This post explores the idea that “displacement,” a word most commonly used in a negative sense to mean the forced uprooting of people, is better understood as a broad concept that describes a wide range experiences that involve feeling out of place. Displacement happens whenever we choose to move or are forced to move from one place to another. From a geographical perspective it includes a wide range of experiences that involve some feeling of outsideness. Forced displacement is an extreme version of these. More muted versions happen for anyone who chooses to migrate to another country, move to a different city, or live as an expat in a foreign country.

Notions of Displacement

The broad idea of displacement is apparent in the way it is used as a descriptive term in several disciplines, without negative connotations. In geology it refers to the relative movement between the two sides of a fault. In medicine it refers to the form and extent of separation in a bone fracture. In geometry and physics it is a vector quantity that describes the direction and straight line distance an object has moved from its original location. In literature it refers to any narrative that engages with enslavement, exile, uprooting, migration or emigration.

From a geographical perspective, displacement can be understood as any experience of being an outsider, when you are disconnected from your familiar home place, whether a dwelling, a neigbourhood, region or country. Geographical displacement is inextricably linked with sense of place because detachment from or loss of place both reveals and reinforces the significance of attachment to place.

Types of Displacement

Different types of geographical displacement can be identified according to whether they have been forced or are voluntary, whether they are enduring or temporary, and according to their causes. Here I have ordered them from the most intense outsideness, in which people have been forcibly and permanently uprooted, to the gentlest, in which the modest outsideness experienced as a tourist serves as a source of pleasure. Actual displacements may be the result of combined causes, and what was expected to be temporary can become permanent.

I have included some counts of displaced persons, mostly from agencies associated with the UN. These should be regarded cautiously because it is not always clear what they refer to and whether there is double counting. Nevertheless they indicate that processes of displacement, which have a history as long as civilization itself, are currently widespread and that since the middle of the 20th century they have apparently increased faster than population growth.

Forced Displacement

Forced displacement includes all involuntary or coerced movement of people away from their homes or home region. It is the central concern of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which has collected data and provided assistance to refugees since 1950, and which reviews global trends every year. There is also an extensive research literature about forced displacement that emphasizes issues about inequality and injustice (a summary is available here An academic overview is Peter Adey et al, 2020 The Handbook of Displacement, Springer Nature)

• International Forced Displacement. UNHCR, defines this as”a result of persecution, conflict, generalized violence or human rights violations” that have forced refugees to flee their country. This sort of displacement is effectively permanent, and breaks attachments to place both in terms of home community and in national identity. There were about 2.1 million refugees in 1951, when UNHCR began to keep records. By 1993 there were 20 million, and by the end of 2023 the number had risen to almost 38 million. In addition, in 2023 there were 6.9 million asylum seekers, and another 5.8 million people considered to be in need of international protection (UNHCR, PopStats)

• Internal Forced Displacement refers to those forced to leave homes or places of habitual residence to avoid armed conflict, violence, or environmental disasters, but who remain in the country of their birth. For some there is the possibility of returning home and rebuilding. There were 4 million internally displaced people in 1993 when UNHCR started counting; the number had risen to 68.3 million at the end of 2023 (UNHCR Figures).

• Climate Change Displacement. UNHCR notes that 60% of refugees and internally displaced persons, perhaps 20 million to 30 million in 2023, are from countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and East and South Asia, that are especially vulnerable to environment hazards related to climate change (UNHCR Climate Change). These displacements might at first be temporary, for instance as droughts ease, but they are expected to grow in extent and become permanent as the climate crisis intensifies The World Bank projects that by 2050 216 million will be internally displaced because of climate change, and the UNDP suggests that climate change displacement might impact as many as one billion people by 2100 (UNDP 2017 Climate Change, Migration and Displacement, p.10).

Permanent displacements as a consequence of climate change are already apparent in developed countries because of rising sea levels, repeated extreme weather events and threats from wildfires (see e.g. Jake Bittle 2023 The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, Simon and Schuster) These displacements are now being managed through policies of ”planned or managed retreat” (see reviews here and here). These are, in other words, policies of planned displacement.

• Temporary Environmental Displacement happens because of natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires and storm surges. They include precautionary evacuations ahead of forecast disasters, some in recent cases involving several million people. These can extend into much longer but still temporary displacements wherever infrastructure and buildings need to be rebuilt before people can return home.

• Development displacement because of large scale developments, such as the construction of dams and reservoirs, mines, airport expansions, expressways, deforestation, etc, that involve expropriation and eradication of existing settlements. This was widespreas in the 20th century, but is now often contested and continues on a smaller scale.

• Urban development displacement caused by the redevelopment of urban areas, renovictions, and, more subtly, gentrification. These are permanent and mostly impact poor or disadvantaged residents A recent argument has been made by Hirsch, Eizenberg and Jabereen (2020) that that there are strong similarities between urban displacement in the Global North and forced displacement in the Global South in terms of the exercise of power, coercion, and the relatively low socio-economic status of those displaced.

• Homelessness – a homeless person is somebody displaced from their habitual place of residence. There is no standard measure of the numbers involved, but Wikipedia (using data from the World Economic Forum) suggests that worldwide there may 150 million homeless people.

Voluntary Displacement

Voluntary displacement is the outcome of choices made to move to an unfamiliar place, whether to find a better life, to study, to enjoy living abroad, or to travel for pleasure. The line between forced and voluntary is not always clear, not least because some choices to move may be made in anticipation of forced displacement.

• International Migration has historically been a significant form of enduring voluntary displacement as people have moved to places that offered improved lifetime opportunities. The 2024 World Migration Report estimates that currently about 281 million people in the world (3.6% of the global population) were born in a country other than the one they now live in – in other words are voluntarily displaced. That Report in 2000 (see p.4 of the pdf) made the important comment that since the 1970s the annual rate of global population growth had been consistently outpaced by the growth of international migration. This trend has continued. The world’s population grew by by 48% between 1990 and 2020, but international migration grew by 83%.

• Displacement for Transnational Employment (foreign workers and students). These temporary forms of displacement may last for several years for students but only a few months for seasonal employees. There are estimated by the World Bank to be about 184 million migrant workers in the world who send remittances to family in their home nations, and there are about six million international students.

• Expatriate Displacement. Expatriates include both those who have long-term professional work assignments in other countries, and those, such as retirees or people with flexible employment, who choose to live permanently in a foreign country without renouncing their nationality. One estimate by Finaccord, a business consultancy specializing in services to expats, was that in 2017 there were 66.2 million globally, projected to increase to 85 million in 2021.
InterNations, which considers itself to be the largest expat network, has 2.5 million members in 390 cities around the world. It notes in one entry that spending so much time away from their original home can create an identity crisis for expats. The longer you’re away and the more places you move to, the less attached you can feel to any nationality, and In your new home it may be difficult to identify as a local if you do not share the nationality of the residents.

• Churning and Displacement. Churning is the widespread, continual restlessness that seems to underlie modern urban societies, with many people moving every year, either to a different addresses in the same city or to different different cities or regions in the same country. Some idea of the scale of this can be gleaned from national censuses. On average individuals in the US move 11.5 times in their lifetime. In the UK almost a quarter of households have lived in their home for three years or less. In Canada just over a third of the population (roughly 12 million) moves to a new dwelling every five years, with about half of those moving to a new city or province. Most of these relatively gentle displacements are chosen, presumably to find a different or better everyday life experience in a new place that is culturally familiar but is geographically and socially unfamiliar.

• Tourism and Travel Displacement is the extreme case of voluntary displacement because it involves brief experiences of outsideness, is entirely by choice, and so many participate in it. A major motivation for tourism is to spend time in a place that is unfamiliar in order to enjoy and appreciate different weather, languages, foods, and ways of doing things. In other words, to enjoy an experience of displacement that is temporary. Numerous websites promote the benefits of travel and getting away from home. They refer to new challenges, experiences you can share when you return, fresh perspectives, a break with routine, and most significantly for understanding tourism as a form of displacement, stepping outside your comfort zone, and development of a better appreciation for what you have at home. This is displacement with the comfortable insurance of soon returning to your native country or home place.

The sheer scale of international travel is significant. In 2023 there were 1.3 billion international arrivals (overnight stays of at least one night and less than 12 months, without remuneration), though this includes individuals who travelled to several different countries. The number has grown almost continuously for decades – in 1990 it was 435 million, it quadrupled to 1.46 billion by 2019, dropped to 406 million in 2020 during COVID, and has now climbed back to pre-COVID levels (see Statista).

Three Concluding Comments

First, given the broad perspective I have proposed, displacement or the experience of somehow being an outsider, is a widespread and diverse way of encountering the world.

Second, while there have always been people forcibly uprooted because of violent conflicts and oppression, or voluntarily displaced by pilgrimages and rural-urban migration, there are strong indications in the growing numbers of refugees, tourists, and now particularly climate migrants, that displacement is becoming an increasingly prevalent companion to experiences of place.

Thirdly, and more theoretically, displacement reinforces the significance of attachment to place by exposing its absence.  Loss of place in forcible displacement makes clear the significance of connections to place that might previously have been taken for granted. Encounters with unfamiliar places in voluntary displacement either raise the challenge of establishing sense of place somewhere new or simply reveal the merits of different place identities.

Place attachment is knowing and being known somewhere, feeling at home, being in a neighbourhood or community where you can find your way around, feel comfortable with the language and everyday ways of behaving, of being inside a place. Displacement involves place detachment, an experience of outsideness, an absence of familiarity with somewhere. This absence reveals the value and significance of place. It seems that displacement and sense of place are intertwined. Displacement is experienced when sense of place is taken away, and sense of place is made explicit by experiences of displacement.

In 1990 Jacques Attali, an adviser to the President of France, speculated that the twenty-first century would see an increasingly restless world of “rich nomads” and “poor nomads.” Rich nomads are people from privileged regions who roam the planet seeking ways to spend their free time by looking for places that offer pleasurable experiences. Poor nomads are uprooted people, mostly in the destitute periphery of the world, who hope to escape hopelessness, violent conflict, or starvation, by making their way to places that can provide sustenance and security. The consequence, he suggested (p.99), would be that: “The sense of place that gave birth to all previous cultures will become little more than a vague regret.”

We are now a quarter of the way through the 21st century. How does Attali’s prediction stand up to what has happened in the last thirty years? What are the impacts on place and sense of place?  As I explored these questions I realised that we are now living in a world where displacement, or being in some way an outsider, is becoming a prevailing condition.

The Rapid Growth of Rich and Poor Nomadism
Attali’s prediction of growth in nomadism has so far proved correct. Since 1990 there has been rapid growth both in international tourism from rich countries, and in refugees and displaced people in poor countries.

International tourism has surged in the last 70 years. The UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has collected data about international tourist arrivals – people who travel to another country and stay overnight – since 1950. The graph below shows that there were about 25 million international tourist arrivals in 1950; by 1990 these had grown to 450 million. Since then the number has tripled to almost 1.4 billion, and is currently projected to grow to 1.8 billion by 2030. [A note of caution: these numbers are deceptive because it’s thought that perhaps only 5 percent of the world’s population (about 400 million) is rich enough to travel internationally, and many of those people travel several times a year.]

The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, has also tracked numbers of refugees since 1950, when there were about 2.1 million. This number grew slowly to about 20 million by1990.  In 1993 UNHCR added asylum seekers and internally displaced people (those uprooted within their own country) for a total of 24.2 million poor people uprooted and on the move. Since then this combined total has more than quadrupled to about 120 million.

On the left numbers of international tourist arrivals 1950-2030. This graph was prepared by UNWTO in 2010, and does not show the impact of the Covid pandemic in 2019 and 2020, when numbers dropped to 1990 levels, but in other respects it corresponds to actual numbers. Source: UNWTO. On the right, Annual number of refugees, internally displaced persons and other poor nomads, 1951-2023. The numbers of poor nomads did not decline during the pandemic. Source: Statista.com

Place Impacts and Experiences of Rich Nomadism – Overtourism
Rich nomadism takes various forms. Cruising in the superyachts of billionaires or in huge ships; package holidays lasting from a few days to months to both popular and exotic destinations to lie on beaches, climb mountains, do yoga; business trips; students studying abroad; expats who have retired to a foreign country; individuals who collect countries or travel mostly to take selfies.

A consequence for sense of place of the recent growth in rich nomadism is that tourist places have become increasingly defined by economics. On the one hand, destinations that offer low cost vacations are popular, especially when promoted in online reviews and by agencies offering package trips. On the other hand, the income and employment provided by tourism have allowed otherwise depressed places to prosper, and they have become essential to the local economy even in cities that are major tourist destinations. The consequence is that their landscapes have been reworked with economically efficient, placeless, international style resorts, hotels, restaurants, and airports.

Since about 2010 the promotion of iconic destinations, especially through social media, combined with cut-rate air fares and packages, has led to ‘overtourism’. This has been simply defined in the National Geographic as “too many people in one place at any given time.” In effect, it is when the number of tourists is so great it simultaneously undermines the character of the places that attracted them and diminishes the quality of life for local residents. There have been vigorous protests against overtourism in Barcelona, Amsterdam, Venice, Dubrovnik, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, Bali, and Mount Fuji in Japan. One small, symptomatic example of overtourism is Juneau in Alaska, a city of 32,000 where cruise ships can deposit as many as 18,000 visitors on a single day, and residents are trying to restrict cruise ships on Saturdays so that they can have the city to themselves for one day a week.

Overtourism raises the significant issue for place of whether some types of attachment to, or association with, a place are more important than others, and whose voice should carry the most weight about its identity. Should it be the year-round residents who have roots there? Should it be those who depend on income from tourism? Or should it be the international tourists for whom a place’s attractions are regarded as a global amenity that should be readily available for anybody to experience? 

The response of UNWTO and tourist operators is to regard overtourism as a management problem about the balance between competing interests, and to suggest strategies such as charging tourists, rationing access to major attractions, encouraging visits outside the peak season, and promoting other destinations (see this article in The Economist). However, as long as international travel is easy and  inexpensive, and social media amplify the attractions of particular destinations, it is not clear that overtourism can be controlled. The likely result is that sense of place in the most popular destinations will be sacrificed to an other-directed veneer that satisfies visitors.

For tourist agencies and operators none of this seems to matter much, because they regard travel as wholly beneficial, a way to learn about other cultures. This is in line with the National Geographic argument that travel should be considered an essential human activity: “It’s not the place that is special, but what we bring to it and, crucially, how we interact with it. Travel is not about the destination, or the journey. It is about stumbling across a new way of looking at things.”

This splendid sentiment glosses over the fact that for many travel is a way to escape the humdrum, familiar places of everyday life. Moreover, for some rich nomads a new way of looking at things is based mostly on collecting places in order to brag about how many countries have been visited. For instance, the Most Traveled People club (one of several for place collectors) is for people who aspire to travel “Everywhere,” which is actually a list of 1500 places around the world, many of them obscure or difficult to get to.  Place is thus reduced to little more than a push pin on the map of the world (see these two screen captures below from the MTP website). 

Of course, some rich nomads do travel thoughtfully, do appreciate and learn from the places they visit. Nevertheless, mass tourism, bucket lists, collecting countries, all of which have intensified in the last two decades, suggest that international travel is turning many places into commodities to be consumed. And protests against overtourism are an indication that sense of place is at a tipping point as the everyday experience of being attached to a place is displaced by place collection for outsiders.

Poor Nomads are Placeless People
At the opposite end of the spectrum poor nomads, like many rich nomads, experience places in passing, but on the ground, on foot or by whatever inexpensive means can be found. Their experiences begin not with websites and brochures and cut-rate flights, but with the trauma of being uprooted, displaced by conflicts, political repression, drought, or some other event that has made life in their home place intolerable. For them travel is dangerous and arduous, involving violence, exploitation, risks of death, constant uncertainty about what might come next.

These challenges are apparently outweighed by the possibility of getting to somewhere that offers some hope for the future, preferably in one of the developed countries. Particular places encountered on the way are to be coped with and passed through as quickly as possible.  For those heading to Europe the Sahara Desert and then the Mediterranean are very difficult and dangerous, in 2023 probably 270,000 attempted the crossing and about 10,000 are thought to have died. The Darien Gap in Panama was long considered to be impassable because of its mountains, jungles, poisonous snakes, and rough rivers. Yet hundreds of thousands, many of them families with children, are now attempting to cross it every year in a desperate effort to get to United States (see this recent account in The Atlantic about “Seventy Miles in Hell ).

Lyndsey Stonebridge, in an authorative book on the rise of refugee movements in the 20th century, describes refugees as “placeless people.” When they cross the frontier of their home country  they become effectively placeless and stateless, and lose their  rights as citizens and persons. Many end up in placeless refugee camps or asylum centres, often located in remote areas of a foreign country that may not even be legally part of that country, where they are condemned to be outsiders (see, for example, Kari Burnett, Feeling like an outsider: a case study of refugee identity, and Guntars Emerson et al, “Refugee Mental Health and the role of place in Global North Countries).

International refugees get most media attention, but well over half of all poor nomads are people displaced within their own own countries. These too have been “forcibly displaced” (UNHCR’s term to describe the coerced mobility of people who have been uprooted and forced to move as a result of warfare, persecution, conflict, violence, extreme weather). Wherever they travel or try to resettle they are likely to be more or less unwelcome, out of place, outsiders, even though they are nominally still citizens of in their own country.

A Concluding Comment about the Prevalence of Different Forms of Displacement
While I was writing about rich and poor nomadism I began to see both of them as manifestations of displacement, which in its various forms has become a significant aspect of how place is experienced in the 21st century.

Forced displacement as a consequence of conflict and repression has been extensively researched  as a consequence of  social injustice and repression. (See for example, Adey, P, et al, eds, The Handbook of Displacement, Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2020; chapter summaries available here). But from the broader perspective of sense of place displacement applies to a range of apparently dissimilar events and experiences. The sense of place associated with both poor and rich nomadism has in common some degree of cultural outsideness and disconnection from the places where people were born and grew up.

This is obvious when displacement has been coerced. For tourists spending a few days or weeks away from home, for expats who choose to live in a foreign country, for guest workers, students studying abroad, and migrants, the displacement is voluntary chosen perhaps because it offers some excitement and a challenge. But it still involves disconnection and the experience of being an outsider, of not fully belonging somewhere.

I recognise that displacement is is not a new phenomenon, people have always traveled for pleasure, trade and discovery, moved to other places in other countries, and been uprooted by wars, oppression and environmental disasters. However, now, in the 21st century as rich and poor nomadism continue to grow, as climate change makes more and more parts of the world unliveable, attachments to places have become increasingly tenuous, not necessarily broken but weakened, and displacement is becoming the prevailing sense of place.

[I intend to dedicate a future post to the notion of displacement.]

Adey, P, et al, eds, 2020 The Handbook of Displacement, Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2020;

Attali, Jacques, 1990 Millenium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order, Times Books, Random House, New York.

Stonebridge, Lyndsey, 2018 Placeless People: Writings, Rights and Refugees, Oxford University Press

Perhaps the greatest omission in my writing about place is how it relates to health.  My inclination has been to consider the emotional stress caused by uprooting, displacement and destruction of place as important mostly for the way it demonstrates the existential significance of belonging to a place. But there is substantial evidence, supported by a body of scientific literature, that many characteristics of places and local environments have an impact on the physiology of health.

The connections between health and place have been part of medical understanding since the origins of medicine, but there has been a flurry of academic research exploring these connections since about 1990. As I wrote this post I became increasingly aware that this aspect of place deserves far more consideration than a single post can provide. Indeed, I think a comprehensive account could take years. So this very short overview of the history of place in health, plus some links to recent researchand a few comments about how place seems to be understood in that research, is no more than a sort of outline introduction.

Historical Background
Connections between health and place have been acknowledged since the beginning of modern civilization, usually by linking the quality of health to the environmental conditions in specific locations.  For example, the Ancient Greek philosopher Hippocrates, widely considered the father of medicine, began his book Airs,, Waters, Places, which was written about 400 BC, with the statement that anyone who wants to investigate medicine properly should first of all consider the seasons, winds and waters “such as are peculiar to each locality.” He elaborated these and then recommended that, “if one knows all of these things well, or at least the greater part of them, he cannot miss knowing, when he comes into a strange city, either the diseases peculiar to the place, or particular nature of common diseases…” [Section 6].

Hippocratic ideas that health was related to the environmental quality of a place endured through the centuries, and, for instance played a role in the Middle Ages when citizens protested against foul air and stench from slaughterhouses, and also in the belief that, for those with the means, it made good sense in times of epidemics to escape from cities to the countryside (see, for example, Carole Rawcliffe, 2021, “A Breath of Fresh Air: Approaches to Environmental Health in Late Medieval Urban Communities.” Palgrave Macmillan).

It was, however, not until the mid-nineteenth century that the actual causes of place-based disease and ill-health began to be identified. In this regard, John Snow’s epidemiological study in 1854 that linked cases of cholera to a specific water pump in London was especially significant. He demonstrated through careful investigation of the location of the cases of cholera and where the families had obtained water that it was not bad air that was responsible, but water contaminated with sewage. Causes of diseases are rarely quite this specific (though the search for a precise origin for COVID suggests it is an idea that is hard to shake). Nevertheless, the recognition that health conditions, whether in their manifestations or their causes, often have a geography that can be mapped and that this can help in their treatment continue to be very important.

The Journal Health and Place
Subsequent studies of the environmental determinants of health have mostly followed along the lines of Snow’s systematic, scientific investigation of manifestations and causes. With the rise of interest in place and sense of place in the late twentieth century these began to be framed specifically in term of place and health, culminating in 1995 in the creation of the academic journal Health and Place. Initially this was a modest publication – four issues a year with a handful of articles and research notes, but it got increasing international attention, has expanded to six issues a year, each one with more than twenty articles and numerous research notes, many of which address public health issues. At the top of every online issue of Health and Place is a statement that makes its aim explicit: “Designed to the study of all aspects of health and health care in which place or location matters.”

The first edition of Health and Place in 1995 had an editorial by Graeme Moon, “(Re)placing research on health and health care”, in which he stated the aim of the journal is to publish “research into health and health care which emphasises differences between places, the experience of health and care in specific places, the development of health care for places, and methods and theories underlying these in geography, sociology, public health, anthropology, and economics.” (Volume 1, No 1, 1995, pp.1-4).

Moon noted specifically that communicable diseases spread geographically, which is to say from place to place, and that chronic disease can vary geographically. Furthermore, health policies vary between nations and regions, and often have singular local impacts because access to health services are not the same everywhere. It is, he suggested, a trivial observation to say that conditions affecting health are different in different places: the key questions are why is this the case, what are the issues of location and mobilitiy, and in what ways do people in different places experience sickness and use health services differently?.

My impression, after a rather cursory investigation of the recent research published in Health and Place, is that these questions are ones that continue to be explored in the Journal, with an emphasis on public health, and now across a wide international range of case studies.

How Does Place Affect Health?
This question is addressed in a program of the Center for Disease Control of the United States.

The places of our lives, it suggests – our homes, workplaces, schools, parks, and houses of worship – affect the quality of our health and influence our experience with disease and well-being. And it uses a variety of geographical and GIS methods to explore how this might be the case, including a framework for the “geographical determinants of health”. The aims of the program are to define the geospatial drivers of health with an emphasis on factors that vary by place. Place is described simply as “… a broad and evolving concept… the places of our lives define, shape, and influence the health determinants we face throughout our lifetimes.”

The intention of this branch of the Center for Disease control is to promote research into the relationship between geographic variations of disease and environmental, demographic, behavioural, socioeconomic, genetic, and infectious risk factors. Examples of the fields of research include investigations of space and time trends in the spread of Ebola and Zika viruses, geographical variations in cancer incidence, and spatial components of the opioid crisis in the US, such as where overdose deaths and drug-seeking behaviours happen.

Epidemiology
Books and websites about epidemiology often note that three basic variables in the investigation of patterns of disease, are person, place and time (or Who, Where and When, as Wikipedia has it). Person here refers both to individuals and to social circumstances, and time acknowledges that diseases wax and wane over years, decades and ccenturies. Place, is not always defined, but one book notes that it can refer to more than one thing, for instance “a location, an area, a city, a state, or a country.” However, since place is primarily a spatial concept, it is now frequently described and understood in terms of the coordinates used in geospatial data and GIS, which means that place patterns are defined primarily by what the data indicate. 

An important idea in epidemiology is that where somebody lives, works, and travels can provide clues about relevant exposures to particular diseases. Disease frequency can vary geographically between regions, or between neighbourhoods in cities, or between urban and rural areas, and clues to the reasons for this might be found in social conditions (relative wealth or poverty), proximity to polluting industries, or possibly aspects of the natural environment.

The Definition of Place in Health and Place Research
My impression is that the notion of place in much research into health and place is taken to be straightforward and self-evident. A place consists of a any relatively distinctive, two dimensional spatial fragment of geography, whether a neighbourhood, a city, an ecosystem, a region, or a country.  This “broad and evolving concept” as the Center for Disease Control describes it, allows “geospatial data”, in other words any information that has a geographical location, to be analysed using GIS methodologies as way to find statistical, spatial connections between diseases and environments.

Some Further Ideas about Place in Health Research
There is no question that this is an invaluable way to grasp the reasons why the qualities of health and disease vary from place to place.  But place also an experiential phenomenon, something with depth, filled with meanings and associations, often an essential part of the very identity of individuals and communities. My impression is that these are peripheral to much of the research on place and health. However, they are not entirely ignored. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but the following are some instances of topics that, implicitly or explicitly, consider relationships between health and place as an experiential phenomenon. Of these, I think only Therapeutic Places have been studied with regard to the phenomenological importance of place.

• Healthy Cities
The initiative to consider cities from the perspective of health does not consider place explicitly, but the top page on the WHO website on healthy cities begins with this quote from the Ottawa Charter of 1986 about health promotion: “Health is created and lived by people within the settings of their everyday life; where they learn, work, play, and love.” In other words, the widely promoted idea of healthy cities is about the urban places where people live, and with which they are practically and emotionally engaged, and about finding ways to enhance that engagement.

• Pollution and Solastalgia
Environmental scientists in Australia have identified a connection between solastalgia – the deep emotional feeling of a loss of attachment to place without ever leaving it – and the effects of air pollution on deteriorating health (see my post on solastalgia). In other words, local pollution and forms of environmental damage that cause physiological health problems also undermine people’s attachment to place. (see Nick Higginbotham et al, 2010 “Environmental injustice and air pollution in coal affected communities, Hunter Valley, Australia,” Health and Place, March 2010, 16(2), pp. 259-266).

• Aging in place
A growing issue in much of the developed world as populations age is the tension between people’s wish to continue living in their homes and communities, in the places to which they belong, even as their needs for health care become more pronounced. See for example, this website of National Institute of Health

• The Experience of Quarantine
Quarantine is a disruption to the everyday experience of place. It can mean escaping to somewhere thought to be safe from an epidemic (Newton was quarantining from an outbreak of plague Cambridge at the family estate in Woolsthorpe when he saw the apple fall). It can mean being confined to a colony of individuals who have been excluded because share the same disease (historically, colonies of lepers, sanitoriums for tuberculosis patients). It can mean being confined to one’s own house until the epidemic has subsided, which happened in numerous cities during COVID-19, which caused serious psychological problems for some. This demonstrated that while home might be an intensely meaningful place, that relationship needs to be mitigated by the freedom to get away from it. Too much home is not a good thing.   See, for example, this website on aging in place.

• Homelessness
The widespread epidemic of homelessness is, more or less by definition, the loss of attachment to place. It is also a circumstance that exposes individuals to disease, whether because of exposure to the weather, or because of exposure in crowded shelters, or because of inadequate access to sanitary facilities. This is explored, for example, in Lisa Vandemark 2007 “Promoting the Sense of Self, Place and Belonging in Displaced Persons: The Example of Homelessness” Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 21(5), pp. 241-248.

• Therapeutic places
Therapeutic places are those which are believed to have the power to heal. They includes places of pilgrimage, such as Lourdes in France, where miraculous cures are said to have occurred.  They also include social and natural environments that appear to facilitate convalescence. This 2018 bibliographic survey on therapeutic landscapes and healthy places in Social Science and Medicine, lists many publications on the topic.

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I recently had a long stopover at the enormous airport in Dallas-Fort Worth. It involved the usual sorts of airport activities –  getting from one terminal to another (in this case by the monorail that connects the five terminals), looking for lounges and a place to eat, trying to get information about another flight, going up and down on escalators, walking crowded corridors, studying screens of flight departures, and looking out through windows at the vast spaces devoted to aircraft and other machines.

In the course of all these activities I began to think about placelessness, and specifically about the way I was temporarily trapped in what the French ethnographer Marc Augé has called a “non-place”. I took some photos to try to capture my experiences, but my travel had started long before dawn and I had two more flights that day, so it wasn’t until I got home to an actual place that I was able to reflect on those experiences. 

Non-Place and Placelessness
In 1995 Augé proposed that “supermodernity,” the globally interconnected condition of the late 20th century, was producing non-places. Previous types of places, he suggested, have a history and culture, and residents who share an identity and sense of commitment to them. In contrast, the non-places of supermodernity, such as motorways, clinics, hospitals, and airports, are experienced in fleeting, temporary ways that have no room for history or belonging. In non-places we are in transit, passing through them as customers, passengers, clients, or patients (see p.77 and p 102). But this does not mean the erasure of place distinctiveness, and Augé was careful to point out that “place and non-place are like opposed polarities – the former is never completely erased and the second never totally completed (p.79).”

I understand non-places as specific manifestations of placelessness, which is the broader process of undermining attachment to place by diluting geographical distinctiveness with standardised ways of doing things. While elements of this have a long history, it has been especially powerful since the mid-twentieth century, first with the surge of post-war rebuilding, then the need to accommodate population growth, coupled with globalisation and the widespread use modernist design practices that put undecorated functionality ahead of sense of place. This tendency has been partially countered since the 1970s by the protection cultural and natural heritage that is vested in particular places, as well as a growing sense of the ecological value of locality.

In other words, the polarities of place and placelessness are always shifting.  What I encountered in Dallas-Fort Worth Airport seemed to that offer clues about the ways that this is happening.

Background on The Airport
Here are some basic facts about Dallas-Worth Airport. It started operations in 1974, about when what Augé calls the age of supermodernity is usually considered to have begun, to replace two older small airports. In 2022 it was, in terms of passengers, the second busiest airport in the world (Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta is the busiest with about 94 million). It is a major hub in international and national networks of air travel, with links to 193 domestic destinations and 67 inte rnational non-stop destinations. It has 60,000 employees. It covers 26.9 square miles (70 square kilometers), an area slightly greater than the island of Manhattan. And significantly it has its own city designation and postal Zip code, which makes it easy to check for data about it in the US Census; that indicates its residential population is zero.

So Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, the second busiest airport in the world for passengers, is a city with tens of thousands of employees, visited on average by about 200,000 people a day, where nobody lives. It is, in Augé’s terms, clearly a huge non-place, intended to facilitate customers in transit from one place to another but lacking a deep history or cultural identity.

But Augé’s point that place and non-place are like opposed polarities warrants consideration.  While the non-placeness of DFW prevails, there are some distinctive place characteristics.  One is the unique layout of the airport, with a highway running down the middle of its five terminals the provides easy access for parking close to each terminal, and with a monorail that weaves sinuously around them for passengers transferring to connecting flights. And in the the passenger zone that there are signs that do refer to its location in Texas, some with photos of the respective mayors of Dallas and of Fort Worth, though my sense was that these are few and far between. And, of course, for the  60,000 people who work but do not live in the airport, there is presumably some sense of community and engagement with place.

The Importance of Airports as Non-Places
What DFW suggests to me is that airports have become the paragons of non-place. They are its largest manifestations, and, globally, more than 10 million people pass through them every day. In 2019 the number of airline passengers worldwide was about 4.7 billion (the peak year before Covid, but it could well be reached again in 2024). Of course, that includes many passengers who fly several times, and even in the developed countries of Europe, North America and Australasia flights per capita each year amount to only between 2 and 4. In most less developed regions the great majority of people never fly. Nevertheless airports are both leading symbols and have keys roles in the infrastructure of modernity and globalization.

• First, there is their enormous size. Airports are among the most prominent landscape products of modern civilization (along with skyscrapers, apartment towers, shopping malls and the sprawling cities which they serve).  They have no historical precedent, did not exist before the 20th century, and until about 1950 were relatively humble facilities, little more than large fields with hangars. Since then they have expanded spatially to occupy more land than the downtowns of the cities with which they are associated. In terms of the They are incomparably larger than other types of non-places that Augé identified, such as motorway service centres, clinics, hospitals, railway stations and shopping malls.

• Second, they attract almost no aesthetic attention. Airports occupy space that it greater than landscape gardens of the 18th century and the great urban parks of the 19th century, which are widely admired for their aesthetic merits. And the runways have a spatial scale is unquestionably awesome but treeless and seems to attract no aesthetic attention. While most airports have installations and artworks in passenger areas, their engineered, functional landscapes are apparently regarded as elements of urban infrastructure designed most for machines and easily ignored. In other words, airports are experienced fleetingly as blank landscapes.

• Third, the importance in people’s experience of the world is growing. More people travelling by air means more people experiencing the huge non-places of airports. The number of passengers carried by air transport has grown steadily from 310 million in 1970 to 4.7 billion in 2019. The optimistic projection of the airline industry is that, after the pandemic dip,  air travel will soon exceed 2019 levels and could well double by 2040, with much of the future growth in Africa and South Asia.  The case is that more and more people are passing through the non-places of airports. This is indicated by the rapid growth of international tourism. In 1950 there were about 22 million international tourist arrivals, then equivalent to less than one per cent of the world’s population travelling internationally; by 1975 the number had grown to 222 million, equivalent to 6 per cent of the world’s population; in 2019 there were almost 1.5 billion such arrivals equivalent, to almost 20 percent of the global population. In short, more and more people are experiencing the non-places of airports in order to travel for vacations.

• Fourth, many of the non-place characteristics of airports extend into the urban zones around them, which are filled with parking lots, chain hotels, networks of expressways and wide roads, and distribution centres for handling air freight and supplying services to the airport that are housed in very large, undistinguished buildings with blank walls and loading bays for trucks. It seems that the non-placeness of airports is mestastasizing into the surrounding landscapes.

A Concluding Comment
What my experience at Dallas-Fort Worth, combined with my experiences at t other large international airports, suggests to me is that the mitigation of processes of placelessness that has happened with protection of cultural and natural heritage since about 1970, does not apply to non-places. Airports are the pre-eminent instance of non-place, and they have grown significantly both in spatial extent and in the number of people who pass through them. Whether this is also the case with other types of non-places I do not know. What I do know from my own airport experiences is that as non-places they are not exactly alienating, but neither are they engaging.  They involve neither commitment nor antipathy. They are somewhere to be tolerated, with a sort of detached neutrality, as increasingly unavoidable and necessary aspects of travel between places that do matter to us.  

Marc Augé, 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, (London: Verso)

and on this website see my post about Non-Place and Placelessness

This is a brief post stimulated by something I recently read online in The Atlantic that took me by surprise because it adds an entirely different aspect to the idea of what might be considered placeless. Charlie Warzell, who writes about trends in social media, began by putting things in a context which applies to anybody reading this post: “You are currently logged on to the largest version of the internet that has ever existed…one of the 5 billion-plus people contributing to an unfathomable array of networked information…” Then he declared:

“The sprawl has become disorienting. Some of my peers in the media have written about how the internet has started to feel ‘placeless'”.

But isn’t the internet inherently placeless – a network of flows and websites that are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.? Cables and radio waves that carry the flows are either buried or invisible; there’s no easy way to know where websites like this one are based, and the computers and devices with which they are accessed are mass produced. The large data centers that house the cloud are clusters of unremarkable, industrial buildings in obscure locations; the smaller data centers with “meet-me rooms” where intercity fiber connects with local providers are mostly anonymous. Of course, you can use your devices to search for local shops or for wayfinding, and software does prompt us to turn on location services, but these are little more than gestures to place in an overwhelmingly placeless system.

_{Networks and Nodes of the Placeless Internet [Source: Mountpeaks]}

Bu I think that what Warzell means when he says “it “the internet has “started to feel placeless” has nothing to do with what I have always thought of as ‘placeless.’ What it suggests is that for him, as a devotee of online communication and social media, the internet once seemed to have distinct ‘places’ that gave it both coherence and diversity. He doesn’t say, but perhaps these were like communities of users, or perhaps it was just that the big apps – Facebook, You Tube, Twitter and so on – had identities that was embedded in how they conveyed information and how they were used. Anyway, his comment suggests that what he previously experienced as organized diversity of the internet is fragmenting into incoherence with no consistency, no discernible pattern. Online experiences, he suggests, are become increasingly “unique to every individual.”

Warzel references an article in NY Times Magazine by John Hermann, who also uses the word “placeless” to describe the fragmentation that he thinks is currently happening to media in the US: “As the election looms, the media — old but also new, niche but especially mainstream — is falling to pieces.” It will, he writes, “be a placeless race, in which voters and candidates can and will, despite or maybe because of a glut of fragmented content, ignore the news.”

^{A word cloud that gives a sense of the new meaning to the placeless internet [Source: Graph Design]}

The only conclusion I can take from this is that the internet has contributed to the development of a metaphorical meaning of ‘placeless’ as a way to describe whatever in the world seems to have become so unstructured and incoherent that you can no longer see where you are or how to find a way through it (which at the moment seems to apply to many things). And in the particular case of the internet, place is, to borrow a phrase from Huw Halstead, significant only in its absence.

A Footnote on the Development of this new sense of “Placeless”
That comment of Halstead’s was in an edition of the journal Memory Studies devoted to the impact of digital media on memory, in which he describes how the rapid growth of the internet in the 1990s prompted contrasting opinions from ‘cyber-visionaries’ and ‘cyberpessimists’.

The optimistic visionaries then envisaged the digital world as creating a sort of progressive placelessness that permitted greater freedom, enhanced democratic participation, and promoted global solidarity because it was unencumbered by the restrictions and antagonisms of boundaries and rootedness. This was a digital version of modernist, international style architecture, which promoted (and still does) the idea that one style is good for any climate and any location.

Cyberpessimists, on the other hand, feared that digital technologies, such as those of the internet, would lead to a different form of placelessness in which citizens would be separated from real neighborhoods and communities where daily life takes place, and memories would be cut loose from the distinctive places in which they were formed and which gave them meaning.

What the recent comments about the emergence of “the placeless internet” suggest is that with the subsequent development of social media and mobile phones, the internet came to be experienced not so much as placeless but as creating new types of communities or digital places on Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Tik Tok and so on, and there seemed to be a coherence to this. It now seems that these and other uses of the internet have fragmented into a constantly shifting kaleidoscope that involve unexceptional everyday use for messages and searches, influencers with short half-lives, sparks of viral activity, and echo chambers filled with almost indecipherable mixture of information and misinformation about the world. It’s an expanding universe moving in many directions at once.

The feeling that the world or some aspect of it has lost its familiar patterns and become become incomprehensible is nothing new. In 1611 John Donne wrote in his poem The Anatomy of the World : “Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.” In 1919 William Butler Yeats wrote: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.” What is new is that this feeling is now being characterized as ‘placeless’.

Perhaps that is a good thing. It implies that place, no matter how it is understood, is about coherence, order and comprehensible meaning. One obvious way of resolving placeless uncertainty, metaphorical or otherwise, is to attend to places.

Solastalgia” is the word coined in 2003 by Australian professor of environmental studies Glenn Albrecht to refer to the “place-based distress” that people experience when the places where they live in are negatively impacted by environmental changes over which they have no control (Connor et al, 2004, Albrecht et al, 2007).

This seems to have given a name to what had previously been widely felt but unspecified emotional reactions to unwelcome environmental changes. It was very quickly adopted as a way to encompass various types of eco-anxiety and psychological syndromes associated with both artificially and naturally caused environmental damage, and especially with climate change. It has also become popular in the arts – paintings, documentaries, music of all sorts, videos, poetry – perhaps in part because it’s a new idea but also, I suspect, because it captures some of the current underlying angst about the state of the world. At the beginning of 2023 National Public Radio in the US listed solastalgia as one of the buzzwords of the year.

Solastalgia lies at the intersection of health and place (which is a topic that has been extensively studies which has a major journal devoted to it with a number of articles about sostalgia). In this post I concentrate specifically on the relationships between place and solastalgia. The images I’ve included are screen captures that give an indication of the diverse ways solastalgia is being interpreted: the captions provide links to the sources, but I have not explored many of these.

Place, Nostalgia and Solastalgia
In his book Earth Emotions (2019, p.37) Albrecht reflects on the origins of the idea of solastalgia in terms that indicate both a strong connection to place and the force of the emotions it represents: “I thought we needed, in English, [a word for] the idea of a place-based emotion that captures the feeling of distress when an external force, one that we are powerless to prevent, enters the biophysical location or “life-space” within which one lives out a life (the private home, the property, and the region) and chronically desolates it. The place becomes literally toxic, and at the same time one’s sense of place becomes negative.” 

What solastalgia embraces is this combination of negative or damaging environmental changes (in Albrecht’s initial work these specifically involved an open-pit coal mine and persistent drought in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales in Australia), the unpleasant effects these have on the psychological health of those who live in places directly effected by those change, and the lack of control people in those places over the causes or the causes.

The word itself’ combines the idea of solace (as associated with the comfort and security of home) and the Greek root –algia, meaning pain or suffering. It was conceived as a variation of ‘nostalgia,’ a word coined in the 17th century to describe homesickness and depression experienced by those separated from their home place. It now means little more than a gentle longing or wistful affection for the past, but until the early 20th century it was regarded as a diagnosable, psychosomatic disease. Solastalgia, in contrast, is the distress and depression people suffer in their home place because of adverse environmental changes of some sort.

Thomas Dodman (2023) puts it succinctly: “Solastalgia is nostalgia in reverse: the consequence not of having to leave a particular place, but of having that place leave us, or dissolve before our very eyes.” One further difference is that, as Albrecht has written solastalgia “…is in your face, existential, raw, and Earthly” (2019, p.37). But the fact is that it can vary a lot depending on the intensity of the changes and people’s personalities, and may be, as he has also written, merely a sense of “homesickness when you are still at home” (Albrecht et al, 2007).

The Vagueness of Place in Studies of Solastalgia
A systematic review of academic research about solastalgia by Galway et al (2019) observes that while most discussions and case-studies of solastalgia describe it as a place-based phenomenon they actually leave the meaning of ‘place’ undefined. Place is apparently regarded as something more or less self-evident, a malleable backdrop to the physical and mental health issues of solastalgia which are the main focus of the research. This has the disadvantage that the active role of place in the distress of solastalgia is mostly left unexplored. But it has the advantage that solastalgia can be understood in relation to any spatial scale of environments – local communities, regions or even, especially in in the context of climate change, the whole world, without worrying much about how things are related. Naomi Klein, in her influential book This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate, (2014, p. 165), describes solastalgia as an expression of dread about the consequences of global warming and suggests, without elaboration, that it is fast becoming universal because the Earth itself is under assault.

The Academic and Popular Reach of Solastalgia
The comprehensive bibliographic review of solastalgia by Galway et al (2019) made it clear that it is a topic that has been identified as important in many disciplines. They identified 49 substantial academic articles that represented research in psychiatry, regional and city planning, sociology, ecology, agriculture, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, geography, environmental studies, and especially public and mental health.

They did not pay attention to the substantial parallel interest in solastalgia that is artistic rather than academic My unsystematic Google search including images, identified hundreds of websites that discussed, illustrated or interpreted solastalgia in some way – art shows, music compositions and videos, performance pieces, community discussions of eco-anxiety, magazines, documentaries, programmes on the BBC and PBS (Public Broadcasting Service in the US), poetry, several in . A number of the in French, Italian, Greek or Spanish, or in English but about events in Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Slovenia and the Netherlands. I haven’t explored all of these sites, but I get the impression that most are explorations of the emotions of solastalgia, that environmental degradation and climate change predominate, and the role of place is scarcely mentioned. Here are six images from all those websites that show different attempts to illustrate the emotions of solastalgia. Links and sources are in the captions.

Top Left: An Eco-Anxiety Zine. Centre: Biko audio CD; Right: a book of Irish Poetry
Bottom Left: Dutch Pop Concert; Centre: Fundación Meri; Right: Sheet Music

Solastalgia, Place, Placelessness
I understand place as the primary way people everywhere relate to the world. First of all we live in, visit and experiences places; concepts of neighbourhood, city, environment and so on, which are often used as equivalents to place, are abstractions that are secondary to place. Places are territories of concentrated meanings, associations and appearances, which may not always be pleasant but which always inform the identities of individuals and communities. All our lived experiences are to some degree grounded in and made specific by places. As territories of meanings places are subtle and elusive, which makes them difficult to analyse, but the names of places serve as metaphors for their complex meanings and make it possible to share understanding about them. Some places may have political or property boundaries, but from the perspective of experience these don’t mean a great deal because for individuals, communities and economies every place connects to the larger world, continually giving to it and receiving from it.

This sort of understanding of place and how it is experienced matters for solastalgia because it gives an indication of the depth, subtlety and complexity of the values that are threatened by external forces. In other words, solastalgia varies in its manifestations not only because of the character of the external environmental change that promotes it, but also because of the character of the place that experiences it and because of the diverse ways people in that place relate to it.

Some of this was indicated by a study of the health implications of climate change for the small Inuit community of Nunutsiavut in Labrador in Canada (Willox et al, 2012, p.545). One resident suggested that people there think of themselves “not only from this place, but of this place” because the land and way of life are deeply integrated with the setting. The authors of the study acknowledged this and suggested that: “A place-based approach …understands that even subtle alterations in climate and environment can have profound impacts on health and well-being” because for the residents their identities, well-being, livelihoods, histories, and emotional/spiritual connections emerge from the place they live. In some measure this is in fact the case for places everywhere. Our identities as individuals, members of communities, citizens and human beings are unavoidably influenced by the diverse connections we have with places. Solastalgia can dismember those connections.

This sort of understanding of place suggests to me that Albrecht is wrong when he states bluntly (2019 p.37) that solastalgia “.. is not a case of ‘placelessness’ as people are still firmly emplaced within their ‘home.'” On the contrary, I think solastalgia is a clear a manifestation of a sense of placelessness, of no longer belonging somewhere, of the feeling that follows when some external change over which people have no control ruptures the web of meanings that link them to particular places. They may continue to live in the same location, but it is a far less meaningful place.

Of course, this reaction to ruptures in place attachment is not uniformly shared by everyone. While some people recognize the quality of their place has diminished, but adapt to it and get on with their lives, others may experience it as a profoundly upsetting, pathological psychosomatic syndrome.

A promotional video for “The Terrasitic Infestation North American Headline Tour by West Coast Deathgrind Practitioners Capital Decapitation” suggests something towards the angry pathological side of Solastalgia. Here’s the link.

Two Reasons for the Rise of Interest in Solastalgia
I think there are two reasons why solastalgia has rapidly attracted such widespread interest.  One is historical. Presumably people have always been distressed by how environmental changes impacted the places where they lived, but until quite recently environmental destruction, for instance by damming rivers, open-pit mining, development of oil fields, constructing expressways, urban expansion, power generation and so on, was mostly accepted as a by-product or cost of progress, and rarely challenged.  Since about 1970 the shift to environmental protection, sustainability, and heritage preservation has given cultural value to natural environments; damage to them is now regarded as something to be minimised. Solastalgia is an outcome of this increased sensitivity, and a sign that economic progress at any cost has become morally and emotionally unacceptable.

The other reason has to do with uncertainty about the future. Solastalgia, especially in its popular manifestations, is an emotional response to the looming presence of the climate crisis (plus other global problems such as the loss of biodiversity). Global warming is a transformational change that, in the likely absence of equally transformational changes to social and economic life, will negatively affect everyone on the Earth. Especially or those who have been born since the beginning of the century and might well live to the beginning of the next one, future environmental conditions are deeply uncertain. Solastalgia is an anticipatory emotional reaction to the expectation that places everywhere and at every geographical scale will become increasingly difficult to live in as temperatures and sea levels rise, weather events become more extreme, and the entire Earth as the place of human life becomes increasingly challenging and unhomely. 

References

Albrecht, Glenn 2006 “Solastalgia” Alternatives Journal, Waterloo, Vol 32 4/5, pp. 34-35

Albrecht, Glenn et al 2007 “Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change”, Australasian Psychiatry 15 Issue 1, Suppl 1:pp. S95-8 accessed here

Glenn Albrecht 2019 Earth Emotions; New Words for a New World, Cornell University Press.

Connor, Linda, et al 2004 “Environmental Change and Human Health in Upper Hunter Communities of New South Wales, Australia”, EcoHealth Volume 1

Dodman, Thomas, 2023 “Nostalgia and what it used to be” Current Opinion in Psychology Vol 49.

L. Galway et al, 2019 “Mapping the Solastalgia Literature: A Scoping Review Study,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16, 2662 accessed here.

Klein, Naomi, 2014 This Changes Everything, Toronto: Knopf Canada

Willox, A.C. et 2012 “From this place and of this place: climate change, sense of place and health in Nunutsiavut, Canada” Social Science and Medicine. 75 538-547 accessed here

While searching websites for my recent post about Place on Google I discovered a number of diagrams that illustrate the concept of sense of place. These are the five I think most useful and informative.

1. A Triangle of Identity and Attachment
   

This triangle of triangles puts the emphasis on the sense aspect of sense of place by emphasizing identity and attachment. These are concepts that are important in psychological studies of place, so I find it intriguing that this diagram is in a chapter an edited volume about water quality in which most of the chapters focus on pollution and technical concerns. The authors argue that “sense of place offers promise as a tool for measuring an important aspect of the social value of water quality.”

Source: Kate K. Mulvaney, Nathaniel H. Merrill and Marisa J. Mazzotta, 2020, “Sense of Place and Water Quality: Applying Sense of Place Metrics to Better Understand Community Impacts of Changes in Water Quality” in Kevin Summers, ed. Water Quality: Science, Assessments and Policy, InTech Open [an open access peer-reviewed edited volume], accessed online here.

2. An Inverted Triangle of Built Form and Activity

Another triangle diagram that identifies three different components because it puts the emphasis on the place aspect of sense of place, reflecting how it is viewed in terms of built environments by planners and some geographers. The context is also interesting because this is in a paper that examines the ways electronic media are impacting sense of place, though this diagram does not capture those.

Source: Mai Ahmed and Peter Zelle 2020 “Places’ representation on social media – A study to analyze the differences between the virtual communities and the offline environment” Conference paper REAL CORP 2020 Proceedings/Tagungsband, accessed here. (They acknowledge that this is partly based on a diagram in J. Punter, 1991 “Participation in the design of urban space” Landscape design , 200, 24-27.)

3. A Web of Indicators

This more complex diagram includes components from the two triangle diagrams above, adds others, and suggests links between what the authors call “place indicators.” The suggestion is that sense of place, as it relates to houses and built forms, can be understood as the centre of a web of interconnected social, individual and environmental aspects of places and experience of place’.

Source: Duygu Gokce and Fei Chen 2018 “Sense of Place in the changing process of house form: Case studies from Ankara, Turkey”, Environment and Planning B, 45 (4) p. 774 July 2018, accessed online here

4. A Venn Diagram of Individual, Community and Place

This Venn diagram combines elements of the three previous diagrams, and is I think the most sophisticated of all five images I show here. Sense of place is not labelled, but is implicitly in the centre where the three loops overlap. Although the emphasis is social and psychological, the details about global-local linkage, familiarity, power and discourse, intersubjectivity, etc, extend the range for how sense of place needs to be understood, and also suggest its the subtleties and complexities. The way that the various sub-components are loosely clustered acknowledges that their relationships are flexible and varied. It is worth noting that the- the author teaches in a Department of Nursing – interest in place has few disciplinary boundaries.

Source: Goran Erfani 2022 “Reconceptualising Sense of Place: Towards a Conceptual Framework for Investigating Individual-Community-Place Interrelationships”, Journal of Planning Literature, Vol 37, No. 3 accessed online here

5. Circles, Radii, and Words

This visually powerful diagram of sense of place is based on ideas about urban design that are taken from Kevin Lynch’s work on the image of the city (cited bottom left). It can be read, I think, as an elaboration of the inverted triangles about built form and activity shown above. At first glance I found it striking. and it certainly has a lot of information with the combination of diagram and text. However, on reflection I think there is too much going here for the diagram to be really effective; it is cluttered with circles, radial patterns, the ring of little badges, the outer band divided into segments, lists of landmarks, events, world’s best public art, most visited cities. And in spite of this it conveys fewer ideas than the Venn diagram. However, if your interest in specifically in sense of place from the perspective of urban and built environments, this should be helpful.

Source: Ric Stevens 2011 “Sense of Place: An approach to environmental perception/cognition and placemaking”, Prepared for the Oregon Planning Institute, accessed online here:

One of the earliest entries I did for this blog was the page Place on Google, in 2015.  I wanted to get some sense of the wide range of ways the idea of ‘place’ is used, and was curious what on online search would produce. What I got was “an eclectic, jumbled set of results.” The exercise was a good reminder that ‘place’ is powerful and versatile word with a solid core and many, diverse branches.

When I recently went back to look at that page I found that a number of the links no longer worked, which led me to wonder what else might have changed. A quick search suggested some differences, which in turn led me to follow my previous strategy of looking at about the first 100 entries or so for ‘place’ and about 50 each for ‘sense of place’ and ‘spirit of place’. This post summarizes the results.

My search for ‘place’ found over 20 billion results In half a second. For ‘sense of place’ it was 3.3 billion, and ‘spirit of place’ a mere 1.25 billions. Very impressive, but the fact is that after the first 100 or so the results mostly are a blend of inconsequential and repetitive.

What’s New About Place on Google in 2023

Definitions and Meanings: In 2023 definitions and synonyms dominate the top search results. This was not the case in 2015 when I identified about 18 different ways ‘place’ was used in websites, for instance in the names of shelters, in teaching resources, mathematics, architecture, social networking, writing computer code, building names, heritage, and no sense of place. I had no category for definitions.

The following sites were in the top twelve results.
Google’s definition based on Oxford Languages. Then Cambridge, Dictionary, Thesaurus, Collins, Britannica, Wiktionary, Merriam Webster
Each offers maybe twenty or more dictionary definitions of place, both nouns and verbs, and most also suggest synonyms such as ‘ambience’, ‘spot’ and ‘vibe’. My impression is that this plethora of definitions offers almost no clarity about the idea of experience of ‘place” except to demonstrate that it is a remarkably flexible word with many different uses and meanings.

Books: I do not recall if in 2015 there was a separate search category on Google for Books, but in 2023 there is, and it lists hundreds that have ‘place’ in the title – novels, autobiographies, poetry, accounts of regions and of cities.

About 10 percent of all the titles Iare about academic research, and many listings have fragments of the text that discuss the meaning of place. Merely glancing at these is an easy way to get some sense of the range of recent thinking about place across a range of disciplines. In the first five screens I looked at there were books about indigenous places and colonialism, place in architecture, landscape painting, place names, neighborhoods, poetics, diasporas, politics, heritage, and geography.

Real Estate: Another new category. It consists mostly of online listings for buildings or streets that have ‘place’ in their name, but there is also a highly ranked website providing services for real estate agents, with the succinct URL  https://place.com – an all-in-one technology platform for real estate agents.

Locational Bias. This is not a category of place websites but rather a clear orientation I found in the search results towards where I live. This was the case even though I thought I had blocked access to my location. Presumably search engines have a built in assumption that you want to know about what is relevant in your part of the world. What I got were numerous websites that had something to do with Canada that ranged in scale from Earth: Spirit of Place, a book of photographs from space by the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, to Toronto: Spirit of Place, to Our Place, a shelter for the homeless a few blocks from where I live.

This sort of locational bias was not evident in 2015.  From a place perspective it is difficult to regard it as anything other than positive. On the other hand, place is no more concentrated in my part of the world than it is anywhere else, so it is important to note this bias and to look beyond it.

Continuity and Discontinuity

Continuities: Except for the new categories of Definitions and Real Estate there is considerable continuity in how ‘place’ is revealed in website searches. Especially notable  is the continuing and perhaps increasing use of the word ‘place’ in names of shelters and support groups – e.g Rosies’s Place, the first women’s shelter in the US, also Nina’s, Maggie’s, Stella’s, My Sister’s Place. etc, which provide similar support services. I think this reflects the fact that ‘place’ is a neutral term in the name of a facility, it has connotations of comfort, safety, and security.
Place continues to be important in education websites that provide resources for teachers and the promotion of place-based learning.  It remains popular as as focus in design and planning. There are still some active sites that refer to place in relation to computers; Schema is important because it has to do with writing code that captures place and location data.

The locational bias in my search results drew my attention to the Quebec Declaration on the Preservation of The Spirit of Place, approved in 2008 at the meeting of the International Council of Monuments and Sites, an NGO that works to protect cultural heritage places and is an advisory body to UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee. This sort of thinking about place has trickled down and now seems to be a common element in heritage conservation at all levels (though there are rather different ways of thinking about spirit of place, as these two recent books indicate)

Discontinuities In 2015 I identified categories of place in my Google Research that had to do with Social Networking, Placemeters (Placemeter), Science Research about Place, and No Sense of Place. Most of the links for these have disappeared, and I found little evidence in 2023 that these are significant themes.

A Concluding Comment about Placeness
I find it mildly encouraging that this website on Placeness, Place and Placelessness, with absolutely no attempts to get a high ranking and out the billions of results of the searches, is identified in the top 100 or so websites on Place that I looked at, in the top 50 for Sense of Place and in the top five for Spirit of Place.

About a year ago I came upon a sign in Paris about Rene Descartes (shown below) that led me to wonder if place might have had some role in facilitating the insights of philosophers and scientists. I began to read biographies and autobiographies of some of them with whose work I was modestly acquainted, to see whether they suggest anything of note about the role of place in their lives. Understandably those books deal mostly with intellectual history, and many convey nothing of interest, but some offer intriguing though brief comments about the places where ideas where conceived or developed. This post is a sort of experiment based on just ten cases to see if the biographies of famous philosophers and scientists suggest anything of value about place.

René  Descartes (1596-1650)
In Discourse on the Method of Reason Descartes developed an approach that lies at the foundation of rationalism and modern science. His method was, in his words, “never to accept anything as true that I did not incontrovertibly know to be so; carefully to avoid both prejudice and premature conclusions; and to include nothing in my judgements other than that which presented itself to my mind so clearly and distinctly, that I would have no occasion to doubt it.” From the perspective of place Discourse on the Method of Reason is significant because it includes clear descriptions of the places where Descartes formulated this method (though it’s important to note he concluded paradoxically that it led to the conviction that he himself “was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which doesn’t need any place or depend on any material thing.”)
In 1619 while he was returning to his position as an officer in the army of the Duke of Bavaria he was unexpectedly held up, probably somewhere near Munich, by the onset of winter, and it was then that his philosophical reflections began. “Finding no conversation to help me pass the time,” he wrote,” and no cares to trouble me, I stayed all day shut up alone in small room heated by a stove where I was free to talk with myself about my own thoughts.”
His life then immediately took a different turn, and he set aside his reflections for nine years when he “did nothing but roam from place to place, trying to be a spectator rather than an actor.” When he finally was about to settle in France it became clear that his scientific views were likely to be repressed by the Catholic church, so he moved to Holland, a Puritan country, where he could continue to develop his method of reason without fear of reprisals. In his words, he decided “to move away from all the places where I might have acquaintances and to retire here, in a country in which … people enjoy the fruits of peace with correspondingly greater security, and where amid a teeming, active, great people that shows more interest in its own affairs than curiosity for those of others, I have been able to live as solitary and as retiring a life as I would in the most remote of deserts, while lacking none of the comforts found in the most populous cities.”
Descartes lived at a time when war and religious orthodoxy were almost constant companions of everyday life. It appears that what mattered most for him were not places attractive for aesthetic or social distinctiveness but rather places attractive primarily for what they were not, ones free of distractions and ideological prejudice that allowed him the opportunity to pursue his own thoughts as he chose.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
Hobbes, considered the founder of modern political philosophy, was a contemporary of Descartes, and they exchanged letters on a number of issues. The remarkable title page of his major work, Leviathan, shows the state as a monster comprised of the bodies of countless individuals, but it also identifies the author as “Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury.”

Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
Newton was born at Woolsthorpe, a village in England, in 1642, at the beginning of the English Civil War. In 1664 he was a student studying classics at Cambridge when he came upon the works of Descartes and Galileo and, following their leads, his mind turned to science and mathematics. In the summer of 1665, the university was closed because of an outbreak of the plague, and he returned to Woolsthorpe to quarantine for almost two years. It was there that he made his initial experimental discoveries in optics and astronomy, and developed his understanding of mathematics, including the calculus, and and where he is said to have seen an apple falling from a tree that led him to the notion of gravity. In other words, rather like Descartes in the Netherlands and Hobbes in Paris, the important aspect of place for Newton was freedom from distracting concerns that allowed him time for contemplation, though in his case he found this at his familiar childhood home rather than a foreign country.

David Hume (1711-1776)
Hume was born and educated in Edinburgh, then moved to Bristol to work in business. He soon abandoned that and, as he wrote in his short autobiography My Own Life, “went over to France with a view of prosecuting my studies in a country retreat; and I there laid that plan of life, which I have steadily and successfully pursued…During my retreat in France, first at Reims, but chiefly at La Flèche, in Anjou, I composed my Treatise of Human Nature.” La Flèche was a small village where, whether coincidentally or not, Descartes had studied a century earlier. It provided the quiet and seclusion Hume initially wanted, but he soon moved to Paris. “There is,” he wrote, “a real satisfaction in living at Paris, from the great number of sensible, knowing, and polite company with which that city abounds above all places in the universe.”
Hume’s empirical approach to philosophy, that aimed to “reject every system … however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation”, explicitly influenced the work of Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant and Charles Darwin (who regarded it as a central influence on the theory of evolution).

Adam Smith (1723-1790)
Adam Smith was born and went to school in the small town of Kirkcaldy near Edinburgh, then studied at the University of Glasgow and at Oxford (which he he found to be an intellectual desert compared with Glasgow). When he graduated he returned to Glasgow as a professor of moral philosophy and became deeply involved in the social life of the city, including with merchants and businessmen. These years he described afterwards as “by far the happiest, and most honourable period of my life.” But his university job paid poorly and after a few years he left for a higher paying position as tutor to a young English aristocrat. This took him to Toulouse in France (where, out of boredom he started work on The Wealth of Nations), and then to Paris, where David Hume introduced him to the intellectual society of the city, including social reformers (some called themselves les economistes) who had a very significant influence on his economic thinking.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Kant is a key figure in modern philosophy because he both brought together the themes of early modern rationalism, and set the terms for most 19th and 20th century discussions. It was Hume’s work, he noted, that woke him from his “dogmatic slumber.” Kant lived in the small city of Koningsberg, then a major German commercial centre and port, now called Kaliningrad in Russia. Unlike most of his philosophical predecessors of the 17th and18th centuries, he spent his entire life in that one place. The reasons for his commitment to Koningsberg are not altogether clear. He constantly worried about his health, and may thought that travel would affect it adversely. He was also compulsively systematic, following exactly the routines every day, and it seems possible that he would have been unable to cope with the disruptions involved in moving to an unfamiliar place. Whatever the reason, he never traveled more than a few kilometres away from the city.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)  
Mill’s autobiographical essay is mostly devoted to his education, but gives hints about the importance of some places for his thinking. He was born in a suburb of London, and educated at home. There he met his father’s acquaintances, including utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham who had a house in the west of England where Mill spend a summer when he was about twelve and which he describes in his autobiography as “an important circumstance in my education.. a fine old place, so unlike the mean and cramped externals of English middle class life.” It was, he wrote in a statement that seems to anticipate his writing about liberty, somewhere that “gave the sentiment of a large and freer existence.” 
A few years later, in his teenage years, he accompanied the Bentham family to France for several months, where he visited the Pyrenees, of which he wrote: “This first introduction to the highest order of mountain scenery made the deepest impression on me, and gave a colour to my tastes through life.” No less important was the fact that the trip included a visit to Paris where he was “exposed to continental liberalism” for the first time and started to become “a firm believer in the agency of the revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity.” France, and specifically “the enjoyment of country life” in the house he lived in near Avignon, became the place where he worked with his wife Harriet on many of the ideas of his seminal work On LIberty. After she died he made infrequent trips to England, and he was buried beside her in Avignon.

Friedrich Engels (1820-95)
The place experience of Engels, though more or less contemporary with that of Mills, could scarcely have differed more.  He was born into a wealthy family of industrialists in what is now Wuppertal in Germany, and was sent to Manchester in 1842, when the city was by many accounts the epicentre of the industrial revolution, to supervise a cotton mill that was owned by his family. However, he had a radical view of the world, and as a keen observer of landscapes and places he systematically explored the city’s neighbourhoods, especially the poorest one. These he described in The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844 as a “planless, knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness.” In his book he described the poverty, filth and squalor, including families in single, windowless rooms, where many families lived “in defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health.” The contrast with the clean and orderly areas where the middle classes lived could hardly have been greater. “When I consider in this connection the eager assurances of the middle-class, that the working-class is doing famously,” he wrote, “I cannot help feeling that the liberal manufacturers, the ‘Big Wigs’ of Manchester are not so innocent after all.”

Charles Darwin (1809-82)
Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, a small English city close to the mountains of North Wales where, in his youth, he frequently walked and appears to have developed his initial interest in the natural world. His formal education in Edinburgh and Cambridge he found “dull”, but his incidental interests in natural science, especially geology and etymology, led to his appointment in 1831 as a naturalist on the Beagle, a Royal Navy survey ship. In the five years of the voyage, which he described in his autobiography as “by far the most important event in my life,” he collected specimens and kept detailed notes about the natural history of all the places the Beagle visited in South America and elsewhere.  
When the Beagle reached the Galapagos Islands his main focus was on their volcanic geology, and his field notes included only brief mentions of animals and plants. His autobiography, written towards the end of his life, describe the Islands as the place merely as important for their “singular relations of its plants and animals.” He had no epiphany about evolution while he was there. But as the Beagle sailed on to Tahiti he examined the specimens that had been collected by himself and others from the different Galapagos Islands and noticed that similar birds from different islands, though related to species he had seen on the mainland of South America, had developed features that suggested they were different species. However, it was not until 1845, nine years after the Beagle had returned to England and he had had time to confirm his observations with ornithologists and the work of other naturalists, that he realized the importance of what he had observed. He wrote then in his Journal of Researches (p. 394): “I never dreamed that islands about 50 or 60 miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted… It is the fate of most voyagers, no sooner to discover what is most interesting in any locality, than they are hurried from it…”
From the perspective of place Darwin’s life was a contrast between mobility and stability. A few years after the voyage of the Beagle he began to suffer from chronic illnesses (which he described as involving violent shivering and vomit attacks) that made both travel and social activities almost impossible. The most important place for him then became his house at Down, in the countryside south of London.  In his autobiography he wrote: “We found this house and purchased it. I was pleased with the diversified appearance of vegetation proper to a chalk district, and so unlike what I had been accustomed to in the Midland counties; and still more pleased with the extreme quietness and rusticity of the place.” It was a retreat where he could concentrate on his scientific work when he was feeling well enough. “Few persons can have lived a more retired life than we have done. Besides short visits to the houses of relations, and occasionally to the seaside or elsewhere, we have gone nowhere.”

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Kierkegaard is generally regarded as the first existential philosopher. He was a contemporary of Darwin and Engels, but his experiences of place had no similarity to either of theirs. He lived most of his life in Copenhagen within a one kilometre radius of Copenhagen’s Vor Frue Kirke (Church of Our Lady) and his place experience involved a complicated relationship with that city. “I regard the whole of Copenhagen as a great party,” he wrote. “But on one day I regard myself as the host who goes and talks to all the many invitees, my dear guests; on the next day I imagine that it is some great man who is giving the party and I am a guest.”
George Pattison has written that the city of Copenhagen is no less important a part of the background to Kierkegaard’s authorship than any intellectual and cultural movement. It was a crucial part of his writing process because he formulated his thoughts by walking around the city and talking with people, then wrote as soon as he returned to his house. Its streets, churches, parks, entertainments, and burial grounds were integral to the very fabric of his his critique of modernity and struggle to redefine what it meant to be Christian. Kierkegaard was a sort of flaneur for whom the place where he lived was replete with the meanings and attitudes of the age. His task deciphering those meanings made him increasingly dismayed about the degree to which belief and faith had been displaced by false convictions and rationalism.  He began to refer to the city as “a market town” occupied by a “human swarm” and and to seek specific places, such as the Church of our Lady and the countryside outside the city, where he could be free of its influences and find inner peace.

A Concluding Comment
On the basis of these biographical summaries I think no firm conclusion can be drawn about the role of place in stimulating profound thinking and insights of notable philosophers and scientists.
For Descartes and Hobbes finding places free from ideological oppression was important. Newton’s innovative thinking seems to have benefitted from being quarantined at home. Hume, Mill and Smith were intellectually stimulated by life in Paris. but to write The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith presumably found it advantageous to live with his mother in his home town. Places encountered through travel were important to some, especially Darwin of course, though he, too, needed a quiet home place to write about those. Engels was an acute observer of places, and his radical ideas were stimulated by the inequality he saw in them. Kant lived his life in one place but it had no apparent role in his thinking. Kierkegaard also spent his life in one place but his experiences there were essential to his thinking .
In short, while associations with particular places were not unimportant in their lives, those associations took diverse and inconsistent forms. T

The Impact of Philosophers and Scientists on Places
The most notable relationships between philosophers and places, as indeed with many famous people, is actually in posterity. The various places where they were born, lived, studied and died have been given some lasting recognition, usually in plaques, signs and statues, sometimes by turning their houses into heritage sites. The site of the house in Malmesbury where Hobbes was born has a simple sign. So does the site of the long-demolished house in Kirkcaldy where Adam Smith spent most of life. Mill’s grave in Avignon has a decorative fence, and there’s a statue of him in London where he lived and worked for many years. Trip Advisor ranks the statue of Immanuel Kant as #37 of 238 things to do in Kaliningrad.
On a more elaborate scale the University of Glasgow has an Adam Smith Business School, an Adam Smith chair of Political Economy, an Adam Smith building, an Adam Smith Research Foundation and an Adam Smith Library. Newton’s estate in Woolsthorpe is now owned by the National Trust and, in some process of scientific place transference, grafts from the apple tree have been shipped to universities around the globe. Down House in Kent where Darwin lived is owned by English Heritage whose website recommends it as “A Great Value Family Day Out for Just £41.60”; the Galapagos Islands are marketed as an important destination for environmental tourists. Copenhagen has Søren Kierkegaard walking tours. Engels had largely been ignored In Manchester until 2017 when the rock musician Phil Collins got a statue of Engels he had found abandoned in Ukraine installed in front of the HOME performing arts centre.
I am not sure why identifying or visiting a place associated with a person famous should be considered worthwhile, though I often do it myself. Perhaps it is a way for us to admire and recall famous individuals, but I suspect we also quietly hope that by going to those places some of their insights or abilities will somehow rub off on us and we can share a little bit of their fame.

Darwin’s Down House as promoted on the website of English Heritage in 2023, and rubbing the toe of the statue in Edinburgh of David Hume, a person who did not believe in miracles, in the hope that it will bring good fortune.

References
• A general source I have found informative for this post is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has excellent biographies of philosophers and essays about their contributions to philosophy. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu
• René Descartes, Discourse on the Method trans Ian MacLean, Oxford World Classics, 2006 https://docslib.org/doc/10835580/descartes-1637-discourse-on-method-pdf
• David Hume, 1777, My Own Life, available at https://davidhume.org/texts/mol/
• John Stuart Mill, Autobiography available at https://www.utilitarianism.com/millauto/
• Friedrich Engels, 1845, The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844, available at https://archive.org/details/conditionworkingclassengland/page/49/mode/2up?view=theater
• Charles Darwin, 1881, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2010/2010-h/2010-h.htm
• Charles Darwin, 1845, Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Countries visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, available at http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F14&viewtype=text&pageseq=1
• Kierkegaard – I have relied on George Pattison, 2013, “Kierkegaard and Copenhagen” in J. Lippet and G Pattison (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, Oxford University Press. Available at https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34339/chapter-abstract/327336322?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

[Note: I have not included the philosopher Martin Heidegger in this post because because he is a sole exception to general disconnection between place and philosophical or scientific insight and because I have written about elsewhere in this website about his thinking, for instance in the posts Home and Place, and the Politics of Place.]

This topic that has been on my place radar for some time. Taking students outdoors to learn about and from places has been done for centuries, and I did it in many of my classes when I was teaching. In the last thirty years this practice has been formalized and explicitly named as ‘place-based education’ or ‘place-based learning’.  It has been widely promoted and adopted, especially in North America and Australia, but also in Japan, Norway, Britain and elsewhere.

Here I consider it as an example of one of the ways that the importance of place is now being explicitly recognized in different fields and disciplines, and note its alignment with the notion of learning through doing that was first articulated about a century ago by the American philosopher John Dewey. An account of its background and origins from an educational perspective, particular how it developed from attempts to find ways to teach children about environmental issues is provided by Greg Smith in “The Past, Present and Future of Place-Based Learning” at Getting Smart 2016.

Definitions and Principles of Place-Based Education
David Sobel, in the first book devoted to place-based education provides a comprehensive definition that is frequently referenced by others : “Place-based education is the process of using the local community and environment as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum…Hands on, real world learning experiences help students develop stronger ties to their communities, enhance appreciation for the natural world and create a heightened commitment to serving as an active citizen” (Sobel, 2004).

Another more succinct and enigmatic definition, which also seems to be frequently cited, is: “Place based education is anywhere, anytime learning that leverages the power of place to personalize learning” (see: Getting Smart 2017)

These definitions are elaborated in what are often described as the six key principles of place-based education. (See for example: castschool, maine, teton science, and particularly vander Ark et al which is summarized here ).

• A place that is beyond the confines of the school can be a classroom.
• Local learning can serve as basis for understanding global issues (sometimes phrased as the need to develop a sense of place before trying to understand abstract global problems).
• The process is learner centred, which makes it personally relevant to students.
• Lessons are enquiry based, which involves making careful observations about a place, asking relevant questions, and collecting data in systematic ways.
• Students learn the sorts of critical skills needed to make an impact on the local community.
• It is holistic and interdisciplinary because traditional subject area content and skills are taught through an integrated interdisciplinary approach that responds to real places.

While some of the ideas and practices in these six principles have long  been a part of the curriculum, for instance in geography, in place-based education they have taken on a more forceful and focussed role which recognizes that where and how a student learns are as important as what a student learns. Unlike conventional text learning, which is both passive and siloed into subject areas, place-based learning is multidisciplinary, participatory, connects students with a community, and gets them directly engaged in making sense of environment processes and problems.

Place in Place-Based Learning
In place-based education the idea of place seems to be taken mostly as self-evident, unproblematic concept: it is simply a fragment of geography, somewhere local with a particular identity, usually but not necessarily the community or area where the school is located because this is easily accessible. However, implicit in the six principles is the acknowledgement that places/localities are rather more complex than this, that they are the contexts of everyday life, tangled knots of social and environmental features and processes that in various ways are both openings to and open to the larger world, and that it requires some effort of observation and interpretation to disentangle them.

I think the approaches of place-based education are important because they convey to students that we all unavoidably live in places with all their thrown-together complexities, contradictions, and contestations. Places are what we know first in the real world, before we learn about mathematics and language arts and social studies. Accounts and explanations provided by conventional disciplines, no matter how complicated they may sometimes seem, are always simplifications of our experiences of places.

Place-based education is also important because teachers have to educate students in ways that will help their students to deal with what they will encounter in the rest of their lives. It is easy to despair about the unprecedented local and global challenges of the 21st century, including climate change, ongoing degradation of natural environments, and persistent inequalities, but the advocates of place-based learning bring a very positive attitude to handling these. Peter Renshaw (2017), for example, is confident that place-based learning can provide the personal connectedness and interdisciplinary flexibility that are essential tools for dealing with them. And Tom vander Ark, Emily Liebtag, and Nate McClennen are utterly optimistic about the value of learning from place (vander Ark, 2020, p. 132):
“Despite mounting risks, the second decade of the 21st century is a wonderful time to be a young person on this planet. It has never been easier to make an impact by coding, launching a campaign, starting an organization that will have an impact on the world, and many of these will be the result of an adult working with a young person and a place.”

John Dewey: “Local geography is the natural starting point”
In the background of place-based education, and frequently referred to by its proponents, are the ideas of the early 20th century American philosopher John Dewey. He didn’t write explicitly about place but he did argue that schools needed to move away from memorization of received knowledge to experiential learning. In his 1916 book Democracy and Education (Chapter 16, The Significance of Geography and History) he claimed that if geography and history are taught as ready-made studies which somebody studies simply because they are sent to school, it easily happens that “ordinary experience…is weighed down and pushed into a corner by a load of unassimilated information.” On the other hand: “With every increase of ability to place our own doings in their time and space connections, our doings gain in significant content;” in schools, he suggests, “local or home geography is the natural starting point” to encourage this.

Dewey did acknowledge that some content, facts and values had to be taught in classrooms, but his pedagogical philosophy emphasized above all the principle of learning by doing. Abstract knowledge needs to be grounded in activities in the real world. And because education is unavoidably connected to community and social life, this necessarily involved engaging directly with the community and its local or home geography. It took another eighty years for Dewey’s suggestion to be realized, but grounding abstract knowledge is exactly what place-based learning aims to achieve by deriving it from the investigation of local communities and places.

Two Qualifications: Non-Places and Learning from Places
This straightforward interpretation of place as local community and geography, which seems to be assumed by many proponents of place-based education, is problematic according to Joy Berling (2018). She raises the matter of non-places, the ones without history or culture that are described by Marc Augé (1995) in his book about them, and argues that rooting place-based learning in the local environment and emphasizing place awareness fails to address the fact that place is “increasingly ephemeral or even non-existent in the world of supermodernity.” I think this is an important caution. In order to help students makes sense of the modern world it is just as worthwhile to investigate uninspiring, placeless settings apparently empty of culture, as it is to examine conveniently local fragments of geography.

Moreover, if education is understood in its broadest sense as learning about the world, and places are understood as complicated territories of meanings with or without distinctive identities, then it is clear from the insights of numerous artists, poets, philosophers and scientists that there are many ways individuals have learnt from them that owe little to the pedagogic approaches of place-based education. Some that spring easily to mind are Alexander von Humboldt, Gilbert White, Wordsworth, Cézanne, van Gogh, Thoreau, Darwin, Heidegger, even Descartes whose philosophy explicitly disavowed place but nevertheless carefully described the places where he conceived that philosophy. I don’t know that place-based education has much to learn from the place experiences of such remarkable people, but from the perspective of place they suggest some intriguing possibilities that I hope to explore in a future post.

References
Augé, Marc, (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, (London: Verso)

Joy Berling (2018) Non-Place and the Future of Place-Based Education, Environmental Education Research, Vol 24, Issue 11

John Dewey, (1916), Democracy in Education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. Available at Project Gutenberg

Peter Renshaw, ed., (2017) Diverse Pedagogies of Place: Educating Students in and for Local and Global Environments, Taylor and Francis, London

Sobel, D. (2004) Place-Based Education: Connecting Classroom and Community, Great Barrington, MA, The Orion Society.

Tom Vander Ark, Emily Liebtag, and Nate McClennen (2020 )The Power of Place: Authentic Learning Through Place-Based Education, Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development