drawing on Massey’s (1991) call for a global sense of place, this chapter adopted an extroverted sense of place along with a postcolonial approach in order to apprehend the translocal livelihoods of West African migrants. An extroverted sense of place calls for a twofold diversification: first of the places being studied, in order to integrate a broader spectrum of place experiences, and second of the locations of knowledge production. Considering sense of place in a postcolonial setting, the chapter demonstrated how colonialism and its aftermath have modified sense of place in Benin and disrupted ties to the land. An extroverted sense of place is one that thinks from the outside and seeks to extend sense of place in order to incorporate the many diverse experiences of place in the global aftermath of colonialism. It multiplies the diversity of the empirical material we draw on. Testing the concepts of sense of place in new geographies enables us to evaluate the sturdiness of place theories and their potential in addressing planetary concerns that reach beyond habitual sites of investigation. Benin, a small francophone country in West Africa, is most certainly at the margins of place research, but it also has the potential to generate novel insights, and more importantly to trouble certain implicit givens within place research. This postcolonial setting teaches us that if no one is a prophet at home, those who seek to succeed must at times uproot their ties and multiply their senses of place in order to navigate the challenges of the African city.

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Bakewell, O. and Jónsson, G. (2013) ‘Theory and the study of migration in Africa’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 34, no. 5, pp. 477–485. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07256868 .2013.827830 Barker, J. E. (1979) ‘Designing for a sense of place in Mississippi small towns’, in Prenshaw, W. P. and McKee, J. O. (eds), Sense of Place: Mississippi, Jackson, University of Mississippi, pp. 162–178. Basso, K. H. (1996) Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press. Beauchemin, C. and Bocquier, P. (2003) Migration and Urbanization in Francophone West Africa: A Review of the Recent Empirical Evidence, Paris, DIAL/Unité de Recherche CIPRE. Boccagni, P. (2017) Migration and the Search for Home, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Canter, D. (1977) The Psychology of Place, London: Architectural Press. Ciavolella, R. and Choplin, A. (2018) Cotonou, histoire d’une ville ‘sans histoire’, Cotonou, Fondation Zinsou. Collyer, M. (2019) ‘From preventive to repressive: the changing use of development and humanitarianism to control migration’, in Mitchell, K., Jones, R., and Fluri, J. L. (eds), Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, pp. 170–181. Coquery-Vidrovitch, C. (2005) ‘Introduction: African urban spaces – history and culture’, in Salm, S. J. and Falola, T. (eds), African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective, Rochester, University of Rochester Press, pp. xv–xi. Di Masso, A., Williams, D. R., Raymond, C. M., et al. (2019) ‘Between fixities and flows: navigating place attachments in an increasingly mobile world’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 61, pp. 125–133. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2019.01.006 Gaibazzi, P. (2015) Bush Bound: Young Men and Rural Permanence in Migrant West Africa, New York, Berghahn Books. Gustafson, P. (2001) ‘Roots and routes: exploring the relationship between place attachment and mobility’, Environment and Behavior, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 667–686. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/ 00139160121973188 Hay, R. (2009) ‘A rooted sense of place in cross-cultural perspective’, Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 245–266. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064 .1998.tb01894.x Institut National de la Statistique et de l’Analyse Economique (INSAE) (2012) Survey on Migrant Transfers conducted under the Ministry of Development, Prospective and Economic Analysis. Institut National de la Statistique et de l’Analyse Economique (INSAE) (2013) RGPH4 Survey conducted under the Ministry of Development, Prospective and Economic Analysis. Johnson, C. (1988) ‘A consideration of collective memory in African American attachment to wildland recreation places’, Human Ecology Review, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 5–15. Jorgensen, B. S. and Stedman, R. C. (2001) ‘Sense of place as an attitude: lakeshore owners’ attitudes toward their properties’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 233–248. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jevp.2001.0226 Juhé-Beaulaton, D. (2009) ‘Un patrimoine urbain méconnu’, Autrepart, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 75–98. Lalli, M. (1992) ‘Urban-related identity: theory, measurement, and empirical findings’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 285–303. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S02724944(05)80078-7 Landau, L. B. and Kihato, C. W. (2018) The Future of Mobility and Migration within and from Sub-Saharan Africa, Brussels, European Strategy and Policy Analysis System.

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Lessault, D., Beauchemin, C. and Sakho, P. (2011) ‘Migration internationale et conditions d’habitat des ménages à Dakar’, Population, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 197–228. Lopez, S. L. (2015) The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Low, S. M. and Altman, I. (1992) ‘Place attachment’, in Altman, I. and Low, S. M. (eds), Place Attachment, Boston, Springer, pp. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8753-4_1 Manzo, L. C. (2003) ‘Beyond house and haven: toward a revisioning of emotional relationships with places’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 47–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(02)00074-9 Manzo, L. C. (2005) ‘For better or worse: exploring multiple dimensions of place meaning’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 67–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j .jenvp.2005.01.002 Massey, D. (1991) ‘A global sense of place’, Marxism Today, June, pp. 24–29. Mbembe, A. and Nuttall, S. (2004) ‘Writing the world from an African metropolis’, Public Culture, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 347–372. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-347 McEwan, C. (2019) Postcolonialism, Decoloniality and Development, 2nd ed., London, Routledge. Melly, C. (2016) Bottleneck: Moving, Building and Belonging in an African City, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Myers, G. (2011) African Cities: Alternative Theories and Practices, London, Zed Books. Najafi, M. and Shariff, M. K. B. M. (2011) ‘The concept of place and sense of place in architectural studies’, International Journal of Social, Behavioral, Educational, Economic, Business and Industrial Engineering, vol. 5, no. 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1082223 Ortega, A. (2016) Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration and Dispossession, Lanham, Lexington Books. Pellow, D. (2008) Landlords and Lodgers: Socio-Spatial Organization in an Accra Community, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Pred, A. (1986) Place, Practice and Structuralism: Social and Spatial Transformation in Southern Sweden 1750–1850, Cambridge, Polity Press. Relph, E. (1976) Place and Placelessness, London, Pion. Roy, A. (2011) ‘Conclusion: postcolonial urbanism: speed, hysteria, mass dreams’, in Roy, A. and Ong, A. (eds), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Chichester, Wiley Blackwell, pp. 307–335. Scannell, L. and Gifford, R. (2010) ‘Defining place attachment: a tripartite organizing framework’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j .jenvp.2009.09.006 Schmitz, J. (2008) ‘Migrants ouest-africains vers l’Europe: historicité et espace moraux’, Politique africaine, vol. 109, pp. 5–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/polaf.109.0005 Shamai, S. (1991) ‘Sense of place: an empirical measurement’, Geoforum, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 347–358. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0016-7185(91)90017-K Shamai, S. and Ilatov, Z. (2005) ‘Measuring sense of place: methodological aspects’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, vol. 96, no. 5, pp. 467–476. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111 /j.1467-9663.2005.00479.x Tacoli, C., Satterthwaite, D. and Gordon, M. G. (2015) Urbanization, Rural–Urban Migration and Urban Poverty, Geneva, IOM. Tall, S. M. (2009) Investir dans la ville africaine: les émigrés et l’habitat à Dakar, hommes et sociétés, Paris, CREPOS.

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Taylor, D. E. (1989) ‘Blacks and the environment: toward an explanation of the concern and action gap between blacks and whites’, Environment and Behavior, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 175–205. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0013916589212003 Tuan, Y.-F. (2011) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Virden, R. J. and Walker, G. J. (1999) ‘Ethnic/racial and gender variations among meanings given to, and preferences for the natural environment’, Leisure Sciences, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 219–239. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/014904099273110

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8

Place Detachment and the Psychology of Nonbelonging Lessons from Diepsloot Township Ursula Lau, Kevin Durrheim and Lisa S. Young

The literature on sense of place has demonstrated how important places are to our personal and collective well-being (Cresswell, 2015). Scholarly writings on place identity and attachment have described the experience of social, spatial and autobiographical ‘insideness’ that place attachment engenders (Tuan, 1980; Relph, 1976). Warm thoughts and feelings form the psychological basis of an individual’s place identification and rootedness in places such as home and neighbourhood. These become apparent as nostalgic longing when people leave these places due to disaster, or when the character of a place changes; such loss of place can be overwhelming and traumatic (Fullilove, 1996). Discursive research has highlighted the political and strategic use of narratives of belonging and attachment. Accounts of insideness and loss of place are often developed to show that ‘outsiders’ are a disruptive presence who do not belong, and to justify social exclusion (Di Masso et al., 2014; Dixon and Durrheim, 2000). This body of work as a whole is written from the perspective of those who belong. It adopts the point of view of people who are attached to places, of individuals or communities who claim a stake in belonging to disputed places, or who mourn the loss or disruption of place (Lewicka, 2011; Manzo, 2003). We have a psychology of place attachment, belonging and loss of place, but what is the psychology of not belonging, and of being detached from the place you occupy? Places such as airports, service stations and supermarkets have been described as ‘nonplaces’ (Augé, 1995). They are places through which people pass but to which they do not belong. Can one then be at home in a non-place? Put differently, can one remain detached from a place called home? What are the costs of doing so? In this chapter, we attempt to answer these questions by studying complex narratives of place and attachment derived from interviews with residents of Diepsloot Township. Diepsloot (‘deep ditch’) is situated on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg, within 10 km of exclusive housing estates. As formal housing stands became available, migrants from various parts of the country flocked to Diepsloot in search of job opportunities. The majority of its residents live in informal homes, and an estimated 73 per cent live below the poverty line (Harber, 2011). Informal settlements like the parts of Diepsloot we studied are a special category of nonplace, where deprivation and insecurity lend an abject and dystopian quality: no one wants

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to live there. All the residents are passing through. How do residents detach from devalued places through which they are ostensibly only passing but have come to reside in and call home?

8.1

Informal Settlements as Places of Belonging An estimated 25 per cent of the world’s urban population – over 1 billion people – live in informal settlements (Avis, 2016). These are vast residential areas defined by their informal construction and lack of land tenure, services and security (Dovey and King, 2011). Some informal settlements have become formalised and serviced over time, but many remain insecure and dangerous places that might more appropriately be termed slums or squatter settlements. From a governance perspective, informal settlements are ‘problems to be fixed’ (Dovey and King, 2011, p. 11) – regulated, formalised or removed. Yet informal settlements are growing at a faster rate than other forms of urban development, and have become integral to the functioning of many cities in the global South. Liberal academic writing on informal settlements has resisted the ‘discursive marginalization’ (Lombard, 2014, p. 3) of bureaucratic and administrative texts, and has tended instead to write sympathetically from the perspective of the inhabitants. Informal settlements have thus been treated as places of belonging, place-making and ordinariness. Research has shown how residents humanise the places they inhabit, even under extreme circumstances. For example, Jewish Israeli settlers on the West Bank endured hardship by developing a collective view of their squatting as an expression of religious place attachment and pilgrimage towards the realisation of a higher goal (Mazumdar, 2005). Lombard’s (2014) analysis humanises the residents of an informal settlement in Mexico, showing their place-making activities to be as ordinary, creative and diverse as those of residents in other locations. Despite hardship, marginalisation and stigma, residents not only identify with and attach to their places of residence, but also engage in creative discursive and physical activities of placemaking and integration with the city.

8.2

Urban Estuaries as Places of Nonbelonging Migration researchers have developed a very different picture of informal settlements as places of migration, temporariness, disinvestment and detachment. Landau (2014, p. 359) characterises African informal settlements as ‘estuarial zones’: confluences of migrations from multiple urban and rural ‘elsewheres’, both domestic and international. They are also estuarial as urban gateways where migrants converge. Informal settlements are thus primarily defined not in terms of structural informality, but as unregulated meeting places of people ‘moving into, out of, and through African cities in search of profit, protection and passage elsewhere’ (Landau, 2014, p. 361). They are dynamic ecosystems, cities of strangers, dangerous dystopian realties – not places to hanker after or become attached to.

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African urban estuaries are places of ‘limited financial and emotional investment’ (Landau, 2014, p. 363). Attachments lie elsewhere. Migrants connect to their homes of origin, where they maintain family, ethnic and political ties, hoping to return and retire (Kankonde, 2010). Migrants also invest in moving to new places of opportunity and prosperity, cultivating ties outside (through church or work) that offer a promise of upward mobility and escape. Landau and others have begun to describe the political and legal condition of nonbelonging – that is, the permanent temporariness of informal settlement, or the liminality of noncitizenship. Tonkiss and Bloom (2015) argue that nonbelonging – like being stateless or having noncitizen status – is not simply the absence of belonging, but is a condition in its own right. Noncitizenship is a positive status arising from migration (and conditions that spawn migration) as well as from the legal and administrative practices and exclusions of the nation-state. Therefore, Tonkiss and Bloom (2015, p. 840) advocate dropping the hyphen from ‘non-citizenship’ to encourage recognition of the ‘diverse experiences and belongings’ of noncitizens. Landau, Tonkiss and Bloom have considered the political, legal, geographical and normative orders of nonbelonging. Our aim is to investigate the psychological orders of nonbelonging, which have been neglected thus far. Their writings beg psychological questions. What is the experience of belonging in spaces of nonbelonging, as noncitizens or as residents of urban estuaries? Despite the condition of permanent temporariness, residents of Africa’s informal settlements ‘form solidarities and communities in order to meet daily needs and find rights and recognition’ (Landau, 2014, p. 354). How do residents manage these countervailing pressures to become simultaneously attached and detached? This chapter explores senses of place in co-constructed accounts by informal settlement residents who belong – yet also struggle to not belong – to nonplaces. We illustrate how (non)belonging is performed as unspoken affective resonances in participant–interviewer exchanges. Using Lacanian psychoanalytic insights, the chapter contributes to an expanded conceptualisation of senses of place, showing that we also perform belonging in an unconscious sense – beyond our discursive performances (place identity) or expressed feeling states (place attachment). This epistemological stance highlights senses of place belonging as coordinated via an unspoken social contract with the hovering interlocutor (Other), who offers navigational cues, situating where we are (place) and defining who we are (identity).

8.3

Introducing Diepsloot Diepsloot (Figures 8.1 and 8.2) originated as a transit camp for squatters removed from privately owned land to make room for a luxury housing development. Although its township status was formalised in 1999, Diepsloot comprises an estimated 24,373 shacks, compared with 5,000 formal RDP houses1 and bank-financed houses (Harber, 2011). 1

These homes are part of the government-subsidised Reconstruction and Development Programme to address the socio-economic devastation of apartheid. However, they are ‘sterile’ and of poor construction quality (Harber, 2011).

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Figure 8.1 Diepsloot: surface water alongside settlements prone to flooding. Photo credit: Mark Lindsey Tyrell (2008).

Figure 8.2 Diepsloot: informal waste disposal alongside makeshift homes. Photo credit: Mark Lindsay Tyrell (2008).

Diepsloot’s appeal to migrants lies in its convenient location for job opportunities amid Johannesburg’s affluent spaces (business parks, shopping malls, residences).

8.4

Methodology The analysis presented below forms part of a PhD project by the first author. A mobile interviewing method (Brown and Durrheim, 2009) was used to derive spatial-

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discursive meanings in unfolding participant–researcher interactions. The first author accompanied five residents around their home spaces, eliciting conversations about their everyday doings. A discourse-analytic method inspired by Lacan (2014) guided our ‘reading’ for affect across the data. For Lacan, desire covers over anxiety, producing a meaning frame (fantasy) to assuage the uncertainties of our existence. Our purpose is to show how fantasy works as a co-created social construction between speakers to make sense of experiences that defy sense. We show that fantasy is not limited to what is said about places, events or characters named in speech, but encompasses visual performances that help to materialise space and produce nonbelonging (Martin, 2016). Through Lacan’s (2014) concept of the ‘big Other’, we draw attention to the unsaid and how this may be discerned as the ‘hovering interlocutor’ (Hook, 2018, p. 17). When we speak, we hold in mind this Other, an imagined ideal presence whose desire we wish to capture. This external frame transcends the intersubjective ‘you-and-me’ exchange, and is discerned as ‘something else’ that is bigger than us (i.e. the big Other). This Other refers to the entire structure of meaning in society – beyond spoken language – which allows dialogue to work (Hook, 2018). The hovering interlocutor provides direction for and recognition of how we perform senses of (non)place and (non)belonging. In speaking, we enter into an unconscious agreement with this hovering Other to assure our sense of place. The following analytic steps offer ‘navigational cues’ (Hook, 2018) to discern the hovering interlocutor in the text. First, we locate anxious moments in speech, materialised as emphases, hesitations, gasps, whispers, laughter and so on (Saville Young, 2013). Second, we highlight reasoning between speakers as counterpoints to anxiety. Desire is the counterpoint to anxiety, where fantasy intercedes to give meaning. We explore how desire ‘stitches together’ images, language (theme repetitions) and affects evoked in speech (fantasy construction) (Martin, 2016). Third, we identify places where speakers position themselves as the same as or different from the person, place or thing spoken about. The emphasis here is on how speakers use fantasy to install a relationship in which they can be recognised or desired by the other (Hook, 2018). Last, we attend to how speakers align with symbolic scripts – that is, a speaker’s self-interpellation relative to an authoritative social order of race, class, gender and so on. Our address to the Other may be discerned by its effects: the relational positions produced are constrained in hierarchical, binarised ways to repeat a familiar historical script. We selected extracts containing markers of anxiety to illuminate speakers’ fantasy constructions of belonging in Diepsloot. Data were transcribed following the conventions of discursive research (Du Bois, 1991), paying attention to speech dysfluencies (hesitation, stammering, drawn-out words) and intonational changes (whispers, emphases, smiles). From a Lacanian psychosocial research stance, these ‘ruptures’ in speech signal anxious points in the text (Saville Young, 2013)

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8.5

Analysis

8.5.1

The Body Not ‘at Home’ Madala, like all participants, offers a (dis)embodied narrative of ‘passing through’. Diepsloot is depicted as a spatio-temporal interregnum where the body remains cut-off from the mind that imagines ‘home’ elsewhere. Extract 1: Madala, a gardener

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

The:::re [Limpopo] is my (.) my originally eh, eh, eh (3.0) eh PLACE. Here I’m/I’m/I’m just eh/eh/eh/eh/eh/eh been eh/eh/eh temporary. I can go, go home (.) to START AFRESH AGAIN /. . ./ The feelings are THERE (3.0) so:: it’s like that because here by Diepsloot (.) it’s just eh:: the BODY IS HERE, BUT MY MIND, when am WORKING, the MIND is there. I must go home. I must go home. When I’ve, I’ve MONEY, must go home, §must go home, must go home, ≪I must go home§≫ I’m/I’m ENJOYING because (.) I’m not gonna s::::it here/stay here for long, every time (2.0) I wanna go home.

The interregnum is not an easy space to occupy, particularly in a place like Diepsloot. Madala derives his livelihood as a ‘WORKING’ ‘BODY’ (1:4–5), but the place is depicted as devoid of life. The body remains lifeless and stuck, contrasted against the enlivening space (‘START AFRESH’ (5:2–3)) of Limpopo, Madala’s original ‘HOME’ (4:2). There is some reprieve in this objectified existence, as Madala constructs it as a ‘temporary’ (1:2) dislocation (‘I’m not gonna s::::it here/stay here for long’ (1:8). Perhaps it is this temporariness that allows him the capacity to ‘enjoy’ (1:7), knowing his ‘real’ home is ‘THERE’ (1:3), elsewhere but not ‘HERE’ (6:4). In these asserted disavowals of belonging, anxiety ruptures the text, evinced in stammering speech (‘I’m/I’m/I’m just eh/eh/eh/eh/eh/eh been eh/eh/eh temporary’ (1:2)) and drawn-out words (‘s::::it’ (1:8)). These moments of anxious ambivalence (Martin, 2016) make way for fantasy creation. We can appreciate this shift as a transference. In speech, we become transferred from the place of anxiety to the place of desire (another ideal place), an external meaning frame that quells anxiety and gives direction. Madala’s angst is masked in a narrative of homing desire (Brah, 1996). His echoes of ‘home’ evince a painful yet nostalgic yearning – ‘≪I must go home§≫’ (1:9–10) is spoken smilingly (§) through whispered tones (≪..≫). Madala’s desire to be seen as not belonging in Diepsloot ensures his own recognisability as a subject who belongs elsewhere. Thus, longing and disavowal are not distinct but jointly constituted and articulated in stories of nonbelonging in Diepsloot.

8.5.2

Dead Bodies: Narratives of Fear and Horror Nonbelonging is articulated in stories of violent crime told via recurring tropes of death.

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Extract 2: Mlandy, a community centre librarian 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Mlandy:

UL:

EVERYday lot of people die here [UL: Okay=] people they kill each o::ther::Even last we/week, last week there is a woman=They. . .were they/they just gaining a woman’s house=is zozo2. Then I don’t know, they were looking for MONEY or something=Then they shoot that woman and then [s]he die immediately=Then they, he or ~h~e~, I mean the daughter h/she’s in hos/she’s in hospital. E::VERYday=[Everyday people] are dying. [O h m y g o s h]

Extract 3: Mamakgowa, who earns a living collecting recyclables from bins 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Mamakgowa: UL: Mamakgowa: UL: Mamakgowa: UL: Mamakgowa: UL: Mamakgowa:

And that side [Ext. 1], you KNO:::W. . .the child, they/are k/they/the/the/the people they kill the child and then Here? See the dustbin here? Yes. For five years they ≪they:: They put the dustbin, [put the baby in the dustbin]. [Yes, they put the baby] in dustbin. Oh (.) gosh≫ Five years and then::two to three years again the (.) child. They raped=After that, they KILL the child that side, you see.

Both extracts yield deathly images of Diepsloot (‘shoot’ (2:6), ‘kill each o::ther::’ (2:1), ‘people are dying’ (2:1)). These deaths are gruesome and untimely. More disturbingly, they defy sense. A(n infant) body in the dustbin (Extract 3) profoundly disrupts the natural order of things. Contributing to the disturbance is the ‘EVERYday’ ((2:1,8) repeated three times) regularity of events or recurrences (‘Five years and then:: two to three years again’ (1:10)). The emphasis on ‘EVERY’ seems hyperbolic, an extreme case formulation (Pomerantz, 1986) affirming Mamakgowa’s investment in her claim as fact. Moreover, her anxiety is marked in voice quivers (‘~h~e~’ (2:7)), dysfluencies (2:7–8), stammering (‘they/are k/ they/the/the/the’ (3:2)) and hushed tones (≪≫ (2:6,9)), closing down any need for refutation of ‘fact’ – as evident in the interviewer’s disoriented, startled response: ‘Oh (.) gosh≫’ (2:9). Our intention is not to dispute the veracity of these accounts. Rather, we argue that dialogue allows speakers to construct meaningful versions of reality. ‘Plausible stories’ (Martin, 2016, p. 1) insist on a view of things as they ‘really’ are. In these accounts, fantasy construction (‘stitched together’ images, language and affective resonances) helps speakers to restore meaning in a place where meaning has collapsed (Kristeva, 1982). A horror fantasy might seem a counter-intuitive response to anxiety. However, traumatic horror is simply the underside of an idyllic narrative of home (Extract 1) (Žižek, 2008). This narrative split offers a way to resolve the anxious ambivalence – reordering a world that seems ‘irreal’ or nightmarish but at the same time all too familiar or real. To restructure meaning and reorient themselves towards a sense of 2

A tin shack in township talk.

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place, participants and interviewer alike appeal to the invisible yet ever-present hovering interlocutor to guide the fantasy construction. Mamakgowa visually and spatially cues the interviewer to a seemingly ordinary object (‘see the dustbin here?’ (2:4)) framed by the wider event, ‘the people they kill the child’ (2:2). These two referential markers, in common-sense terms, bear little relationship to each other. However, the interviewer anticipates Mamakgowa’s speech to complete the meaning frame. In effect, two seemingly irreconcilable realities become stitched together, forming a horror plot: ‘the baby in the dustbin’ (2:7–8). We might ask how the interviewer arrives – prematurely – at this sense-making frame. ‘Trash bin babies’, a familiar storyline in impoverished communities, corresponds to a white fantasy of black bodies-in-pieces (Hook, 2013). Such newsworthy constructions, as Hook suggests, offer white subjects a soothing function by locating anxieties ‘in a site of pronounced dis-identification’ (p. 259) (i.e. ‘not me’, as white bodies cannot be broken). In this context, participant and researcher alike align with the hovering interlocutor of the white imaginary. Gazing at Diepsloot through this horror lens restores sense to senselessness, simultaneously allowing the experience of horror at a distance. This struggle to not belong is performed through discursive boundary work (‘me’ versus ‘not me’) in order to ensure one’s survival and thus recognisability as a subject.

8.5.3

Surviving Bodies The horror of violent crime is localised to Extension 1, a ‘reception area’ for new migrants to Diepsloot (Harber, 2011). Occupying a subaltern status in an already impoverished community, the place is depicted by residents as ‘a pure squatter camp’ populated by ‘dangerous criminals’. Khuras, having moved from Extension 1, draws on survival repertoires to reaffirm his separateness (survival) from that place. Extract 4: Khuras, a videographer who sells newsworthy footage about Diepsloot to media agencies

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Khuras:

UL: Khuras: UL: Khuras: UL: Khuras:

Khuras: UL: Khuras:

It’s too dark this place. There’s NO LIGHT. There is no electricity. There’s nothing. They/they USE paraffin and candle. So=I WAS STAYING HERE long time then. . .during the night. . .you have to be at the house. Ri::ght and/and because there’s, it’s just SAFER in the house? YAH EVEN in the house you safe [but not safe]. [M m m : : : ] So because. . .sometimes they can even::get into your house because it’s shacks. They can even BREAK the/the/the, the ZINC and get in. Um for you:::when you return to THIS place WHERE YOU USED TO LIVE does it make you FEEL anything uh::= Yuh they changes i(hh)s yo(hh)u kn(hh)ow) hh u:::m=SINCE I LEFT HERE there were lots of stories around this place. . .then I realise oh my gosh, what if I was still staying the:::re? Maybe [I/I’ll Right] be one of the VICTIM or whatever.

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The makeshift home is rendered ambivalently ‘safe but not safe’ (4:10) in a place depicted as dangerous. Apart from having ‘NO LIGHT’ (4:1), home is a permeable structure, a ‘ZINC’ shack (4:2) affording minimal protection from intrusive threats. The anxiety is rendered palpable in Khuras’ speech: ‘they can even BREAK the, the/ the/the, the ZINC and get in’ (4:13). Khuras’ survival status has been achieved ‘SINCE I LEFT HERE’ (4:13), renouncing his belonging to ‘THIS place’. Through survival repertoires, Khuras maintains bodily integrity, escaping ‘VICTIM’ status (4:29) – ‘oh my gosh, what if I was still staying the::: re?’ (4:17–18). Much angst (and ‘enjoyment’) remains in surviving, evinced in the anxious laughter ringing through Khuras’ newfound positioning: ‘Yuh they changes i(hh)s yo(hh)u kn(hh)ow) hh u:::m=SINCE I LEFT HERE’ (4:16). Disavowal of and desire for place/ identity thus are mutually constituted. Khuras and the interviewer both align with the gaze of the Other, the hovering interlocutor who frames meaning based on ‘lots of stories around this place’ (4:17). A fantasy of wholeness/survival is predicated on seeing the other through a lens of horror. As in the previous narratives, there is a constant slippage between simultaneous identification and disavowal. Khuras’ narrative grants him recognisability as a surviving body, yet he is recognised as such because he has moved on from this abject place that is ‘not me’ (Kristeva, 1982). What are the coordinates that grant recognisability to persons as surviving, whole bodies?

8.5.4

Desiring a Unified Body Below, the poverty of Diepsloot as a ‘black space’ is juxtaposed with the suburban abundance of symbolic ‘white spaces’. Extract 5: Mamakgowa

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

I like FourWAYS3 because the townhouse, no/no/no/no shelters, neh? Nothing shelters, tin house then::the security is/is guarding there/. . ./There, happy, and there fresh air everything. No noise. If noise, maybe from people who go to the bar; they dancing. It’s too much happy, at least. Not here. If they happy, everybody say, ‘no, wait, wait’. They fight. . .It’s not happy ’cause there’s too much=‘Oh, this one they killed somebody’, you see. . .people they stay here is dying. No, is not all right.

Bodily integrity is preserved in securitised suburban spaces (5:2), unlike the exposed ‘shelters’ (5:1,2) and ‘tin house[s]’ (5:2) of townships. Mamakgowa looks towards the hovering Other as an orienting guide to what constitutes the ideal sense of place. This is predicated on symbolic coordinates of whiteness that offer the promise (not the fulfilment) of plenitude (‘everything’ (5:2), ‘too much happy’ (5:4)). At the same time, it is structured through a horror fantasy that looks back at the ‘other’ as existing in a default state of brokenness (fighting (5:5), killing (5:5–50), dying (5:6)). Like other participants, Mamakgowa appeals to our ideas of what 3

Fourways is a commercial and residential hub, comprising medium/high-income housing estates and borders the more affluent residential suburbs of Johannesburg north.

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makes a home and non-home. Yet participants’ performances of nonbelonging include a quality of enjoyment in their narrations of horror. For Lacan (2014), enjoyment is a compulsive repetition that exceeds pleasure; it is an attachment to something that stays the same despite it destructive effects. It is as if, through participants’ appeals to the hovering interlocutor with horrifying details of murder and death, a recognition will be bestowed on them that might even feel like belonging. Narratives of nonbelonging are paradoxically adopted in order to belong. However, in gaining temporary recognisability as subjects, speakers disavow belonging to Diepsloot and contribute to a hegemonic script that constructs its place as abject. Furthering this argument, we adopt a reflexive stance typical of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Saville Young, 2013) to document the interviewer–participant relationship as well as the researchers’ relationship to the text. In the participant’s appeal to the Other, the interviewer is implicated. Fourways resonates as reassuringly familiar to the interviewer, who can identify with its place as a lived reality. Unlike these participants, who remain stuck in interregnum states of poverty and violence, the interviewer is spared that ‘irreality’ (Žižek, 2008). Mamakgowa’s appeal echoes Madala’s ‘I must go home’ (1:5). For the interviewer, it brings the comforting realisation that ‘I can go home’, making Diepsloot a temporary stop where the ‘enjoyment’ of horror can be vicariously experienced and escaped at any time. The analytical sense-making frame we adopted aligns us closely with the hovering interlocutor. We are equally implicated in performing nonbelonging in abject spaces, yet the dividing lines (material, social, ‘racial’) between ourselves and the participants reproduces our belongings as hierarchical. Our nonbelonging therefore rests on our complicity in covering over the real horror of racial and structural inequalities.

8.6

Discussion Conceptualisations of place attachment, place identity and sense of place require a more nuanced understanding of affect, beyond expressed feelings or discursive claims. Using Lacanian analysis, we have argued that narratives of nonbelonging and belonging are mutually constitutive, because we tell stories of nonbelonging to belong. The lure of belonging, however, is never realised. Home is an impossibility, not simply as a material reality, but as a symbolic representation. From a Lacanian perspective, the human condition is marked by constitutive incompleteness, and we perform belonging as a yearning for completeness. True, there is a level of horror in the Diepsloot narratives relative to places of privilege. These narratives point to a double alienation: not just an alienation from ‘home’, but an experience of racial abjection for migrants who make home in Africa’s urban estuaries. Their narratives are shocking, but they bring home the reality of nonbelonging – of the anxieties of attachment and the escape fantasies that characterise many experiences of home in an age of migration and deep inequality.

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Our aim was to highlight how affect flows through narratives of nonbelonging. The constant slippages between identification and disavowal illuminate anxious tensions between death and survival, belonging and nonbelonging. Through place disavowal, we rid ourselves of people, spaces and bonds that are perceived as bearing no resemblance – or perhaps too much of an uncanny resemblance – to ourselves. Horror is a powerful fantasy that covers over the collapse in meaning. It plays with oscillating tensions between our fragmenting subjectivity or disorientation (‘where am I?’) and our reorientation (‘who am I?’). To say ‘who I am’ (or conversely ‘who I am not’) points to our narrative survival. Horror is enjoyable. It offers a compromise, proclaiming our survival while experiencing our dissolution at a distance. In our desire to belong elsewhere, we align ourselves with the imagined gaze of the Other, who provides the coordinates – often idealised, hegemonic and exclusionary – to prescribe how and where we belong as racially divided subjects.

8.7

Conclusion The literature on sense of place and place attachment has largely been written from the perspective of those who belong and are attached to place. Their lived experiences and place identities have been described at length, as have resistances to change and experiences of displacement (Lewicka, 2011; Manzo, 2003). This chapter has sought to describe the psychology of nonbelonging. Following Tonkiss and Bloom (2015), we conceive of nonbelonging as a state in its own right and not simply the absence of belonging. While there has been progress in describing the political and legal state of nonbelonging, the psychological understanding of the condition remains underdeveloped. A Lacanian-inspired discourse analysis, with its focus on the unspoken subtexts of speech, widens place identity and place attachment concepts. These are not simply discursive constructs or outward expressions of ‘inside’ feelings. We perform senses of place belonging via the unspoken social coordinates of the hovering interlocutor (Other), who gives us navigational cues to (re)orientate where we are (place) in order to define who we are (identity). We (dis)identify with place through a fantasy construction to manage our sense of nonbelonging. Therefore, we do not simply construct the other as an ‘outsider’ to territorialise our space. We imbue the other with this meaning frame, escaping the real horror of our nonbelonging.

Acknowledgements This research was conducted for Ursula Lau’s PhD, support for which was received from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) in collaboration with the South African Humanities Deans Association (SAHUDA). The opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the authors, and are not to be attributed to the NIHSS or SAHUDA.

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References Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London, Verso. Avis, W. R. (2016) Urban Governance (Topic Guide) [Online]. Available at https://gsdrc.org /topic-guides/urban-governance/ (accessed 4 May 2020). Brah, A. (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London, Routledge. Brown, L. and Durrheim, K. (2009) ‘Different kinds of knowing: generating qualitative data through mobile interviewing’, Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 911–930. http://dx.doi.org /10.1177/1077800409333440 Cresswell, T. (2015) Place: An Introduction, 2nd ed., Malden, Wiley Blackwell. Di Masso, A., Dixon, J. and Durrheim, K. (2014) ‘Place attachment as discursive practice’, in Manzo, L. C. and Devine-Wright, P. (eds), Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 75–86. Dixon, J. and Durrheim, K. (2000) ‘Displacing place-identity: a discursive approach to locating self and other’, British Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 27–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1348/014466600164318 Dovey, K. and King, R. (2011) ‘Forms of informality: morphology and visibility of informal settlements’, Built Environment, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 11–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/23289768 Du Bois, J. W. (1991) ‘Transcription design principles’, Pragmatics, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 71–106. Fullilove, M. T. (1996) ‘Psychiatric implications of displacement: contributions from the psychology of place’, American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 153, no. 12, pp. 1516–1523. http://dx.doi.org/10.1176/ajp.153.12.1516 Harber, A. (2011) Diepsloot, Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball. Hook, D. (2013) ‘The racist bodily imaginary: the image of the body-in-pieces in (post)apartheid culture’, Subjectivity, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 254–271. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/sub.2013.7 Hook, D. (2018) Six Moments in Lacan: Communication and Identification in Psychology and Psychoanalysis, London, Routledge. Kankonde, B. P. (2010) ‘Transnational family ties, remittance motives, and social death among Congolese migrants: a socio-anthropological analysis’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 225–243. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jcfs.41.2.225 Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York, Columbia University Press. Lacan, J. (2014) Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, Cambridge, Polity Press. Landau, L. B. (2014) ‘Conviviality, rights, and conflict in Africa’s urban estuaries’, Politics and Society, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 359–380. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0032329214543258 Lewicka, M. (2011) ‘Place attachment: how far have we come in the last 40 years?’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 207–230. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010 .10.001 Lombard, M. (2014). Constructing ordinary places: place-making in urban informal settlements in Mexico. Progress in Planning, 94, 1–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2013.05.003 Manzo, L. C. (2003) ‘Beyond house and haven: toward a revisioning of emotional relationships with places’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 47–61. http://dx.doi .org/10.1016/S0272-4944(02)00074-9 Martin, J. (2016) ‘Capturing desire: rhetorical strategies and the affectivity of discourse’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 143–160. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/1467-856X.12065

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Mazumdar, S. (2005) ‘Religious place attachment, squatting, and “qualitative” research: a commentary’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 87–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.jenvp.2004.09.003 Pomerantz, A. (1986) ‘Extreme case formulations: a way of legitimizing claims’, Human Studies, vol. 9, pp. 219–229. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00148128 Relph, R. (1976) Place and Placelessness, London, Pion. Saville Young, L. (2013) ‘Becoming other to oneself: misreading the researcher through Lacanian discourse analysis’, in Parker, I. and Pavon-Cuellar, D. (eds), Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Analyses of Textual Indeterminacy, London, Routledge, pp. 279–290. Tonkiss, K. and Bloom, T. (2015) ‘Theorising noncitizenship: concepts, debates and challenges’, Citizenship Studies, vol. 19, no. 8, pp. 837–852. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2015 .1110278 Tuan, Y. (1980) ‘Rootedness versus sense of place’, Landscape, vol. 24, pp. 3–8. Tyrell, M. (2008) Urban Design for Capacity Development in Informal Settlements [Online]. Available at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5613d09ee4b01b9a1333c012/t/5667864fd82 d5eb53652cd5f/1449625167113/tyrrellm.pdf (accessed 14 June 2020). Žižek, S. (2008) The Plague of Fantasies, London, Verso.

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Sense of Place in Urban China Multiple Determinants of Rural–Urban Migrants’ Belongingness to the Host City Xu Huang

9.1

Introduction

9.1.1

Sense of Place in Chinese Literature Sense of belonging is a widely investigated phenomenon in the study of transnational migration. Some countries, such as China, however, have experienced extensive internal migration, particularly from rural to urban areas (Wu et al., 2013). Studies of migrants working in cities have shown that many migrants have difficulty integrating into their host cities because of their lower socio-economic status and educational level. Not only do they face difficulties in regard to the material aspects of their lives, but they also struggle to integrate socially into their host communities (Chen and Liu, 2016). In China, a key inhibitor to their integration is the traditional household registration system called hukou, which has its origins in ancient China and is still widely used today. A lack of hukou status in the host city effectively denies migrants access to a number of social spaces (Wu et al., 2013), social welfare schemes (Huang et al., 2014) and political rights (Chan, 2009). The hukou restrictions have also influenced the development of sense of place concepts and research in China. Historically, because of the hukou restrictions, scholars presumed that rural migrants were unable to permanently settle in cities, since they would all eventually return to the countryside; therefore, it made little sense to discuss whether they belonged to the host city or not (Fan, 2011). Instead, Chinese scholars focused on sense of place among domestic tourists rather than internal migrants (Sheng and Yang, 2015). One result is that in Chinese studies of sense of place, scholars talk more about place attachment than about belonging to a place (Qian et al., 2011). Another complication is the difficulty of measuring these concepts. While the measurement of place attachment has achieved relatively mature development in environmental psychology (Lewicka, 2011), the measurement of belonging to a place has not (Sheng and Yang, 2015). Indeed, it is not easy to distinguish between these two concepts very clearly, and their similarities may be greater than their differences, both in Chinese investigations (Sheng and Yang, 2015) and in the English-language literature (Pollini, 2005). Place

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attachment often represents the emotional component of one’s relationship with a place; in most circumstances, this emotion is positive and takes the form of affection or a sense of rootedness (Manzo, 2005). Behaviourally, attachment also includes a tendency to maintain physical proximity to places with which people develop emotional and affective bonding (Lewicka, 2011). In contrast, belonging often refers to a presumably stronger and deeper inner identity, and is therefore similar to another important concept of sense of place: place identity (Wright, 2015). Some scholars also see attachment and belonging as different elements in the hierarchical structure of sense of place, with belonging representing a deeper, higher-level bond than place attachment (Sheng and Yang, 2015). This deeper nature of place-related belonging seems to indicate its close relationship with the socio-economic context in which it is located. In other words, place-related belonging might change with institutional support, and this can have a functional meaning as one’s economic opportunities and success increase. Therefore, this chapter tries to understand place-related belonging as an embedded relationship between the individual and the local structure of place, a relationship born from institutional, social and economic conditions. Unlike the emotional nature of place attachment, this kind of embedded relationship is more difficult to change once it is formed, and the transformation can only be completed when the individual’s institutional and socio-economic conditions change in the structure as a whole.

9.1.2

Hukou Reforms and Rural–Urban Migrants’ Sense of Place Starting around 2010, the Chinese government initiated a series of hukou reforms intended to promote migrants’ social integration, in particular by opening up previously restricted social participation in the host neighbourhood and improving urban social welfare schemes for migrants (Huang et al., 2014). These improvements have granted migrants more institutional rights in their destination cities, such as greater access to public services, social insurance and schooling for their children. These changes may make migrants feel institutionally connected to the city, rather than excluded from the system. This inclusiveness may inspire a sense of belonging. Therefore, the hukou reforms have encouraged a rethinking of migrants’ sense of place, especially regarding the effects of institutional links. Within the existing Chinese literature, there is a lack of discussion of the institutional dimensions that underlie belongingness, due to the earlier institutional constraints; instead, studies have generally emphasised the influence of social factors on migrants’ sense of place. More specifically, past research indicated that migrants who remained tightly connected to their home town’s social networks or their places of origin showed little intentional belongingness to their destination cities (Cao et al., 2015), whereas those who actively reconstructed their social networks in the destination cities showed a strong belongingness (Chen and Liu, 2016). This was because, in the absence of institutional guarantees, migrants had to rely on social capital to provide social support, such as when renting a house, taking out a loan, sending a child to school and so on (Cao et al., 2015). When this informal social support was sufficiently

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strong, migrants could develop a sense of belonging. However, with the deepening of the hukou reforms, migrants may have been able to gain more formal social support through institutional participation. Therefore, it is necessary to consider migrants’ sense of place from a broader perspective than just social networks. In addition, emphasising spatial proximity to place, earlier studies commonly regarded migration as a de-territorialising process that was necessarily associated with a decrease in bonding to a place (Tuan, 1977). However, scholars have recently noted that place should also be seen in a broader context that involves migration as an important axis around which the meanings of place emerge. Migration per se does not lead to the dissolution of migrants’ bonding with places (Di Masso et al., 2019). The process of migration instead combines various types of place at various geographical scales under specific social, economic and cultural conditions. In acknowledging this, scholars have advocated a dialectical understanding of the interplay of sense and identity across places of migration. From this perspective, a history of migration can be viewed as a re-embodiment of the meanings of home (Qian et al., 2011). Similarly, recent English-language literature suggests that there is a likely positive effect of residential mobility that also should be considered (Di Masso et al., 2019). For example, individuals with high residential mobility may develop belongingness to different places, and belongingness to previous places of residence may coexist with belongingness to the current place of residence (Wright, 2015). Indeed, intensive urbanisation, migration and economic development might change the form of belongingness, such that active and self-conscious belongingness replaces traditional belongingness (Lewicka, 2011). These arguments imply that, compared with native belongingness, migration might provide an alternative strategy for constructing relationships or bonds to place. Accordingly, mobility is seen as an adaptable experience with respect to belongingness (Pollini, 2005), or even as a way that people mobilise their sense of place through migration (Cresswell, 2015). This revolutionary, positive perspective challenges the conventional view, which assumed a negative impact of mobility on belongingness with the kind of modern transition experienced by China. It shows a change of sense of place against the background of political and economic transformation. In this sense, we expect to highlight in an unprecedented way the inherent tensions and politics of place-related belonging. To advance this discussion, this chapter seeks to articulate the different determinants of place-related belonging and how they interface with the challenge of increasing internal migration and mobility. Our first hypothesis is as follows: H1: Belongingness is multidimensional, and social, demographic, financial and institutional dimensions are all significant in the explanation of migrants’ belongingness to the host place. The second purpose of this chapter is to investigate how different contextual variables influence migrants’ belongingness, since the recent hukou reforms vary across neighbourhoods and cities (Huang et al., 2014). In view of these contextual differences, our second hypothesis is as follows:

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Sense of Place in Urban China

Contextual perspective: receiving city/neighbourhood

Sociodemographic endowment: Individual, household characteristics

Economic incentives: Income Housing property Remittance

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Institutional participation: Hukou status Insurance scheme

Social links: Non-resident contacts Kin resident contacts Non-kin resident contacts

Figure 9.1 Framework of rural migrants’ belonging to the host place.

H2: The provision of public services1 has a positive effect on rural migrants’ belongingness to the place of destination, which results in a significant spatial difference in migrants’ belonging among different cities and communities. Bearing these hypotheses in mind, the following sections address how migrants’ belonging to the place of destination is affected by different dimensions, and the effects of neighbourhood- and city-level characteristics on migrants’ belongingness (Figure 9.1). At the micro level, immigrants’ sense of belonging may be affected by four dimensions: socio-demographic endowment, economic incentives, institutional participation and social links. In addition, the contextual nature of the city and community also influences the individual’s sense of belonging.

9.2

Data and Methodology

9.2.1

Survey and Data Set The empirical data were collected from China’s National Migrant Population Dynamic Monitoring Survey (MDMS). This survey was conducted by the China Population and Development Research Centre and commissioned by the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China in 2013. The survey contained questions relevant to migrants’ demography, socio-economic status, migration experiences, social integration and belongingness in Chinese cities. The survey’s data subset contains approximately 15,000 migrant respondents living in eight cities (Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi, Quanzhou, Changsha, Wuhan, Xi’an and Xianyang). These cities were chosen purposely because of their high numbers of migrants. In the survey, migrants were defined as those who were aged between 15 and 59 in May 2013, had moved 1

The content of public services can be divided into four summary categories: (1) assistance services for the elderly, disabled, orphans, etc.; (2) information services for community residents; (3) industrial support services for small community enterprises; and (4) re-employment and social security services for laid-off workers.

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across county boundaries (based on their hukou status), and had resided in their place of relocation for more than one month (Huang et al., 2019). The final data set used for our analysis contained a total of 12,891 migrants living in about 750 neighbourhoods in eight cities.

9.2.2

Variables and Measurement For the empirical analysis, questionnaires were distributed to measure the extent to which migrants had developed a sense of belonging (see Table 9.1). The design of the subitems was partly justified by existing research on sense of place (Lewicka, 2011; Scannell and Gifford, 2010). For instance, the MDMS asked about emotional belongingness, social bonding and place identity (Huang et al., 2019). For each item, a four-point Likert scale ranging from one (‘strongly disagree’) to four (‘strongly agree’) was used (see Table 9.1). The standardised value of Cronbach’s alpha was 0.873. We used principal component analysis to extract a principal component for these six items, calculating the belongingness index with the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin value of 0.856. To measure their institutional participation in their places of origin and destination cities, we included migrants’ hukou status and their participation in urban or in rural insurance schemes, since previous studies employed these indicators to reflect migrants’ institutional participation in the place of destination (Huang et al., 2014). Economic incentives might influence people’s belongingness, since many migrants move to their destination cities for higher incomes. Therefore, the better the economic status of immigrants at their destination, the stronger their sense of belonging is likely to be (Cao et al., 2015). We used several variables as proxies for migrants’ connection to their places of destination and origin, beyond income. The first variable related to the total amount of remittance sent home over the previous year. The more money a migrant remits home, the stronger his/her bond with the place of origin or village. Migrants may remit in preparation for their lives after returning to the home village later. We thus expected a negative relationship between remittances home and links to the place of destination. The last two variables were linked to migrants’ homeownership and landholding in the rural community. Specifically, respondents were asked to report the size of their farmland and self-owned houses in their place of origin (Hao and Tang, 2015). In addition, we categorised social contacts to establish social links. Respondents were asked: ‘Outside working hours, whom do you interact with frequently in the host city?’ To investigate their supportive social contacts, respondents were asked: ‘When you face difficulties, from whom do you normally seek help?’ We grouped these choices into three categories: contacts with non-residents (relatives, countryfolk and other friends who had left their homes for jobs), contacts with kin residents (relatives who already had a local hukou) and contacts with non-kin residents (other people who had a local hukou, including colleagues, classmates, friends, government officers, landlords, and staff in residents’ committees/villagers’ committees/property management companies) (Yue et al., 2013).

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Table 9.1 Descriptive statistics of response variables

Demographic controls Gender Education level

Place of origin

Arrangement for children

Arrangement for elderly parent(s)

Arrangement for spouse

Interactive social ties Interact with relatives, countryfolk and other friends who have left their homes for jobs Interact with relatives who already have local hukou Interact with colleagues, classmates and friends who have local hukou Interact with government officers or staff in residents’ committee/villagers’ committee/property management company Financial and institutional links Have medical insurance in home town Have pension insurance in home town Have medical insurance at destination Have pension insurance at destination

Categories

Frequency

Percentage

Male Female Lower level Medium level Higher level From another province From another prefecture within same province From another county within same province/ prefecture Migrated along with children Children remain in home town/no children Migrated along with parent(s) Elderly parents remain in home town/another place Migrated along with spouse Spouse remains in home town No spouse

6,692 6,199 8,945 3,124 766 5,903 5,796

52 48 70 24 6 46 45

1,195

9

7,477

58

5,414

42

88

1

12,103

99

9,402

73

791

6

2,614

21

Yes No

10,947 1,948

85 15

Yes No Yes No Yes No

2,231 10,660 2,268 10,623 477 12,414

18 82 17 83 4 96

Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No

9,527 3,364 3,404 9,487 2,800 10,091 2,527 10,364

74 26 26 74 22 78 20 80

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Table 9.1 (cont.)

Neighbourhood-level attributes Provision of community services Occurrence of volunteering and charitable activities Presence of community volunteers

Categories

Frequency

Percentage

Yes No Yes No Yes No

11,475 1,416 12,102 789 10,600 2,291

89 11 94 6 82 18

Continuous variables Belongingness to place of destination (1–4 Likert scale) I want to live next door to local residents (place attachment) I want to be friends with local residents (social bonding) I want to be part of the community (place identity) I have the sense of belonging to the destination city (sense of belonging) I want myself or other family members to marry local residents (social bonding) I want local residents to accept me as part of the community (place dependence) Age of respondent Duration of stay in destination city Remittance home Size of rural farmland Monthly household income in destination city Yearly household income in home town Total observations

Mean value 20.49 out of 24 (6 items) 3.54 3.55 3.50 3.31 3.29 3.30 33 4.50 years 8,209 RMB 3,056 m2 5,870 RMB 15,374 RMB 12,891

Moving on to the contextual predictors, three neighbourhood-level variables were included in the regressions to explore the provision of neighbourhood public services: whether the respondents had access to any community service; whether there was any voluntary or charitable activity for migrants; and whether there were any community volunteers in the neighbourhood (Chen and Liu, 2016). With respect to city-level characteristics, we examined two factors: the first was the urban area size of the city, since belongingness is also related to size of place; the second was gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, which represents the economic development status of the destination (Huang et al., 2019). To establish a more holistic perception of belongingness, we controlled for a series of respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics (e.g. age, gender, education level). We also considered whether the migrants had brought their family members (e.g. children, parents, spouse) to the destination. Finally, we employed a variance inflation factor (VIF) to quantify the severity of multicollinearity. When all the VIF values for independent variables are below 3, this suggests that no severe multicollinearity exists among independent variables.

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Results Table 9.2 presents the estimates of regression coefficients for the multilevel linear regression on migrants’ sense of belonging. We added socio-demographic variables, institutional participation and economic incentives, social links and contextual variables to a null model, and then generated a model focused on each of these dimensions (designated as Models 1, 2 and 3).

Table 9.2 Estimation results of belongingness index Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

Independent variables

Coefficients

t-value

Coefficients t-value

Coefficients t-value

Socio-demographics Age ≤45 Age ≤60 Female Higher education Middle education Length of stay in host city

0.075* 0.099 0.013 0.402*** 0.113* 0.020***

(1.82) (1.54) (0.38) (5.37) (2.75) (5.13)

0.742* 0.108 0.213 0.259*** 0.580 0.020***

(1.75) (1.60) (0.63) (3.42) (1.41) (5.10)

0.059* 0.006 0.003 0.249*** 0.078** 0.017***

(1.72) (0.12) (0.27) (3.95) (2.25) (4.65)

0.086** −0.845* −0.857

(1.99) (−1.88) (−0.42)

0.089* −0.063 −0.08

(1.95) (−1.38) (−0.40)

0.043 −0.082** −0.057

(1.18) (−2.18) (−0.36)

−0.034

(−0.88)

−0.052

(−0.01)

−0.003

(−0.08)

0.008 −0.008

(0.15) (0.92)

0.016 −0.009

(−1.36) (−0.01)

−0.024 −0.059

(−0.46) (−0.83)

0.368*** −0.165

(9.98) (−0.41)

−0.891**

(−2.31)

0.368***

(1.48)

0.092***

(5.13)

−0.016*** 0.011** 0.241*** −0.110 0.111**

(−3.33) (2.24) (3.25) (−1.52) (3.13)

Family arrangement Children migrated to city Children remain at home Elderly parents migrated to city Elderly parents remain at home Partner migrated to city Partner remains at home Institutional dimensions Has hukou in host city Has medical insurance in home town Has pension insurance in home town Has medical insurance in host Has pension insurance in host Financial dimensions Log remittance home Log remittance from family Log size of rural housing Log size of rural farmland Log monthly household income in host

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Table 9.2 (cont.) Model 1 Independent variables

Coefficients

t-value

Log yearly household income in home town

−0.228***

(−5.65)

Social dimensions Interaction with local residents Help from local residents Interaction with government officers Help from government officers Interaction with relatives that have local hukou Help from relatives that have local hukou Interaction with migrant relatives and countryfolk Help from migrant relatives and countryfolk

Model 2 Coefficients t-value

0.138* 0.210*** 0.550***

(2.63) (4.42) (6.06)

0.160*** 0.214***

(4.09) (3.33)

−0.103

(−1.60)

0.024

(0.38)

−0.172**

(−2.86)

Neighbourhood-level characteristics Provision of community services Occurrence of volunteering and charitable activities Presence of community volunteers Community population City-level dummy variables City population City GDP per capita Constant σb2 −2 loglikelihood Observations

−1.284 0.011 52,650.662 12,891

−4.23

−1.093 0.011 52,470.394 12,891

(−3.60)

Model 3 Coefficients t-value

0.480**

（3.06）

−0.026

(−0.13)

0.193

(1.44)

−0.119*

（−1.78）

−0.144** 0.042 −2.084 0.009 47,467.084 12,891

(−2.28) (0.17) (−0.76)

Notes: t-statistics in parentheses. * p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.

9.3.1

Social Determinants of Place-Related Belongingness With respect to social ties in the host city, social support from other migrants in the city is less likely to increase belongingness to the host city. Specifically, help from local social contacts is negatively correlated with migrants’ sense of belonging. This finding is consistent with the argument that a reliance on intragroup social contacts inhibits people’s openness to new social contacts, thereby preventing migrants from being socially integrated into the host society (Yue et al., 2013). One possible explanation is

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that migrants are unable to build social networks in the host city due to continued social segregation, and they have to turn to social support from fellow migrants. However, the social support from migrants is relatively limited, because other immigrants have limited social resources – there is a limit to what they can do to help each other. Notably, if migrants have contact with residents with a local hukou, the results are different. Because local people with a registered permanent residence have higher social and economic status compared with migrants without hukou, they have relatively rich social resources and can provide more social support. Having contact with and receiving social support from local residents positively predicts migrants’ sense of belonging to the host city. These forms of social ties may provide migrants with more useful resources and practical support, facilitating their living in the host city (Chen and Liu, 2016). Similarly, the duration of residence in the host city is also a positive predictor of belongingness, which is consistent with existing research (Huang et al., 2019). Maintaining emotional connections with family members shows little correlation with migrants’ belongingness. Moreover, with regard to family arrangements, it is unsurprising that the absence of migrants’ children from the host city (i.e. because they remain in the place of origin) is negatively correlated with migrants’ belongingness to the host city.

9.3.2

Financial Determinants of Place-Related Belongingness With regard to the effect of economic incentives, monthly income in the new location is a positive indicator of belongingness. This result suggests that migrants with higher economic status (who are more successful, in a sense) have a greater sense of belonging to the host city, indicating that economic success may promote the building of connections to the new place. This is consistent with existing research that has found that rural migrants with higher socio-economic status are more likely to enjoy their lives in the host place (Yue et al., 2013). Additionally, economic support from the family appears to improve migrants’ belongingness: remittances received from the place of origin and ownership of housing in the place of origin are positive predictors of belongingness. By contrast, migrants have a weaker sense of belonging to their city of destination if they need to send money back to their home town. It is easy to understand that sending remittances means they are supporting and caring for family members back home (Tao et al., 2015), reflecting a stronger sense of belonging to the home rather than the destination.

9.3.3

Institutional Determinants of Place-Related Belongingness Compared with migrants without a hukou in the host city, migrants who have obtained hukou status are more likely to feel stronger belongingness to the host city. Migrants who have received formal registration in the residential system are able to access public services (Huang et al., 2014). Logically, these institutional benefits promote a sense of belonging to the host city. Likewise, participation in social insurance

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schemes (pension and medical insurance2) in the host city is significantly related to migrants’ belongingness (Model 1 in Table 9.2). By contrast, if migrants choose to participate in pension and medical insurance schemes in their home town, their belongingness to the host city is less.

9.3.4

Contextual Factors Impacting Place-Related Belongingness Our investigation also examined how contextual or city and neighbourhood characteristics influenced belongingness. A key finding is that the size of urban area of the host city is negatively related to migrants’ belongingness, presumably because it is easier to become familiar with and cultivate social connections in smaller cities (Huang et al., 2019). By contrast, the relationship between belongingness and the host city’s GDP per capita is not statistically significant, suggesting that belongingness is more about social and psychological bonding to the place than it is about the host city’s economic status. Among neighbourhood-level factors, which include various community, charitable and volunteer services, only the provision of public services has a significant and positive influence on migrants’ sense of belonging to their host city. By contrast, the provision of neighbourhood committee public activities is statistically insignificant, probably because the content of these activities does not appeal to migrants. For example, the neighbourhood committee usually organises activities such as education on birth control. Unlike public services, these activities, which do not include practical help, seem unattractive to migrants.

9.4

Concluding Remarks Our findings further the understanding of changes in migrants’ sense of belonging after the hukou reforms in China. First, the multidimensional framework of belonging provides an overall better explanation of sense of belonging: beyond social capital, institutional and financial support are most likely to help people to adapt to their new lives. The hukou reforms do help to a large extent. But it is important to note that different cities have adopted different hukou reforms, while different communities offer differentiated public services. Such policy differences are likely to lead to new spatial inequalities, which are clearly contrary to the purpose of the hukou reforms. Governments therefore need to think more about how to promote a sense of belonging among migrants through even deeper and more equitable reforms in this more globalised age. Second, belongingness need not be thought of as bonding to a single place (e.g. one’s home town). We should at least consider the possibility of a sense of belonging to both one’s home town and one’s new (host) community (Di Masso et al., 2019). We need to realise that a sense of belonging does not precede people’s life experiences. In 2

The social security system includes pension insurance, medical insurance, unemployment insurance, industrial injury insurance, maternity insurance and housing funds. Of these, pension and medical insurance are significant predictors of belongingness.

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this age of mobility, it is impossible to live in one place for long periods of time (i.e. to be born, grow up, leave home and settle down all in the same place). As a result, individuals may act as tourists, migrants and residents throughout their lives, with different people and different stages of life shuttling between these roles. The same is true of places, which may serve for recreation, temporary residence or settlement. People might have a natural attachment to/feeling for their home town. But after they leave home, they may gradually develop a sense of belonging to a new place, over time and through a variety of sensory experiences. Thus, sense of belonging is multi-centred in nature. To sum up, this study and its emphasis on place-related belonging enriches the meaning of sense of place, especially as it encourages a pluralistic concept. It attempts to understand place-related belonging as an embedded relationship between the individual and the local structure, a relationship that arises from the institutional, social and economic context. Unlike the affective nature of place attachment, this embedded relationship is more difficult to change once formed, and can only be completely transformed when the institutional and socio-economic attributes of the individual change throughout the structure. Thus, this place-related belonging has a passive element that often needs to be stimulated in the context of social system and economic change, as in the Chinese story.

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Huang, X., Zhao, B., Liu, Y. and Xue, D. (2019) ‘Belonging to a place: an analysis of the perceptions of rural-to-urban migrants in China’, Geographical Review. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/gere.12366 Lewicka, M. (2011) ‘Place attachment: how far have we come in the last 40 years?’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 207–230. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010 .10.001 Manzo, L. C. (2005) ‘For better or worse: exploring multiple dimensions of place meaning’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 67–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ J.JENVP.2005.01.002 Pollini, G. (2005) ‘Elements of a theory of place attachment and socio-territorial belonging’, International Review of Sociology, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 497–515. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080 /03906700500272483 Qian, J., Zhu, H. and Liu, Y. (2011) ‘Investigating urban migrants’ sense of place through a multi-scalar perspective’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 170–183. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2011.01.002 Scannell, L. and Gifford, R. (2010) ‘Defining place attachment: a tripartite organizing framework’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ J.JENVP.2009.09.006 Sheng, T. and Yang, Z. (2015) ‘Research progress and enlightenment on sense of place’, Human Geography, vol. 2398, pp. 4–11 [in Chinese]. Tao, L. Hui, E. C. M., Wong, F. K. W. and Chen, T. (2015) ‘Housing choices of migrant workers in China: beyond the hukou perspective’, Habitat International, vol. 49, pp. 474–483. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2015.06.018 Tuan, Y.-F. (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Wright, S. (2015) ‘More-than-human, emergent belongings: a weak theory approach’, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 391–411. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132514537132 Wu, F., Zhang, F. and Webster, C. (2013) ‘Informality and the development and demolition of urban villages in the Chinese peri-urban area’, Urban Studies, vol. 50, no. 10, pp. 1919–1934. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0042098012466600 Yue, Z., Li, S., Jin, X. and Feldman M. W. (2013) ‘The role of social networks in the integration of Chinese rural–urban migrants: a migrant–resident tie perspective’, Urban Studies, vol. 50, no. 9, pp. 1704–1723. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0042098012470394

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Part III

Renewable Energy Transitions The rapid decarbonisation of today’s energy systems is one of the key global challenges to mitigate climate change. Making these energy system transitions are fundamentally about places, and multiple senses of place act as catalysers for interpreting change related to novel energy infrastructures. They evoke divergent interpretations and contestation between senses of place, for example, when on-shore wind turbines or solar panels are perceived as a landscape element symbolising progress and innovation, while at the same time being sensed by other people as a disturbing and objectionable artefact introduced into the landscape. Placing new (energy) technologies that manifest as visible landscape elements can be framed as the struggle for a place–technology ‘fit’. In this part, the authors of the following chapters use examples from North America and the UK to illustrate the diverse meaning-making processes and contestations of senses of place in the context of renewable energy transitions. Place-related message framing can raise contestations between different senses of place. In Chapter 10, renewable energy development challenges existing place meanings in rural agricultural landscapes in New York, USA. The diversity of interpretations of proposed energy facilities involves developers and energy advocates strategically framing solar installations as ‘farms’, while people who resist these developments articulate a large-scale industrialisation of the landscape and the loss of landscape functions such as open space and amenity values. These opposing narratives of place help to understand better the dynamics and conflicts in local energy transitions and rural change. Senses of place also have implications for the deployment of wind, tide and wave energy projects, as Chapter 11 illustrates for an island context in the UK. Applying auto-photography as a visual method helps explore the heterogeneous, multiscaled and constructed nature of place. The concept of ‘place–technology fit’ is explored, implying that the social acceptance for renewable energy technologies is dependent on how they are locally interpreted. The traditional focus of sense of place research on an a-priori scale of place is challenged and senses of place are considered as more plural because places are understood as nested amid other scales. By revealing the multiple senses and scales of place, it provides a foundation for understanding the social acceptance of renewable energy projects. The social acceptance of low-carbon energy developments is further unpacked in Chapter 12 by using a life course perspective to pluralise sense of place. The dynamic development of different senses of place over the life course is conceptualised in the form of distinct ‘life–place trajectories’. The interrelated influence of interpersonal relations and wider socio-economic, cultural and political forces in the formation of senses of place

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and their evolution over time is emphasised. The life course approach is then applied to better understand the social acceptance of low-carbon energy technology developments. In essence, this section addresses the competing senses of place and heterogeneous perceptions of energy technologies coming into place. Over time, a place–technology fit may evolve, when these facilities become established as ubiquitous landscape elements. Still, the diverging perceptions of this fit will likely remain contested. It therefore appears relevant to acknowledge the nested character of the place–technology link. That is, the local implementation sites are embedded in other scales and may become reframed at these larger or smaller scales.

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10 Farming Landscapes, Energy Landscapes or Both? Using Social Representations Theory to Understand the Impact of Energy Transitions on Rural Senses of Place Richard C. Stedman and Roberta S. Nilson

10.1

Introduction Social-ecological transitions are fundamentally about places – how transitions affect places, and how place meanings and attachments act as lenses for interpreting change. Our chapter focuses on energy transitions. We suggest that most analyses of energy transitions are overly technical and macro in their focus, lacking a sense of the subjectivity of the social actors who experience – and ultimately create – these transitions. Our chapter explores large-scale solar development in New York state by engaging with sense of place theory, and in particular the utility of sense of place considered as a social representation as a tool for interrogating the subjectivity of energy transitions. We suggest, consistent with the themes of this book, that the social representations approach is particularly useful for considering the multiple senses of place as coherent assemblages that are held – and strategically invoked – around solar development and its relationship to agriculturally based meanings.

10.2

Literature Review The scholarly literature on sense of place is vast and proliferating. As we cannot review this literature adequately in a single chapter, we presume that readers of this volume have some working knowledge of core concepts and approaches. Our approach in this chapter rests on previous work of the lead author (for fundamental assumptions, see especially Stedman, 2016, 2002; for recent applications, see Masterson et al., 2019, 2017) in a way consistent with our analysis here. Tuan (1977) described sense of place as the meanings of and attachment to a setting, based on experience, held by an individual or group. We emphasise this definition in our chapter (see also Stedman, 2003) by emphasising both meanings and attachment as distinct but complementary elements of sense of place. Altman and Low (1992) emphasise that attachment represents the emotional element of sense of place, while Stedman (2008) argues that meanings, as symbols of what a place is, are descriptive

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and analytically separable from attachment. Attachment can accrue to the symbol itself; as such, different groups can have similar levels of attachment, but fundamentally different kinds of attachment if they are based on different kinds of meanings (Stedman, 2003). It therefore follows that any given site is composed of multiple meanings, and that these meanings often compete with each other (Stokowski, 2002), both reflecting and recreating power structures (Ingalls et al., 2019). Crucial to our analysis in this paper, we argue that place meanings and attachment are key subjectivities of transitions (for a more thorough engagement, see Stedman, 2016). Stedman (2016) argues that ‘social-ecological systems . . . are subjectively perceived and acted upon by the social actors that occupy these systems’, and that these interpretations form the basis of the trajectory of such transitions (p. 891). Place meanings and attachment act as key lenses through which changes are perceived, both in what the system is – its core identity (Voß and Bornemann, 2011) – and in how changes are perceived positively or negatively: how is this system, as a system of meanings, affected by key changes accompanying a transition? Such questions tend not to be at the forefront of analyses of system resilience (Davidson, 2010), as this ‘messy’ view of transitions does not fit particularly well within the rather orderly systems perspectives that characterise much of transitions work (e.g. Verbong and Loorbach, 2012). We focus this sense of place lens on energy transitions. Transitions to renewable energy represent a key multiscalar (local to global) challenge and opportunity. They are inextricably linked to responses to climate change, energy independence, foreign relations and – in the USA, at least – partisan politics. As such, they may be a ‘flashpoint’, concatenating multiple issues. Crucially, energy transitions are not simply about energy. Energy plays an omnipresent role in society, helping to define our social organisation, culture, infrastructure, associated technologies and domestic and international policy. Societies ‘locked into’ particular energy sources may find it difficult to transition, as these transitions pose deep and fundamental challenges due to the interdependencies described above. As such, energy transitions have the potential to transform social-ecological systems by rearranging governance systems, markets, social relations, landscapes and communities. In particular, and at the core of our interests, energy transitions are about place. They may transform places by threatening some meanings and enabling others; costs and benefits of transitions are viewed through the lenses of multiple (and often contested) place meanings. The politics of place matter: opposition and support are often framed in terms of place impacts. Despite this, most analyses of energy transitions focus on technical elements. Energy transition writings (e.g. see Petit, 2017; Smil, 2017; Brown et al., 2015) emphasise engineering-technical elements, markets and policy regimes that affect the trajectories of these transitions. With few exceptions (e.g. Bakke, 2016; Nye, 1999) these works do not engage with culture and society as drivers of these transitions. Analyses that do engage with social elements tend to focus on macro-scale policy and governance. In a review of 15 years of energy research, Sovacool (2014) confirms that the content of energy social science research has most frequently focused on energy markets, public policy mechanisms, climate change and pricing. Research that focuses on social actors has emphasised individual-level support or technology

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adoption through survey-based methods, or has explored factors that predict adoption or support of new technologies, rather than comprehensive frameworks integrating technology, people, place and process (Boudet, 2019). Such analyses often show that the public is unfamiliar with energy technologies, putting social science in the position of describing/resolving discrepancies between lay and expert views (Beckley, 2017). As alluded to the above, in this chapter we advocate energy transition analyses that emphasise the subjective interpretation of these transitions. These experiences are critical to understanding how people may respond behaviourally, and why. Our primary point is that energy transitions – like all transitions – are subjectively experienced, perceived, enacted and ultimately defined by social actors (Stedman, 2016). ‘Place’ fits at the centre of such analyses. Boudet (2019, p. 451) summarises the contextualising role of place, noting ‘not only are aspects of the proposed technology and the people involved important in shaping public perceptions of a new energy technology, so too are the characteristics of the place(s) within which it is proposed or deployed, such as historical experiences with similar technologies and industries or residence in a “green” neighbourhood’. Particularly relevant to our case, she continues: ‘Energy development . . . can become problematic if it is seen as . . . incompatible with the existing landscape, tourism and recreational opportunities.’ We use social representations theory (SRT) (Moscovici, 2000) to analyse the meanings of place and other phenomena that define energy transitions. SRT purports that human understanding and everyday thought is derived socially from conversations and collective actions. Human knowledge, composed of a network of concepts, images and beliefs, belongs to groups that collectively produce and reproduce our understanding of the world. Social representations are formed through two mechanisms: anchoring and objectification. Anchoring helps people understand the meaning of things that would otherwise remain alien and threatening. During anchoring, something new or foreign is mentally placed into a category that people already understand. Objectification is a more dynamic process in which a concept is reproduced in an image. With objectification, one no longer has to rely solely on language to understand a concept: understanding is materialised with a non-verbal equivalent (Moscovici, 2000). Discourse among groups can lead to new representations. In the processing of a new phenomenon, group members engage in discussion with one another and may gather information from other sources (e.g. media). Through this collective discourse, social ideas arise and change until a particular construction of reality is understood (Wagner and Hayes, 2005). Prior research using SRT has shown how public responses to energy projects are rooted in contested definitions of place and the perceived fit of new energies with place. For example, engaging SRT around public responses to wind farms (Wheeler, 2017; Wiersma, 2016; Devine-Wright, 2009) and high-voltage power lines (Bailey et al., 2016; Batel and Devine-Wright, 2015; Devine-Wright and Devine-Wright, 2009) has challenged NIMBY (‘not in my back yard’) explanations for opposition. Instead, this research frames local opposition as place-protective action that is more likely to occur when new developments threaten existing place-related identities and emotional attachments (Devine-Wright, 2009). As Batel and Devine-Wright (2015) assert, SRT

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illuminates alternative rationalities for the observed ‘social gap’ between broad support for renewable energy and local opposition. Wheeler’s (2017) work adds additional insight into public responses by including a temporal component, observing how new wind energy facilities can became familiar or even valued components of the place over time.

10.3

Our Case Study In this section, we describe how contested senses of place have become central to the discourse around siting large-scale solar facilities in upstate New York. With this exploratory fieldwork we sought to understand how individuals and local governments are making sense of the proposed proliferation of large-scale solar facilities. We engage with social representations of place to explore mechanisms we observed as communities engaged in the siting processes.

10.3.1

Research Setting and Methods New York state is pursuing ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals, with current renewable energy portfolio standards requiring that 70 per cent of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2030 (McKinley and Plumer, 2019). Large-scale solar facilities figure prominently in meeting these goals. As of 2018, the state had 1,718 MW of installed capacity, approximately half of which was in residential, smallscale installations. This capacity is expected to nearly triple over the next five years, mostly in the form of non-residential, large-scale projects. Currently, there is one operational 32 MW project on Long Island, but most facilities in the state range from 1 to 2 MW (SEIA, 2019). Yet the state’s grid operator maintains a queue of projects in the planning phase, which includes over 100 projects averaging over 80 MW each. Forty of those projects have started the state’s siting process at the time of this writing, indicating a great deal of potential for industry growth. These projects are almost exclusively proposed in rural regions distant from major population centres (NYISO, 2019). As projects initiate the review process, they hold public involvement events including open houses in host communities. We initially identified one project initiating public involvement at the time of our data collection, the Horseshoe Solar project. This proposed facility has a capacity of 180 MW, spanning 1,200 acres of land in western New York, approximately 20 miles south of the city of Rochester. Approximately 600,000 photovoltaic solar panels would provide electricity for 35,000–50,000 homes (Invenergy, 2019). We conducted key informant interviews (including representatives from the developers, town board and concerned citizens group) and participant observation of public meetings (four open houses, two town board meetings, one conference and one meeting of concerned citizens). Additionally, we conducted a content analysis of the public comments (n = 97) submitted to the New York State Department of Public Service in the first year of the siting process (October 2018 to October 2019).

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We sought to understand whether the kinds of responses we saw in depth for the Horseshoe project would be consistent across sites. Because projects and state siting policy are rapidly evolving, the trajectory of public responses remains unclear. Accordingly, we conducted exploratory fieldwork for two other proposed projects, attending town meetings and conducted 13 phone interviews with town supervisors in areas where other projects were proposed. We recruited from a list of supervisors for the towns with the first 29 projects in the state’s system. All interviews were audiorecorded and transcribed, and detailed field notes were written following each participant observation.

10.3.2

Findings Place meanings and attachment played a central role in the representations of largescale solar development. The Horseshoe project was characterised by opposing place meaning-based messages from the two dominant discourse groups, the project developers and the concerned citizens group. In public meetings and informational materials, each group represented the project based on whether it fit the community’s place meanings and attachment. The project developers promoted a social representation of the project anchored in agriculture to strategically help gain public support. They strongly emphasised the possibility of co-location activities (sheep grazing and honey production) around solar panels. At the open houses they provided lamb-based refreshments, samples of ‘solar honey’ and cupcakes decorated to look like sheep, and they used two live lambs as ‘greeters’ (Figure 10.1). Additionally, they advertised public field trips to visit an active sheep grazing operation at a small-scale solar facility nearby. They objectified this representation with images, such as a picture of a flock of sheep foregrounding solar panels on the project website. The energy company, in their explicit characterisation of the project as a ‘solar farm’, encouraged the public to understand the project as anchored to agricultural practice and place meanings.

(a)

(b)

Figure 10.1 Free gifts and food provided by the developers at the open house. (a) sheep cupcakes; (b) live lambs at the entrance. Figure credit: R. Nilson.

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Meanwhile, the oppositional group countered the developers’ message by insisting that the project represented an ‘industrial power plant, not a farm’. Their public message made explicit reference to this development as undercutting the ‘rural character’ and aesthetic that defined the meanings they associated with the location in the current state. The opposition group named themselves ‘Residents United to Save our Hometown’ (Figure 10.2). Their suggestion that rejecting the large-scale project would ‘save’ what they valued about their community indicated that they saw attachment to existing place qualities as a valid reason for rejecting the proposed project. Additionally, they emphasised that the project developers were an out-of-state energy conglomerate, an explicitly non-local entity. We observed a variety of reactions to the developers’ emphasis on sheep; many found it contrived and questioned its viability. Several described the sheep as an offensive marketing technique, stating that it seemed

Figure 10.2 A road sign of the opposition group in the town of Rush. Figure credit: R. Nilson.

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as if the developers were intentionally ‘trying to pull the wool over our eyes’ and ‘soften the deal’ by emphasising sheep. As we continued fieldwork throughout the public involvement phase, reactions of additional community members continued to shape representations. Many informal conversations between attendees at public meetings discussed whether the project would complement agriculture by diversifying landowner income. Landowners, many of whom had signed leases with solar developers, emphasised the current economic hardships faced in agriculture and framed the project as an economic opportunity in a struggling area. Other community members critiqued the debate over whether the solar facility was an ‘industrial’ land use, pointing out that existing agricultural practices on the land were also industrial. These arguments suggested that the opposition group did not actually care about agriculture. They responded by shifting their message somewhat, putting greater emphasis on the non-local, corporate nature of the developers, a concern that seemed to broadly resonate. The emphasis on project scale in initial reactions to the Horseshoe project supports the relevance of place-specific concerns – more than that of the solar technology itself. Individuals frequently noted that they were not opposed to solar panels or renewable energy in general; indeed, several said that they supported community-scale projects, or referenced having solar panels on their own homes. But they were concerned about projects of this size because of the trade-offs with other existing land uses and the concern about the cumulative landscape impacts of large projects, both aesthetically and ecologically. Inequality between places matters. Across multiple cases, we observed stronger opposition to large-scale solar projects in communities with less economic stress and closer proximity to urban areas. Struggling communities more dependent on natural resource industries and more isolated from cities were more eager to pursue the economic opportunities presented by large-scale solar development. In the Horseshoe case, the opposition group consisted mostly of Rush residents, who were on average wealthier and more educated, and had higher property values, than residents of the neighbouring town of Caledonia, which is farther from the city of Rochester and more dependent on agriculture. From interviews, we know that other communities with significant opposition also tend to be wealthier and closer to urban areas with other opportunities for increasing local revenues, such as tourism or residential development. Supervisors from these places described the development as an unwelcome intrusion of industrial development. Meanwhile, no significant opposition had formed around several projects in places with lower economic status, and their supervisors described how the solar development presented an economic opportunity: ‘What we are looking at is the future of our community. Are there going to be any major industrial places going up or anything like that? . . . I can’t foresee anything major like the solar people are proposing for a while, and it’s going to help everyone out in the long run.’ The eagerness of disadvantaged communities to embrace large-scale solar development as an economic lifeline may increase their disadvantage relative to wealthier jurisdictions. Economic benefits, which mainly consist of lease payments for landowners and payments in lieu of property taxes from the solar

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facilities, are negotiated with the project developers. With solar a novel industry in the area, little information and a lack of regulation of the level of economic incentives can put local actors at a disadvantage. As opposition grows and stalls projects in communities with more resources and other economic opportunities, developers may become more likely to target economically disadvantaged communities for future proposals. This raises distributive justice concerns that could reinforce existing intercommunity inequality. Accordingly, the politics of place play a crucial role in solar siting. In the USA, climate change – and thus renewable energy policy – is highly politicised. Furthermore, in New York an ‘upstate–downstate’ political divide mirrors the ‘rural–urban’ divide common across the nation. Upstate residents frequently reference how the state, and the governor in particular, call for renewable energy production in the upstate region to meet downstate’s green energy demands. As one supervisor put it, ‘You know this electricity is going somewhere else, whether it is going to New York City or where it’s going, I don’t know, but you know, why do we have to ruin our community to send electricity somewhere else?’ Based on this, one might expect climate change to figure prominently in the discourse around solar energy facilities. However, at the local level we did not find this to be the case, except in a somewhat unexpected way. In public comments and conversations, many individuals opposed to or uncertain about solar projects were quick to indicate they supported renewable energy and the state’s climate mitigation goals. The place-specific impacts of proposed large-scale solar facilities left them either questioning this development as an appropriate response to climate change or wondering whether the local sacrifice was justified in light of the absence of global coordinated effort around climate change. We suspect that upstate/downstate politics are especially relevant for perceptions of procedural injustice in the siting process. As the state has centralised the siting authority, upstate residents and representatives have expressed concern that downstate politicians and politics exert unfair influence over upstate interests. Even town supervisors that spoke favourably about solar development had concerns about the level of state influence over the siting process, with one of them noting that ‘in the long run I think what the state wants the state will get’, indicating that even if his town board was opposed to the project or sought design changes, he did not think it would matter. Most of our study participants spoke about downstate people and state agencies as the out-of-touch ‘them’ who attempted to exert undue influence over the local ‘us’. We expect that the pre-existing place-based politics will continue to have considerable impact on perceived justice as development progresses.

10.4

Discussion: Engaging with Central Themes Meshing sense of place theory and SRT in the context of large-scale renewable energy development helps us to embrace the key themes of this volume. Crucial to our work, key social representations cohere around local, place-based elements. We need to recognise place as more than just the context in which energy transitions occur, and

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engage with social representations about place: what are the key place meanings, how do they relate to place attachment, and how are they embedded in local/regional social structures? Pluralising ‘sense of place’ acknowledges that places are created in part within/among groups and by external forces in the physical world, thus necessitating engagement with multiple senses of place, variably constructed and interpreted. Further social representations of place are linked to other key meanings. Simply put, any potential changes to local environs will be interpreted and given meaning in the context of the meanings and attachment already attributed to those environs Key to shifting energy transition analyses, in the SRT perspective expertise with technology becomes less crucial. SRT challenges the ‘information deficit’ model so common in technical analyses of transitions – the implicit idea that people who lack extensive knowledge about energy technology have nothing substantive to say about energy transitions. In contrast, SRT emphasises that expertise derives from experience of all related phenomena, and the meaning attributed to these phenomena, making the unfamiliar familiar. These social representations then play a role in shaping how people behave, based not on what something is, but rather on what it is like. Community acceptance of large-scale solar development depends on whether the development is socially defined as more similar to a ‘solar farm’ or ‘big industry’, and whether people believe the chosen place is suited to hosting that type of facility. Another key element of senses of place is the systematic variability found within communities. Especially in heterogeneous landscapes, one cannot simply engage with dominant responses (i.e. how is ‘the community’ going to respond?) as if communities spoke with a single voice. In the case study, the ‘rural agricultural’ communities where many elements of the energy transition will occur are experienced differently by different people within these communities. Understanding whether people are attached to the aesthetic and peaceful qualities of the agricultural landscape, versus being dependent on the agricultural industry as an economic lifeline, is important for interpreting public responses to proposed changes to that place. In our work, we engage with this variability: we can and should seek to understand variation in these senses of place (Masterson et al., 2017; Stedman, 2016), what drives it, and by association how these variable senses of place are likely to be affected by perturbations such those associated with changes in the energy system. Closely related to senses of place (rather than a singular sense of place) as underpinning analyses of energy transitions is the notion that multiple senses of place act as assemblages, which allows multiple, simultaneous and/or consecutive sites of meaning and appreciates that a collection of senses of place might fit together into a larger meaningful whole. We see in our analysis that a coherent assemblage – around farming – is challenged by these energy developments, despite the best efforts of solar developers to frame their endeavour in such a way as to maintain key agricultural meanings. Finally, the need to recognise the fundamentally political nature of place converges nicely with our analysis. SRT sees views of energy, place and other phenomena as embedded in society, culture, institutions and so on, rather than being individually perceived. If we start with the premise that senses of place are fundamentally social, rather than a product of individual cognition, we can easily engage with the role of

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power interests invested in these senses of place – that is, state- or market-supported representations of meaning. The SRT approach gives us a fresh and powerful entry point into the idea that not all senses of place compete on an equal footing, and that social representations can become anchored in the state or market apparatus and become a mechanism for creating ‘preferred’ meanings. In the Horseshoe case, we directly observed the process of social representations forming through social discourse around the new phenomenon of large-scale solar development. This process started with the energy developers promoting one representation, but shifted over time as community members responded and created counternarratives. A-priori social representations, such as perceived power imbalances between upstate and downstate New York, also shaped people’s interpretations of the development. Upstate residents perceived place-based injustice in the siting process, reinforcing the political nature of place. This notion of upstate as a ‘dominated place’ infiltrated other understandings of place, and therefore perceptions of proposed solar energy facilities in that place. SRT offers a strong approach for thinking about the social structural experience of energy transitions – rather than being radically individualised, SRT emphasises the analysis of context/patterns of regularity behind phenomena, as well as causal drivers of these patterns.

10.5

Conclusion Our chapter has explored large-scale solar development – a critical aspect of New York state’s proposed transition to renewable energy – using a ‘social representations of place’ perspective. Such transitions ultimately engage with how changes affect places, and how place meanings and attachments act as lenses for interpreting them. These changes are both descriptive (how has the place changed?) and evaluative (do these changes enhance or detract from key meanings?). All of these elements are fundamentally social in their production and their invocation. Empirically, we find a plurality of place meanings centred on agriculture, and invoked politically around questions of whether large-scale solar installations are consistent with, support or undercut these agriculturally based meanings. Developers and energy advocates portray solar installations as ‘farms’, replete with images they believe support agricultural meanings; those who resist these developments emphasise the large-scale industrialisation of the landscape and the loss of services such as open space and amenity value. Beyond this particular case, we advocate an increasing presence of analyses that focus on the active interpretations of people that comprise these energy transitions, and movement away from transition analyses that are dominated by technical perspectives.

Acknowledgements This work is supported by funding from a joint research and extension programme funded by the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station (Hatch funds) and

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Cornell Cooperative Extension (Smith Lever funds) based in the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NIFA or the USDA. This project received Institutional Review Board approval from Cornell University, protocol number 1101001927.

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Masterson, V. A., Stedman, R. C., Enqvist, J., et al. (2017) ‘The contribution of sense of place to social-ecological systems research: a review and research agenda’, Ecology and Society, vol. 22, no. 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08872-220149 Masterson, V. A., Enqvist, J. P., Stedman, R. C. and Tengö, M. (2019) ‘Sense of place in social-ecological systems: from theory to empirics’, Sustainability Science, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 555–564. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00695-8 McKinley, J. and Plumer, B. (2019) ‘New York to approve one of the world’s most ambitious climate plans’, New York Times, 18 June [Online]. Available at www.nytimes.com/2019/06/ 18/nyregion/greenhouse-gases-ny.html (accessed 14 October 2020). Moscovici, S. (2000) Social Representations: Explorations in Social Psychology, Cambridge, Polity Press. Nye, D. E. (1999) Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies, Boston, MIT Press. NYISO (2019) ‘Interconnection process’ [Online]. Available at www.nyiso.com/interconnec tions (accessed 2 August 2019). Petit, V. (2017) The Energy Transition: An Overview of the True Challenge of the 21st Century, Cham, Springer International. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50292-2 SEIA (2019) ‘New York Solar’ [Online]. Available at www.seia.org/state-solar-policy/newyork-solar (accessed 2 August 2019). Smil, V. (2017) Energy Transitions: Global and National Perspectives, 2nd ed., Santa Barbara, Praeger. Sovacool, B. K. (2014) ‘What are we doing here? Analyzing fifteen years of energy scholarship and proposing a social science research agenda’, Energy Research and Social Science, vol. 1, pp. 1–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2014.02.003 Stedman, R. C. (2002) ‘Toward a social psychology of place: predicting behavior from place-based cognitions, attitude, and identity’, Environment and Behavior, vol. 34, no. 5, pp. 561–581. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0013916502034005001 Stedman, R. C. (2003) ‘Is it really just a social construction? The contribution of the physical environment to sense of place’, Society and Natural Resources, vol. 16, no. 8, pp. 671–685. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08941920309189 Stedman, R. C. (2008) ‘What do we mean by meanings “emergent themes”’, in Kruger, L. E., Hall, T. E. and Stiefel, M. C. (eds), Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management, Portland, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, pp. 61–81. Stedman, R. C. (2016) ‘Subjectivity and social-ecological systems: a rigidity trap (and sense of place as a way out)’, Sustainability Science, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 891–901. http://dx.doi.org/10 .1007/s11625-016-0388-y Stokowski, P. (2002) ‘Languages of place and discourses of power: constructing new senses of place’, Journal of Leisure Research, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 368–382. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 00222216.2002.11949977 Tuan, Y.-F. (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Verbong, G. and Loorbach, D. (2012) Governing the Energy Transition: Reality, Illusion or Necessity?, New York, Routledge. Voß, J. P. and Bornemann, B. (2011) ‘The politics of reflexive governance: challenges for designing adaptive management and transition management’, Ecology and Society, vol. 16, no. 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-04051-160209

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11 Auto-Photography, Senses of Place and Public Support for Marine Renewable Energy Patrick Devine-Wright and Bouke Wiersma

11.1

Introduction Many countries worldwide are considering the deployment of renewable energy technologies in marine locations to harvest wind, wave and tidal resources. Using these resources to generate electricity can increase energy security by displacing imported fossil fuels and mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2018). While the technical and economic challenges of such projects are increasingly well understood, social science contributions to date have lagged behind (Sovacool, 2014). In particular, social acceptance is an important topic of research, given strong public objections to largescale technology projects that have been said not only to transform but to spoil places associated with natural beauty and tranquillity (Batel et al., 2015; Haggett, 2008). In this chapter, we consider ways that senses of place have implications for the deployment of wind, tidal and wave energy projects. Central to this is the concept of ‘place–technology fit’ (McLachlan, 2009), which asserts that the acceptability of certain technologies is contingent upon the ways that they are interpreted symbolically as enhancing or transgressing pre-existing place meanings (Cresswell, 1996). Place meanings refer to the associations that people have with particular locations in the world, arising from direct perception, embodied action and socio-cultural meanings that are shared across communities or social groups. As such, place meanings are important constituent elements of senses of place: dynamic, plural and influenced by power relations. While such meanings are often overlooked by technology developers and policymakers (DevineWright, 2011; McLachlan, 2009), they can be crucial in leading to a sense of threat to the character of particular places, and by association to people and communities with strong affective bonds and identities rooted in those places (Devine-Wright, 2009). This chapter develops our understanding of the relationship between place and technology meanings, and its role in shaping the acceptance of offshore energy projects, in four ways. First, we capture place meanings using an in-depth, semistructured qualitative method. This contrasts with the marginal attention paid to place meanings in existing marine energy studies, the tendency to use standardised quantitative instruments (e.g. Bidwell, 2017; Gee, 2010), or simply duplicating the place meanings used in other contexts without scrutinising their local relevance (e.g.

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Carlisle et al., 2014). Second, we focus on the ways that less developed areas of coast and sea might be relevant for understanding acceptance of energy projects, in contrast to previous studies focused on coastal towns (e.g. Brownlee et al., 2015; DevineWright and Howes, 2010). Third, we take an open-ended approach to which scale of place is most relevant to a particular project, unlike previous studies that have tended to make a-priori decisions about scale – for example prioritising local over regional accounts (e.g. Soma and Haggett, 2015). Fourth, we combine verbal and visual methods to uncover place-based meanings, building on evidence that visual methods can enrich accounts of lived experience in a place (Stedman et al., 2014). We address these points by conducting an open-ended, place-based investigation of acceptance of marine renewable energy that recognises the plurality of senses of place by encompassing meanings, scales and experiences, using auto-photography. Auto-photography is a method that has rarely been used in the literature on social acceptance of energy technologies. In this technique, participants are given instructions (and cameras) to produce a particular set of photographs, which subsequently form the basis for in-depth discussions during follow-up interviews (Lombard, 2013). Visual methods such as auto-photography have been argued to have several advantages over more conventional methods. They give participants a means to reflect on aspects of their lives that may usually be taken for granted (Rose, 2007). They provide a more emotional way of engaging people with topics of research, contrasting with text-based methods such as questionnaires, which typically afford a more cognitive engagement with research topics (Rishbeth, 2014). Coupled with verbal methods (e.g. in-depth interviews), auto-photography has the potential to provide richer data than verbal or text-based methods alone (Rose, 2007). Moreover, auto-photography is an approach that can reverse the typical researcher–participant relationship by positioning the participant as the ‘expert’ (Lombard, 2013), casting the interview as an opportunity for two people to discuss the meaning of photographs together. Auto-photography allows participants a certain amount of time to reflect before and while carrying out a task, which may lead to more considered responses (Gauntlett and Holzwarth, 2006). Some studies have noted that participants very much enjoy taking part in auto-photography research (e.g. Stedman et al., 2004), which may help in reducing dropout rates and enhance research outcomes. Auto-photography can be well suited to the study of sense of place (Stedman et al., 2014). Indeed, multiple studies have used the method to understand place-related meanings and place attachments in diverse contexts (e.g. climate change adaptation (O’Neill and Graham, 2016)). These studies suggest that auto-photography can be a productive way to address senses of place, and in doing so address methodological shortcomings of existing research on the social acceptance of marine energy technologies. Auto-photography is well suited to exploring multiple senses of place simultaneously, to exploring place and technology meanings in detail, and to better understanding the (lack of) ‘fit’ between such places and the technologies that may be developed in them. For that reason, we describe here a study in which auto-photography was employed in an island context with the aim of gauging public views about potential future deployment of wind, tidal and wave energy technologies.

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11.2

Context The research was conducted in Guernsey, an island situated 115 km south of England and 50 km west of Normandy, France (States of Guernsey Government, 2019; see Figure 11.1). Guernsey has a total population of 62,000, with centres of population in the east and north and less populated areas to the west and south (States of Guernsey Government, 2019). The island is relatively small, with a total area of 65 km2. Electricity supply is managed by a state-owned electricity company via an undersea cable from France and a diesel-fuelled power station sited to the north-east of the island. Faults to the cable occur occasionally and require the diesel power station to meet total demand, which has raised public concerns over system expense, environmental impacts and security of supply (Targett, 2018). There were 28 participants in the study, comprising 10 females and 18 males with ages ranging from 18 to over 70, living across the island’s different parishes. Thirteen participants had been born on the island. The aim was to obtain a diverse sample of

Figure 11.1 Map of Guernsey, showing parish boundaries and proximity to Great Britain and France. Figure credit: States of Guernsey Government (2019).

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residents that reflected a variety of voices, including those with a strong interest in the marine environment (e.g. sailors or surfers). Each participant was asked to produce up to 10 photographs of ‘what you value about Guernsey’s coast and sea’, to allow participants the freedom to photograph and talk about any locally relevant object, concept, experience or social relation beyond the photography of physical places. Participants were given at least one week to create their set of photographs and were told that this could include both new and pre-existing ones. Each person chose the order in which to discuss the photos, and the interviews took place in a venue of their choice (e.g. their home or place of work). The interviews followed a semi-structured format. The first part explored participants’ connections to Guernsey through a series of general questions (e.g. ‘How would you describe Guernsey to me?’). Next, participants were encouraged to talk about their photographs in their own terms (‘Could you tell me about this photo?’). The interviews explored participants’ awareness of Guernsey’s current energy system (‘Thinking about the electricity you use every day, where do you think this electricity comes from?’) and offshore wind, tidal and wave energy. The researcher did not immediately introduce the terms ‘offshore wind’, ‘tidal energy’ or ‘wave energy’ into the discussions, but instead talked about the possibility of using devices for generating electricity that are in or near the sea in Guernsey (‘Have you heard of this at all?’). If any of these technologies were not mentioned, then the researcher introduced these concepts into the discussion. Finally, participants’ ideas of the suitability of different places around Guernsey for the development of offshore wind energy were discussed. The interviews on average lasted about one hour. Four participants did not take any photographs. Three of these indicated when being asked to participate that they never took photographs, suggesting they were more comfortable expressing themselves verbally. These participants were included to further diversify the variety of coastal experiences captured by the study. The one other participant did not take any photographs because everything he wanted to talk about was underwater, and no equipment was available to photograph such an environment; this participant decided to print several maps instead, to highlight the places he wanted to talk about. The other 24 participants produced a total of 200 photographs. All interviews were recorded, transcribed and uploaded into the qualitative analysis software NVivo, along with the 200 photographs. Verbal data from follow-up interviews and visual data from the photos were analysed together using thematic analysis (Joffe, 2011), in order to ensure the researcher’s interpretation of the data reflected participants’ narratives. All participants’ names have been pseudonymised.

11.3

Describing Senses of Place on the Island of Guernsey Guernsey and its coast were represented in typically positive ways by participants. In response to an opening question about how they would describe Guernsey, participants used terms such as ‘wonderful’, ‘lovely’, ‘nice place to live’ (Nicole, Geoff, Paul, Hank) or ‘paradise’ (Linda), while several participants stated that they ‘love Guernsey’

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(Julie, Michelle). The island was represented as very safe and ‘a good place to bring up children’ (Michelle, Walt, Mike). Attempts to define the essence of Guernsey were often made relationally, positioning Guernsey as unique and better than ‘other’ places such as Jersey (another of the Channel Islands) or parts of the UK or France. Nevertheless, participants also highlighted some negative aspects, including that Guernsey is crowded and has too many cars, has increasing wealth inequality and corrupt, ineffective governance, and is overly focused on the short term. Photographs were taken of many locations around the Guernsey coast, as well as offshore and on the nearby islands of Herm and Sark. Notably, there was a concentration of photographs on the south-east and (north-)west coasts, while fewer photos were taken in the north-east and the western half of the south coast. This absence became apparent later when participants discussed suitable locations for marine energy projects. Photos and accompanying discussions represented multiple dimensions of the ways in which places are meaningful to people, identified previously to include physical, social and personal or experiential aspects (see Manzo and Devine-Wright, 2014). The social dimension was present across many photographs in which places became meaningful by association with important shared experiences that were part of everyday life or family traditions (for an example, see Figure 11.2). Such experiences were used to describe a particular coastal place, as well as to frame the island as offering excellent access to coastal outdoor activities. This way of thinking about the island was apparent in many stories and photographs in which

Figure 11.2 The importance of sense of place for illustrating shared experiences and family traditions. Photo credit: interview participant, with consent.

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Figure 11.3 The importance of sunsets to convey Guernsey place identity and distinctiveness. Photo credit: Kelvin Tulie Photography.

participants constructed a narrative of Guernsey as a unique place in the world. Other photographs emphasised where significant personal experiences had occurred (see Manzo, 2005), such as childhood memories, meeting their partner or having their first experience of the sea. Almost all participants emphasised the physical aspects of Guernsey’s coast, describing it as beautiful, picturesque, scenic, rugged and unspoilt, descriptions previously found across other coastal settings (e.g. Devine-Wright and Howes, 2010). For example, Emily commented: This is Icart, overlooking Petit Port and Moulin Huet to St Martin’s. I just love this place, because it’s very scenic, really coastal. And I do a lot of kayaking and coasteering1 on the south coast. It’s got lots of caves and things like that, so it’s a really interesting place. A beautiful place to be.

Another way that participants emphasised the beauty of the island was to talk about its sunrises and sunsets, which were included in 21 photographs overall (10 sunrises and 11 sunsets), such as Figure 11.3. Sunrises and sunsets were also used to portray Guernsey as comparably beautiful with more famous and distant locations, such as the Caribbean or Thailand. Sunsets seen at specific places on the west coast of the island (Cobo Bay, Grandes Rocques, Pleinmont) were represented as an important part of island culture. In the words of one participant, such places are as iconic to a ‘Guern’ (a local term describing a person born on the island) as alpine mountains would be for Swiss people: Charles: I know at school . . . when you get the kids to draw you a landscape of Guernsey, or paint, or photograph, you always get sunsets. And then you think of the Hanois lighthouse, all the 1

Coasteering is a physical activity that involves movement along the intertidal zone of a rocky coastline, on foot or by swimming, without the aid of boats, surfboards or any other craft.

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way to Cobo, Vazon, all the beaches. And so, I think in the local psyche, I assume I believe that setting is probably the heart and soul for a Guernsey person . . . There’s a reason why a child would paint you a sunset, if you take a child from Switzerland, it would probably paint you a mountain, so to speak, that’s what they experience. But for a Guern, I’m coming to the realisation that, you know, that space where the sunset takes place is very sacred to them.

Another prominent representation of Guernsey’s coast and sea referred to the sense of escape that it offers, a value that is key to psychologically restorative experiences (see Kaplan, 1995). The coast was represented relationally, in contrast to the land, as offering a chance to ‘get away from the fact that there are more cars here per person than almost anywhere else in the world’ (Edward), providing an open, empty space that offers relaxation and tranquillity. As Jesse commented: [This photo illustrates] kind of like getting away. I imagine over here [on the land] everyone is kind of stuck over here, this is just kind of like freedom to me, I think. You know, there’s nothing here, there’s just emptiness, you can just do whatever you want [. . . This photo illustrates] being able to get away from everything else. On such a small island, to have all that open space to yourself.

In addition to natural beauty, a common way of talking about the island referenced its physical size – ‘we are only a small island’ (Emily). Not only was Guernsey portrayed as ‘crowded’, but its physical appearance and spatial layout, characterised by high stone walls and ribbon development along a few key routes, was said to add to a sense of claustrophobia from which the coast offered escape, echoing previous findings on how the sea is valued for its openness (Devine-Wright and Howes, 2010; Gee, 2010). A final theme in how participants represented Guernsey’s coast and sea focused on distinctions between different parts of the island. While some coastal areas were represented as places of natural beauty, others were represented as more developed and less beautiful. In particular, the St Sampson and Vale parishes contain the island’s only power station and landfill site, and were described by participants as ‘the industrial north’, a place that is ‘very built up’ (Marie), ‘industrial’ (Emily), ‘urbanised’ (Andy), ‘horrible’ (Emily), ‘bandit country’ (Dean), ‘not somewhere I’d want to live’ (Edward) and ‘ghastly’ (Edward). As such, both physical and social characteristics were invoked to create a notion of ‘the north’ as the least desirable place on the island, a symbolic ‘other’ (Batel et al., 2015).

11.4

Relating Senses of Place to Acceptance of Offshore Renewable Energy Participants considered possible future deployment of renewable energy projects (wind, tidal and wave energy) in the sea around the island. The discussions highlighted how technology options were assessed in relation to each other, as well as multiple senses of place: comparing the island with other locations elsewhere, treating the island as a whole, and comparing different specific places on the island. While offshore wind turbines were commonly represented as being ‘out of place’ due to their large size and visual impact, tidal energy was positively regarded as locally appropriate. It became clear that one of the

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reasons for this was that islanders have a particular relationship to the tides around the island, which are visibly apparent throughout the seasons of the year. Walt: To me on this island, having grown up on boats and surf and so, I’m just very aware of the tidal movement here. And four knot currents, or whatever it gets up to up and down the Russel [the strait between Guernsey and the other islands], I think a lot of Guernsey people would have been caught in that at some point on a boat, and again, it’s a power you can really appreciate. To be able to harness that I think would just be phenomenal.

This experiential knowledge complemented a broader sense of the tide as part of the uniqueness of the island, and participants stressed that ‘their’ tidal resource was globally significant (Julie: ‘We’ve got the biggest tidal range in the world, haven’t we?’). Tidal and wave energy was also less likely to be characterised as ‘out of place’ because these technologies were expected to be underwater and less visible, fitting in with existing objects already in the water (as previously found in Devine-Wright, 2011): Paul: Well, in my mind, most of the engineering going on, out of sight, underwater, and just relatively small towers sticking out above the water. So again I think they’re very acceptable, we’ve got plenty of those type of objects around us now in the sea anyway in terms of rocks, beacons, marking rocks and such like. So I would have thought that would be an extremely acceptable way of generating electricity.

For some, recognition of the small stature of the island economy and community – the notion of Guernsey as ‘a small place’ – was an important condition affecting their support for renewable energy. Energy projects would only be acceptable at a scale that was seen to fit the island: Rebecca: We’re a small island, I think there’s already a lot of demands on our space, and I think if – I don’t know, it would all depend on how much infrastructure was needed, and how much of an impact it would have on our island to create it here.

Guernsey’s size was also used to argue that it was too small a context to afford marine energy technologies, and that there were already too many demands on Guernsey’s limited space. By contrast, other participants argued that Guernsey was ‘the perfect place to do it’ because of its small size – explicitly contrasting Guernsey with other, bigger places: Tim: It wouldn’t take too much for it to be pretty much self-reliant on those kind of technologies, whereas in England and the EU and other international settings, it takes so much for people to meet, like, estimates and forecasts, everyone’s depressed – whereas Guernsey is small enough to do . . . I think it’s one of the perfect places to do it.

Similar arguments were made by others to highlight that their support was contingent on the proportion of local electricity demand a project would be able to meet: only if that proportion was considered significant would a project be viewed as acceptable. As Daniel remarked: ‘If we were getting seventy-five per cent or so of our electricity from there, I would swallow that, I’d say “there we are, we’ve got to have it done”. But for five per cent I can’t see the point.’

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Such conditional support has already been found in the literature, notably in a US study of offshore wind, where acceptance was higher if participants believed a specific project to be the first of many projects going ahead in the future as part of a broader shift away from fossil fuels (Firestone and Kempton, 2007). These findings suggest that renewable energy projects that increase island self-sufficiency, autonomy and resilience will be more socially acceptable.

11.5

Discussion In this chapter, we aimed to capture multiple senses of place held by islanders in order to better understand the acceptability of marine renewable energy. Local residents’ senses of place can be used to inform the ways that certain technologies are seen to ‘fit’ (or not) in a given context, and can be a productive way to identify locally embedded and acceptable solutions. Given the necessity to transform energy systems of provision to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2018), the importance of drawing on preexisting senses of place to understand potential responses to different technology options provides a valuable lesson to energy companies and policymakers. In particular, findings suggest the importance of maintaining or enhancing a sense of local uniqueness as a consideration in the design of energy projects (Devine-Wright, 2009; Twigger-Ross and Uzzell, 1996). By weaving narratives of technology deployment into important elements of senses of place – in this case, beliefs about Guernsey’s unique coastal character as well as its acknowledged vulnerabilities – it might be more feasible to devise a process of energy system transformation that maintains or even enhances sense of place, avoiding the sense of threat and imposition already identified in the literature (e.g. Wolsink, 2007). However, there may be unintended distributional consequences of this approach that illustrate the necessity for equitable governance of changing senses of place. Antipathy towards the siting of energy technologies in places widely seen as pristine or natural (e.g. western parts of the island associated with sunsets) may lead to further and more unequal burdens being placed upon communities already exposed to infrastructures of provision (e.g. northern parts of the island, where the power station and landfill are situated). To ensure that senses of place are maintained or enhanced for all, it is important that processes of decision-making give voice to all who are impacted by systemic change. One possibility is to address distributional challenges by offering compensation, if appropriate, to those who directly experience the costs associated with changes to energy systems (e.g. visual impacts, air pollution), to ensure no place or community is ‘left behind’. Auto-photography proved a useful method to reveal multiple senses of place, including affective, emotional and discursive aspects. Many photographs also captured practices associated with specific places, which subsequently led to in-depth discussions around how different places would ‘fit’ particular forms of energy development (or not). Moreover, some of the overarching narratives that were found would have

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been unlikely to be captured by standardised verbal instruments used in previous studies of energy technology acceptance (e.g. Devine-Wright, 2011; Gee, 2010). However, a few caveats can also be made about the use of auto-photography to uncover senses of place. Not all participants wished to take photographs, and their interviews were typically shorter and more superficial when talking about Guernsey. Some aspects of senses of place cannot be easily captured using photography. For example, one participant was unable to access the coast due to a disability, which highlights issues of inclusiveness. It is revealing that themes of island independence and self-sufficiency, which were clearly important to participants, did not come up specifically in any of the 200 photographs. Finally, most auto-photography studies involve photographs taken specifically for the research project at that point in time. However, use of pre-existing photos can offer the opportunity to examine the ways in which senses of place develop and change over time (much like narrative interviews (see Bailey et al., 2016)).

11.6

Conclusion In conclusion, this study reveals the inherent plurality in senses of place arising from the multiple, unique experiences of the island participants. It captured many instances in which senses of place were invoked to construct arguments around a (lack of) fit between place and technology. The use of auto-photography helped to reveal the diversity of ways in which the land and the sea were meaningful to local residents – as a place for social relations, a place for fun and sport, a place for escape and a place for aesthetic beauty. By revealing these multiple senses and scales of place, it provides a rich foundation for understanding the acceptability of local energy projects. This further supports the arguments of McLachlan (2009) of the value in uncovering symbolic meanings related to place and technology as an important and often overlooked element of processes of energy transition.

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Carlisle, J. E., Kane, S. L., Solan, D. and Joe, J. C. (2014) ‘Support for solar energy: examining sense of place and utility-scale development in California’, Energy Research and Social Science, vol. 3, pp. 124–130. Cresswell, T. (1996) In Place, Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Devine-Wright, P. (2009) ‘Rethinking Nimbyism: the role of place attachment and place identity in explaining place protective action’, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 426–441. Devine-Wright, P. (2011) ‘From backyards to places: public engagement and the emplacement of renewable energy technologies’, in Devine-Wright, P. (ed.), Public Engagement with Renewable Energy: From NIMBY to Participation, London, Earthscan, pp. 57–70. Devine-Wright, P. and Howes, Y. (2010) ‘Disruption to place attachment and the protection of restorative environments: a wind energy case study’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 30, 271–280. Firestone, J. and Kempton, W. (2007) ‘Public opinion about large offshore wind power: underlying factors’, Energy Policy, vol. 35, pp. 1584–1598. Gauntlett, D. and Holzwarth, P. (2006) ‘Creative and visual methods for exploring identities’, Visual Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 82–91. Gee, K. (2010) ‘Offshore wind power development as affected by seascape values on the German North Sea coast’, Land Use Policy, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 185–194. Haggett, C. (2008) ‘Over the sea and far away? A consideration of the planning, politics and public perception of offshore wind farms’, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 289–306. IPCC (2018) ‘Global warming of 1.5 °c’. Available at www.ipcc.ch/sr15 (accessed 16 October 2020). Joffe, H. (2011) ‘Thematic analysis’, in Harper, D. and Thompson, A. R. (eds), Qualitative Research Methods in Mental Health and Psychotherapy: A Guide for Students and Practitioners, Chichester, Wiley, pp. 209–223. Kaplan, S. (1995) ‘The restorative benefits of nature: toward an integrative framework’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 169–182. Lombard, M. (2013) ‘Using auto-photography to understand place: reflections from research in urban informal settlements in Mexico’, Area, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 23–32. Manzo, L. C. (2005) ‘For better or worse: exploring multiple dimensions of place meaning’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 67–86. Manzo, L. C. and Devine-Wright, P. (eds) (2014) Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, London, Routledge. McLachlan, C. (2009) ‘“You don’t do a chemistry experiment in your best china”: symbolic interpretations of place and technology in a wave energy case’, Energy Policy, vol. 37, pp. 5342–5350. O’Neill, S. and Graham, S. (2016) ‘(En)visioning place-based adaptation to sea-level rise’, Geo: Geography and Environment. https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.28 Rishbeth, C. (2014) ‘Articulating transnational attachments through on-site narratives’, in Manzo, L. and Devine-Wright, P. (eds), Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, London, Routledge, pp. 100–111. Rose, G. (2007) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, 2nd ed., London, Sage.

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Soma, K. and Haggett, C. (2015) ‘Enhancing social acceptance in marine governance in Europe’, Ocean and Coastal Management, vol. 117, pp. 61–69. Sovacool, B. (2014) ‘What are we doing here? Analyzing fifteen years of energy scholarship and proposing a social science research agenda’, Energy Research and Social Science, vol. 1, pp. 1–29. States of Guernsey Government (2019) Guernsey Facts and Figures 2019, St Peter Port, States of Guernsey [Online]. Available at www.gov.gg/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=121362andp=0 (accessed 1 June 2020). Stedman, R., Beckley, T., Wallace, S. and Ambard, M. (2004) ‘A picture and 1000 words: using resident-employed photography to understand attachment to high amenity places’, Journal of Leisure Research, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 580–606. Stedman, R., Amsden, B. L., Beckley, T. M. and Tidball, K. G. (2014) ‘Photo-based methods for understanding place meanings as foundations of attachment’, in Manzo, L. and DevineWright, P. (eds), Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, London, Routledge, pp. 112–124. Targett, T. (2018) ‘Repairs to power cable fault by peak of winter’, Guernsey Press, 17 October [Online]. Available at https://guernseypress.com/news/2018/10/17/repairs-to-power-cablefault-by-peak-of-winter/ (accessed 4 March 2019). Twigger-Ross, C. L. and Uzzell, D. (1996). ‘Place and identity processes’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol.16, pp. 205–220. Wolsink, M. (2007) ‘Planning of renewables schemes: deliberative and fair decision-making on landscape issues instead of reproachful accusations of non-cooperation’, Energy Policy, vol. 35, pp. 2692–2704.

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12 A Life Course Approach to the Pluralisation of Sense of Place Understanding the Social Acceptance of Low-Carbon Energy Developments Etienne Bailey

12.1

Static to Dynamic Conceptualisations of Sense of Place In view of the threat of human-induced climate change, the development of renewable energy technologies and associated electricity networks (including smart grids) has sought to respond to international targets to cut global greenhouse gas emissions. This chapter outlines academic research that has applied a place-based lens to understanding local acceptance of low-carbon energy technologies. In recent years, scholarship in environmental psychology has drawn on a qualitative narrative methodology in order to better understand the temporally dynamic development of different senses of place over the life course, in the form of distinct ‘life-place trajectories’ (Bailey et al., 2016b). This research problematises a monistic and static conceptualisation of sense of place, pointing to the development of a plurality of senses of place that evolve temporally across the entire life course, and also to a need to conceptually expand our notions of sense of place by recognising the interrelated role of ‘linked lives’ – the influence of interpersonal relations and wider socio-economic, cultural and political forces in the formation of different senses of place and residential mobility decisions over time. Furthermore, this chapter outlines how this life course approach to researching senses of place has been applied to better understand local responses and the social acceptance of low-carbon energy technology developments. Scholarship on sense of place developed among humanities scholars (Tuan, 1977; Relph, 1976) and human geographers (Rose, 1995; Agnew, 1987), with the concept involving ‘a personal orientation toward place, in which one’s understandings of place and one’s feelings about place become fused in the context of environmental meaning’ (Hummon, 1992, p. 262). From its phenomenological roots, sense of place designates a holistic relationship to place infused with both feelings and socio-cultural meanings (Lalli, 1992). Research on sense of place in environmental psychology has tended to adopt a more positivist approach, examining discrete subconcepts including place attachment, place identity, place dependence and so on. This chapter adopts a superordinate conceptual framework for understanding sense of place, comprising the subdimensions of place attachment (including formative place (non-)attachment experiences and varieties of people–place relations) and place identity (through the

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concept of settlement identity) (Hernandez et al., 2014; Jorgensen and Stedman, 2006, 2001), and incorporating the micro (interpersonal relations and networks with friends and family) and macro (socio-cultural, economic and political structural conditions and forces) levels of the linked lives concept from the human geography literature (Coulter et al., 2015). Research has flourished across a number of coterminous disciplines, with two main approaches emerging from scholarship on sense of place and its aforementioned subdimensions. A structural approach, arguably the more ubiquitous and widespread of the two, has tended to unearth the qualities and antecedents of place attachment and place identity, utilising temporally static cross-sectional research designs that capture these sense of place subdimensions at a singular point in time. With relative scarcity, a dynamic or process-oriented approach has sought to better understand the development of different senses of place (or life-place trajectories) and the processes underlying transitions of attachment and detachment over time and the life course (Bailey et al., 2016b; Devine-Wright, 2014; Lewicka, 2011; Giuliani, 2003). Research adopting this temporally dynamic approach has gone some way in challenging monistic and static understandings of sense of place and its related subdimensions of place attachment and identity by highlighting the development of a plurality of senses of place that develop over the life course of individuals. A number of examples can be cited for the structural approach. Central to these are Scannell and Gifford’s (2010) conceptual model of place attachment, comprising person, process and place dimensions and the development of a typology of varieties of people–place relations, encompassing different forms of attachment and nonattachment to the residence place (Bailey et al., 2016a, 2016b; Lewicka, 2013, 2011; Hummon, 1992). Of the types of place attachment, the ‘traditional’ variety refers to an unselfconscious taken-for-granted bond, the ‘active’ variety to a reflective and selfconscious bond, and the hybrid ‘traditional/active’ variety to a blend of these two. Varieties of non-attachment include the ‘place-alienated’, referring to a dislike of one’s residence place; ‘place relativity’, an ambivalent and conditionally accepting attitude; and ‘placelessness’, an absence of emotional association with place. In addition, place identity has been conceived as a substructure of one’s self-identity (Proshansky, 1978), as aligned with particular settlement types in Feldman’s (1990) concept of settlement identity (e.g. identifying as a ‘city’ person), and as co-created within groups in the form of ‘place-related symbolic meanings’ (Devine-Wright, 2009). In the past 30 years, a small yet insightful body of literature has foregrounded sense of place dynamics, examining place attachment formation at different life stages (Hay, 1998a, 1998b; Cooper Marcus, 1992; Rubinstein and Parmelee, 1992; Rowles, 1983), the impacts of residential relocation on disruption and continuity of place attachment (Di Masso et al., 2019; Fullilove, 2014; Manzo and Devine-Wright, 2014; Gustafson, 2001), and relocating individuals striving to maintain continuity across settlement type and identity (Speller and Twigger-Ross, 2009; Fried, 2000; Feldman, 1996, 1990). While these studies have spearheaded research on the dynamics of place attachment and identity, they have tended to observe only multiple instances of change. In recent years, scholars have articulated this perceived gap in the literature (Bailey et al., 2016b;

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Devine-Wright, 2014), employing a narrative research design and narrative interviews to better understand the formation of different senses of place (or life-place trajectories) across the life course of individuals.

12.2

Beyond Static and Monistic Understandings of Sense of Place: Life-Place Trajectories and the Concept of Linked Lives This section will outline two ways in which the aforementioned narrative and biographical research has problematised monistic and static understandings of sense of place from both a temporal and a conceptual standpoint. In recent years, scholars straddling the disciplinary boundaries between environmental psychology and human geography have made a more concerted effort to trace the temporally dynamic aspect of sense(s) of place and its related subdimensions across the entire life course of individuals across varied residential mobility patterns (Bailey et al., 2016a, 2016b, 2021). Research in this area has highlighted the concept of life-place trajectories. These comprise the interrelated roles of (1) formative place (non-)attachment experiences, (2) static/changing varieties of people–place relations, (3) (dis)continuity in settlement identities, (4) the micro level (interpersonal relations) and (5) the macro level (socio-cultural, economic and political structural conditions and forces) of the linked lives concept, resulting in varied configurations of these concepts across people’s lives and residential mobility patterns, with the subsequent development of different senses of place across the life course of individuals. This research draws on the linked lives1 concept from human geography (Coulter et al., 2015), conceiving residential mobility decisions and place (non-)attachment and settlement identity formation to the residence place over time as deeply intertwined with both the micro level of interpersonal relations (with networks of friends and family members) and the macro level of changing socio-economic, cultural and political contexts within which people live. For example, the rise of commuter towns in 1960s and 1970s Britain (a substantial political, social and economic phenomenon) saw a significant trend in relocation away from inner-city areas – the result of a decline in the UK’s manufacturing industry and increases in automobile ownership and rail/ road networks (Crowley et al., 2012; Schettkat and Yocarini, 2006) – with the development of individuals’ sense of place in relation to new commuter towns predicated on (in)congruence with formative place (non-)attachment experiences (varieties of formative place attachment and non-attachment can influence future residential mobility decisions and place attachment varieties), prior settlement identities, and interpersonal ties and networks (e.g. Speller and Twigger-Ross, 2009). Drawing on a qualitative narrative-based methodology, this research was informed by an epistemological approach combining insights from phenomenological and social 1

The linked lives concept recognises that two types of connection are important in understanding residential mobility across the life course: the micro level, where social networks at and beyond the home unit are implicated in residential mobility choices; and the macro level, where socio-economic and political forces influence residential mobility decisions over time.

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constructionist perspectives (e.g. Batel and Devine-Wright, 2015; Manzo, 2005). The researchers drew on a methodological approach referred to as narrative enquiry, which draws on a ‘three-dimensional narrative enquiry space’ framework comprising personal/social, temporal and place dimensions, which positions an individual within four directions of movement within place over time – inward (personal/socio-cognitive) and outward (social/socio-cultural), backwards (past) and forwards (future) (Clandinin and Connelly, 2004). Drawing on this framework, narrative interviews with residents of a town called Nailsea in south-west England were conducted that elicited individuals’ residential histories, their varieties of place (non-)attachment, settlement identities, interpersonal relations and influential structural forces shaping their mobility to residence places over their lifetimes. This research identified five life-place trajectories across the life course of individuals (Bailey et al., 2016b): 1. ‘Long-term residence in a single place’ was a life-place trajectory that was characterised by low residential mobility and lifelong residence in Nailsea, strong local family ties and a strong sense of autobiographical insideness2 (Seamon, 1982). These individuals tended to take the place largely for granted due to a lack of competing place experiences, and identified with a strong unselfconscious traditional form of place attachment. 2. ‘Return to the home place’ was a life-place trajectory characterised by participants who had grown up in Nailsea, moved elsewhere for short periods of time in early adulthood and experienced a negative life event in those places, before returning to Nailsea seeking to resume a strong place bond, an interpersonal support network and commitment to long-term residence in the place. They expressed an unreflective bond to Nailsea and relatively low involvement in place-based communal activities (features of traditional attachment); however, this was combined with some interest in the goings-on and historical roots of the place (features of active attachment), suggesting a hybrid of traditional/active attachment (Bailey et al., 2016b). 3. ‘Residential mobility with continuity in settlement type’ was a life-place trajectory that was expressed by participants who had moved to Nailsea as adults. These individuals had lived in and formed active attachments to prior semi-rural settlement types that were valued for their nearby scenic countryside settings and outdoor recreational activities. They sought continuity in semi-rural settlement type, consciously moving to Nailsea and forging an active attachment to the place. For some individuals, relocation to Nailsea was also predicated on a partner whose job relocation – the result of changes in structural job markets – had brought them to the town. 4. ‘Residential mobility with discontinuity in settlement type’ was expressed by participants who had formerly lived in urban settlements such as large towns and cities. These places were generally valued for their ‘buzz’ and ‘energy’, and participants expressed strong active attachments with these places. Subsequent 2

The term ‘autobiographical insideness’ refers to an emotional attachment and identity with a place forged through a lifelong accumulation of experiences, memories and stories in that locale.

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discontinuity in settlement type arising from relocation to Nailsea resulted in an alienated and in some cases ambivalent relationship to the place, characteristic of the place-alienated and place-relative non-attachment types. For some individuals, this relocation was based on complementary and interrelated structural aspects, including a partner’s job relocation to the area and access to educational institutions in the nearby city of Bristol. 5. ‘High residential mobility’ characterised individuals who had undertaken numerous relocations across their lives, resulting in a lack of place attachment to former and present residence places and a tendency towards non-territorial identity formation (Lewicka, 2011). This trajectory was viewed by participants as conditioning them to expect and accept the placeless variety of non-attachment to residence places. For elderly residents within this trajectory, the decision to relocate to Nailsea stemmed from a structural condition: the town’s historical development of good road and railway networks enhanced and facilitated their access to family and relatives living in more distant cities in the north of England. This research problematises the view of sense of place (and its related subdimensions) as a singular or static phenomenon, pointing to the existence of different senses of place in the form of five different life-place trajectories that develop across the entire life course. From this perspective, senses of place can be understood as a pluralistic and temporally dynamic phenomenon, comprising a process in which individuals’ formative place (non-)attachment experiences, the formation of particular varieties of people–place relations and settlement identities, the development of interpersonal bonds across past and present residence places and the role of structural conditions configure in varied ways across the life course of individuals, informing differential residential mobility patterns and the development of different senses of place over time. The concept of linked lives, particularly at the macro level of structural conditions, lends greater conceptual plurality to the notion of sense of place, recognising that the development of place (non-)attachment varieties and residential mobility patterns and choices over time arises not only from formative place experiences, settlement identities and interpersonal relations, but from the macro level of socio-economic and political forces such as job relocations, access to nearby educational facilities, urban regeneration policies and the historical development of rail and road networks.

12.3

The Low-Carbon Energy Transition: Understanding the Social Acceptance of Low-Carbon Energy Technologies Through a Place-Based Lens In view of the threat of human-induced climate change, international targets have been set in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions across numerous sectors (e.g. energy, transport, housing) and mitigate anthropogenic global warming (UNFCCC, 2015). The development of renewable energy technologies is seen as an important step towards achieving such carbon-reduction goals, prompting the variegated and expanded

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deployment of wind, solar, wave and tidal energy technologies and new electricity networks (including smart grids) across developed and developing parts of the world in recent decades (United Nations Environment Programme, 2019). Localised opposition and negative attitudes to low-carbon energy development proposals have been well documented in empirical studies (Devine-Wright, 2011a; Devine-Wright and Howes, 2010; Vorkinn and Riese, 2001). Local objectors have often been cast pejoratively using the NIMBY (not in my back yard) concept, and labelled as selfish, ignorant and irrational by developers and media sources (e.g. Cotton and Devine-Wright, 2011; Burningham et al., 2006). Despite its prominence, the NIMBY concept has been widely criticised for overlooking the varied motivations leading to opposition or support, and for discounting the subjective emotional and symbolic associations people form with places (Devine-Wright, 2011b, 2009; Ellis et al., 2007; Wolsink, 2000). In response to these critiques, a place-based research pathway has emerged that explores the role of place attachment and place-based symbolic meanings in shaping community responses to energy projects, recasting local opposition as ‘placeprotective action’ (Devine-Wright, 2009). Research in this vein has tended to use surveys or mixed method designs, and has found that: (1) higher place attachment intensity is associated with project opposition in some instances (e.g. Devine-Wright and Howes, 2010; Vorkinn and Riese, 2001); (2) type of place attachment is important – for example, active attachment emerged as a significant predictor of objection to a power line proposal (Devine-Wright, 2013) – suggesting that place attachment intensity per se is not sufficient for understanding objections to place change; and (3) place-related symbolic meanings, in particular a lack of ‘fit’ between place and infrastructure-based representations, result in objections and negative feelings towards energy projects (Anderson et al., 2017; Batel and Devine-Wright, 2015; Venables et al., 2012; Devine-Wright and Howes, 2010; McLachlan, 2009). While this body of literature is highly insightful, it tells us little about the way in which different senses of place, mobilised using the concept of life-place trajectories, can enlighten our understanding of differential responses to energy infrastructure projects, and how this knowledge might assist efforts to decarbonise our energy systems. It is to this that we will now turn our attention. In recent years, scholars have sought to better understand the social acceptance of electricity grid infrastructure by adopting a life course narrative approach to place attachment dynamics. The most notable example of research in this vein (Bailey et al., 2016a, 2016b) sought to better understand the ways in which participants’ life-place trajectories informed their responses to a nearby high-voltage power line proposal (the Hinkley Point C project). The research showed the following: 1. Those residents with traditional and traditional-active attachments who had lifelong (or near-lifelong) attachments to Nailsea (the ‘long-term residence in a single place’ and ‘return to the home place’ trajectories) tended to accept the proposed power line, given their lifelong familiarity with the existing electricity infrastructure in the area. One such interviewee commented: ‘As long as I can remember there were

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pylons in the countryside around Nailsea, they’re nothing particularly new . . . I think the countryside around Nailsea is beautiful, but the pylons that are there already have always been part of it.’ These residents had become familiar with the commonplace visual presence of electricity infrastructure and represented these as blending into the nearby countryside, corroborating existing research that suggests perceived fit between a place and a project renders energy infrastructure developments more locally acceptable (Venables et al., 2012; McLachlan, 2009). 2. Place-based opposition arose among actively attached residents, supporting existing research (Devine-Wright, 2013). Actively attached participants tended to have life-place trajectories that were repeatedly centred upon positive attachments to semi-rural settlement types and where countryside locales were valued for their recreational, scenic and natural attributes, resulting in a symbolic logic of opposition between the place and what was perceived as the industrialising nature of the power line, as in the following interview extract: ‘It’s going to be incredibly ugly and out of proportion and industrial and all the things that you don’t expect to see in the countryside.’ 3. Those with non-attached life-place trajectories tended to develop weak or absent place relations with Nailsea (place-relative, place-alienated and placeless varieties), rendering place and project-related meanings less salient in this instance of proposed place change. These participants tended to express arguments, and in some cases opposition, on social justice-related grounds (procedural and distributive justice (Walker et al., 2014; Lima, 2006)) rather than on grounds of aspects of the place, appearing less aware of or interested in the potential positive or negative impacts of the power line on the character of the nearby countryside: ‘We were given a limited choice from the start, it’s either this one or that one, you choose. They’d done all their planning and scheming behind the scenes, and they came out with these two overhead options, and I think people felt those options were very limited.’ This research shows that people’s life-place trajectories across the life course can affect not only the extent to which they are engaged and active in the goings-on of their residence place, but can also shape residents’ perceptions of the degree of fit between place and technology meanings and thus inform their responses to prospective place change.

12.4

Conclusion Noting a preponderant structural approach in research to date, this chapter has sought to highlight recent academic literature that problematises a monistic and static conceptualisation of sense of place by pointing towards a temporally dynamic, processoriented and pluralistic conceptualisation of senses of place across the life course, in the form of five distinct life-place trajectories. Drawing on a qualitative narrative methodology, this scholarship has shown that individuals’ life-place trajectories to the

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residence place are shaped by a variety of subdimensions of the sense of place concept, including formative place (non-)attachment experiences and the development of distinct varieties of place (non-)attachment and (dis)continuity in settlement identities over time and across residential relocation, together with the micro (interpersonal relations) and macro (structural conditions and forces) levels of the linked lives concept (Bailey et al., 2016a, 2016b; Coulter et al., 2015). Drawing on the concept of linked lives (in particular, the macro level of socio-cultural, economic and political conditions and forces), this research also points to a more expansive conceptual plurality in our understandings of sense of place, recognising that the development of different senses of place over time is framed and informed by wider structural conditions, including urban regeneration policies (e.g. the development of commuter towns in 1970s Britain), changing job markets and the development of transport networks over time. In light of climate mitigation policy and the increased deployment of low-carbon energy technologies, fostering a better understanding of how scholarship on different senses of place (in the form of life-place trajectories) across the life course can usefully inform and illuminate the issue of community acceptance of such technologies is key. Seeking to enhance social acceptance could involve government and industry actors avoiding perceptions of local residents as a homogeneous ‘community’ of people, and instead tailoring engagement activities to heterogeneous groups of people that have distinct ways of relating to and representing their residence place. Furthermore, attempts could be made to minimise the industrial nature and impact of low-carbon energy infrastructure on countryside areas in and beyond the UK by avoiding areas of outstanding natural beauty, mitigating through the use of landscaping, adopting less visually intrusive technology solutions (e.g. subsea tidal convertors, wave energy devices, undergrounding of power lines), and emphasising the existing industrialised and modernised aspects of the contemporary countryside. Future research could therefore seek to understand the ways in which different lifeplace trajectories inform community responses to forms of offshore low-carbon energy project that are in their relative developmental infancy (e.g. subsea tidal and wave energy devices).

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Vorkinn, M. and Riese, H. (2001) ‘Environmental concern in a local context: the significance of place attachment’, Environment and Behavior, vol. 33, pp. 249–263. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 00139160121972972 Walker, B., Wiersma, B. and Bailey, E. (2014) ‘Community benefits, framing and the social acceptance of offshore wind farms: an experimental study in England’, Energy Research and Social Science, vol. 3, pp. 46–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2014.07.003 Wolsink, M. (2000) ‘Wind power and the NIMBY-myth: institutional capacity and the limited significance of public support’, Renewable Energy, vol. 21, pp. 49–64. https://doi.org/10 .1016/S0960-1481(99)00130-5

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Part IV

Nationalism and Competing Territorial Claims Nationalist discourses and practices tend to mobilise deep-seated assumptions about ‘who belongs where’ and on what grounds of legitimacy (Billig, 1995). The ‘nation’ is at the same time a psychosocial (i.e. identity-related), territorial (i.e. geographical) and political (i.e. involving rights, entitlements and power) construction. Accordingly, nationalist claims tend to implicate a complex politics of place belonging that strategically brings to the fore competing meanings and senses of place. The three chapters included in this part tackle the multifaceted and controversial nature of senses of place in contexts marked by nationalist conflicts, social injustice and political violence. In so doing, they demonstrate the plural nature of senses of place, both as an everyday experience and as a conceptual construct, presenting new theoretical elaborations of place to better grasp the complex experiential facets of nationalist politics of place belonging. Plural experiences of sense of place are discussed in Lewicka and Dobosh’s chapter on ethnocentric perceptions of place in Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania. The authors foreground how different ways of constructing the history of a place lead to more or less ethnocentric representations and ways of understanding place, as well as to different place identifications and attachments. In Chapter 14, plural senses of place appear in the form of emotionally ambivalent bonds with place by Palestinians under siege, showing how ‘feeling home’ is actually a polyhedric experience that combines safety and oppression, stability and loss, continuity and change, embedded in nested layers of place meanings. Relatedly, Katju and Kyle’s chapter on place belonging and the politics of self-determination in a north-eastern region in India shows how, as different human groups are defined as ‘tribes’ or as ‘Indigenous’, a particular way of representing their relationships with the land emerges (i.e. organic, essential, selfdefining). Other groups become ‘the Other’, and identity politics start revolving around plural and contested (institutionalised versus lived) forms of senses of place. The three chapters in this part also widen and enrich the theoretical grounds that inform sense of place as a conceptual tool to understand people–place relations. The contributions range from a combination of Doreen Massey’s progressive ontology of places with a phenomenological approach to senses of place and a post-positivistic empirical approach to the study of place-essentialisation and place disruption (Chapter 13). The phenomenological lens demonstrates the potential of adopting an ‘emic’ approach to the lived experience of place (i.e. from the perspective of place-insiders),

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especially in situations of political violence (Chapter 14), and the discussion on the postcolonial logics of place-identity redefinition of human groups as ‘tribals’ foregrounds the role of colonial relations in shaping and warranting the historical continuity between old and new senses of place. This theoretical broadening of the field of sense of place studies implies a problematisation of habitual ontological assumptions about place itself. By explicitly embracing an ‘anti-essentialist’ approach to place, Lewicka and Dobosh originally propose a ‘third way’ of conceptualising places that refuses at the same time placeessentialisation and postmodern fluidity. Their proposal is ‘narrative continuity’, a conceptual formula that articulates place continuity and change, and that is premised on a time-embedded understanding of places as having a ‘multi-layered history’. From a quite different perspective, Bleibleh draws on Williams’ notion of ‘home as a centre of meaning’, retrieving a well-known hierarchical or ‘concentric’ view of places, in which home is located in the nucleus of a series of expanding spatial scales with differentiated value in terms of provision of ontological security and experiential centredness. Respecifying this classic place hierarchy, Bleibleh highlights its full sense in warfare states, in which the meaning of home (the ‘inside’) is profoundly penetrated by broader scales of political violence (the ‘outside’: the street, the city, the country), therefore representing safety, rootedness, personal control and social gathering, but at the same time fear, anxiety, loss and a sense of threat. Also blurring the inside–outside place divide, Katju and Kyle (Chapter 15) show how place boundaries and related senses of place are strategically reshaped as social identities become redefined as ‘tribal’: a colonial construction that assumes an essential bond with the land and related political entitlements on the grounds of a naturalised form of territorial belonging. In sum, this section provides compelling theoretical arguments and empirical illustrations to demonstrate how complex and changing forms of senses of place unfold in contexts of political conflicts against the backdrop of nationalist processes. As crosscutting themes, the chapters in this section address: the historical dynamics of the production and reproduction of senses of place; the multiscale connections between senses of place, spatial justice and place-based political resistance; the contingent and contested nature of place meaning, place-making and place identities; and a conception of senses of place as a politically strategic form of constructing place and ‘positioning’ in regard to a place, that can either represent a threat or a resource to empower a given community.

Reference Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism, London, SAGE Publications.

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13 Ethnocentric Bias in Perceptions of Place The Role of Essentialism and the Perceived Continuity of Places Maria Lewicka and Olena Dobosh

Are these the only alternatives for a history of place: an essentialist continuity or a breaking of the relation altogether? Do we have to choose, in the terms in which this is usually presented, between temporality and spatiality? Perhaps the answer lies in insisting on both, but on forging a different relation between them. Perhaps a real ‘radical’ history of a place would be one which did not try to present either simple temporal continuity or only spatial simultaneity with no sense of historical depth. A way of understanding which, in the end, did not try to seal a place up into one neat and tidy ‘envelope of space-time’ but which recognised that what has come together, in this place, now, is a conjunction of many histories and many spaces. (Massey, 1995, p. 191)

13.1

Introduction On YouTube you can watch a fascinating historical spectacle: in a few minutes you can become an eyewitness to changes undergone by Europe and the rest of the world over the last 200,000 years. You can see how deserted areas become populated, empires rise and fall, new states appear only to be annihilated by stronger neighbours, borders change, territories are colonised and then retaken by their original owners – all in the space of 3–20 minutes. History is a kaleidoscope, and places are palimpsests where former traces are constantly erased and replaced by new ones, leaving room for future investigations by historians and archaeologists. This also leaves room for sociologists, geographers and psychologists to study how people’s view of a place’s history affects their present sense of place and their openness to future place changes. We began this chapter with a quotation from a short essay by Doreen Massey, the eminent geographer whose works on place and place meaning gave a new impetus to formerly phenomenology-based and mostly essentialist theories of place. Massey is usually identified with a strongly anti-essentialist theoretical position, and this essay is a manifestation of that anti-essentialist stand. She criticises the essentialist view of place identity, which sees place history as a culturally continuous chain of events that is shaped only by internal factors and is immune to global pressures. She wonders whether the only alternative to this essentialist version of continuity is a lack of any

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continuity whatsoever, as postmodernists claim (Jameson, 1991) – that is, a spatial rather than historical identity of place. If a place is a palimpsest with many different cultural layers, how can the identity of place be understood? Is there a third way to view a place’s history that would conceive of it as continuous but at the same time acknowledge its multi-layered character? In this chapter we present a series of studies that offer a preliminary answer to Massey’s question. Drawing from theories elaborated within social and cognitive psychology, we describe the different ways in which people reconstruct the complex histories of their places of residence as continuous or discontinuous, and the different meanings and senses of place that these constructions entail. We also investigate how these different constructions of places’ histories affect people’s emotional bonds with their places of residence.

13.2

The Geographical Scene The authors of this chapter come from a part of Europe that has witnessed radical territorial and demographic changes in recent history, and which thus seems ideally suited to study processes at the intersection of memories, place identities and senses of place. The country of Ukraine was born within its present borders in 1991; previously its territories had belonged to different political entities – Russia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Polish Republic and finally the Soviet Union. As a result, Ukraine’s different regions have distinct political and cultural histories and a strongly divided cultural and political memory (Liebich et al., 2019). Poland was a multicultural country before World War II, with about onethird of its population comprising ethnic minorities: Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, Belarussians and Lithuanians. The country’s territory changed radically at different historical periods. It first moved east, disappeared from the map for over 100 years in the nineteenth century, gradually withdrew west, and as a result of political treaties signed in Yalta and Potsdam after World War II it ended up occupying a territory that roughly coincided with its tenth-century borders. Consequently, approximately onethird of the formerly Polish eastern territories were annexed after 1945 to the Soviet Union (after 1991 they were incorporated into independent countries such as Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine), whereas some formerly German territories (e.g. East Prussia, part of Pomerania and Lower Silesia) were annexed to Poland. This shift led to massive migrations of people evicted from their cities and towns who had to find new homes in new environments, leading to an almost complete change in the country’s population. Moreover, in 1947 during Operation Vistula, which was organised by the Polish communist authorities, the Ukrainian minority that for centuries had inhabited the south-east of Poland was forcibly resettled, either in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, or in the Polish western territories, which had been emptied of their former German inhabitants. In addition, as is known, the Holocaust deprived the cities and towns of Central and Eastern Europe of their pre-war Jewish populations. All this led to profound changes in cities’ ethnic compositions: previously ethnically diverse cities became ethnically homogeneous; those previously inhabited

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by one nationality (e.g. Germans) were now populated by another (e.g. Poles); the Jews who had been a stable component of all Eastern European cities before World War II had been wiped out altogether. During the communist period, in the countries of the Soviet bloc, censorship prevented any enquiries into the multicultural pasts of newly acquired lands. The censorship was lifted after the fall of the Soviet system, which led to increased interest in the pre-war history of annexed territories. Currently, there is a growth of cultural events, historical treatises, popular books and novels (including ‘retro-crime’ stories) that familiarise readers with their lands’ multicultural pasts. However, there are also processes that go in the opposite direction. The newly acquired independence of two former Soviet Republics, Ukraine and Lithuania, has intensified efforts in these countries to present the history of their territories in national terms, and thus to build national identity, either by ignoring the presence and contributions of previous ethnic groups or by presenting them in a strongly unfavourable light. Poland, which stayed outside the Soviet Union and had a longer history of state independence, was in a somewhat better position; therefore, it seemed until recently that the processes of retrieving the multi-ethnic and multicultural pasts of Poland’s current territory were more advanced than in neighbouring countries. Alas, the conservative Polish government that has been in power since 2015 has returned to a uniform vision of Polish history in which there is no place for ethnicities other than Polish. All three countries – Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania – have multi-layered, disrupted histories. The most recent disruptions, described above, date back less than 100 years, which makes them a part not only of cultural memory, but also of communicative memory – that is, personal autobiographical remembrances and family stories mix with the products of official memory politics (Assman and Czaplicka, 1995). This makes collective memories of places in this part of the world a particularly relevant and interesting research object for those who investigate the relationships between perceptions of place continuities, senses of place and place identities.

13.3

Ethnocentric Bias as an Essentialist Continuity of Place Given the complex, disrupted history of cities and towns in this part of Europe, we initiated a large research programme based on extensive interviews with local populations, to investigate their representations of local history (Lewicka, 2012, 2008). We included localities in Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania that changed their state belonging after World War II and replaced their populations. We also included cities and towns in central Poland that previously had strong Jewish populations. We employed various measures of the content of the representations, from asking respondents to estimate their city/town’s pre-war national composition, to open questions about the most important figures and events in the place’s history, to less direct suggestions about who should be commemorated in the city space. We also asked about the meaning associated with respondents’ present place of residence (i.e. the degree to which it incorporates the memory of previous inhabitants). We used the specially designed

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Ethnocentric Bias Scale (Lewicka, 2012) to measure respondents’ willingness to acknowledge their city’s multicultural past. Finally, we collected various measures of people’s feelings towards their places of residence, such as place attachment and place identity, which are considered to be different facets of sense of place (Stedman, 2002). Our findings unequivocally point to ethnocentric bias in views of place history (Lewicka, 2012, 2008). In all cities and towns, without exception, respondents overestimated the share of their own ethnic group in the pre-war population and underestimated that of other groups, to the extent that in cities located in western Ukraine respondents’ own ethnic group (Ukrainian) was seen as having been dominant before World War II, despite the census data showing that it was a minority. In Vilnius, the city’s Lithuanian residents judged the proportions of Poles and Lithuanians in the 1930s to have been equal (around 30 per cent) despite the enormous difference reported in the 1931 census (65 versus 0.5 per cent). In the former German territories the overestimation was less blatant, but even here it was considerable. In Wrocław (formerly Breslau), where the pre-war Polish population had been less than 1 per cent, it was now estimated as having been 21 per cent, and this estimate did not change between studies in 2003 and 2014. In all cities, the number of Jews was grossly underestimated. Likewise, when asked about the most important figures in a city’s history, the figures most frequently mentioned (between 60 and 80 per cent, depending on the place) were members of the respondents’ own ethnic group (Ukrainians in Ukraine, Poles in Poland, Lithuanians in Lithuania) (for more detail, see Lewicka, 2012). It is of course possible that the names of well-known members of one’s own ethnic group, particularly contemporary ones, are easier to bring to mind in an interview than are less popular figures, particularly past ones. Therefore, in another study that covered six big Polish cities (Białystok, Cracow, Olsztyn, Łódź, Poznań and Wrocław) and the Lithuanian capital (Vilnius), for each city we created a list of names of over 10 important citizens associated with the city in the past, matched with their professions and the time when they lived. The list represented different ethnicities. Respondents were asked to select those who, in their opinion, were worth commemorating in the city space by having a street named after them. We took particular care to ensure that none of the names in question were already represented on the city map at the time of the study. Alongside each name there was a short description of the person, showing his or her contribution to and relationship with the city. In addition, his or her ethnicity was explicitly mentioned. In Polish cities we used Polish, German, Jewish, Russian and Belarussian former citizens. In Vilnius we used representatives of four ethnic groups: Lithuanians, Poles, Jews and Russians. Despite the equal availability of all ethnicities on the list, there was a clear bias towards commemorating persons from one’s own ethnic group. Altogether in the 6 Polish cities, almost 60 per cent of those who were judged worth commemorating were Poles, compared with only 18 per cent for candidates of Jewish origin, and 10 per cent for Germans. In Vilnius, which is still a multicultural city, we had respondents from three ethnic groups: Lithuanians, Poles and Russians. As Figure 13.1 shows, each

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group clearly preferred to commemorate people of their own ethnicity. Jewish names were ignored by all three groups, even though Vilnius had a significant Jewish minority until World War II and was known as ‘the Jerusalem of the North’. In another study, conducted using a specially designed experimental procedure, we asked groups of students from two cities, Lviv in western Ukraine and Wrocław in Poland, to compose a history of their city out of previously prepared iconic material, by picking out 12 pictures that best illustrated that history. The prepared material covered different periods of each city’s history and included pictures of different historical scenes, as well as portraits of the cities’ past residents of different ethnicities. Each picture was accompanied by a relevant description. In another, similar study, we asked students at the Ivan Franko University in Lviv and Wrocław University to compose histories of their universities. Like the cities themselves, the universities in these cities also have a disrupted history: the formerly Polish (Lwów) and German (Breslau) universities became Ukrainian (Lviv) and Polish (Wrocław) universities, respectively, after World War II. The iconic material covered the universities’ history from their foundation (Lviv in 1661, Wrocław in 1702) up to World War II, when their state belonging changed. The data again point to a clear in-group preference. The numbers of historical figures selected to illustrate the cities’ and universities’ histories were clearly biased towards students’ own ethnic groups compared with the groups that were dominant before World War II (28.23 versus 6.38 per cent for the city of Lviv; 27.96 versus 13.27 for Lviv University; 18.63 versus 1.9 for the city of Wrocław). The only exception was the history of Wrocław University: here, the number of eminent German figures (university professors) selected was slightly higher (15.78 per cent) than the number of Polish figures (12.28 per cent). However, even this pointed to a clear bias, as Poles constituted an insignificant minority at Breslau University before World War II. We also classified the pictures selected according to the historical period represented. In both cities there was a clear overestimation of two periods in the city’s history, both associated with the major contribution of the students’ own ethnic group: the city’s beginnings, and the contemporary period.

13.4

Ethnocentric Bias: Cognitive and Motivational Routes Ethnocentric bias is a product of multiple mechanisms and forces. Some of these are of a purely cognitive nature, while some testify to motivationally driven cognition. One of the reasons why people might see a place’s past through an ethnocentric lens is the lack of access to alternative information. Nation-states commemorate only certain events and heroes; school textbooks and media usually present a one-sided version of history, mostly in the service of national identity. Information may also be accessed through the traces left in urban space (street names, monuments, historic buildings). When these traces are wiped out because of either wartime destruction or political action, memories disappear too. Our studies show that people who live in historic districts rich in ‘urban reminders’ have a richer knowledge of the place history than do

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Figure 13.1 Commemorating past residents of Vilnius: streets to be named after past eminent Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Jewish citizens according to the city’s current Lithuanian, Polish and Russian inhabitants (percentage choices).

those who live in new settlements erected ‘from scratch’ (Lewicka, 2012, 2008). The biased representation of history may also be a product of cognitive rules of thumb applied when access to historical sources is lacking. There are numerous examples of the role that simple heuristics play in biased representations of the past (Lewicka, 2012). However, the distorted, one-sided view of the past may also have motivational roots – some located in external circumstances, some intrinsic to humans’ emotional make-up. If the country is under siege, the defensive function of human beliefs takes precedence over the cognitive function. Defensive cognition serves the function of maintaining group coherence rather than learning what the world is really like. The threat may also be imaginary, a product of political manipulation. In Poland today, the conservative government successfully evokes a feeling of threat among Polish citizens, disseminating images of catastrophes allegedly brought about by refugees and LGBTQ+ people. The outcome is a one-sided picture of an ethnically pure country organised around a set of traditional, homogeneous values and mores. Other routes are mixed: cognitive-motivational. One is the way in which people think about continuity in either essentialist or anti-essentialist terms. Ethnocentric bias is an example of essentialist continuity. However, it is also possible to think about place continuity in a non-essentialist way. This distinction has consequences for differences in the representation of a place’s past, for the way the place is currently experienced and for the emotions associated with the place. Findings in group psychology – a different research area – show that perceiving a group’s history as continuous increases group identification (Sani et al., 2008); however, this mostly concerns essentialist and not anti-essentialist continuity (Smeekes and Verkuyten, 2014). The data collected on our research project help us to explore the consequences of essentialist versus anti-essentialist constructions of history, including people’s emotions about place.

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Perceived Narrative Continuity: Between Essentialism and Historical Discontinuity The distinction between the two types of continuity goes back to Chandler and colleagues (Chandler and Proulx, 2008; Chandler and Lalonde, 1998), who described two strategies through which people can preserve their sense of individual continuity in the face of inevitable change. One strategy is to identify those parts of oneself that form a ‘personal essence’ – something in one’s personality, a set of traits that remains the same despite the passage of time. The other strategy consists of looking at one’s own biography as a sort of narrative, a sequence of different but interrelated ‘chapters’. The preference for one type of continuity or the other differentiates people (Chandler and Proulx, 2008). For example, Chandler et al. (2003) showed that Aboriginal Canadians represented their autobiographical pasts as a narrative, while Canadians of European descent referred more often to their unchangeable ‘essence’. The distinction between essentialist and anti-essentialist continuity was taken up by Sani et al. (2008) and applied to the perception of group continuity (in their case, the Scottish nation). The Perceived Collective Continuity Scale, created by the authors, is a set of 12 items diagnostic of either cultural (essentialist) or historical (nonessentialist) continuity (e.g. ‘Scottish people have passed on their traditions across different generations’ and ‘Scottish people have maintained their values across time’, versus ‘Scottish history is a sequence of interconnected events’ and ‘there is a causal link between different events in Scottish history’). In our studies, we used a shortened eight-item version of the scale adapted to the places and countries in question (e.g. ‘Polish people/inhabitants of Wrocław/students and professors at Lviv University/etc. have maintained their values across time’). The perception of group history in terms of essentialist continuity implies that the group is endowed with a set of stable properties – such as values, traditions or the personality traits of its members – which determine the group’s unique character (‘essence’) and can be identified in different periods of the group’s history. Essentialist continuity presents history in a simplified way that is easy to grasp and communicate to others. However, it is a double-edged sword. For example, ‘we are one with our ancestors’ implies taking responsibility for one’s ancestors’ past deeds. If the deeds were noble, then the group members can bask in the glory of past heroes; but it is more difficult to accept responsibility for deeds that were shameful. Hence, an essentialist representation of group history most often leads to the denial of responsibility for the group’s immoral behaviour, and to the attribution of that behaviour to external factors – for example, seeing it as a defence triggered by the hostile behaviour of others (Bilewicz, 2016). In comparison, narrative continuity should allow a more detached attitude towards both glorious and shameful events in the group’s history. Here, both kinds of deed are interpreted not through group members’ intrinsic traits, but as a result of a complex chain of causal forces (Sani et al., 2008). Thinking of one’s own group history in terms of narrative continuity therefore means not merely evaluating the past – that is, treating

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it as evidence that group members were heroes rather than scoundrels – but first of all understanding its historical causes. As a result, it is much easier to accept that both desirable and undesirable deeds have been a part of the group’s history. It has been known since David Hume that causality is a faculty of the human mind, not of reality. We have perceptual access to a sequence of events, but whether the sequence will be interpreted as a radical change, a lack of change or a coherent cause– effect narrative depends to a great extent on our mindset. The places that were the objects of our studies all had multi-layered, and mostly objectively disrupted, histories. Nevertheless, as shown above, in the majority of cases their history was seen as largely uninterrupted – that is, as having a stable (ethnically homogeneous) essence. Perceiving history as multiple coexisting narratives is cognitively more demanding than perceiving it in essentialist terms. As our survey data from six big Polish cities show, the perceived narrative continuity of place (as measured with our modified version of Sani’s Perceived Collective Continuity Scale) – but not the perceived essentialist continuity – is positively correlated with a willingness to invest cognitive effort in solving problems and appreciating complexity (Cacioppo and Petty, 1982). This suggests that people who perceive a sequence of events as a narrative may also be willing to acknowledge the past ethnic diversity of their place, and less willing to see the place’s history through simplified black-and-white lenses. Our findings corroborate this prediction. In the same survey we asked respondents which events in the history of their country they were proud of, and which events they were ashamed of. The answers were clearly biased towards positive events: almost 50 per cent of respondents were unable to name a single shameful event in their country’s history, compared with only 12 per cent who could not name an event they were proud of. Among the shameful events, we selected those that referred to discriminatory behaviours against ethnic minorities living in Poland before World War II. With respect to the two types of perceived continuity, a comparison of participants who mentioned at least one such event with those who did not revealed that the former scored significantly higher on perceived narrative continuity than did the latter, with no difference in perceived cultural continuity. Those who acknowledged atrocities committed by their own nation against its minorities were also more willing to acknowledge their city’s multicultural past (measured by the Ethnocentric Bias Scale), and somewhat less willing to perceive the place’s past through ethnocentric lenses, than were those who acknowledged no such events (Lewicka, 2016). Not surprisingly, the two subscales of the Ethnocentric Bias Scale were also related to the two types of perceived continuity. Different constructions of historical continuities entail differences in cognition that build our senses of place. In a study that involved residents of six Polish cities, all of which had multicultural histories, we asked participants to select sentences from a larger pool that they considered descriptive of ‘how I think about my city now’. The sentences referred to different meanings of a city, including national (e.g. ‘X is a source of my national pride’) and multicultural meanings (e.g. ‘X is a place full of traces left by other cultures’). As seen in Figure 13.2, compared with perceived cultural continuity, perceived narrative continuity was associated with the attribution of more

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multicultural (e.g. German in Wrocław, Olsztyn and Poznań; Jewish in Łódź, Cracow and Białystok) and less national (Polish) meanings to places of residence. The multiple senses of places that accompany essentialist versus anti-essentialist constructions of history entail differences not only in cognition but also in associated affects, such as place attachment and place identity (see Stedman, 2002). As shown in Figure 13.2, however, our studies point to a trade-off between the veridicality of the construction of a place’s history and the strength of the feelings towards that place. Emotional bonds with places were related to cultural rather than narrative place continuity, confirming similar findings obtained in research on group identity (Smeekes and Verkuyten, 2014). In other words, not only spatial but also temporal essentialism helps to create emotional bonds with a place.

13.6

Conclusions Sense of place refers to the way a place is experienced. It is a mix of the sensuous reactions, cognitive images, memories and feelings that people associate with a place. According to Fritz Steele, one of the first authors to publish a book with ‘sense of place’ in the title, ‘the sense of place is an experience created by the setting combined with what a person brings to it. In other words, to some degree we create our own places, they do not exist independent of us’ (Steele, 1981, p. 9). The findings presented in this chapter show that even a disrupted local history, like that in cities in Central and Eastern Europe, can be constructed as continuous, but also that this continuity may mean different things for different people, leading to different representations of history and thus different senses of place. We have shown that an individual construction of a place’s history may be rooted in either the more frequent essentialist view or the less frequent anti-essentialist view. Of course, a place’s history can also be seen as broken and discontinuous. We started our chapter with a quotation from Massey, whose position was openly anti-essentialist but who also wondered whether this stand would necessarily lead to the perception of the identity of a place as discontinuous. In this chapter we have provided evidence for a third possibility. Drawing from social-psychological theories and concepts elaborated in research on autobiographical memory, we have suggested that this third way is to view place history as a causally related sequence of events – a narrative. The perception of a place’s past through an anti-essentialist lens should combine two seemingly contradictory features: on the one hand, it acknowledges the place’s complex and multi-layered history; on the other hand, it allows one to think about the place’s past as coherent and meaningful. We have also shown that people who construct their local history as a narrative tend to be more open to the complexity of the place’s past, are less ethnocentric and are more willing to acknowledge their nation’s past atrocities than are people who see their local history as culturally continuous. This has consequences for how these places are experienced now. When walking the streets of contemporary Wrocław, Olsztyn and Łódź, antiessentialists notice traces of their German and Jewish heritage that essentialists do not see

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Figure 13.2 Perceived cultural and narrative continuity as predictors of place meaning and

emotional bonds with places (standardised beta values).

(or which they would rather ignore). However, anti-essentialists also feel less attached to, and identify less with, their places of residence than do those who use essentialist categories. This suggests that anti-essentialism and (place) identity do not go together, or – perhaps – that we should look more closely at both the nature of anti-essentialist continuity and the intricacies of people–place emotional bonds. The relationships between different dimensions of sense of place may be more complex than they appear. Therefore, the takehome message of the findings presented in this chapter is that future researchers who investigate the role of memory in shaping people’s emotional bonds with places should perhaps focus more on the conditions under which people would both emotionally identify with their places and be willing to appreciate their fascinating multi-layered history.

Acknowledgements The studies described in this chapter were financed with research grant number 2011/03/ B/HS6/03320 from the National Science Centre. The preparation of the chapter was financed with research grant number 2017/25/B/HS6/00137 from the National Science Centre.

References Assman, J. and Czaplicka, J. (1995) ‘Collective memory and cultural identity’, New German Critique, vol. 65, pp. 125–133. Available at www.jstor.org/stable/488538 (accessed 21 October 2020). Bilewicz, M. (2016) ‘The dark side of emotion regulation: historical defensiveness as an obstacle in reconciliation’, Psychological Inquiry, vol. 27, pp. 89–95. https://doi.org/10 .1080/1047840X.2016.1162130

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Cacioppo, J. T. and Petty, R. E. (1982) ‘The need for cognition’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 42, pp. 116–131. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.42.1.116 Chandler, M. J. and Lalonde, C. (1998) ‘Cultural continuity as a hedge against suicide in Canada’s First Nations’, Transcultural Psychiatry, vol. 35, pp. 191–219. https://doi.org/10 .1177/136346159803500202 Chandler, M. J. and Proulx, T. (2008) ‘Personal persistence and persistent people: continuities in the lives of individual and whole cultural communities’, in Sani, F. (ed.), Self-Continuity: Individual and Collective Perspectives, New York, Pergamon Press, pp. 213–226. Chandler, M. J., Lalonde, C., Sokol, B. W. and Hallet, D. J. (2003) ‘Personal persistence, identity development and suicide: a study of Native and non-Native North American adolescents’, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, vol. 68, no. 2. https://doi.org /10.1111/1540-5834.00246 Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Lewicka, M. (2008) ‘Place attachment, place identity and place memory: restoring the forgotten city past’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 28, pp. 209–231. https://doi.org/10 .1016/j.jenvp.2008.02.001 Lewicka, M. (2012) Psychologia Miejsca, Warszawa, Scholar. Lewicka, M. (2016) ‘Ethnic bias in perception of the disrupted multiethnic city past: role of national identity, temporal perspective and perceived continuity of place’, paper presented at International Society for Political Psychology, Warsaw, 14 July. Liebich, A., Myshlovska, O., Sereda, V., Gaidai, O. and Sklokina, I. (2019) ‘The Ukrainian past and present: legacies, memory and attitudes’, in Schmid, U. and Myshlovska, O. (eds), Regionalism without Regions: Reconceptualizing Ukraine’s Heterogeneity, Budapest, Central European University. Massey, D. (1995) ‘Places and their pasts’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 39, pp. 182–192. Available at www.jstor.org/stable/4289361 (accessed 21 October 2020). Sani, F., Bowe, M. and Herrera, M. (2008) ‘Perceived collective continuity: seeing groups as temporally enduring entities’, in Sani, F. (ed.), Self-Continuity: Individual and Collective Perspectives, New York, Psychology Press, pp. 159–174. Smeekes, A. and Verkuyten, M. (2014) ‘Perceived group continuity, collective self-continuity, and in-group identification’, Self and Identity, vol. 13, pp. 663–680. https://doi.org/10.1080 /15298868.2014.898685 Stedman, R. C. (2002) ‘Toward a social psychology of place: predicting behavior from place-based cognitions, attitude, and identity’, Environment and Behavior, vol. 34, pp. 561–581. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916502034005001 Steele, F. (1981). The Sense of Place. Boston, CBI Publishing Company.

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14 Sense of Place Between Spatial Justice and Urban Violence in Palestine Sahera Bleibleh

Here, under the mountains of smoke, on the threshold of my home, time has no measure . . . Under siege, time becomes a location solidified eternally Under siege, place becomes a time abandoned by past and future (Darwish, 2003)

14.1

Introduction War implications are never documented enough to comprehend their deep scars; rather, they are sensed in people’s lived experiences and everyday reflections on their sense of place under siege. Almost two decades ago, Israel launched one of the largest and most lethal attacks on Occupied Palestine since 1967. Although inseparable from other intense events in the region, the 2002 Israeli invasion, known among Palestinians as the Ejtiyah, was unique with regard to its intertwined impacts and applied military techniques. The assault included the deliberate annihilation of homes and fundamental infrastructure, including the destruction of entire historical buildings of significant cultural heritage. This chapter considers the testimonies of Palestinians who survived the urbicidal1 war on the old town of Nablus (Bleibleh et al., 2019) and experienced home reconstruction and displacement.2 The aim of this analysis is to assess the fundamental role of sense of place, and the significance of its multiscalar nature, in the establishment of stability and the rebuilding of Palestinian homes. The chapter demonstrates the intangible implications of urban violence beyond the numbers of 1

2

The term urbicide literally means ‘violence against the city’. However, Bleibleh et al. (2019) argue that the Israeli destruction of homes and infrastructure in the Jenin refugee camp, including the whole of the Hawashin neighbourhood, was intended to shatter not only the physical urban fabric but also people’s memories and sense of place, thus extending beyond the term’s literal meaning. This qualitative and phenomenological study is part of a larger study conducted in the old city of Nablus (2009–2011) and the Jenin refugee camp (2013–2015) to document the lived experiences of Palestinians who witnessed the Ejtiyah in 2002. The study takes a bottom-up approach, tracing everyday life practices by collecting narratives of interactive relationships in a context of urban violence, in order to map spatial and behavioural coping tactics and adaptations. The narratives were collected through lengthy open-ended interviews with householders, shop owners and representatives of official institutions at the two sites.

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injured and the physical destruction. It also aims to contribute to the understanding of the pluralisation, production and reproduction of sense of place in a violently controlled environment, especially given the unpredictability of localised contexts and global power politics. Living under the Israeli occupation, Palestinians are constantly exposed to violence in their homes and surrounding urban environments. It is within this context that an examination of the meanings of home and the shifting sense of place is relevant. The physical place of home has been weaponised, particularly during the Ejtiyah. Thus, urban violence not only ruptures home, as the spatial incubator of Palestinians’ sense of place, but also demonstrates the ways in which the dominant colonial power controls their homeland in general, and the very place where Palestinians intimately nurture sense of place at home.

14.2

Urban Violence and the Multiple Meanings of Sense of Place Sense of place and people–place relations in Palestine are infused with uncertainty: uncontrollable disruptions are unceasingly combined with compulsory displacement, fear of loss and the creation of a new exile. A core location where sense of place is strongly experienced and associated with attachment, identity and rootedness is home. Home is the site of reassuring temporal rhythms, as well as markers involving both stability and change. In addition to the loaded combination of security and threat, what makes sense of place unique in the context of Palestine is the concentric character and hierarchal trajectory of home as it is incorporated within the larger context of the Israeli occupation. In other words, the scale of the dispute affects every Palestinian by involving physical space, regardless of that space’s scale and ownership, and threatening the stability of individuals and communities (Akesson, 2014; Bleibleh, 2015, 2014). The significance of home in this sense extends beyond its physical characteristics to include the social and emotional attributes that make it inseparable from the wider struggle over the land. Home is a ‘symbol of continuity and order, rootedness, self-identity, attachment, privacy, comfort, security and refuge’ (Lewicka, 2011, p. 211). According to Hay (1998), a sense of place is developed through rootedness in place, and through individual self-continuity. Rootedness in this context is another ‘inherently geographical concept and is central to the notion of home. [It] has acquired temporal, cultural, and psychological connotations in its everyday use’ (Terkenli, 1995, p. 329). Thus, the longer you stay in a place, the stronger your ties become. Cross (2001) describes rootedness as the strongest bond between self and community or place. In a situation of threat, fear and limited spatial control, home is sometimes a state of mind (Bunkše, 2004, p. 13; see also Blunt and Dowling, 2006). As Brown and Perkins (1992) have argued, research on place disruption has mostly dealt with natural forces or human actions. However, it seems that there is a lack of research on the significance of sense of place during times of war. In most cases, including when people voluntarily leave or move out, disruptions entail relocations that are often sudden, with change threatening to overwhelm stability (Lewicka, 2011). Daily routines of coming and going, when completed safely, reinforce the feeling that

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home provides a secure anchor. But in certain uncontrollable situations, these routines can involve injury, loss of life and possessions or losses that are integral to selfdefinitions (Brown and Perkins, 1992, p. 290). To shed light on how sense of place is experienced amid political violence, the next section presents a brief contextual history of the Israeli occupation’s impact on people–place relations in Palestine.

14.3

A Brief History of the Israeli Occupation and Political Violence The longest military occupation in modern history, the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine has led to several wars and responses (Hajjar, 2005). The 1948 Nakba, the 1967 war, the first intifada of 1987 (the ‘stone intifada’), the second intifada of 2000 (the ‘al-Aqsa intifada’3) and the 2002 Ejtiyah4 were deadly and destructive confrontations (Hajjar, 2005). Over the decades of occupation, Israel has continued to enforce various military strategies to control every aspect of Palestinians’ lives. Despite their unequal power, Palestinians have resisted, mostly non-violently or by initiating coping tactics to momentarily overcome their oppression. One episode in the resistance was the al-Aqsa intifada, which the Palestinians started in September 2000. It was an inseparable part of the ongoing Palestinian struggle for national liberation, justice and an end to the Israeli occupation, especially after the 1993 Oslo Accords failed to bring any positive change. The Palestinians’ resistance played right into the hands of Israel, which with ‘its superior propaganda apparatus turned everything we [the Palestinians] did against its occupation of our lands, its devastation of our villages, and its oppression of our population, into “terrorism”’ (Said and Mohr, 1999, p. 107). The Israeli military capitalised on the discursive opportunity of the ‘war on terrorism’5 and declared a war on terror, as if the USA and Israel faced the same enemies and thus required the same response (Gregory, 2004, p. 108).

3

4

5

The second intifada erupted following a provocative visit by former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to the Islamic holy site of al-Aqsa Mosque (Haram al-Sharif) in Jerusalem, the site after which the intifada was named. The 2002 Ejtiyah, the Palestinian term used to refer to the Israeli military Operation Defensive Shield (ODS), once again brought people and space to the forefront of a lethal war. The Israeli military used heavy weapons such as tanks, bulldozers, Apache helicopters and F-16 jets to level large areas across the major Palestinian cities and refugee camps, including Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm, Hebron, Ramallah and Bethlehem, among others. Not only were these cities ripped apart but, according to a 2010 B’Tsalem report (see Reporters sans frontières, 2003), up to 6,168 Palestinians were killed. In addition to the homes that were damaged, schools, hospitals, universities, mosques, churches, libraries, TV stations, cultural centres and other vital institutions were also targeted in an attempt to destroy the Palestinian state’s urban infrastructure and eliminate any viability of a normal life or an independently functioning state. Thus, not only history and architecture but also the home and everyday life were targeted, in order to annihilate people’s steadfastness (sumoud) and resistance (moqawameh). This term was commonly applied to an international military campaign led by the USA and the UK with the support of other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members as well as non-NATO countries. Originally, the campaign was waged against al-Qaeda and other militant organisations, with the purpose of eliminating them.

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To end the Palestinian resistance, Israel launched the Ejtiyah, an oppressive military operation – also known as Operation Defensive Shield – in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces used heavy weapons as well as the newly introduced military technique of ‘walking through walls’ (Bleibleh et al., 2019; Bleibleh, 2015, 2014, 2012; Weizman, 2007): the Israeli military avoided walking the streets, and moved instead through the interiors of homes after unpredictably blasting through the walls. In Nablus, this meant two forms of assault: first, the policy of forcefully breaking each person’s grounded ties, as embodied in and through the home; second, the policy of demolishing significant portions of the old city in order to refashion the context of the battle, while also destroying the historical materiality of Palestinian existence in the process. In addition to conjuring up memories of the 1948 Nakba, as emphasised in the narratives I collected in the old city, the Ejtiyah revealed a strategy of destruction that brought the built environment into a unique paradigm of war. Indeed, understanding the devastation of the physical urban environment during Israel’s war against Palestine requires a reimagining of that environment’s purpose and context. More precisely, it requires the recognition that the politicide of the Palestinian people entailed urbicidal tactics (Bleibleh et al., 2019; Abujidi, 2014; Graham, 2002). This correlates with one of the defining features of the concentric character of place: smaller places are incorporated within larger ones (Altman and Low, 1992; Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1975). This is emphasised in the inseparable relationship between the sense of place at home and the larger national sense of homeland. It highlights the multiscalar nature of sense of place: the urbicide is territorial, connecting the sense of home with the larger sense of the urban context, which also instantiates the pluralisation of sense of place. Thus, sense of place fosters Palestinians’ collective perseverance to rebuild their homes in order to contribute towards their larger national goal of freeing their homeland. Like the killing of people, the destruction of buildings matters. The human experience during the Ejtiyah offers not only a snapshot of the implications of the long Israeli occupation, but also an insight into how people capitalised on sense of place to cope with this struggle, both spatially and behaviourally, by reclaiming their everyday lives through home reconstruction. This is crucial because, first, such a close perspective offers a qualitative, humanistic understanding of the political aspects of place, people and what lies behind accumulated damage. Second, increasing global tension, especially in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, combined with the alleged Palestinian connection with terrorism, influenced the awareness of national versus local senses of place. Third, it is important to expand the existing literature on sense of place, spatial justice and urban violence by detailing an example of human interactional experience in an uncontrolled environment, and its implications in terms of living with fear and uncertainty in a world that increasingly involves war, violence and displacement. Shifting between hope, fear and uncertainty, most households in Nablus had to make multiple decisions to survive the new trauma of the 2002 Ejtiyah. In cases where houses were severely damaged, households had to temporarily rent accommodation on the periphery of the old town until their houses had been reconstructed. The decision to stay on the periphery was made to enable access to, or to participate in, the reconstruction

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process at any time, especially under conditions of curfew. Although safety was (and still is) a priority, my findings affirm the severity of the forced relocation. The next section provides further discussion of the significance of the lived experience of home and sense of place under the Israeli occupation.

14.4

The Significance of Home in the Face of Political Violence In wartime, the battlefield expands to include almost every aspect of life. Home plays a key role in creating a sense of place and identity for both individuals and communities. It represents a place of being, not only as a dwelling, but also as an everyday element of experience and an attachment to a particular setting. It represents our emotional response and a sense of commitment that becomes more apparent in times of loss and hardship (Relph, 1976). This reflects a dualistic juxtaposition in terms of place that people experience between the need to stay and the need to escape, which creates a fusion between people and their places while also alleviating the misery of everyday life. This also supports the argument that relationships to place are ambivalent: not every experience in a place is a pleasant one (Manzo, 2005). The fact that sense of place exceeds people’s habitation of places captures how people experience those places, granting them life and social meaning; thus home importantly becomes a place that alleviates the misery that people go through in times of oppression or nostalgia, a characteristic that reveals our rootedness and connectedness. This study does not underestimate the inhumane repercussions of the Israeli occupation in general, but it seeks to highlight that certain people–place constructs are experienced distinctively due to the micropolitical impact of sense of place around home, and the ways in which these constructs lead to long-term implications. The Israeli military techniques, including ‘walking through walls’, not only affected the significance of spatial hierarchical relations, but also meant that households were left in fear and insecurity within their own domestic spaces. Their homes were no longer private or safe, but became ‘forbidden spaces’ (Bleibleh, 2014) where inhabitants experienced the loss of home at home. In other words, in a war zone, home represents a shattered space where concepts of self, identity and belonging coexist and can be inspected. The repercussions of the Israeli occupation also reveal the multifaceted meaning of sense of place through home rebuilding. The narratives I collected from Palestinian householders who experienced the Ejtiyah offer an intimate perspective on how they experienced the occupation by making links between history, sense of place, safety, fear and the socio-cultural aspects of the community. Home interactively tells us something about how the inhabitants of the old town of Nablus adopted both spatial and behavioural modifications in order to reflect not only their sense of place and memories, but also their sense of safety, continuity and social connectedness. This also relates to their attempts to overcome their sense of displacement, fear and random attack. In this regard, for Palestinians the home is not only where the sense of place is rejuvenated, but is also an important site of resilience and resistance. As many of my

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interviewees confirmed, people rushed to repair their damaged homes immediately after the Ejtiyah. This was done to create a sense of normalcy, which many claimed by insisting ‘we need to rebuild our homes, and we want to claim our normal lives’. Obviously, a life without walls is basically inconceivable, because, as Jackson (1995) has emphasised, a ‘broken home means a broken life’ (p. 85). Perhaps thanks to their meaningful or efficacious involvement in the recovery process, victims were able to cope with their traumatic experience, and the rebuilding of their homes subconsciously supported the healing of their wounded souls. Almost all my interviewees affirmed that they made changes to the physical space of their homes, either for safety reasons or to take the opportunity to improve the spatial layout. The Ejtiyah brought the struggle against the occupation into the intimate space that represents the inner core of each individual living under the occupation, in a way that threatened the anchored ties each person had established with his or her home: ‘Home is hearth, an anchoring point through which human beings are centered’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006, p. 11). People–place relations were rendered in different actions that emphasised the continuity of the production and reproduction of meanings in creating a sense of place. These actions evolved with the emerging, continuously negotiated patterns of everyday life under uncertainty in order to create tactics of resistance and making do. The military strategies triggered the emergence and intensification of negotiated rituals and everyday habits, empowering Palestinian resistance through home rebuilding.

14.5

Analysis of Home Rebuilding and the Lived Experience of Sense of Place Living in an environment of political violence activates and transforms tactics of resistance so that they intertwine with the sense of place in relation to home as a fundamental part of ongoing resistance. The Israeli occupation issued several military orders against Palestinian homes that had been accused of engagement in any form of resistance. These orders included eviction, closure, confiscation, demolition, direct bombardment and compulsory imprisonment (house arrest). Each measure was applied according to the alleged situation and based on the geographical location within Palestine. Palestinians affected by these military orders were mostly displaced and rarely able to return home. Their stories provide resilient evidence of how a sense of place fostered their journey of home reconstruction and return. The voices presented here comprise a small sample of the Palestinians who experienced the Ejtiyah. They offer representative narratives of reminiscences gathered between 2009 and 2012 from witnesses to the Ejtiyah in the old town of Nablus. Much of the material comes from eyewitness accounts and interviews with homeowners who lived through the Ejtiyah and whose homes were destroyed. They had first-hand experience of the impact of urban violence upon the physical and social meanings of home, resistance and identity. Despite the rebuilding of their homes, the lingering impact of Israel’s militarisation policies was still rooted in their souls and how they experienced sense of place. It was a sense of place that had led them to repair

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their damaged homes. Each interview extract represents a situation of ‘homeness’, whether as a physical space or a state of mind. The following extracts and interpretations thus demonstrate the lived experience of sense of place under Israeli occupation as manifested in the voices of Palestinians.

14.5.1

Sense of Place as Faith and the Rituals of Everyday Life Sense of place expressed in relation to maintaining one’s faith and the rituals of everyday life is well demonstrated in the story of Um Raed.6 Despite her sense of invasion, the surrounding threat and the imposed curfew, she insisted on still conducting her five daily prayers to seek some internal stability at home, albeit in the presence of the Israelis. It seems that Um Raed sought an internal sense of place inspired by faith and prayer, to counteract her inability to control the physical space of home: Wallah ya binti [with God’s name, my daughter], we had tough days. Our inner space and privacy had been invaded, enkashaf halna [literally ‘we were bare’, indicating an invasion of privacy]. I used to pray each of the five prayers at the nearby mosque [Aljame’ Alkabeer]. During the Ejtiyah, the Israelis surrounded the place and wouldn’t allow anyone to go out. I didn’t care. I took my lamp and went out to pray. The Israelis wanted to shoot me, and people were yelling to come back. I just walked confidently and went to the mosque. I continued to do so for the whole time during the Ejtiyah, despite the curfew . . .7 I just want to keep my prayer patterns that I am used to do. I always say twakalto ala Allah [in God I trust]. (Um Raed, 25 July 2010, Nablus)

14.5.2

Sense of Place as a Social Construct Um Jamal articulates a socially constructed sense of place. In her testimony, the lived sense of place goes beyond the individual self or the home to include the entire neighbourhood. Safety and security are experienced among neighbours as if within one family. In accordance with Um Raed’s narrative, there is a correlation between the sense of place and the sense of the body, related to ‘privacy’: in the face of unexpected intrusions by the Israelis, most women remained covered at home,8 as Um Jamal’s narrative confirms. This socially constructed sense of place intersects with the construct of faith and inner peace: Those days were really hard, Allah la y’eidhom [may God never repeat them]. We left our home on the second day of the Ejtiyah and returned after one year, after the repair work was completed. I will never accept, or be able, to live in a different place; it was hard enough to be away for one year until our home was repaired . . . In our neighbourhood, we lived as if we were one big family. As we say, nam ya jari be’aman la anam ana weyak [literally, ‘if my neighbour sleeps safely, I can too’] . . . We used to sleep wearing our jilbabs and esharbs and prepared ourselves for the worst. (Um Jamal, 27 July 2010, Nablus) 6 7 8

All interviewees have been pseudonymised to protect their anonymity. The ellipses used in all of the interview extracts indicate pauses in speech, not omitted speech. Most Muslim women wear a hijab comprising a long dress (jilbab) and head covering (scarf or esharb) in public.

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Sense of Place as a State of Mind The power imposed by the Israeli military confined Palestinians’ sense of spatial control; thus, their sense of place was also experienced as a state of mind. A good example of this is the case of Abu Alaa. He stayed at home despite the departure of his family members. Consequently, his sense of place and control was only possible while he kept himself busy decorating the wall of his home. Another angle can be observed when Abu Alaa evokes the memory of his forebears, which also provides a clear connection with rootedness in place: I stayed at home during the Ejtiyah and refused to leave . . . I was surrounded by the Israeli militias9 who entered our home after blowing up the external wall . . . I was doing some renovation and repairs in my home before the Ejtiyah started . . . Although the Israelis surrounded me, I continued to build with joy . . . No one can put an end to anyone’s life except the One [i.e. God] who gave it to you . . . I won’t leave the place, my home, by any means . . . It’s where I have all my family, life, and lots of zikrayat [memories] . . . I’ll keep fixing everything with my own hands . . . I have belonged to this place for a long time and feel that my roots are as deep as An-Naser Mosque [one of the oldest mosques in the old town of Nablus, completed in 1935], which my father participated in rebuilding after the earthquake of 1927. (Abu Alaa, 9 July 2010, Nablus)

14.5.4

Sense of Place as Nostalgic Memories Similarly to Abu Alaa, Abu Saleh was also nostalgic, and connected his sense of place to his childhood memories. In addition to a sense of community, he had blood ties with his home. Abu Saleh and his son tended the ruins every day and anxiously waited to have their home repaired. His stability lay in taking care of the ruins of his home until the repairs started. Abu Saleh’s home was not rebuilt until a decade after the Ejtiyah, when the municipality collaborated with a non-governmental organisation to provide financial support: My lifestyle changed 180 degrees. If the Ejtiyah were repeated, and if it were in my hands, I would not leave my home. The rest of the houses were partially destroyed, and everybody returned home, except our home, totally damaged and still is . . . Every day I went to check on my home after each dhur [noon] prayer. Even though it is still destroyed, I check the ruins and see if things are still the same. My childhood was in that home, even my son Saleh goes to visit our home every day, eshe fe dammi [it is something in my blood]. I feel nostalgic for my childhood and my land, elardh aghla men elum [the land is more precious than a mother]. The memories . . . childhood . . . children . . . it is a lifetime home. [Silence. Abu Saleh has a very deep, sad look in his eyes.] . . . I am sure it’ll be rebuilt again . . . and when that actually happens . . . I will ask someone to pinch me, so I know that I am alive and it’s real. (Abu Saleh, 9 July 2010, Nablus)

14.5.5

Sense of Place as Resistance Against Displacement and New Exile The sense of place in Raed’s narrative is inseparable from nostalgic memories of ancestors, or traumas of previous tragic wars and the Palestinians’ first exile, when they were uprooted from their villages in the 1948 Nakba (Pappé, 2006). Therefore, 9

This is translated from Arabic narrative, where the interviewee, Abu Alaa, used this particular term.

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fear of a new displacement fed Raed’s sense of place and encouraged him to stay, despite the surrounding atrocity. His story illustrates the weaponisation of home through the ‘walking through walls’ technique. Raed also thought that his sense of place was empowered by staying close to his community, as he felt safe just being together with them: I inherited this home from my maternal grandparents. It is more than 200 years old . . . It was severely damaged in 2002. The Israelis used bombs, missiles, explosions, bullets and even hammers to open the walls and walk through houses. It was so terrifying; we were shocked and didn’t know what to do . . . We learned our lesson from the first intifada, not to leave our homes, the same as we learned from the Palestinian 1948 Nakba . . . If it [the Ejtiyah] happens again, we’ll take it like everybody else, we’ll stay, and if our fate is to live, we will, and if we die then la hawla wala qowat ella be Allah [there is no power but from God], and we say elmout ma’ eljama’ah rahmeh [dying together is a mercy]. (Raed, 3 August 2011, Nablus)

14.6

Conclusion The interview extracts presented in this chapter underscore the multiple lived forms of sense of place that relate to everyday life, community and socially constructed meanings, state of mind, nostalgic memories and the fear of displacement. These attributes of sense of place were actually lived and practised, despite the trauma, in processes that safeguarded the Palestinian families’ devastated homes and helped to rebuild them. The experience of the Ejtiyah, combined with the reconstruction process, highlights the ways in which sense of place intersects with the production of social space, the duality of negotiation and anxiety, and the resilience and vulnerability of Palestinians, as individuals and as a community. These voices also clearly demonstrate the significance of the community and the healing power it generates in encouraging people to care for one another in times of disaster, to calm one another in times of agony, and to look out for one another in times of danger. Most Nablusis opened their homes to welcome others who were seeking shelter, thus creating a shared home. Their common fear fuelled their resistance and made them more determined to remain in their homes, repair them and hope they would ultimately one day return to them. The narratives I collected suggest that community organisations can help victims with recovery, especially when the problems are of such a magnitude that they require governmental or corporate assistance. The ways in which the Palestinians took care of their homes suggest a paradigm shift in regard to the influential role of sense of place in the rebuilding of a city from within after it has been severely attacked. The context presented here suggests that the scalable sense of place may comprise a counter-hegemonic spatial and behavioural practice of everyday resistance against urban violence. Home rebuilding in the face of urban violence is mostly empowered by individuals’ and communities’ sense of place. Furthermore, the Palestinians’ insistence on participating in and contributing to the repair of the damage provides yet more evidence of the meaning of home. In line with this book’s argument regarding how externally enforced power shapes our sense of

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place, my analysis shows how the enforcement of recurring displacements during the Israeli attacks, and the damage done to Palestinian homes, empowered Palestinians’ sense of place and creative resistance in wartime. Living in a place where people have limited control over their own everyday lives requires the continuous negotiation of opportunities to create a sense of stability through place. The construct of sense of place exceeds the physical and social contexts of people– place relations to include the political aspects of power relations that are contextually experienced by Palestinians. Likewise, it empowers Palestinians’ moqawameh (resistance) and sumoud (steadfastness), which may form part of their non-violent struggle against Israel’s colonial presence in their homeland.

Acknowledgements I wish to express my deep appreciation to the residents of the old town of Nablus, who passionately helped to demonstrate the experience of sense of place in action. Their stories of humanity, perseverance, resistance and resilience, despite their desperate living circumstances under the Israeli occupation, continue to be educational and inspiring.

References Abujidi, N. (2014) Urbicide in Palestine: Spaces of Oppression and Resilience, New York, Routledge. Akesson, B. (2014) ‘Castle and cage: meanings of home for Palestinian children and families’, Global Social Welfare: Research, Policy, and Practice, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 81–95. https://doi.org /10.1007/s40609-014-0004-y Altman, I. and Low, S. (eds) (1992) Place Attachment, New York, Plenum Press. Bleibleh, S. (2014) ‘The tradition of the oppressed: between resilience and frustration under the Israeli occupation’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 26, no. 1, p. 70. Bleibleh, S. (2012) ‘Everyday Life: spatial oppression and resilience under the Israeli occupation: the case of the old town of Nablus, Palestine’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Washington, Seattle. Bleibleh, S. (2015) ‘Walking through walls: the invisible war’, Space and Culture, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 156–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331213512919 Bleibleh, S., Perez, M. V. and Bleibleh, T. (2019) ‘Palestinian refugee women and the Jenin refugee camp: reflections on urbicide and the dilemmas of home in exile’, Urban Studies, vol. 56, no. 14, pp. 2897–2916. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098018811789 Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. M (2006) Home, New York, Routledge. Brown, B. B. and Perkins, D. D. (1992) ‘Disruptions in place attachment’, in Altman, I. and Low, S. (eds), Place Attachment, New York, Plenum Press, pp. 279–304. Bunkše, E. V. (2004) Geography and the Art of Life, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press. Cross, J. E. (2001) ‘What is sense of place?’, paper presented at Twelfth Headwaters Conference, Western State College, 2–4 November. Available at www.western.edu/academics/head waters/headwatersconference/archives/Headwaters12 (accessed 29 May 2012).

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Darwish, M. (2003) ‘A state of siege’, Arab World Books, 1 April [Blog]. Available at www.arabworldbooks.com/Literature/poetry4.html (accessed 21 October 2020). Graham, S. (2002) ‘Bulldozers and bombs: the latest Palestinian–Israeli conflict as asymmetric urbicide’, Antipode, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 642–649. Gregory, D. (2004) The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq, Malden, Blackwell. Hajjar, L. (2005) Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza, Berkeley, University of California Press. Hay, R. (1998) ‘Sense of place in developmental context,’ Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 5–29. http://doi.or/10.1006/jevp.1997.0060 Jackson, M. (1995) At Home in the World, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Lewicka, M. (2011) ‘Place attachment: how far have we come in the last 40 years?’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 207–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010. 10.001 Manzo, L. C. (2005) ‘For better or worse: exploring multiple dimensions of place meaning’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 67–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.jenvp.2005.01.002 Pappé, I. (2006) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford, Oneworld. Relph, E. C. (1976) Place and Placelessness, London, Pion. Reporters Sans Frontières (2003). Israel/Palestine: The Black Book. London: Pluto Press in association with Reporters without Borders. Said, E. W. and Mohr, J. (1999) After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, New York, Columbia University Press. Terkenli, T. S. (1995) ‘Home as a region’, Geographical Review, vol. 85, no. 3, pp. 324–334. Tuan, Y.-F. (1975) ‘Place: an experiential perspective’, Geographical Review, vol. 65, no. 2, pp. 151–165. Weizman, E. (2007) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London, Verso.

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15 The Political Ecology of Place Meaning Identity, Political Self-Determination and Illicit Resource Use in the Manas Tiger Reserve, India Dhananjaya Katju and Gerard Kyle

15.1

Introduction This chapter addresses the intersection of place-based identity and environmental outcomes, particularly as it relates to biodiversity conservation. Specifically, the chapter explores the nexus between indigenous identity and natural resource conservation. In a world rife with attempts to link indigenous cultures with the possibility of environmental sustainability, we highlight some terrible problems inherent in such simplistic associations. We focus on a so-called tribal community, the Bodos, who are believed to be indigenous to north-eastern India, and who reside both within and in proximity to one of the key spaces for biodiversity conservation in the subcontinent: the Manas Tiger Reserve. Building on past work framed within the literature on political ecology, sense of place and identity, our research explores the contingent nature of identity, and how political processes contribute to the development of place meaning and in turn to practices of place-making (Hopkins and Dixon, 2006). We illustrate that the Bodo sense of place – the meanings Bodo people ascribe to the landscape – is indelibly linked to Bodo identity. This chapter conducts a historical exploration of the politics underlying the development of a modern Bodo identity and the outcomes of its deployment for the governance of Manas. Our conceptualisation of place follows the phenomenological tradition of the human geographers Relph (1976), Buttimer (1980) and Seamon (1984). This perspective foregrounds the need to understand a locality and region from the perspective of people who normally live within that place or region – that is, the insiders. The approach moves beyond the understanding that place differs from space owing to the array of emotions and meanings individuals and collectives associate with specific locations. The emphasis here is on understanding that individuals’ experiences of place are contextual (Larkin et al., 2006). The perspective of the insiders’ world is grounded in the everyday experience of living in a specific environment. Ordinarily, in contexts in which place is uncontested, it involves processes and events that normally go unnoticed and unquestioned. Relph (1976) characterised the insider–outsider dichotomy as a continuum that runs from a deep, unselfconscious immersion in place (i.e. existential insideness) through to place alienation (i.e.

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existential outsideness). In the account that follows, we document how claims of insideness within a place are indelibly linked to identity and the political currency associated with such claims. In this context, the identities of insideness and outsideness have implications for individual livelihoods, well-being and biodiversity conservation. The study’s context is troubled by the heterogeneity of ethnic identities, the accompanying place identities, and an ethnic group’s attempts to legitimise its own placebased identity, delegitimise the other and authenticate its own claims to place.

15.2

Study Area and Methods The Manas Tiger Reserve covers 2,837 km2 of tropical moist forests directly south of the foothills of the Bhutan Himalayas. It includes a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is part of the Indo-Burma ‘biodiversity hotspot’. Manas National Park (876 km2) constitutes the core of the tiger reserve; the remaining area is a buffer zone comprising a few reserved forests (RFs). Manas is located in a semi-autonomous political unit within Assam, the Bodoland Territorial Areas District (BTAD or Bodoland) (Figures 15.1 and 15.2). From a biogeographical standpoint, it is part of an area known as the Eastern Duars, which forms the north-west portion of Assam. The Eastern Duars were part of the erstwhile district of Goalpara, and have historically been home to a multiplicity of ethnic groups whose history is steeped in their extensive use of the Manas forests to satisfy a variety of socio-cultural, political and economic needs. These groups include some designated as tribal (Bodo, Garo, Hajong and Rabha) as well as groups that are not (Assamese, Adivasi, Bengali, Koch Rajbanshi and Nepali). For the purposes of this chapter, we will focus on three ethnic groups: the Bodos, the Adivasis and the Bengali Muslims. These three groups have been involved in most incidents of identity-based ethnic conflict in Bodoland over the past four decades. Specifically, we detail the ethnic identity formation of all three groups through a Bodo cultural lens. From the position of the Bodo, we illustrate the instruments they employ to privilege and legitimise their sense of place and its constituent meanings. This chapter utilises data from research conducted between 2013 and 2016 among government officials, civil society groups and rural households in the Manas landscape. Fifty-five detailed semi-structured interviews were supplemented with extensive archival research and media studies to evaluate the ideological, discursive and inpractice forms of ethnic identity construction in relation to place-making. Respondents included government officials, academics, journalists, members of civil society groups, and members of seven ethnic groups. Additionally, we surveyed 215 households to assess patterns of livelihood production and forest resource use. Our theoretical lens is interpretative phenomenological analysis (Larkin et al., 2006). Using this approach, we attempt to (1) describe participants’ experiences of place and their meaning; (2) interpret individual meanings and contextualise them within the broader social, political and spatial milieu; and (3) provide insight into how participants’ relationships with identity and place are utilised to establish political ends.

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Figure 15.1 Location of the Manas Tiger Reserve with reference to India and Assam. Figure credit: Wildlife Trust of India.

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Figure 15.2 Location of the BTAD within the state of Assam. Figure credit: adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

15.3

Being Tribal as a Cultural Identity in India Current tribal policy and politics in India are steeped in the social-evolutionist beliefs and theories that were popular within the field of anthropology during the nation’s colonial era, which framed tribal communities as inhabitants of wild areas (forests, hills) who had primitive cultures and conducted unsophisticated, shifting agricultural practices (Karlsson, 2001). These essentialising discourses attempted to tie such groups to land in specific relationships, thus generating distinct ‘environmental subjects and identities’ that cast them as people of the forest/forest dwellers (Robbins, 2012, p. 215). Such paternalistic constructions in turn created the policy space for the colonial administration to view tribal people as in need of protection and improvement through specific modes of governance (Li, 2008), and in doing so ran contrary to such communities’ histories as powerful, sophisticated political entities (Guha, 1996). Post-independence India uncritically adopted the colonial concept of the ‘tribal’, codifying it into law through the creation of a formal category, the Scheduled Tribe (ST), and binding it with explicitly delineated geographical spaces. In doing so it crystallised tribal identity by sealing the ‘boundaries between tribe and non-tribe’ (Béteille, 1986, p. 318). Because of the tangible benefits of ST status through affirmative action, there has been an unending and ongoing succession of communities agitating to acquire that status. Certain STs currently attempt to identify with a more recent and globalised political domain, the United Nations category of indigenous peoples (IPs), using a discourse of subjugation, exploitation, loss of forest rights and overall marginalisation (Karlsson, 2003). The category of IP utilises temporality of settlement as its defining standard, a criterion that is particularly difficult to establish in much of India, given its long, complex histories of migration and residency.

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While recognising the ambiguities, vagueness and contradictions inherent in the ST and IP categories, academics caution against an overemphasis on critical analysis of the terms (Shah, 2007; Karlsson, 2003). Instead, they draw attention to the political and emotional spaces these terms create, as well as the strategies utilised by STs and IPs to situate themselves within these spaces and subsequently negotiate with them to further their territorial claims. Indigeneity is ‘not natural or inevitable, but neither is it simply invented, adopted or imposed. It is, rather, a positioning which draws upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes and repertoires of meaning, and emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle’ (Li, 2000, p. 151). The discourses associated with these socio-cultural categories and political spaces, as well as the power generated from the working of such spaces, may permit certain articulations while simultaneously excluding or suppressing others. We utilise such dynamics to study how the Bodos of western Assam leverage an ethno-regional identity as an ST that is simultaneously externally generated and self-realised in order to access key resources (political and material) within and on the fringes of the Manas Tiger Reserve.

15.4

The Tribal Category in Western Assam The Bodos are one of several closely related ethnic groups with cultural and linguistic affinities that inhabited and politically controlled parts of modern-day Assam until approximately the thirteenth century (Karlsson, 2000; Gait, 1906). The colonial administration’s largely negative characterisation of Assamese tribal culture, ecology and economy conformed with its overall depiction of tribal groups across the subcontinent (Rennie, 1866). Colonial criticisms of native economic and political institutions created the space for policies and practices that established administrative power and control over the Eastern Duars. A redrawing and subsequent concretisation of political and economic space was both accompanied and supported by a fixing of cultural boundaries. To serve a diversity of administrative and research needs, colonial officials and social scientists opportunistically identified tribal communities both as distinct tribes and as members of a tribal collective (Misra, 2005). Colonial land use and demography in the Eastern Duars were shaped by the political and cultural economies of three key commodities: tea, jute and timber (Saikia, 2015). A variety of tribal ethnic groups, collectively known as the Adivasis, were coercively transplanted from different parts of eastern India as labour for tea plantations and timber production (Behal, 2014; Gohain, 2007). Facilitated immigration from East Bengal (East Pakistan post-1955, Bangladesh post-1971) was driven by a need to boost the jute economy as well as the grain production to feed the vast tea labour force. East Bengali (predominantly Muslim) immigrants moved into forest and forest savannah commons officially known as wastelands and grazing reserves, which were not under intensive utilisation and thus not contributing to the colonial economy (Saikia, 2011). The value of such lands to the shifting subsistence mode of production and pastoralism of local communities (e.g. Bodos) was not factored into the administrative calculus, thus sowing the seeds for future discord between tribal people and Bengali Muslims.

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15.5

Tribal Agency and the Advent of a Dominant Bodo Identity The processes that would crystallise a Bodo identity and generate a struggle for autonomy (the Bodoland movement) had their roots in the tumultuous political upheavals that commenced with the postcolonial process of nation-building in the late 1940s. A key outcome was the splitting away of East Bengal as part of Pakistan, and this process of political fracturing engendered the sharpening of religious identities. Specifically, the Muslim was labelled a ‘foreigner’, perceived as an illegal infiltrator into the landscape of Assam and as emblematic of a Bengali identity; this was particularly influential in shaping Assamese linguistic nationalism (Misra, 2014). While the non-tribal middle class and elites of Assam had fared relatively well both politically and economically in pre-independence days, tribal groups such as the Bodos had accrued scant educational, economic or developmental benefits. In the early twentieth century, a new generation of young, educated tribal elite provided the impetus for a social movement and religious change, by promoting education among the poor and discouraging certain practices viewed as negative stereotypes of tribal cultures, such as the consumption of pork and alcohol. Religious practices were also modified: caste stratifications were rejected, Hindu scriptures were reinterpreted and new narratives about origin and identity emerged. The result was a novel and unique Bodo identity that simultaneously adopted and rejected elements of Hinduism (Sharma, 2011). From a political standpoint, the Bodo identity continued to be part of a broader tribal movement that resulted in 1967 in the formation of the Plain Tribals Council of Assam, which demanded half the land area of Assam as a separate state that they labelled ‘Udayachal’ (Goswami, 2014). By the late 1980s the Bodos had gained control of the movement through coercive means and replaced the idea of Udayachal with a demand for Bodoland. Land alienation became a pivotal political issue, with the Bodo claiming that the unlawful appropriation of tribal land had continued since Indian independence and had accelerated through unchecked illegal immigration from Bangladesh. In the early 1990s, the movement took a violent, militant turn that saw kidnappings, extortion and killings (Misra, 2014). Significant occupation of land within the Manas Tiger Reserve occurred during this period, predominantly by Bodos and Adivasis. Bodo militancy largely ended with the signing of a key accord in 2003 that resulted in the semi-autonomous Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), with broad-ranging legislative, administrative, executive and financial powers. Four districts (Baksa, Chirang, Kokrajhar and Udalguri) were amalgamated into Bodoland, an administrative unit to be governed by the BTC. The Bodos have since maintained political control over the BTC and Bodoland. Bodos view their livelihood and cultural identities as being intimately associated with forested landscapes. They express the meaning of their association with the landscape across multiple layers (Williams, 2014), from the instrumental (e.g. wellbeing), to the cultural (e.g. norms governing place-related action), to meanings attached to identity that anchor emotional ties to the landscape. In our research,

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Bodo respondents used a variety of expressions to portray an intimate association with forest ecosystems: ‘dependent’, ‘dweller’, ‘part and parcel of’. They also described themselves as the ‘indigenous’ people of Assam and the ‘first ethnicity to clear the forest and settle down here’, who had progressively lost their land to immigrants due to their own ‘simple’ nature. Such descriptions conform with colonial and postindependence understandings of tribal communities. Our research documented extensive illicit extraction of both fuelwood and timber for commercial purposes by Bodos, as well as widespread illegal occupation of RF land by them. Respondents spoke of voluntary land sales by Bodos to non-tribal settlers and the latter’s forced eviction during episodes of ethnic conflict.

15.5.1

Non-Bodo Communities as the ‘Other’ in Bodoland With an emphasis on identity (the Bodos) firmly situated in indigeneity (Bodos as original inhabitants) and politically driven by a linguistic focus (the adoption of Bodo as a lingua franca), the Bodoland movement has generated feelings of marginalisation among non-Bodo communities residing in the BTAD. Our research documented the widespread opinion that the Bodo accord’s sole beneficiaries were the Bodos. Such views are fuelled by political realities, such as the fact that a significant majority (75 percent) of BTC seats are reserved for tribal candidates (Bhattacharyya and Mukherjee, 2018). This has led to non-Bodo mobilisation to counter the perceived socio-political dominance of the Bodos. The two communities with which the Bodos have had recent and significant conflict are the Adivasis and the Bengali Muslims. Both conflicts are rooted in two key factors driving the Bodoland movement: a tribal identity and control over land designated for tribal people.

15.5.2

The ‘Primitive Adivasi’ The term ‘Adivasi’ encompasses a diversity of ethnic groups that have current ST designations across India, but not in Assam. The Indian Ministry of Tribal Affairs lists the following characteristics as ‘criteria followed for specification of a community’ as an ST: primitive traits, geographical isolation, distinct culture, shyness of contact with the community at large and backwardness (Government of India, 2017, p. 38). In our interviews, Bodo descriptions of Adivasi socio-cultural mores and livelihood practices tended to match official understandings and descriptions of tribals and tribalness. A Bodo respondent was remarkably candid – and devoid of irony – when asked how his community viewed Adivasis: As for Adivasis, we Bodos think of them as being stupid folk (buddhu jaisa aadmi). They use bows and arrows to hunt, their lifestyle is sort of uncivilised. So, we Bodo folk tend to look down upon them because they are not a developed community.

A key driver of ethnic tensions between the Bodos and the Adivasis is land control. Militant Bodos had virtually driven the Indian Forest Department out of Manas by the late 1990s, and this administrative vacuum enabled both Bodos and Adivasis to occupy

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land parcels within the Manas RFs. Bodo informants frequently characterised Adivasis as encroachers on forest land and destroyers of forests. A ‘Bodo militant’ respondent stated that the recent conflict between Bodos and Adivasis was primarily due to the latter’s ingress into forest land. Counter-intuitively, this conflict has frequently resulted in increased incursions by Adivasis into RF land, due to their unwillingness to return to locations where they have been subjected to violence. Despite the recent conflict and ongoing tensions, Bodo discourse also reflected a complex, conflicted relationship between the two ethnic groups. While expressing a sense of solidarity by viewing Adivasis as ‘bona fide forest residents’ and including them ‘within the label of tribal’, one Bodo respondent criticised Adivasi attempts to acquire ST status within Assam, claiming that the Adivasis’ economic and educational status precluded the need for affirmative action. However, in fact the Adivasis of Assam rank among the state’s lowest in terms of educational, economic and health indicators (Ananthanarayanan, 2010).

15.5.3

The ‘Encroaching Muslim’ Bodo respondents overwhelmingly viewed Bengali Muslims as illegal occupiers of tribal land at best, and as dangerous foreigners at worst. The facilitated settlement of western Assam and modern-day Bodoland by Muslim immigrants reached a peak in the years prior to and following the subcontinent’s independence (from the British) and subsequent partition (into India and Pakistan) in 1947. Official colonial documents contain graphic descriptions of this movement as an ‘invasion of a vast horde of land-hungry Bengali immigrants, mostly Muslims’, who served as an ‘advance guard – or rather the scouts – of a huge army following closely at their heels’, with comparisons to the ‘mass movement of a large body of ants’ (Mullan and Government of India, 1932, pp. 49, 51). The Bodos have historically contested the legality of the role of the colonial government in facilitating the settlement of modern-day Assam by Adivasis and Bengali Muslims and maintain that illegal immigration from Bangladesh has continued since its founding as an independent nation in 1971. Additionally, Bodo respondents frequently characterised the Bengali Muslim community as overwhelming them demographically, turning the Bodos into a demographic minority in their own land. This is particularly noteworthy given that the assignment of villages to the BTAD was based on demographic considerations. Bodo concerns are frequently bolstered by rhetoric that highlights religiously sanctioned polygamy among Muslims as the driver of population growth. However, Bodos have also voluntarily sold their land to Muslims through informal transactions, since they traditionally have not held formal titles to their lands. Yet another key aspect of the Bodo understanding of Muslims is that the latter are an industrious people with a diversity of skills of value to local economies. A Bodo informant said that if he wanted any sort of work done on his house, he would always prefer a Muslim to a Bodo due to the former’s work ethic, efficiency and promptness. Multiple Bodo respondents expressed concern over the paucity of available

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agricultural labour since the exodus of Muslims from rural parts of the BTAD following ethnic conflict. The differing work ethic also manifests itself in each group’s relationship with the land, its meaning and its use. The Bodos characterise their relationship with the land as sustainable, while portraying Muslims’ relationship with it as exploitative. They draw upon indigenous platitudes to characterise the forest landscape as part of the self and their self-construal. The multifaceted relationship between these two communities was aptly summed by a Bodo informant: The Bodos think that they [Muslims] are very intelligent, and just by looking at them, we Bodos get angry, especially when we see how populous they are. They will say that they marry multiple times . . . that is the first thing a Bodo will say. As soon as a Bodo gets to know that the person he’s talking to is a Muslim, he will say ‘bloody Muslim!’ (saala Muslim) because they keep changing their wives . . . that is their habit. Then the Bodo will say that the Muslim is willing to do any kind of work, even the sort of work that Bodos are not willing to do. He will say, ‘I abused them and he will still come to me saying sir, sir. They are not ashamed . . . what sort of people are these, what sort of community is this?’ That is how Bodos think.

Finally, respondents expressed concerns that aligned with generalised concerns about militant fundamentalist Islam. A Bodo academic raised the spectre of ‘jihadis and alQaeda’ as well as ‘terrorists’ from ‘Bangladesh’, without providing data to support his claims or attempting to identify or contextualise the motivations of such groups. Conversely, when discussing the long history of violence by Bodo militants, he positioned them as a political strong arm that acted as a bulwark against political forces threatening the Bodo community.

15.6

Discussion The Bodos’ sense of place embodies many of the elements previously reported in the literature. It is strongly emotional (Low and Altman, 1992; Tuan, 1974), integral for understanding individual and collective identities (Fried, 1963), and central for understanding Bodo intentions and values (Windsor and McVey, 2005). We found that Bodos leveraged their sense of place to create problems for other ethnic groups and the environment. While the importance of place for the Bodos is without question, our illustration of their strategic manipulation of place meaning for political gain contrasts with much of the sense of place literature, which has predominantly focused on the essential role of place in human well-being. Our investigation also provides insight into the historical roots of Bodos’ contemporary sense of place and place meaning. Our analysis has provided an account that moves beyond the static depiction of place meaning to reveal the social and political processes that shape and contest place-making. The Bodos’ sense of place is situated within a dynamic and complex social and political history. Cultural and religious assimilation and differentiation, along with linguistic similarities and differences, have shaped, altered, engendered and contested the identities of place and people among many communities in Assam. The demand for a separate state on the basis of such similarities and differences begs the question of who exactly the Bodos are.

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Despite widespread disagreements about a uniform Bodo ethnicity, several ethnic groups (Garo, Rabha, Mech, Dimasa and Moran) are assumed to be part of the larger Bodo identity (Karlsson, 2000). Religion, caste, notions of ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’, and social status combine to form an intricate dynamic that drives the adoption and rejection of identities and associated labels. Prejudices based on notions of the ‘primitive’, however, have led to a simultaneous rejection of a tribal identity in an effort towards social mobility, as well as its adoption to acquire political power and livelihood benefits in the form of affirmative action. Bodo militancy has been a significant dynamic in the political landscape of Bodoland. In addition to precipitating interethnic conflict, it has mediated both patterns of land use and land cover change (e.g. the clearing of forested land for agricultural production, or the conversion of relatively intact forest to a more open, wooded savannah as a result of selective logging), contributed to the establishment of Bodo political dominance, and been a principal driving force of an informal economy of illicit timber extraction from the Manas landscape. It occurs in a landscape that is virtually devoid of developmental infrastructure and has a severe paucity of sustainable livelihood opportunities apart from agricultural production. Most accounts lack appropriate context and tend to focus disproportionately on the spectacle (kidnappings, murders) rather than key drivers (lack of development, socio-cultural marginalisation). Concomitantly, the tendencies of various Bodo entities to downplay the excesses of the militants are equally problematic, although comprehensible in terms of the political, economic and sociocultural gains that have accrued to the Bodo community – albeit disproportionately to its ‘dominant elite’ (Barbora, 2015, p. 299). This chapter has demonstrated the ever-changing way in which the Bodos have aligned with ‘the nation, the government, and their own, unique tribal place’ through the enactment of cultural and political agency (Li, 2000, p. 151). In doing so, it has highlighted the dark side of the Bodo tribal category: its essentialism-driven oppression of non-tribal groups, as well as the Bodo elite’s capture of resources and institutions through the appropriation of global discourses pertaining to tribalness (Shah, 2007; Li, 2000). In a landscape with scant modes for livelihood generation apart from agriculture, limited means for generating disposable income, and a diversity of risks to the system of predominantly rain-fed cultivation, the Bodos have relied on the Manas landscape to alleviate risks to both crop production and household revenue. They have illegally occupied forest land within Manas and illicitly extracted commercially valuable forest resources (timber, fuelwood) while self-identifying as forestdwelling protectors of the forest. In doing so, they have expressed a sense of land alienation resulting from the practices of non-tribal residents (Adivasis and Muslims), whom they portray as having encroached on tribal land. As a result, Bodos have come to view themselves as socio-culturally distinct from other communities within Assam, which in turn has provided them with the impetus to carve out a space for autonomy and self-determination (Bodoland) while articulating with hegemonic ways of knowing (being tribal).

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Conclusion The Bodos’ self-realised, ethno-regional identity as a tribal people is a ‘positioning’ that draws upon their ‘historically sedimented practices’ (e.g. shifting cultivation, timber extraction), ‘landscapes’ (Manas) and ‘repertoires of meaning’ (forest dwellers, marginalised autochthons), and has emerged ‘through particular patterns of engagement and struggle’ (the Bodoland movement) (Li, 2000, p. 151). It is simultaneously generated internally (through self-identification as indigenous) and externally (through description and classification by colonial and postcolonial states). It came into being through interactions with a normalising state machinery that attempted to standardise the complex precolonial socio-political and economic landscape with the aim of making it more legible and amenable to its own administrative imperatives. The subsequent interaction of the Bodos with the rationality of colonial and postcolonial states was not a straightforward one, mainly because the diverse objectives of successive governments were ‘often in tension with one another and sometimes contradictory’ (Li, 2010, p. 386). Throughout the process of development of a tribal identity, the Bodos have demonstrated agency in opportunistically (often simultaneously) accepting and discarding the classificatory tropes of the state. In recent times, they have utilised the state’s standardising practices to generate essentialisms regarding other ethnic groups – for example, to challenge the tribalness (Adivasis) or citizenship (Muslims) of the other. This recreated sense of place privileges their tribal identity and authenticates their territorial claims.

Acknowledgements This chapter emerged from Dhananjaya Katju’s thesis research, which was generously supported by the Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences, the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, the Center on Conflict and Development, the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies, and the Applied Biodiversity Science Program (IGERT number 0654377) at Texas A&M University. In India, we particularly wish to thank the Indian and Assam Forest Departments, Bodo Territorial Council, All Bodo Student Union, Action Northeast Trust and Wildlife Trust of India for enabling relevant field research through a diversity of logistical support.

References Ananthanarayanan, S. (2010) ‘Scheduled Tribe status for Adivasis in Assam’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 290–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2010.494823 Barbora, S. (2015) ‘Uneasy homecomings: political entanglements in contemporary Assam’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 290–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/0085 6401.2015.1032473

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Behal, R. P. (2014) One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam, New Delhi, Tulika Books. Béteille, A. (1986) ‘The concept of tribe with special reference to India’, European Journal of Sociology, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 297–318. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000397560000463X Bhattacharyya, H. and Mukherjee, J. (2018) ‘Bodo ethnic self-rule and persistent violence in Assam: a failed case of multinational federalism in India’, Regional and Federal Studies, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 469–487. https://doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2018.1478293 Buttimer, A. (1980) ‘Home, reach and the sense of place’, in Buttimer, A. and Seamon, D. (eds), The Human Experience of Place and Space, London, Croom Helm, pp. 166–187. Fried, M. (1963) ‘Grieving for a lost home’, in Duhl, L. J. (ed.), The Urban Condition: People and Policy in the Metropolis, New York, Basic Books, pp. 151–171. Gait, E. A. (1906) A History of Assam, Calcutta, Thacker, Spink & Co. [Online]. Available at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006573889 (accessed 22 October 2020). Gohain, H. (2007) ‘A question of identity: Adivasi militancy in Assam’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 42, no. 49, pp. 13–16. Goswami, U. (2014) Conflict and Reconciliation: The Politics of Ethnicity in Assam, New Delhi, Routledge. Government of India (2017) Annual Report, 2016–17, New Delhi, Ministry of Tribal Affairs. Guha, S. (1996) ‘Forest polities and agrarian empires: the Khandesh Bhils, c. 1700–1850’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 133–153. https://doi.org/10.1177 /001946469603300202 Hopkins, N. and Dixon, J. (2006) ‘Space, place and identity: issues for political psychology’, Political Psychology, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 173–185. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221 .2006.00001.x Karlsson, B. G. (2000) Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People’s Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal, Richmond, Curzon Press. Karlsson, B. G. (2001) ‘Indigenous politics: community formation and indigenous peoples’ struggle for self-determination in northeast India’, Identities, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 7–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2001.9962683 Karlsson, B. G. (2003) ‘Anthropology and the “indigenous slot”: claims to and debates about indigenous peoples’ status in India’, Critique of Anthropology, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 403–423. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X03234003 Larkin, M., Watts, S. and Clifton, E. (2006) ‘Giving voice and making sense in interpretative phenomenological analysis’, Qualitative Research in Psychology, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 102–120. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp062oa Li, T. M. (2000) ‘Articulating indigenous identity in Indonesia: resource politics and the tribal slot’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 149–179. https://doi.org/10.1017 /S0010417500002632 Li, T. M. (2008) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Li, T. M. (2010) ‘Indigeneity, capitalism and the management of dispossession’, Current Anthropology, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 385–414. https://doi.org/10.1086/651942 Low, S. M. and Altman, I. (1992) ‘Place attachment: a conceptual inquiry’, in Altman, I. and Low, S. M. (eds), Place Attachment, Boston, Springer, pp. 1–12. Misra, S. (2005) ‘Changing frontiers and spaces: the colonial state in nineteenth-century Goalpara’, Studies in History, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 215–246. https://doi.org/10>.1177/025764300502100204

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Misra, U. (2014) India’s North-East: Identity Movements, State and Civil Society, New Delhi, Oxford University Press. Mullan, C. S. and Government of India (1932) Census of India, 1931, Vol. III, Assam, Part I: Report, Calcutta, Government of India. Relph, E. (1976) Place and Placelessness, London, Pion. Rennie, D. F. (1866) Bhotan and the Story of the Dooar War, London, J. Murray. Robbins, P. (2012) Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed., Malden, Wiley Blackwell. Saikia, A. (2011) Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826–2000, New Delhi, Oxford University Press. Saikia, A. (2015) ‘Jute in the Brahmaputra Valley: the making of flood control in twentieth-century Assam’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 1405–1441. https://doi.org/10.1017 /S0026749X14000201 Seamon, D. (1984) ‘Phenomenologies of place and environment’, Professional Geographer, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 242–242. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1984.0242a.x Shah, A. (2007) ‘The dark side of indigeneity? Indigenous people, rights and development in India’, History Compass, vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 1806–1832. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007 .00471.x Sharma, J. (2011) Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Tuan, Y.-F. (1974) Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall. Williams, D. R. (2014) ‘Making sense of “place”: reflections on pluralism and positionality in place research’, Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 131, pp. 74–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.land urbplan.2014.08.002 Windsor, J. E. and McVey, J. A. (2005) ‘Annihilation of both place and sense of place: the experience of the Cheslatta T’En Canadian First Nation within the context of large-scale environmental projects’, Geographical Journal, vol. 171, no. 2, pp. 146–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14754959.2005.00156.x

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Part V

Urban Change Rapid urbanisation is one of the biggest transformative dynamics of our time. Urban growth is driving continuous and often contested changes in the socio-spatial fabric of cities. Today, urbanisation occurs intertwined with processes such as the commodification, gentrification and marginalisation of space and communities. These processes accelerate competing and often coexisting place meanings that are continuously formulated, negotiated and (re-)narrated among people. Reconsidering how we make sense of places in the context of urban change promises to help us disclose the multiple layers of place contestations that pertain to many cities undergoing transformations worldwide. In this part, the authors of the following three chapters reflect on and highlight the dynamics around multiple and conflicting senses of place, drawing from case studies in North America, Europe and Latin America. They share a critical appraisal of urban change dynamics emerging under a capitalist logic of urban space appropriation. Senses of place are considered as discursively constructed and (re-)formulated, expressing themselves in particular and temporary socio-spatial configurations. From different angles, the chapters reveal the inherent power asymmetries and forces at play when senses of place become deliberately articulated, homogenised or creatively destructed (Chapters 16 and 17) and how the unfolding of senses of place can be largely determined by social and racial inequalities (Chapter 18). The authors consequently call for vigilance concerning the threats against multiple senses of place when they channel structural and political imbalances. Dominant discourses about urban change can create and impose a falsely homogenised sense of place, as illustrated for the city of Seattle, one of the fastest growing and dramatically changing cities in the USA. Chapter 16 uncovers how such hegemonic discourses are deliberately constructed, deployed and become challenged by divergent perspectives. A one-sided and politically distorting place narrative can underrepresent marginalised voices of the urban society. The notion of gentrification is unpacked as one of the dynamics behind reconfiguring senses of place in Chapter 17. Senses of place become reshaped and channelled, following a capitalist logic of supporting place-based profitable values. Place dynamics in the city of Barcelona, Spain demonstrate how the urban fabric is semiotically designed and forged in order to simulate authentic experiences of places rendered as objects of symbolic consumption. Gentrification evokes conflicted senses of place in the individual, manifesting in subjective ambivalence, contradictions in place-related affect and interpretations. The multiple senses of place of overlooked and invisible urban communities are the guiding theme of Chapter 18. Urban change and the commodification of urban space

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interferes with the multiple ways in which marginalised urban communities appropriate spaces. Understanding the senses of place and place meanings of people whose daily lives are on the streets of Brazilian cities problematises traditional conceptions of sense of place. Spaces in the city that people living in the streets have to appropriate as a condition of sheer survival are often the same spaces that reject them as human beings and citizens. The unfolding of multiple senses of place is found to be largely determined by social and racial inequalities. In sum, the chapters included in this part provide a nuanced understanding of how urban changes articulate politically sensitive reconfigurations of sense of place, highlighting the need to refine the conceptual languages (e.g. hegemonic discourses, space appropriation, semiocapitalism) used to better understand the interface between place change and changing senses of place in the contemporary city.

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16 Uncovering Competing Senses of Place in a Context of Rapid Urban Change Lynne C. Manzo and Richard Desanto

16.1

Introduction At the start of the twenty-first century we entered the age of the Anthropocene, an epoch when human influence on the planet has instigated unprecedented environmental change. Flux and uncertainty have become the new norm. One central environmental change is rapid urbanisation and urban change. While scholars have long considered urban space to be fluid, complex and dynamic, the global challenges we now face have only served to compound that urban complexity and dynamism. Intense and rapid urban change challenges our understandings of the places of our everyday lives as their meanings, values and symbols – essential components of sense of place – shift with the changing landscape. In this chapter, we examine multiple, competing senses of place in a rapidly changing city through a lens of critical theory, which concerns itself with ‘forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism’ (Lindlof and Taylor, 2002, p. 49). In particular, we analyse discourses around urban change in the city of Seattle, one of the fastest growing and most dramatically changing cities in the USA, in order to uncover how hegemonic discourses are constructed and deployed to establish a normative order, and how those dominant narratives are challenged by divergent perspectives. Although the specifics of the urban change and discourse we highlight are fairly unique to Seattle, the broader dynamics around multiple competing senses of place vying for expression pertain to any city undergoing transformation. In analysing competing narratives and demonstrating the power of dominant discourses to create a falsely homogenised sense of place, this chapter offers a cautionary tale for vigilance against the erasure of multiple senses of place.

16.2

Evolving Senses of Place More than 20 years ago, Williams and Stewart (1998) defined sense of place as ‘a collection of meanings, beliefs, symbols, values and feelings that individuals or groups

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associate with a particular locality’ that is ‘continuously constructed and reconstructed within individual minds, shared cultures and social practices’ (p. 19). In seeking to broaden conceptualisations of sense of place, they emphasised the social and historical processes by which ‘place meanings are constructed, negotiated and politically contested’ (p. 20). Later work on sense of place has also emphasised its socially constructed and contested nature. For example, Kyle and Chick (2007) argue that sense of place encompasses both subjective qualities and social context. Drawing on Hay (1998), they posit that place meanings are ‘conditioned by cultural affiliation’, and that both personal meaning and social context play a critical role. More recently, a 2019 special issue on sense of place in Sustainability Science suggests the growing importance of the subject now, when the pace and scale of environmental change has become ‘staggering’ (Masterson et al., 2019). Although the focus of that issue is on social-ecological systems, it has relevance for understanding the processes behind, and responses to, urban change like that we see in Seattle. For example, Ingalls et al. (2019) note that ‘place meanings are produced and compete across a highly uneven landscape of power wherein some place claims are privileged while others struggle to gain traction’, and that ‘certain place meanings come to dominance when they achieve the status of “normal” although dominant claims typically face the threat of subaltern claims, and so the process of place-making is never finished’ (p. 625). Building on this work, and in keeping with the spirit of this volume, we pluralise and problematise senses of place in considering the ways that the space, identity and future of a rapidly changing city entail the contestation and navigation of multiple competing senses of place. By senses of place, we mean the constellation of place interpretations, meanings1 and values continually formulated and negotiated among collectives of people developed in relation to the socio-physical characteristics of the space itself. We wish to underscore several critical aspects of this definition. First, it involves multiple, competing and coexisting understandings of a place. Like ethos, senses of place have to do with the characteristics of a place drawn from the various experiences, beliefs and ideals of its inhabitants. Yet in pluralising and problematising senses of place, our perspective is a critical departure from an understanding of the construct as a singular, essentialised and dominant characteristic of a place. Second, these multiple and competing senses of place entail an active and ongoing negotiation, a process of sense-making that recognises the agency of those involved. As Ingalls et al. (2019) note, these negotiations take place in an uneven landscape of power as people struggle to determine whose place values and meanings get realised. Third, articulations of senses of place involve aspirational and normative projects in that various stakeholders compete to realise their vision for what a place is and should be. Finally, there is an emotional implication of these negotiations among competing senses of place, particularly in a context of change as people’s identities, values, understandings and visions of place are challenged, triggering anxiety about an uncertain future for themselves and their place. 1

We distinguish place interpretation from place meaning because we consider interpretation to be an active process involving the intake of information/experience and making sense of that information/experience (meaning-making), while meaning is the result of that process.

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The Unsettled Nature of Urban Space and Place The pluralisation and problematisation of senses of place derive from the nature of place itself. As Gieryn (2000) notes, ‘places are not only materially carved out of space but interpreted, narrated, understood, felt, and imagined – their meanings pliable in the hands of different people or cultures, malleable over time, and inevitably contested’ (p. 455). Moreover, urban space overall is inherently contested, ‘a shifting landscape of experimentation’ for society (Peck and Tickel, 2002). Urban space is ‘difficult’ in that it is fundamentally ambiguous, composed of competing forces that reflect the timeless, humble, reiterative rhythms of everyday life that are, at the same time, new and constantly changing (Lefebvre, 1991). Thus, urban space as a whole, and the places that make up urban life,2 are in constant communication and defined by a complex realm of social practices (Chase et al., 2008, p. 6; see also Purcell, 2008). The everyday experiences of urban space and urban life are essential for considering changing senses of place as these create personal and collective demands on the sociospatial order. ‘The practices of everyday urbanism . . . inevitably lead to change not through abstract political ideologies . . . but through specific concerns that arise from the lived experience’ of urban dwellers (Chase et al., 2008, p. 10). However, when it comes to shaping urban space today, economic growth has become the imperative, arguably more so than the lived experience of place. As Eizenberg (2013) notes, the history of urban transformations has been inextricably linked with capitalism as space has become a dominant means for using, producing and controlling economic surplus (see also Harvey, 1989). Thus, neoliberalism – the dominant political-economic strategy of late capitalism – ‘uses space as its privileged instrument’ (Benner and Theodor, 2002, quoted in Eizenberg, 2013, p. 4). Urban space is perceived and acted upon as a commodity that not only shapes the urban political and social structure, but influences the spatial organisation and experience of everyday life (Eizenberg, 2013; Tajbakhsh, 2001). As a result, cities are becoming ever more unequal and segregated (Purcell, 2008) as people experience greater socio-spatial precarity. Everyday urban space remains a crucial arena of debate and discourse around culture and society, revealing tensions between oppression and resistance (Chase et al., 2008). The goal of the everyday is to orchestrate what Bakhtin (1981) calls ‘dialogism’ – the constant interaction among meanings. This is what occurs when language becomes relativised, de-privileged and contains competing definitions of the same idea (as summarised by Chase et al., 2008, p. 8). In this chapter, we attempt to ‘dialogise’ the city and unpack the multiple senses of place expressed by its inhabitants and the local media in the context of dramatic change. In doing so, we examine the ruptures that come with intense change, recognising that the value of ruptures lies in revealing both the limitations and possibilities of urban life. 2

Here we follow the general argument of Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) that what begins as undifferentiated space evolves into place as we come to know it and endow it with meaning and value. Thus, place refers to the specific locales and loci of meaning that constitute urban space and reflect people’s lived experience of that space.

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A Discursive Approach to Senses of Place An examination of multiple competing senses of place lends itself particularly well to a discursive analysis, as place interpretations (processes of meaning-making) and meanings themselves (i.e. the content resulting from that interpretive process) are socially constructed and expressed through linguistic practices (Di Masso et al., 2014). As Ryan (2018) notes, ‘when people talk about something or when we act, we always draw on or activate certain meanings – resources or discourse. We often do so within dominant discourses, which characterize ways of talking, writing, thinking, behaving and theorizing that prevail at certain times in certain arenas of life’ (p. 15). Like Ryan, we treat discourse(s) as ‘socially organized frameworks of meaning that define what can be said and done’ (Burnam, 1994, p. 2, quoted in Ryan, 2018). These discourses ‘form regimes of truth which present like social facts except that they exist in a state of fluidity and are coextensive with movements of power’ (Ryan, 2018, p. 16). Following Ryan, we consider how discourses around urban change act to legitimise particular senses of place, how they reveal assumptions about what is normal or desirable and how they serve to strengthen or weaken particular realities and viewpoints through the focus of the discourse. In considering what discourses are muted, we offer views that challenge the ‘undialogised’ hegemonic view of the city. This particular approach to discourse stems from Foucault and the post-structuralist view, which not only challenges a singular sense of place but also problematises claims of authenticity that are implicit in claims of meaning. After all, a desire for a return to the so-called authentic, along with ideologies of essential, unchanging and deep meaning, has been enmeshed in practices of domination (Dovey, 2002). The poststructuralist practice of pluralising goes hand in hand with a discursive approach in challenging a singular hegemonic sense of place. In this way, discursive strategies ‘demonstrate how place meanings are socially constructed and therefore embedded in the structures of power in everyday life’ (Dixon and Durrheim, 2000, quoted in Williams and Miller, 2021).

16.5

The Seattle Context Since 2010, the city of Seattle, located in the north-west corner of the continental USA, has been one of the fastest growing cities in the nation. Ranked number one in growth nationally in 2016 (US Census Bureau, 2019), it has remained among the top five cities in the USA for growth since then. In terms of sheer numbers, this growth translates to an average of an additional 15,685 people per year (Balk, 2017). A key part of this growth has been a boom in the technology industry. The city houses the global headquarters of Amazon, and corporate offices of Google and Facebook, while Microsoft’s headquarters lie just east of the city limits (Levy, 2019). These and other companies have ‘contributed to a population and wealth boom and the attendant struggles that come with it’, including ‘soaring housing prices’ (Romano,

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2019). For example, in 2018, the median household income for Seattle was recorded at US$93,500 – a 35 per cent increase from 2000 (Balk, 2019). Alongside these spikes in income came an increase in housing costs across the city. The median average cost of a single-family home grew 12.7 per cent between 2017 and 2018, over double the national average of 6.1 per cent (Rosenberg, 2018a). Similarly, rent has increased from a gross median US Census estimate of US$1,555 in 2017 for a two-bedroom apartment to US$2,454 in 2019 (Zillow, 2019). As the prices of homes rose, so too did the number of people living in a state of socio-economic precarity. The share of Seattle’s population living below the national poverty line of US$25,701 per year for a family of four is now 12.5 per cent, a significant difference from the Seattle median household income of US$100,630 (Semega et al., 2019). Additionally, although Seattle’s homeless population hovered around 9,000 people from 2010 to 2013 (Greenstone and Davilla, 2019), these numbers have risen annually, peaking in 2018 at 12,112 people, with a slight decrease in 2019 (Greenstone and Davilla, 2019). This larger trend caused city officials to declare a housing emergency in 2015 (Seattle.gov, 2019). All of these demographic shifts set the stage for the emergence of competing senses of place existing simultaneously, but not always peacefully, in the city.

16.6

Critical Moments of Unsettling Senses of Place In this section, we examine two critical moments in Seattle’s socio-spatial trajectory as our point of entry for a discursive analysis of the city’s changing senses of place. Both of these cases have catalysed debate about Seattle’s transformation and what it implies for the experience, identity and future of the city. The first case is the construction of the Amazon Spheres and the competing interpretations and responses that appear in local discourse surrounding these structures and their status as emerging icons of the city. The second is a television documentary titled Seattle Is Dying (2019) that examines the homelessness and drug ‘crisis’ in the city, and the responses it received in the mainstream and alternative local media. Together, these two cases reflect the full arc of socio-spatial precarity evident in the Seattle landscape. We systematically examined the narratives around each of these cases and identified prominent themes that emerge in the media debates in order to understand the competing senses of place being expressed in the city. For example, in Case 1, we reviewed archival data for references to the Spheres in the local media before, during and after the completion of their construction, with particular attention to the use of discourse in co-creating their symbolic values. For Case 2, we transcribed the documentary and conducted a content analysis of the ways that the city and place changes are represented, with a focus on the use of rhetoric to maintain a particular normative order – that is, the capitalist hegemony over society and state. Together, competing senses of place revealed themselves through fundamental ontological anxiety via debates about the struggle for the ‘heart and soul of the city’, in attempts to articulate the contemporary ‘Seattle ethos’ (Licata, 2018).

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16.6.1

Case 1: The Spheres The Amazon Spheres are three multistorey, overlapping orbs of steel and glass, built to provide working space and a lounge for Amazon employees (Figure 16.1). The Spheres also serve as greenhouses for an extraordinary array of flora. As a private space for Amazon employees, they are open to the public in a limited fashion for tours. Their ultramodern aesthetic and state-of-the-art technology have made them symbols of high-tech glamour, sustainability and imagination. As such, they have become a lightning rod for debate about the changing senses of place of Seattle. Dramatically opened in 2018 by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with the command ‘Alexa, open the Spheres!’(Shafer, 2018), the structures have been the subject of discourse from university classes on the future of the city to popular media considerations of the Seattle ethos and where the city is heading. Local news coverage by The Seattle Times and Seattle Magazine highlights the symbolic value of the structures. Since their conception, the Spheres have been heralded as indicators of Seattle’s ‘futuristic ambition and industry’ (Romano, 2019, p. A1), with an executive from Amazon declaring that the ‘buildings embody Seattle’s ethos’ (Shafer, 2018). Local government officials echoed that conflation of the city and the corporate architectural icon during the opening of the Spheres. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan claimed: ‘Seattle is the coolest city in the country, leading the way with innovative urban projects like the Spheres’ (Shafer, 2018). Similarly, another local politician described the Spheres as ‘a permanent expression of [Amazon’s] commitment to Seattle’ (Day and Gilbert, 2018). This rhetoric works to weld Amazon and its

Figure 16.1 The Amazon Spheres in Seattle, Washington. Photo credit: Richard Desanto.

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vast economic dominance to Seattle’s civic identity, resulting in a neoliberal distillation of Seattle as a cutting-edge visionary city. Amazon’s effect on the city has been a major part of the urban change discourse articulated in The Seattle Times. In 2019, the Times began a series entitled ‘Amazon at 25: a yearlong look at how a Seattle company has changed commerce, work and everyday life in its first quarter century’. In one instalment, a former Amazon Web Service executive claims that the coevolution of Seattle and Amazon has helped to ‘brand’ the city ‘as a high-tech center for the country and, in fact, the world’ (Romano, 2019, p. A17). He references Seattle’s heritage of company associations when suggesting that the city has gone from ‘Jet City’ – a nod to Boeing’s past success in Seattle – to ‘Cloud City’, underscoring Amazon’s influence on the city’s identity via internet commerce (Romano, 2019, p. A17). The executive further claims that Amazon’s prosperity has been good ‘for the morale of the Pacific Northwest, and civic pride’ (Romano, 2019, p. A17), extending this corporate and civic oneness to a regional level. There is resistance to this singular celebratory vision of Seattle through the lens of Amazon and the Spheres. Journalists have referred to the Spheres as ‘the centerpiece of the retail juggernaut’s $4 billion urban campus’ (Day, 2018), an ‘ostentatious display’ (Romano, 2019, p. A17) and ‘a corporate vanity project’ (Day, 2018). These points of view are further charged when put into the context of Seattle’s affordable housing crisis and rising rates of homelessness. The widening gap between wealthy and poor within the city explains why one journalist writing on the Spheres refers to Seattle as ‘the lab where Amazon conducts its experiments in capitalism’ (Clement, 2018). As an avatar for Amazon, the Spheres have become the site for protests, civic actions and press conferences. It was not accidental that one city council member held a press conference at the Spheres to discuss a ‘head tax’ that would have charged US$275 per employee for Seattle-based businesses making more than US$20 million per year (Semuels, 2018). In a separate incident, a participant in a May Day protest for workers’ rights allegedly threw a rock at the Spheres, creating a four-inch scratch in a US$10,000 pane of glass (Green, 2018). In adopting the structures as the site for these moments of unrest, protestors saturate the Spheres with symbolic importance as places of resistance to corporate-led urban change, further fracturing any illusion of a singular sense of Seattle.

16.6.2

Case 2: Seattle Is Dying On 16 March 2019, a major Seattle television network owned by a conservative national broadcasting corporation aired a documentary entitled Seattle Is Dying. The journalist behind the documentary sought to address homelessness in the city along with the opioid crisis and shortcomings in the criminal justice system around drug arrests, co-implicating these three phenomena. The documentary aired nationally and catalysed vigorous debate about the nature and future of the city. It began with the provocation ‘what if Seattle is dying and we don’t even know it?’, then pursued the proposition thus:

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Figure 16.2 Sidewalk scenes like this were the target of assumptions and criticism in the Seattle Is Dying documentary. Photo credit: Richard Desanto.

This story is about a seething, simmering anger that is now boiling over into outrage. It is about people who have felt compassion, yes, but who no longer feel safe, no longer feel like they are heard, no longer feel like they are protected. It is about lost souls who wander our streets, untethered to home or family or reality, chasing a drug, which in turn chases them. It is about the damage they inflict to themselves, to be sure, but also on the fabric of this place where we live. This story is about a beautiful jewel that has been violated, and a crisis of faith amongst a generation of Seattleites falling out of love with their home.

The rhetorical devices in this framing abound.3 Like much of the normalising discourse around neoliberalising urban space (e.g. Kohn, 2004), this comment assumes a consensual ‘we’, a shared sensibility about what the city is and should be (‘a beautiful jewel’ – in reference to Seattle’s moniker as the ‘Emerald City’, bestowed upon it by tourism officials in the mid-1980s). At the same time, this commentary postulates an Other – ‘lost souls’ creating a sense of danger by living outside societal expectations – as distinct from, and perhaps lesser than, ‘us’, thus privileging the perspective and urban presence of those who are housed and have families, while the dangers faced by unhoused people go unmentioned (see Figure 16.2). The narrative jumps quickly to broader speculations about the city and its inhabitants as a whole. For example, when introducing a third-generation Seattleite who founded a Facebook page called Seattle Looks Like Sh*t, the narrator calls the city a ‘postapocalyptic landscape’. Yet competing interpretations of change in the city are evident in comments throughout the documentary, including this consideration of the city: A city is a living thing. It has a rhythm and a heartbeat. A kind of soul. It is a collection of ideas that we protect and defend, old ideas and new ones. And over time, the ideas blend into a collective, living, ever-changing dream. And the dream is nothing more, and nothing less, than 3

It is no coincidence, then, that the corporate owner of this television station mandated the insertion of conservative talking points in its news programming, causing turmoil among journalists frustrated with the direction the station was taking (Rosenberg, 2018b).

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a better life for our children. But behind the beauty and the ideals, behind the bridges and the ballparks and the beautiful buildings, the dirty work is the fight. Great dreams and great cities don’t survive without a fight.

The notion of the city as a dynamic collection of ideas is congruent with academic discourse on urban space and sense of place. Yet the documentary’s singularity of vision, its romanticisation of a ‘dream’, and the idea of protecting and defending a very particular lifestyle decidedly couched in middle-class, heteropatriarchal values are critical points of departure. The pushback from social service providers, advocates for the unhoused and journalists alike has been swift and strong. For example, Tim Harris (2019), the founding director of Real Change, a non-profit weekly newspaper that provides employment opportunities for homeless and low-income people, called the documentary ‘misery porn’ that ‘conflate[s] homelessness, criminality and drug addiction into a seamless whole’. He critiques the location of urban social problems with the homeless themselves rather than with the ‘upstream problems’ of the political economy. Matching the tenor of the documentary itself, Harris calls some of its scenes ‘alt-right-style thuggery’ when construction workers’ disruption of a head tax rally at Amazon headquarters is ‘glorified as righteous popular anger’. Tyrone Beason (2019), a Seattle Times columnist, notes that ‘we are fighting bitterly over what to do about’ changes in the city, suggesting that the fight around competing senses of place is indeed contentious.

16.7

Conclusion Intense and rapid urban change is a significant global challenge. Such change catalyses substantial shifts in senses of place as urban dwellers seek to ‘make sense’ of this change and what it holds for the future and their place in the city. While we have examined such change in Seattle, the lessons from this work are applicable elsewhere. As Pithouse (2008) notes: Visions of the future, presented as aspiration or inevitability, exercise tremendous power over certain kinds of decision making in the present. In cities where local elites are able to imagine a convivial future for themselves . . . the future is, above all, the idea of a ‘World Class City’. This is the idea that guides and justifies the decisions of the technocratic elites . . . Their decisions produce broadly similar results around the world – the exclusion and eviction of the poor, the commodification of public space and public investment in projects for private profit. (p. 567)

A critical way to examine and challenge elite revisions of the city is through discourse analysis. As Ryan (2018) notes, discourse creates regimes of truth that present as social facts. Yet that discursive reality does not go unchallenged. Discourse is, after all, a site of cultural struggle (Xu, 2007), and analysis of that discourse serves as a vital social critique to challenge normative arguments about place and the future of our cities (Herzog, 2016). Thus, we urge a continued line of such analysis in various urban contexts to unveil competing senses of place and challenge the normative order.

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The examination of the discourse around urban change in Seattle offered in this chapter provides lessons about urban growth and change elsewhere. It supports the need for pluralising and problematising senses of place as a way to recentre marginalised voices and enable a more inclusive vision of the city to emerge. In doing so, it offers a way to reinvigorate urban governance by providing citizens’ groups with another lens through which to challenge hegemonic forces and advocate for the future of their city to accommodate the full citizenry.

References Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin, University of Texas Press. Balk, G. (2017) ‘Seattle once again nation’s fastest-growing big city: population exceeds 700,000’, The Seattle Times, 25 May [Online]. Available at www.seattletimes.com/seattlenews/data/seattle-once-again-nations-fastest-growing-big-city-population-exceeds-700000/ (accessed 16 September 2019). Balk, G. (2019) ‘Seattle median income soars – but not everyone shares in the wealth’, The Seattle Times, 26 September [Online]. Available at www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/ seattle-median-income-soars-to-93500-but-wealth-doesnt-reach-everyone-census-data-shows/ (accessed 16 September 2019). Beason, T. (2019) ‘I told you my reaction to Seattle is Dying, here is what you told me’, The Seattle Times, 8 April [Online]. Available at www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/i-told-youmy-reaction-to-seattle-is-dying-heres-what-you-told-me/ (accessed 23 September 2019). Chase, L., Crawford, M. and Kaliski, J. (2008) Everyday Urbanism, New York, Monticelli Press. Clement, B. J. (2018) ‘How does the food actually taste at Amazon Go? 6 Amazon-style reviews of Seattle’s new checkout-free store’, The Seattle Times, 4 March [Online]. Available at www .seattletimes.com/life/food-drink/how-does-the-food-actually-taste-at-amazon-go-6-ama zon-style-reviews-of-seattles-new-checkout-free-store/ (accessed 8 September 2019). Day, M. (2018) ‘Take a look inside Amazon’s Spheres as they get set to open’, The Seattle Times, 26 January [Online]. Available at www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/take-a-look-insideamazons-spheres-as-they-get-set-for-next-weeks-opening/ (accessed 8 September 2019). Day, M. and Gilbert, D. (2018) ‘HQ2 cities listen up: Amazon flexing its political muscle sends a message not just to Seattle’, The Seattle Times, 5 May [Online]. Available at www.seattletimes .com/business/amazon/amazon-flexes-political-muscle-sending-message-to-city-officials-hereand-elsewhere/ (accessed 8 September 2019). Di Masso, A., Dixon, J. and Durrheim, K. (2014) ‘Place attachment as discursive practice’, in Manzo, L. and Devine-Wright, P. (eds), Place Attachment, London, Routledge, pp. 75–86. Dovey, K. (2002)‘Dialectics of place: authenticity, identity, difference’, in Akkach, S. (ed.), De-placing Difference: Architecture, Culture and Imaginative Geography, Adelaide, University of Adelaide, Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture, pp. 45–52. Eizenberg, E. (2013) From the Ground up: Community Gardens in New York City and the Politics of Spatial Transformation, London, Ashgate. Gieryn, T. F. (2000) ‘A space for place in sociology’, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 463–496. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.463 Green, S. J. (2018) ‘Woman who hurled rock at Amazon Spheres on May Day released from custody’, The Seattle Times, 4 May [Online]. Available at www.seattletimes.com/seattle-

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news/crime/woman-who-hurled-rock-at-amazon-spheres-on-may-day-released-from-custody/ (accessed 8 September 2019). Greenstone, S. and Davilla, V. (2019) ‘King County homeless count drops for the first time since 2012, but officials aren’t celebrating yet’, The Seattle Times, 2 May [Online]. Available at www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/homeless-count-drops-for-the-first-time-since2012-but-officials-arent-celebrating-yet/ (accessed 19 September 2019). Harris, T. (2019) ‘KOMO asserts Seattle is dying with misery porn’, Real Change, 20 March [Online]. Available at www.realchangenews.org/2019/03/20/komo-asserts-seattle-dyingmisery-porn (accessed 3 October 2019). Harvey, D. (1989) The Urban Experience, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press. Hay, R. (1998) ‘Sense of place in developmental context’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 5–29. https://doi.org/10.1006/jevp.1997.0060 Herzog, B. (2016) Discourse Analysis as Social Critique: Discursive and Non-discursive Realities in Critical Social Research, London, Palgrave Macmillan. Ingalls, M., Kohout, A. and Stedman, R. (2019) ‘When places collide: power, conflict and meaning in Malheur’, Sustainability Science, vol. 14, pp. 625–638. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-006 89-6 Kohn, M. (2004) Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space, London, Routledge. Kyle, G. and Chick, G. (2007) ‘The social constructions of a sense of place’, Leisure Sciences, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 209–225. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400701257922 Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Critique of Everyday Life, London, Verso. Levy, N. (2019) ‘Google will open new Seattle campus this summer, just across the street from Amazon’s headquarters’, GeekWire, 21 March [Online]. Available at www.geekwire.com/ 2019/google-will-open-new-seattle-campus-summer-just-across-street-amazons-headquarters/ (accessed 16 September 2019). Licata, N. (2018) ‘Seattle’s ethos: changes in our shared space’, Arcade, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 28–29. Lindlof, T. R. and Taylor, B. C. (2002) Qualitative Communication Research Methods, Thousand Oaks, SAGE Publications. Masterson, V. A., Enqvist, J. P., Stedman, R. C. and Tengo, M. (2019) ‘Sense of place in social-ecological systems: from theory to empirics’, Sustainability Science, vol. 14, pp. 555–564. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00695-8 Peck, J. and Tickel, A. (2002) ‘Neoliberalizing space’, Antipode, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 380–404. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00247 Pithouse, R. (2008) ‘Book review: Mike Davis (2006) Planet of Slums. London: Verso’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 567–574. https://doi.org/10.1177/002190960 80430050502 Purcell, M. (2008) Recapturing Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures, New York, Routledge. Romano, B. (2019) ‘Amazon at 25: the magic that changed everything’, The Seattle Times, 30 June, pp. A1, A17. Rosenberg, M. (2018a) ‘Seattle-area home-price growth from current boom has surpassed last decade’s bubble’, The Seattle Times, 8 May [Online]. Available at www.seattletimes.com/ business/real-estate/seattle-area-home-price-growth-from-current-boom-has-surpassed-lastdecades-bubble/ (accessed 16 September 2019). Rosenberg, M. (2018b) ‘Turmoil inside KOMO News as conservative owner Sinclair mandates talking points’, The Seattle Times, 3 April [Online]. Available at www.seattletimes.com/ent

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ertainment/tv/turmoil-inside-komo-news-as-conservative-owner-sinclair-mandates-talkingpoints/ (accessed 2 May 2020). Ryan, A. B. (2018) ‘Discourse: some considerations for the reflexive practitioner’, in Ryan, A. and Walsh, T. (eds), Reflexivity and Critical Pedagogy, Leiden, Brill Sense, pp. 15–30. Seattle Is Dying (2019) Documentary. KOMO, 14 March. Seattle.gov (2019) ‘Homelessness response’ [Online]. Available at www.seattle.gov/homelessness (accessed 19 September 2019). Semega, J., Kollar, M., Creamer, J. and Mohanty, A. (2019) ‘Income and poverty in the United States: 2018’ [Online]. Available at www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/ 2019/demo/p60-266.pdf (accessed 19 September 2019). Semuels, A. (2018) ‘How Amazon helped kill a Seattle tax on business: a levy on big companies to fund affordable housing awakened the ire of corporations’, The Atlantic, 13 June [Online]. Available at www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/how-amazon-helped-kill-aseattle-tax-on-business/562736/ (accessed 8 September 2019). Shafer, D. (2018) ‘Amazon opens the Spheres in downtown Seattle with help from Jeff Bezos and Alexa’, Seattle Magazine, 27 November [Online]. Available at www.seattlemag.com/ news-and-features/amazon-opens-spheres-downtown-seattle-help-jeff-bezos-and-alexa (accessed 3 October 2019). Tajbakhsh, K. (2001) The Promise of the City: Space, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary Social Thought, Berkeley, University of California Press. Tuan, Y.-F. (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. US Census Bureau (2019) ‘Fastest-growing cities primarily in the south and west’, press release. Available at www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/subcounty-populationestimates.html (accessed 16 September 2019). Williams, D. and Miller, B. (2021) ‘Metatheoretical moments in place attachment research: seeking clarity in diversity’, in Manzo, L. and Devine-Wright, P. , Place Attachment, 2nd ed., London, Routledge, pp. 13–28. Williams, D. and Stewart, W. (1998) ‘Sense of place: an elusive concept that is finding a home in ecosystem management’, Journal of Forestry, vol. 96, no. 5, pp. 18–23. https://doi.org/10.1093 /jof/96.5.18 Xu, S. (2007) Discourse as Cultural Struggle, Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press. Zillow (2019) ‘Apartments for rent in Seattle’ [Online]. Available at www.zillow.com/ seattle-wa/apartments/2-_beds/ (accessed 19 September 2019).

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17 Gentrification and the Creative Destruction of Sense of Place A Psychosocial Exploration of Urban Transformations in Barcelona Andrés Di Masso, Víctor Jorquera, Teresa Ropert and Tomeu Vidal

17.1

Introduction Gentrification has become a widespread form of urban transformation during the last decades. Critical social theory has persistently argued that gentrification reflects one form of territorialisation of current capitalist logics (Stein, 2019). Urban capitalism materially and socially takes place, reshaping the urban scene and its embedded forms of social and cultural life in ways that renew capitalist logics, ensuring the recreation and circulation of value.1 Specifically, the ‘creative destruction of the city’ (Batty, 2007) has been described as an endogenous process of capitalist renewal of cities that involves massive changes in the urban fabric (destruction or regeneration of buildings, refunctionalisation of open areas, replacement of lifestyles and populations, etc.) while partially building on physical (e.g. architectural façades), functional (e.g. commerce) and symbolic (e.g. place representations) continuities with the past, ensuring innovation and thereby invigorating a revalorisation of capital. While gentrification has been vastly theorised and studied from the point of view of its economic, sociological, cultural and geographical underpinnings, its psychosocial implications have seldom been explored (for an exception, see Atkinson (2015) on symbolic displacement). In so far as gentrification modifies the urban environment, it tends to alter and recreate symbolic representations of urban space and residents’ subjective relationships with places. Gentrification therefore challenges and reshapes senses of place, in the two senses of ‘sense’: past and present ways of perceiving (i.e. making sense) and feeling (i.e. sensing) one’s neighbourhood and the broader urban scene, creating and promoting renewed forms of located subjectivity. In this chapter, we argue that the changing senses of place implicated in gentrification processes can be interpreted not as a mere or even neutral effect of the capitalist logic of creative destruction of the city, but as one of its main subjective catalysers. 1

This expression refers both to the economic gain and the added value derived from a given investment, which is a precondition for capital circulation, accumulation and expansion (for an application to gentrification theory, see Smith (1987) on the ‘rent gap’ as the maximum difference between current and potential rental incomes related to a property).

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Based on the empirical analysis of a study conducted in the neighbourhood of Gràcia in Barcelona, Spain, we illustrate how gentrification channels capitalist dynamics through the psychosocial process of the creative destruction of senses of place.

17.2

Gentrification and the Psychosocial: Transdisciplinary Navigations Ruth Glass (1964) originally defined gentrification as the process of rehabilitation and construction of new buildings in city centres, which affects working-class populations who are displaced and replaced by new residents with higher socio-economic status. However, more than 50 years of research in cities around the world has expanded the concept. Gentrification studies have examined forms of displacement other than the physical (e.g. symbolic, political, cultural, (Hyra, 2015; Shaw and Hagemans, 2015)). Many studies have shown how gentrification works in areas outside city centres (Atkinson and Bridge, 2005). Progressively, there has been uneven interest in exploring the relative weight of different factors shaping the everyday life of gentrification, such as urban lifestyles and cultural consumption trends (Zukin, 1998; Jager, 1986), changes in the commercial landscape and its aestheticisation (Ley, 2003; Mills, 1988), social differentiation strategies between old residents and ‘new middle classes’ or gentrifiers (Sorando and Andura, 2016) and the relationship between gentrification and ‘touristification’ (Gotham, 2005). Despite this varied panorama, research on the relationship between gentrification and people–place psychological bonds is still underdeveloped. This is arguably a meaningful absence, given that gentrification has been related to anxiety, stress and a self-perceived loss of health (Gibbons et al., 2018), a sense of weakening social and community bonds (Betancur, 2011) and a questioning of self-identity and place belonging by old residents who feel displaced (Valli, 2015). A psychosocial approach (Frosh, 2015) to gentrification, as a transdisciplinary practice of enquiry that builds social-psychological knowledge across many different disciplinary domains, can build on several theoretical traditions to enrich critical understandings of this form of urban change.

17.2.1

Urban Space and Capitalism Neo-Marxist contributions to political geography have interpreted the urban form as a spatialisation of circuits for capital accumulation (Lefebvre, 1974). As Harvey (2004) notes, the production of the industrial cityspace was followed by a process of overaccumulation and the space–time contractions of capital, involving a transition from exploitation mainly in the sphere of work to a neoliberal logic of dispossession of resources, rights and services in many other spheres of societal life. In this frame, gentrification is interpreted as a historically situated expression of capitalist investments in the cityspace, expropriating basic democratic rights such as the right to the city, the right to housing and the ‘right to stay put’ in one’s neighbourhood (Newman and Wyly, 2006).

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Critical studies in semiocapitalism (Bifo, 2010) have contributed a postmodern reading of this process, highlighting that capital also works via the cultural production and social circulation of signs (i.e. linguistic, iconic), beyond the material exchange of consumption goods. In this frame, catching the consumer’s attention, activating desires and provoking affective states is seen not as an effect of consumer capitalism, but as the symbolic raw material that makes the economy flow. A semiocapitalist approach to gentrification can therefore contribute critical knowledge by focusing on the intersubjective codes and affective states that articulate gentrifying place experiences, understood as psychosocial gears of capital.

17.2.2

Gentrification and Cultural Consumption The symbolic underpinnings of gentrification have been explored in studies that frame it as a process of cultural consumption. Specific attention is given here to three interrelated aspects of the gentrified urban landscape. The first is its ‘symbolic economy’ (Zukin, 1998), meaning circuits of reproduction of economic value based on the consumption of abstractions that are culturally coded (e.g. in buildings, food, clothes, artistic expressions, bodily gestures), shaping urban lifestyles that connect consumption practices, symbolic spaces, identities and sociability. Second, this symbolic economy involves the creation of a specific urban ‘ambience’ (Allen, 2006) that relies heavily on the aestheticisation of spaces and retail premises, using design and art to seduce and to satisfy demands for and pleasures of visual and sensuous consumption (Degen, 2008; Ley, 2003). Third, these aesthetically coded consumption signs work as markers of class tastes and preferences, so their visual and material consumption provides a basis for the social differentiation – that is, social identification and distinction – of the ‘new middle classes’, who are seduced by the distinguished urban lifestyles typical of gentrified environments (Mills, 1988; Jager, 1986). This symbolic process involves a performance of social status not necessarily on the basis of economic advantage, but rather on socially shared consumption preferences and choices.

17.2.3

Gentrification and the Micropolitics of Desire The symbolic economy of gentrification involves the creation of an urban atmosphere that works through seduction to promote the consumption of a specific urban experience. Specifically, gentrified landscapes stimulate consumption by speaking to the desire for an experience that is promised by the object of consumption (e.g. refinement, elegance) but that is not (in) the object itself (e.g. a glass of ‘good wine’), which stands for that symbolic promise as a tangible signifier (Baudrillard, 2009). This seductive logic involves a desire that is impossible to satisfy, given that its symbolic target is constantly slipping away through an infinite chain of cultural signifiers (e.g. from the glass of ‘good wine’ to the art gallery, to the tapas place, to the yoga-for-kids cooperative). Most importantly, this seductive logic assumes a subject that celebrates, enjoys and actively participates in the aesthetics, pleasures and symbolic

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differentiations of the gentrified atmosphere. In this respect, as a form of capital-driven power transforming the urban place experience, gentrification is not only premised on external coercion and direct or indirect violence (i.e. evictions, relocations, unaffordable rents, disidentification with the community). More strategically, gentrification involves subtle forms of domestication that operate through the attractive power of the socio-physical environment (Allen, 2006). In other words, gentrification implicates a micropolitics of pleasure and desire (see Guattari and Rolnik, 2005) that articulates positive and productive forms of sensing place as ‘subjective galvanisers’ of capital (e.g. the smell of takeaway Thai food, the surprise of finding people swing dancing in the square, the pride of showing off a baby carried in an ‘eco’ foulard).

17.2.4

Sense of Place: Environmental-Psychological Approaches Sense of place has been broadly defined as ‘the meanings and attachments held by an individual or group for a spatial setting’ (Stedman, 2003, p. 822). Sense of place encompasses deep emotions, cultural and ideological meanings, personal attachments, social identifications and functional relations that people develop in relation to places at many different scales. Sense of place research can provide theoretical tools for a psychosocial exploration of gentrification through four main assumptions: (1) places are relevant for the construction and regulation of self- and community identity; (2) people tend to attach to places; (3) place satisfaction can support psychological wellbeing; and (4) environmental changes tend to trigger self-protective defensive reactions that can be politically consequential. It is therefore expected that, as it transforms the urban environment, gentrification somehow reconfigures senses of place, redefined here as place-based experiential ‘assemblages’ (Di Masso and Dixon, 2015; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) – that is, as intersubjective formations of place-related meanings and affective states emerging from sense-making practices (i.e. contextualised meaning-making and understanding) and sensory practices (i.e. embodied feelings and affect) that articulate people’s discursive appraisals of, and bodily involvement in, a given environment.

17.3

Research Context and Method We used the theoretical tools summarised above as a route map to explore the psychosocial implications of gentrification in Gràcia, a district located on the upper side of Barcelona’s city centre. With almost 50,000 inhabitants, in recent years Gràcia has become a highly visited area, thanks to its proximity to Gaudí’s Park Güell and its touristic promotion as a traditional neighbourhood rich in community organisations, picturesque squares bustling with social life, and a vibrant nightlife. The retail landscape has changed significantly with the proliferation of a myriad of commercial premises combining cultural industries, highly visual aesthetics and trendy alternative lifestyles. Statistical data provided by the municipality (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2018) and the Centre for Demographic Studies (López-Gay, 2018) confirm

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gentrification trends (e.g. a steady rise in housing prices between 2014 and 2018, above Barcelona’s average; the arrival of higher numbers of college-educated young adults between 2011 and 2016; an overall population loss in recent years). Most importantly, social movements and local newspapers have insistently lamented the gentrification of Gràcia, triggering institutional action and public forums to deal with the situation. In this context, we conducted a qualitative study in Gràcia between October 2017 and March 2019, addressing two main research questions: what kind of urban experience is promoted by the renewed commercial landscape, from the theoretical perspective of the symbolic consumption of signs? How do old and new residents experience the neighbourhood and its recent transformations, especially changes in the commercial landscape? To tackle the first question, we took pictures of all the commercial façades within Gràcia’s administrative boundaries. We clustered the pictures and conducted a visual semiotic analysis (Nöth, 2011) of a sample of 80 types of photograph. Simultaneously with the photo analysis, we conducted 18 individual walking interviews (Evans and Jones, 2011) to explore the lived experience of the neighbourhood and its recent changes, using snowball sampling and a criterion of maximum diversity in terms of age, gender, years of residence in the neighbourhood and experience/lack of experience of displacement. The walking interviews were fully transcribed and itineraries mapped for further analysis. The chapter authors interpreted the transcripts until reaching a consensus, using thematic content analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2013) based on local historical clues, theoretical resources, contextual information and intertextual cross-references.

17.4

Analytic Insights

17.4.1

Recreating the Urban Experience Through the Commercial Landscape We organised the semiotic patterns cast by the commercial façades into five main discursive axes configuring what we labelled the ‘gentrified urban experience’. In most cases, these semiotic patterns follow a communicative style of direct interpellation of the potential consumer, as if the signs spoke directly to the passer-by, in some cases using exhortative formulas (e.g. ‘be free’, ‘be happy’).

Authenticity The most recurrent discourse is articulated through signifying assemblages ensuring that what is ‘going on’ in the shop in question – its ‘vibe’ – is something authentic, and that people are ‘keeping it real’. Authenticity appears in two principal forms. First, it appears in retro vintage style: new ‘bodegas’ (wineries) that look like old ones; second-hand shops selling refashioned clothes from the 1980s; hipster hair salons announced with classic barbershop signs, old-style furniture and haircutting tools; renewed traditional bars that retain their old name or add ‘new’ to the sign. Second, authenticity appears in what we call appellation of origin signs: authenticity

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experiences grounded in the symbolic value of historic preservation (e.g. signs showing the year of foundation – in the distant past – of the shop or building), the localness of the shop (e.g. ‘Gràcia’ or ‘Gracienca’ (‘from Gràcia’)), the ‘naturalness’ of products as if untouched by human hand (e.g. ‘direct from the earth’, ‘natural’, ‘wild’, ‘seeds and roots’), traditional arts and crafts (e.g. craft beer, seamstress shops, furniture restoration), ‘ethnic’ restaurants selling original dishes from exotic areas, and austerelooking bars selling popular working-class meals (e.g. food cans, croquettes, fishermen’s seafood). The symbolic promise of authenticity works in all these cases through irony: what is presented as authentic is actually a simulation of what it is meant to be, so authenticity appears as a symbolic transfiguration of the past that is recreated in the present, ironically undermining any possible form of authenticity. Thus, a new form of the old is presented as innovative because it is supposed to be the same old experience of the past.

Exclusiveness A second common discourse in the commercial semiosphere articulates class-related cultural tastes and preferences, spoken to passers-by who are invited to symbolically consume an experience of social distinction. This is especially clear in shops displaying signs, objects, practices and phrases that express refinement and ‘good taste’ (e.g. bridal shops, perfumeries, art galleries, design shops, signature cuisine and tapas). However, the social exclusiveness discourse is also present in what we label ‘high coolture’ stores: less refined but highly valued arts and métiers linked to creative cultural industries (e.g. cinema production companies, graffiti shops, architecture coworking studios) with a carefully designed aesthetic style.

Alternative Lifestyles This axis of alternative lifestyles brings together a diversity of semiotic assemblages that are strongly rooted in the reiterated presence of verbal (e.g. ‘eco’, ‘organic’, ‘vegan’, ‘friendly’, ‘proximity’, ‘cooperative’, ‘anti’) and material signifiers (e.g. the wooden, self-made, handmade, plant-based, colourful). These symbolic patterns connote non-normative or counter-normative ways of living, generally meaning social consciousness (e.g. ecologism, veganism, social solidarity), socio-cultural transgression (e.g. urban art, alternative motherhood), political activism (e.g. squatter aesthetics, anti-capitalist claims, feminist literature), community organisation (e.g. cooperatives) and what we call ‘bizarre’ fashion (e.g. cafés for cats, Frida Kahlo product shops). Alternative lifestyles are a cross-cutting discourse in the commercial areas of food, clothes, health, childrearing practices, culture, leisure and work, finding a symbolic foothold in Gràcia’s local identity as a neighbourhood with a tradition of strong community associations, cultural diversity and grassroots activism. If, as we stated above, authenticity symbolically operates through the simulation of the old, then alternative lifestyles seem to ironically represent the domestication or pacification of Gràcia’s old signs of socio-cultural and political progressiveness. Two paradigmatic examples of this are the opening of an organic supermarket and a natural seed shop on premises vacated by the eviction of two squatted social centres.

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Urban Optimism Gràcia’s ‘gentrified experience’ is also articulated in the retail landscape through semiotic patterns fostering a state of positive psychology – what we call ‘urban optimism’. A significant number of establishments (cafés, bars, health centres, gift shops, etc.) offer proclamations or promises of happiness (e.g. ‘Be Happy Bar’, ‘today can be a great day’), icons of joy (e.g. smiley faces, images of people having fun, exclamation marks after every sentence in a window display or on a blackboard) or a whole lexicon of enthusiasm encouraging self-determination and positive thinking to cope with life (e.g. ‘find yourself and feel better to change’).

Glocal Cosmopolitanism Especially linked to the discourses of authenticity and alternative lifestyles, glocal cosmopolitanism involves an assemblage of ‘smellscapes’, national signs and aesthetics (e.g. Thai food, Mexican enchiladas, Ethiopian cuisine, Greek takeaway, Vietnamese dishes), inviting an instant self-transportation to a different country every few metres. The sight–smell–nation semiotic assemblage calls the subject to dive into a multicultural landscape of ethnic singularity, exotica and celebration of difference that tends to dislocate sense of place according to a glocal logic. In a second and inverted variety of the cosmopolitan sense of place, the gentrified experience is also prompted by multinational takeaway coffee shops in the neighbourhood as local forms of the global. Taken together, these five discursive axes articulate Gràcia’s gentrified retail landscape (see Figure 17.1) in a way that recreates a socially distinctive sense of place. More precisely, this process is symbolically worked through the simulation of authenticity as a commodified revival of the place in the past, a ‘brandification’ of the identity of the place (‘Gràcia’, a village), a capitalisation of local identity codes of progressiveness and community life subsumed into fashionable alternative lifestyles, and a profitable fetishisation of the place’s cultural diversity. This psychosocial

Figure 17.1 Photographs of the retail landscape. Left to right: co-working space; vegetarian bakery; eco-design atelier; bar. Figure credit: A. Di Masso.

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process – in which new place experiences are semiotically nested in old place-related codes, replacing them but strategically building on them to produce value in the frame of a symbolic economy – is what we call the creative destruction of sense of place.

17.4.2

Bringing the New into the Old Sense of Place: Creative Destruction and Subjective Knots Three main recurring themes emerged in the walking interviews as particularly relevant for understanding the psychosocial implications of gentrification: Gràcia’s essential character, the gentrifying trend as disrupting sense of place, and subjective ‘knots’ of place identification.

Gràcia’s Essential Character A cross-cutting theme in all participants’ accounts was that Gràcia has a particular essence and a special character, a well-defined and historically rooted local identity discursively constructed as ‘a village’, ‘a neighbourhood full of vitality’, ‘with rich community life’, ‘good neighbour relations’, ‘politically activated’, ‘culturally transgressive’, ‘keeping traditions alive’ and ‘calm’. The main icon of this shared representation of the neighbourhood’s identity is the Festes de Gràcia, a traditional annual festival in which neighbourhood associations collaborate to decorate the streets according to a chosen theme. Participants highlighted Gràcia’s uniqueness and singularity, especially compared with other neighbourhoods (e.g. Eixample, Ciutat Vella). However, when changes in the neighbourhood surfaced in participants’ narratives, it was generally to describe a new sense of place that seemed to parallel the place’s essential character. Regardless of whether participants had left the neighbourhood or were still living there, most stressed that Gràcia had become a ‘very attractive’ place for foreigners and tourists, with an ‘ambientillo’ (special ambience) recurrently described as ‘fashion neighbourhood’, ‘hipster’, ‘guay’ (cool), ‘modernillo’ (trendy), ‘pijipi’ (‘boho’), ‘with look and feel’, ‘eco-organic-something’, ‘plenty of muffins’ and similar phrases. These eloquent descriptions evidenced a new representation of the neighbourhood’s identity in terms closely connected to the urban atmosphere described in our previous analysis of the retail landscape. Not surprisingly, tourist leaflets promote Gràcia by representing the place as a perfect and unique combination of local essence and trendy urban atmosphere. All in all, gentrification brings the old identity of the place into an encounter with new place representations, triggering contrasting experiences.

Gentrification as Disrupting Senses of Place Originally from Mexico, Pedro was a 40-year-old man who had lived in Gràcia for 8 years, having been attracted to the neighbourhood by its unique charm. He referred to gentrification as a ‘shadow’ that was pushing local residents away. Unable to achieve residential stability due to rising housing costs, he had already decided to leave Gràcia in the months following the interview to live with his wife and son outside Barcelona. He also expressed a general disidentification with many areas of the neighbourhood,

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and he showed a preference for meeting his neighbours at home, rather than in the many public squares that characterise Gràcia, due to the noise and the people’s affluence. Noise, mass tourism, the privatisation of public space, an excess of hostels and new fashion boutiques also lay behind the disruption of sense of place for Diego, aged 23, who had been born in Gràcia and still lived there: the calm was gone, he could no longer see ‘his people’ in the local festival, the squares were overcrowded and coffee was too expensive in the trendy new stores. This sense of disruption, connoting feelings of symbolic displacement (Atkinson, 2015; Shaw and Hagemans, 2015), was especially evident among older residents. For instance, Joana (aged 55) recounted a nostalgic narrative of place loss as we walked with her through the neighbourhood. Interestingly, in the first hour of the walk Joana mainly showed us places that were no longer there; her account traced a cartography of absent places that had the contradictory effect of sustaining the continuity of her sense of place identity through memories. The places were gone (e.g. a school, a bar, a friend’s home), but she could articulate a coherent sense of place by connecting herself to the past in a narrative of autobiographical insideness (Rowles, 1983). Something similar happened with Nàdia (aged 49), another Gràcia-born resident, who spontaneously brought pictures to the interview that showed what the place had been like in the past. Nàdia’s narrative showed less nostalgia than resignation, accepting that ‘changes happen, it is what it is’. However, unlike in Joana’s case, the change in Nàdia’s sense of place had led to her withdrawal into smaller and more intimate circles of social bonding, seeking continuity of place attachment through more restricted community ties. Our walking interview with Diego constantly took us to his autobiographical referents in the urban landscape (home, school, work, scouts’ centre, childhood places). Unlike in Joana’s account, however, these places were still physically there and seemed to work as biographical anchors, providing a sense of ontological security beyond self-continuity. In sum, Joana, Nàdia and Diego seemed to express their sense of place disruption by situating their place identities either in the past or in ‘microsegregated’ (Kohn, 2013) circles of community bonding, thereby feeling less disidentified and/or safer.

Subjective Knots in Sense of Place The coexistence of place representations opposing Gràcia’s traditional essence and the newly gentrified environment mostly leads to dislike, estrangement and a disruption to sense of place. Nevertheless, participants’ accounts were very rich in moments of ambivalence, hesitation, dilemmatic talk, contradiction, discursive collapse (inability to speak, changing routes to avoid answering) and dissociation. We label these ‘subjective knots’: discursively confusing moments in the walking interviews when negative appraisals of the disruptively gentrified environment suddenly appeared to become positive and compatible with a participant’s preferences and actual consumption practices. These subjective knots put the seductive logic of the retail landscape directly into dialogue with participants’ subjective investments in or resistance to it.

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Diego, for instance, was critical of the neighbourhood’s mass tourism and the ‘elitisation’ of the commercial landscape. However, at one point he took us to Plaça Revolució, one of his childhood places. When asked about the new ice cream shops there, he only had good things to say, because they reminded him of when he was a child and went there with his father to buy ice cream. One of the new shops even had the same name as the old one. In this case, Diego’s acceptance of place change was grounded in its compatibility with a deeply felt autobiographical memory. Retail change found an accommodation in his personal past. Llorenç (aged 23), who had left Gràcia after living there for 4 years because he could not afford his flat, also rejected the ‘trendy’, ‘hipster’ and ‘veggie’ style redefining the retail landscape. However, he was very fond of swing dancing in the neighbourhood’s public spaces (a social practice that had been absent from Gràcia but had gained popularity with the opening of many swing academies). In his account, swing dancing was typical of one square (Plaça Virreina), especially during the Festes de Gràcia. Thus, Llorenç positively embraced swing dancing outdoors, not as a matter of cultural taste, but as a matter of coherence with local tradition. In other words, he celebrated the new ‘swingscape’ because it seemingly fitted the cultural representation of one of Gràcia’s iconic squares. Similarly, despite their narratives of dislike and sense of place disruption, both Llorenç and Joana acknowledged that they sometimes bought things in the expensive new shops. Joana argued that this was a selective choice (to visit a Galician ‘eco food shop’) because the food was good, and relatedly because it was a positive thing to have some of these alternative shops, even though they were expensive. Llorenç described having contradictory feelings when, out of ‘curiosity’, he had decided to buy rice in an organic seed shop (located where a squatted social centre had stood until recently), knowing that he could find the same organic product cheaper in the traditional market a few streets away. This contradiction was even more evident in Pablo (aged 28, about to leave Gràcia). Pablo took us to a ‘small shop’ representing the kind of commerce that he liked in Gràcia: a place with ‘a community logic’, ‘reinvesting in the neighbourhood’, with ‘proximity and fair trade, eco, organic, everything . . . you’ll love it!’ At the end of the walk, and reflecting aloud on the gentrifying trend in Gràcia, he spontaneously revisited his own words about this shop to say that ‘maybe this is not proximity trade, maybe they pay a lot for a place like this, in Astúries Street, very well arranged, maybe they are selling us more than we think’. Pablo’s reflection offers an explanation for Joana’s, Llorenç’s and Diego’s ambivalent experiences of sense of place. These subjective knots seem to evidence that, despite their conscious feelings of estrangement or dislike towards the gentrified environment, in practice residents may simultaneously accept gentrifying trends as less problematic. As the gentrified atmosphere symbolically embeds new experiences into the old sense of place (place-based biographical insideness, local traditions and alternative lifestyles), it facilitates a subjective sense of familiarity and continuity with Gràcia’s permanent character and its residents’ long-standing sense of place. In this context, subjective resonances between the new and old neighbourhood recreate a sense of place that orients the symbolic economy of gentrification towards the creative destruction of self-distinctive and selfcongruent place identifications and preferences.

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Conclusion Gentrification dynamics are a global trend challenging people’s senses of place. From a critical perspective, and in addition to the indispensable analysis of residents’ class-based exclusionary displacement (Paton, 2014), a psychosocial approach can enrich gentrification studies by revealing the symbolic mechanisms that renew senses of place, transforming them while recreating them, to channel, reproduce and capture place-based profitable value – that is, the creative destruction of senses of place. We have specifically shown how the symbolic economy of gentrification (Zukin, 1998) in one neighbourhood in Barcelona significantly relies on the ‘seductive’ promotion (Allen, 2006) of a commercial experience that capitalises on traditional cultural place representations, celebrating simulated authenticities and tracing symbolic continuities with the place’s character as traditional, alternative, diverse and unique. Relatedly, the new gentrified atmosphere can speak a language that has subtle symbolic resonances with residents’ previous sense of place, anchoring place change in self-stability. It tends to recreate people–place bonds and affects in a way that harmonises the ‘trendy’ with traditional codes, combining feelings of place estrangement, disruption, nostalgia and resistance with self-identifying and self-distinctive place preferences, tastes and practices in everyday life. In this process of symbolic inscription and subsumption of the new into the old, capital captures senses of place and makes place subjectivity a key aspect in the circulation of value. Our study therefore advances empirically based knowledge about the semiocapitalist (Bifo, 2010) processes that reshape sense of place by capitalising on place-related meanings, affect, desire and identification with the urban symbolic environment.

Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Laia Aleu, Júlia Bisbe, Laura Cardona, Josan Dorado, Pablo González, Arnau Huguet, Susana Lacasta, Mariona Penya, Cristina Poza, Cristina Pradillo, Helena Quesada, Maria Rovira, Laura Sánchez, Fernanda Salvador and Anastasia Zisakou for their participation in the fieldwork and in the analytic discussions during successive stages of the study reported in this chapter.

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Atkinson, R. (2015) ‘Losing one’s place: narratives of neighbourhood change, market injustice and symbolic displacement’, Housing, Theory and Society, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 373–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/14036096.2015.1053980 Atkinson, R. and Bridge, G. (2005) Gentrification in a Global Context, New York, Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203392089 Batty, M. (2007) ‘The creative destruction of cities’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 2–5. https://doi.org/10.1068/b3401ed Baudrillard, J. (2009) La sociedad de consumo: sus mitos, sus estructuras, Madrid, Siglo XXI de España. Betancur, J. (2011) ‘Gentrification and community fabric in Chicago’, Urban Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 383–406. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098009360680 Bifo, F. (2010) Generación post-alfa: patologías e imaginarios en el semiocapitalismo, Buenos Aires, Tinta Limón Editores. Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2013) Successful Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide for Beginners, Los Angeles, SAGE Publications. Degen, M. M. (2008) Sensing Cities, New York, Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203895511 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Di Masso, A. and Dixon, J. (2015) ‘More than words: place, discourse and the struggle over public space in Barcelona’, Qualitative Research in Psychology, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 45–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2014.958387 Evans, J. and Jones, P. (2011) ‘The walking interview: methodology, mobility and place’, Applied Geography, vol. 31, pp. 849–858. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2010.09.005 Frosh, S. (ed.) (2015) Psychosocial Imaginaries, London, Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10 .1057/9781137388186 Gibbons, J., Barton, M. and Brault, E. (2018) ‘Evaluating gentrification’s relation to neighborhood and city health’, PLoS One, vol. 13, no. 11. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0207432 Glass, R. (1964) London: Aspects of Change, London, MacKibbon and Kee. Gotham, K. F. (2005) ‘Tourism gentrification: the case of New Orleans’ Vieux Carre (French Quarter)’, Urban Studies, vol. 42, no. 7, pp. 1099–1121. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980 500120881 Guattari, F. and Rolnik, S. (2005) Micropolítica: cartografías del deseo, Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños. Harvey, D. (2004) ‘The “new” imperialism’, Socialist Register, vol. 40, pp. 63–87. Hyra, D. (2015) ‘The back-to-the-city movement: neighbourhood redevelopment and processes of political and cultural displacement’, Urban Studies, vol. 52, no. 10. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0042098014539403 Jager, M. (1986) ‘Class definition and the aesthetics of gentrification: Victoriana in Melbourne’, in Smith, N. and Williams, P. (eds), Gentrification of the City, London, Unwin Hyman, pp. 78–91. Kohn, M. (2013) ‘What is wrong with gentrification?’, Urban Research and Practice, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 297–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2013.846006 Lefebvre, H. (1974) The Production of Space, Oxford, Blackwell. Ley, D. (2003) ‘Artists, aestheticisation and the field of gentrification’, Urban Studies, vol. 40, no. 12, pp. 2527–2544. https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098032000136192 López-Gay, A. (2018) ‘Cambio en la composición social y gentrificación en Barcelona: una mirada a través de los flujos migratorios y residenciales’, Papers, vol. 60, pp. 80–93.

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Mills, C. A. (1988) ‘“Life on the upslope”: the postmodern landscape of gentrification’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 6, pp. 169–189. Newman, K. and Wyly, E. K. (2006) ‘The right to stay put, revisited: gentrification and resistance to displacement in New York City’, Urban Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 23–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980500388710 Nöth, W. (2011) ‘Visual semiotics: key features and an application to picture ads’, in Margolis, E. and Pauwels, L. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods, London, SAGE Publications, pp. 298–316. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446268278.n16 Paton, K. (2014) Gentrification: A Working-Class Perspective, New York, Routledge. Rowles, G. D. (1983) ‘Place and personal identity in old age: observations from Appalachia’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 299–313. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S0272-4944(83)80033-4 Shaw, K. S. and Hagemans, I. W. (2015) ‘“Gentrification without displacement” and the consequent loss of place: the effects of class transition on low-income residents of secure housing in gentrifying areas’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 323–341. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12164 Smith, N. (1987) ‘Gentrification and the rent gap’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 77, no. 3, pp. 462–478. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1987.tb00171.x Sorando, D. and Andura, Á. (2016) First We Take Manhattan: la destrucción creativa de las ciudades, Madrid, Catarata. Stedman, R. (2003) ‘Sense of place and forest science: toward a program of quantitative research’, Forest Science, vol. 49, no. 6, pp. 822–829. Stein, S. (2019) Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, London, Verso. Valli, C. (2015) ‘A sense of displacement: long-time residents’ feelings of displacement in gentrifying Bushwick, New York’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 1191–1208. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12340 Zukin, S. (1998) ‘Urban lifestyles: diversity and standardisation in spaces of consumption’, Urban Studies, vol. 35, nos. 5–6, pp. 825–839. https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098984574

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18 Looking at the Urban Invisibles Appropriation of Space and Senses of Place by People Living in the Streets Tadeu Farias and Raquel Diniz

The Animal I saw an animal yesterday In the filth of the courtyard Picking up food among the garbage. When It found something, It neither examined nor smelled: He swallowed with a ravenous appetite. The animal was not a dog, It wasn’t a cat, It was not a rat. The animal, my God, was a man.

18.1

(Bandeira, 1966, p. 196, our translation)

The Capitalist Production of Space and People Living in the Streets People living in the streets (PLS) is an urban phenomenon that radically manifests the contradictions of capitalist production in cities (Silva, 2006), and is a fundamental aspect of the study of urban changes in their different contexts (Berroeta and Muñoz, 2013). This group’s senses of place and ways of appropriating urban space emerge from a contradictory movement: on the one hand, the production of cities by capital, unemployment and the precariousness of work as conditions of urban reproduction, which constantly reproduces PLS as a phenomenon; on the other, the dynamics of these subjects organising themselves in the production of ways of life in the city, in the struggle for recognition (Farias and Diniz, 2020). These characteristics pose some starting questions for the reflections in this chapter. What are the meanings and senses of the city when we think about a population that lives a contradictory process of invisibility and perverse visibility? What types of reflection for studies of the relationship between people and cities can PLS’s ways of appropriating the city disclose? Thus, PLS pose some challenges for the study of people–environment relations and conceptions of sense of place. First, there is a theoretical challenge to overcome abstract and atomistic conceptions of individuals and objectivist conceptions of the environment, towards a historical conception that incorporates the dynamics of the

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reproduction of space and the subjects’ praxis, including mediation by the social, cultural, economic and political fields. Second, there is an epistemological challenge to overcome ideals of neutrality, assuming that scientific praxis is positioned in terms of class, gender and ethnicity, and conceiving of scientific production as a tool for broader social transformation that must be allied with the working class, oppressed groups and their struggles. Third, there is a methodological challenge to apprehend the general trends of urban reproduction, articulating them with the local specificities of the context of Latin American cities and the everyday of being/living on the streets. We seek to analyse the appropriation of space by PLS through a materialist, historical and dialectical conception of reality (Marx and Engels, 2007), problematising traditional conceptions of sense of place in light of these subjects’ context.

18.1.1

PLS as a Social and Historical Phenomenon People living in the streets is a heterogeneous and long-standing phenomenon, and in the eighteenth century it became an inherent factor in the capitalist mode of production. PLS are part of a population that, for capital’s management of the labour market, functions as a regulator of the value of the workforce, and also as itself an available workforce to be incorporated in times of economic expansion – a relative surplus population (Marx, 2013) that may have temporary, informal jobs, underemployment or unemployment (Silva, 2006). The globalisation of capitalism and the mercantile model of urban space production makes PLS a global phenomenon linked to the growth of cities. More than half a million people live in the streets in the USA, concentrated mainly in the country’s 50 largest cities (US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2019), while Europe has seen an increase in this population in practically all countries (BuschGeertsema et al., 2010). The profile of this population is complex, constituted by structural aspects and also by the historical specificities of each region, as is evident in the significant presence of African Americans and war veterans among PLS in the USA (US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2019), and the increasing presence of migrants among European PLS (Busch-Geertsema et al., 2010). However, the contradictions of capitalist cities are exacerbated in the Latin American and Caribbean context due to the processes of colonisation and slavery, the condition of dependent economies, the historical roots of the concentration of income and land and the specificities of labour market dynamics. This is the most unequal region in the world, with high rates of poverty and extreme poverty, where 40 per cent of the employed population receive below the minimum wage established in their country, and 20 per cent are underemployed (ECLAC, 2019). Colonial exploitation left its mark on indigenous and enslaved populations, leading these groups into the worst conditions in the continent’s social structure, with implications for the profile of PLS. Furthermore, the history of political violence, and military dictatorships in partnership with the local and international bourgeoisie, have impacted on how Latin American states deal with the struggle for social rights. The mark of brutal social

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inequality and violence is found in the context of PLS across Latin America (Medeiros et al., 2020). In the Brazilian context, the abolition of slavery and the lack of assistance for formerly enslaved people threw thousands onto the streets, many of whom were unable to find jobs (Maricato, 1996). In the mid-twentieth century, with intense industrialisation and urbanisation, a mass of workers migrated to the large urban centres, producing a population that was not absorbed by industry and services and had only precarious jobs (Silva, 2006). From the 1990s onwards, the restructuring of production and the neoliberal agenda made work relations more flexible, with an increase in unemployment and informality that also impacted on PLS. In Brazil, an estimated 50,000 people were living in the streets in 2008 (SAGI, 2008), with an average unemployment rate of 7.9 per cent. By 2016, that estimate had more than doubled to 101,854 people (Natalino, 2016) – approximately 0.05 per cent of Brazil’s population – with an average unemployment rate of 12.7 per cent. The data suggests a link with changes in the job market, which were also manifested in the types of occupation and activity performed, since 70.9 per cent worked or engaged in some paid activity, such as car-minding and car-washing, collecting recyclable materials, shoeshining, etc., all of an informal character and yielding very low incomes (SAGI, 2008). Housing is directly linked to labour market dynamics. With the commodification of urban land, the problem of (lack of) housing cannot be solved within capitalist logics (Engels, 2010). It is on the periphery of capitalism that the most drastic effects of the housing deficit are evident. As Boulos (2015) states, in Brazil there are more houses without people than people without houses, considering the number of people living in precarious housing conditions or on the streets, compared with the number of unoccupied and unused buildings that have potential for social housing.

18.1.2

PLS as a Place-Related Process Even so, the PLS population is not restricted to those who are entirely unhoused. An individual may have housing but sometimes need to sleep on the streets due to a lack of money for transport or the distance to work. Analysing the street condition involves considering social inequality and the violation of rights, such as the lack of access to health services, education, employment and income. Living on the street is a contingent situation, as stated by Prates et al. (2017, p. 194, our translation): ‘seeing this situation as a state and not as a process is a way of reiterating it, without recognising the perspective of a movement towards overcoming it’. Prates et al. make several critical findings concerning PLS: (1) they are not characterised as vagrants, although they travel to shelter from the weather; (2) they do not practice begging alone, but instead develop informal activities or precarious jobs; (3) their life stories are marked by various losses (home, job, family, etc.); and (4) there is a marked inequality in living conditions, reinforced by the social imaginary and multiple prohibitions on access to goods and services. However, there is a way of incorporating PLS into urban space, in a precarious visibility whereby they become part of the urban dynamic. Within capitalist

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urbanisation there have emerged the notions of ‘dangerous classes’ and their territorial counterparts, ‘dangerous neighbourhoods’ – the tenements and streets where the dangerous classes roam (Rolnik, 2015). Together with invisibility, this characterisation is a way to naturalise the situation and blame the subjects for their own condition. In this way, PLS gain visibility as a target of violence from the state or even civil society.1 We position ourselves in opposition to this naturalisation, and consider the dynamic and complex relationships among PLS as a way to study people–environment relations and challenge current conceptualisations of sense of place. We believe that historical and dialectical materialism equips us to deal with the theoretical, epistemological and methodological problems at stake.

18.2

Appropriation of Space and Senses of Place: Thinking About Place Through Historical and Dialectical Materialism To address the various forms of relationship and connection between people and their surroundings, the literature on place often invokes overlapping concepts such as place attachment, place identity, belongingness, sense of place, rootedness and appropriation, among others. This has generated difficulties, especially in terms of theoretical unification and conceptual delimitation (Raymond et al., 2017). Williams (2014) helps us to understand this difficulty in speaking ‘the same language’ when we talk about place, by dividing the literature on the subject into two axes: ‘place as locus of attachment’ and ‘place as centre of meaning’. In the first, there is an interactionist view of the relationship between people and the environment, by means of which the different phenomena are described and the intensity of this relationship is measured. Alternatively, the second perspective focuses on the processes of producing meaning throughout people’s experiences in environments, emphasising the unique and holistic character of the relationship (Williams, 2014). This perspective is usually associated with hermeneutic, discursive, dialogical or phenomenological paradigms (Raymond et al., 2017). This debate shows that the investigation of the meanings of place is based on deep problems that – despite the optimistic efforts of many researchers, who for example adopt pluralistic and integrative perspectives (Patterson and Williams, 2005) – may be insoluble within the current terms of the debate. PLS’s own experience illustrates the problems of unilateralism in addressing the meanings of place. Based on universalising and static constructs, how can we approach the complexity and processuality of the meanings of place for this population? They experience exclusion from and inclusion in the urban space simultaneously: they are an intrinsic phenomenon to the production of the urban, but at the same time this space is alienated from them, leading them to experience a specific symbolic reality. On the other hand, how can we understand the 1

In Brazil, a notorious case of violence against PLS was the massacre at Praça da Sé in 2004, when seven people were murdered in front of the Catedral da Sé in the city of São Paulo. Six military police officers were accused, but none are currently in custody. This episode was a catalyst for the constitution of the National Movement of People Living in the Streets, which fights for rights for this population.

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senses of these experiences without paying attention to some general patterns that are present in the phenomenon of being on the streets and its socio-economic determinants? We recognise that the two axes pointed out by Williams regarding studies of place help us to understand people–place relations to the extent that they address one aspect of the question, but they lack historicity and a perspective of totality in the understanding of human beings, social phenomena and the relationships between human beings and social–environmental reality. To help fill this gap, the study presented here is grounded in Marx’s social theory. A fundamental aspect of this theory is the notion of totality, which posits that historical reality presents itself as an articulated and dynamic whole, composed of other, equally complex and dynamic totalities – that is, a complex of complexes (Lukács, 2013). However, the relationships and structures that make up this totality (family, science, racism, culture, state, market, etc.) are historical: they are produced by human activity, and therefore transformed over time by that activity. Thus, Marx’s ontology – his theory of (social) being, which is our starting point – affirms the radical historicity of the human. The diverse human experiences of places must not be exempt from historical and materialist reflection. Pol (1996) and Vidal and Pol (2005) point out that it is possible to find in Marx’s texts the principles of the concept of appropriation, which is related to the notions of labour and alienation. The concept of appropriation of space makes four analytical advances compared with other related concepts: it incorporates the temporal dimension; it emphasises the dialectical nature of the bonding process (behavioural and symbolic); it makes clearer the territorial and embodied dimensions of placebonding; and it encourages a clearer understanding of the potential conflict provoked by different uses and transformations of space (Benages-Albert et al., 2015, p. 2). Deepening this perspective, it is important to highlight that appropriation is a fundamental process of the humanisation of the human being, and of alienation as its dehumanising counterpart, the concrete determinations of which can be found in capitalist social relations. Therefore, we believe that the appropriation of space is a category that allows us to historicise the meanings of place, precisely because of its power to synthesise the humanisation–alienation dialectic and the role of that dialectic in the constitution of subjects, taking into account both social structures and the elements of people’s living spaces. Considering the human being as a social and historical being means that human activity itself is a producer of history (Marx and Engels, 2007). The vital human activity is labour. Through labour, a humanised reality is created, with the products of human objectivation:2 physical products, language and social relations, which are appropriated by other humans in their own activity. In the process, new needs are 2

Here we speak of labour in the ontological sense, as what distinguishes us from other animals through its teleological character – that is, the prefiguration of its results in human awareness (Lukács, 2013). Salaried, servile or slave labour are forms of human labour that are historically specific and richly determined. Objectivation is the product of labour. Thus, a human being interacts with the world, objectivising her/himself in it, whether by aiming to materially transform reality or by seeking to interfere in the activity of other humans through the use of language.

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created that no longer arise in immediate response to survival. This appropriation/ objectivation of human beings over successive generations is the very movement of history. Thus, the appropriation of space is the dynamic of the humanisation of space through the appropriation–objectivation dialectic. As a result of the set of human objectivations, place is thus always social and historical, a product of human labour. In this way we can say that labour, in addition to producing instruments, structures of social relations, language, works of art, etc., also produces places. However, in class-structured societies such as capitalism, the result of labour – the activity that should humanise us – ends up dehumanising us, appearing as something that turns against its creators. This is the phenomenon of alienation. Under capitalism, labour is alienated because instead of humanising, it dehumanises, leads to exhaustion and turns human creative power mainly into a means of individual survival through the purchase and sale of labour power (Duarte, 2013). Human labour, likewise transformed into a commodity, appears to be endowed with characteristics that are proper to an object and not to human activity, when, in fact it, ‘is a definite social relation between men [sic], that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx, 2013, p. 147, our translation). Moreover, a person’s position in the social structure largely determines their opportunities to appropriate the set of objectivations throughout their life, which limits their access to the material and symbolic wealth produced by society. Extending these determinations to places, under capitalist relations these are usually subjected to the commodity form – that is, alienated from those who produce them. Thus, the appropriation of urban space in capitalist society occurs in a contradictory way: it is humanising and alienating at the same time, and this is expressed in the meanings of place. One can think, for example, of the contradiction in experiences of residence among women, who may find meanings of shelter and violence in the same space, as Manzo (2003) points out. Such a space has historically been constituted as the locus of the reproduction of the patriarchal structure under the logic of capital, but also as the space of affective ties. Likewise, cities, which are sometimes perceived as places of opportunity, are also sometimes oppressive and inaccessible places. Gender relations and the denial of the possibilities of urban space to the majority of the population under capitalist logics are necessary content for understanding the determinations of the multiplicity of meanings and senses of place experienced in the contemporary urban environment.

18.3

PLS and the Senses and Meanings of the Urban People living in the streets radically experience the appropriation–objectivation dialectic in an alienated form, since the spaces in the city that need to be appropriated as a condition of survival are the very spaces that emphatically reject them. In light of this dialectic, it is worth explaining how it is possible to think about the process of signifying places. In Vygotsky (2009), we find an important distinction between

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sense and meaning. For this Marxist author, the formation of the subject takes place through an active adaptation – in interaction with culture, mediated by signs – and intrapsychic processes are primarily social. Meanings have the function of generalising and abstracting reality, allowing the planning of actions and communication between subjects. Equally, meanings tend to have a certain stability, which is exactly what guarantees these psychological and social functions. Psychologically, these meanings are saturated by the subject’s affects and other contents, which can give a new sense to a word. For this reason, senses are much more fluid than meanings. For Vygotsky (2009, p. 465, our translation), meaning, which is the most stable social content, ‘is only a cornerstone in the edifice of sense’. Due to its structural connection with capitalist urbanisation, the determinations that involve PLS, as well as the meanings of the urban for this group, tell us about the direction of the capitalist production of space. For example, a correlation between going into the streets and problems with alcohol and other drugs and/or family disagreements is quite common. In these cases, the meaning of the streets may be a kind of freedom, in opposition to the home. However, these meanings are mediated by the economic possibilities granted by class conditions, making it impossible for people to sustain access to places. Likewise, the possibility of accessing shelters and services, or of qualifying for assistance and healthcare to deal with the conflicts in question, should be analysed. A middle-class person or member of the bourgeoisie involved in the same conflict may have options for mental healthcare and/or financial support so that the streets are not their only alternative. This degree of choice due to class structure is a mediating element with regard to the possible meanings of life on the streets. It is also common among PLS to seek out public and busy places such as walkways and squares, or hidden places to stay overnight, such as abandoned houses and buildings (Farias and Diniz, 2020). In a study on the meanings of public space among PLS in Chilean cities, Berroeta and Muñoz (2013) show that the meanings of city spaces mainly refer to danger or protection – that is, they usually focus on safety. Busy urban centres also mean greater opportunities for income. Moreover, restaurants, bakeries and other establishments often guarantee some food and opportunities for hygiene, in addition to an income from regulars, and they tend to function as an informal support network for those who cannot access the rights supposedly guaranteed by state institutions (Matos, 2016). Urban centres – which have meanings commonly linked to movement, passage and indifference – for PLS can combine security, personal hygiene, subsistence, housing and fear. The set of objectivations that PLS can appropriate, and which unfold in multiple senses of place, are largely determined by elements related to the inequality that causes the PLS to be in the streets, and by what the city offers them. Thus, the lives of PLS lay bare the directions of urban development under capitalism, because the elements that are at the root of the unequal social structure and the production of space under this logic are evident in this group’s existence. In the context of the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus in 2020, for example, the social distancing measures necessary to prevent the spread of the disease directly affect PLS, who depend on a flow of people and cars in cities that have been emptied by these measures. Public spaces also rarely provide options for the

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recommended hygiene precautions, such as frequent handwashing. At the same time, mistreatment and a lack of structure in shelter institutions lead many PLS to prefer not to stay in such places to protect themselves from the disease. What about sex workers? In Brazil, for example, a considerable portion of this group is made up of transsexual people who have been expelled from their homes because of family rejection. On the streets, due to the lack of alternatives and because they have little formal education, they conduct an activity that fulfils a regulatory role for the bourgeois family form, since prostitution plays the role of a socially accepted relationship outside the nuclear family – albeit not without conflicts. The city, then, absorbs those that are rejected by the structure, but this very rejection concretely and functionally inserts them into capital’s dynamics of reproduction. These examples show that in order to account for this reality, an analytical category such as senses of place needs to be able to approach concrete people and concrete places. This entails not reducing them to their empirical manifestations. Marx (2008, p. 258, our translation) tells us that ‘the concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many determinations, hence the unity of the diverse’. The empirical is the most immediate manifestation, the starting point of analysis; it is our task to identify the mediations that make it appear as it does. If we take the empirical manifestation of PLS in Brazil, for example, without understanding from a historical perspective the growth of cities that lack the capacity to absorb incoming workers, the lack of suitable jobs and basic services such as health, schools and sanitation for a considerable portion of the population, in addition to state violence and the weight of racism in the constitution of a society with a colonial past, then we will be able to say little or nothing about these people in concrete terms. The dynamics of reality are only understood if we saturate empiricism with concrete determinations; and these determinations are historical social structures and dynamics. The same goes for places. How can we think about the relationship between PLS and the city without considering that the logic of private property – the foundation of capitalism – gained a tendency to expand across the city’s spaces from the 1970s onwards, magnifying the social meaning that places are commodities and the city is big business, which, as such should be accessed according to purchasing power (Harvey, 2012)? To survive, PLS confront the social meanings that mark the spaces of the city, but they do so because the city used to be all they had left as a space to appropriate. Thus, the meanings of place that can be appropriated by PLS in their relationships with the city already carry a burden of alienation through the logic of private property; but the street condition means that other senses and meanings need to be appropriated and developed. To understand these senses and meanings, we must pay attention to the concrete determinations that are present in the process of appropriation–objectivation by PLS. Discovering hiding places throughout the city for their belongings, and creating informal support networks with property owners and churches, are just some of the ways of appropriating the city, based on the socially present senses and meanings in the cityspace and determined by PLS’s living conditions. To understand these senses of place, it is necessary to start from the appropriation–alienation dialectic, because it allows us to look at concrete social relations.

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18.4

Conclusions By paying attention to the phenomenon of PLS, we are led to question the possibilities of the sense of place concept when it is taken in a static, ahistorical way, outside any notion of totality. Therefore, we propose that the starting point to study these experiences and understand senses of places in terms of process and multiplicity must lie in the category of appropriation of space, and especially in the analysis of the appropriation–alienation dialectic, the determinations of which are historical and must be sought in the social relations that structure the capitalist mode of production. In this type of analysis, we seek the historical basis of the phenomenon and consider the possibility of overcoming it, without accepting any naturalisation of the reality of an alienated city or a population that expresses itself as the extreme of social and urban issues. It is about understanding human experience and reality – in this case, in people’s relationships with places – not to reform them, but to overcome them.

References Bandeira, M. (1966). Estrela da vida inteira – poesias reunidas, Rio de Janeiro, Livraria José Olympio. Benages-Albert, M., Di Masso, A., Porcel, S., Pol, E. and Vall-Casas, P. (2015) ‘Revisiting the appropriation of space in metropolitan river corridors’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 42, pp. 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.01.002 Berroeta, H. and Muñoz, I. (2013) ‘Usos y significados del espacio público en personas en situación de calle: un estudio en Valparaíso y Viña del Mar’, Revista de Psicología, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 3–17. https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-0581.2013.30849 Boulos, G. (2015) De que lado você está: reflexões sobre a conjuntura política e urbana no Brasil, São Paulo, Boitempo. Busch-Geertsema, V., Edgar, W., O’Sullivan, E. and Pleace, N. (2010) Homelessness and Homeless Policies in Europe: Lessons from Research, Brussels, European Commission. Duarte, N. (2013) A individualidade para si: contribuição a uma teoria histórico-crítica da formação do indivíduo, Campinas, Autores Associados. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (2019) Social Panorama of Latin America 2018, Santiago, United Nations. Engels, F. (2010) A situação da classe trabalhadora na Inglaterra, São Paulo, Boitempo. Farias, T. M. and Diniz, R. F. (2020) ‘População em situação de rua e direito à cidade: invisibilidade e visibilidade perversa nos usos do espaço urbano’, in Nobre, T. N., Amorim, A. K., Medeiros, F. C. and Matos, A. C. (eds), Vozes, imagens e resistências nas ruas: a vida pode mais!, Natal, EDUFRN, pp. 34–62. Harvey, D. (2012) ‘O direito à cidade’, Lutas Sociais, vol. 29, pp. 73–89 [Online]. Available at https://revistas.pucsp.br/ls/article/view/18497/13692 (accessed 23 October 2020). Lukács, G. (2013) Para uma ontologia do ser social II, São Paulo, Boitempo. Manzo, L. C. (2003) ‘Beyond house and heaven: toward a revisioning of emotional relationships with places’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 23, pp. 47–61. https://doi.org/10.1016 /S0272-4944(02)00074-9

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Maricato, E. (1996) Metrópole na periferia do capitalismo: ilegalidade, desigualdade e violência, São Paulo, HUCITEC. Marx, K. (2008) Contribuição à crítica da economia política, 2nd ed., São Paulo, Boitempo. Marx, K. (2013) O capital: crítica da economia política, livro I, São Paulo, Boitempo. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2007) A ideologia alemã, São Paulo, Boitempo. Matos, A. C. V. (2016) A atuação dos consultórios na rua (CnaR) e a atenção à saúde da população em situação de rua, Natal, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. Medeiros, F. C., Matos, A. C. V., Pagnussat, E. and Oliveira, I. M. F. F. (2020) Entre a benesse e o direito: as políticas de atendimento à população em situação de rua na América Latina. Psicologia em Estudo, vol. 25, e45025. Natalino, M. A. C. (2016) Estimativa da população em situação de rua no Brasil, Brasília, IPEA. Patterson, M. and Williams, D. (2005) ‘Maintaining research traditions on place: diversity of thought and scientific progress’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 361–380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2005.10.001 Pol, E. (1996) ‘La apropriación del espacio’, in Iñiguez, L. and Pol, E. (eds), Cognición, representación y apropriación del espacio, Barcelona, Publicacions Universitat de Barcelona, pp. 149–198. Prates, J. C., Prates, F. C. and Machado, S. (2017) ‘Populações em situação de rua: os processos de exclusão e inclusão precária vivenciados por esse segmento’, Temporalis, vol. 11, no. 22, pp. 191–215. Raymond, C., Kyttä, M. and Stedman, R. (2017) ‘Sense of place, fast and slow: the potential contributions of affordance theory to sense of place’, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, pp. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01674 Rolnik, R. (2015) Guerra dos lugares: a colonização da terra e da moradia na era das finanças, São Paulo, Boitempo. SAGI (2008) Rua: aprendendo a contra: pesquisa nacional sobre a população em situação de rua, Brasília, SAGI. Silva, M. L. (2006) Mudanças recentes no mundo do trabalho e o fenômeno da população em situação de rua no Brasil 1995–2005, Brasília, Universidade de Brasília. US Department of Housing and Urban Development (2019) The Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, Washington, DC, US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Vidal, T. and Pol, E. (2005) ‘La apropiación del espacio: uma propuesta teórica para comprender la vinculación entre las personas y los lugares’, Anuario de Psicología, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 281–297. Vygotsky, L. S. (2009) A construção do pensamento e da linguagem, São Paulo, Martins Fontes. Williams, D. (2014) ‘“Beyond the commodity metaphor” revisited: some methodological reflections on place attachment research’, in Manzo, L. C. and Devine-Wright, P. (eds), Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, New York, Routledge, pp. 89–99.

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Part VI

Technological and Legal Transformations Innovations in technology and governance (law, policy, coalition-building) are radically changing the ways we understand and negotiate senses of place. Such innovations are leading to socio-spatial transformations that catalyse both uncertainty and untapped potential for the ways we relate to place. Digital technologies such as mobile phones, new forms of social media, and sharing apps alter space–time relations and the ways we connect to place. Legal innovations such as new policies governing biodiversity (as discussed in Chapter 20) can also transform our senses of place. All of these innovations catalyse changes that are both tangible and intangible. For example, technological transformations are tangibly seen in our constantly evolving digital devices and tools producing intangible alterations to social relations and the way we are emplaced. Similarly, legal orders and policies are intangible in and of themselves, but they are designed to yield tangible results in the framing of allowable and recommended action. Two of the chapters in this part reveal important tensions between the variety of ways in which technology mediates place. Technology can enhance personal sensing of place by ‘adding an instant, data-rich way of getting information about places and connecting us with elsewhere’ (Chapter 19) and nurturing the ‘ongoing, dynamic, diverse and inclusive negotiation and formation of senses of place’, including the formation of public opinion on resource management issues (Chapter 20). However, personal, social and public aspects of place can be impacted in negative ways by technology. For example, the radical externalisation of personal life through social media and the associated dilution of personal aspects of sense of place; how chat platforms can lead to the creation of echo chambers for ‘exclusionary convictions’ that can translate into acts of terrorism and violence in real places; and in more covert ways, how corporations use surveillance capitalism via the Internet of Things as a tool to transform a public sense of place into a corporatised space (Chapter 19). Chapters 19 and 20 also elucidate how technology dynamically connects multiple senses of place to our everyday life world, whether it be by engaging in public debates, navigating to where we live or remembering where we have travelled. Engagements through texts, pictures, videos and comments can be attributed to specific places, affecting how we experience natural or built environments as well as mobilising individuals and groups to be engaged in campaigns for place change, either for or against sustainability (Chapter 20). Mobile technologies can also be valuable for

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wayfinding and learning about local amenities (Chapter 19). But technology can also simultaneously ‘couple’ and ‘decouple’ us to/from the world by, for example, distracting us from real-world realities, leading to a loss of sense of internality of places, or through obsessive use, creating spaces for loneliness and suicide (Chapter 19). Legal transformations, such as the proclamation of new nature protection directives across the European Union, also challenges us to rethink the couplings and dynamic interplay between changing places and changing senses. Chapter 21 points out that new laws can lead to new constructions and understandings of place that affect people–place relationships, but also affect the reception of laws. This relational dynamic gives salience to the epistemic dimension to place. Chapter 21 makes the case for separating epistemic bonds as a distinct dimension of sense of place by providing examples of how knowledge of place (in this case knowledge about nature protection laws) does not fully overlap with values, norms, identities or socio-cultural and identity-expressive layers of place meanings. Rather, knowledge participates together with meaning and is constantly changing as people turn spaces into places. Knowledge is also a process of integrating action, perception and interpretation. In this light, senses of place emerge from recognising that places are both worlds of meaning and knowledge. This, in turn, opens up conceptualisations of engagement through meaning; engagement through affection; and engagement through knowledge that is dynamically negotiated across time. In summary, this section eloquently describes how technological and legal transformations act as catalysts for redefining our understanding of self and others in relation to place, and in negotiating alternative land-use futures. The section also reinforces the importance of taking into account the ontological, personal and public components of sensing, including cultural and identity-expressive layers, and as process taking account of the epistemic processes that inform ‘how things are’ or ‘how things should be’. Crucial to the pluralisation of sense to senses of place are the dynamic couplings between social, ecological and technological systems and between knowledge intertwining process and product, and knowledge as learning and hybridisation through relation.

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19 Electronically Mediated Sense of Place Edward Relph

One reason for the invention of electronic media was despair about slow communication between distantly separated places. In 1826 Samuel Morse was in Washington, DC when he received news from his home in Connecticut, then a four-day trip away for a messenger on horseback, that his wife had been taken seriously ill. He left immediately, but by the time he arrived, his wife had died and been buried. It is said that in his grief he made a commitment to himself to find a way to overcome the barrier of distance for communication. Whatever the truth of that, the fact is that almost two decades later in 1844 he successfully demonstrated his invention of a single-wire telegraph by sending the message ‘what hath God wrought?’ from Washington to the railway station in Baltimore, 71 km away. Others in Germany and Britain had developed telegraph systems, but they were less efficient, and within a decade Morse’s superior version had been adopted as the international standard. The immediate benefit of the telegraph was safer, more efficient operation of railways, but historically it represented a radical break from the past. For the first time messages could be delivered faster than a human courier, the geographical separation of places had been overcome, and the world had been made smaller. These profound changes were intensified and broadened by telephones, the mass media of radio and television, and since 1990 by the World Wide Web, search engines, social media and smartphones, which unlike television and radio have enabled active individual participation in electronic communications. In less than 30 years, these newer forms of electronic media have come to be part of everyday experience for almost 4.5 billion people, well over half the population of the world (Internet World Stats, 2019). It is impossible to imagine that electronic media have not come to play a role in how most people relate to the world and their sense of place. It is rather more difficult to determine just what this role is because, as Joshua Meyrowitz (1984, p. 117) put it, ‘electronic media steal into places like thieves in the night’. Furthermore, their modes of intrusion into places are changing so rapidly that trying to grasp them can seem scarcely more possible than grabbing a wireless signal with your hands. In this chapter, I suggest that this elusiveness can be reduced by acknowledging that there are several different aspects of sense of place. Two of these, neurological and ontological, are little affected by developments in electronic communications, but

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personal, social and public aspects of sense of place have been and continue to be substantially impacted by them.

19.1

Clarifications Concerning Sense of Place and Electronic Media The expression ‘sense of place’ has two different yet complementary interpretations: one stresses place, and the other stresses sense (Relph, 2015, 1997). In travel writing, place branding, architecture and urban design, sense of place mostly refers to the distinctive appearance of somewhere (e.g. Hu and Chen, 2018; Lecompte et al., 2017). ‘Place’ can refer to a particular building, town or even nation, and ‘sense’ serves as a synonym for the mostly visible qualities that make it remarkable, such as medieval buildings, festivals or landscape. Although there are instances where communications towers – for instance, the CN Tower in Toronto and the Tokyo Skytree – have changed skylines and urban identities, for the most part electronic media have little effect on this landscape sense of place. Radio, television and Wi-Fi signals are invisible, most fibre runs underground, and all the aerials, mobile phone towers, poles and wires on city streets are part of the unassuming and mostly unnoticed backdrop to daily life. The other interpretation of sense of place, the one I consider in this chapter, regards it as a synaesthetic faculty that unifies the various experiences of places registered by sight, hearing, smell, movement, touch, memory, imagination, purpose and anticipation, regardless of whether those places have distinctive landscapes. This suggests that there are several senses of place, each corresponding to a physiological or psychological sense, which are nevertheless united in the usually unnamed yet whole phenomenon of place experience that is involved in the ways that we know, relate to and remember where we live and have travelled. In our experiences of actual places, all those senses unavoidably overlap and are mixed together. Nevertheless, in order to explore how the whole synaesthetic sense of place might be modified by electronic media, I have found it helpful to distinguish five interconnected aspects that roughly reflect ways it has been discussed in different disciplines: neurological, ontological, personal, social and public. An appropriate way to examine the impact of electronic media on sense of place is through the ideas of Marshall McLuhan (1964), a literary scholar who argued that all media of communication are technological ‘extensions of our bodies’ that expand the scope of human senses, and who devoted much of his life to understanding the impacts of electronic communications on society. Although McLuhan rarely mentioned place in his writing, and to my knowledge never referred to sense of place, it follows that if media are extensions of our bodies and our senses, then they insert themselves, as it were, between sense and place, and alter them in some way. One of McLuhan’s (1964) main arguments was that ‘the medium is the message’. In other words, media are not neutral agents for conveying information: they influence attitudes and ways of thinking, and innovations inevitably lead to social changes. In preliterate cultures, communication was oral, therefore spatially constrained, and always involved direct engagement with others. The invention of literacy extended

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senses in both space and time because messages could be written, sent and recorded. The wide distribution of mass-produced books made possible by the invention of mechanical printing in the fifteenth century further ‘extended the minds and voices of men’ in ways that contributed to the rise of popular education, democracy, the Enlightenment, science, the expansion of empires and the rationalism that still underlies most modern institutions (McLuhan 1964, pp. 155–157). Innovations in communications prior to the invention of the telegraph expanded spatial reach and made experiences of the world more detached. In contrast, electronic media eliminate distance, collapse time and space, travel at the speed of light and circle the globe in seconds. McLuhan (1964) described their effect as an implosion rather than expansion. They turn the world back on itself in ‘a global embrace’ that ‘affects the whole psychic and social complex’ (p. 19) and ‘we everywhere resume person-toperson relations as if on the smallest village scale’ (p. 225). They transform the globe into an electronic village filled with modern versions of the direct contact and emotional immediacies that prevailed in preliterate oral cultures. This radical change unquestionably has impacted sense of place, but it has not affected all aspects of sense of place equally. Neurological and ontological aspects appear to have been relatively unaffected by electronic media, whereas personal, social and public aspects have been influenced in diverse ways, especially by the dramatic developments since 1990 in digital devices and related applications.

19.2

Unchanging Aspects of Sense of Place

19.2.1

Neurological Aspects The neurological aspect of sense of place, for which John O’Keefe, Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2014, involves brain functions necessary for finding one’s way around the world (Nobel Prize, 2014). Their research investigated why an early symptom of Alzheimer’s disease is a loss of sense of place and a diminished ability to know where you are and how you got there. It suggests that the cause may lie in a breakdown of connections between ‘place cells’ in the hippocampus, which store complete memories of specific locations (sights, smells, sounds and so on) but are randomly arranged, and ‘grid cells’ nearby in the brain that organise those memories into coherent sequences to form a sense of place (Moser and Moser, 2011). This neurological aspect of sense of place appears to be an attribute of all sentient beings. It enables both navigation through the world and identification of familiar home places. As an innate physiological attribute possessed by both humans and animals, it appears to be resistant to the influences of communications media.

19.2.2

Ontological Aspects The ontological aspect of sense of place is related to the philosophical notion of place as an essential foundation of existence. For example, Ed Casey (1993, p. 313) claims

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that ‘to be a sentient bodily being at all is to be place-bound, bound to be in a place’, and ‘nothing we do is unplaced. Place is as requisite as the air we breathe, the ground on which we stand, the bodies we have’ (Casey, 1997, p. ix). Jeff Malpas (2018) expresses the same idea from a slightly different perspective: ‘It is . . . only in and through place that the world presents itself – it is in place and our own being-in-place, that the world begins’ (p. 12, italics original). What Casey and Malpas describe is the ontological necessity of the unavoidable, omnipresent specificity of place. Malpas is explicit that this fundamental role is immune to technological and social change: ‘The mobile phone, Internet and other technologies give control over space and time and break down the barriers between places . . . .They change the way places appear but the fundamental role played by place . . . remains unchanged’ (Malpas, 2019, pp. vii–ix). This, he argues elsewhere, is because technology depends on the ontological nature of place and relation to place in order to function, even though superficial changes caused by technology can obscure these (Malpas, 2018). In other words, while other aspects of sense of place might be impacted by innovations in communications media, the ontological aspect of place endures. It serves as a stable foundation in a changing world.

19.3

Impacts of Electronic Media on Changeable Aspects of Sense of Place

19.3.1

Personal Aspects A personal aspect of sense of place involves uniquely individual experiences and memories of places. My interpretation of this is derived from Casey’s (2001, p. 404) definition of place as ‘the immediate ambiance of my lived body and its history, including the whole sedimented history of cultural and social influences and personal interests that compose my life history’. What I take from this is that where we come from should always inform how we relate to the world, because a personal sense of place begins in unmediated environmental experiences, especially those of childhood. While social and public influences later come to play important roles, our particular place experiences, attachments and memories are always ours alone. Regardless of whether these provide feelings of belonging and security or are tainted by poverty or domestic violence, they offer a personal point of reference against which other place experiences are assessed. It is not clear that older forms of electronic media – telephones and televisions – had much, if any, impact on personal sense of place. However, some effects of digital media are obvious; for instance, users of mobile phones in public spaces talking apparently to themselves, scarcely paying attention to what is around them. Sharon Kleinman (2007, p. 2) calls this ‘displacing place’, or ‘the circumstance of mobile communication in which “here” and “there” can be virtually anywhere’ and the phone literally intervenes between person and place. Less obvious but more disturbing is evidence that use of smartphones can become addictive – hours each day devoted to games, texting, social media and otherwise displacing place. Obsessive use of

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smartphones may contribute to teenage loneliness and suicide, in part because so many teenagers now spend much of their lives indoors, rather than outdoors experiencing others in real places (Twenge, 2017). While it is difficult to establish a causal relationship between high levels of online activity and mental health problems, because there are confounding factors such as loss of sleep, there is compelling evidence from a combination of MRI and behavioural observations that prolonged Internet use produces both ‘acute and sustained alterations in specific areas of cognition’ – including an inclination to outsource memory to the Internet, and reduced attention spans that suggest there may be impacts on otherwise resistant neurological aspects of sense of place (Firth et al., 2019). Malpas (2018) draws an explicit connection between use of social media and experiences of place. Social media, he suggests, have ‘the effect of radical externalization of personal life’, which obscures ‘the internality of the self’. This is connected to an obscuring of place because ‘the loss of a sense of place is a loss of a sense of the distinctiveness of places, and that loss of distinctiveness is closely tied up with the loss of the sense of the internality of places’ (p. 206). Self and place are intimately connected, and distractions from the world caused by the use of electronic media involve a dilution of personal aspects of sense of place. An alternative interpretation of the impact of electronic media on personal sense of place is that smartphones have come to function almost as body/mind appendages, carried everywhere and blending seamlessly into everyday life, adding an instant, datarich way of getting information about places and connecting us with elsewhere. Leighton Evans (2015, p. 3) has argued that ‘locative media’ – devices such as smartphones that always know where you are (which is the case even with location services disabled) – provide valuable help for wayfinding and learning about local amenities. They draw information into and out of a place in ways that he argues contribute to an enhanced sense of place in which embodied practices and data-infused environments act as ‘co-constituents’ (p. 11). It seems that electronic media simultaneously disconnect us from and connect us with the world, a contradiction that, given the enormous popularity of mobile phones and other devices, most of us are either unaware of or do not care about.

19.3.2

Social Aspects Social aspects of sense of place develop from knowing and being known somewhere, from experiences that are intersubjectively shared by those who live in a village, neighbourhood, city or region. An excellent example is provided by anthropologist Keith Basso (1996), who observed that for the Western Apache the experience of sensing places is regarded as a private affair, yet this experience is frequently communicated and appraised so that ‘places are lived most often in the company of other people’ (p. 56). Where mobility is limited, it is inevitable that social relationships, whether friendly or antagonistic, will develop between people who live close together and have a shared sense of place. This connection between community and place, according to Meyrowitz (1984), has been undone by

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electronic media because they lead to ‘a nearly total dissociation of physical place and social place. When we communicate through phone, radio, television or computer where we are physically no longer determines who we are socially’ (p. viii), and ‘where one is, has less and less to do with what one knows and experiences’ (p. 115). The outcome, as he puts it succinctly in the title of his book, is no sense of place. However, when Barry Wellman (2001), a sociologist, compared the social characteristics of physical place and what he called ‘cyberplace’, he came to a very different conclusion. In his research he found that online social networks could involve strong interpersonal feelings of shared identity, and that locally based communities and cyberspace communities were interacting and reinforcing each other rather than pulling in different directions. The reason for the contradictory conclusions of Meyrowitz and Wellman was that in the interval between their investigations there had been a radical transformation in prevailing electronic media. Meyrowitz, writing in the 1980s, was mostly concerned with television and radio, forms of mass media that delivered uniform, programmed and edited messages to relatively passive audiences, and thus contributed to placelessness. Wellman’s work in 2001 post-dated the introduction of the World Wide Web, search engines, email and chat rooms (an early form of social media), which together had begun to turn those passive audiences into participants who could, in effect, create their own online relationships and narratives. Since then the shift to participation has been reinforced by Facebook, YouTube, other social media platforms and smartphones. Facebook’s explicit mission is to keep people connected with friends and family and to allow them to share and express what matters to them. Research into the uses of social media and locative devices confirms that they have indeed added an important dimension to social relationships by enabling them to be maintained over time and long distances (Wilken and Goggin, 2014). It appears that newer forms of electronic media, rather than simply undermining the social aspect of sense of place as Meyrowitz suggested, have distributed and supplemented it. This is consistent with the notion of ‘communities without propinquity’ proposed by Melvin Webber (1964) to describe how different types of communities operate at different spatial scales – some local, some regional and others, such as those of scientists and professionals, widely distributed and international. These latter communities without propinquity were once maintained through written communication and occasional meetings, but have been hugely facilitated by the Internet and social media, which allow continual connections even between continents. In modern diasporas, the social relationships of families and groups are maintained simultaneously at an international scale through Skype, email and Facebook, and in the respective particular localities where they live. In an electronically mediated world, migration does not mean uprooting and abandoning the place of your origins, but the development of a new, electronically reinforced social sense of place that combines links with where you came from with roots and relationships where you now live. There is, however, another side to this. In the placeless virtual world of the Web, otherwise geographically scattered and disaffected individuals can connect through

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blogs and websites to exchange extreme views about the purity of place. This sort of thinking has a long history, and at its worst can grow into the poisoned sense of place and ethnic cleansing of Nazi Germany and the Balkans (Relph, 1997). On the Web, it has found a new home where the exclusionary convictions of isolated individuals can metastasise in the echo chambers of social media and all too often leap from the virtual world into acts of terrorism and violence in real places.

19.3.3

Public Aspects Public aspects of sense of place arise from received ideas that do not develop through individual and social experiences but in some manner come from outside, from government agencies, heritage advocates, business groups, place branding consultants, travel writers or websites. These received ideas can be ideologically constructed to promote national or regional pride, or associated with profit and other vested interests. They may also reflect rationally developed concepts about how people encounter places. In 1994, the economic geographer Doreen Massey challenged what she described as a reactionary sense of place rooted in nostalgia about bounded locations and local traditions, by defining places as nodes in open and porous networks of socio-economic processes that are caught up in the ‘time–space compression’ of international flows and interconnections. She suggested that we need ‘a global sense of the local, a global sense of place’ which recognises that places are dynamic, constantly changing and being produced and manipulated by political and economic processes (Massey, 1994, p. 156). Massey based her redefinition on what was happening in the late twentieth century, but in fact, a global sense of place began to emerge on the heels of the invention of the telegraph in 1844. In 1848, several major American newspapers formed a collective (that became Associated Press) to take advantage of news already being delivered by telegraph about the Mexican–American War; Morse’s technology and versions of Morse code were adopted at a European conference in 1851 as international standards for running railways; and the first successful transatlantic submarine telegraph cable was laid in 1866. The dubious effects of such changes on the public aspects of sense of place were not lost on the contemporary English art critic John Ruskin, who exclaimed: ‘Your railroad . . . is only a device for making the world smaller; and as for being able to talk from place to place . . . suppose you have, originally, nothing to say’; and he cited Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘The light outspeeding telegraph carries nothing on its beam’ (Ruskin, 1856, chapter XVII, s. 35). These strong opinions, well expressed, were to no avail. Making the world smaller mattered. An advertisement for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in the 1890s declared simply: ‘The mail is quick, telegraph is quicker but long distance telephone is instantaneous.’ In due course, radio, television and the Internet came to reinforce instantaneity. McLuhan was not enthusiastic about this sort of fallout from the implosion caused by electronic media. He recognised that even in the 1960s, the world had been turned into a global village, and he did not approve of it. He saw it as a world where ‘everybody has to live

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in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another’s lives’, sharing gossip, rumours and disagreements about events in remote places (McLuhan, 1964, p. 47). When Massey proposed a global sense of place in 1994, the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Tim Berners-Lee had conceived it in 1989 mostly as a way to facilitate internet communication among scientists, but also with the hope that it could be used for people around the world to connect without any cost, and to get involved in things that concerned them (Berners-Lee, 2017). The Web breaks the model of control from the top that was used in publishing, radio and television because it makes every user a potential participant, producer, editor and commentator. Unfortunately, as Berners-Lee subsequently realised, the Web developed in unexpected ways into a virtual public place that has involved loss of personal data, political manipulation and the spread of misinformation and mutual animosity. It facilitates the promotion of alternative beliefs and falsehoods. Empirical research has clearly shown that false information on Twitter and other social media platforms diffuses faster, is seen by more people and otherwise outperforms accurate information on every subject – terrorism, science, entertainment or politics (Vosoughi et al., 2018). It is not yet clear how this might affect sense of place, but it seems inevitable that digital falsehoods will find their way into locative media, perhaps as deep-fake videos and contrived histories of places. Berners-Lee sees the spread of misinformation and loss of personal data as a problem that could lead to a ‘digital dystopia’, and to counter this possibility he has actively promoted both technical redesign and what he calls a ‘contract for the Web’ that requires corporations, governments and individuals to cooperate on making the online world affordable, protecting privacy and promoting civil discourse (Berners-Lee, 2019). Hundreds of digital corporations, including most of the really big players, have nominally signed onto this contract. Shoshona Zuboff (2019, 2015), however, regards the problems of the Web from a socio-economic perspective and argues that they represent profound social and economic changes associated with the emergence of what she calls ‘surveillance capitalism’, an innovative form of capitalism that takes advantage of the technological innovations of the most recent phase of electronic media. She maintains that the big data tech companies that have developed since the 1990s – Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Alibaba and so on – not only provide enormously popular services, but have found ways to translate data about human behaviour, which they gather in the background through those services, into profits. ‘As a result of pervasive computer mediation, nearly every aspect of the world . . . is reborn as data’ that come from economic transactions, sensors embodied in objects and places, private and public surveillance cameras, smartphones, wearable devices, corporate and government databases, Google Street View, online searches, facial recognition, YouTube videos, blogs and ‘non-market forms of social production and everydayness’ (Zuboff, 2015, p. 77). These data are aggregated, analysed into predictive forms and then auctioned off to advertisers in order to make money. Zuboff does not discuss place explicitly, but her argument begins with what is clearly an assumption about sense of place. She suggests that a search for home and

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attachment to somewhere is part of human nature, and the question she raises is whether ubiquitous, constant collection of data, which commodifies everyday experiences, undermines this attachment. If I understand her argument and its implications correctly, a public sense of place has become grist for the capitalist mill. An indication that this might well be the case is the recent proposal of Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, for the redevelopment of a waterfront district it owns in Toronto (Sidewalk Labs, 2019). Its plan for this district, issued in June 2019, began with the language of place: When we ask Torontonians what they dream about for future neighbourhoods what we hear are dreams that are human, fundamental – a place with safer streets, a place where people are more engaged with their world than with their phones, a place that’s both inspiring and affordable; a place where, quite simply, everyone who wishes to call it home, can. (Sidewalk Toronto, 2019)

The core of the plan was ‘a layer of data integration that provides ubiquitous connectivity for all’, with smart technologies collecting ‘urban data’ about traffic, housing, healthcare, greenhouse gas emissions and people’s behaviour. Sidewalk Labs subsequently abandoned this plan, citing economic uncertainty associated with the COVID-19 pandemic (Sidewalk Toronto, 2020), but it is clear that the proposed redevelopment was intended as a prototype for ‘creating a new type of place to accelerate urban innovation . . . a beacon for cities around the world’ (Sidewalk Labs, 2019). In fact, this new type of place has probably already arrived: London has more than 600,000 surveillance cameras, and in China millions of these are already being used in cities for facial recognition and social monitoring (Bischoff, 2019). Surveillance technology is a major aspect of the ‘Safe City Solution’ being promoted across Asia and around the world by Huawei in association with the development of 5G networks (Yan, 2019). While benefits for urban management can follow from some data collection and monitoring of behaviour, it is nevertheless hard not to regard these all-encompassing approaches as a virtual public panopticon that will monitor and invade personal and social aspects of sense of place.

19.4

Conclusion Beginning with the invention of the telegraph, electronic media have overcome the barrier of distance, shrunk the world and interceded in sense of place in ways that variously enhance it and diminish it. They have enriched sense of place by making instantly available a wealth of information about both local and distant places, giving everyone a platform to share place experiences with others, and enabling social relations to be maintained at a distance. They have diminished sense of place by diverting attention to virtual elsewheres, undermining local social relationships, facilitating the promotion of false information about places and advancing poisoned ideas about places.

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The fact that so many substantial innovations in electronic media are so recent and are continuing to happen means that conclusions about broader consequences for sense of place have to be regarded as tentative. In some ways it seems that sense of place is historically contingent, because it is related to technological developments that change both the nature of places and how people relate to them. In other ways, sense of place appears to be immune to technological innovations such as those of electronic media. This in turn suggests that sense of place, although it is unified in our experiences of the world, has plural aspects, some rooted, others malleable. From the practical perspectives of everyday life, it is these malleable aspects that are a cause for concern, because misinformation, manipulation and surveillance have become prevalent on the Internet, and these undermine those aspects of sense of place that involve a freedom to experience the world directly, whether by ourselves or in association with others. We may not always be explicitly aware of sense of place, but it is necessarily part of our memories, intentions and encounters with the particular realities of the world. As social media, search engines and smartphones have made electronic media increasingly popular and participatory, they also appear to have become unwitting agents of political and corporate power that indirectly treat sense of place as a resource that can be exploited, and thus erode its freedom.

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Webber, M. (1964) ‘The urban place and the non-place urban realm’, in Webber, M. (ed.), Explorations into Urban Structure, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 79–153. Wellman, B. (2001) ‘Physical place and cyberplace: the rise of personalized networking’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 227–252. Wilken, R. and Goggin, G. (2014) ‘Locative media: definitions, histories, theories’, in Wilken, R. and Goggin, G. (eds), Locative Media, New York, Routledge, pp. 1–19. Yan, Y. T. (2019) ‘Smart cities or surveillance: Huawei in Central Asia’, The Diplomat, 7 August [Online]. Available at https://thediplomat.com/2019/08/smart-cities-or-surveillance-huaweiin-central-asia/ (accessed 20 February 2020). Zuboff, S. (2015) ‘Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization’, Journal of Information Technology, vol. 30, pp. 75–89. Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, New York, Public Affairs.

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20 A Dynamic View of Local Knowledge and Epistemic Bonds to Place Implications for Senses of Place and the Governance of Biodiversity Conservation Paula Castro

It is evident today that people’s relations to place are crucially relevant for their engagement with, or resistance to, measures adopted in view of climate change adaptation or biodiversity conservation (Nicolosi and Corbett, 2018; Raymond et al., 2017; Castro and Mouro, 2016; Adger et al., 2012). In biodiversity conservation, a considerable share of such measures today are legal ones. Many have supranational origins but are then transposed into national legal frameworks, where they become laws to be implemented at the local level. In this chapter, I focus on one such supranational legal order: the one that created and now governs the European Union’s (EU) ‘Natura 2000’ network of protected sites, designed to assure the long-term survival of habitats and species that represent European biodiversity (European Commission, 2009). Supranational legal orders, negotiated among many countries at the same time, express a ‘view from nowhere’ (Williams, 2014) with respect to the issues they regulate; it is when they are brought into local implementation that they encounter the ‘views from somewhere’ of local communities. It is at the local level that these new laws become fully relevant for people–place relations: the new understandings of place that they carry affect such relations and are pertinent to how communities interpret the laws (Castro and Mouro, 2016). This chapter explores these relational dynamics – where laws affect people–place relations, and those relations affect the reception of the laws – by focusing on two groups whose professional activities involving species and habitats are directly impacted by the Natura laws: farmers and artisanal fishers. In the last 10 years, I have spent many hours interviewing them and walking with them on the land and the coast. The extent and complexity of their accounts of knowledge have inspired me to reflect on how local knowledge intertwines with both sense of place and responses to supranational legal innovations governing biodiversity. I will argue that to better understand these responses it is crucial to reconceptualise people–place relations in a way that is more attentive to the epistemic dimension – that is, to local knowledge and the weaving of epistemic bonds to place. I will argue that the epistemic dimension should be added to the two dimensions that have been the focus of enquiry into senses of place: place attachment and place meaning (Raymond et al., 2017; Benages-Albert et al., 2015; Williams, 2014). The former is conceptualised as the emotional bonds linking people to places (Hidalgo and Hernandez,

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2001), the second as the bonds woven through meaning-making and identification processes (Raymond et al., 2017). Neither concept is thus directly oriented towards the theorisation and study of how knowledge of/in a locale weaves bonds to place (i.e. epistemic bonds) and their consequences. In order to theorise people–place relations in a way that offers specific attention to local knowledge and epistemic bonds, a theoretical view of the nature of (local) knowledge is necessary. I will present a dynamic view in which epistemic labour – that is, knowledge as process, not just content (Maranta et al., 2003) – takes a central role. This position also posits that meaning and knowledge, although interdependent, are not the same. In turn, this reconceptualisation informs a plural view of senses of place: one that encompasses the three processes of attachment, meaning-making and knowing, all of which are themselves inherently plural. In what follows, I first briefly characterise Natura and its laws. Afterwards I present an integrated theoretical view of the division of epistemic labour and (local) knowledge, illustrating it with examples of how fishers and farmers living in Natura 2000 sites discuss their places, knowledges and laws.

20.1

Creating an EU Supranational Legal Order for Governing Biodiversity The Natura 2000 network of protected sites, a major example of today’s supranational legislative orders, covers about 18 per cent of EU land, both private and state-owned (Blicharska et al., 2016), and was launched based on the 1992 European Commission Habitats Directive. With the transposition of this directive into national legal frameworks, each member state had to identify a set of areas where the conservation of species and habitats would be a priority. In those areas, several new laws now define the suitable practices of production and uses of natural resources. The laws forbid certain agricultural practices (intensive farming), encouraging others through subsidies (e.g. direct sowing); they also establish mandatory closed periods when species in peril cannot be fished or hunted. The Natura laws, like most laws, incorporate and express two types of assumption: epistemic and normative (Castro and Mouro, 2016; Ferranti et al., 2014). The former makes knowledge claims, describing ‘how things are’ (e.g. certain fish are threatened with extinction). The latter asserts ‘how things should be’, expressing choices of norms and values, and linking them to specific actions (e.g. threatened species should be protected from hunting/fishing during closed periods). The formulation of the Natura laws was supported by conservation experts and initially involved little local consultation, preventing the knowledge of fishers and farmers from having a role (Blicharska et al., 2016; Ferranti et al., 2014; Stoll-Kleemann, 2001). The laws’ implementation called on a complex network of local actors to readjust their own normative and epistemic views – and relations to place – in line with the (expert-led) assumptions that had travelled down from the EU level (Castro and Mouro, 2016). This illustrates well what Maranta et al. (2003) call ‘the epistemic asymmetry’ conferring all authority to experts in the division of epistemic labour. I now turn to this division.

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The Division of Epistemic Labour Although all humans are equipped to do epistemic labour, it is – like other types of work – subjected to a social division (Maranta et al., 2003; Wynne, 1996). Supported by formal institutions and the roles these create (Castro and Santos, 2020), this division prescribes who can (rights) and should (duties) do the work of knowledge, and importantly also defines those whose work does not count as such even if it is done (exclusions) (Foucault, 1982). A complex institutional scaffolding supports this division, establishing scientists as those entitled to produce proper knowledge (Latour, 2004; Scott, 1998; Wynne, 1996), deciding what can or cannot be integrated within the dominant regimes of evidence, assuring the reproduction and circulation of scientific knowledge beyond the local of production (e.g. laboratories, universities) (Klenk et al. 2017; Welsh and Wynne, 2013). Even when knowledge systems on the ‘other side’ of this division (e.g. indigenous knowledge) are recognised, or indeed brought into decision-making, they are frequently regarded as being of a lesser nature (Nazarea, 2006; Scott, 1998) – for example, as being rigid and repetitive, ‘shaped by pragmatic criteria, and heavily leaning towards concrete instead of abstract information’ (Wagner, 2007, p. 9). This generalised attitude of epistemic asymmetry defining proper versus lesser knowledges is entrenched in the way many international ecological supranational legal orders are formulated, and/or it resurfaces in their national/local implementation, even when other laws attempt to equalise these systems (Castro and Mouro, 2016; Welsh and Wynne, 2013). The processes of Natura 2000’s formulation and implementation initially followed this binary logic (Ferranti et al., 2014; Stoll-Kleemann, 2001). Through this logic, local residents are ‘imagined’ as devoid of both knowledge and meaning/norms, and as ready to embrace new laws once they have been informed about the veracity and normative relevance of those laws’ assumptions (Castro and Mouro, 2016; Welsh and Wynne, 2013; Latour, 2004). Yet, this version of how new laws (might) be accepted is not supported by evidence gathered about the reception of Natura (Castro and Santos, 2020; Blicharska et al., 2016) or other laws (Castro, 2012; Devine-Wright, 2009). It is also contrary to constructionist and interpretative socialpsychological theorising (Bruner, 1990; for an overview, see Batel and Castro, 2018). To be sustained, action needs to have meaning, and legal innovations are never received in a vacuum, but rather through the work of interpretation, which is linked to people’s cultural worlds (Castro and Santos, 2020; Castro, 2012; Devine-Wright, 2009). Within the literature on senses of place, place meanings are seen as part of local cultural worlds, offering the lens through which environmental measures are interpreted (Raymond et al., 2017; Williams, 2014). However, this literature does not necessarily see such cultural words as including knowledge. For instance, important pleas for environmental policy to more explicitly incorporate cultural dimensions closely tied to place may define culture as including ‘the symbols that express meaning, including beliefs, rituals, art and stories’ (Adger et al., 2012, p. 112), but

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not knowledge. Similarly, important systematisations of aspects that may affect the acceptance of biodiversity conservation at the community level include ‘social and cultural norms and social identities’ (Bennett et al., 2016, p. 60), but not local knowledge. In other words, the literature that highlights the importance of the cultural dimensions of place frequently forgets knowledge, and/or conflates meaning with knowledge – thus paying less attention to the role of knowledge and people’s epistemic bonds to place. Yet fully understanding sense of place requires a consideration not only of values, norms and identities as socio-cultural and identity-expressive layers of place meanings, but also (local) knowledge (e.g. of where, when, how, what for) and local practices (Williams, 2014). In other words, cultural worlds are meaning and knowledge worlds, and thus the full conflation of meaning with knowledge is generally problematic. It is even more problematic when it comes to groups engaged in resourcerelated professions, such as fishers or farmers, since humans’ ability to attain complex, resource-related knowledge that can evolve and travel to other places is a foundation of our life on earth. This is evidenced in the spread of agriculture from the Fertile Crescent to the Atlantic shores (Diamond, 1997), or the travel of knowledge about medicinal plants in the Caribbean world (Schiebinger, 2004). Recently, the many local conflicts around biodiversity conservation policies that confer epistemic authority only – or mostly – to science have led several scholars to reopen the issue of local knowledge. These scholars have argued that the management of ecosystems needs contributions from local knowledge (Raymond et al., 2010; Berkes, 2004), refusing to draw sharp distinctions between local, traditional and scientific knowledge (Raymond et al., 2010) and calling for collaboration among these systems (Tengo et al., 2017). They join other approaches across the social sciences that reject binary oppositions regarding epistemic labour and share the view that all knowledges result from ‘going around in an environment’ (Ingold, 2011), being exposed to both the relational dynamics between perception–action processes and processes of interpretation conducted by the shared, socially constructed meaning categories of a community, whether that community be scientific or otherwise (Klenk et al., 2017; Raymond et al., 2017; Wynne, 1996). Some of these non-binary positions regarding epistemic work – bringing attention to knowledge as process, not just content – are helpful for devising a conceptualisation of (local) knowledge as not fully overlapping with meaning (norms, values). Drawing from these positions, I will now propose a dynamic model of local knowledge that argues that this overlap is indeed imperfect. I will illustrate two dimensions of this proposal – (1) knowledge as intertwining process and product, and (2) knowledge as learning and hybridisation through relation – with examples from farmers and fishers in studies conducted in Natura 2000 sites in Portugal (see methodological details in Castro and Santos, 2020; Mouro et al., 2018; Castro and Mouro, 2016). Together, the conceptual proposal and the examples will help to clarify the relevance of local knowledge and epistemic bonds for people–place relations, illustrating how, when mobilised to interpret Natura laws, these bonds are consequential for both resisting and integrating them.

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Local Knowledge and Epistemic Bonds to Place: A Conceptual Proposal and Examples The initial tenet of this dynamic proposal is that the epistemic realm comprises and intertwines process (epistemic work) and product (concepts, knowledge systems) for all types of knowledge (Raymond et al., 2017; Ingold, 2011; Scott, 1998). Process refers to learning by means of a continuous engagement with the constituents of an environment (Raymond et al., 2017; Ingold, 2011; Scott, 1998). In scientific knowledge, the process dimension is captured by the notion of research, an open-ended process that inherently contains indeterminacy and involves using, transforming and proposing collectively elaborated knowledge systems: the product (Welsh and Wynne, 2013; Latour, 2004; Maranta et al., 2003). Knowledge as process integrates action, perception and interpretation. Gibsonian affordance theory (see Raymond et al., 2017) calls attention to the importance of both the perception of place features and how these are interpreted. Perception is linked to the affordances available in place (Raymond et al., 2017) – for example, water currents seen travelling to the right, not the left; sandy, not rocky, soils observed in a patch of land – which constrain the when, how or why of knowledge. Regarding interpretation, my proposal contends that both knowledge systems and meaning systems (e.g. values) shared in a community (whether a local community of fishers or a transnational scientific community) are mobilised to select and attribute sense to place affordances. Such shared knowledge systems – the products – are learned with others, and also transformed with them (Batel and Castro, 2018). Thus, knowledge, in this view, is the product of perception, action and being with others (Ingold, 2011, p. 159), not the result of a solipsistic activity that relies exclusively upon direct and individual perception of the features of the world, although those features do play a role in guiding it (Raymond et al., 2017; Ingold, 2011; Devine-Wright, 2009). Extracts 1–4 all illustrate how action-in-place, perception and interpretation are integrated in local knowledge, and how local knowledge is used to interpret the Natura laws. Extract 1 is from a focus group of fishers; Extract 2 is from a focus group of farmers on a site where bustards are a priority protection species. Both extracts exemplify local knowledge being used to interpret some laws and draw negative conclusions. Thereafter, Extracts 3 and 4 exemplify local knowledge being used for a positive appraisal of other laws. Extract 1

F: About four, five years ago this legislation started, these licences . . . At first it was the tools, our old tools . . . We were not allowed to use them [to catch bivalves]. But they are not going to damage the soil, it is even good to stir the oysters. C: It’s good, if the sand is not stirred, they do not develop. X: Yes, a lot of people do not know this, but they develop if the soil, the mud or the sand, is stirred . . . Sometimes those who do the laws, they are not in the know.

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F: . . . Clam, razor shell, cockle, they all have to be stirred, to bring the microorganisms up. C: . . . I don’t know where they do the studies, or why sometimes so many studies are needed. I’ll give you an example: from that bridge down, our river is a salt marsh. And now we cannot even so much as step on the mud of the marsh [due to the laws]. [However,] the mud, if not mixed, it becomes sludge, and sludge, it rots and supports no life. (Focus group, fishers, 2015) Extract 2

P6: So, for instance, we are harvesting, and we find a [bustard] nest. And [the law says] we need to leave a circle of 5 meters of un-harvested land around the nest . . . very nice, we do that! We go on, find another nest, do the same. Then we bring the sheep to the harvested land, and the sheep, where do they start eating? Where the un-harvested stalks are, and then! there go the nests! P3: they go straight for the stalks and destroy everything P6: we follow the rule, just as the experts tell us, but then . . . P4: . . . but then what happens is that the birds end up dying, because the experts do not know the reality of the land. (Focus group, farmers (reproduced from Castro and Mouro, 2016)) In Extracts 1 and 2, the contestation of the laws is presented through the lens of knowledge developed in the context of the speakers’ immersion and action in a specific place, which grants them the authority to draw conclusions. It also appears as the result of ongoing processes of engagement in a socio-cultural context, not as a solipsistic activity. In Extract 1, the knowledge is local in the sense that it comes from engagement with local salt marshes and soils; however, it is not only local but general. In both extracts, the focus groups make the relational side of epistemic work particularly visible as the interlocutors complete each other’s ideas and sentences. Also in both extracts, the laws are criticised through the lens of this knowledge. However, local knowledge can be used to interpret the legal recommendations as valid and to accept them. Extracts 3 and 4 – which discuss catching barnacles and direct sowing, respectively – illustrate this. Extract 3 I like to catch barnacles, I go everywhere around here for that. I used to catch a lot at the [locally famous] Galé rock. Only now I don’t, because now . . . well, it’s not like before, when a person would arrive at the rock and – what a beauty! Today we look at the rock, and what do we see? Nothing. I used to see that rock all dressed in red, what a sight, how beautiful . . . Now [due to the laws] barnacles cannot be caught during a three-month [closed] period, but I told them [fellow catchers] ‘you could even catch only during the summer, or on weekends, and you would still do good money, then you could choose only the big ones, because if you kill the small ones, still developing, then it’s the end’. (Interview, fisher, 2014)

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Extract 4 This was a very rainy year. My neighbour, I saw he worked the land the old way, then those big rains came, and there his soil went . . . gone into the Atlantic Ocean . . . I saw that, and also that his production was not nil, and mine was nil, but at least my soil stayed put . . . Direct sowing is complicated in our region, not easy to make a profit from it, but [Natura 2000] compensations [for direct sowing] can help a little. But mostly, the preservation of nature, of the property itself, for me, that is a reason for pride. I did not produce anything, but the soil is here, it did not go away. (Focus group, farmer, 2012)

In these extracts, the acceptance of the laws again comes in accounts that intertwine action (‘I go everywhere’), perception (absent barnacles, abundant rain) and knowledge (‘if you kill the small ones, still developing, then it’s the end’). In both extracts it is also clear that in addition to knowledge, meaning systems – the values that are relevant for the self (e.g. conserving barnacles, preventing soil erosion), the values of others in place, the values and assumptions of the Natura legislation – are all considered together in a reflexive appraisal of self and others. In Extract 3 in particular, the depiction of a (current) situation of resource depletion, which is reliant on a vocabulary of direct perception (what one sees now, what one saw before), supports knowledge claims. These claims then warrant the next step: persuading colleagues towards conservation. This is done by arguing that they should do more than just respect the closed period the laws impose: the interviewee reports himself talking to a fellow catcher, arguing through knowledge for more conservation efforts. In other words, knowledge and meaning/values are both mobilised here to interpret the laws in a relational context, as a done-together achievement. In all four extracts there is a vocabulary that foregrounds love of place and profession intertwined with knowledge – that is, epistemic bonds. In the farmers’ case, it is pride intertwined with knowledge of the land; in the case of the barnacle catcher, it is love intertwined with knowledge about what experts might call ‘resources’, but which catchers call by their name: barnacles. Thus, epistemic bonds intermingle knowledge with aesthetic pleasure in the beauty of barnacles’ colours (some barnacles have a vivid red rim), and with pride in the land that was not washed away by the rain.

20.4

Knowledge as Learning and Hybridisation Through Relation This conceptualisation of knowledge as process also sees learning as happening in and through relations, intermingling with interpretation and sociality: we see, and others guide us on how to interpret what we see through shared and collectively sustained knowledge and meaning systems, with which we ‘catch’ experience – as well as fish, as Extract 5 illustrates. Learning here is also seen as perpetually ‘under construction’ through the person’s action and encounters with others.

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Extract 5 We are friends, and they know – ‘eh, look, fish are in that zone’, and we go to that zone. And we talk . . . I learned by seeing the others fishing, and they taught, isn’t it? I was with them, and they ‘do like this, put the bait there’ . . . Because fishing is difficult, there are places where the fish do not go, we need to know the zone. (Interview, fisher, 2014)

Yet, the processes of knowledge learning and construction can be relational without being enclosed within one community, or even requiring co-presence: individuals and communities are in contact with others in different ways, and they can learn new interpretations, borrow from other knowledge systems, and be transformed by them (Nazarea, 2006; Scott, 1998). This can make local knowledge plastic, changeable and hybrid, unlike some of its depictions (Wagner, 2007). Laws – which bring with them the power of the state to impose its epistemic and normative assumptions on local communities (Castro and Santos, 2020) – can be integrated and change previous knowledge, as Extracts 3 and 4 showed. But other knowledge sources and systems can be used as well. Extracts 6–8 eloquently show how complex and varied the meaning and knowledge systems brought to the local can be, testifying to knowledge processes that are not static or rigid but in motion, incorporating new elements and voices – from the past, other places, different types of knowledge. Yet they also show that the knowledge being constructed, while not only local, is still strongly anchored in the local. Extract 6 We, the fishers from this place, we know where things are, where the oysters are in the river, or the mussels, or the barnacles in the sea . . . And if we do not catch everything, only small amounts, letting the rest develop . . . for instance, let’s say in 20 m2 of mussels, we only pull 5 m2, and why? For the ova of the mussel to be able to go to the rock already cleaned. These are small studies through the years, isn’t it, that these older people . . . for me they are my teachers, with the knowledge that comes from their elders, isn’t it? We take it, we go and internalise it in our thoughts and implement it in the youngsters, isn’t it? And I have also been talking to them here, the university people. They come here, the young ones, to collect samples and do the analysis . . . and I help, well, in what I, in what we know we help each other. And I learned with them too. (Focus group, fisher, 2015) Extract 7 How do I find the fish? Well, it’s many years, and with the probes and the GPS that we have today. The probes know where the barriers are, the bottom of the sea, it is just like here, the earth, right? It has valleys, mountains, it has rivers, just like here, right? And with our eyes, the knowledge, the probes, with this, we have, we know where the barriers are, we research all that. (Interview, fisher, 2015) Extract 8 With direct sowing we can work the same plot every year, the more we work it, the more productive it becomes – and who is inside the property is who best knows what is the better plot, what is the most productive one . . . [But keeping in mind also], as my great-grandfather used to tell me, that the land is female, so one has to work it at the right time, if we do not do it in the right period, we are lost . . . Actually, I started [doing direct sowing] by myself, then I went to Spain to see other farms that were ten years ahead of us, and I read Brazilian articles. (Focus group, farmer, 2012)

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The organisation of these last three extracts is similar: knowledge of the place is strongly claimed, and is linked to a reflexive integration of various voices and sources, and to the shared knowledge and meaning systems with which they operate. Some of these voices come from the past, some from direct experience, some from the experience of others, some from the young university people that biodiversity protection projects bring into the community, and some from new technologies. This is clear testimony that local knowledge does not have to be rigid, static or even strictly local, but it is still kept alive and meaningful in the local – thus evidencing the dynamism of epistemic bonds to place.

20.5

Discussion The previous sections have presented and illustrated a dynamic theorisation of knowledge. The proposal presented (1) views knowledge as not fully overlapping with meaning, assuming that (local) knowledge participates together with meaning in the constantly ongoing process of turning spaces into places. It also (2) views knowledge as more than a product: knowledge is also a process integrating action, perception and interpretation, happening with others, and in the context of a social division of epistemic labour that frequently establishes a simplistic binary contrast between proper (scientific) knowledge and lesser knowledges. Read through this theorisation, the extracts presented above suggest three main conclusions. First, they vividly reveal that local socio-cultural worlds are both meaning and knowledge worlds. Second, they show that local knowledge provides a relevant lens through which supranational legal innovations for biodiversity governance (often based on scientific knowledge) are locally assessed, a process that sometimes leads to their contestation and sometimes to their integration into local worlds. Third, they illustrate that learning and the weaving of epistemic bonds are plastic processes that are done together not only with present local others but also with experts, friends, visiting scientists and even voices from the past. They thus also illustrate the connectivity of local knowledge, and how it can be metamorphosed by many voices and sources (Nazarea, 2006; Scott, 1998). All of this demonstrates the extent to which local knowledge matters for the reception of biodiversity conservation measures regulated by supranational legal orders. This in turn calls for these legal innovations to be formulated in ways that do not exclusively rely on top-down, expert ‘views from nowhere’ (Williams, 2014), which lead to implementation processes that are detached from the ways that people live and act in place. It also demands that we take seriously local knowledge and the epistemic bonds to place it weaves. Incorporating local inputs – through more public participation in legal decision-making and implementation – can offer more complex and nuanced responses to conservation, since the knowers are multiplied, and more knowledges are put at the centre of action-in-place. This pluralisation of knowledges can perhaps – and hopefully – lead to less narrow and less standardised imaginings of what our places, and our present and future together as (many) species, may look like.

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20.6

Conclusion I have argued in this chapter that a better understanding of how today’s supranational environmental legal orders are locally contested or accepted requires the addition of the epistemic dimension to the dimensions that are already at the centre of the literature on senses of place – that is, place attachment and place meaning. This involves paying more attention to local knowledge, which I have theorised as interdependent but not overlapping with meaning, and as a process and product that is constructed with others and weaves epistemic bonds to place. By including the epistemic dimension, the conceptualisation of senses of place can become more relational, plural and dynamic, allowing us to understand people’s engagement with place through three dimensions: engagement through meaning, resulting in belonging and identity bonds; engagement through affection, resulting in attachment; and engagement through knowledge, resulting in epistemic bonds. These need further study regarding biodiversity conservation, and indeed climate change.

Acknowledgement The studies described were partially supported by the projects ERANET/ CIRCLEMED2/0003/2013 with Foundation for Science and Technology funding, and LIFE-Aves-LIFE07NAT-P654 with European Commission funding.

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Castro, P. (2012) ‘Legal innovation for social change: exploring change and resistance to different types of sustainability laws’, Political Psychology, vol. 33, pp. 105–121. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1467-9221.2011.00863.x Castro, P. and Mouro, C. (2016) ‘“Imagining ourselves” as participating publics: an example from biodiversity conservation’, Public Understanding of Science, vol. 25, pp. 858–872. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662515581303 Castro, P. and Santos, T. (2020) ‘Dialogues with the absent other: using reported speech and the vocabulary of citizenship for contesting ecological laws and institutions’, Discourse and Society, vol. 31, pp. 249–267. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926519889126 Devine-Wright, P. (2009) ‘Rethinking NIMBYism: the role of place attachment and place identity in explaining place-protective action’, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, vol. 19, pp. 426–441. https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.1004 Diamond, J. (1997) Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, London, Vintage. European Commission (2009) Europe’s Nature for You, Luxembourg, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Ferranti, F., Turnhout, E., Beunen, R. and Behagel, J. H. (2014) ‘Shifting nature conservation approaches in Natura 2000 and the implications for the roles of stakeholders’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, vol. 57, pp. 1642–1657. https://doi.org/10.1080 /09640568.2013.827107 Foucault, M. (1982) ‘The subject and power’. In Dreyfus, H and Rabinow, P (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 208–222. Hidalgo, C. and Hernandez, B. (2001) ‘Place attachment: conceptual and empirical questions’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 21, pp. 273–281. https://doi.org/10.1006/jevp .2001.0221 Ingold, T. (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, London, Routledge. Klenk, N., Fiume, A., Meehan, K. and Gibbes, C. (2017) ‘Local knowledge in climate adaptation research: moving knowledge frameworks from extraction to co-production’, WIREs Climate Change. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.475 Latour, B. (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Maranta, A., Guggenheim, M., Gisler, P. and Pohl, C. (2003) ‘The reality of experts and the imagined lay person’, Acta Sociologica, vol. 46, pp. 150–165. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0001699303046002005 Mouro, C., Santos, T. and Castro, P. (2018) ‘Past–present discontinuity in ecological change and marine governance: an integrated narrative approach to artisanal fishing’, Marine Policy, vol. 97, pp. 163–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2018.06.008 Nazarea, V. D. (2006) ‘Local knowledge and memory in biodiversity conservation’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 35, pp. 317–335. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123252 Nicolosi, E. and Corbett, J. B. (2018) ‘Engagement with climate change and the environment: a review of the role of relationships to place’, International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, vol. 23, pp. 77–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2017.1385002 Raymond, C. M., Fazey, I., Reed, M. S., et al. (2010) ‘Integrating local and scientific knowledge for environmental management’, Journal of Environmental Management, vol. 91, pp. 1766–1777. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2010.03.023

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Raymond, C. M., Kyttä, M. and Stedman, R. (2017) ‘Sense of place, fast and slow: the potential contributions of affordance theory to sense of place’, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01674 Schiebinger, L. (2004) Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Scott, J. C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale, Yale University Press. Stoll-Kleemann, S. (2001) ‘Barriers to nature conservation in Germany: a model explaining opposition to protected areas’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 21, pp. 369–385. https://doi.org/10.1006/jevp.2001.0228 Tengo, M., Hill, R., Malmer, P., et al. (2017) ‘Weaving knowledge systems in IPBES, CBD and beyond: lessons learned for sustainability’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, vol. 26–27, pp. 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2016.12.005 Wagner, W. (2007) ‘Vernacular science knowledge: its role in everyday knowledge communication’, Public Understanding of Science, vol. 16, pp. 7–22. https://doi.org/10.1177 /0963662506071785 Welsh, I. and Wynne, B. (2013) ‘Science, scientism and imaginaries of publics in the UK: passive objects, incipient threats’, Science as Culture, vol. 22, pp. 540–566. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14636778.2013.764072 Williams, D. (2014) ‘Making sense of “place”: reflections on pluralism and positionality in place research’, Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 131, pp. 74–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j .landurbplan.2014.08.002 Wynne, B. (1996) ‘May the sheep safely graze? A reflexive view of the expert–lay knowledge divide’, in Lash, S., Szerszynski, B. and Wynne, B. (eds), Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, London, SAGE Publications, pp. 44–83.

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21 Social Media and Experiences of Nature Towards a Plurality of Senses of Place Anton S. Olafsson, Maja S. Møller, Thomas Mattijssen, Natalie M. Gulsrud, Bas Breman and Arjen Buijs

21.1

Introduction It is widely recognised that social media impacts on how we relate to the world in multiple ways, including our language, perceptions, values and behaviours. Since sense of place is formed through interactions between the material world and people’s meanings, emotions, stories and practices (Stedman, 2003b), it has also been influenced by the rise of social media. This chapter focuses on people’s experiences of natural places and changes in their sense of place through the use of social media. While several scholars argue that electronic media is leading to a decline in experiences of natural environments, and consequently to a weakening sense of place (see Chapter 19), this chapter focuses on the qualitative changes in sense of place that may result from social media use. Social media contextualises place by introducing new forms of communication about it, from shallow communications such as ‘likes’ to richer communications including narratives, photos and videos. Although social media has been linked to an ‘extinction of experience’ caused by increasing indoor time (Soga and Gaston, 2016), it also enables new forms of experience and engagement with natural environments. Social media might facilitate cognitive understandings and affective bonds between people and ecosystems in multiple ways, such as through the construction of self-identities and place identities (Champ et al., 2013), potentially forming a plurality of senses of place. Social media platforms can thus be understood as new arenas for the co-construction of places and values, whereby relational values stemming from socialecological interactions are negotiated and communicated (Calcagni et al., 2019). This chapter explores how social media is linked to senses of place and experiences of nature from a social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) perspective. We argue that a shift towards plural senses of place – taking into account dynamic couplings between society, ecology and technology – is essential to deal with the multiple ways in which social media engages people with place. This is illustrated through four empirical cases:

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1. the sharing of urban nature images on Instagram; 2. the role of social media in forming public opinion and mobilising people to contest ecosystem management; 3. the use of a tailor-made social media platform for urban forestry governance; and 4. the use of a grassroots-developed social media app to increase urban foraging. First, we elaborate on how we understand sense of place in the context of social media and experiences of nature.

21.2

Sense of Place and Social Media We draw on understandings of sense of place from SETS and natural resource management literature. This literature emphasises that sense of place is based on meanings with cognitive as well as affective (emotional) components (Masterson et al., 2017), and that individual and social experiences of specific settings are important in forming place-based meanings (Stedman, 2003b). Since social processes are involved in meaning-making, some meanings of place may be shared between different groups. In reality, however, individuals carry diverse meanings of place because of the different ways in which they interact with and within a setting, and this forms multiple senses of place within individuals and across groups. Therefore, we treat sense of place as a plural concept. There is no single sense of place for a specific site; rather, there are many senses of place that different people attribute to it. These senses of place are often constructed in interaction with others, and may be contested. Social media can contribute to experiences of nature and senses of place in multiple ways. First, content shared on social media, such as texts, pictures, videos and comments, can be associated with specific place names through hashtags or titles. A search for a place name hashtag on global social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) will swiftly reveal a wide variety of content, highlighting the different perceptions that people attribute to that place. Thus, usergenerated content nurtures the ongoing, dynamic, diverse and inclusive negotiation and formation of senses of place. Second, much shared content on social media is geocoded with locationbased data (e.g. via smartphone GPS) or volunteered geographical information (Sui et al., 2013). This geocoding or geotagging facilitates map-based visualisations of senses of place. Many global social media platforms have online map interfaces where people can search specific areas and/or generate ‘heat maps’ of social media posts (e.g. onemilliontweetmap.com, flickr.com/map). This geocoding enables the analysis of assemblages of place-related social media content (Jenkins et al., 2016). Third, social media may increase the focus on emotional dimensions of sense of place. Many social media platforms are designed to represent affects, such as ‘like/ dislike’, ‘love’ (heart symbol), other emojis and selfies with different facial

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expressions. Such social media data have been used in emotional mapping, a new subfield within neogeography using social media big data to link place with affect (Ashkezari-Toussi et al., 2019). In this field, researchers have employed novel methods to explore the construction of place, such as by analysing facial expressions in geocoded social media images combined with environmental factors (Kang et al., 2019). Finally, the sharing of place-related content on social media is often associated with real-life experiences of nature: ‘Rather than existing in a separate “virtual” sphere, technological developments including the internet, mobile phones and social media are integrated with the everyday “real world” through their “hard” infrastructural supports, capacity to link people and places and through the mediation of social spaces by digital information’ (Marlowe et al., 2017, pp. 85–86). Social media’s capacity to facilitate user-generated content allows people to assign meanings to specific locations. Hence, social media platforms mediate and communicate actual experiences of nature in the real world that can be interpreted as people–place bonds. Thus, social media facilitates and mediates people–place interactions through affect, cognition and practice, and thereby contributes to the formation of senses of place.

21.3

Four Examples from a SETS Perspective As is generally acknowledged, sense of place is socially constructed within socialecological interactions. The biophysical and ecological attributes of places matter in this process (Stedman, 2003a). However, we argue that these meanings are not only constructed through the interplay between social and environmental dimensions; the technological context also needs to be considered. Technologies (such as social media) mediate interactions between communities of people and ecosystems. To acknowledge this role of technologies, we use a SETS perspective to present and analyse four cases of sense of place in the context of social media and experiences of nature. A SETS framing (Gulsrud et al., 2018a) stresses that technologies have social, ecological and technological ramifications, but are often only discussed in limited terms – focusing either on their technological and ecological impacts, or their technological and social impacts. The SETS perspective goes beyond this by exploring social-technological, ecological-technological and socialecological interfaces. This is necessary to uncover the opportunities and challenges associated with technologies in nature–culture relations, including senses of place. The four cases represent specific people–place–tech systems – that is, systems where different social, ecological and tech contexts interact. Two of our cases focus on global social media: uses of Instagram on a city scale in one case, and uses of (mainly) Twitter and Facebook on a national scale in the other. The two other cases focus on tailor-made social media platforms, one initiated by a public authority, the other, a citizen initiative. We have previously published research related to all four cases, and we refer the reader to the original sources (Table 21.1) for detailed information on the methodologies and results.

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Social context Instagram community

Civic mobilisation

Local citizens

Foraging community

Short name

Insta case

OVP case

Melbourne case

Byhøst case

Case

Shared urban nature: analyses of Instagram images from Copenhagen, Denmark Social media and civic movement, Oostvaardersplassen, the Netherlands Melbourne Urban Forest Visual, Melbourne, Australia Byhøst urban foraging app, Denmark Wild urban food

Urban tree management

Contested nature management

Urban nature

Ecological context

Small grassroots app and website

State-initiated online platform

Global social media platforms

Global social media platform

Tech context

Table 21.1 Overview of SETS domains and social media-facilitated people–place interactions in the four cases

Emailing individual trees and visualising urban tree stock Facilitating community knowledge exchange about urban foraging

Place-based communication across platforms

Sharing of geocoded images under #sharingcph

Facilitated people– place interaction

Møller et al. (2019)

Gulsrud et al. (2018b)

Mattijssen et al. (2019)

Guerrero et al. (2016)

Reference

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275

Insta Case: Shared Instagram Images of Urban Nature in Copenhagen, Denmark Instagram has become one of the most popular social media platforms for imagesharing, with more than one billion monthly active users (Constine, 2018). Building on a study of images of urban nature shared on Instagram (Guerrero et al., 2016), we reinterpret its findings in the context of sense of place. The focus is on content analyses of Instagram images of urban nature in Copenhagen. The images were harvested through the Instagram API and coded by a team of Copenhagen-based researchers, using an interface developed for the purpose. Images were harvested under the hashtag #sharingcph in order to analyse the importance of urban nature for ‘sharing Copenhagen’ online. The purpose was also to study social-ecological interlinkages in terms of urban nature as perceived, experienced and communicated by Instagram users. For this purpose, a subsample of harvested images was coded into six categories of perceived urban nature. A quantity and diversity of images of urban nature – related to all six categories – were shared from all over the city, revealing a rich variety of shared places. These places included official green and blue spaces, as well as informal green spaces such as brownfield sites, and vegetation in unexpected places such as greydominated urban structures (comprising one-third of all urban nature images). Images showing temporary experiences were also frequently shared, such as natural phenomena including reflections of trees in rainwater puddles, sunsets and sunrises, and clouds and skies. One might argue that Instagram has expanded the dominant policy conceptualisation of urban nature (expressed in Copenhagen’s Urban Nature Strategy) from a focus on protected nature and formal green spaces to a broader and more inclusive conceptualisation reflecting people’s subjective experiences of place. Novel conceptualisations of urban green have thus emerged through a multitude of subjective and contrasting meanings of place, illustrating plural senses of place. Furthermore, Instagram facilitates senses of place by mediating affective bonds. This happens when images and tags are shared in order to invite emotional responses, when images are communicated with specific meanings, stories or messages in order to invite cognitive responses, and also when behavioural responses are invited through tags and texts such as ‘belonging’, ‘travel back’, ‘never leave’, etc. Thus, Instagram mediates social spaces where meanings and senses of place are co-produced. Further, while a single image of a place’s qualities is ‘frozen’ in space and time, dynamics occur when images are shared, followed and commented on, and when multiple images of the same place reflect different values. However, Instagram and other platforms also reinforce certain qualities and experiences of place – for example, when particular characteristics of a place are reproduced repeatedly due to tourist gazes and ‘photo hunts’ for the most Instagrammable locations. This case demonstrates how social media provides a platform for sharing experiences of nature by means of images, hashtags and location stamps. These expressions of experience are simultaneously a potential source for other Instagram users to gain

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inspiration and awareness about the qualities of one or more places in urban nature. This demonstrates the social-technological-ecological potential of the social media sharing of place.

21.3.2

OVP Case: Social Media Facilitation of a Civic Movement, Oostvaardersplassen, the Netherlands The Oostvaardersplassen is a formally protected 5,600-hectare Dutch nature reserve, consisting of reedy marshes, wild grasslands and water. The area developed spontaneously after the land reclamation of the 1960s, eventually becoming a unique area for many Red List species. Between 1982 and 1992, large herbivores (red deer, horses, cattle) were introduced into the fenced area. While the Oostvaardersplassen’s starting point was completely human-made, its management developed into a ‘hands-off’ strategy, focusing on natural processes in an open landscape maintained by large herbivores. In 2013, the film New Wilderness celebrated the Oostvaardersplassen’s ‘wild’ nature. It drew a large audience and was highly appreciated by both critics and the broader public. Although the idea of creating a ‘new wilderness’ generated a lot of (inter)national interest and appreciation, it was also contested. The hands-off management resulted in fluctuations in the large herbivores’ population size, and this was increasingly criticised. Especially in wintertime, stories and images of starving animals frequently led to varying degrees of public outrage on social media. Film and social media played a crucial role in connecting people to the area and developing a sense of place. However, in this case, the sense of place was also negative. While the film portrayed a romantic wilderness, social media was mainly used to share images of starving animals and to organise protests against the ‘concentration camp for animals’, as it was termed in social media posts (Nico de liberaal, 2018). In the second half of 2018, the number of social media posts about the Oostvaardersplassen was almost twice the total number of posts across the five previous years. Social media not only mediated the construction of meanings of the Oostvaardersplassen, but also played an important role in the mobilisation of criticism. Activists organised through Twitter and Facebook, and this online debate and mobilisation increasingly led to offline protests during which activists threw hay over the fences to feed the animals. These protests attracted a lot of media attention, eventually escalating to the point where managers and politicians were intimidated and threatened. Although many people publicly disapproved of the threats, the hands-off management strategy became so contested that policymakers felt obliged to change it. A first step was to feed the large herbivores in order to prevent starvation. Ultimately, it was decided to change the management of the area and regulate the animal population. This case demonstrates how social-ecological bonds are enforced in times of crisis, and how this is propagated and enforced by means of technology – leading to a change in the meaning of place, and eventually to a change in practices to accommodate a certain ideal of place.

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Melbourne Case: Melbourne Urban Forest Visual, Australia The city of Melbourne, Australia actively takes a SETS approach to urban forestry in order to validate the diverse values of nature and increase residents’ sense of wellbeing by strengthening green place-making. An online digital platform called the Melbourne Urban Forest Visual engages citizens in discussions of ecosystem services. Citizens are invited on the platform to explore the ‘big tree data’ from the publicly managed urban forest, monitoring the health and predicted lifespans of approximately 70,000 publicly owned trees. The Urban Forest Visual is an ecological-technological system that situates every municipal tree on an interactive map. Rich, place-specific public data monitors the current tree diversity, tree canopy cover and health performance of Melbourne’s urban forest. The platform gives residents a tool to visualise and better understand the diverse values of the urban forest, and the risk of massive tree death if new plantings are not undertaken. Interactions on the platform include the opportunity to track the progress of neighbourhood tree-planting programmes. Significantly, residents are also given the ability to celebrate and mourn transformations of the urban forest. Each publicly owned tree in Melbourne has been given an email address, and residents can share a personal correspondence with the trees, such as wishing them well and asking after about their well-being. Between the Urban Forest Visual website launch in 2013 and 2015, more than 3,000 emails were received (Brown, 2015). The following is an example from one such email or ‘love letter’ (Burin, 2018): ‘Dear Magnificent River Red Gum. I admire you every day as I walk past you on my way to and from work . . . You look substantially older than any of the trees around Princess Park . . . How old might you be? Regards and hope you enjoyed the rain this weekend.’ This place-based digital approach to urban forestry has resulted in the visibility of a plurality of personal attachments to and stewardships of existing and newly planted trees. A swathe of citizens actively contribute critical urban tree data, as well as engaging in urban forest management activities. By means of this direct socialecological-digital place-based communication tool, the city of Melbourne can now collect information on residents’ perceptions of and connections to trees and green spaces that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. These place narratives not only visualise social-ecological bonds, but may also provide opportunities for those bonds to develop by enabling people to express and share their emotions about the trees. The narratives have also supported Melbourne council members’ arguments for additional funding for their urban forest strategy, drawing on the power of the diverse sociocultural understandings associated with the urban forest.

21.3.4

Byhøst Case: Urban Foraging App, Denmark The Byhøst app and web platform are a gateway to knowledge about urban edible plants, including their proliferation across the city’s formal and informal green spaces. By entering an online map, Byhøst’s users can retrieve and share information about wild edible urban plants. The social media app facilitates a ‘view from somewhere’

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(Williams, 2014), providing knowledge about place from subjective viewpoints. It facilitates social-technological interaction with a focus on social-ecological processes. These processes are evident in the ways in which the app helps to categorise and map edible plants, enabling users to plan visits to nature that they might not otherwise have made. When interviewed, foragers describe how spaces that appear at first to be messy and unmanaged develop into highly valued places when one’s knowledge about local species is expanded by foraging for and tasting edible plants. This process is described as developing ‘plant by plant’ into a relational understanding and attachment to meanings of place, as revealed by an interview with an urban forager (Sewón, 2016): It takes several years [to get to know a place] and I like that a lot, because then it’s really my place! You know – all the times you visit and look and find [plants], you become intimate with the place. I appreciate places that people would say is just a piece of junk. A lot of times they look messy, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t find something good there . . . I think it’s very simple – if you get to know something you get a relationship with it.

This example illustrates how the digital platform provides information that expands both access to and knowledge about nature. It thereby both enhances social activities in nature and strengthens bonds between people and nature. Furthermore, edible plants are frequently situated in contested places such as wasteland, brownfield sites and former dumps, which traditionally have negative connotations. Thanks to the app, these natural sites are now framed positively as places for social activities and encounters with a focus on wild food. Hence, the Byhøst app nurtures novel conceptualisations of place that contrast with the city’s dominant discourse of place.

21.4

Discussion Through these four cases, we have identified different ways in which social media facilitates and meditates the construction of senses of place in the context of experiences of nature. We now discuss our case findings and assess their implications for future research using a SETS-inspired people–place–technology–system perspective. We base this discussion on four overarching processes of change in senses of place (Figure 21.1): 1. 2. 3. 4.

21.4.1

novel conceptualisations of place; extended place experiences and interactions; place-related social mobilisation and organisation; and an enriched basis for place-based governance.

Novel Conceptualisations of Place As explained above, we see sense of place as a plural concept. Our case studies highlight that sense of place is co-constructed in interactions with others, both offline and online. Like Jenkins et al. (2016), we show that studying various forms of online

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Figure 21.1 Summary of changes in sense of place through social media’s facilitation of experiences of nature from a SETS perspective.

communication can be a way to interpret how people perceive a location, allowing the (re)construction of a sense of place. Our cases also illustrate that such interactive formations of sense of place have moved online in various ways. This is evident in the Byhøst and Melbourne cases, where dedicated social media apps enable novel conceptualisations of place. In the Byhøst case, contested places such as brownfield sites are now framed positively. Similarly novel meanings of place emerge from our analyses of urban tree posts in Melbourne, which expand policy understandings of place by embedding the urban forest with feelings and meanings. In the OVP case, social media activities created a novel shared conceptualisation of place that was used to challenge the official narrative. Our interpretation of shared Instagram images of urban nature in Copenhagen also demonstrates a range of novel meanings of place.

21.4.2

Extended Place Experiences and Interactions Activities in the virtual world are interlinked with place-related activities in the physical world in many different ways. The sharing of images of urban nature in the Insta case is embedded in actual encounters with place and real-life experiences of

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nature. Some of those who share images on social media would possibly even argue that doing so expands and enriches their encounters with nature through feedback from the online community. In the Melbourne case, the Urban Forest Visual links trees with citizens’ emotional love letters, while also providing citizens with knowledge and information about individual trees and the urban forest. Thus, online activities contribute to both affect and cognition in relation to place. In the Byhøst case, the online platform directly focuses on promoting experiences of nature in the physical world. Online knowledge-sharing about places with edible flora is intended to extend and enrich urban foraging as a nature-based recreational activity. Even in the OVP case, a heated online debate resulted in physical encounters with place as activists fed starving animals. These are all examples of how online activities stimulate real-life experiences of place by fostering the expression of emotions, potentially contributing to the co-construction of plural meanings and senses of place.

21.4.3

Place-Related Social Mobilisation and Organisation With billions of users globally, social media unifies and organises place-specific attitudes, values and perceptions across space and time at an unprecedented scale, accelerating global processes where senses of place are dynamic, plural and fluid (Di Masso et al., 2019; Massey, 1997). Social media’s capacity for mobilisation and organisation is also evident in the cases described above, where social media mobilises and unifies people around alternative, contrasting and novel senses of place. In the OVP case, the main official narrative was positively framed as rewilding and hands-off management for biodiversity. A brief, intense social media movement challenged and questioned this discourse as a negatively framed ‘concentration camp for animals’. Social media has played similarly significant roles in other social movements, such as the place-related Gezi protests in Turkey (Haciyakupoglu and Zhang, 2015). In the Byhøst and Melbourne cases too, social media apps mobilise and unify like-minded people across space and time to promote urban foraging for wild food and urban forest values as novel conceptualisations of place.

21.4.4

An Enriched Basis for Place-Based Governance Increasingly, social media platforms are utilised to inform public participation and e-governance (Møller and Olafsson, 2018). While social media are not representative of public opinion, they provide subjective and crowdsourced experiences as data for the dominant instrumental interactions between citizens and governance institutions. In this sense, social media can also expand the ways in which people interact with authorities, linking people and places for place-based governance and management (Møller et al., 2019). A digital approach to place-based governance can be seen as a new opportunity to integrate socio-cultural and scientific knowledge for governance use. This is demonstrated in the Melbourne case, where the digital approach engages residents’ senses of place and experts’ knowledge about tree ecology and climate resilience for urban forestry governance. A similar argument can be made for the Byhøst platform, which

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promotes new forms of interaction with (edible) nature by integrating the knowledge of users and advocates of wild food, which in turn has been taken up by the local administration. Hence, these two cases suggest that a social media approach to urban green governance can successfully integrate other place-based knowledge perspectives, thereby actively facilitating pluralistic views and hybrid understandings of place. However, social media data has well-documented limitations. It is not 100 per cent open, transparent and inclusive of all views and social groups. In principle, all social media reflects political and corporate power. It is designed and controlled by algorithms, and those algorithms are mediated by administrators that function as centralised gatekeepers and shape the discussion in certain directions, with consequences for place-making (Al-Rawi, 2019). This is illustrated in the OVP case, where people with certain opinions were expelled from Facebook activist communities. Nor do all community members necessarily have access to social media platforms, resulting in the ‘digital divide’ (van Dijk and Hacker, 2003). Discourses on social media are not necessarily representative of public opinion, and social media users are not necessarily representative of the broader population. For local authorities, social media thus offers opportunities to learn about meanings of place among some citizens and to engage with diverse stakeholders, but it also requires critical reflections about inclusiveness and the dominant narratives that influence meaning-based senses of place.

21.5

Conclusion As the four cases demonstrate, social media comprises social-technological couplings. From a system perspective, those couplings are integrated parts of people’s experiences of nature that bridge virtual and physical worlds, thereby facilitating and communicating cognitive, affective and behavioural social-ecological interactions. These interactions foster novel individual and co-constructed meanings of place and thus plural senses of place; they can also mobilise people around shared meanings of place that are used to question dominant views. We argue that social media can mediate and proliferate plural meanings of place, leading to new conceptualisations of senses of place. However, we have only touched upon a fraction of all the possible ways that social media might affect senses of place, which also include more critical and disturbing impacts linked to agents of political and corporate power. More research is needed to fully grasp the many linkages between senses of place, social media and experiences of nature. We encourage researchers to use a SETS approach to embrace all these linkages and proliferations, as well as their critical impacts on senses of place.

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Part VII

Design and Planning Strategies for Changing Senses of Place

Sense of place has been a popular concept in the design and planning professions for some time. Both practitioners and scholars, particularly those attuned to the social dimensions of design, have advocated for its consideration as a guiding principle for ‘good design’. A close look at the way the construct has been treated in the design and planning discourse confirms that it is largely approached as something that can be expressed by practitioners through thoughtful design. That is, a designer or planner can create a sense of place through careful attention to the unique character and qualities of a place (what Norberg-Shulz (1980) famously called ‘genius loci’) by defining the space with specific features or material elements, and by considering the socio-cultural context and history of a place. Thus, a sense of place is something that can be released by the designer, but that ‘belongs’ to the place itself. There are several implications of such an approach that warrant highlighting for this part of the book. First, this approach tends to treat sense of place as a decidedly singular phenomenon. Second, it is linked to claims of authenticity – that is, this singular sense of place purports to tap into the ‘genuine’ nature of a place that is presumed to be fairly consensual. However, as Dovey (2002) notes, the ‘discourse of authenticity is a legitimating discourse which authorizes certain meanings while repressing others’ (p. 45). Third, this traditional approach to sense of place involves orchestration, a manipulation of sorts from the outside. The three chapters in this part all in their own way challenge this notion of a singular, authentic sense of place granted from the outside, opening up new ways of understanding sense of place for design and planning professions. While divergent in scope, each of these chapters calls out the relational and dynamic nature of multiple, socially constructed senses of place as subjectively experienced and negotiated at multiple scales. For example, Chapter 22 develops a framework that supports pluralising local senses of place through global policy, underscoring the interconnectedness of sense of place across different spatial contexts. Using the case of a rural World Heritage Site in South Africa, the authors develop several principles for spatial planning that respond to the dynamic complexities of a local site that can be applied on a global scale: issues of democracy, subsidiarity, participation, integration, proportionality and precaution. In an interesting complement to this, Chapter 23 unpacks the role of plural senses of place in

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urban experimentation in Rotterdam, the Netherlands through a case study of the BlueCity Lab. Here, the authors examine how a new, community-driven institution emerged to foster innovations in climate adaptation where urban actors themselves are the drivers of what is called ‘active experimentation’. Both chapters take a governance approach and demonstrate how local actors take on critical ‘steering capacities’ based on more intimate knowledge of and investment in place. While Chapter 24 also explores the social construction of senses of place, it examines that construction through the circulation of domestic imaginings presented in IKEA home furnishings catalogues in China. Here, sense of place is problematised as an orchestration deployed to market a culturally fluid, global identity using the strategy of ‘cultural odourlessness’ or the erasure of national identity by emphasising transcultural flows. The authors note that the absence of a specific locality/place/culture ironically becomes a presence in itself, pluralising and complicating senses of place further still. The chapters in this section all underscore the dynamic tensions between the global and the local that are characteristic of the changing senses of place catalysed by the global challenges addressed in this volume. In doing so, they highlight the political dimension of senses of place by challenging the traditional treatment of sense of place in spatial design and planning. While Chapter 22 illustrates the politicisation of senses of place through democratic participatory processes that allow multiple senses of place to emerge from the bottom-up, Chapter 23 demonstrates the ways that ‘in-between test spaces’ empower citizens as urban actors to create and explore in experimental space outside of prevailing governance systems. In contrast, Chapter 24 considers market reforms in China that encourage a global identity as status marker, at the same time erasing and recreating local identity through global mixing. Together, the chapters in this section remind us that multiple senses of place are drawn from intimate relations with local places and that these multiple senses of place are in constant negotiation with one another. They offer critical lessons for the design and planning professions as facilitators of dynamic sense of place that enable people to express transformative agency through their connection to place.

References Dovey, K. (2002) ‘Dialectics of place: authenticity, identity, difference’, in Akkach, S. (ed.) De-placing Difference: Architecture, Culture and Imaginative Geography, Adelaide: University of Adelaide, pp. 45–52. Norberg-Shulz, C. (1980) Genius Loci: Toward a Phenomenology of Architecture, New York, Rizzoli.

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22 Local Sense(s) of Place in a Global World Towards a Normative Framework for Spatial Planners Karen Puren and J. Ernst Drewes

22.1

Introduction The topic ‘senses of place’ is a complex, vague and relational construct, subjectively experienced in the global–local world (Erfani, 2020). In spatial planning and design disciplines (e.g. urban design), the term ‘sense of place’ mainly revolves around singular conceptualisations of a sense of place that resides in observable environmental attributes (Beidler and Morrison, 2016; Jivén and Larkham, 2003). This focus originated from the Roman mythological concept of ‘genius loci’ (spirit of place), interpreted by planners/designers as the unique character or atmosphere of a place as defined through observable properties (Stedman, 2003). Planners generally claim that capturing and integrating this (singular) character/atmosphere of a local place into spatial interventions will assist in preserving the uniqueness of that place (Hague and Jenkins, 2005). However, the basis of claims to authenticity of place that reside in a singular conception of sense of place and are based on singular, segregated constructs (e.g. visual properties) needs critical scrutiny. Singular, segregated approaches reduce the actual meaning of a place and disconnect it from its context (Smaldone et al., 2005). Therefore, our chapter aims to develop a framework to move towards pluralising local senses of place through global policy principles used in spatial planning. To structure our argument, the first part of the chapter contextualises theories of senses of place in spatial planning. The second part then reflects on global policy as a way to pluralise senses of place in spatial planning. The remainder of the chapter illustrates how local senses of place can be incorporated in a global normative policy framework by reflecting on a case study at the Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site (VDWHS) in South Africa.

22.2

Understanding Senses of Place in Spatial Planning Theory In this section, we provide a short guide through the maze of spatial planning theory to contextualise theories of senses of place in spatial planning.

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Spatial Planning Theory Spatial planning theory can broadly be divided into three paradigms that developed more or less successively over time: a substantive paradigm, a procedural paradigm and a normative paradigm. In the substantive planning paradigm (theories in planning), spaces are produced and regulated according to universal artistic principles (e.g. geometric layout patterns). Blueprints/master plans are produced that represent a utopian fixed end-state for a town/city/region (Hall, 2014; Hall and Ward, 1999). However, blueprints/masterplans lack an in-depth understanding of the environment as a flexible and complex system of interconnected dynamics that vary across different spatial and temporal contexts. Systems planning may well provide an alternative, being ‘a scientific activity where vast amounts of precise information were garnered and processed in such a way that the planner could devise very sensitive systems of guidance and control, the effects of which could be monitored and . . . modified’ (Hall, 1988, p. 327). Systems planning incorporates social complexities (people’s activities, social behaviour, interactions, etc.) by reducing them to measurable and predictable geometrical patterns consisting of, for example, points and lines on a map (Puren et al., 2008). However, both blueprint/master planning and systems planning fail to understand the complexity and richness of social life in towns, cities or regions, as they do not take into account, for example, different meanings and values that people attribute (individually or collectively) to spaces. In the procedural planning paradigm (theories of planning), utopian end-products are replaced by rational decision-making processes (formulating goals; objectives and targets; collecting data; analysing data; developing alternatives; selecting the best alternative; implementing it; monitoring it; and receiving feedback) to create a society where human happiness and welfare can flourish (Healey, 1997). Rational planning was criticised for not accounting for the political ways in which people socially use and colonise space (Carmona et al., 2003). It was within this realisation that planning is a political process that the normative paradigm (theories for planning) started to unfold. Normative planning aims to transform planning practices from a universal (decontextualised), expert-based exercise towards a flexible, open-ended and plural process, by ‘making sense together while living differently’ (Healey, 1997, p. 16) – a type of planning in which the participation or collaboration of people in decision-making is optimised (Steyn, 2015; Faludi, 1973). Communicative/collaborative planning is the dominant theory that underpins the normative paradigm in spatial planning. Instead of being the designer/technical expert creating ideal end-state plans, the planner takes on the role of negotiator or mediator among different stakeholders, to reach a consensus where all participants benefit from the process (Fainstein and DeFilippis, 2016) and where power imbalances are minimised.

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Theories of Senses of Place in Spatial Planning The development of sense of place scholarship in spatial planning poses some challenges in pluralising senses of place. A review of the scholarship is consolidated in Figure 22.1 to illustrate the most relevant theoretical trends for our chapter. Theories of senses of place used in planning have mostly remained focused on environmental properties as static, segregated constructs that shape a locality’s (singular) ‘sense of place’. Although people, the environment and the broader context are separate actors in shaping senses of place, they are dynamic entities that are constantly formed and reformed through processes of differentiation and interaction (Gifford, 2014; Uzzell and Räthzel, 2009). Singular conceptions fail to understand the complexity of this interconnectedness, and reduce senses of place to observable environmental attributes. While many authors admit that senses of place reside in both the environment and what people bring to the setting – such as meanings and activities (e.g. Montgomery, 1998; Punter, 1991; Steele, 1981; Canter, 1977; Relph, 1976) – limited explanation is offered of how the interplay of different actors shapes senses of place. It is only recently that integrated approaches have been developed: for example, Beidler and Morrison’s (2016) framework includes the environment, person, time and social context; Puren et al.’s (2018) transdisciplinary approach uses people–environment interactions as a framework to explore how senses of place can be translated into planning and design guidelines; Erfani’s (2020) framework combines cognitive, affective and conative aspects of senses of place to evaluate participatory urban redevelopment. Although a shift towards more integrated approaches of senses of place has emerged, it needs further development. A second theoretical trend relates to the idea of senses of place as objective, universal attributes to guide planning/design interventions, irrespective of context. Space is treated as a neutral, value-free background against which people’s activities, events and experiences unfold. However, numerous studies in disciplines outside planning have illustrated the context-dependent nature of senses of place. Examples include Soini et al.’s (2012) study of senses of place at urban–rural interfaces in four Finnish municipalities, Fang et al.’s (2016) study of place-making among older persons in affordable housing in Western Canada, and Pérez-Ramírez et al.’s (2019) study of cultivated landscapes in rural Madrid, Spain. The importance and role of context in shaping senses of place, and how to account for the relativistic nature of senses of place, has not been sufficiently addressed in spatial planning (Fawcett and Sturzaker, 2017). Third, while public participation has been debated in planning scholarship since the 1950s, a shift towards the politicisation of senses of place has been acknowledged more recently. Various debates around best practices to negotiate and integrate plural senses of place are found in the scholarship (see Kudryavtsev and Pavlodsky, 2012; Lewicka, 2011). Recently, the use of visual research has been propagated as an effective way to integrate senses of place in decision-making (e.g. Fagerholm et al., 2019; Brown and Kyttä, 2018; Brown et al., 2018). However, evidence regarding how the pluralisation of senses of place on a local level can be integrated into global spatial planning policy is a novel avenue to be addressed.

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1940

E

Lynch Conzen

E

Cullen

Ep

1960

E

Sharp 1970

Lynch E

E Ep

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Punter Ryden

Ep

Ep

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Montgomery

Relph Canter EP EP E: Environment as focus Ep: Environment as focus – reference to person in environment EP: Environment and person as focus EPC: Interplay of environment, person and context

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Figure 22.1 Literature map of conceptions of senses of place in spatial planning.

No-limited integration of environment, person, context Some integration Moderate integration Full (or towards full) integration

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Steele

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(emphasis on negotiation/consensus to include multiple perspectives)

EPC

Convery, Corsane & Davies

(emphasis on expert-based plan/design as end product)

Schumaker & Taylor Lynch

Normative theories

EPC

2020

Beidler & Morrison Puren, Roos & Coetzee

Substantive theories

Erfani

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The theoretical issues raised here suggest the need to pluralise local senses of place in a global world. A shift away from universal, singular conceptualisations of a sense of place towards the pluralisation of senses of place can better reflect the interplay of person, environment, time and broader context that shapes senses of place. However, an integrated, context-dependent and flexible framework is needed that allows the pluralisation of senses of place on a local level while linking it with a normative global framework.

22.3

Policy Framework for Pluralising Senses of Place in Spatial Planning Since the onset of globalisation, there has been a move towards more uniform goals in spatial planning systems. This move towards uniformity is based on the acceptance that no single spatial planning approach is ideal, and that a normative approach provides an alternative to traditional top-down planning. Initiatives towards more uniform planning goals were compiled by the United Nations’ Habitat programme and adopted by many of its member states (United Nations, 2002). Accordingly, all countries need a minimum set of planning tools to enable fair and effective management of spatial planning and development (United Nations, 2008). This led to the existing global paradigm whereby a normative approach1 towards both dimensions2 of spatial planning is embedded in most developed and even developing countries (Laubscher et al., 2016; ISOCARP, 2015) to replace the top-down, comprehensive and control-based planning that had prevailed since the early 1900s. This approach to spatial planning was formalised by the United Nations in 2002, followed by a supporting policy document (United Nations, 2008) on spatial planning that put forward six principles: democracy, subsidiarity, participation, integration, proportionality and precautionarity (United Nations, 2008). These principles form the basis for all Habitat programme member countries, and it is their appropriate, unique application that is relevant in this chapter – that is, the pluralisation of senses of place through normative global principles. The following sections will attempt to encapsulate plural senses of place planning and its translation into local guidelines that conform with and support global best practice.

22.4

Case Study of Senses of Place on Kromdraai Farm in VDWHS To illustrate how local senses of place can be integrated into a global normative spatial planning policy framework, we draw on a case study conducted on Kromdraai, a farm in VDWHS. 1

2

Normative planning in a spatial policy context refers to the opposite end of the scale from blueprint planning. One of the main drivers of this approach to spatial planning has been the United Nations’ Habitat programme. Accordingly, best practices and goals were universally adopted by the signatories globally and then applied locally (United Nations, 2008). These global policy directives and the underlying normative approach are also evident in the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by all signatories globally. That is, both strategic planning (forward planning) and statutory planning (regulation of land-use types).

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The Study Area and Case Study Background Vredefort Dome is a rural3 South African landscape that was listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 2005 as a natural World Heritage Site due to its unique geology: it is the world’s oldest (2,023 million years) and largest (190 km radius) meteorite impact site (UNESCO, 2020). Cumulatively, the site’s ecological sensitivity as a Critical Biodiversity Area – it contains outstanding universal biodiversity value and visual quality that is sensitive to impacts from developments (Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, 2013) – has made it a sought-after tourist destination, and therefore an attractive piece of land that holds development potential. Kromdraai is an 85-hectare farm with a 600 m riverfront, located in the south-west part of VDWHS, that was bought as an investment for future development. Based on previous research in the area, the first author was invited to become involved in developing suitable guidelines for Kromdraai that would maintain the farm’s unique character without compromising the integrity of the larger context (i.e. VDWHS). From a research perspective, Kromdraai was considered an interesting setting to explore senses of place, as it reflects the complexities that are typical of global–local senses of place. While the overarching purpose was to develop planning/design guidelines for Kromdraai’s senses of place, the objectives were (1) to use people–environment interactions as a framework to explore Kromdraai’s senses of place, and (2) to translate people’s senses of place into spatial expressions by following a participatory approach.

22.4.2

Research Methodology The exploratory nature of the study, and the focus on understanding senses of place in a particular context rather than making generalisations (Neuman, 2014; Creswell, 2007), motivated the use of qualitative methodology. Due to the complexity of senses of place, the research warranted a transdisciplinary team of spatial planners and psychologists.

Participants Twenty-two participants were selected through purposive sampling (Waters, 2015; Noy, 2008) based on the following criteria: (1) diverse backgrounds, to allow multiple perspectives including participants with spatial knowledge and skills (government officials, environmental consultants, spatial planners, architects and an artist) and participants without any spatial knowledge/skills (a nurse, a human resources manager and psychologists); (2) no vested interests in the area; (3) ability to provide rich data in terms of their experiences and interaction with a rural landscape; (4) self-description as having a close relationship with nature, and as regularly spending leisure time in nature/rural landscapes. Practical aspects that were considered included participants’ ability to walk in a rural site and express themselves verbally. 3

This classification in South Africa is defined as an area that contains sparsely populated pockets where local communities farm or depend on natural resources, including villages and small towns that are dispersed throughout the area (Department of Land Affairs, 1997).

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Procedure/Methods Participatory visual research was used to generate data, as this method minimises power relations while offering new ways of producing data (Hill, 2013). Data were generated in three phases: 1. A visit to Kromdraai, where participants were supplied with disposable cameras and requested to freely roam the area for about three hours and take photographs of whatever presented the uniqueness of the site to them. Altogether, 270 photographs (10–15 per participant) were collected. Photography was chosen for its potential to generate implicit and explicit information (Pauwels, 2015), as well as its ability to minimise power relations because the focus is on the content of the image. 2. Individual face-to-face interviews of 60–90 minutes with each participant, to understand the meanings behind the images. 3. A visit to a venue near Kromdraai, where participants were placed in four focus groups. Photographs taken during the first site visit were projected onto a screen, and prints were made available to the focus groups as reminders and probes, eliciting their experiences during their interactions with Kromdraai. Each focus group was supplied with materials (e.g. an aerial photograph, polystyrene, colour pens and paper, photographs of building materials, colour code cards, plant materials from the environment) and requested to use the materials to generate visual images (a twodimensional layout plan and three-dimensional collage), based on their individual senses of place, to guide development at Kromdraai. The focus groups, which were consensus-driven and facilitated by either a spatial planner or a psychologist from the research team, produced four collages and four layout plans.

22.4.3

Data Analysis Thematic analysis was used to provide a rich, detailed and complex account of the data (Clarke and Braun, 2017, 2013). Non-computerised analysis of all textual and visual data was conducted to allow an integrated view of entire data sets, so as to ‘obtain an overview of the thematic range of the text’ (Flick, cited in Henning et al., 2004, p. 109). As suggested by Van Leeuwen and Jewitt (2013) and Roos and Redelinghuys (2016), visual representations separated from textual or narrative data contain no inherent meaning of their own. Accordingly, the textual and visual data were treated as a unity (Liebenberg et al., 2012), analysed by all the researchers, and checked with the participants to enhance the trustworthiness of the findings.

22.4.4

Findings and Discussion Figure 22.2 illustrates how multiple overlapping individual senses of place at Kromdraai were interpreted and clustered into collective senses of place (themes).

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Figure 22.2 Examples of senses of place at Kromdraai: from individual senses of place to collective senses of place to guidelines.

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The themes were translated into visual images (two-dimensional layout plans and three-dimensional collages) using a participatory process. These pluralised senses of place hold implications for the different levels of spatial planning thinking – that is, the substantive, procedural and normative paradigms. Pertaining to the substantive paradigm in planning, the study illustrates the plural nature and contextual embeddedness of senses of place at Kromdraai. In this case, senses of place are multidimensional, comprising explicit and implicit dimensions. Explicit collective senses of place include the openness of the landscape, intimate landmarks, limited human intervention, and the harmonious fit between constructed features, nature and the totality, which presents an integrated wholeness (see examples of supportive quotes). While these themes relate to environmental features as attributes of senses of place, they also illustrate that senses of place extend beyond environmental attributes to include implicit senses of place: experiences of physical and emotional safety, relaxation and tranquillity, hope and curiosity, and various relational experiences with friends, family members, unrelated members of society and spiritual connections (see examples of supportive quotes). In terms of the procedural paradigm, the qualitative method that was followed demonstrates the benefit of an open-ended, flexible process that allows multiple senses of place to emerge spontaneously from the bottom-up, instead of imposing a preconceived framework that categorises senses of place. The various senses of place form complex, interconnected systems where specific environmental attributes elicit specific implicit attributes. Examples include an enclosed space (Figure 22.2c) that elicits feelings of safety, and a curved gravel footpath whose endpoint is not visible (Figure 22.2d), which is related to the anticipation of hope and feelings of curiosity (to explore). This interconnectedness suggests a reciprocal and iterative process. This contrasts with the rational, deductive thinking processes that are often followed in spatial planning (practice). Within a normative paradigm, the use of participatory visual research illustrates how various perspectives can be included from which multiple senses of place manifest. Participants’ translation of individual senses of place into collective senses of place, and their further translation of the latter into spatial planning/design and development guidelines, demonstrates a possible way forward to pluralise senses of place in decision-making through an inclusive process. The micro-scale of this case study was customised for participants’ individual and collective senses of place, and was context-based for the specific site. However, although it resonates with the particular environment, it can be translated and incorporated into the broader spatial planning principles suggested by the United Nations (2008) and discussed in Section 22.3. Below is our interpretation of how the unique and small-scale senses of place in this study can be interpreted in terms of the global normative principles referred to in Section 22.3: • Democracy: an inclusive approach was followed by incorporating multiple perspectives (participants with different knowledge types and skill levels) and using

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•

•

•

•

•

non-threatening methods (participant-driven interviews and image-based data) to address power relations throughout the research process. Subsidiarity: in the case of VDWHS, various levels of decision-making apply, including international, national and local. In this study, the exploration of senses of place was bottom-up and did not incorporate particular decision-making levels, as no guideline document existed at the time of the research. Participation: the unobtrusive process that was followed allowed participants to reach a consensus about how to merge plural senses of place into collective senses of place and express these spatially. Integration: transdisciplinary collaboration and a multisectoral approach that included ordinary citizens, government officials and private sector planning/design experts enabled an integrated understanding of and sensitivity towards the pluralisation of senses of place. Proportionality: although the spatial development guidelines were formulated for a microsite and had not been quantified at that stage, the study illustrates how a commitment to pluralise senses of place can merge rural preservation (the natural) and development (the human-made) in concrete spatial expressions. Precautionarity: this principle relates to the main focus of this research – to determine the study area’s senses of place in order to provide direction in terms of the principles of integration and subsidiarity. The micro-scale guidelines were formulated for maximum harmonious blending with the rural environment and sitespecific features, and minimum development impact in terms of footprints and visibility from the larger VDWHS.

The interplay between the paradigms and principles potentially ensures a comprehensive approach towards pluralising senses of place on a local level, while simultaneously integrating them into a global normative framework for spatial planning decision-making.

22.5

Conclusion The case study in this chapter confirms the pluralistic and contextual nature of senses of place that may overlap in a particular setting. Instead of focusing on the environment as a fixed and neutral backdrop for people–environment interactions, this case study illustrates that senses of place are shaped by a complex interplay of people, the environment and the broader context in which these interactions occur. Singular conceptions of a sense of place that reduce senses of place to segregated constructs – that is, observable environmental attributes – fail to understand the complexity and interconnectedness of senses of place, which may vary significantly across different spatial contexts. The relativistic and plural nature of senses of place warrants a shift away from singular universal conceptions towards the politicisation of senses of place. It entails the inclusion of multiple perspectives through innovative, democratic, participatory processes in which power imbalances are minimised. A flexible framework

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is suggested in which senses of place are pluralised by allowing them to emerge spontaneously from the bottom-up, instead of imposing a preconceived framework in which senses of place are categorised or universalised. The case study demonstrates how pluralised senses of place can be integrated within the current dichotomy of local– global senses of place through the use of normative global principles in international policy. In conclusion, the case of Kromdraai is an example of how pluralised senses of place contest the habitual and fixed understandings of sense of place propagated within the substantive spatial planning paradigm that has prevailed until recently in theoretical development. Our approach suggests a step towards pluralising senses of place in spatial planning as a foundation for the formulation of appropriate spatial planning policy – for this and other unique study areas – that might potentially be of value in other international settings.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to express their gratitude to the National Research Foundation in South Africa, for funding the empirical investigation upon which the chapter is based; and to David Payne, a student in urban and regional planning at North-West University, for his assistance with technical matters.

References Beidler, K. J. and Morrison, J. M. (2016) ‘Sense of place: inquiry and application’, Journal of Urbanism, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 205–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549175.2015.1056210 Brown, G. and Kyttä, M. (2018) ‘Key issues and priorities in participatory mapping: toward integration or increased specialization?’, Applied Geography, vol. 95, pp. 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2018.04.002 Brown, G., Sanders, S. and Reed, P. (2018) ‘Using public participatory mapping to inform general land use planning and zoning’, Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 177, pp. 64–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2018.04.011 Canter, D. V (1977) The Psychology of Place, Michigan, Architectural Press. Carmona, M., Health, T., Oc, T. and Tiesdell, S. (2003) Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design, Oxford, Architectural Press. Clarke, V. and Braun, V. (2013) Successful Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide for Beginners, London, SAGE Publications. Clarke, V. and Braun, V. (2017) ‘Thematic analysis’, Journal of Positive Psychology, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 297–298. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2016.1262613 Creswell, J. W. (2007) Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches, 2nd ed., Thousand Oaks, SAGE Publications. Department of Land Affairs (1997) Rural Development Framework, Pretoria, Government Printer. Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (2013) Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act, Pretoria, Government Printer.

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Erfani, G. (2020) ‘Sense of place as an investigative method for the evaluation of participatory urban redevelopment’, Cities, vol. 99, pp. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102648 Fagerholm, N., Eilola, S., Kisanga, D., Arki, V. and Käyhkö, N. (2019) ‘Place-based landscape services and potential of participatory spatial planning in multifunctional rural landscapes in Southern highlands, Tanzania’, Landscape Ecology, vol. 34, no. 7, pp. 1769–1787. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-019-00847-2 Fainstein, S. S. and DeFilippis, J. (2016) Readings in Planning Theory, 4th ed., Chichester, Wiley. Faludi, A. (1973) Planning Theory, Michigan, Pergamon Press. Fang, M. L., Woolrich, R., Sixsmith, J., et al. (2016) ‘Place-making with older persons: establishing sense-of-place through participatory community mapping workshops’, Social Science and Medicine, vol. 168, pp. 223–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.07.007 Fawcett, P. and Sturzaker, J. (2017) ‘Rediscovering place for social town planning’, Town and City Planning, vol. 85, no. 5, pp. 196–199. Available at http://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk /id/eprint/3001719 (accessed 10 February 2020). Gifford, R. (2014) ‘Environmental psychology matters’, Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 65. no. 1, pp. 541–579. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115048 Hague, C. and Jenkins, P. (2005) Place Identity, Participation and Planning, Abingdon, Taylor & Francis. Hall, P. (1988) Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880, New York, Wiley Blackwell. Hall, P. (2014) Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880, New York, Wiley Blackwell. Hall, P. and Ward, C. (1999) Sociable Cities: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, Michigan, Wiley. Healey, P. (1997) Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies, London, Macmillan. Henning, E., Van Rensburg, W. and Smit, B. (2004) Finding Your Way in Qualitative Research, Pretoria, Van Schaiks. Hill, J. (2013) ‘Using participatory and visual methods to address power and identity in research with young people’, Graduate Journal of Social Science, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 132–151. ISOCARP (2015) International Manual of Planning Practice, 6th ed., The Hague,International Society of City and Regional Planners. Jivén, G. and Larkham, P. J. (2003) ‘Sense of place, authenticity and character: a commentary’, Journal of Urban Design, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 67–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/1357480032000064773 Kudryavtsev, A. and Pavlodsky, J. (2012) ‘Description-based and experience-based decisions: individual analysis’, Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 316–331. Laubscher, N., Hoffman, L., Drewes, E. and Nysschen, J. (2016) SPLUMA: A Practical Guide, Durban, LexisNexis. Lewicka, M. (2011) ‘Place attachment: how far have we come in the last 40 years?’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 207–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010. 10.001 Liebenberg, L., Didkowsky, N. and Ungar, M. (2012) ‘Analysing image-based data using grounded theory: the Negotiating Resilience Project’, Visual Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 59–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2012.642958 Montgomery, J. (1998) ‘Making a city: urbanity, vitality and urban design’, Journal of Urban Design, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 93–116.

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Neuman, W. L. (2014) Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, 7th ed., Harlow, Pearson Education. Noy, C. (2008) ‘Sampling knowledge: the hermeneutics of snowball sampling in qualitative research’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 327–344. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645570701401305 Pauwels, L. (2015) ‘“Participatory” visual research revisited: a critical-constructive assessment of epistemological, methodological and social activist tenets’, Ethnography, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 95–117. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138113505023 Pérez-Ramírez, I., García-Llorente, M., Benito, A. and Castro, A. J. (2019) ‘Exploring sense of place across cultivated lands through public participatory mapping’, Landscape Ecology, vol. 34, no. 7, pp. 1675–1692. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-019-00816-9 Punter, J. (1991) ‘Participation in the design of urban space’, Landscape Design, vol. 200, pp. 24–27. Puren, K., Drewes, E. and Roos, V. (2008) ‘A sense of place and spatial planning in the Vredefort Dome, South Africa’, South African Geographical Journal, vol. 90, no. 2, pp. 134–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/03736245.2008.9725320 Puren, K., Roos, V. and Coetzee, H. (2018) ‘Sense of place: using people’s experiences in relation to a rural landscape to inform spatial planning guidelines’, International Planning Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 16–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563475.2017.1329087 Relph, E. C. (1976) Place and Placelessness, London, Pion. Roos, V. and Redelinghuys, A. (2016) ‘Analyzing visual data with text from the Mmogo-method: experience of meaning during the third trimester of pregnancy’, in Roos, V. (ed.), Understanding Relational and Group Experiences Through the Mmogo-Method, Potchefstroom, Springer, pp. 119–138. Smaldone, D., Harris, C. and Sanyal, N. (2005) ‘An exploration of place as a process: the case of Jackson Hole, WY’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 397–414. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2005.12.003 Soini, K., Vaarala, H. and Pouta, E. (2012) ‘Residents’ sense of place and landscape perceptions at the rural–urban interface’, Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 104, no. 1, pp. 124–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.10.002 Stedman, R. C. (2003) ‘Is it really just a social construction? The contribution of the physical environment to sense of place’, Society and Natural Resources, vol. 16, no. 8, pp. 671–685. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920309189 Steele, F. (1981) The Sense of Place, Michigan, CBI Publishing. Steyn, J. (2015) Reforming Normative Planning: Essays on a Christian Approach to Planning, Orania, Prisca. UNESCO (2020) ‘Vredefort Dome: UNESCO World Heritage Centre’[Online]. Available at https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1162/ (accessed 29 May 2020). United Nations (2002) Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly: Strengthening the Mandate and Status of the Commission on Human Settlements and the Status, Role and Functions of the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat), New York, United Nations. United Nations (2008) Spatial Planning: Key Instrument for Development and Effective Governance with Special Reference to Countries in Transition, Geneva, Economic Commission for Europe.

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23 Urban Experimentation and the Role of Senses of Place An Illustrative Case from Rotterdam, the Netherlands Timo von Wirth and Niki Frantzeskaki

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Putting Local Experimentation in Place to Address Global Urban Challenges In this chapter, we unpack the role of sense of place in relation to urban experimentation. We conceptualise urban experimentation as a governance approach to foster and activate communities’ and places’ innovation capacities for climate adaptation and the institutional trialling of novel approaches (Evans et al., 2016; Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013). Recent research suggests that experimentation goes beyond testing innovative solutions to embedding them in socio-spatial contexts (von Wirth et al., 2019). The emergence of urban experimentation offers an alternative to the modernist dream of total control. It centres on new relations and new institutions that are actorand community-centred: urban actors are the drivers of experimentation rather than its subjects, and as such they approach urban life with a ‘more provisional, adaptive understanding of the city’, conceiving the ‘city as an emergent and heterogeneous assemblage’ (Evans et al., 2016, p. 429).1 In line with this conceptualisation and application of urban experimentation, research has shown that as a governance approach it provides urban actors with steering capacities to better navigate the longterm dynamics of transformation, and to deal with the complexities and limitations of existing urban governance (Frantzeskaki et al., 2017). Experiments do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they unfold locally in particular socio-spatial contexts, embedded and entangled in diverse meanings and place contestations. Actors that are involved in designing, facilitating and participating in urban experiments need to make sense of a place that their experiment is set to transform. It is this nexus of urban experimental interventions with sense of place that is of particular interest in our work, because local experimentation might provide a new means for place-making (Frantzeskaki et al., 2017). The nature of 1

Our understanding of assemblages in the context of urban experimentation resonates with McFarlane’s (2011) idea of ‘urban learning assemblages’. These assemblages are about ‘both, a coming together of relations and objects and a way of thinking about a relational process of composition how these come together to produce new institutions and practices’ (p. 23). The learning in urban assemblages is tactical, whereby people collectively start to challenge and change their (urban) life conditions.

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urban experimentation as described here allows a diversity and plurality of views, visions, solutions and institutions to coexist and be co-created. This plurality requires a conceptual shift from sense of place to senses of place, in order to allow a critical conceptualisation of the socio-spatial embedding of the outcomes and outputs of urban experiments. In this chapter we focus on one specific type of urban experiment that has received increasing attention in European cities recently: urban living laboratories (ULL) (Evans et al., 2016; Voytenko et al., 2016). ULL represent sites in cities that allow stakeholders to collaboratively create, test and learn from sustainabilityfocused innovations, and to co-create visions, solutions and the institutional modifications or new institutional settings that they require (Puerari et al., 2018). Participation and learning are central to ULL (Bulkeley et al., 2019; Cloutier et al., 2018). ULL invite different aspects of city life to become (re)assembled in a new, place-based way, and are often temporary interventions. Despite their collaborative and enabling purpose, ULL are not evolving as depoliticised arenas. Their activities are prone to power asymmetries and risks of further harming disadvantaged communities (Naumann et al., 2018). Nevertheless, ULL provide a novel attempt to enable citizens and urban actors to create an experimental space outside the prevailing governance system. They often serve as ‘in-between test spaces’, defying the neoliberal logic of urban land development, and engaging new actors, collaborations and ideas (Mukhtar-Landgren et al., 2019). Here, we use urban experimentation in ULL as an example to consider a dynamic and pluralistic understanding of place. Despite their recent proliferation in research and the policy sphere (Steen and van Bueren, 2017), the question of whether and how these geographically embedded experiments interact with and reflect senses of place is still largely unstudied. This begs questions such as: how do urban experiments make sense of a place to intervene in space use, design, appropriation and planning? What mechanisms are at play when the process of urban experimenting (co-)creates new place narratives and meanings? Understanding the role of place in the context of urban experimentation requires an understanding of the impacts and interrelations emerging from ULL in their socio-spatial contexts. In one of the first studies bridging the theory of urban experimentation and sense of place, Frantzeskaki and colleagues (2018) examined the notion of socio-spatial embeddedness. Their conceptual framework builds on an understanding of transformative agency as rooted in places, and provides first insights into the role of sense of place in relation to (long-term) changes. We may now ask how place can be used as a concept for transformative action – as a mediating vehicle to facilitate local adaptations by (co-)creating a sense of change with a sense of place (Frantzeskaki et al., 2018). Sense of place offers a valuable lens for this endeavour. It enables a grounding of the aforementioned interactions among people, urban environments and technologies on a localised scale, where the interdependencies of systems under transformation become traceable.

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Theoretical Embedding: Making Senses of Place in Urban Transitions The decoding of the role of place in research on urban transitions and sustainability experimentation can be traced back to the spatial turn in the social sciences, a paradigm change ‘involving a reworking of the very notion and significance of spatiality to offer a perspective, in which space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs’ (Warf and Arias, 2008, p. 1). Critical work on the devaluation and (overlooked) relevance of place (Hayden, 1994; Agnew, 1989) had not been reflected in urban transitions research. For many years, this research had remained basically place-blind. It was not until researchers asked why transitions emerge and accelerate in some places and not others that a constructive critique around the lack of socio-spatial embedding in existing niche experimentation was formulated. However, the lack of attention to the role of space and place in transition studies has been overcome in recent years, addressed for example in work on the ‘geography of transitions’, which derives from interactions between transition scholars and relational or evolutionary geography (Hansen and Coenen, 2015; Truffer et al., 2015; Raven et al., 2012). Research on the role of urban experimentation is central to this research agenda, given that it is within experiments that empirical evidence suggests interactions between local platforms for experimentation (such as ULL) and the development of place identities (von Wirth et al., 2019). Authors point to the importance of ULL’s active socio-spatial embedding in place, and the role of (place-related) narratives in transitions. Still, little is known about how urban experimentation shapes places (Torrens et al., 2018). Research has largely neglected how experiments, as temporary place-based practices, may themselves become agents that stimulate change by (co-)generating new senses of place. This instigating role of senses of place is further unpacked below. In order to understand the role of senses of place in local change processes, we work with a definition of (sense of) place that acknowledges the epistemic plurality of the ‘material and social-discursive practices that create, govern and transform places’ (Williams, 2014, p. 74). A relational perspective on place resonates with the systems perspective and the underpinning theories of urban experimentation and transitions. We understand senses of place as the diversity of meanings, emotions, interpretations and values generated, embodied and communicated by individuals and among networks of people in relation to their material, social, political and ideational environments. As such, senses of place are nested in larger scales, and are dynamic as well as pluralistic. This means that multiple senses of place can coexist and co-evolve. A dynamic and relational understanding of place is ‘pivotal for positioning experimentation as a means to facilitate transformative sense of place and to instigate urban sustainability transitions’ (Frantzeskaki et al., 2018, p. 1056). Recent literature examining sense of place and communities’ place attachments emphasises the dynamic character of these concepts and their mediating influence on how (urban) actors value place change (Di Masso et al., 2019; Clarke et al., 2018). The positive relationship between experimentation and co-created senses of place can be further supported by

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recent research that points to the enabling capacities of sense of place as a catalyst for collective action and environmental stewardship (Masterson et al., 2019; Murphy et al., 2019). These studies provide insights into how senses of place may leverage people–place relationships that in turn facilitate local stewardship and transformations. In this chapter, we work with the conceptualisation of transformative senses of place as the outcome and medium of urban experimentation. We examine whether, and under what conditions, transformative senses of place can be a tracer or pathfinder of transition dynamics. Our analysis makes use of the three dimensions presented in Frantzeskaki et al.’s (2018) framework: 1. Meanings and narratives of place: transformative senses of place manifest through place-based narratives that string together new meanings of current relations between place and experience, and address hoped-for future relations among people, place and lived experiences. This dimension is about understanding sense of place as a medium for urban transformations. 2. Person–place practices and experiences: transformative senses of place embody the sentiment and plurality of experiences in relation to place. Transformative senses of place capture appreciations of place as they are shaped and shifted through experimentation, as well as practices that challenge existing symbols of places. 3. New relations between people and place, and between people in the place: these new relations provide the basis for understanding the transformative capacity in relation to and in connection to place. Urban experiments can contribute to ‘new relations of people and place’ and shape ‘new collective relations in place’.

23.3

Place-Making for Change: An Illustrative Case in the City of Rotterdam We explore the characteristics of an urban experiment in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, called the BlueCity Lab (BCL). This urban experiment has been studied alongside over 40 other ULL cases across Europe in the course of the Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions project (McCormick 2018). Our analysis of BCL has identified place-related meanings and narratives of change, new person–place practices coming into action and new local relations and rules. Data collection and analysis were conducted with a triangulation of methods. Primary data were collected through in-person, semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in the ULL (e.g. representatives from the ULL management, the municipality, local knowledge institutions). The interviews lasted 30–90 minutes. All interviews were recorded then fully or thematically transcribed. Interview data were subjected to the template analysis technique, using a coding scheme to obtain answers to the guiding questions (von Wirth et al., 2019). Further data on place-making dynamics and the socio-spatial contextualisation of the urban experiments were gathered through a literature review and participant observation at events organised by the ULL.

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Rotterdam is the second-largest city in the Netherlands, with a population of 650,000 inhabitants; there are 2.5 million inhabitants within its metropolitan region. Large parts of the city lie below sea level, resulting in residential areas being vulnerable to future flooding through sea-level rise. The city faces challenges such as providing affordable and energy-efficient housing, substantially reducing its material consumption and waste streams, and addressing socioeconomic inequalities. Rotterdam is considered a global frontrunner in experimenting with local solutions to address these challenges, and the city government actively promotes experimentation, collaborative learning and innovations for resilience and sustainability (Hölscher et al., 2019). Since 2015, BCL has been making new use of a large former indoor swimming pool (the Tropicana) and serving as an experimental platform for the circular economy. As a platform for innovative sustainable approaches to reduce material flows in the city, BCL has spaces for co-creation and co-working, hosting (wastefree) events and offering lectures, hackathons and a place for experimentation, including a wet and dry laboratory. It particularly aims to facilitate trials and demonstration projects that address the reuse of urban waste streams as a resource. Most of the site is open to the public, and in 2018 BCL attracted roughly 1,500 visitors per month. BCL’s mission is to offer an example of the circular city of the future that has no equal elsewhere in the world. This means that the management board, social entrepreneurs and participating citizens operate a zero-waste approach within the building. The lab integrates diverse place-related functions such as recreation, offices, food production and meeting spaces (Figure 23.1).

Figure 23.1 Aerial view of BlueCity Lab Rotterdam. Photograph by Denis Guzzo.

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23.4

Findings on the Instigating Role of Place-Making and Senses of Place for Local Transformation

23.4.1

Place-Related Meanings and Narratives of Change The collaborative actions at BCL have been fertile ground for retelling and (re)shaping place-related meanings and narratives. The key actors involved in starting this urban experiment shared the vision of establishing a symbolic site of change, a locality where people could have first-hand experience of sustainable practices and connect with engaged citizens and start-up entrepreneurs to create alternative approaches for a liveable, circular city. Many Rotterdam inhabitants visited the BCL site during their childhood, when it was still the Tropicana swimming pool; it is therefore associated with positive, joyful memories of indoor swimming in an artificial tropical ambience. The indoor water park was known citywide as a leisure attraction for decades. The emergence of new place narratives started with a strong, shared transformative vision for the place to become a symbolic locality of change, driven by the idea of demonstrating the possibility of a waste-free city. This idea guided activities towards the co-creation of a local ecosystem of start-ups, residents, citizens and other actors. BCL was meant to serve as a playing, testing and learning ground for social enterprises to link their waste streams and move towards a circular system (for further information, see BlueCity, 2020). Becoming a symbol of change entailed both preserving (parts of) the previous place identity and reframing previous place meanings while building up new place narratives. The place-based vision sought to retain many of the building’s original features (reflecting inherently place-related memories) while carefully transforming the building into a place of innovation, collaboration and lived sustainability principles. To give an example of the preservation of elements of the old place identity, the large Tropicana sign on top of the building remains, as do the abandoned water slides, hot tubs and changing rooms inside, which are now supposed to receive ‘new meaning, function and value’ (BlueCity, 2020). These artefacts serve as symbols of the historical use and place memories associated with the iconic building. The shared vision, and its manifestation in materiality and discourses around BCL, is a dynamically evolving narrative that is intensively and compellingly shared and communicated in negotiations with the municipality, new participants and interested stakeholders. The space itself, it’s part of the transformation, it is an iconic building that can draw attention to stimulate the imagination. It would be different if it were in a new office building. (BCL board member)

Making use of the iconic building for the experimental activities played an important role in promoting a new place narrative and offering new meanings. Setting up BCL in the iconic building helped to draw attention to the lab activities within the city and beyond, and it created a strong visibility for the place in transformation. The placemaking interests of the neighbouring community were acknowledged early on in the

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processes. Expectations and community needs were included in the plans to adapt the building. Today, BCL provides space for local sustainability initiatives and hosts community meetings. It also is becoming a place where learning about sustainability is being institutionalised. For example, the University of Applied Sciences collaborates with BCL to conduct joint research and higher education in the place.

23.4.2

Person–Place Practices Coming into Action BlueCity Lab facilitates collaborative experimentation and learning conducted by people engaged with the circular economy. This involves new person–place practices coming into place. BCL hosts numerous public events and critical debates that address the (un)sustainability of current logics in urban waste management, production and consumption, and involves diverse actors in experiencing alternative urban innovations in relation to circularity. ‘Change maker nights’ have become regular activities that bring diverse people into the building. Through these activities, different networks and individuals meet and interact for the first time, and enrich the senses of place with appreciation and an experience of possible transitions. At BCL, opportunities are created to actually taste and sense the outcomes of some of the transformative experiments (i.e. the new place practices). A sustainable food start-up produces oyster mushrooms inside the building (Rotterzwam, 2020), growing them on coffee waste collected from the café located at BCL and from restaurants in the city. The mushroom products are then used in the catering for events, and in the café’s kitchen. New materials and consumer goods are also elements of experimentation to be sensed and tested. One start-up is successfully reusing food waste, mainly from mangoes that arrive damaged in Rotterdam’s harbour (Fruitleather, 2020). The rejected fruit is transformed into a durable, leather-like material that can be made into footwear or used in the interiors and furniture industry. Tropicana has changed, it is now seen as a serious thing. BlueCity in the collective mindset is a place where novel things are happening about sustainability, where entrepreneurs, citizens and the municipality, together with other stakeholders, are coming to see how they could alternatively organise their systems. (Head of municipal area development, Municipality of Rotterdam)

New place-related practices include addressing the needs of residents in the neighbourhood and integrating people from vulnerable and economically marginalised backgrounds. Neighbourhood residents came together in a citizen initiative and now use BCL as a meeting place. BCL has also initiated ‘programmes with people who do not easily get jobs, like long-term unemployed or former drug addicts or refugees’ (interview with BCL founder), to engage them in lab activities. Experimenting and learning about solutions for a circular city is not restricted to the BCL premises. The active embedding includes site visits, knowledge exchange and shared learning around BCL. These practices have emerged as a process of weaving in and sharing local experiences with connected partners in national and global knowledge networks (e.g. the global blue economy network) to learn about transforming urban material flows. This has been accelerated by journalists (Dicker, 2019) and the citywide innovation

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agency becoming interested in BCL’s practices. Innovation press tours bring journalists and innovation scouts to the site to spread information about the place. At BCL, the coexistence of old structures and textures with new functionalities instigates a sense of change.

23.4.3

Place-Based New Relations and Rules Our interviews and participant observations show that different networks and individuals come together to interact and start doing things differently under the uniting theme of the circular economy. These actors normally do not meet and connect so easily. But activists and impact investors, public servants and start-up entrepreneurs, neighbouring residents and local policymakers, students and jobseekers do talk to each other in the context of events, workshops and initiatives at BCL. Participants report that they are attracted not only by the objective of the event in question, but also by experiencing first-hand ‘a special place in transition’. Building on the principles that lie behind the shared sustainability vision of a circular city, novel place-related rules have been established through the social relations and networks activated at BCL. The new start-ups in the building follow explicit rules that require them to indicate the amounts and kinds of waste and material streams they expect to be working with, and how these might be offered as resources to other actors within or beyond the building. Similarly, the sources of the required input have to be made transparent in order to collaboratively identify options to reuse them. Implicitly, occupants and start-ups are asked not only to reduce waste in their operations but to eventually not produce surplus material at all. BCL activities have led to new relations between international corporations and local start-ups that are testing circular economy approaches. For example, BCL’s experience with circular (and almost waste-free) catering has sparked serious interest from Sodexo, a global catering and facility services company in the Dutch public sector, which manages large canteens in all government ministries (Greer et al., 2020). New relations have emerged within and across sectors. The example of Fruitleather mentioned above illustrates how BCL has become a breeding ground for cross-sector collaborations (e.g. between trade, food and fashion sectors).

23.5

From Place-Based Experimenting to Co-creating Transformative Topophilia We have analysed urban experimentation through a place lens, using the conceptual framework provided by Frantzeskaki and colleagues (2018). We refine this model by adding the conceptualisation that transformative senses of place can be pluriform, relational and dynamic: experimentation facilitates the co-creation of senses of place that coexist concurrently and co-evolve translocally. First, new senses of place can emerge from narratives and practices in and through urban experimentation. All three key elements (meanings and narratives of change,

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new people–place practices and novel place relations and rules) are evolving at BCL. Many of the ascribed meanings revolve around the notion of BCL becoming an exemplary place to transform how people deal with urban waste. This narrative of a symbolic place of change is reflected in the shared vision of the diverse people engaging in and relating to BCL activities. So far, the vision of becoming the circular city of the future has provided a broad, tangible frame that is uncontested, at least among those more directly engaged with BCL. This vision serves as an inherent place narrative, enclosing and connecting to the plurality and variety of different meanings. A closer look at underlying dissimilarities and contested narratives is important here. Some engaged citizens at BCL see the place as home to a grassroots movement, while others feel like partners in a business-oriented start-up accelerator located in an exotic building. We find more contested place meanings at the deeper layers of instrumental or socio-cultural meaning. While some interviewees acknowledge the economic potential attributed to BCL (i.e. its instrumental meaning), the majority of actors address socio-cultural meanings, i.e. meanings that are socially constructed through language and social interactions in relation to place (e.g. ‘BCL is a place where novel things are happening’; ‘we are the blue citizens or bioneers at BCL’). Such meanings often serve to support people’s identifications with particular groups or cultures (Williams, 2014). Overall, the multifaceted character of place meanings contests the idea that one can ascribe just one sense to a place. Second, we found several novel people–place practices, and some new place relations and rules. The emergence of these practices and relations follows a translocal pathway. Experimentation at BCL is embedded within citywide, national and even international networks of shared knowledge and project partners. The new senses of place emerging from activities at BCL give rise to discourses about an ‘iconic building in transformation’, and simultaneously appear to be the outcome of social interactions, practices and social constructions evolving in-between actors. This leads us to conceptualise BCL as a translocal boundary object that generates translocal pathways of new practices, as well as pluriform and dynamic senses of place that connect the local to the global. These new senses of place have a multi-sited, multiscalar character, implying the transgression of a fixed understanding of place (Porst and Sakdapolrak, 2017; Brickell and Datta, 2011). The relational plurality of place may come into play as a mechanism to instigate transformative practices and place-based engagement with other localities, recently conceptualised as translocal diffusion (Loorbach et al., 2020). Third, three key dimensions have guided our work. Their interplay is supposed to stimulate transformative topophilia over time – a sense of change through place. Through the lab work at BCL, the actors involved create a symbolic place of change, facilitating the prefiguration of a radically different urban future. A sense of change (i.e. urban transformation) is connected with a sense of continuity (e.g. by preserving and acknowledging aspects of existing meanings). Transformative topophilia thus refers to the collection of (new and old) meanings, practices and relations that actors (or a community) experience, embody and envision during and as an outcome of a (deliberate) transformative process. In this understanding, place is a dynamic and

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instigating concept for action. It is important to note that the reported senses of place and their potential transformative capacity have emerged over a time frame of several years (BCL has been active since 2015). The mid- to long-term effects of urban experimentation and the role of place are largely unknown, and recent research indicates that they may be limited (Eshuis and Gerrits, 2019). This requires further research, the design and implementation of which can be guided by our extended framework.

23.6

Conclusion The variety of meanings and practices observed in our context of urban experimentation suggests that novel governance interventions provide the spaces for a place-based sense of change to emerge. In order to make adaptive governance more impactful, it is instrumental to designate spaces that will facilitate experimentation. We interpret BCL as a space where new place-related narratives of change and novel practices and relations emerge, embedded within wider translocal networks of practice. Backed by our case study, we contend that a translocal, pluralised and dynamic concept of place promises to be a valuable lens through which to understand the impacts, manifestations and appropriate responses to global challenges in everyday life.

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Di Masso, A., Williams, D. R., Raymond, C. M., et al. (2019) ‘Between fixities and flows: navigating place attachments in an increasingly mobile world’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 61, pp. 125–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2019.01.006 Eshuis, J. and Gerrits, L. (2019) ‘The limited transformational power of adaptive governance: a study of institutionalization and materialization of adaptive governance’, Public Management Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2019.1679232 Evans, J., Karvonen, A. and Raven, R. (2016) ‘The experimental city: new modes and prospects of urban transformation’, in Evans, J., Karvonen, A. and Raven, R. (eds), The Experimental City, London, Routledge, pp. 1–12. Frantzeskaki, N., Castán Broto, V., Coenen, L. and Loorbach, D. (2017) ‘Urban sustainability transitions: the dynamics and opportunities of sustainability transitions in cities’, in Frantzeskaki, N., Castàn Broto, V., Coenen, L. and Loorbach, D. (eds), Urban Sustainability Transitions, New York, Routledge, pp. 1–22. Frantzeskaki, N., van Steenbergen, F. and Stedman, R. C. (2018) ‘Sense of place and experimentation in urban sustainability transitions: the Resilience Lab in Carnisse, Rotterdam, the Netherlands’, Sustainability Science, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 1045–1059. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0562-5 Fruitleather (2020) ‘About Fruitleather’ [Online]. Available at https://fruitleather.nl/about-us/ (accessed 6 June 2020). Greer, R., von Wirth, T. and Loorbach, D. (2020) ‘The diffusion of circular services: transforming the Dutch catering sector’, Journal of Cleaner Production, vol. 267, art. 121906. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.121906 Hansen, T. and Coenen, L. (2015) ‘The geography of sustainability transitions: review, synthesis and reflections on an emergent research field’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, vol. 17, pp. 92–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2014.11.001 Hayden, D. (1994) ‘The power of place: claiming urban landscapes as people’s history’, Journal of Urban History, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 466–485. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2018.10.043 Hölscher, K., Frantzeskaki, N., McPhearson, T. and Loorbach, D. (2019) ‘Tales of transforming cities: transformative climate governance capacities in New York City, US and Rotterdam, Netherlands’, Journal of Environmental Management, vol. 231, pp. 843–857. https://doi.org/10 .1016/j.jenvman.2018.10.043 Loorbach, D., Wittmayer, J., Avelino, F., von Wirth, T. and Frantzeskaki, N. (2020) ‘Transformative innovation and translocal diffusion’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, vol. 35, pp. 251–260. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2020.01.009 Masterson, V. A., Enqvist, J. P., Stedman, R. C. and Tengö, M. (2019) ‘Sense of place in social-ecological systems: from theory to empirics’, Sustainability Science, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 555–564. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00695-8 McCormick, K. (2018) ‘About the GUST project’ [Online]. Available at www.urbanlivinglabs.net /p/about.html (accessed 6 June 2020). McFarlane, C. (2011) Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage, Chichester, Wiley Blackwell. Mukhtar-Landgren, D., Kronsell, A., Voytenko Palgan, Y. and von Wirth, T. (2019) ‘Municipalities as enablers in urban experimentation’, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning. https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2019.1672525 Murphy, A., Enqvist, J. P. and Tengö, M. (2019) ‘Place-making to transform urban social-ecological systems: insights from the stewardship of urban lakes in Bangalore, India’, Sustainability Science, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 607–623. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00664-1

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Naumann, S., Davis, M., Moore, M. and McCormick, K. (2018) ‘Utilizing urban living laboratories for social innovation’, in Elmqvist, T., Bai, X., Frantzeskaki, N., et al. (eds), Urban Planet: Knowledge Towards Sustainable Cities, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316647554.012 Porst, L., and Sakdapolrak, P. (2017). ‘How scale matters in translocality: uses and potentials of scale in translocal research’, Erdkunde, 71, pp. 111–126. Puerari, E., de Koning, J., von Wirth, T., et al. (2018). ‘Co-creation dynamics in urban living labs’, Sustainability, vol. 10, no. 6, art. 1893. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10061893 Raven, R., Schot, J. and Berkhout, F. (2012) ‘Space and scale in socio-technical transitions’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, vol. 4, pp. 63–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.eist.2012.08.001 Rotterzwam (2020) ‘Rotterzwam home’ [Online]. Available at www.rotterzwam.nl (accessed 6 June 2020). Steen, K. and van Bueren, E. (2017) ‘The defining characteristics of urban living labs’, Technology Innovation Management Review, vol. 7, no. 7. http://doi.org/10.22215/timreview/1088 Torrens, J., Johnstone, P. and Schot, J. (2018) ‘Unpacking the formation of favourable environments for urban experimentation: the case of the Bristol Energy Scene’, Sustainability, vol. 10, no. 3, art. 879. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10030879 Truffer, B., Murphy, J. T. and Raven, R. (2015) ‘The geography of sustainability transitions: contours of an emerging theme’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, vol. 17, pp. 63–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2015.07.004 von Wirth, T., Fuenfschilling, L., Frantzeskaki, N. and Coenen, L. (2019) ‘Impacts of urban living labs on sustainability transitions: mechanisms and strategies for systemic change through experimentation’, European Planning Studies, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 229–257. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2018.1504895 Voytenko, Y., McCormick, K., Evans, J. and Schliwa, G. (2016) ‘Urban living labs for sustainability and low carbon cities in Europe: towards a research agenda’, Journal of Cleaner Production, vol. 123, pp. 45–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.08.053 Warf, B. and Arias, S. (2008) ‘Introduction: the reinsertion of space in the humanities and social sciences’, in Warf, B. and Arias, S. (eds), The Spatial Turn, Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 17–26. Williams, D. R. (2014) ‘Making sense of “place”: reflections on pluralism and positionality in place research’, Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 131, pp. 74–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j .landurbplan.2014.08.002

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24 Domestic Matters IKEA Catalogues, the Good Home and the Changing Aspirations of Urban Chinese Gladys Pak Lei Chong and Yiu Fai Chow

24.1

Introduction The real-estate spree has become a common global issue. The widening difference between median housing prices and median incomes has intensified the wealth gap and the class divide worldwide (Lin, 2019; Piketty et al., 2019). In China, this has engendered a paradox: while young people find it increasingly difficult to own their own homes, they predicate their version of the good life precisely on homeownership and the physical arrangement of their homes. Existing studies of the home in cultural studies, sociology, human geography and psychology focus predominantly on Anglo-Saxon experiences (Mallett, 2004; Rybczynski, 1986; Cooper, 1974). The historical and socio-cultural contexts of homemaking in the non-West, or transcultural exchanges around homemaking, rarely draw academic attention. Borrowing from an introduction to a special issue on home, we premise our enquiry on ‘our sensitivity to and our privileging of Asian experiences, and revisiting our homes’ (Chow et al., 2015, p. 254). This chapter not only fills the research gap but also challenges a singular understanding of home and homemaking. It aims to reveal the circulation and multiplication of domestic imaginaries through the lens of IKEA catalogues. IKEA, a Swedish-founded global furniture retailer, is tremendously popular in China. Not only have we observed heavy traffic around and inside IKEA stores, and the always-packed IKEA cafeterias in Beijing, but media reports about Chinese people conducting leisure and domestic activities (e.g. taking a nap) in IKEA stores have raised questions about its specific appeal (Levin, 2016). de Kloet (2014), exploring the presence of hyper-European buildings in Beijing,1 suggested that these designs were comparable to heterotopias: mirrors of the good life. In her study on young people’s dwellings, Chong (2020) also discovered that imaginaries of the ‘West’ offered them aspirations to a good home. Taking IKEA catalogues as the objects of analysis, this chapter advances the aforementioned research by examining

1

de Kloet (2014) refers to an excessive, baroque style that suggests Europe but is not quite recognisable to Europeans themselves.

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how this global furniture retailer constructs ideal homes that offer Chinese consumers aspirations to a good home and a good life, which also have cultural implications. We argue that IKEA’s popularity in China can be attributed to a ‘cultural odourlessness’ that – thanks to the ease with which it travels globally – has itself become an odour in the Chinese context. Here, we borrow and build on the concept of cultural odourlessness initially developed by Koichi Iwabuchi (2002). Positing the sense of locality as olfactory, Iwabuchi evocatively and provocatively links the sensory imagery of smell to associations between national cultures and cultural products. In his conceptualisation, cultural odourlessness implies the non-embodiment/absence of national traits in cultural products, which explains their global circulation and popularity. Iwabuchi argues that the strategic erasure of Japaneseness from cultural products such as VCRs, the Walkman, animations and video games has ensured their global popularity. When Sun Jung (2011) examined the globalisation of South Korean popular culture (the ‘Korean wave’), she appropriated Iwabuchi’s concept by accentuating the positive qualities of mobility (Chua, 2015). ‘Cultural odourlessness’ in Japanese (mukokuseki) has a Korean equivalent (mugukjeok); both refer to nonnationality. Jung (2011) proposed that this cultural odourlessness/mugukjeok can be considered a ‘transcultural hybridity’: ‘how popular cultural flows enable the mixing of particular cultural elements (national, traditional, and specific) with globally popular cultural elements, which then causes those particular cultural elements to become less culturally specific’ (p. 3). It is not a simple absence of national culture; rather, it embraces both ‘odourless global elements’ and national (local) elements (Jung, 2011). The reference to odour adds sensory, interactional and affective dimensions to the examination of transcultural flows that change our senses of place. Advanced media technologies and intensifying transcultural flows help IKEA to generate an odourless sense of place that ‘de-places’ home, yet at the same time this absence of a specific locality/place paradoxically becomes a presence in itself, pluralising the senses of place suitable to different cultural groups in different localities. If the economy drives global cultural flows, China – a profitable market of 1.4 billion consumers – deserves examination. Earlier studies have focused on how Western media corporations (e.g. MTV, IKEA) encountered and overcame economic and political constraints (cf. Fung, 2006) and found marketing approaches to reach Chinese consumers (Enoncho, 2015; Holmstrom and Spjuth, 2005). Moving beyond the frameworks of political economy and marketing, this chapter looks into how IKEA, as a lifestyle furniture company, draws on global odourless elements as well as local elements in changing and pluralising the senses of home to which Chinese consumers aspire in homemaking. In order to demonstrate how this cultural odourless has impacted on senses of place, we choose to focus on a site specifically embedded in visual and design culture: IKEA’s catalogues. This chapter develops from one of the authors’ research studies on aspirations to a good life among young Chinese people in Beijing and Hong Kong. We take IKEA catalogues from 2010 to 2017 (see Appendix) as our main object of enquiry, informed by the popularity of these publications, which both reflect and construct popular desires in homemaking. Especially among the younger generation of consumers who belong to (or aspire to join) the emerging middle class, IKEA catalogues are an

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important index of ideal domestic living (Weller, 2017). In addition, we include IKEA’s yearly financial reports, and refer to catalogues in other localities. We chose the time frame of 2010 to 2017 because it was around 2010 that IKEA saw a sizeable growth of 23 per cent in the fiscal year, to 3.7 billion RMB (Li, 2010). The IKEA catalogue is released globally every August, covering the 12 months from 1 August to 31 July, while its financial year runs from 1 September to 31 August (Inter IKEA Systems BV, 2018). The eight catalogue editions we have chosen thus span an important period for tracing IKEA’s increasing popularity, which coincided with China’s growth after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In what follows, we first give a brief account of market reforms, how China’s ‘Reform and Opening’ policy has encouraged individuals’ pursuit of wealth and consumption, and the intimate relationship of this with the idea of the modern good life. Second, we provide some background information on IKEA’s expansion into China, and how the IKEA concept as a generic set of formulae has allowed it to become an odourless global culture that is popular with Chinese consumers. The third, empirical and analytical part delves into the design, visuality and textuality of the catalogues. On one hand, it examines the catalogues’ odourless transcultural appeal, whereby the global becomes the local, and the odourless becomes new senses of place. On the other hand, we also observe certain specificities in the Chinese catalogues where the local inflects the global, and where mutation and multiplication transpire. We argue that IKEA’s transcultural, odourless home – which is not associated with any particular nationality, locality or culture, and yet distinguishes itself precisely by that nonassociation – becomes an odour that is identified and desired by Chinese consumers.

24.2

IKEA in China After the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, it rolled out a series of reforms that originally aimed to catch up with its modern capitalist Western counterparts, but which resulted in severe economic disasters and material deprivation for decades. The Reform and Opening policy of the late 1970s changed socialist collectivism into a socialist market economy. The once centralised danwei (work unit)-based social life was replaced by an individualistic and family-oriented society (Chong, 2020; Chow, 2019). Framed within the discourse of patriotism, individuals are encouraged to exercise a certain degree of freedom and autonomy to pursue material gain, private ownership and social mobility. The state’s call for the building of a xiaokang (moderately prosperous) society promotes the material comforts associated with modern electrical appliances such as televisions, refrigerators and rice cookers. The everyday sensory experiences derived from these appliances stimulate individuals to seek wealth accumulation and consumption. Chinese populations are guided to be desiring consumers: not only do they labour for consumption, but their consumption also generates continuous demand and growth (Rofel, 2007). Consumption helps to accelerate economic growth and increases the country’s movement towards modernity. This renewed call for modernisation and socio-economic growth converges with

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a globalising trend in the search for a mode of tasteful and comfortable living infused with symbolic and material values. Like many multinationals lured by the untapped market potential, IKEA came to China. It opened its first store in 1998 in Shanghai; the Beijing store followed one year later. Founded in 1943, IKEA is a private multinational company, properly called Inter IKEA Systems BV. In compliance with Chinese law, IKEA in China is a joint venture with a local partner. Globally known for its relatively low pricing, IKEA was nonetheless considered expensive in China; from 2000 onwards, it reduced its product prices by as much as 60 per cent (Chu et al., 2013). It took IKEA eight years to open more stores (Wall, 2013). With China’s spectacular economic growth and fast-expanding middle class, in 2012 IKEA had a turnover exceeding 6 billion RMB (nearly US$1 billion) in China. By 2017, China had become one of IKEA’s fastest-growing markets, and one of its largest markets based on sales value (Ingka Holding BV and Its Controlled Entities, 2017). Its revenue in 2018 was 15.5 billion RMB (Hancock, 2019). As of 2019, it had 27 stores across China (excluding Hong Kong), a rapid expansion of 15 additional stores since 2010 (Xinhua, 2019). IKEA’s popularity in China comes from how it has turned the IKEA concept (Inter IKEA Systems BV, n.d.) into a set of generic formulae that have become odourless global elements through transcultural circulation. The largest furniture retail chain in the world, it had 424 stores in 52 markets in 2018 (Inter IKEA Systems BV, n.d.). Its worldwide presence guarantees it easy access to different markets. This large-scale penetration in a diversity of markets has allowed its generic line of products to become recognisable elements of popular culture, flexibly appealing to specific local needs. This generic quality is enhanced by the expanding do-it-yourself (DIY) lifestyle trend and a number of elements that we discuss below. On the product level, there is no logo or brand name on the exterior of its products. The materials used (e.g. wood, glass, plastic) are universally available around the world. The DIY concept guarantees functionality and flexibility for urban populations. Its product assembly instructions use universal pictorial guidelines that assure convenience. This DIY culture allows subjects to acquire a sense of empowerment and autonomy by constructing their ideal home furnishings. A popular consumption lifestyle growing out of Western societies in the late 1970s (Yoshitaka, 2009; Philips, 2005), this DIY concept inspires Chinese people to try to live like their modern counterparts. This global modernity is related to an automobile culture: IKEA stores usually occupy sizeable spaces in suburban centres, with ample parking and road access (USCBC, 2004). In its earlier years in China, when the economy was still developing, only 20 per cent of IKEA’s visitors had cars; IKEA stores were situated near public transport and taxi lanes, and offered home delivery and fee-based assembly services (USCBC, 2004). The construction of home settings in IKEA showrooms and catalogues is often decontextualised, showing only interior and partial areas of the home. With no outdoor landscapes, this vagueness – lacking specificity in terms of actual size – allows the home to be imagined by consumers everywhere and anywhere. The uniformly positive emotions – suggesting happy, fun and enjoyable living – of the sometimes faceless

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models (shot at a distance, from the back or above) are offered for the consumer’s imagination and identification. The activities recorded in the catalogues (e.g. talking and preparing food in the kitchen, smiling while arranging flowers) are ordinary, mundane and identifiable activities in domestic settings. When filmed and associated with specific furniture items, home products and positive emotions, these activities allow IKEA to construct a happy and desirable home for consumers. This is what the so-called IKEA concept seeks to impress upon us, wherever we are. In the next section, we zoom in on IKEA’s catalogues in mainland China and investigate its domestic appeal as it is dynamically played out between the global and the local.

24.3

Global as Local Glancing over the eight covers of the IKEA catalogues from 2010 to 2017, appraising their formats and thickness, flipping through their pages, one is likely to draw a paradoxical conclusion: what is remarkable about these Chinese catalogues is the absence of ‘Chineseness’. On one hand, readers discern no interiors that are designed primarily according to traditional Chinese styles and aesthetics in terms of fabrics, materials, patterns, motifs, symbols, colours, items and so forth – think of the iconic, hard(-lined) but elegant suanzhi (ebony) furniture (cf. Li, 2018; Sun and Wang, 2016). On the other hand, nor is there anything reminiscent of ongoing attempts to fuse traditional Chinese elements into modern interior design – what one research team has distinguished as ‘Chinese neoclassic’, ‘Chinese postmodernism’, ‘Chinese new modernism’ and ‘Chinese parametric’ (Ding and Guo, 2019). To put this differently, if a Canadian edition were to be placed next to its Chinese counterpart, a casual viewer would not notice any difference – apart, that is, from the different languages and fonts used. This absence of Chineseness (or any national culture), and what we discussed earlier as odourlessness/mugukjeok, seems to be the specific appeal to potential local customers in China. This odourlessness/mugukjeok, according to Jung, is related to intensifying trans-Asia cultural flows (de Kloet et al., 2020; Iwabuchi, 2020), Meyrowitz’s (1985) idea of ‘no sense of place’ and Appadurai’s (1996) mediascapes. Building on these earlier works, Jung (2011) highlights the significant influence of media flows in creating ‘communities with “no sense of place” who share culturally neutral presentations’ (p. 18). The representation of these culturally hybrid, odourless ideal homes in the catalogues demonstrates how IKEA creates and provides images and narratives for culturally diverse audiences. By producing and disseminating these images and narratives, the catalogues transform the supposedly Scandinavian/Western into the familiar transcultural global, mixing the global and creating the local. It is this morphing, this transcultural movement through time and space, this becoming something else while staying the same, that we believe constitutes the odourlessness that permeates the catalogues. As if to underline this dominance of the global as local, and the concomitant absence of Chineseness from the catalogues, certain visual mutations have taken place through the years under study. These mutations are not readily discernible unless we place the

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catalogues in a comparative light. For the year 2010, a random comparison of the eight editions shows that the US, Canadian and UK catalogues share identical covers (with interiors on two levels); the Swedish catalogue has a slightly different cover (with interiors on four levels), which is reproduced on the French, Taiwanese and Hong Kong covers; only the mainland Chinese catalogue cover displays interiors on three levels (Figure 24.1). We have no idea why such subtle differences grace the covers of catalogues in different localities, nor do we want to venture a guess. What we want to foreground is that since 2014, such subtle differences among various local editions have given way to one global cover: all the covers are identical. This identicalness is both an intervention and a transformation that brings together audiences of different cultural backgrounds. Another remarkable mutation we have observed through the years concerns ethnic/ racial representation in the images used in the catalogues. We counted all the models that appeared in all the images in all the Chinese catalogues, as well as in five Canadian (2010, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2017) and three US editions (2012, 2013, 2016).2 The choice of North American editions was based on availability and the probability that they were created for a different cultural context. While both editions of the 2010 catalogues appear to be ethnically/racially diverse (in the Canadian editions, white models comprise 47 per cent, East Asian-looking models 30 per cent; in the Chinese editions the figures are 57 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively), subsequent catalogues become predominantly white, and the percentages of East Asian-looking models drop to 4 per cent in the Canadian editions and 6 per cent in the Chinese. This quantitative analysis demonstrates that, at least from a visual perspective, what is circulated as the transcultural hybrid representation of a good home (interior) is predominantly and increasingly white, and there seems to be no attempt to include more East Asian-looking models to ‘sinicise’ the Chinese catalogues. This conflation of the transcultural global and the local is not only visual, but also appears in the way IKEA frames its potential customers. Since 2016, IKEA has commissioned an annual survey report on what people think about home. The 2018 report (IKEA Group, 2018) – the most recent available report we could locate – claims to have surveyed over 22,000 people in 22 ‘markets’. While a small number of people are cited with their localities, including a couple from Shanghai, the potential homemakers are generally treated in their entirety, counted together, and described as people all over the world. The construction of this collective group creates “sodalities” between different cultural groups, which eventually stimulate active transcultural consumption’ (Jung, 2011, p. 18). At least, this is what we are given in the publicly available report. The shout line on its first page is illustrative of the tendency to mobilise ‘the world’ to conflate and thus elide the local: ‘Today around 1 in 3 people all over the world say there are places where they feel more at home than the space they live in’ (IKEA Group, 2018, p. 1).

2

The US editions are not specifically noted in the analysis, but they are included in the general analysis.

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Figure 24.1 IKEA 2010 catalogue covers in the USA, China and Sweden, from left to right. Photo courtesy of IKEA.

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Odourless, Not Senseless The Chinese version of the IKEA catalogue looks almost identical to its counterparts ‘all over the world’, and evokes a certain globality that is odourless/mugukjeok, not readily identifiable with any particular origin or nationality. This transcultural hybrid odourlessness, we argue, is precisely the charm of the local – an odour in itself – for Chinese customers. These sodalities, derived from ‘the conditions of collective reading, criticism and pleasure’ (Jung, 2011, p. 18), endow translocal audiences with a shared sense of imagination and a feeling of being together. However, we hasten to add, odourlessness does not mean senselessness. Jung (2011) writes: ‘When one culture flows into another, there must always be interventions and metamorphosis, which emphasise the interaction between two different cultures and create commonalities that are conducive to transcultural consumption’ (p. 19). While there is no distinct smell exuded by the catalogues under our examination, here and there between the pages there do drift senses of something that vaguely, elusively suggests that this is home, indeed in its local sense. In other words, in the Chinese catalogues we see not only how the global becomes local, but also how the local inflects the global – for instance, the one-child policy in mainland China (cf. He and Zheng, 2017). In the 2010 version, the Chinese catalogue contains one image of a living room, with an East Asian(-looking) child drinking tea, half-standing on a sofa, on his own (Figure 24.2). If this image comes over ‘naturally’ to Chinese readers who are used to having a single child in the family, its ‘artificiality’ becomes apparent when we notice a similar image in the Canadian catalogue: instead of a child on his own, the Canadian catalogue shows two children, visibly of different ages, conversing with each other as siblings would. In the 2011 catalogue, a dining room and kitchen image in the Chinese version shows a mother in the kitchen and a girl at the dining table, while its Canadian counterpart shows a mother and two children. Another instance follows a section regarding ‘two worlds, one room’ in the 2014 catalogues. As suggested in the heading, the main image as well as the accompanying text depicts two girls sharing one room, with two beds, two wardrobes and so forth. The two girls are white in both the Chinese and Canadian versions. In the Chinese version, however, an image is placed right below the main image (of two girls): that of a girl drawing on her own; she looks East Asian. The portrayal of a single child – a phenomenon more commonk if not predominant in mainland Chinese families – is a tactic to conjure some sense of a Chinese home; and this sense, we must stress, does not mitigate against, but is firmly embedded in, the more prominent and permeating odourlessness of the global home. That is to say, the presence of the local is in tandem with, if not enhancing, the omnipresence of the global. These localised differences reveal how mass-mediated sodalities have to manage and navigate ‘the complexity that, in them, diverse local experiences of taste, pleasure and politics can crisscross with one another, thus creating the possibility of convergences in translocal social action that would otherwise be hard to imagine’ (Appadurai, 1996, p. 8).

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Figure 24.2 Images of a living room in IKEA 2010 catalogue in Canada (above) and in China (below). Photo courtesy of IKEA.

There are other similar tactics for conjuring a sense of a Chinese home: for instance, the use of sinicising items (such as tea and a padded panda in the first single-child image mentioned above), of colours that probably appeal more to Chinese customers (such as the replacement of the colour black with white in Chinese catalogues compared with Canadian catalogues), and of situations specific to mainland China (for instance, in the 2017 catalogues, the Chinese version outlines a public engagement project concerning children of migrant workers, while the Canadian project is on children’s environmental education). Finally, we turn to language use. Generally speaking, the Chinese catalogues correspond to the global diction of IKEA’s aesthetics and ethos in Chinese script. We read Chinese renditions of the DIY idea or ideology (sometimes graphically rather than

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linguistically), of smart texts alluding to home sweet home, of product descriptions phrased in an ecologically responsible and appealing manner (often in combination with images of interiors with wooden furniture and decorative plants) – just as in other languages in other IKEA catalogues. But then, amid this transcultural hybrid odourlessness of language use, we detect certain senses of Chinese home. Some are more explicit; for instance, in the 2010 catalogue, a section regarding kitchenware opens with a subtitle telling readers that ‘all are specifically designed for Chinese families’. The supplement, we believe, has to do with Chinese ways of cooking (high temperatures, frying and deep frying, different dishes served at the same time and so forth), which presumably necessitate special attention and compatible designs. In other words, these images in the catalogues invite readers to sense some culturally odourless, non-defined place as well as to sense a specific, local place; to sense there, as well as to sense here. Some linguistic sinicising techniques are more stylistic, such as the use of Chinese expressions or proverbs, the linguistic habit of repeating words for stylistic and acoustic accentuation (diezi), the traditional couplet format (two lines with the same number of Chinese words) and so forth. There are also linguistic features in the Chinese catalogues that should convince readers of the catalogue’s – and thus IKEA’s and IKEA merchandise’s – firm and continuous grounding in the local culture. We refer in particular to the mobilisation of ‘trendy’ or new words in the Chinese context. In the 2010 catalogue, the verb tao is used, a word whose circulation and trendiness increased in tandem with the popularity of the online shopping platform Taobao. In the 2016 catalogue, we find ‘your TA’ (nide TA). ‘TA’ is a pinyin transliteration that applies equally to the two different Chinese characters meaning ‘him’ and ‘her’; some writers, particularly online, choose to use the genderneutral pinyin TA instead of the Chinese characters in order to avoid the need to specify whether a man or a woman is involved. The IKEA catalogue’s inclusion of ‘TA’ underwrites its attempt to inculcate a sense of closeness, of intimacy with the local even when the general outlook is global, and its refusal to be marked by proximity, whether geographical or cultural, to anywhere – an odourlessness that is everywhere.

24.5

Conclusion This chapter has examined the ways in which IKEA, a global furniture retailer, constructs a transcultural, odourless ideal home that de-places home while simultaneously pluralising senses of home. With no specific place-based identity, IKEA’s transformative capacity lies in its promises of inclusion and selftransformation. This, we argue, has been a welcome aspiration for urban Chinese people as the country leaps from the communist era’s collective workbased home to the post-socialist, family-oriented home of today. In its global circulation, IKEA’s transcultural odourlessness attracts – rather than rejects – diverse translocal experiences of different places, and therefore powerfully

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enriches and pluralises senses of place. IKEA exemplifies how transcultural flows deterritorialise and reterritorialise home, endlessly pluralising senses of home.

Acknowledgement The research for this article was funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (project numbers 22609415 and 12610118).

Appendix: List of Catalogues Table A1 Ikea 2017

Distribution

Author

USA Canada UK China Sweden Hong Kong Taiwan France

Inter IKEA Systems BV

Date of publication

Location of publication

Catalogue number

2016

Älmhult, Sweden

NA

Date of publication

Location of publication

Catalogue number

2015

Älmhult, Sweden

NA

Inter IKEA Systems BV (edited by Meubles IKEA France SNC)

Table A2 Ikea 2016

Distribution

Author

USA Canada UK China Sweden Hong Kong Taiwan France

Inter IKEA Systems BV

Inter IKEA Systems BV (edited by Meubles IKEA France SNC)

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Table A3 Ikea 2015

Distribution

Author

Date of publication

Location of publication

Catalogue number

USA Canada UK China Sweden Hong Kong Taiwan France

Inter IKEA Systems BV

2014

Älmhult, Sweden

40051 NA 40050 NA 40019 NA 40015

Inter IKEA Systems BV (edited by Meubles IKEA France SNC)

Table A4 Ikea 2014

Distribution

Author

USA Canada UK China Poland Hong Kong Taiwan Singapore

Inter IKEA Systems BV

Date of publication

Location of publication

Catalogue number

2013

Älmhult, Sweden

NA 30048 NA

30019 NA

Table A5 Ikea 2013

Distribution

Author

USA Canada UK China Sweden Hong Kong Taiwan France

Inter IKEA Systems BV

Date of publication

Location of publication

Catalogue number

2012

Älmhult, Sweden

12147 12106 NA

Inter IKEA Systems BV (edited by Meubles IKEA France SNC)

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Table A6 Ikea 2012

Distribution

Author

Date of publication

Location of publication

Catalogue number

USA Canada UK China Japan Hong Kong Taiwan France

Inter IKEA Systems BV

2011

Älmhult, Sweden

11043 11006 11042 NA

Inter IKEA Systems BV (edited by Meubles IKEA France SNC)

Table A7 Ikea 2011

Distribution

Author

Date of publication

Location of publication

Catalogue number

USA Canada UK China Singapore Hong Kong Taiwan France

Inter IKEA Systems BV

2010

Älmhult, Sweden

1650 1610 1632 NA 1590 1666 NA 1654

Inter IKEA Systems BV (edited by Meubles IKEA France SNC)

Table A8 Ikea 2010

Distribution

Author

Date of publication

Location of publication

Catalogue number

USA Canada UK China Sweden Hong Kong Taiwan France

Inter IKEA Systems BV

2009

Älmhult, Sweden

91280 91030 91110 91130 NA 91330 NA 91080

Inter IKEA Systems BV (edited by Meubles IKEA France SNC)

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Conclusion

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25 Navigating the Spaciousness of Uncertainties Posed by Global Challenges A Senses of Place Perspective Lynne C. Manzo, Daniel R. Williams, Christopher M. Raymond, Andrés Di Masso, Timo von Wirth and Patrick Devine-Wright We opened this volume with sobering stories of the dire global challenges before us. Indeed, one would not be hard pressed to find stories of the urgency of our various environmental and social crises. While we wrote this book, the COVID-19 pandemic raged, towns in the Arctic reached unprecedented temperatures, countless hectares of forests fell while fossil fuels continued to be violently extracted from the earth, and Black, Indigenous and people of colour continued to be exploited and oppressed. Yet, despite all this, or rather because of it, we wish to begin our conclusion with hope and determination. Drawing on Solnit (2016), we believe that there is a spaciousness in the uncertainties posed by the challenges before us in that they offer new possibilities for being, thinking and acting – for renewal and purposeful redirection in our trajectory – and it is through a reawakened awareness of our rich and dynamic relationships to place that we can find a better way forward. This book was motivated by the goal of elevating senses of place as a critical way to navigate global challenges. The multiple and constitutive aspects of senses of place addressed in this volume demonstrate the need to broaden existing conceptualisations of this pivotal construct. In this text, we have problematised and pluralised senses of place, defining it as the plurality of place-related meanings, interpretations and values continuously produced, contested, negotiated, reconstructed and embodied by individuals and collectives of people (see the Introduction for a more detailed exploration of the construct). We have presented novel perspectives on how key global challenges such as ecological regime shifts, migration and mobility, intensive urban change, technological and legal transformations, growing nationalism and competing territorial claims interconnect with our senses of place. These insights, organised according to the global challenges addressed in this volume, are summarised in Table 25.1. It is a key proposition of this book that our understanding of global challenges is transformed when we take senses of place into account. This transformation is based on the fundamental premise that we are all emplaced, and that the challenges we are facing necessarily occur at a particular time and place. These locations are not mere backdrops or containers for social processes and interactions; they are constitutive elements of what passes for reality and they have agency. Given that, any attempt to understand or to intervene across these global challenges will be deficient if senses of

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Table 25.1 A summary of how global challenges interconnect with our senses of place Thematic area

Key findings

Climate change and ecological regime shifts

Changes to physical place alter the emotional and intangible elements of senses of place, challenging dominant views about the singularity of ‘sense’, and the fixity of place, encouraging an increased awareness of the temporalities and transitory nature of place. Senses of place surface as a nexus between mobilities and various forms of belonging and nonbelonging that are, in turn, tied to different degrees of privilege and place-based forms of ontological security. Senses of place appear as plural, socially constructed and politically contested symbolic resources in conflicting social contexts, framed as the struggle for a place–technology ‘fit’. Hegemonic and alternative versions of senses of place reveal historic dynamics of the (re)production of place. Multiscalar connections between senses of place, spatial justice and place-based political resistance show how ambivalent experiences of place may represent either a threat or a resource to empower communities. Urban change processes accelerate coexisting and competing place meanings that are continuously formulated, negotiated and (re)narrated among people – disclosing the multiple layers of place contestations related to cities undergoing transformations, including tensions between commodification, gentrification and marginalisation of space and communities. Technological transformations are tangibly seen in our constantly evolving digital devices and tools producing intangible alterations to social relations and the way we are emplaced. Similarly, legal orders and policies are intangible in and of themselves, but they yield tangible results in the framing of allowable and recommended action in any given place. Multiple senses of place are drawn from intimate relations with local places that can inform more inclusive design and planning processes and outcomes. These senses of place are in constant negotiation with one another, and when considered, can form the foundation of socially and environmentally responsive urban design and planning.

Migration, mobility and belonging

Renewable energy transitions

Nationalism and competing territorial claims

Urban change

Technological and legal transformations

Design and planning strategies

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place are ignored. Moreover, a place-based perspective can offer new solutions to the dire global challenges that we face, as they can provide insights regarding adaptive responses to uncertainty and renewal. In elaborating the ways that senses of place interconnect with global challenges, we have drawn upon metaphors of navigation and orientation. These metaphors serve two purposes. First, they emphasise a fluid and dynamic perspective on senses of place. Second, they employ a familiar set of concepts as a basis for understanding our collective responses to the global challenges. Concepts such as navigation, shoals, drifting, mooring and anchoring hint at the ways we encounter and respond to challenges – sometimes actively and sometimes passively – as well as the considerable precarities and dangers involved. While any set of metaphorical concepts will have limitations, we believe that these metaphors facilitate understanding of the complex interconnections between senses of place and global challenges.

25.1

Global Challenges Threaten Ontological Security (Shoaling) All of the chapters in this volume collectively teach us that global challenges can disrupt our ontological security. This section unpacks what this means and then outlines a new epistemic attitude to navigate these challenges in a thoughtful and just manner. To begin, ontological security, a term coined by Laing (1960), refers to a ‘continuous person’ who enjoys a stable and whole existence (Kirke, 2020). Giddens (1991) expounded on this concept, describing it as a person’s fundamental sense of safety in the world that is necessary to maintain a sense of well-being and lessen existential anxiety. Place scholars have further noted the fundamental role of place in ontological security. For example, Relph (1976) considers place ‘an ontological structure’ that affords people ‘a secure point from which to look out on the world, a firm grasp of one’s own position in the order of things, and a significant spiritual and psychological attachment to somewhere in particular’ (p. 38). As formative global challenges unfold, one of the key ways that we experience them is through local disruptions to places. We live our lives situated in time and space, so while we can appreciate dilemmas on the global scale and be motivated by them to act, we also directly experience the influences of distant forces on local activities and places. These disruptions remind us of the precariousness of our emplaced existence, that our sense of ontological security cannot be taken for granted, but largely depends on how we navigate plural senses of place at multiple scales (Williams and Van Patten, 2006). While some see modern ruptures to ontological security as an impetus to seek refuge in everyday routines and social practices (Giddens, 1991), others have argued that ontological security has a ‘status-quo bias’ in privileging a fixed, enduring sense of place (Kinnvall and Mitzen, 2020). From our perspective, a critically reflexive approach to ontological security need not perpetuate the existing social order, but offer a way to adapt to place change and seek more transformative and just outcomes in response to those changes, much in the spirit of Solnit’s (2016) spaciousness of uncertainty noted earlier.

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This book therefore takes a wide view of the interconnections between global challenges and senses of place at multiple levels. Senses of place remind us that there are ‘anxious tensions between death and survival, belonging and nonbelonging’ (Lau et al., Chapter 8) and that there is a ‘duality of negotiation and anxiety, as well as resilience and vulnerability’ (Bleibleh, Chapter 14). To maintain some security, we navigate between fixed and fluid attachments to place (Di Masso et al., 2019). In other words, we negotiate between senses of place as a fixed foundation of existence and a mobile and multi-centred understanding in which global challenges pervade personal and social aspects of place (Relph, Chapter 19).

25.1.1

Global Challenges Provide an Opportunity to Disrupt a Damaging Normal The work presented in this volume also calls out the ways in which disruptions to place can serve to interrupt an already socially and environmentally damaging way of living and relating to place. This was previously noted in Durgerian’s (2019) research on post-earthquake recovery in Christchurch, New Zealand. This study revealed how the indigenous Maori participants saw the earthquake as a ‘welcome disruption to a damaging normal’ that up-ended the colonial identity of the city. The earthquake thereby provided an opportunity for city rebuilding efforts to better accommodate indigenous history, identity and presence erased by colonisation. Similarly, the work in this volume demonstrates new possibilities that emerge from disruption. For example, Hertzog (Chapter 7) draws upon the often positive experiences of urban migrants in Western Africa to emphasise the importance of an ‘extroverted sense of place’ that incorporates migrants’ many diverse experiences of place in the global aftermath of colonialism. Her work disrupts ‘colonial’ narratives on sense of place, which normalised sedentary roots, blamed migration to the city for urban poverty and restricted rural–urban migration. By showing how new migrants often prosper more than host populations while maintaining ‘translocal lives’ and multiple ties to place, Hertzog counters the legacy of colonialism that reshaped senses of place. Other chapters demonstrate the variability and unevenness in people’s responses to place change and shifts in senses of place more broadly. For example, Gurney et al. (Chapter 1) demonstrate how some place meanings deepened (pride and biodiversity) as a result of sudden changes to the Great Barrier Reef, while other place meanings lessened (certain lifestyles, aesthetics and scientific value), suggesting that disruption can lead to both positive and negative changes in place meanings. Further, Relph (Chapter 19) suggests that technological innovations are more likely to change the personal, social and public aspects of place, but the neurological and ontological are arguably less affected by electronic media. As urban transformations, spatialised forms of political violence, evolving digital domains and new transnational relations are navigated, place-related adaptive practices and forms of resistance may emerge and crystallise as positive forms of social change. However, the contrary may occur if, for instance, people are not free to move or remain, they are unable to participate in the digital arena, or they are structurally dis-empowered to assert their rights to place. Thus, although navigation might be interrupted by the structural conditions that frame

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human experience, global challenges present opportunities to redirect our efforts towards a more inclusive future driven by provisional, adaptive approaches from the ground up. The global challenges considered in this volume are like shoals in the sea, causing us to pause, reconsider our current situation and deliberate on where we want to go. Much like rock outcroppings, coral beds and sandbars cause ships to reassess their route (King, 2019), the global challenges before us require thoughtful navigation and readjustment both in terms of decisions we make in our daily lives and decisions made in policy and planning arenas. As King (2019) notes, shoals are ‘metaphors for contact and encounter, as well as emergent formations’ (p. 3). While King applies the shoals analogy to the role of Black and Indigenous epistemologies and decolonial politics, the metaphor applies to the disruptions posed by the global challenges addressed in this book as they are largely catalysed by an industrial, neoliberal, capitalist mode of living and the resulting environmental harms are distributed unevenly. Notably, shoals represent a dynamic set of processes that are always in a state of flux (King, 2019). As such, they present us with opportunities to identify new pathways, collaborations and possibilities towards a proactive disruption of the momentum of long-standing and contemporary modes of thinking and living on the land. Nonetheless, the ontological plurality of senses of place can also serve as shoals – for example, having to navigate multiple alternative routes with multiple endpoints could lead to a less purposeful ‘drifting’ as we endeavour to articulate and negotiate new policies, coalitions and strategies. Moreover, this drifting may not always be conscious. Lau et al. (Chapter 8) point out that we also perform belonging in an unconscious sense via an ‘unspoken social contract’ with the other who provides navigational cues that can inform where we are (place) and define who we are (identity).

25.1.2

Navigating Global Challenges Effectively Requires a New Epistemic Attitude We face the global challenges before us with a legacy of an approach to knowledge and inquiry (epistemology) that was advanced in the era of the Enlightenment in which science offered unique access to a singular, external Truth and therefore provided a sense of certitude over arbitrary habit, custom and tradition (Giddens, 1991). Since then, most science and policy has assigned greater weight to abstract, universal views from nowhere aimed at transcending place, whereas most practical action is necessarily context-dependent (Williams, 2013; Nagel, 1986). As various social critics of modernity (Bauman, 2013; Giddens, 1991) have argued, science attained increasing cultural and institutional hegemony over the production of knowledge, rendering the scientific enterprise and fact-finding deliberations of policymakers ‘largely undemocratic and disconnected from people’s lived experiences’ (Gauchat, 2011, p. 755). That epistemic attitude – or approach to knowledge – is rooted in white, Western and settlercolonial biases that eschew local, indigenous and other forms of knowing. The problems that such an attitude has wrought now demand a new epistemic attitude. We must reconsider what we know on a fundamental level, questioning not only our current ways of being in the world (ontology), but also the forms and ways in which we

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build knowledge (epistemology) and the normative-political considerations we make in applying such knowledge (axiology) towards shaping more sustainable and just places in the face of chronic uncertainty (Williams, 2018). Currently, the declining public legitimacy and increasing politicisation of scientific institutions and practices (Gauchat, 2011) – and a more general loss of epistemological bearings in the era of ‘post-truth’ (Kelkar, 2019) – intensify the sense of flux and fragility of life in the face of constant change (Bauman, 2013). Navigating global challenges in this context requires an epistemic attitude that pluralises and problematises how we understand and act in an increasingly complex and uncertain world (Mitchell, 2009). Such a position challenges the epistemic supremacy long afforded to science and technical expertise over the knowledge of locally emplaced actors (Castro, Chapter 20; Bartel, 2014) and points towards democratised, inclusive and place-based approaches for the production and application of knowledge (Carrozza, 2015). That positioning encourages us to drop anchors in certain disciplinary fields and concepts, and comfortably drift into other knowledge domains to enrich existing understandings and welcome new ones, thus enabling novel streams of inquiry. Such drifting also means being able to translate, negotiate and synthesise multiple forms of knowledge across diverse institutions, actors and processes (Tengö et al., 2017). This epistemic attitude produces knowledge in the unsettled grounds of unquiet and unfixed senses of place. In the Introduction, we proposed that a ‘complex, dynamic constellation of materiality, representations and performative practices’ are central to a new epistemic attitude for navigating multiple global challenges. This more relational understanding of place involves recognising the multi-centred nature of place; for example, consideration of different time–space dynamics (Murphy and Williams, Chapter 2), different scales of people–place relations (Devine-Wright and Wiersma, Chapter 11) and the inevitably plural, incomplete and dynamic character of all knowledge (Castro, Chapter 20). Adopting an epistemic attitude that pays greater attention to place leads to methods of knowledge creation and integration that emphasise collaborative forms of learning among scientists, policymakers and local actors (Williams, 2018) and advances the sense of procedural justice that comes from both hearing and being heard (Hill et al., 2019). It promotes forms of inquiry built on civically engaged, collaboratively co-produced post-normally guided science (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993) as a way forward in turbulent times.

25.2

Elevating Senses of Place in Navigating Global Challenges As place change invites us to reconsider our emplaced existence, we find ourselves experiencing new, more nuanced forms of sensing place, as well as renewed and emerging modes of human ‘locatedness’. In this book, we call for a renewed focus on senses of place to move us forward in conducting research and developing policies in an environmentally and socially responsible way. We propose that a pluralisation of ‘sense’ is foundational to a more inclusive epistemic attitude that foregrounds situated

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knowledge, the lived experience of place and the interpretation and meaning-making around place and place change. When reflecting on the pluralised and dynamic nature of senses of place presented across the book chapters, three key aspects of senses of place emerge – the temporal, spatial and normative.

25.2.1

Temporal Aspects of Senses of Place: Navigating between Stability and Change Senses of place necessarily entail the temporal. The past shapes today’s senses of place while present times shape new senses of place. A temporal understanding of senses of place would consider life cycles, genealogic explanations and longitudinal logics such as systemic shifts over time (Pinheiro, 2013; Werner et al., 1988). Yet, it can also include more nuanced aspects of time; for example, the extent to which senses of place have the capacity to condense and echo the historical zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the times’. This may include the virtualisation of social relations, the territorial reorganisation of nations or the acceleration of migration and mobility trends. Senses of place can also help call out the historical legacies that can lay the foundation for renewed senses of place, particularly when they include marginalised voices and histories. In this respect, historically sedimented forms of making sense of place may be drawn into emerging forms of representing places and people–place relations, as cultural antecedents shape the environmental present in connection with the environmental past (e.g. the politics of place following postcolonial logics of territorial authority and privilege; or essentialised views of a place in the past shaping ‘new’ senses of place in the present). These temporal dynamics are illustrated in many chapters of this volume. For example, regional senses of place are expressed in narratives of both stability and change (Stewart and Evans, Chapter 5). Changes can be both descriptive, referring to how the place has changed, or evaluative, referring to whether the changes shaping senses of place were regarded as positive or negative (Stedman and Nilson, Chapter 10). Regarding the former, depending on context, navigation between stability and change can strengthen one’s senses of place (Bleibleh, Chapter 14), or it can change the types and intensities of place meanings (Gurney et al., Chapter 1) or lead to dynamic and unfolding relationships between people and places. In regards to the latter – that is, how changes to place influence senses of place – this is evident in environmental management efforts, which can further change the character of a place (Murphy et al., Chapter 4), or in catalysing an interweaving of affective, discursive, material, embodied and institutional practices (Berroeta et al., Chapter 3). Global challenges like climate change also call into question the very notion of change itself. Murphy and Williams (Chapter 2) raise such questions and assert that there can be plural senses of future places, each informing views on climate change adaptation. In summary, the dialectic between temporal stability and change surfaces as a co-constitutive tension lying at the core of emerging senses of place that arise in the face of global challenges. In considering these tensions, we need to pay attention to both conservative and progressive

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meanings of place, recognising that together they provide a full arc of understandings and approaches to navigating between stability and change, and necessitate navigation on their own.

25.2.2

Spatial Aspects of Senses of Place: Navigating between Liquid Places and Solid Grounds The dynamic interplay between changing senses and changing places occurs at different spatial scales from the intimate to the global. Senses of place can also coexist in polycentric ways with multiple simultaneous connections to different places at different geographic scales. Moreover, place changes at these different spatial scales suggest a tension between stability and change, between liquid places and solid ground. That is, the places we once knew or relied on to build a coherent narrative of self and world may become unrecognisable, revalued or left behind in a context of change, thereby unsettling a ‘stable’ sense of place grounded in a modern ideology of rootedness, spatial fixity and temporal stability. However, new territorial anchorages may emerge that tie ourselves to place in novel ways, relocating senses of place in ‘liquid’ times. These more liquid forms of connection to place are characterised by provisionality, constant change, uncertainty and a lack of permanent ‘moorings’ (Bauman, 2013). In this context, we argue that senses of place tend to be less ‘solid’, stable, fixed and centred than previously assumed, and more ‘liquid’, unstable, mobile and de/multicentred across spatial nodes in an interdependent and contingent web of volatile placemaking processes. Several chapters in this volume illustrate how territorial reorganisations of nations, deterritorialisation of social relations, multi-localisations in transnational migration or multiscalar place-making seem to emphasise a dialectic between the liquid and the solid grounds of our emplaced experience. For migrant households, for example, home is not necessarily in town or in the current place of residence, but in the place of origin, or another, third place (Hertzog, Chapter 7; Huang, Chapter 9). For longer-term residents in Barcelona, gentrification processes, including the aestheticisation of spaces and retail spaces and rebranding of the ‘new’ into the ‘old’, can challenge their subjective relationships with places (Di Masso et al., Chapter 17). From a landscape planning perspective, Puren and Drewes (Chapter 22) indicate that, despite many residents holding fluid and relational place meanings, the substantive planning paradigm privileged habitual and fixed understandings of sense of place.

25.2.3

Normative Aspects of Senses of Place: Navigating Power Relations Navigating changing senses of place also means navigating power relations and challenging the normative order of things. Notions of good or bad, appropriate and inappropriate, just and unjust, belonging and exclusion, are also defined, expressed, organised and enforced in spatial ways (Sibley, 1995; Cresswell, 1996). Accordingly, it is expected that processes changing senses of place amplify the moral, political and ideological role played by place relations in our lives. In this respect, the global

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challenges considered in this volume reveal how the normative aspects of senses of place become (re)defined, negotiated and disputed in all manner of ways. These include place-oriented policy implementation, political resistance to dominant senses of place, tensions between top-down or bottom-up decision-making and conflicting strategies of territorial control and completion for a right to place in a changing world. Many of the chapters in this volume provide examples of how power relations and social values catalyse contested and conflicting place interpretations and related territorial practices, evidencing the centrality of the normative aspects of senses of place, and their inherent disputes, in navigating global challenges. This emerges in analyses of competing senses of place and claims of spatial legitimacy between elites and the marginalised as reflected in different discourses around the future of a rapidly growing city (Manzo and Desanto, Chapter 16), as well as the contested place meanings of residents and tourism agencies with respect to place change and visitor management (Raymond et al., Chapter 6). In contexts of violence and conflict, political aspects of place and power relations can both violate and reinforce one’s sense of place (Bleibleh, Chapter 14). Explorations that consider the political economy of space note that capitalist modes of production can lead to both the humanisation and dehumanisation of marginalised people, leading to contradictory expressions of place meanings (Farias and Diniz, Chapter 18). The power of the political economy and globalisation is also at play in an analysis of how multinational businesses can wilfully alter senses of place through branding strategies that uphold an ideal home that de-places traditional, culturally based interpretations and expressions of home in favour of more generic ones that convey a cultural ‘odourlessness’(Chong and Chow, Chapter 24).

25.3

Future Navigation of Global Challenges through Senses of Place In the remainder of this chapter, we highlight some emerging future directions for research to understand changing senses of place in the context of significant global challenges. We make the case that research, practice and policy would benefit from: (1) adopting more provisional approaches to how we create knowledge and apply it to action; (2) rethinking a relational ontology of senses of place; and (3) developing reflexive, anticipatory and agentic capacities to respond to the ‘shoals’ created by global challenges. Each of these areas for future exploration are described below.

25.3.1

Adopting Provisional Approaches to How We Apply Knowledge to Action The contributions in this volume make clear that we need a more provisional approach to how we generate (scientific) knowledge and apply it to place-configuring action. By emphasising plurality, diverse positionality, more inclusive engagement and adaptive forms of knowledge creation and governance, we can shift from expert-driven decision-making structures to multi-level and polycentric approaches that emphasise inclusiveness, collaboration, local knowledge and identities (Koontz et al., 2015; Wyborn, 2015; Armitage et al., 2011). This, in turn, facilitates an enlarged social

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capacity and flexibility to put responses to global challenges ‘into place’. Such an approach has recently been framed as ‘action-oriented knowledge for sustainability’ (Caniglia et al., 2020; Fazey et al., 2020). It foregrounds the need to integrate the many kinds of knowledge involved in the shared design, enactment and realisation of change and embraces situated knowledge tailored to specific contexts (e.g. local place-based knowledge or indigenous knowledge) as ‘essential for taking action adaptively in response to changing circumstances’ (Caniglia et al., 2020, p. 4). We see similar discussions in the values of nature literature where senses of place have been incorporated into a wider concept of ‘relational values’ and where the relevancy of the ‘relational turn’ in the social sciences is considered for sustainability science (West et al., 2020). For example, West and colleagues outline the characteristics of relational thinking as an awareness of continually unfolding processes, embodied experience, reconstructing language and concepts, and ethics and practices of care. These characteristics reflect the collective message and interpretation of senses of place articulated in this volume. As uncertainty looms over our futures, navigating our way forward must be much more provisional and in constant dialogue and negotiation. This means we need to weave, within and across different senses of place, a consideration of multiple local-toglobal dynamics of change as well as diverse spatial identities. This type of navigation calls for governance and institutional practices that can adopt a nimble and adaptive response to spatial unfolding at multiple scales. New ways of configuring places are needed that rely less on extrapolation, projection of trends and navigation as precise steering. Instead, it is useful to conceptualise navigation as an iterative and reflexive process of repositioning and adjusting, sometimes mooring in one place (spatially, epistemologically) and sometimes intentionally reorienting in a new direction, guided by principles of adaptability and flexibility. These principles are reflected in the turn towards ‘place-based governance’ in the sustainability sciences (Buijs et al., 2019; Gulsrud et al., 2018; George and Reed, 2017), which responds to dynamic global-scale problems by prioritising institutional diversity and emergent, self-organising learning networks and partnerships among different stakeholders. We also see promise in transformative innovations research where socio-material, emergent, multi-actor initiatives are co-created across different contexts to promote sustainability transitions (Loorbach et al., 2020). This approach emerges in this volume in explorations of place as a milieu for active urban experimentation where new place-related narratives of change, novel practices and collaboration emerge to achieve a more sustainable city (von Wirth and Frantzeskaki, Chapter 23). Navigating global challenges could build on the idea of evolving discursive spaces in which co-production between science and governance can expand, contract or change direction over time in response to both local and extra-local forces and actors (Wyborn et al., 2015). Adaptive capacity is the ability to navigate new and emerging pathways and to enlarge the future adaptive space. Rather than trying to tame or ignore uncertainty, an adaptive approach accepts change and develops resilience in its responses to it. It involves nimble thinking that recognises existing injustice and

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power differentials and commits to empowering more diverse voices to participate in navigating the flux and uncertainties of global challenges. Including situated knowledge and the lived experiences of place in response to place change are thus critical steps towards democratising knowledge creation and adjusting actions for configuring places.

25.3.2

Rethinking Relational Ontology through Senses of Place Navigating changing senses of place in the context of global challenges calls us to rethink our interconnectedness to each other, to other species and to the planet as a whole. Such a relational ontology posits that ‘what distinguishes a subject from a subject, a subject from an object, or an object from an object is their mutual relation rather than their substance’ (Schaab, 2013). While this is the basis for indigenous approaches to place, knowledge and being, it has been more recently expressed in two distinct theories and bodies of literature that emphasise relationality: systems theory in ecology and earth sciences (e.g. Berkes et al., 2003) and assemblage theory as developed to analyse social complexity, with an emphasis on exchangeability and multiple functioning (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). Because of their diverse epistemological and disciplinary roots, these approaches are not typically seen as commensurate (the former stemmed from a positivistic tradition and the latter from a more constructionist one), yet we find potential in both of these to help us understand senses of place and move us towards solutions that are socially and environmentally responsive and responsible. Both theories can provide conceptual tools to understand how senses of place are generated within complex and dynamic networks. We find particular potential in assemblage theory as a ‘stream of relational thinking that opposes taxonomic essentialism, rejects binaries, stresses the material aspects of phenomena, and supports a conception of a mind-independent reality’ (Briassoulis, 2017, p. 169). Assemblages emphasise relationships between history and potential, between the actual and the possible (Langhoerst, 2018). They do not rely on resolving difference but working with a range of actors, networks, spatialities and values, thus offering an enabling process model (Langhoerst, 2018) to reconceptualising senses of place. Several authors in this volume draw on assemblage theory; for example, Berroeta et al. (Chapter 3), who describe ‘assemblage as of influences and reciprocal variations between subjective, social and spatial aspects, articulating at the same time the relationship between individual experiences of place and social and institutional processes’. While both relational theories can be useful to future research on place, considerable conceptual and methodological developments are still required. For example, in systems theory, human and natural systems are recognised as connected, but experience is often reduced to an individual, subjective, cognitive (i.e. human) phenomenon (West et al., 2020). There are also methodological challenges associated with integrating relational thinking into natural resource management (Raymond et al. 2021 responding to West et al., 2020), including how to operationalise aspects of relationality if objects and

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subjects are dynamically co-constituted and how to ‘lever’ transformations towards sustainability if people–place relations are continuously unfolding. Still, we maintain that a relational ontology has important potential to address questions of how to adapt and transform in the face of complex global challenges, multiple uncertainties, cross-scale interactions and the divergent values and needs of places, cultures and communities. Explorations of senses of place from a relational perspective can help us develop a post-normal science agenda that recognises the value of different starting points to address the global challenges presented in this book. It is in embracing this relationality that we develop the nimble, provisional and adaptive response we emphasise here.

25.3.3

Develop Reflexive, Anticipatory and Agentic Capacities to Navigate Ruptures and New Beginnings The global challenges before us demand reflexivity – a thoughtful awareness of our current situatedness to help us find a path into uncertain futures. We draw on Ryan and Walsh’s (2018) notion of reflexivity as ‘a critical assessment of the significance of environment, power and context as well as subjectivity in the delineation and construction of knowledge’ (p. 1), and we would add the (re)construction of place. The uncertainty we face can only be tackled by placing values, normative commitments and experiential and plural ways of knowing at the fore (Nightingale et al., 2020; Tengö et al., 2017). Transformations towards more regenerative and equitable futures call for a commitment to polycentric and contextualised learning systems that take account of the highly interconnected nature of social and environmental issues (Fazey et al., 2020). This is a critical part of navigation – we are driven by the lure of finding new configurations of human ‘locatedness’ in a changing world. Yet we must remain cognisant of the benefits of anchoring along with the risks, when the value or necessity of moving leads to renewed considerations of experiences of waiting, being still, and being stuck in one place (Cresswell, 2012). Reflexive capacities are critical to transformational learning (Borie et al., 2020; Moore et al., 2018) and therefore becoming unstuck – that is, processes that enable individuals and groups to surface the constraints and opportunities created by the norms, values, beliefs and expectations of society (Moore et al., 2018), and which shape or reinforce one’s senses of place. Navigating global challenges with a renewed commitment to senses of place also suggests new capabilities to anticipate and govern ruptures and steer new beginnings, much like the agentic approach to assemblages described earlier. In times of amplifying global challenges and their potential for disruptive societal consequences, anticipatory governance can offer a flexible ‘decision framework that uses a wide range of possible futures to prepare for change and to guide current decisions toward maximizing future alternatives or minimizing future threats’ (Quay, 2010, p. 496). Such anticipatory processes seek to extend the boundaries of imagination, to explore future directions under multiple drivers of change and to guide decisions and policy formation under conditions of complexity and uncertainty (Muiderman et al., 2020). Unlike adaptation, anticipation involves intentionality, action, agency, imagination,

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possibility and choice, while at the same time acknowledging fear, uncertainty and apprehension (Nuttall, 2010). Making sense of how anticipatory and transformative capabilities of different actors (e.g. Hölscher et al., 2019) can include the plurality of lived place experiences and local knowledge is a relevant avenue for further exploration. Finally, navigating through global challenges also involves imagining and practising new forms and strategies of social resistance and political transformation that build on citizens’ agentic capacities to initiate local change to global problems, and not just to adapt to them. These capacities require citizens to acknowledge and embrace contestation, plurality and inherent uncertainties by identifying stability in dynamically evolving local contexts. These agentic abilities could also entail stewardship capacities (Hölscher et al., 2019), meaning the resources and skills to anticipate and respond to (global) long-term change, while connecting these anticipations to shortterm local action. This may involve capacities to actively challenge and instigate disruption to a damaging status quo – that is, the abilities to recognise and dismantle place injustices, continuous (dis)empowerment, (un)sustainabilities and local (mal) adaptations. By promoting and strengthening place-related agentic capacities, we specifically advocate channelling these towards progressive dynamics of spatial justice (Soja, 2010). Assuming that social inequalities and structural oppression are mapped onto the micro-geographies of everyday life (Cresswell, 2011), citizens’ active engagement in changing senses of place emerges as an opportunity to unsettle the spatial grounds of political injustice and reinforce citizenship’s spatial entitlements (Di Masso, 2015). Collective resistance and citizens’ active commitment to positive place change against exclusionary forms of urban transformation, for instance, have proved a politically effective way of remaking cooperative models of urban governance, reinvigorating the right to the city by knitting public alliances through the empowering capacities of a community’s place transformations (Marulanda and Martí, 2019; Goetz et al., 2019).

25.4

Summary As we continue our attempts to navigate the global challenges before us and reflect on how to go thoughtfully, justly and sustainably into an increasingly unpredictable future, the importance of place and the dynamic ways that our senses of places respond to and evolve with our changing circumstances become more evident. The body of work in this volume suggests that senses of place can offer a broader, more inclusive epistemic attitude that is based upon a plural and provisional approach to knowledge and action. In turn, this enables a systems understanding of complexity in both place experience and place research, and can develop citizens’ capacities to navigate ruptures and forge new pathways forward through a critically reflexive approach to people–place relations. As Tsing (2015) notes, ‘precarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate. Now it seems that all our lives are precarious’ (p. 2). Thus, it is together that we must orient

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ourselves to this common life of no guarantees. We collectively face the imaginative challenge of navigating a journey without a detailed map of where we wish to travel. Collaboratively surviving in precarious times, and we would add thriving for all species, requires curiosity (Tsing 2015) and a provisional, reflexive and anticipatory approach to place change. This requires a deepening awareness of and commitment not only to place, but also to hope. Like Solnit (2016), our view of hope is not a belief that everything will be fine; it is about developing broad perspectives with specific possibilities: ‘hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act’ (p. xiv). In this book, we have explored the spaciousness of the uncertainty created by global challenges, and in that spaciousness we can (re)discover new possibilities and emergent senses of place that work together to provide a hopeful path forward.

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Solnit, R. (2016) Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, Chicago, Haymarket Press. Tengö, M., Hill, R., Malmer, P., et al. (2017) ‘Weaving knowledge systems in IPBES, CBD and beyond: lessons learned for sustainability’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability vols 26–27, pp. 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2016.12.005 Tsing, A. L. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc77bcc Werner, E. E. (1988). ‘Size, scaling, and the evolution of complex life cycles’. In Size-Structured Populations. Berlin: Springer, pp. 60–81. West, S., Jamila Haider, L., Stålhammar, S. and Woroniecki, S. (2020) ‘A relational turn for sustainability science? Relational thinking, leverage points and transformations’, Ecosystems and People, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 304–325. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2020.1814417 Williams, D. R. (2013) ‘Science, practice, and place’, in Stewart, W. P., Williams, D. R. and Kruger, L. E. (eds), Place-Based Conservation: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 21–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5802-5 Williams, D. R. (2018) ‘Spacing conservation practice: place-making, social learning, and adaptive governance in natural resource management’, in Marsden, T. (ed.), The SAGE Handbook of Nature, vol. 1, London, SAGE Publications, pp. 285–303. Williams, D. R. and Van Patten, S. R. (2006) ‘Home and away? Creating identities and sustaining places in a multicentered world’, in McIntyre, N., Williams, D. R. and McHugh, K. E. (eds), Multiple Dwelling and Tourism: Negotiating Place, Home, and Identity, Cambridge, CABI Publishing, pp. 32–50. Wyborn, C. (2015) ‘Co-productive governance: a relational framework for adaptive governance’, Global Environmental Change, vol. 30, pp. 56–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j .gloenvcha.2014.10.009 Wyborn, C., Yung, L., Murphy, D. and Williams, D. R. (2015) ‘Situating adaptation: how governance challenges and perceptions of uncertainty influence adaptation in the Rocky Mountains’, Regional Environmental Change, vol. 15, pp. 669–682. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10113-014-0663-3

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Index

Tables are referred to in bold, figures in italics access to nature Bengaluru lakes, 54, 56–57 Big Hole Valley, Montana, 37 Byhøst app, Denmark, 278 Faroe Islands, 83–84, 87–88 Great Barrier Reef, 22 Guernsey, 148–149 access to public services, China, 116, 117, 125–126 access to urban resources, West Africa, 95–97 acid mine drainage, 38 active land management, Bengaluru lakes, 59–60 adaptations, climate change, 5, 11, 32–34, 40–41, 259, 337 adapting vs protecting strategies, Faroe Islands, 85–86 adaptive capacity, global challenges, 340–341 adaptive management practices, Faroe Islands, 86 addiction, smartphones, 250–251 Adger, N. 261–262 Adivasi ethnic groups, 194, 197, 199–200 affordance theory, 263 Africa, migration, 12, 78; see also mobility (West Africa) Alaska, climate change, 35, 39, 40 algorithms, social media, 281 alienation, labour, 239 alienation, street-living, 241 alternative lifestyles, 226 Alzheimer’s disease, 249 Amazon Spheres, Seattle, 213, 214, 215 America see USA Amish people, Illinois, 70–71 anchoring, 133 Anthropocene, 53, 209 anticipation, global challenges, 342–343 anti-essentialism, 171–172, 176 anxiety in speech, 107, 108 Appadurai, A. 320 appropriation, space, 238–239, 241 Arias, S. 303 Assam tribal communities, 8–9, 197

348 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108769471.029 Published online by Cambridge University Press

assemblage theory, 6, 10, 13, 28, 224 disasters, 44, 45–47, 49 energy transitions, 139 relationality, 341 assemblages, 203, 225 alternative lifestyles, 226 gentrification, 224 sight–smell–nation, 227–228 urban life, 301 Associated Press, 253 attachment disruption see disruption of attachment attachment to place see place attachment attitudinal survey, Great Barrier Reef, 24 authenticity, urban experience, 225–226 authenticity of place, 287 auto-photography Guernsey, 10, 145, 146–147, 148, 148–150, 149, 152–153 Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site, 292 Barcelona, 5, 207 gentrification, 221–222, 224 Basso, K. 251 behavioural responses, 80–81, 133 belongingness index, 120, 123–124 contextual factors, 126 financial determinants, 125 institutional determinants, 125–126 social determinants, 124–125 belonging/nonbelonging, 12, 77–78, 103–104, 112–113, 334, 335 China, 117–118, 121–122, 126–127 Diepsloot, Johannesburg, 105–106 discourse analysis, 106–112 informal settlements, 104 multidimensional approach, 118, 119 public services impact, 118–119 urban estuaries, 104–105 Bengali Muslims Assam, 197, 198 ethnic conflict, 200–201

Index

ethnic identity, 194 Bengaluru lakes, 4, 53–54, 61–62 active land management, 59–60 citizen–state relationships, 60–61 governance, 56–57 place meanings/place attachment, 58 socio-ecological restoration, 54–55 temporal processes, 55–59 Benin, 92 translocal networks, 97 urban migrants, 95–97 Bennet, N. J. 261–262 Berners-Lee, T. 254 Big Hole Valley, Montana, 36, 37–38 biodiversity, 245, 259–260, 268 decline, 1 epistemic bonds, 263–265 epistemic labour, social division, 261–262 EU legislation, 260 Great Barrier Reef, 22–23, 25, 26 legal measures, 259 Manas Tiger Reserve, India, 193–194 regional conservation, 67 shared knowledge and meanings, 265–267 theory of knowledge, 267 bleaching of coral, Great Barrier Reef, 23 BlueCity Lab (BCL), Rotterdam, 304, 305, 305 circular city, 309 local transformation, 306–308 place meanings, 306–307 transformative topophilia, 309 urban change, 310 blueprints/master planning, 288 Bodo people ethnic identity, 193, 194, 198–199, 201–202, 203 landscape meanings, 193, 198, 201, 202 political dominance, 202 sense of place, 201–202 Bodoland Territorial Areas District, 194, 196, 198, 200–201 body–mind disconnection, 108 boundary objects, 7, 33, 309 brain, grid cells, 249 Brazilian cities, 207–208, 236 brownfield sites, 275–276 Byhøst app, Denmark, 277–278, 280–281 Cape Town Princess Vlei wetland restoration, 57–58 capitalism, 211 gentrification, 221, 222–223 global, 235 Marxist perspective, 239 Seattle, 215 street-living, 241 surveillance, 254 Casey, E. 249–250

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349

change vs stability, 1–2 Chase, L. 211 Chicago, 70 Chile natural disasters, 10, 44 street-living, 5, 240 China access to public services, 116, 117, 125–126 cultural odourlessness, 320–322 global as local, 317–318 IKEA, 313–317 IKEA catalogues, 286, 313, 314–315, 322–323 National Migrant Population Dynamic Monitoring Survey, 119–120 one child policy, 320 China, internal migration, 5, 12, 78, 119–126 household registration (hukou), 116–117 hukou reforms, 117–119, 126–127 circular city, 305, 306–308, 309 citizen involvement Bengaluru, 55, 59–60 Melbourne, 277 New York state, 57–58, 134 Rotterdam, 302, 309 Seattle, 217–218 citizens empowerment, 286, 302, 343 noncitizenship, West Africa, 105 relationship with state, 60–61, 280–281 climate change, 1, 19–20 adaptations, 5, 11, 32–34, 40–41, 259, 337 Alaska, 35, 39, 40 Bengaluru, 54–55 case studies, 34–39 collaboration, 32, 33, 34–35, 40 Colorado, 34–35 energy transitions, 132 global challenges, 32, 129 Great Barrier Reef, 27, 28 impact on ecosystems, 21, 332 Montana, 34, 36, 37–38, 40 Ohio, 35, 38, 40 people–place relationships, 33 place-based perspectives, 33, 36–37, 40, 156 regional conservation, 67 renewable energy, 129, 138, 144–145, 156, 160–162 risk of disasters, 43 scenario-based research, 33–35 temporality, 34, 35, 36–37, 38–39, 40, 332 cognitive causes, ethnocentric bias, 175–176 collaboration, 71, 335, 336, 343–344 biodiversity, 59–60, 262 climate change, 32, 33, 34–35, 40 spatial planning, 288, 296 urban experimentation/sustainability, 302, 306–307

350

Index

colonialism, 94–95 India, 196, 197 Latin America, 235–236 West Africa, 96, 334 Colorado, climate change, 34–35 communications, electronic see electronic media communities without propinquity, 252 community attachment see place attachment community involvement, 139 Bengaluru, 11, 60 China, 122 landscapes, 73 Palestinians, 190 renewable energy, 162 community/place disruption, 251–252 community-scale vs large-scale projects, 137 commuter towns, UK, 158 completeness, desire for, 112 concentrating vs distributing impacts, Faroe Islands, 86 conservation, regional see environmental management consumerism, China, 315 context dependency, design and planning strategies, 289 continuity, essentialist vs anti-essentialist, 177, 178, 180 Copenhagen, urban nature, 275–276, 278–279 coral decline, Great Barrier Reef, 23, 24, 27 costs and benefits, tourism in, Faroe Islands, 84, 85, 86 COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 240–241 Cresswell, T. 6 Critical Biodiversity Area, 292 critical social theory, 221 cross-disciplinary approaches, 7, 157, 336, 341 design and planning strategies, 289, 292–293, 296 electronic media, 248 gentrification, 222 psychology/geography, 158 cultural assimilation, 8–9, 196–197, 201–202 Barcelona, 231 gentrification, 223–224 cultural continuity, 178–179, 198, 261–262 cultural odourlessness, 9, 314, 317, 320–323, 339 cyberplace, 252 declensionism, 37–38 democracy, normative planning principle, 295–296 Denmark, urban foraging app, 277–281 dependence, place, 43–44 design and planning strategies, 285–286, 287 case study, 291–296 policy frameworks, 291, 296–297 spatial planning theory, 287–291 dialectical perspective, street-living, 235

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dialogism, 211 Diepsloot, Johannesburg, 12, 103–104, 105–106, 106, 110–111 digital technologies see electronic media disasters, 10, 43–44, 50 assemblage theory, 45 new senses of place, 45–47 reconfiguration processes, 48–49 discourse analysis, 217–218; see also below Barcelona, 225–230 disaster recovery, 43–44 Seattle, 213–217 urban change, 212 discourse analysis, nonbelonging, 113 body–mind disconnection, 108 methodology, 106–107 migrant reception area, 110–111 racial and structural inequalities, 111–112 violent crime, 108–110 discursive perspective, street-living, 237 displacement, 189–190, 250–251 disruption of attachment, 59, 111–112, 333 Barcelona, 228–230 benefits, 334–335 Palestine, 183–184 urban change, 211 distributing vs concentrating impacts, Faroe Islands, 86 document analysis, 80 Dovey, K. 285 dynamic approach, life-place trajectories, 157–158 dynamic nature, sense of place, 28 dynamic theory, knowledge, 267 Eastern Europe, 172, 173–175 ecological changes, cultural impact, 4, 23–24, 27 ecological conditions, regional conservation, 68–69, 69, 73; see also environmental management/stewardship ecological impact, tourism, 83 ecology–society couplings see socio-ecological perspective economic costs and benefits, tourism in Faroe Islands, 84, 85, 86 ecosystems, 25 culturally symbolic, 57–58 decline, 1, 24, 79 human benefits, 21, 67–68 local knowledge, 262 restoration, 65, 68–69, 73 services, 10–11, 277 social media, 271, 273–275 subjective meanings, 53 electronic media, 9, 245, 247–248, 255–256, 334–335 neurological aspects, 249 ontological aspects, 249–250

Index

personal aspects, 250–251 public aspects, 253–255 senses of place, 248–249 social aspects, 251–253 emails, 252 Emerson, R. W. 253 emotional elements, 131, 295 emotional mapping, social media, 272–273 empiricism disaster recovery, 43–44 street-living, 241 energy transitions, 8, 131, 140; see also renewable energy literature review, 131–134 social representations theory, 138–140 solar development, New York state, 134–138 environmental behaviours, 53–54, 61–62 environmental degradation, 59, 209, 210 environmental management/stewardship, 11, 19–20, 53, 59–60, 66, 73–74 cultural perspectives, 261–262 geography and temporality, 73 Great Barrier Reef, 11, 23 place-making, 68–73 regional conservation importance, 66–68 urban change, 303–304 environmental psychology, 156 environmental sustainability see sustainability environmental–psychological approaches, gentrification, 224 epistemic bonds, 9, 245–246 biodiversity legal measures, 259, 268 local knowledge, 263–265, 267 epistemic labour, 260, 261–262 epistemology, 12–13, 43–44, 158–159, 335–336 essentialism, tribal communities, India, 202, 203 essentialist continuity, 177, 179–180 essentialist theories, 171, 196 ethnocentric bias, 173–175, 176 estuarial zones, 104–105 ethnic conflict, 199–201 ethnic identity, 194, 195, 197 Bodo, 193, 194, 198–199, 201–202 ethnocentric bias, 173–175 cognitive and motivational causes, 175–176 Ethnocentric Bias Scale, 173–174, 178 ethnocentric place perceptions, 8, 169, 171–172, 179–180 European Union, nature protection, 9, 260, 263–265 Evans, J. 301 Evans, L. 251 exclusionary convictions, 245 exclusiveness, urban experience, 226 exclusivity vs hospitality, Faroe Islands, 84–85 externalisation, personal life, 245 extinction of experience, social media, 271 extremism, online, 252–253

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351

extroverted sense of place, West Africa, 93–95, 98, 334 Facebook, 252, 281 facial recognition, 254–255 Faroe Islands tourism, 79–80, 83 expansion, 7, 77, 81–83, 82 multiple senses of place, 87–88, 89 socio-ecological perspective, 80–81 tensions, 83 Faroe Islands’ Tourism Strategy (2018–2025), 80 forbidden spaces, Palestinian homes, 186 Frantzeskaki, N. 303 Gauchat, G. 335 gender relations, urban space, 239 genius loci, 287 gentrification, 207, 231 Barcelona, 5, 8, 221–222, 338 capitalism, 222–223 cultural consumption, 223–224 discourse analysis, 225–228 environmental–psychological approaches, 224 people–place relationships, 222 psychosocial implications, 224–225, 228–230 geocoding/geotagging, social media, 272 Gieryn, T. F. 211 global as local, 317–318, 320 global challenges, 1–2, 4, 14, 331–333 beneficial disruption, 334–335 climate change, 32, 129 contested place meanings, 7–8 epistemic attitudes, 335–336 future directions, 339–343 migration, 92 mobilities, 77–78 ontological security, 333–334 senses of place, 286, 332, 336–339, 343–344 urbanisation, 92, 209 global communications, 248–249 global village, 253–254 globalisation, 1, 9–10, 235 global–local tensions, 286 glocal cosmopolitanism, 227–228 Gràcia, Barcelona, 224, 228–230 Grand County, Colorado, 35–36 Great Barrier Reef, 4, 11 attitudinal survey, 24–26 ecological changes, cultural impact, 23–24 environmental management, 23 human impact of ecosystem decline, 27–28 place meanings, 22, 334 World Heritage Site, 22–23 Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 23 green spaces, urban, 275–276 greenhouse gas reductions, 134–135, 144–145, 152–153, 156, 160–162; see also climate change

352

Index

grid cells, brain, 249 grief, ecological changes, 27 group history essentialist continuity, 177 narrative continuity, 177–178 Guernsey, 146 auto-photography, 148, 149, 150 marine renewable energy, 146–147, 150–152, 153 senses of place, 147–150, 152–153 hierarchical view, places see place hierarchy high residential mobility, 160 Hinkley Point C project, 161–162 hippocampus, place cells, 249 historical perspectives, 2–4; see also group history Bengaluru, 11 people–place relationships, 238–239 street-living, 235–236 home, attachment and identity, 183 home in wartime, 186 home rebuilding, Palestinians, 186–190 home significance, Palestinians, 186–187 homelessness, Seattle, 215, 217; see also streetliving homemaking, China, 313, 314–315 horror, traumatic, 108–110, 113 Horseshoe Solar project, New York state, 134–135, 135, 136, 140 hospitality vs exclusivity, Faroe Islands, 84–85 house prices Barcelona, 224–225 China, 313 Seattle, 212–213 housing remittance, 97–98, 99, 120, 125 shortage, Brazil, 236 hukou (household registration system), 116–117 belonging/nonbelonging, 126–127 reforms, 117–119 social links, 120–122 human impacts, 1 humanistic–phenomenological approaches, 3 Hummon, D. 156 Huslia, Alaska, 39, 40 identity see place identity identity/security relationships, 1 IKEA in China, 313–317 catalogues, 286, 313, 314–315, 319, 321, 322–323 global as local, 317–318 transcultural appeal, 316, 317, 320–323 Illinois, prairie restoration, 65, 67 immigrants/immigration see migrants/migration indigenous people (IPs), 196 individualism, China, 315

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108769471.029 Published online by Cambridge University Press

industrial developments, 137–138 inequalities, 207, 343 Diepsloot, Johannesburg, 112 Guernsey, 148 Latin America, 43 New York state, 137–138 Rotterdam, 305 Seattle, 213 street-living, 8, 236–237, 240 urban change, 211 West Africa, 96–97 informal settlements, 104 estuarial zones, 104–105 information deficit model, 139 Ingalls, M. 210 Instagram, Copenhagen, urban nature, 275–276 integrated approaches, design and planning, 289 interdisciplinary see cross-disciplinary approaches internal migration in China see China, internal migration Israeli invasion and occupation of Palestine, 182–183, 184–186 Jung, S. 314, 320 Kleinman, S. 250–251 knowledge communities, 7 dynamic theory, 267 epistemic attitude, 335–336 local see local knowledge pluralisation, 4, 12–13, 267, 280–281, 339–340 process, 263, 265 scientific vs indigenous, 260, 261, 267 senses of place, 246 shared, 267 Koyukon communities, Alaska, 35, 39, 40 Kromdraai farm, South Africa, 292, 293, 294, 296–297 labour, epistemic, 260, 261–262 labour market, 235, 236, 238–239 Lacanian psychoanalysis, 106, 107, 112, 113 Laing, R. D. 333 landscape changes, 71–73, 203 landscape meanings see place meanings land-use practices, 66, 68, 69 Latin America, street-living, 12, 235–236 legal transformations, 9, 245–246 Li, T. M. 196–197, 202, 203 life course perspective, renewable energy, 156–158 life-place trajectories, 129–130, 156, 158–160, 162–163 dynamic approach, 157–158 energy transitions, 161–162 linked lives, 158–160 Likert scale, 121–122

Index

Great Barrier Reef, 24 National Migrant Population Dynamic Monitoring Survey, 120 linked lives, 156, 162 life-place trajectories, 158–160, 162–163 Lithuania, 173, 174–175, 176 local knowledge, 266, 339–340, 343 biodiversity, 267, 268 ecosystems, 262 epistemic bonds, 263–265, 335–336 local vs regional scales, 145 local–global frameworks, 340 locative media, 251 long-term residence in single place, 159 low-carbon energy see renewable energy Malpas, J. 250, 251 Manas Tiger Reserve, India, 194–196 marginalisation Bodoland Territorial Areas District, 199 indigenous people, 196 Mexico, informal settlement, 104 senses of place, 337, 339 urban change, 8, 207–208, 332 marine renewable energy, 129, 144–145 Guernsey, 146–147, 150–152, 153 Marlowe, J. M. 273 Marx, K. 241 Marxian social theory, 238 Massey, D. B. 5, 93, 253 master planning, 288 materialist perspective, street-living, 235 material–semiotic approach, 50 disaster recovery, 44, 45 McLuhan, M. 248–249, 253–254 meanings of place see place meanings media technology see electronic media Melbourne, urban forest extended experiences and interactions, 279–280 novel conceptualisations, 278–279 place-based governance, 280–281 social media, 277 mental health problems, internet use, 251 mercantile model, urban space, 235 Mexico, informal settlement, 104 Meyrowitz, J. 247, 251–252 Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, 67, 74 migrants/migration, 77–78 Africa, 12 belongingness, 124–125 Benin, 95–98 Bodoland Territorial Areas District, 200–201 China see China, internal migration Diepsloot, Johannesburg, 110–111 informal settlements, 104–105 meaning of home, 118 multiple senses of place, 95

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353

place bonds, 77–78 street-living, 235 urban, 92–93, 95–97, 98, 334 West Africa, 92–93, 94, 99, 334 mobile technologies, 245–246, 250–251 mobility belonging, 118 belongingness, 332 global, 1, 77–78, 80 life-place trajectories, 158–160 people–place relationships, 22, 89 residential decisions, 158 mobility, West Africa, 92–93, 99, 334 extroverted sense of place, 93–95 remittance housing, 97–98 urban migrants, 95–97 Montana, climate change, 34, 36, 37–38, 40 Morse code, 253 motivational causes, ethnocentric bias, 176 multiple senses of place, 6, 87–89 West Africa, 95, 99 multi-scaled iterative scenario-building (MISB), 34 Nablus, Palestine, 182, 185, 187–190 Nailsea, UK, 159–160, 161–162 narrative based methodology, 158–159, 162 narrative continuity, 170, 177–179 narrativeness, time, 36–37 Natcher, D. C. 39 National Migrant Population Dynamic Monitoring Survey (MDMS) China. 119–120, 121–122 nationalism, 169 Natura 2000, EU legislation, 260, 263–265 natural access see access to nature natural places see environment natural resource management, 272 nature protection, 9, 86, 246; see also ecosystems, restoration; environmental management neoliberalism, 211, 216, 222–223 Netherlands, nature reserve algorithms, social media, 281 extended experiences and interactions, 279–280 novel conceptualisations, 278–279 social media, 276 networked aspects, 13 internal migration, China, 124–125 mobility, 13, 158 mobility, West Africa, 93, 97–98 neurological aspects, electronic media, 249 New York Billion Oyster Project, 57–58 New York state, solar development, 131, 140 Horseshoe Solar project, 134–135, 135, 136 place meanings and attachment, 135–138 Nigerians in Benin, 97–98 nonbelonging see belonging/nonbelonging noncitizenship, 105 non-nationality see cultural odourlessness

354

Index

non-places, 78, 103 normative/normativity EU legislation, 260 place-making, 71–73 senses of place, 209, 217–218, 338–339 spatial planning, 287, 288, 291–296 nostalgic memories, 189, 253 NVivo (software), 147 objectification, 133 offshore energy see marine renewable energy Ohio, climate change, 35, 38, 40 one-child policy, China, 320 online map interfaces, social media, 272 ontological aspects, electronic media, 249–250 ontological security, 333–334 ontology, relational, 341, 342 Oostvaardersplassen (Dutch nature reserve), 276 Oswick, C. 7 Palestine and the Palestinians, 8, 182–183, 190–191 home rebuilding, 187–190 home significance, 186–187 Israeli occupation, 182–183, 184–186 urban violence, 183–184 pandemic, 1 participation localism, 69 migrants, 120, 123–126 normative planning principle, 296 participatory visual research, 293 planning, 288, 289 urban experimentation/sustainability, 302 urban living laboratories, 302 people living in the streets (PLS) see street-living people–place relationships, 2, 5–6, 169–170 BlueCity Lab, Rotterdam, 307–308 boundary objects, 7 climate change, 33 dynamic nature, 22, 28 environmental attitudes, 21 epistemic labour, 260 gentrification, 222 impact of disasters, 43, 49 legal measures, 259 local transformation, 309 Palestinians, 183, 187, 190–191 social media, 273 street-living, 234–235, 237–239 urban change, 304 urban nature, 275, 277 West Africa, 93, 95–97 people–place–technology systems, 273, 278 Perceived Collective Continuity Scale, 177, 178 phenomenological perspective, 2–3, 43–44, 158–159, 169–170, 195 philosophical perspective, 249–250

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108769471.029 Published online by Cambridge University Press

photo analysis, 225, 293 Pithouse, R. 217 place attachment, 43–44, 111–112, 237, 259–260, 334 Bengaluru lakes, 58 China, 116–117, 127 dynamic approach, 157–158 energy transitions opposition, 161 Faroe Islands, 80 Great Barrier Reef, 26 Palestine, 183 renewable energy, 156–157 residential decisions, 158 structural approach, 157 transitions, 132 West Africa, 93, 95 place-based perspectives, 272, 332; see also senses of place biodiversity, 193–194 climate change, 33, 36–37, 40, 156 energy transitions, 160–162 global challenges, 332, 336 governance, 280–281, 340 urban change, 304, 306–307, 308–310 urban forestry, 277 urban living laboratories, 302 place bonds see people–place relations place cells, hippocampus, 249 place continuity, 5, 13, 170 place identity, 43–44, 111–112, 121–122 Bodo people, 199 China, 117, 120 dynamic approach, 157–158 Eastern Europe, 173 environmental management, 193–194 Great Barrier Reef, 26 renewable energy, 156–157 social media, 273 structural approach, 157 tribal communities, India, 193–194 West Africa, 93 place-making, 3, 65–66, 77, 338 Bengaluru lakes, 58 BlueCity Lab, Rotterdam, 304–305, 306–308 Bodo people, 193 informal settlements, 104 landscape changes, 71–73 regional conservation, 68–70, 69, 73 spatial planning, 289 stability, 70–71 place meanings, 7–9, 67–68, 144, 145 Bengaluru lakes, 58 BlueCity Lab, Rotterdam, 306–307 Bodo people, 193, 198, 201, 202 contested, 60–61, 83, 87–89, 210, 339 cultural perspectives, 180, 261–262 epistemic bonds, 246, 259–260

Index

ethnocentric perceptions, 8, 169, 171–172, 179–180 Faroe Islands, 77, 80 Great Barrier Reef, 21–24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 334 marine renewable energy, 144–145 narrative continuity, 177–179 New York state, 135, 138–140 political perspectives, 193–194 power and place, 210 social construction, 94, 209–210 socio-ecological systems, 131–132 urban change, 8, 304 place–technology fit, 10, 129, 144, 153, 162 Plain Tribals Council of Assam, 198 planning see design and planning strategies PLS (people living in the streets) see street-living pluralities/pluralisation, 4, 6, 303 climate change adaptations, 32 electronic media, 13 large vs small places, 8 life course, 156 local/global framework, 285, 287, 289–291, 309 marine renewable energy, 153 onto-epistemological, 12 Palestinians, 185 senses of place, 79, 81, 87–88, 89, 272, 331, 336–337 social media, 271 spatial planning, 289, 294, 295 technology/society/ecology couplings, 245–246 time and place, 41 urban change, 211, 212, 301 pluriversal approach, 13 Poland, 172–173, 174–175 policy frameworks, 9–10 political conflicts, 170 political perspectives, 8, 139–140, 185, 193 post-apocalyptic landscape, 216–217 postcolonial perspective, 94, 96–97, 99 post-structuralism, 3, 212 post-truth, 336 power and place, 13, 81, 209–210 power asymmetries, 207 power lines, 133–134, 161–162 prairie restoration, 65, 67, 74 Prates, J. C. 236 precarity, 211, 213, 343–344 precautionarity, normative planning principle, 296 private property, street-living, 241 procedural planning paradigm, 288 progressive-relational approaches, 3 proportionality, planning, 296 protecting vs adapting strategies, Faroe Islands, 85–86 psychological effects, disasters, 43 psychology, time, 37

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355

psychosocial implications, gentrification, 221, 224–225, 228–230, 231 public services, China, 116, 117, 125–126 public spaces, street-living, 240 Quay, M. 342–343 rational planning, 288 reconfiguration processes, disasters, 43–44, 45–46, 48–49 reflexivity, 342 regional conservation ecological changes, 65–66 importance, 66–68 temporality, 66 regionalism, 73 relational perspectives, 13, 303 mobility, 13, 95 relationality, 341 relative surplus population, 235 religious aspects, Palestinians, 188 religious assimilation, 8–9, 201–202 remittance housing China, 120 West Africa, 97–98, 99 renewable energy, 8, 129, 332 community acceptance, 162 life course perspective, 129–130, 156–158 life-place trajectories, 158–160 marine locations see marine renewable energy opposition, 161 place–technology links, 130 rural–urban divide, 129 social acceptance, 160–162 transition to, 160–162, 332 residential mobility, 158, 159–160 resource management issues, 245 return to the home place, 159 rewilding, 276 risk of disasters, 43 Robertson, M. 7 rootedness, Palestine, 13–14, 183, 186 Rotterdam, 10–11, 285–286, 305; see also BlueCity Lab rural–urban divide, 129, 138 Ruskin, J. 253 Ryan, A. B. 212 scalability, regional conservation, 67 scale, projects, 137, 145, 151 scenario-based research, climate change adaptations, 33–35 Schaab, G. L. 341 Scheduled Tribe (ST), 196, 199–200 Seattle, 207, 209, 212–217 Seattle is Dying (TV film), 213, 215–217, 216 sedentary bias, 94–95

356

Index

self-continuity, 13–14, 183 semiocapitalism, gentrification, 223, 231 semiotic analysis, 225 senses of place, 5–6, 13–14, 80 belonging/nonbelonging, 12 boundary objects, 7 epistemology, 12–13 global challenges, 9–10, 331–333, 332, 343–344 historical perspectives, 2–4 multiple, 209 normative aspects, 338–339 novel conceptualisations, 278–279 place-based governance, 280–281 plurality, 7–9, 79, 81, 87–88, 89, 272, 331, 336–337 social aspects, 280 social media, 272–273, 278–281 spatial aspects, 338 temporality, 11–12, 337–338 underlying concepts, 4–5 sex workers, Brazil, street-living, 241 shifting baseline effect, 58–59 shoals, analogy, 335 shramadhan (service), Bengaluru lakes, 59–60 sight–smell–nation assemblages, 227–228 Skype, 252 smartphones, 250–251 social acceptance, renewable energy, 156, 160–162 social–ecological perspectives, 7, 10–11, 19, 68–69, 210 Amish people, Illinois, 70–71 Bengaluru, 11, 54–55 changes, 53–54, 61 energy transitions, 131, 132 Faroe Islands, 80–81, 88, 89 Great Barrier Reef, 28 regional conservation, 67 urban change, 210 social–ecological–technological systems (SETS), 10, 271–272, 276 Melbourne Urban Forest Visual, 277 senses of place, 272 social media, 273–275, 274, 278, 279 social inclusion, 55–57 social links, China, 120–122, 124–125, 127 social media, 9, 10, 245, 271–272; see also electronic media Copenhagen, urban nature, 275–276 cyberspace communities, 252 Denmark, urban foraging app, 277–278 global systems, 273 loss of sense of place, 251 Melbourne, urban forest, 277 misinformation, 254 Netherlands, nature reserve, 276 pandemic, xix senses of place, 272–273, 278–281

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108769471.029 Published online by Cambridge University Press

social–ecological–technological systems, 273–275, 274, 278, 279 tailor-made platforms, 273 social perspectives, street-living, 235–236 social representations theory (SRT), 133, 138–140 social science research, 3 energy transitions, 132–133 epistemic labour, 262 marine renewable energy, 144 sustainability, 303–304, 340 transition studies, 303–304 social values, 286 places, 81 regional conservation, 69, 70, 73 socio-spatial processes, 5, 6, 72–73 disaster impacts, 44 embeddedness, 301–302, 303–304 precarity, 213 transformations, 245 urban change, 207, 211 solar development, 131, 134 solastalgia, 27 Solnit, R. 344 spatial planning, 285, 291, 295, 296–297 spatial planning theory, 287–288, 290 spatiality, 303, 338 stability vs change, 1–2, 3 standard of living, urban migrants, 96, 98 Steele, F. 179 stewardship, Bengaluru, 4, 11, 60; see also environmental management/stewardship Stewart, W. 209–210 street-living, 5, 12, 207–208, 234, 242 inclusion/exclusion, 237 Latin America, 12, 235–236 people–place relationships, 237–239 place-related process, 236–237 social and historical perspectives, 235–236 urban senses and meanings, 239–241 subjective knots, senses of place, 229–230 subsidiarity, normative planning principle, 296 substantive planning paradigm, 288 surveillance capitalism, 245, 254 surveillance technology, 254–255 sustainability biodiversity, 193–194 global challenges, 340, 341–342 senses of place, 12, 210 social media, 245 urban experiments, 10–11, 302, 303–304, 305, 306–307 Sustainable Development Goals, United Nations, 92 synaesthetic perspective, 248 systems planning, 288 systems theory, 341

Index

technology; see also energy transitions; social–ecological–technological systems place–technology fit, 10, 129, 144, 153 technologically mediated futures, 10 transformations, 9–10, 245–246, 249–250, 332, 334–335 telegraph cables, 253 temporality, 5, 11–12, 162–163, 336 Bengaluru lakes restoration, 55–59 climate change adaptations, 32–33, 34, 35, 36–37, 38–39, 40, 332 indigenous people, 196 regional conservation, 66 renewable energy, 156–158 senses of place, 337–338 Terkenli, T. S. 183 thematic analysis, 80 theory of knowledge, 267 tidal energy, 150–151; see also marine renewable energy time–space compression, 253 tourism Barcelona, 228 Faroe Islands see Faroe Islands tourism Great Barrier Reef, 23 Illinois, 70 Nordic region, 79, 81 transcultural hybridity, 318; see also cultural odourlessness transformative topophilia, 308–310 transitions, 7, 132, 340; see also energy transitions urban, 303–304 trauma, 108–110 tribal communities, India, 196–197, 199 Adivasi ethnic groups, 199–200 Bengali Muslims, 200–201 Bodo identity, 198–199, 201–202, 203 Tschakert, P. 33 Tsing, A. L. 343–344 Twitter, 254 Ukraine, 172, 173, 174, 175 unemployment, 234, 235, 236 United Nations Habitat programme, 291 United Nations, Sustainable Development Goals, 92 urban change/urbanisation, 5, 10–11, 207–208, 217–218, 301–302, 310 Bengaluru, 54–57 discourse analysis, 212 local transformation, 306–308 marginalisation, 8, 207–208, 332 plurality, 211 Rotterdam, BlueCity Lab, 304–305 Seattle, 209, 212–213

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357

socio-spatial embeddedness, 303–304 street-living, 8, 234, 236–237, 239–241 transformative topophilia, 308–310 West Africa, 92, 94, 95–97 urban estuaries, 104–105 urban foraging, 277–281 urban living laboratories (ULL), 302 urban migrants, 92–93, 95–97, 98, 334; see also China (internal migration) urban nature, Copenhagen, 274, 275–276 urban optimism, 227 urban violence, Palestine, 182–184, 187 urban–rural divide, 129, 138 USA Midwest, 65, 66–67, 70 user-generated content, social media, 272 Valparaíso, Chile, wildfire, 44, 47, 48 variance inflation factor (VIF), 122 verbal vs visual methods, 145 victimhood, 47, 49 violent crime, 108–110 Visit Faroe Islands (tourist board), 83, 84, 85 visual vs verbal methods, 145 Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site, 9–10, 285, 287, 291–296 vulnerabilities to disasters, 43 Vygotsky, L. S. 239–240 Wagner, 261 war, effects of, 170, 182–183, 186 Warf, B. 303 waste-free city, 306–307, 309 water scarcity, Bengaluru, 54–55 wave energy see marine renewable energy Wayne National Forest, 38 Webber, M. 252 Wellman, B. 252 West African mobility see mobility, West Africa West Bank, Jewish Israeli settlers, 104 Western bias, 94–95 wildfire, Valparaíso, Chile, 44, 47, 48 Williams, D. R. 209–210, 237, 296, 303 wind farms, 133–134; see also marine renewable energy work, connection to place, 35–36 work, precariousness, 234 workforce, value see labour market World Heritage Site Great Barrier Reef, 22–23 Vredefort Dome, 292–296 world wide web, 247, 254 Zuboff, S. 254

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