Using Senses of Place to Help Communities Navigate Place Disruption and Uncertainty

Uncertainty and change are the hallmarks of contemporary life. Global climate change, ecological regime shifts, and urban transformations catalyze new levels of socio-spatial precarity. Exacerbated by political and economic conditions, accelerating change and uncertainty have disrupted people-place relationships and created anxiety around real and perceived place loss and threat. In this article, we outline the potential of senses of place—both pluralized and politicized—to generate new possibilities for thinking, acting, and designing in response to disruption. Three different case studies demonstrate how senses of place can guide us through disruption. For each case, we examine the nature of the disruption/place change, describe how senses of place are involved in the disruption, and consider the role of landscape architecture in helping communities respond. Together, these cases demonstrate that a deeper understanding of senses of place offers a way to respond to disruptions that enables new beginnings to unfold, facilitates the coproduction of knowledge, and supports socio-spatial justice.

[1]  H. Steiner.  Natura Urbana: ecological constellations in urban space , 2022, Journal of Urban Design.

[2]  Andrés Di Masso Tarditti,et al.  Gentrificación y desposesión de lugar: Dinámicas subjetivas del desplazamiento simbólico y la micro-segregación. , 2022, Anuario de Psicología.

[3]  C. Raymond,et al.  Inclusive conservation and the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework: Tensions and prospects , 2022, One Earth.

[4]  Dorottya Mendly.  Reembedding Through Reinhabitation: Towards a Bioregional Planning , 2022, Capitalism Nature Socialism.

[5]  Daniel R. Williams,et al.  Navigating the Temporalities of Place in Climate Adaptation , 2021, Changing Senses of Place.

[6]  Daniel R. Williams,et al.  Introduction: Senses of Place in the Face of Global Challenges , 2021 .

[7]  Daniel R. Williams,et al.  Navigating the Spaciousness of Uncertainties Posed by Global Challenges , 2021, Changing Senses of Place.

[8]  U. Varanasi.  Focusing Attention on Reciprocity Between Nature and Humans Can Be the Key to Reinvigorating Planetary Health , 2020 .

[9]  J. Nassauer,et al.  Cues to care: A systematic analytical review , 2020, Landscape and Urban Planning.

[10]  S. Bond,et al.  Care-full and just: Making a difference through climate change adaptation , 2020 .

[11]  Marijn Janssen,et al.  Digital platforms and responsible innovation: expanding value sensitive design to overcome ontological uncertainty , 2020, Ethics and Information Technology.

[12]  Miriam J. Williams.  The possibility of care-full cities , 2020 .

[13]  N. Gulsrud,et al.  When urban greening becomes an accumulation strategy: Exploring the ecological, social and economic calculus of the High Line , 2019, Journal of Landscape Architecture.

[14]  A. Stirling.  Sustainability and the politics of transformations: from control to care in moving beyond modernity , 2019, What Next for Sustainable Development?.

[15]  J. Tronto.  For a Caring Democracy , 2019, Care Ethics.

[16]  Carola Kloeck,et al.  Dealing with Climate Change on Small Islands: Towards Effective and Sustainable Adaptation? , 2019, Dealing with climate change on small islands: Towards effective and sustainable adaptation.

[17]  Daniel R. Williams,et al.  Between fixities and flows: Navigating place attachments in an increasingly mobile world , 2019, Journal of Environmental Psychology.

[18]  U. Svedin,et al.  Stewardship, care and relational values , 2018, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability.

[19]  M. Fried,et al.  Grieving for a Lost Home , 2018, Social Psychiatry.

[20]  Nathanael T. Lauster.  In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis , 2018 .

[21]  I. Lorenzoni,et al.  Place attachment, disruption and transformative adaptation , 2018 .

[22]  Daniel R. Williams,et al.  Rethinking climate change adaptation and place through a situated pathways framework: A case study from the Big Hole Valley, USA , 2017 .

[23]  Robin S. Cox,et al.  Place‐based loss and resilience among disaster‐affected youth , 2017 .

[24]  Miriam J. Williams.  Care‐full Justice in the City , 2017 .

[25]  Sara Mirhadi,et al.  Designing Meaningful Landscapes through Systematic Discovery of Character of Place , 2017 .

[26]  L. Kern.  Rhythms of gentrification: eventfulness and slow violence in a happening neighbourhood , 2016 .

[27]  Derek S. Hyra.  The back-to-the-city movement: Neighbourhood redevelopment and processes of political and cultural displacement , 2015 .

[28]  R. Atkinson,et al.  Losing One’s Place: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change, Market Injustice and Symbolic Displacement , 2015 .

[29]  Chia-Kuen Cheng,et al.  The Influence of Place Change on Place Bonding: A Longitudinal Panel Study of Renovated Park Users , 2015 .

[30]  Daniel R. Williams,et al.  Situating adaptation: how governance challenges and perceptions of uncertainty influence adaptation in the Rocky Mountains , 2015, Regional Environmental Change.

[31]  I. Levin.  Planning and place in the city: mapping place identity , 2014 .

[32]  Patrick Devine-Wright,et al.  Think global, act local? The relevance of place attachments and place identities in a climate changed world , 2013 .

[33]  D. Massey.  Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place , 2012 .

[34]  John Dixon,et al.  On the contested nature of place: 'Figuera’s Well', 'The Hole of Shame' and the ideological struggle over public space in Barcelona , 2011 .

[35]  V. Vignoles,et al.  Towards an integrative model of place identification: Dimensionality and predictors of intrapersonal-level place preferences , 2010 .

[36]  M. Davidson.  Spoiled Mixture: Where Does State-led `Positive' Gentrification End? , 2008 .

[37]  宋金平,et al.  美国地理学百年发展脉络分析―基于《Annals of the Association of American Geographers》学术论文的统计分析 , 2007 .

[38]  Nick Higginbotham,et al.  Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change , 2007, Australasian psychiatry : bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists.

[39]  D. Conradson.  Landscape, care and the relational self: therapeutic encounters in rural England. , 2005, Health & place.

[40]  Lisa L. Miller.  Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do about It , 2005 .

[41]  R. Corry,et al.  Using normative scenarios in landscape ecology , 2004, Landscape Ecology.

[42]  R. Stedman.  Is It Really Just a Social Construction?: The Contribution of the Physical Environment to Sense of Place , 2003 .

[43]  John F. Sowa,et al.  Review of Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Basic Books 1999. , 1999 .

[44]  J. Diamond.  A sense of place , 1997, Nature.

[45]  David Uzzell,et al.  PLACE AND IDENTITY PROCESSES , 1996 .

[46]  W. Gesler.  Lourdes: healing in a place of pilgrimage , 1996 .

[47]  Joan Iverson Nassauer,et al.  Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames , 1995, Landscape Journal.

[48]  M. Phillips.  Rural Gentrification and the Processes of Class Colonisation. , 1993 .

[49]  H. Maturana,et al.  The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding , 2007 .

[50]  A. Giddens.  Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age , 1992, The New Social Theory Reader.

[51]  K. Korpela.  Place-identity as a product of environmental self-regulation , 1989 .

[52]  H. Proshansky,et al.  Place-identity: Physical world socialization of the self , 1983 .

[53]  J. B. Jackson,et al.  The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays , 1979 .

[54]  Donald Appleyard,et al.  The Environment as a Social Symbol: Within a Theory of Environmental Action and Perception , 1979 .

[55]  Anne Buttimer,et al.  GRASPING THE DYNAMISM OF LIFEWORLD , 1976 .

[56]  郭婷,et al.  Orientalism: An Overview , 2013 .

[57]  Rebecca Solnit.  Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities , 2019, Militarization.

[58]  Carol Farbotko.  Climate change displacement: towards ontological security , 2019, Dealing with climate change on small islands: Towards effective and sustainable adaptation.

[59]  J. Tronto.  Care as a political concept , 2018 .

[60]  Nathan Hensley,et al.  Curriculum as Bioregional Text: Place, Experience, and Sustainability , 2013 .

[61]  Simon Sheikh.  The Production of Space , 1996 .

[62]  R. Grese.  A SENSE OF PLACE, A SENSE OF TIME , 1995, Landscape Journal.

[63]  D. Massey.  Global sense of place , 1991 .

[64]  C. Norberg-Schulz.  Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture , 1979 .

[65]  E. Relph.  Place and placelessness , 1976 .