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

This post differs from all my others because it consists simply of extracts relating to place and landscape that I have taken from Eric Dardel’s 1952 book L’Homme et la Terre: Nature de la Réalité Géographique (Man and the Earth: The nature of geographical reality). It has no images. It does, however, offer what I consider to be valuable insights into the phenomenological foundations of geography, place and landscape. These directly informed my book Place and Placelessness, and have permeated much of my subsequent writing.

I have recently posted a translation of Chapter One of Dardel’s book on Academia.edu. This chapter is about ‘Geographical Space,” and because the book only has two chapters my translation covers about half of it. I have not translated the second chapter, which is on the History of Geography.

In this post the first two items on ‘Geographicality’ are a précis of several sections of Dardel’s book and they are almost entirely in my words. However the items on Landscape, and on Existence and Geographical Reality, are mostly taken directly from my translation of Dardel’s book, and are, in effect, quotations though I have not used quotation marks. What I have done is to omit long discussions about examples that support his arguments, and selected statements that might be of some value to those interested in place or landscape. If you want to cite something from these two items you should acknowledge them as: Eric Dardel, L’Homme et la Terre: Nature de la Réalité Géographique Presses Universitaires de France, 1952, as translated by Edward Relph, 2022.  

Geographicality versus geometric space
Dardel’s premise is that before and behind all objective, formal and scientific accounts of the world, including those of academic geography, there lies the curiosity and wonder of direct, unmediated experience. For Dardel these beforehand experiences constitute a relationship that he calls “geographicality” (géographicité in French) that binds us to the Earth and the world. It is how we encounter what he refers to as “the Earth” which for Dardel is synonymous with “geographical reality’, and equivalent to what is often simply referred to as ‘the world.”

Geometric space and the space of atlases is “homogeneous, uniform, neutral.” However, the space of geographicality is everywhere differentiated because human initiative gives to each place a distinctive appearance and its own name. It involves a sort of complicity of existence that is expressed in curiosity about places, landscapes and environments. Geographicality involves a mix of perceptions, emotions, our bodies, habits, mobility, that are so taken for granted they are mostly overlooked or forgotten in much the same way that we forget our own physiology. Yet it is there when we contemplate the ocean, enjoy walking in a forest or down a picturesque street, look out over a landscape from a scenic viewpoint, get annoyed by some new development that seems out of context, or admire spring blossoms. It is, Dardel suggests, mostly “hidden yet ready to reveal itself,” something that happens, for instance, when we have to move away from a place we love or through some exceptional environmental experience.

Space in Geographicality
The ways we encounter the world are colored by what Dardel describes as the spaces of geographicality. Space here means almost something like ‘atmosphere’ and the ones he identifies are material, telluric, aquatic, aerial, and built, all of which interact in diverse ways in our experiences of places and landscapes.  

• material space is filled with mountains, rivers, oceans, cities, with distances and directions; it welcomes or challenges human freedom; it is somewhere we can get lost in or find ourselves. I think of it as the space of the surface of the earth as we see it or move across it.
• “telluric” means originating in the earth. Telluric space has density and depth, it provides a foundation for human existence. “Granite is the fundamental substance,” wrote Hegel in his Philosophy of Nature. “The rock stands firm against tempest and erosion; it is unshakeable, unalterable, like the very seat of the world.” We experience telluric space in the sheer mass of  mountains, in canyons, quarries, cliffs, caves, almost anywhere bare, solid rock is exposed.
• aquatic spaces of lakes, rivers, the ocean, are always in motion, often gentle, sometimes still and like a mirror but mostly flowing, and occasionally violent and tempestuous in floods and storms. Telluric space provides a foundation; aquatic space has power to erode, and change.       
• the space of air is atmospheric, “invisible yet always present, permanent yet changing, imperceptible but pulled about by the wind as though insignificant,” varying according to time of day, the season and climate and therefore modifying the geographicality of other spaces.
• Built or constructed spaces are all those those made by people, including fields, terraces, roads, and the range of dwelling places from villages to cities. These differ in their qualities and meanings, constituent, enduring, casually accepted, almost unconscious elements that frame everyday life. Built environments, whether roads or towns or transmission towers on mountain tops, given definition to material space, can rearrange and give meaning to aquatic space, and create their own horizons and atmospheres.

Landscape
The constant interactions of the forms of geographical space are manifest in landscape. Something more than a juxtaposition of picturesque details, landcape is an assemblage, a convergence, a lived-moment. There is an internal bond, an ‘impression’, that unites all its elements. It implicates the totality of what it is to be human and our existential attachment to the Earth, our original geographicality, because the Earth is the foundation and the means of our accomplishments. Landscape is a presence that can be attached or estranged, and yet which is lucid in the way it affects our bodies and minds.

Landscape is not a closed circle but an unfolding that opens beyond what can be seen. … a glimpse of the entire world because geographicality is written in the landscape as an expression of humanity, of how we search for identity and our personal and social intentions. Landscape, in its essence, is not made to be looked at but is rather the insertion of people into the world, a place of life’s struggles, the manifestation of personal and social being. For instance, there are regions of slow death, such as North-East Brazil, where famine imposes its dismal presence on the entire landscape. “Death dominates all the North-East. It is always present. It floats over the landscape. It becomes part of life” (Josue de Castro, Geography of Hunger, p.149). A truth of the landscape stands out not as a geographical theory, nor even as some aesthetic value, but as an expression of existence. It tells of a world in which human existence has been realized in distinctive and circumspect ways.

Existence and Geographical Reality
Geography is not initially a form of knowledge; geographical reality is not at first an ‘object’; geographical space is not a blank space waiting to be colored and filled in. Geographical science presupposes a world that may be understood through geographicality and also that a person may feel and know themselves to be tied to the world as a being called to understand themselves in their earthly situation.

Geographicality does not have an indifferent or detached conception of things; it has to do with what matters to me – my anxieties and concerns, my well-being, my plans, my relationships. Though it usually remains unobtrusive, more lived than expressed, for each person it involves first of all the place they are in, the places of childhood, the environment which summons them to its presence. It is the land where they walk or work, the edge of their valley or street or neighbourhood, their everyday movements across the city. It restricts and encloses life, it is a connection to the land, an horizon imposed on actions and thoughts. Color, shape, the smell of the soil and vegetation mix with memories, emotions and ideas.

Geographicality acts on us through an awakening of consciousness. Sometimes it even operates as a reawakening, as though it was already there before we are even aware of it. It is a particular way for us to be permeated by land, by sea, by distance, to be overwhelmed by mountains, and to be animated by landscape. in this there is something over which we have no control because it intervenes, usually without any awareness, into geographical experience. This enlightening (éclairage), as Merleau-Ponty has called it, can surrounds us and lead us away from the commonplace.

 It is from this ‘place’, as the foundation of our existence, that we renew our awareness of the world, and from here that we leave to confront it or to work in it. To live in a country is first of all to entrust ourselves quite literally to whatever is underneath us. To exist is, conversely, also to go away from there, from something that is deeper than our consciousness, from this foundation. This is not abstract and conceptual, but concrete. Before any choice, there is this ‘place’ that we have not chosen, where the foundations of our worldly existence and human condition establish themselves. We can change places, move, but this is still to look for a place. We need a base to set down our being and to realize our possibilities, a here from which to discover the world, a there to which we can go. Everyone has their own country and their own perspective on the world. Consider the distress of the exile or the refugee for whom their own firm foundation of being has been taken away. They may keep with them in memory some ‘objects’, such as trees, hills, houses, but it is their very subjectivity that is wounded, and no ‘reasoning’ can return to them the lost value of those ‘objects’ for they cannot set them down to establish roots. The fact of being at home exceeds any material contact with the ground, but because the Earth is the most definite yet normal aspect of being at home it is there, where the Earth is most directly implicated, that the very foundations of existence hide themselves. (Emmanuel Lévinas, D l’Existence à l’Existant, p.120).

The Earth as foundation is the advent of the subject that is basic to all consciousness becoming aware of itself. Before any objectivity the Earth blends into all consciousness, and for human beings it is that from which we emerge into being, on which we create, it is the site of our living places, it provides materials of houses, the source of suffering, and it is the Earth to which we have to adapt our intentions for building and doing.

That there is, in the final analysis something inexpressible and obscure in this fundamental relationship with the Earth was shown by Heidegger in his study The Origin of the Work of Art.  He describes the sight of a Greek temple built to overlook the sea: “The building stands as a silent presence on the rock. A human work resting on the rigid supports that the rock provides for it, although the rock by itself is just a shapeless mass piled up without purpose. It stands unshakeable in raging storms and reveals them in all their violence. The brilliance and radiance of the stone, which shines only with the gift of sunlight, gives to the day all its light, to the sky all its immensity, to the night all its darkness. The building dominates; its rigid structure makes visible the invisible space of air. Unshakeable, this building resists waves, and its silence make their roaring reverberate. In this setting the tree, the grass, the eagle and star, the snake and the cicada, take on the distinct form that is theirs, and it is then that they should appear as that which they are. This fact of clarification and opening out in totality is what the Greeks meant by the term Physis. Physis clarified that on which man lays the foundations of his habitat. We call it the Earth.” It goes without saying that in stating it this way the Earth loses its particular geographical sense and refers to the obscure depths from which all beings come into the light. Human effort in constructing a temple consists of pulling stone, shoreline and night from their apathy, from their original obscurity, without ever taking them completely away from the Earth which remains in shadow.  Human beings are involved in an incessant struggle – that between the day which gives to things a meaning and distinctiveness; and that of the night, of the “Earth,” of the depths to which all human endeavours return when they are left abandoned to become again stone, wood and metal.

Some Summary Comments
Dardel’s book is an account of the remarkable and diverse ways in which we experience the world around us when the formal concepts and theories of Geography and other sciences do not intervene. As his starting point he takes experiences of space, and space he understands not in the geometric way that has come to prevail in current geographical thought, but as the diverse and ‘colored’ spaces that are manifest in our unmediated experiences of the world around us, its materials, its depths and heights, its air, aquatic and built places. He considers how these are involved in the ways we see landscapes, and the fundamental role of the various manifestations of geographical reality for existence and being. 

            I think it is helpful to emphasise three aspects of Dardel’s argument. The first, which he mentions several times, is that these direct, often wonderful, experiences come before and lie behind formal, scientific knowledge of the world, and, though they may seem to be of less importance than that, they are in fact, to a greater or lesser degree, fundamental, inescapable aspects of everybody’s existence. And they are constantly implicated in our everyday experiences of the world.

            The second aspect, which is not apparent in the abbreviated account I provide here because I have left out all the examples Dardel uses to support his ideas, is that poets and novelists are important sources for identifying the character of experiences of the Earth and its environments because they often find words to express what we may have felt but cannot articulate well. In effect, poetry and poetic language can make our own experiences real for us.  What Dardel does for me is to clarify many of my own experiences when I go hiking in the mountains or the forest, contemplate the ocean (which happens to be at the end of the street where I live), watch the changing sky at sunset, or walk out into the teeth of a storm to feel its winds and rain. He tells me why these experiences are existential as well as aesthetic.

            The third point is that ‘the Earth’ or the world stands for everything that surrounds us – the land, farms, mountains, rivers, lakes, places and landscapes of all kinds whether cities, villages, oil fields, farms, or container ports. in short, they stand for geography in the broadest sense of the word. Although Dardel’s choice of examples, which I have omitted here, suggest a rural and romantic bias towards natural environments, there is, as he notes, really nothing romantic or sentimental in existential encounters with the places and landscapes of the Earth because these places and my encounters with them define the character of human being and existence.

[I updated this post, especially in the Comments sections at the end, in August 2022, to reflect several recent reports about the impacts of military activity on carbon emissions, and relocation of places because of climate change.]

On Monday, March 4th 2022, the fifth day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the greatest act of inter-state, territorial military aggression since the1940s, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published its Sixth Assessment Report. The coincidence that they occurred so close together has led me to think about the very different roles that place plays in war and peace from the perspective of global warming. More specifically, modern warfare involves the deliberate destruction of places, displaces their populations and contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. But the Sixth Assessment Report assumes a geopolitical background of peace will be needed for the mitigation and adaptations needed to keep climate change, which destroys places and displaces populations through fires, floods, droughts and rising sea levels, within reasonable limits

In its effects, global warming is a self-inflicted, slowing intensifying world war that will impact most of humanity. But this is not a war that can be fought with weapons or violence. It has to be fought with peaceful cooperation at every geographical scale from nations to regions, cities and towns.

Nation States and Sense of Place
I’ll begin with some general comments in order to clarify how I understand relationships between place, war, and peace and place.

”Sense of place’, as it is used in everyday language, can refer to the attachment we have with the home we live in to a feeling of responsibility for the entire Earth as the home of humankind. Within this wide range of places the country where we live is likely to stand out as especially significant, not least because our connections with it are constantly reinforced by elections, passports, national sports teams, anthems, flags and patriotic feelings. However, for all its emotional connotations the word ‘country’ has little political or legal status. What we usually call ‘countries’ are more formally ‘nation states’ (usually referred to simply as nations), which are defined by political borders established in treaties, shown in maps and usually demarcated on the ground. The idea behind them, which seems to have originated in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries from some strange combination of political theory, capitalism, and improvements in cartography, is that they somehow fuse a ‘state’, or an area under a single government (it could be a monarchy, a republic or a dictatorship), with a ‘nation’, which involves some combination of ethnicity, culture, language, and shared history.

The United Nations, and various parallel and subsidiary organizations such as the International Olympics Committee, the World Trade Organization and the IPCC, currently recognizes 195 nation states. This formal recognition gives them an aura of permanence. But the fact is that many nation states in their current forms are relatively new, created in the 19th century (e.g. Italy, Germany), or in treaties after the world wars of the 20th century (e.g. Poland, Austria, Hungary, Israel), or as an outcome of decolonization (e.g. India, Nigeria). Their borders and identities are not carved in stone, but are the consequence of negotiated settlements.

Different interpretations about the geographical extent of nations and where state borders should be drawn have led to separatist movements, and more significantly to the violent military confrontations of two world wars, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These territorial wars are, in effect, conflicts between two opposing political or ideological senses of place. On the one hand the aggressors wish to expand the place that constitutes their sense of what their nation should be. On the other hand, countries that are threatened fight to defend their nation as a place with a distinctive culture that is shared by all its communities and citizens. For those caught in the war zone, if they survive, one consequence of these ideological disagreements is that many of the actual places where they live will be destroyed.

War and the Annihilation of Place
Strategies of warfare have often included the deliberate destruction of places where people live and conduct their everyday lives because this is regarded as a way to undermine popular resistance and ensure subjugation. In 146 B.C. the Romans reduced the city of Carthage to such complete ruin it could not be rebuilt. In the 14th century the English Black Prince conducted a chevauchée in France, a campaign to instil terror and to weaken the supply lines of the French by burning and pillaging villages and towns. In 1565 Vijayanagar, a city at the heart of an empire that ruled southern India, was captured and destroyed by Muslim armies, and then completely abandoned; the remnants of the ruins are now a World Heritage Site.

In the Second World War these strategies were brought to a terrifying new level with technologies of area bombing. Ken Hewitt has described the result with brutal simplicity as “the annihilation of place” (Hewitt, 1983, 1994). The bombing, he indicates, was systematically directed at city centres, where population densities were highest, and a deliberate attack on the inhabitants of cities and the infrastructure and amenities of civic life. It was an explicit manifestation of the idea of  ‘total war’ in which everyone, soldier or citizen, is considered to be somehow involved in the conflict and therefore a potential target. The aim of place annihilation was, and still is, to undermine civilian morale, generate terror, displace populations, put leverage on political leaders, and perhaps to reduce casualties among one’s own troops by bringing an early end to war.

Germany used area bombing in the London blitz and in numerous raids on other cities in Britain. The Allies then responded with even more devastating raids on German cities, including Dresden, where a firestorm incinerated almost all the city centre, and on Hamburg, Berlin and about 70 other cities, destroying more than a million houses and making more than seven million people homeless. In Japan the level of destruction was even greater, partly because of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but also because of the enormous firestorm created in 1945 by American bombing of the Asakusa district of Tokyo which destroyed more than 250,000 houses and probably killed about 130,000 people. In every one of those instances, whether in Britain, Germany or Japan, most of those who died or were forced to evacuate were women, children and the elderly. For those who survived, the physical place where they had lived, its buildings, streets, parks, trees, had disappeared. Their sense of place was utterly shattered.

Remarkably, in spite of this astounding scale of destruction, powerful elements of topophilia and attachment to place survived. Almost all these annihilated places were rebuilt. Some, such as the centre of Warsaw and the Asakusa Kannon Temple in Tokyo, are faithful reconstructions of what they had been. Most were rebuilt with modern identities, new buildings and street patterns, with only a few monuments to recall their catastrophic destruction. These acts of reconstructive placemaking may have been indirectly encouraged by the formation in 1945 of the United Nations, which had as its primary aim the prevention of future wars and, by implication, their destruction of places.

The decades since then have been relatively peaceful, at least for European and other developed nations that had been drawn into the two world wars. Major conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and most recently Iraq and Afghanistan were relatively localized (and also seemed remote from more developed nations). Furthermore, the Cold War threat of mutually assured destruction through an exchange of nuclear missiles effectively discouraged conventional wars that might have escalated into global place annihilation.

In this period of enduring peace the widespread assumption (much as it had been before the First World War, see MacMillan, 2013) seems to have been that peace, at least between developed nations, had become a geopolitical condition that would persist indefinitely into the future. This assumption was upended by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the systematic destruction of places in Ukrainian cities, apparently on the pretext of annexing somewhere Russia considers part of its ethnic national place.

Place in Peace at a Time of Climate Change
The Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC, released just a few days after the attack on Ukraine, begins with the blunt statement that the effect of human activity on the Earth’s climate has become unequivocal, increasingly apparent and widespread (IPCC, 2022). Impacts of climate change and extreme weather events have already caused the loss of ecosystems, reduced food security, contributed to migration and displacement, damaged livelihoods, adversely effected the health and security of people, and led to increased inequality. The world is rapidly moving towards temperature, climatic and weather conditions that have not happened in the last 12,000 years (and possibly a much longer period) and will pose enormous challenges. To mitigate and adapt to these challenges require “transformative actions” in political and socio-economic systems need to be taken internationally and immediately. It is very clear from numerous but scattered comments in the Report that these transformative actions will require both peace and the extensive participation of local places, which is to say places at the scale or nations, regions, cities, towns and villages.A context of peace is implicitly assumed in almost everything written about place because it has been written in the peacetime that has generally prevailed for seventy years since the Second World War. Of course, there have been civil wars in Syria, Colombia, Rwanda, and elsewhere, and major regional conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, but until Russia invaded Ukraine there had been no inter-state wars in seventy years.

I think it is no exaggeration to suggest that, in the absence of transformative changes, the destructive, place annihilating consequences of climate change could equal or even exceed those of the two world wars. Rather than missiles and bombs, the damage will be done by wildfires, floods, rising sea levels, droughts, rising wet bulb temperatures and all forms of extreme weather. With global warming the entire world has, in effect, acquired a common enemy with the power to contribute to widespread deaths and destruction of places, and forced mass migrations of tens of millions. But unlike inter-state conflicts, the war against warming cannot  be fought and won with weapons or violence. It has to be fought from a foundation of peace and cooperation in order to implement universal measures needed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and to coordinate strategies for adaptation.

The invasion of Ukraine challenges some fundamental, mostly implicit assumptions both about both place and about strategies for mitigation and adaptation to global warming. First, almost everything written about place, sense of place and placemaking has been published since 1970, and has assumed a peaceful political context. To my knowledge there have been no discussions of the place consequences of civil wars in Syria, Colombia, Rwanda, the Balkans, and elsewhere, or of major regional conflicts in Afghanistan,Vietnam and Iraq. Secondly, the IPCC is an agency of the United Nations, which was created to promote international peace, and all the conferences and reports about climate change that it has created have been in the context of the peace that has prevailed globally since it was created in 1988.

As a first step to try to grasp the implications of substantially changed circumstances created by the war in Ukraine, I studied the Sixth Assessment Report to determine what it suggests about war, peace and the importance of place.

[ A brief note on method: The Sixth Assessment Report is thorough, comprehensive and backed by a huge amount of scientific research. But it is also very long, dense and difficult to read. Because my interest here is in place, peace and war, I employed the Find function to identify uses of these terms (and related terms such as violent conflict, cooperation, and local) and then paid attention to those instances where they are discussed rather than just cited in book titles or used as figures of speech. The numbers given below (14-72 etc) are page references – each chapter has its own pagination (i.e .Chapter 14 page 72); SPM is Summary for Policymakers, the first section of the Report.]

War and Violent Conflict are mentioned only about twenty times each in the 3700 pages of the Report, and most of those suggest that climate change probably contributed to civil wars in Syria and Sudan. More generally it is noted that: “major armed conflict” is much less likely to happen because of climate change than “low-intensity organized violence” and perhaps civil wars (16-3, 16-22, 16.72), and these will most likely happen where extreme weather exacerbates poverty and food shortages (see 7-80, 7-118). In other words, conflicts will probably be localized, perhaps in ragged wars. The solutions to these cannot be military, but have to be linked “to development and people’s vulnerabilities in complex social and politically fragile settings” (18-22). In other words, the solutions lie mostly in development to reduce poverty and food insecurity.

Peace. The IPCC, as a branch of the UN, implicitly assumes a mostly peaceful future for its prognoses and proposals. In the Sixth Assessment Report there are over 500 mentions of peace (perhaps half of those are in titles of articles and books). An important theme in these is that “climate resilient peace” and “peace building” can be promoted through adaptation and inclusive development that reduces exposure to extreme weather (7-8, 7-107). This reflects ideas promoted in the Paris Agreement and in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, especially the goal for peace and justice (9-12).

A major risk to peace-building comes with involuntary displacements and migrations across state borders that could result from drought, crop failure, sea level rise and flooding (16-72). This risk, it is suggested, might be reduced by pursuing “climate resilient pathways.” These are shown in a diagram in the final chapter of the Report (18-11) which indicates the five pillars of development used in the Sustainable Development Goals (People, Prosperity, Partnership, Peace, Planet) and a “narrow and closing window of opportunity” to make the transformational changes needed for development futures that are “climate resilient and sustainable.” In other words, mitigation and adaptation have to involve policies for social justice and equity that will facilitate peace.

Place and Local Knowledge. It is clear from numerous references in the Assessment Report that climate resilient pathways have to run through places and involve local knowledge. Although ‘sense of place’ is mentioned a mere 20 times, ‘place’ and ‘places’ are used over 1000 times and the word ‘local’ almost 3000 times, often in association with ‘knowledge’. It is clear that these are fundamental ideas in climate resilience. Exactly how important can be pieced together from these numerous mentions.

First, the Report emphasizes the importance of Indigenous and local knowledge, as well as scientific knowledge, for understanding and evaluating climate adaptations (SPM-5). ‘Indigenous and local’ are frequently combined (see for instance Cross-Chapter Box INDIG 18-74 ) because they both hold relevant knowledge about specific environments and environmental changes, and the impact of those on ecosystems and livelihoods. Indigenous/local knowledge is defined as the “understandings and skills developed by people specific to the places where they live” (1-44). The scale of what is meant by ‘local’ is not explained, but my reading suggests that they mostly refer to somewhere below the national level, roughly at the spatial scale of municipalities, metropolitan areas, or distinctive topographical/ecological areas, where lower levels of government and other agencies can engage directly with communities impacted by extreme and changing weather, and use building codes, urban planning, and land-use management policies that are appropriate for the specific or unique circumstances in their areas (see, for example, section 17.14.2 on Governance; also comments on 6-120, 10-95, 14-17, 18-21, 18-80). This is, I think, consistent with the Report’s recommendation that adaptation and mitigation options should be aligned to local contexts in order to take advantage of bottom-up initiatives, engage with individuals and communities, protect local resources and ensure that existing inequities in particular communities are not worsened (18-21,18-6).

Secondly, the word place mostly seems to be used interchangeably with local, for example, knowledge may be place-based and rooted in local cultures, (1-44), and locally-driven, place-based approaches can help build adaptive capacity to climate change impacts (5-143). The distinctive importance of place is recognized in terms of place attachment and place-based adaptations, (CCP5-18, CCP5-34).

Thirdly, place-based adaptation is frequently referred to in the Report, perhaps because there is substantial evidence from case studies that place-based approaches can build capacity for transformative action (e.g. 6-89, 5-143). This responsibility for effecting change is, of course, shared with national governments and international agencies because climate change is a “multi-scale phenomenon from the local to the global” and all levels need to work together to advance climate resilience and adaptation (1-46, 1-4).

Fourthly, a conclusion of the Report, explicitly stated with very high confidence, is that Indigenous and place-based local knowledge shapes how climate change risk is understood and experienced, and offers the possibility of significant solutions for the challenges of climate change, though these do need to be integrated with broader national and international policies and practices. (18-7)

Comments
First let me summarize the role of place in both war and in the peaceful conditions needed to address global warming. In territorial, inter-state wars, such as the one in Ukraine, some perverse national sense of place is often a driving cause for starting the war, and then in the fog of what follows actual, everyday places on both sides become objects to be destroyed in the hope this will give some strategic advantage. In the context of the mostly peaceful circumstances that have to prevail if almost 200 nation states are to co-operate to moderate the processes and impacts of climate change, place matters because local places are an essential foundation for establishing constructive practices for mitigation and adaptation. The optimistic hope expressed by the IPCC is that while the extreme weather that follows from global warming will cause some places, such as coastal settlements, to be destroyed or abandoned, and will lead to migrations and other social upheavals, any associated conflicts will be localized and mitigated through international cooperation and appropriate forms of sustainable development. The possibility of inter-state warfare, such as that in Ukraine, was simply not considered in the Sixth Assessment Report, which was consistent with most prevailing expectations until the Ukraine invasion.

However, the U.S. National Intelligence Agency in its March 2021 projection for the next two decades, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World, seems to have sensed a possible shift in geopolitics. It argues cogently and succinctly that a mixture of demographic, economic, technological, and environmental forces, including climate change, will probably generate significant social and political divisions at both national and international levels in the near future. It notes first that the Covid-19 pandemic has shaken assumptions about resilience and adaptation, and rather demonstrating the capacity of international cooperation  to address a common problem it has reinforced nationalism because individual countries have followed their own strategies prioritizing their own needs. More specifically it suggests that climate change could generate social cleavages within countries because the costs of damage from extreme weather, mitigation and adaptation will require difficult trade-offs with other priorities, and internationally it could lead to increasing competition for food, minerals and energy. Climate change alone might not be the cause of inter-state conflicts, but it is certainly a very significant multiplying factor as deterrence becomes more difficult as treaties weaken, geopolitical relations are destabilized by new technologies such as artificial intelligence, and more major political actors emerge (e.g. additional states with nuclear weapons). There is, in fact, a significant possibility that localized struggles and civil wars could escalate into inter-state ones.

Should this happen, what are the implications for places and climate change? First, war will detract attention and resources from transformative actions urgently needed for mitigation and adaptation. Even before the Ukraine war many climate scientists were sceptical that actions would be insufficient to keep global warming to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the target of the Paris Accord; indeed, many expect the average global temperature rise by the end of the century will be at least 3.0C. This will have catastrophic consequences for places almost everywhere.”If we fail in meeting the 1.5C target [of the Paris Accord], Michaelova (2022, p.16) has written in a recent report on Military and Conflict-Related Emissions, “the repercussions will be more deadly than all the the conflicts we have witnessed in the in the last decades.”

Secondly, given past and current experience it is probable that any inter-state wars will involve the deliberate destruction of everyday places. And if the wars persist, the resource hungry military machines, explosions, destruction, and dependence on fossil fuels, will accelerate greenhouse gas emissions that will rush climate change towards its worst possible trajectory and future environmenal conditions that will make the sort of post-war place reconstruction of the 20th century impossible.

However, it is also the case that the character of modern warfare is changing for a variety of technological and economic reasons (National Intelligence Council, 2021, Future of the Battlefield). Ukraine is a 21st-century conflict in which military, technological and financial elements are intertwined. Place destruction will continue to happen, but will be by long range, perhaps hypersonic weapons, with precise targeting, and may be more more focused than in the past. It will, however, be accompanied by economic sanctions, cyberwarfare, and campaigns of misinformation that will infiltrate everyday life and everyday places that are remote from material destruction. This is currently happening, for instance, both through sanctions imposed on Russia, and in countries in Western Europe where energy costs have risen astronomically as supplies of Russian gas have been reduced.

Even if further inter-state warfare is avoided, the Ukraine war does not escalate, and the sort of peaceful cooperation envisaged by the IPCC is achieved, there will still have to be transformative social and economic changes to keep global warming at reasonable levels. These will involve major adaptations to the physical character and everyday life of many villages, towns and cities, in order to cope with the consequences of extreme weather. Many places will be destroyed, not in the traumatic manner of war, but incrementally through modifications or even slow abandonment. Migrations away from (mostly less developed) regions of the world where drought and other weather conditions have undermined hope for the future have already begun, and the World Bank projects that as many as 261 million people could be forced to move within their own countries by 2050 (World Bank, 2021). In developed nations global warming will mean displacement and the relocation of communities from coastal zones, flood plains and wildfire regions (McAdam and Ferris, 2015).

With the intensification of extreme weather events triggered by global warming, many places will, in effect, be destroyed, attachments to them eroded or broken. Some towns, even cities, along coastlines and in regions affected by drought and insufferable heat, will have to be abandoned, their communities relocated or dispersed. Some will be spontaneous, but when they are planned these relocations have been described as “managed retreats” (O’Donnell, 2022), a military metaphor that reinforces the sense that the world is now engaged in a war against global warming. It is a war that has to be waged from a position of widespread peace.  All the indications are that military warfare, especially if it is widespread or protracted, will ensure failure in the battle against climate change and its consequences.

References

Kenneth Hewitt, 1983 “Place Annihilation: Area Bombing and the Fate of Urban Places” Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol 73(2), pp. 257-284

Kenneth Hewitt, 1994 “Civil and Inner City Disasters: The Urban, Social Spaces of Bomb Destruction”, Erdkunde, 48(4) pp. 259-274.

IPCC 2022, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC

McAdam, Jane and Ferris, Elizabeth, 2015, “Planned Relocation in the Context of Climate Change: Unpacking the Legal and Conceptual Issues”, Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law, 2015 , Vol 4, No 1, 137-166.

MacMIllan, Margaret (2013) The War the Ended Peace: the Road to 2014. Penguin Books

Michaelova, Alex, et al, 2022, Military and Conflict-Related Emissions: Kyoto to Glasgow and Beyond. Perspectives Climate Group, Freiburg Germany available here

Oliver Morton, 2022, “The Climate Issue” The Economist March 7 2022 available here (a brief discussion of the invasion of Ukraine and the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report)

Adrian Mourby 2015 “Where are the world’s most war-damaged cities?” The Guardian available here

O’Donnell, Tayanah, 2022, “Managed retreat and planned retreat: a systematic literature review” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, available here

Office of the Director National Intelligence, 2021, “Future of the Battlefield” in Global Trends 2040: A More Contested Future, National Intelligence Council, Global Trends, available

Office of the Director National Intelligence, 2021, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested Future, National Intelligence Council, Global Trends available here

Jeff Tollefson 2021 “Top climate scientists are sceptical that nations will reign in global warming,” Nature, November 2021, available here

White House. 2021 Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration, The White House, Washington D.C.

World Bank, 2021 “Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration”, available here

[This includes a brief update in June 2023, at the end, responding to an article in The Economist]

The dramatic economic growth of the last 250 years happened simultaneously with equally dramatic increases in population and concentrations of C02 in the atmosphere.

The specific question I address in this post is: What might happen with economic growth now that it has become clear that total fertility rates are dropping well below replacement levels in all high income countries and that the use of the atmosphere over the past three centuries as a free way to dispose of carbon generated by economic and population growth is now leading to rapidly increasing costs as a result of disasters caused by extreme weather.

Long-term parallel paths
Graphs of changes over the last two millennia in global population, economic well-being (represented by GDP per capita) and concentration of carbon in the atmosphere all show a dramatic increase beginning in the 18th century and continuing to the present. These have been world-historical changes. Before the middle of the 18th century annual growth rates were about 0.01%, in other words scarcely changing. Then somewhere between 1750 and 1800 they all began to accelerate and since have grown at rates exceeding 1.5% a year, doubling every forty-five years or so.

(NOTE: many of the graphs I use here are screen captures from Our World in Data, an excellent source of data about many different topics. On their website many of the originals are interactive, allowing the horizontal time scale to be adjusted and/or different countries to be represented. These tools are not active here, and some embedded captions may be incorrect).

In terms of economic growth, regardless of what its origins are thought to be, there is no question, as the Bank of England has noted wryly, that it is quite a new thing. Before the 18th century overall standards of living, as well as populations and CO2 concentrations had scarcely changed for several millennia.

However, if they are considered just over the last 250 years, these changes seem more like smooth slopes than cliffs. Populations, initially in industrialized countries and later in less developed ones, began to edge up in the late 18th century and then to gradually accelerate until the mid-20th century. GDP per capita and CO2 concentrations followed a similar growth curve, though they lagged population growth by about half a century.

Interconnected growth
It seems to be the case that each of these three trends has contributed to the more or less simultaneous growth of the others.

Populations began to grow in European nations at about the same time the paradigm of economic growth associated with capitalism came to be adopted, and the same time as innovations in science enabled ideas about growth and progress to be translated into technologies that took advantage of the free good of the atmosphere as a way to dispose of CO2 emissions and increase productivity.

That increase in productivity led to higher GDP per capita and less poverty, which contributed to a decline in child mortality, which led to faster population growth, which (together with colonial expansion and global trading), provided larger markets for industrial goods, the production and use of which led to more carbon emissions, and so forth up the last quarter of the 20th century. In other words, population growth facilitated economic growth even as it was itself facilitated by the benefits of economic growth.

There was concern in the early 19th century that rapid population growth would lead to deprivation because food production could not keep pace with it. This turned out to be unwarranted because after about 1850 annual rates of economic growth (as reflected in GDP per capita, increased life expectancy and reductions in poverty) came to exceed rates of population growth. By 2006 global rates of annual increase in GDP per capita, at 1.94%, were almost three times the population growth rate of 0.76% per year.

What this suggests is first that population growth was, and in some places still is, an important initial stimulus to economic growth, and secondly that at some stage economic growth begins to occur independently.

Now, however, it seems possible that this independence might be threatened, partly because of falling population growth rates and declining populations, and partly because of the rapidly increasing costs of climate warming that are a consequence of carbon concentrations.

Population Decline
Rates of world population growth peaked at just over 2% a year in 1968, have declined since to about 1%, and are projected to drop precipitously to 0.1% by 2100. The time lag between rates of growth and actual populations means that world population is still rising, but the following graph, based on UN projections, suggests that the global population will gradually slow and stabilize at about 10.9 billion in 2100 as birth and death rates come more or less into balance and the global demographic transition is completed.

Two other population projections offer a different view. The Wittgenstein Centre takes into consideration improved levels of contraception, female education and fertility rates, and suggests that global population will peak at 9.4 billion around 2070 and then begin to decline because of pronounced drops in Asia, though these will be partially offset by continuing increases in sub-Saharan Africa until the end of the century.

The apparently gentle curve for global population decline masks what are likely to be substantial changes for individual countries, as indicated below. Populations in China, Russia, Japan, Italy and Spain are already beginning to shrink, and Germany and Vietnam will soon follow.

A third population projection, published in The Lancet in 2020, forecasts even earlier and greater levels of decline than these graphs show. It anticipates that global population will peak in 2064 at 9.7 billion, and then fall to 8.8 billion by 2100. More specifically, it suggests that populations of 23 countries will decline by about half over the course of this century. These include Japan (128 million to 60 million), China (1.4 billion to 732 million), Spain (46 to 23 million; Italy (61 to 31 million).

The reason for these steep declines, revealed in tables accompanying the article, is that total fertility rate, the number of children born per woman of child-bearing age, has already fallen well below the replacement level of 2.1 in those countries, and indeed in every country in Europe and North America. India and Latin American will soon follow, and by 2100 only a handful of countries will be sustaining their population. The authors of the Lancet article do not expect fertility rates to recover to replacement levels.

Consequences of Population Decline
The consequences of global population decline are half a century or more in the future. But for some countries declines are already underway, and within one or two decades will amount to reductions of many millions. It is not entirely clear what the consequences of this scale of population loss will be. It has been argued by some that fewer people should mean a reduction in environmental impacts, less congestion, and higher wages because there well be fewer people working. However, if GDP per capita continues to grow in spite of population decline, then environmental impacts could actually increase because wealthier individuals have larger environmental footprints than poor people. Moreover, there are strong indications that urbanization is increasing even as populations decline, which means that congestion in cities is unlikely to diminish. And some economists have made a compelling case that lower fertility rates are associated with growing economic inequality because inherited wealth is concentrated among fewer children.

If GDP per capita does not continue to grow at a rate that can offset the loss of population, a falling tax base will lead to a decline in basic services, and probably reduced technological and other innovation because that usually come from the young. But if GDP per capita continues to grow faster than the decline in population, as it has recently in Japan, standards of living will actually improve as populations fall.

The authors of the Lancet report think that shrinking and aging populations will pose substantial economic problems as governments struggle to cope with smaller working age populations and fewer taxpayers to provide funds need to meet the growing needs of the elderly, including health care and pensions. Some countries, such as Canada, are expected to continue to maintain or grow their populations through liberal immigration policies, but in others “the desire to maintain a linguistic and culturally homogeneous society will outweigh the economic, fiscal, and geopolitical risks of declining populations”. In other words, population decline could lead to intensifying nationalist and exclusionary political views.

Charles Jones, an economist at Stanford, has made what thus far seems to be the most sophisticated theoretical investigation of the economic impacts of declining populations. In his paper “The End of Economic Growth?” he pursues the idea that in many economic growth models the size of a growing population plays a crucial role because it leads to the growth of new ideas. When he introduces population decline (he refers to it as “negative growth”) into these mathematical models, the result is that innovation and the stock of knowledge stagnate and economic growth grinds to a halt. His conclusion is that if this happens standards of living will stabilize at a reasonably high level, but the population will continue to fall.

At least one commentator, Robert Harding in the Financial Times, suggests that in fact these processes may already be at work in Japan where, even though GDP per capita has risen, almost all recent income growth for working people has been soaked up by tax rises and higher house prices, factors that suppress fertility and therefore contribute to the ongoing population decline.

Under such conditions it will become increasingly difficult to maintain infrastructure and services such as public transit, first as individual buildings are abandoned, and then as neighbourhoods and rural communities become increasingly deserted. Unless the drop in fertility is offset by immigration from places where populations continue to expand, the enormous legacy of built environments created for peak populations will become a growing burden for aging and smaller populations.

The Costs of Climate Warming
Since the 1980s it has become obvious that treating the atmosphere as a convenient and free way to dispose of CO2 emissions has contributed to a steady rise in global mean temperature. This has serious implications for causing changes in climate and weather, especially extreme weather, for the rest of this century and beyond.

I will begin this consideration of the costs of climate change with evidence of recent trends in natural disasters.

In spite of this increase, since 1970 there has only been a modest increase in the number of annual globally reported natural disasters (especially floods and extreme weather), and suggestions of a slight decline since 2006.

Global damage losses from extreme weather, also suggest an upward trend, but if those are considered as a share of GDP this is not the case, presumably because GDP has grown at least as quickly as those losses. On average about 60,000 people a year die from natural disasters, about 0.1% of all deaths.

However, these data on economic losses have to be interpreted carefully because there is confusion in the way losses from weather disasters are calculated, and there is a tendency to underestimate long-term effects (Botzen, Deschenes, Sanders, 2019). Nevertheless, it seems to be the case that, although natural disasters get national and international media coverage, their economic losses tend to be regional and fairly short-lived. In smaller nations, such as those of the Caribbean that are prone to major hurricanes, impacts on GDP may still be substantial, and have a significant opportunity cost because funds used for reconstruction might otherwise have been used for development initiatives.

In countries with large diversified economies, such as the United States the costs of natural disasters are relatively minor (usually less than 1% of GDP, though in 2020 the $450 billion damages were about 2.25% of GDP, which was about $21 trillion). Nevertheless, they are a growing concern. Detailed records of the costs of major disaster events (by NOAA, shown below) indicate an upward trend. The number of events has grown from 2.9 in the 1980s, 5.4 in the 1990s and 6.3 in the 2000s, to 12.3 in the 2010s, and so far in 2020 and 2021alone there have been 20 major events. If this trend continues losses from climate related disasters will suppress annual growth rates in GDP, which have averaged about 3% for the last fifty years, and are declining in higher income countries.

This trend also needs to be put in the context of projections of global warming. Global mean temperature has already risen about 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. How much further it will rise depends on mitigation measures and political will. The most optimistic outlook, according to Climate Action Tracker in November 2021, is an increase to 1.8C, but current policies and actions suggest something closer to or more than 2.5C. Increases of these magnitudes could lead to catastrophic losses from extreme weather in many regions of the world.

This, together with the evidence that temperatures and CO2 concentrations are greater than they have been in human history, indicates that recent trends of the number and costs of weather related environmental disasters offer few guides about what is to come. It is inevitable that the costs of dealing with climate change will climb rapidly and possibly exponentially, not only because of the damage they will cause, but also because of the transformative changes required to move closer to net zero, and because of the need to implement adaptations to handle more extreme weather that will include major expenses such things as protecting cities from rising sea levels and relocating climate refugees. It is possible that growing costs of weather disasters could almost negate annual growth in GDP.

Does this mean the end of economic growth?
When I began to think about the relationship between economic growth, population decline and climate change, my assumption was that the costs of coping with climate disasters, coupled with steadily aging and shrinking populations would be huge brakes on economic growth. However, what I have learned is that is not necessarily the case. It seems that economic growth has broken free of population growth, and one of its main drivers is now innovation, which can allow GDP per capita to be maintained even as populations decline. And it seems that the economic costs of natural disasters, at least in large diversified economies, thus far have amounted to a small percentage of total GDP, and the reconstruction following those disasters can count as contributions to GDP. While this percentage will grow in the future, I have found no indications or opinions that climate change, alone or in combination with population decline, will bring an end to overall economic growth and increases in per capita GDP.

However, from the perspective of particular places matters look rather different (as I have discussed in previous posts here and here). In some regions of the world, rural communities, small towns and even cities, face a future that involves a combination of slowly withering away as people age and the young move away, and the possibility of acute disasters of heatwaves, droughts, floods, and wildfires. Economies may continue to grow, but over the next hundred years geographies will change dramatically and everyday life in places everywhere will become more challenging.

[An afterthought, two days after posting this. I can’t help thinking that I have understated the possible impacts of the combined effects of population decline and climate related disasters, which could be much greater than the sum of their parts. The evidence so far is that a modest drop in population may be offset by innovation that results in growth in GDP per capita, and on average the costs of weather related disasters may only be a small percentage of GDP. But as populations drop by half, and if the costs of disasters regularly come to exceed annual growth in GDP as global temperatures climb, matters could take a very different turn ].

[An update 02 June 2023. The Economist has a leading article today “Global Fertility has collapsed with profound economic consequences: What might change the world’s dire demographic trajectory?” This is, for The Economist, a rather breathless consideration of global population decline that will occur later this century, written as though it is something that has just become apparent even though their writers have frequently discussed the current declines in Japan and Italy and elsewhere. It includes the remarkable comment that “The world is not close to full…” without any supporting argument, and argues, as the subtitle indicates, that we need to get population growth back on track in order to ensure economic growth (though it acknowledges that efforts in individual countries, such as Hungary and Singapore, to boost higher fertility have failed). Environmental concerns are blithely dismissed (“Whatever some environmentalists may say, a shrinking population creates problems.”)

I think this leader fails to identify the profound and clear demographic indications that economic growth and economic theory for the last three centuries or so have been tied to population growth, and that population decline will require a radically revised approach to economics, and indeed how life will be lived. The key questions are: What will economics without growth be like? How will economic systems, and for that matter urban planning, adapt to shrinkage? What will be abandoned and what retained? Or, from my perspective on place, how can places be adapted to an abundance of stuff that is no longer useful – empty houses, abandoned neighbourhoods in cities, expressways and airports and container ports that will be far too large for future needs? This may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s probably less than fifty years away.]

I have the strong impression that there are social, political and environmental shifts underway that affect places almost everywhere. Their consequence is that how places have been experienced in the past bears little relationship to how they are being experienced now and will be experience in the future as climate change, social media, and globalization intrude ever more deeply into everyday life.

These shifts are the context for Changing Senses of Place: Navigating Global Challenges, an edited, academic book published by Cambridge University Press (2021). This post provides a synopsis of that book because I think it pulls together important threads about the importance of understanding change through the lens of place and its messages are worth sharing . I contributed one of the chapters so I am probably biased about its merits, but I knew nothing about the other twenty-four chapters until I received a published copy. I should also add that the book is both interdisciplinary and international in its scope  The 25 chapters were written by about 60 authors from over a dozen disciplines and involved research in at least 25 different countries and six continents.

In short, I think Senses of Place provides an excellent foundation for thinking about place as we move towards the second quarter of the 21st century. An Initial Clarification This book takes the view, as Maria Lewicka and Olena Dobosh put it in their chapter on Ethnocentric Bias in Perceptions of Place, that: “Sense of place refers to the way a place is experienced. It is a mix of the sensuous reactions, cognitive images, memories and feelings that people associate with a place” (p.179). It is, in other words, a complex human faculty for making sense of the world. to be absolutely clear, this book is not about sense of place as an inherent quality of somewhere, which is an idea widely used in architecture, place branding and tourist literature. Plural Senses of Place and Global Challenges The central argument, apparent in the title and reinforced in some fashion in every chapter, is that there are plural senses of place. This revises a conventional idea that sense of place involves a relatively stable, socially shared set of attitudes about a particular place, and that these are revealed by continuity of local traditions. The research described in the chapters of this book shows that even apparently stable places are experienced in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways A second argument, no less significant, is that it is necessary to understand the multiplicity of senses of place in order to grasp the ways places are being challenged by global processes such as climate change, constant mobility, transnationalism, social media and territorial contestation. The basis for this argument is, first, that we are all ’emplaced’, which is to say we cannot avoid looking at the world and experiencing its problems except through the lens of the places we know and where we live. And secondly, while challenges may be global in scope their effects happen in particular places and particular places are where adaptive responses to the uncertainty of those challenges have to happen. It follows, though I don’t think any of the contributors put it quite this bluntly, that efforts to deal with global challenges without paying attention to the idiosyncracies of places are doomed to failure. Global Challenges and Senses of Place Summarized The book is organized around seven global challenges to place, each of which is considered in several chapters. I have slightly revised the wording for clarification, but the challenges are: • Climate Change and Environmental Degradation • Migration and Mobility • Transitions to Renewable Energy • Nationalism and Competing Territorial Claims • Urban Change • Technological Transformations • Planning Strategies Except perhaps for renewable energy, which at first glance doesn’t seem to fit, there is nothing very remarkable in this list. What I do find remarkable are the detailed discussion in individual chapters and the variety of contexts that are examined through the lens of place. The following summaries of chapter in each section attempt to give a sense of that variety. Climate Change and Environmental Degradation: The challenges presented by climate change, and indeed all change to natural environments, are experienced through diverse senses of place specific to local circumstances and their history. For example the Great Barrier Reef in Australia elicits place feelings that include attachment, aesthetic pleasure, appreciation of biodiversity, and acknowledgement of its scientific value. But following the coral bleaching events of 2016 and 2017 that were caused by global warming those feelings were accompanied by a sense of grief at the deterioration of an exceptional place. This insight into the variety of senses of place associated with natural environments is amplified by case studies of places in Alaska and the American mid-west which reveal that attitudes to climate change reflect very different ‘temporalities’ or local perspectives on time. And an environmental disaster in Valparaiso in Chile demonstrates the importance of identifying this sort of variety of local knowledge and senses of places in reconstruction; without it mistakes in planning are likely to be repeated. This is also suggested by the non-linear, dynamic character of senses of place in Bengaluru in southern India where lakes that have a long history of providing water supply are now disregarded as the region rapidly urbanizes and pipes in water from 100 km away. On a more positive note, attempts at prairie restoration in the American mid-west have proven to be more successful when efforts at place-making recognize that there are plural, regional senses of place to be taken into account. Migration, Mobility and Belonging. The modern acceleration of mobility has undermined what, until about quite recently, was a prevailing sense of place that was mostly sedentary because for most people travel was dangerous or expensive and most lives were spent in just one two locations. Isolation and a sedentary sense of place facilitated the continuity of tradition and offered a strong sense of belonging somewhere. This feeling lingers in attitudes about place attachment, for example, in the relatively isolated Faroe Islands the tourist now coming to experience unspoilt landscapes are regarded ambivalently by residents because their presence threatens established ways of living even as it enhances the local economy and connections with the rest of the world. On the other hand for people in post-colonial Benin in West Africa isolation is something that is better escaped. Home is generally regarded as a place a person has to leave in order to succeed, though transnational migrants who work elsewhere develop an extroverted sense of place that incorporates many diverse experiences and includes a continuing commitment to their home place to which they send remittances. An almost mirror image of this transformation of sense of place happens with rural migrants to cities in China, who traditionally were not given full access to social spaces because it was always assumed they would return home. Official efforts are now being to change this assumption that rural migrants do not belong even though they live permanently in the city, a process that has to deal with very different conceptions of what constitutes belonging. This is not the issue in the township of Diepsloot in South Africa where upheaval and mobility seem to have resulted in a denial of most conventional notions of sense of place. It is a sort of non-place where deprivation and insecurity are omnipresent, everyone seems to be just passing through, and narratives of belonging perversely seem to be based on a psychology of non-belonging. Transitions to Renewable Energy. Renewable energy projects, both wind and solar, are so visually intrusive that they create new types of places and invoke divergent interpretations and contestations between senses of place. In New York State the installers of turbines regard them as wind farms, which suggests a positive addition to rural landscapes and places, but for protesters they demonstrate the industrialization of those landscapes. Research in the UK suggests that such contested attitudes about the impact of renewable technologies on places requires fitting them to senses of place by presenting proposed projects as nested among different scales of place. In this manner their manifest local impacts on places can be mitigated by indicating their benefits for place understood at larger spatial scales. Nationalism and Competing Territorial Claims. Nationalism involves assumptions about who belongs where and a politics of place-belonging that involves issues of identity, social justice, inclusion and exclusion, and potential violence. Parts of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine lie at conjunctions of many national histories where political boundaries have often shifted. In these historically confused regions people have mostly adopted ethnocentric rather than national ways of understanding the places where they belong. Ethnocultural sense of place is also apparent with the Bodo, an indigenous group who live adjacent to the Manas Tiger Reserve in north-east India. However for the Bodo this involves a blend of self-identification and environmental practices that actually brings into question simplistic assumptions about indigenous cultures and sustainability because official recognition of the Bodo as indigenous forest dwellers has been used by them as a way to opportunistically occupy land in the Reserve and to extract lumber from it. Their conveniently shifting interpretation of place attachment has led to conflicts with other communities in the region. For Palestinians the issues of belonging to a place are immediate rather than historical because their communities are effectively under siege. The systematic destruction of homes has led to deeply ambivalent senses of place that somehow blend feelings of safety and oppression, stability and loss, rituals of everyday life that continue in spite of everything, belonging that is constantly infused with uncertainty, and resistance against displacement. Palestine, rather like Diepsloot, demonstrates extremes of just how multi-facetted and complex senses of place can be. What is clear is that it is impossible to make sense of their challenging political and social issues without attending to the ways they are experienced as places. Urban Change: Urban growth transforms places in ways that are frequently contested. Gentrification, commodification and marginalization in cities variously accelerate contested senses of place. These are continuously being reformulated and negotiated as urban neighbourhoods are redeveloped and as social and political circumstances shift. For instance, in Barcelona gentrification involves the exploitation and commodification of symbolic elements that are drawn from the sense of place of displaced previous residents because this can ensure that redevelopment and renovation are profitable. A not dissimilar process of simplification of sense of place for ulterior purposes has occurred as a way to characterize urban change in Seattle, one of the fastest growing cities in the United States, with the additional aspect that divergent political perspectives are involved. The city has been variously presented for different political ends as a prosperous centre of technology (headquarters of Amazon, Microsoft, etc), and as a dying city because of the levels of homelessness and street communities that are consequence of rapidly rising house prices caused by the technology boom. For the ‘urban invisibles,’ the marginalized street communities of Brazil, the places they have to appropriate in order to survive are often exactly the same places where they are rejected as undesirable. There, as in Seattle, the competing senses of place have led to political infighting about how best to manage injustices associated with urban change. Technological Transformations: Perhaps the most widespread transformation in modern culture is the global adoption electronic communication and social media. By shrinking distance and connecting us more or less instantly with other people elsewhere, electronic media have radically altered senses of place by adding layers of information and new possibilities for experience that enrich both personal and social senses of place by making a wealth of information available and collapsing the barrier of distance. They have also diminished senses of place by distracting us from the places where we actually are, diverting our attention to virtual elsewheres, and generating echo chambers that exacerbate views that promote exclusionary senses of place. However, there are indications from case studies in Melbourne and in Denmark that social media, such as distributing images of natural settings on Instagram, can facilitate the development of a broad range of affective bonds between people and places that have proved valuable as a way to engage citizens in the development of strategies for managing the urban forest and urban food production. Design and Planning Strategies: The usual notion in urban planning is that sense of place is something that can be enhanced by design. At one time the conviction was that this could be represented on maps showing some sort of ideal end state, or perhaps by quantifying urban dynamics into measurable patterns that could be manipulated. Those approaches fail to take into account the rich variety of senses of place that people have of cities. To acknowledge and take advantage of that richness requires collaborative approaches that can accommodate and mediate diverse senses of place. Because cities are now unavoidably caught up in global flows and networks, those diverse local senses of place have to be integrated with global ones such as the international planning initiatives of the UN Habitat programme. One example of how this can be done is demonstrated in a case study of Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site in SA where participatory research and focus groups were used to identify plural local senses of place and the ways these could be incorporated into international frameworks. This study has some parallels with research in the very different context of BlueCity Lab in Rotterdam, which is an experimental site in a former swimming pool that is now used for exploring innovative approaches to sustainability and placemaking through collaborative learning. The BlueCity Lab, which is itself a symbol of urban change, provides an excellent setting to investigate place-based experiences and how they can contribute to “transformative topophilia” or a sense of how change can happen through place. But some entirely different processes involving transformations of urban senses of places are happening in cities in China, where IKEA catalogues and products seem to be encouraging a culturally fluid sense of what constitutes home. The catalogues, which are globally standardized yet subtly modified to accommodate Chinese tastes, have a transformative capacity that lies in promises of translocal inclusion or being part of a global culture. The effects of IKEA may understood as “transcultural odourlessness” but they have been widely welcomed by urban Chinese people and have to be understood not so much as placeless as actually enriching and pluralising senses of place. A Concluding Comment What Senses of Place makes clear is that place is implicated in many of the challenges of the present century, and that it has to be approached as a multi-layered, multi-dimensional phenomenon that both shapes perceptions of global challenges and in diverse way is threatened by them. It is an academic  book, and some of the discussion is challenging, but it sets the stage for future thinking about place. In the concluding chapter the editors draw attention to “the plurality of place-related meanings” and discuss the importance of finding possible ways of navigating between relatively stable and more fluid attachments to places. I think this captures neatly the ambiguity in how most people now experience places, continually navigating both intellectually and in practice between local, regional and national places, between a desire for stability and a wish for change, sometimes at home, often on the move, constantly informed and connected electronically, mostly uncertain about the future.    C.M. Raymond, L.C, Manzo, D.R. Williams, A. Di Masso, T. von Wirth Ieds) Changing Senses of Place: Navigating Global Challenges, Cambridge University Press, 2021. 

This post is a summary of some ways place has been discussed in literary criticism that may have relevance for a broader understanding of place experience. Though it refers to a few books that are often considered to be based in particular places (such as Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels, or Thoreau’s Walden)  it is not a review of them. It is really just a synopsis of interpretations about the role that place plays in literature that I come across and think are interesting. It elaborates remarks I made in previous posts on writing about places, and Islandia (a novel that is about sense and love of place)..

Place as Context or Background
The most straightforward use of place in fiction is as a background to a story. William Zinsser puts the matter neatly: “every hu­man event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that ‘somewhere’ is like” (p.88). This is so even the place has nothing much to do with characters or the plot. A simple description of the setting , perhaps done in broad strokes in the first few pages, allows readers to fill in details with what they know from their own experiences or knowledge of real places. Something similar is done in movies and TV series, often with little more than a place name and a few shots of landscapes.

In this sense place is a backdrop, not unlike stage scenery, that has minimal significance for the story or the characters involved in it.. The story could happen almost anywhere, but the place where it happens provides a bit of incidental colour and interest.

Place Integration and/or Metaphor
This is a more sophisticated literary use of place, in which it serves a symbolic role that embroiders the story. Linn Ullmann, a Norwegian writer (who I cited in the post on Writing about Places) suggests: “Before you can write a good plot, you need to write a good place.” To support this contention she refers to a comment in a story by the Canadian author and Nobel prize winner Alice Munro: “Something had happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened.  And then there are the other places, which are just other places.” The settings where something happened are where meaning resides and they contain and embroider the story and amplify the characters. In effect, for writers such as Munro  without a place there is no story.

Leonard Lutwack discusses place in more literary terms in The Role of Place in Literature. He takes a broad definition of place as “all inhabitable space,” which includes all forms and scales of scenery, setting and location, and considers the various ways the particular identities of these have been used throughout the history of literature in order to reinforce personalities and plots. He pays considerable attention to the rhetorical and metaphorical purposes place can serve.  

Regardless of whether places in works of literature are rooted in fact or not, Lutwack’s view is that they serve a symbolic function.  He argues that a core element in much American writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries were the distinctive places and regional settings that provided challenges and opportunities. Since then there is evidence of increasing placelessness in literature associated with the implications of dislocation, disorientation, detachment from home and the restless mobility of modern life. Lutwack also notes  “If there is any place at all in the lives of this new breed of character,” he writes, “it is the highway itself.” p 227

This is, however, often ambivalence in this place:story relationship – bucolic landscapes do not necessarily mean mellow personalities, and undifferentiated spaces do not always mean placelessness. Virginia Woolf, for example, wrote in a celebratory tone of the anonymity and whirling flow of the city.

Place is also integrated into literature in more immediate ways that have to do with the author’s own experience of  places either as a record or an invention of human experience. Jason Finch indicates that fiction of the English author E.M. Forster approximated real places, in some cases where he had lived, yet they were modified and given different names. Thomas Hardy did much the same in his novels of Wessex, in some cases using real places, and sometimes substituting invented place names for otherwise recognizable places – thus Oxford he called “Christminster.”

Jeffry Herlihy-Mera notes that Hemingway’s novels depend on the displacement that expatriation provided him. The places in which they are set are principal components of the narrative. Yet while Hemingway had lived in them, he always wrote about them when he was living elsewhere, a role he explicitly referred to as “transplanting” – he needed some distance to capture through his memories the traits he regarded as valuable for his writing. Incidentally, Hemingway also evaluated and esteemed the places where he worked “Madrid was always a good place for working,” he wrote. “So was Paris, and so were Key West, Florida, in the cool months; the ranch, near Cooke City, Montana; Kansas City; Chicago; Toronto; and Havana, Cuba. Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.” (cited in Herlihy-Mera, p. 56-7).

Circularity
While particular places often inspire authors, who then incorporate those into their stories with some fictional elaboration or modification, the relationship between places and literature often can involve a sort of circularity between places, authors, readers, authors and places.

Biographers of authors and artists almost always explore the personal landscapes of their subjects, where they grew up, where they chose to live, because without knowing the places that have mattered to them, biographers can’t form a complete sense of their work. Childhood environments, places and memory all are aspects of the foundation of prose and poetry.

In addition, novels, movies and works of art can shape how we see and interact with the places where they are set. The American writer Walker Percy wrote a novel The Moviegoer that is centred on a character for whom a place only became truly real when he had seen it in a movie. A rather version of this reinforcement occurs in literary tourism that involves visits to the places where authors once lived, or wrote about, and have in some cases have been rebranded to celebrate their fictional identities. Shakespeare and Stratford-Upon-Avon; the Globe Theatre reconstruction in London; Hobitton, which was built as a set for the movie of the Lord of the Rings and is now a tourist attraction in New Zealand. More broadly, but less easy to illustrate, is the effect fiction has on popular interpretations of places and landscapes. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to visit Walden Pond without seeing it through the writing of Thoreau.

There are also instances in which authors engage with the real places in which they have based their stories. Jason Finch observes that the rural part of Hertfordshire in England that was where the writer E.M. Forster had lived in childhood, and which he represented in fictional form in his novel Howard’s End, is also where the first post- Second World War new town of Stevenage is sited. After spending several decades elsewhere Forster returned to Hertfordshire during the war, and despised and actively protested the plan that was being prepared for Stevenage as “a meteorite town, fallen from a blue sky” (Finch, p.384) created by “plansters” and unwelcome intruders (Finch, p.395).

Place as Nature and a Moral Imperative
Barry Lopez, a widely admired author of novels and non-fiction works about nature and environment, wrote a short essay “A Literature of Place” in which he suggests that there is a long tradition in American writing about “the impact nature and place have on culture.” This tradition includes Thoreau, Melville, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. For Lopez the literature of place is a genre that has to do careful observation of the particular qualities of natural environments, and then explicitly raises questions about technological progress and modern economic development that threaten these natural places.

In his essay Lopez argues that to write about a place in this sense requires that you become intimate with its history and that in effect you establish an ethical conversation with it about what is a good or bad way to treat it. In other words the literature of place reflects this intimacy and involves a moral imperative to protect it and protest how it is threatened.

This moral imperative probably originated with the Romantic movement. It was, for instance, part of the association between landscape and literature for those who lived in and wrote about the Lake District in England. “The world is too much with us,” William Wordsworth wrote in 1807 as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum. “Late and soon, getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours.”

Place in Literature as Parochial, Exclusionary and without Historical Perspective
Roberto Dainotto in Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities offers a rather different and more academic argument. He is critical of the role of the conventional interpretation of place in literature because “it is fundamentally a negation of history.” It is tied to regionalism, which is “the idea of place as a fixed background of human sensibility” and assumes that places have their own positive, local traditions., which are mostly divorced from social and economic history.

Implicit in literature that celebrates place, he suggests, is the idea that different place traditions are the basis for happy coexistence. “The goal posited by the literature of place “is therefore an ethical one: to replace the ‘insufficient’ historical remedy with the geographical cure – a cure that…will let tradition survive and be honored, sheltered in the boundaries of place” (p.14). Issues of class, power and political economy, which Dainotto from his political economics perspective regards as primary, are mostly ignored if not suppressed. According to his interpretation the literature of place is exclusionary, inward looking, avoids the realities of social change, technological progress and political struggles.

He supports this with interpretations of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and the philosophical writing about home of Martin Heidegger. These represent  place as free from the contingent imposition and crises of what know as history. For instance, in Hardy’s Return of the Native each main character is the personification of a place, and it is set in the fictional rural region of Wessex in the 1840s and 1850s where there are no railways or evidence of modernity, and distant cities are filled with vice and corruption.

Dainotto acknowleges that “nations are monstrous inventions, with a tendency to violence”,  (p.169), but his view is that the literature of place with its “archaic and more pervasive dream of placeness” presents a much more more serious problem because it can, as Heidegger’s roots in and celebration of peasant life in the Black Forest demonstrated, lead through rural regionalism to fascism. (See the post on Power and Place for some discussion of this criticism of Heidegger).

Dainotto’s critique of place is broadly consistent with the thinking of others, such as Doreen Massey, who have taken a rather narrow interpretation of place as bounded, permeated by tradition, and anti-urban, and then condemned it for being parochial and exclusionary. Though examples of this view of place can certainly be found in literature, it is a selective interpretation. There is also a literature depicting societies that are so caught up in universality and equality that they negate place, including Zamiatin’s We and Huxley’s Brave New World, with the consequence that they promote placeless forms of authoritarianism.

My view is that the best way to understand literature through the lens of place is to consider the ways in which it reveals the often ambivalent tensions between what is local and specific, and what is universal or widely shared. In this view, which is I think is widely represented in works of fiction, events and lives in particular places are inexorably caught up in processes of historical and social change.

References

Dainotto, Roberto, 2000 Place in literature: regions, cultures, communities, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press.

Finch, Jason, 2011 E.M. Forster and English Place: A Literary Topography, Abo Akademie University Press, Finland

Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey, 2011 In Paris or Paname: Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism, Amsterdam: Rodopi (see especially Chapter 2 “The Role of Place in Literature’.

Lopez, Barry, 1997 ” A Literature of Place,” University of Portland, Portland Magazine, Summer 1997. Available online here

Lutwack, Leonard, 1984 The Role of Place in Literature, Syracuse University Press. 

Ullman, Linn in Joe Fassler, “Before you can write a good story your have to write a good place”, The Atlantic April 2014. Available online here.

Zinsser. William, 1990  On Writing Well, Harper and Row.

This second post updating my earlier speculations about the future of places in the 21st century summarizes the five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways [SSPs] that inform the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2021), and considers the possible implications of these for places. The SSPs, or “narratives”, can be understood as sets of well-informed assumptions about ways societies might unfold up to 2100, and are supported by projections of population, education, urbanization and economic activity that are consistent with the assumptions of each narrative. In effect, they are forecasts of different social contexts that could impact the future character of places.

The SSPs have been developed since 2010 (see Moss et al 2010) to complement physical climate change models, notably the Representative Concentration Pathways or RCPs that have been used by the IPCC since 1990. In the Sixth Assessment Report the concentration pathways and socioeconomic pathways are integrated as a way to recognize that any assessment of the severity of climate impacts depends in part on the social, economic and political willingness to take measures to mitigate carbon emissions and to implement adaptations.

The five different pathways are an attempt to span a range of uncertainties about future relationship between political choices, greenhouse gas emissions, and temperature changes. Because their end date is 2100 it’s important to note that all projections become increasingly uncertain the further they are from the present.

The Five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways
The diagram below, which is an elaboration of the original in O’Neill et al in Global Environmental Change, 2017, provides a useful visual summary of the five SSPs. I have abbreviated and paraphrased the descriptions given by O’Neill in order to emphasize aspects that have relevance for places. I have also drawn on Jiang and O’Neil, Global Environmental Change 2017 which offers projections of global urbanization to 2100 and Riahi et al, Global Environmental Change 2017, which offers projections of GDP including GINI measures of inequality.

SSP1 assumes a move towards sustainability and improved management of the global commons, with economic growth shifting toward an emphasis on human well-being and compact urban forms.This pathway is the best one for dealing with climate warming, presenting low challenges for both mitigation and adaptation.

SSP 2, which has been described as Dynamics as Usual, or Current Trends Continue, or Muddling Through, assumes social, economic, and technological trends do not change markedly from recent patterns of uneven growth, imperfectly functioning markets, with modest progress in sustainability. This is perhaps the most likely of the SSPs – a middle of the road in which governments dawdle, doing something about climate change, but putting off difficult decisions for as long as possible.

SSP3 assumes a resurgence of nationalism and geopolitical rivalries, with countries increasingly focusing on achieving their own energy and food security, and limited cooperation on global concerns. Slow economic growth and poor urban planning are expected to make cities unattractive.

SSP4 foresees a future of increasing disparities in political and economic opportunity that lead to increasing inequalities both between and within countries. The gap widens between an internationally-connected society that contributes to knowledge sectors of the global economy, and lower-income, poorly educated societies that are labor intensive. Environmental quality is a concern mostly for the affluent and where they live. Social conflict becomes common.

SSP5 assumes that continuing exploitation of fossil fuels will support rapid growth of the global economy and energy intensive lifestyles. This allows substantial investments in health, education, and institutions and encourages innovations, including geo-engineering for adaptation to global warming. Of course, it will greatly exacerbate the processes of climate change.

Projections Related to the Five SSPs
The five SSPs have been elaborated quantitatively by teams of scientists from IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis), NASA and other research institutions. These elaborations include data bases and projections of population, education levels, GDP and urbanization, both globally and for individual nations, and they refine previous projections by the UN and other institutions, in some cases extending them from 2050 to 2100. The diagram below, for example, projects that with the fossil fueled growth of SSP5 there will be a global population decline before 2100, but substantial growth in GDP and urbanization. However under the regional rivalries of SSP3 there will be continuing population growth in the 22nd century, but slow economic growth and urbanization. The middle of the road, business much as usual future of SSP2 falls in between those extremes.

These projections do not take into consideration the environmental and climatic impacts that would be associated with the various scenarios. This has been done by Zeke Hausfather, who was involved in the research on SSPs and carbon emissions that informs the Sixth Assessment of the IPCC. His analysis, reported on his website Carbonbrief from which the following graphs are taken, shows that in all SSPs, even Sustainability, fossil fuel use will continue to play a role. And because of time lags in the effect of carbon emissions, under all scenarios global mean temperature is projected to rise by 2100 well beyond the target of the Paris Accord of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Even with in the Sustainability Pathway (SSP1) the increase could reach 3.1C, and with continued development based on fossil fuels (SSP5) it could be as high as 5.1C .

It is worth noting that independent projections by Climate Tracker suggest that with the continuation of current policies (roughly the Middle of the Road SSP) the global mean temperature could increase by somewhere between 2.1C and 3.9C by the end of the century, and even if all the current pledges and targets for mitigation are achieved the temperature increase is likely to be between 1.9C and 3.0C.

[Addendum: I recently came upon a 2018 paper by Kai Kuhnhenn, “Economic Growth in mitigation scenarios: A blind spot in climate science,” which points out that all five SSPs assume continuing economic growth. He advocates the consideration of scenarios that acknowledge the possibilities of no growth or “degrowth.” Given both the decline in greenhouse gas emissions that reflected a drop in economic production during the first year of the covid-19 pandemic, and the association since about 1800 between population growth, economic growth and carbon emissions, this does seem like a serious omission.]

Possible Direct Impacts on Places
Regardless of which SSP (or combination of SSPs, or some entirely different pathway) happens, the indications are that the impacts of climate warming will, in the absence of transformative modifications to current climate policy, progressively effect everyday life in places almost everywhere. Conversely, if transformative modifications are made, those too will impact life in places as they adjust to a low or zero carbon way of life. In either case, the effects will become more intense and widespread as global temperatures continue to increase over the course of this century.

Nevertheless, as I noted in a previous post, much of the legacy of present places – by which I mean all the roads, parks, buildings, towns and cities, industrial estates, names – will very likely endure in some form for many decades regardless of climate warming, and measure to mitigate or adapt to it.

However, this is not the case for places that are directly in the path of extreme weather. This was made apparent by the events of the summer of 2021, when there were heatwaves and extensive wildfires in California, British Columbia, Greece and Turkey that destroyed communities, and hurricanes and unprecedented rainfall that caused extensive flooding and disastrous damage to places in America, Belgium, Germany, and China.

For all the local damage and displacement of populations that these sorts of extreme weather events cause, they are a remote concern for the great majority of people. And given the general character and global scale of the SSPs and climate models it is difficult to grasp how they might impact particular places. In large cities, a few more extremely hot days every summer, more rain in winter, sea levels that rise a few centimetres a decade, can go largely unnoticed. So for the next two or three decades, regardless of which SSP comes closest to real life, the combination of the legacy of existing buildings and streets, slow and intermittent changes to the weather, and mostly unseen though critical mitigation strategies such as conversion to electrical generation from coal to renewables, means that most places and everyday life in them will stay much as they are now. Inconveniences caused by changes in weather and climate will seem incremental.

As the century progresses this will cease to be the case. Temperatures will rise, extremely hot days will stretch into weeks and months, intense rainfalls will overwhelm drains and flood walls, extreme weather will become more erratic. Consider that the extreme events of the summer of 2021 were a consequence of a global mean temperature increase of just 1.2C over pre-industrial levels. The SSPs and various analyses of current policies indicate a possible increase in global mean temperature of between 3.0C and 5.0C by the end of the century. A reasonable assumption is that extreme weather events will become far more intense, widespread and impossible to predict, and will have devastating impacts on everyday life in places. Nowhere will be immune from them.

Indirect Impacts
Economic projections associated with the SSPs project a growth rate of between 1% and 2.8% a year in global GDP to the end of the century. However, the growing costs of damages associated with extreme weather, and the expenses incurred by governments for emergency assistance that will not be paid off for the last event before the next one happens, raise doubts about this optimism. The costs of climate change will eat into government resources available for dealing with other social and economic priorities, such as housing, public health, heritage preservation and the arts. The gap between what people expect of federal or regional governments, and what those governments can provide is likely to grow, and responsibility for what happens in specific places will shift to more local levels.

Global Trends 2040, SSPs 2100 and the future of places.
A combined total of ten different scenarios of the future are suggested by Global Trends 2040 (summarized in a previous post) and the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Of those ten narratives only two suggest a possible improvement in the quality of everyday life in places.

A Renaissance of Democracies associated with a revival of civic mindedness, especially if combined with technological breakthroughs to combat climate change, could involve a resurgence of pride of place that is also attentive to the necessity of global responsibility. In such circumstances, even as cities grow, populations age and economic growth slows, the physical forms and services of many existing places could be improved to reduce inequities, provide more security and maintain continuity with the legacy of the past.

In contrast, a Sustainable future necessarily requires transformations to current ways of living in order to give priority to conservation over production and consumption. There will be changes to food production and generation of electricity, which are the largest sources of carbon emission, but those that most obviously effect the places where the majority of people will live include larger cities with denser, walkable and bikeable neighbourhoods, more public transit, wide tree-lined sidewalks, green roofs, and a way of life that is more attentive to local and regional circumstances.

The message of all the other narratives is not encouraging. Socially, environmentally, politically and economically the prevailing sense they convey is that life almost everywhere will become more difficult as challenges expand, and opportunities shrink. Even proposals for positive change will be increasingly contested and difficult to implement. The uneven impacts of climate change will reinforce political divisions as those in climatically disagreeable places attempt to migrate to places where the weather is relatively benign and they will probably not be very welcome. Silos will emerge and inequalities intensify.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that as climates warm over the course of the 21st century daily life in places almost everywhere is going to become progressively more challenging.

I last posted to this site several months ago. Since then there have been several exceptional extreme weather events, and the publication of Climate Change 2021, the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC, which integrates projections of carbon emissions and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)- scenarios of the ways the world might change up to 2100. In addition  a report by The National Intelligence Council of the United States, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested Future, outlines possible ways the world could change over the next two decades.

These two reports supplement and revise my previous posts about the future of places. In this post I summarize Global Trends 2040, and in the next post is a summary of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways [SSPs] , and also recent extreme weather events. In each post I consider relevance for the future of places.

Global Trends 2040: A More Contested Future
Global Trends 2040 is a report for politicians and policy makers which assesses trends that might shape a range of possible futures. Although directed at American concerns, especially security, it provides a comprehensive perspective that is based on wide consultation with academics and others in Africa, Europe, and Asia. It has three main sections: structural forces, emerging dynamics, and scenarios of possible futures. As the subtitle suggests, its major theme is that proposals for change will be increasingly contested.

Structural forces are  trends in demographics, environmental processes, economics and technology that provide a foundation for making projections about the future.
Demographically, population growth will slow but urbanization will increase. The report suggests that almost everywhere governments will struggle to meet the needs and expectations of more urban, educated, aging and connected populations.
Environmentally, climate change will impact every country and will be exacerbated by environmental degradation associated with poor land management, air pollution and water shortages. Emissions cuts to mitigate warming will be difficult because the pay-off runs counter to short-term political incentives. Furthermore, the uneven distribution of costs and benefits associated with reducing emissions and making adaptations is likely to increase political cleavages both within and between countries.
Economically, these cleavages could be compounded by disruptions associated with rising national debt, more complex trading conditions, the global spread of services that are delivered across borders, joblessness, and the continuing rise of very big business firms. All of these could have manifestations in everyday life in cities and their neighbourhoods.
Technologically, innovation will increase in pace and reach, it make for a hyperconnected world. This could help to mitigate the challenges of climate change, aging populations and economic upheaval. But it may also pose problems of security and privacy, and hyperconnectivity could result in “distortions of truth and reality that could destabilize societies at a rate that dwarfs current disinformation challenges.” Digital communications inform, yet confuse and divide communities.

Emerging dynamics are apparent in social and political shifts already underway, but whose outcomes are not easily projected. At individual and societal levels it seems people are becoming increasingly distrustful and pessimistic as they struggle to deal with disruptive economic, political, technological, and demographic trends. Information about these is increasingly available but it is often siloed as people retreat to like-minded groups. Some of those are rooted in places, and exclusionary, but others transcend borders, may be transnational and associated with a resurgence of cultural identities. Both will challenge civic minded attitudes and foster contestation, and at the international level could create more confrontational geopolitics.

A likely consequence of these emerging trends is that governments at all levels will face mounting pressure from economic constraints, aging populations, the costs of climate adaptation, and more empowered but fragmented communities. At all levels of government there could be a growing gap between popular expectations and what governments can deliver.

Five scenarios of the future are derived from the directions and uncertainties of forces and dynamics. The first three are based on various possible shifts in the international relationship between the US and China. The last two assume substantial global discontinuities.
Renaissance of Democracies – the US takes the lead in this. Democratic government provides better service provision, and restoration of public trust in institutions with strong differences of opinion resolved democratically.
A World Adrift – China takes the lead but is not dominant as the international system becomes directionless, there slow economic growth in developed countries following the Covid pandemic, and deepening social divisions and political paralysis. The costs and consequences of aging populations and repeated extreme climate events crowd out other initiatives, and promote political polarization. Climate change and instability in developing countries are largely unaddressed.
Competitive Coexistence – China and the US prosper and compete for leadership, strengthening economic interdependence, though long term stability remains at risk because climate change is ignored in favour of short-term economic gain.
Separate Silos – a world in which globalization has broken down because of cascading challenges of joblessness resulting from global trade, environmental deterioration and health problems, and in which nationalism and economic blocs emerge to provide protection from mounting threats through self-sufficiency.
Tragedy and Mobilization – bottom up revolutionary change in the wake of a global, devastating environmental crisis and the collapse of fisheries and food production. Political power is rechanneled to deal with immediate challenges and to promote sustainability. Countries dependent on fossil fuel are the slowest to adapt, while NGOs and multilateral organizations develop unprecedented ability to set standards and directions.

Implications for Places
Over the next 20 years particular places, by which I mean the neighbourhoods, towns, villages and regions where people spend most of their everyday lives, will mostly endure much as they are now in spite of globalization, economic booms and busts, hyperconnectivity, aging populations, and extreme weather events. Nevertheless Global Trends 2040 indicates that their could be substantial changes in the quality of life in them and their social/political character as public demands and government capabilities move in different directions.

Increasing urbanization in developing countries will pose challenges for provision of transportation, services and food unless there is substantial simultaneous economic growth. This suggests that quality of life in those urban places is likely to deteriorate and some of the gains made over the last few decades in eradicating deep poverty in them will be lost. In more developed countries the main concern is that age. Where a decline in the working age population is offset by immigration from less developed nations this will probably lead both to changes in the cultural character of places and to more racial discord.

The uneven distribution of the impacts of climate change, especially extreme events that cause disastrous damage in particular places but leave most others unscathed, will add a geographical dimension to political divisions, especially because it seems to be the case that less advantaged places are those that will suffer much of the damage. It also seems likely that the costs of mitigation and adaptation will be an increasing economic burden that will require trade-offs with other political priorities, such as the provision of affordable housing. that will be obvious in specific communities.

Of particular relevance for places is the suggestion that local governments and cities are likely to become more consequential because proximity and flexibility allows them to address problems that impact everyday life, including international issues such as climate change and immigration (see page 88). In other words, relatively local places will exercise increasing initiatives in dealing with problems that may be global in scope, and their attempts will be facilitated by digital connectivity. At the same time, local proposals for dealing with aging populations, climate adaptation and higher densities of urbanization, will be increasingly contested, partly because of nimbyism and partly because of the emergence of locally vociferous silos of disinformation.

If there is a revival of democracies, which currently seems unlikely, it would be manifest in revival of pride in place associated with processes for finding modest but acceptable approaches to adapting places to the diverse challenges that will emerge in the next two decades. If, however, the future is one of a world adrift, local places could become microcosms of the national and international discord.

Competitive coexistence seems to be an extension of how the Covid pandemic has been handled – a global problem addressed separately by individual nations, and in many cases by provinces or states within those nations, using different strategies to do the best for themselves. A common thread will be to put short-term economic gain above longer term social benefits, and this could easily result in things being worse off everywhere. In a future of Separate Silos places would be determined by ideas of exceptionalism, with local and regional fiefdoms doing their own thing regardless of broader consequences, where versions of nimbyism will be ascendent.

Tragedy and mobilization would means a very substantial shift of power and practice to the local level, because sustainability can only be successful through local initiatives that take into account regional, national and international patterns and processes. However the transition to this locally based but globally responsible awareness will involve profound upheavals and discord in everyday life in places as the character of jobs and businesses are changed, and as much political power shifts down from the level of the state to regions and municipalities.

Whichever scenario or combination of scenarios prevails over the next twenty years, it appears that everyday life in local places is going to become increasingly challenged as the effects of climate change and aging populations, which are currently in their initial phases, plus political discord, siloed views, and as deep disagreements about what should be done to address these and other challenges become more pronounced.

Hecataeus of Miletus published a map of the world about 500 BCE, and Eratosthenes of Cyrene is the person credited with creating the word “geography” about 225 BCE. In ancient Greece individuals were named for and identified by the place they had been born. More than two millennia later the novelist Lawrence Durrell (1969) claimed that: “as long as people keep getting born Greek or Italian or French their culture productions will bear the unmistakable signature of the place.”  

Whether you agree with Durrell or not, it always seems to have been accepted that people’s personal and social identities somehow reflect the identities of the places they come from or live in. In this post I consider what is meant by identity of and with place and how these meanings have recently begun to get increasingly varied.

Three Aspects of Identity
A “law of identity” in logic holds that everything is identical with itself. This may not seem very helpful, but it lies at the root of the legal assumption that identity is what makes each of us distinct from everyone else, something confirmed when we are required to provide proof of our identity. Similarly, the identity of a place is what makes somewhere different from everywhere else.

The notion of identity in mathematics takes this a step further because it refers to instances where apparently different things can be shown to be identical (as in proofs in algebra). While this sort of strict equivalence does not translate well to what happens in everyday life, it suggests that aspects of individual identities can be shared. In psychiatry personal identity is said to involve both a persistent sameness within oneself and a persistent sharing of some characteristics with others. Similarly, characteristics of the identity of place are shared between different places.

There is also a social form of place identity – the identity of persons with places. Both individually and as groups, we identify in some way with places, for instance where we were born (essential for proof of personal identity), or the region or city where grew up or now live.

Identity of A Place
The identity of a place consists of the unique combination of intrinsic characteristics that make it distinctive. This apparently straightforward definition is in fact elusive because “a place” can refer to anywhere from a room to a region to a nation. Fortunately it is easier to get a handle on identity because regardless of the size of place it is made up of three interrelated components that cannot be reduced to one another.

• Forms consist of topography, buildings, spaces and things. They are whatever would remain if people and all their activities were removed.

• Activities, or what goes on somewhere, including processes of ecological and other changes, land uses, and movements of traffic and people. Some of these can be observed and measured objectively.

• Meanings. Aesthetic, spiritual, political, cultural and ethical values associated with places, including memories, histories, traditions, symbols and plans for the future. These may be revealed in and reinforced by certain built forms and activities, perhaps most obviously in heritage, but are difficult to deduce from them. You have to know about the values people attach to places in order to see evidence of them.

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Three places that respectively stress forms, activities and meanings in their identities. The chapel at IIT in Chicago, designed by Mies van der Rohe. A system for measuring pedestrian flows outside stores devised by the survey firm Placemeter (see References at the end of this post). The grave of John McRae, who wrote the remembrance poem In Flanders Fields, in a WW1 cemetery near Ypres.

The identity of every place, no matter what size and no matter how bland or spectacular it seems, is comprised of these components. The relative weight of them varies. In some cases spectacular forms are dominant, others (for instance sports stadiums) may be little more than empty spaces until filled by events, and some otherwise innocuous places (for instance, military cemeteries) are filled with meaning though their forms are minimal and they have almost no activities.

The identities of places change over time as buildings are added, trees grow, new technologies are introduced, fashions shift, and events happen that are incorporated into place memories and meanings. These changes are mostly incremental so that place identity, somewhat like personal identity, has continuity and persistent sameness. In addition, aspects of the components of place identity, such as landforms, architectural styles, types of land use, festivals, and religious beliefs are widely shared, so that different places have enough in common to make them more or less comprehensible even if their environments and cultures are unfamiliar.

Identity with Place
The identities of places can be considered quite dispassionately, especially if the focus is on forms and activities, for example, in planning reports. In contrast, identity with place involves emotions and feelings. The composer Frédéric Chopin identified deeply with his homeland of Poland. He left in the 1830s because of political upheavals there and never returned, but always carried a jar of Polish soil with him.  When he was buried in Paris, his heart was, in accordance with his wishes, taken to Warsaw for burial.

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Such intense identity with place may be rare, but where we come from is a basic fact of existence that enters in our personality. For some it may be little more than a line in a passport, but for others it is essential to self-identity, reinforced by memories of landscapes and events, accents, attitudes, and beliefs that comprise an individual’s geographical past. Elena Liotta, a psychoanalyst, writes in her book Soul and Earth” (2009): “A place takes on meaning as a result of the sensations and emotions elicited and the consequent attachments formed…External space becomes interior space, a subjective space and time of experience, memory and emotions” (p.6). And…“If one knows how to look the beginnings hold everything” (p.41). In other words, where we come from echoes through our subconscious.

Shifting Attachment to Place
Identity with place overlaps with the idea of what environmental psychologists and others have called “place attachment” (see Lewicka 2011, Manzo and Devine-Wright 2014, Seamon 2014). Their research demonstrates that for an individual place attachment is rarely static. It changes character as circumstances and intentions change, emerging out of involvement in typical daily goings on somewhere, and growing into becoming a member of a community in a place.

There is always a tension between mobility and place attachment, between roaming and putting down roots. Over a lifetime these processes of forming attachments to a place may be repeated several times in various locations. This is the case for migrants who form identities with very different places that are separated by oceans and continents. For groups of migrants this process of identifying with a new place often involves changing the identities of a place by grafting names, temples, stores and restaurants, and culturally specific activities onto the forms and landscapes of the places they have moved to.

Decline of the Born and Bred Narrative of Identity with Place
The tension between mobility and attachment has been clarified by Stephanie Taylor’s research (2010) into the relationship between women’s identities and place in contemporary societies. This brings into question what she refers to as the “born and bred cliché” that home town, home country, or native land “produces a sense of belonging and sense of identity as a person of that place” (p.22). This link has been weakened by increased mobility and changes in the character of place attachment

Place, she argues, is shifting from its former meaning as a geographical context to a community constructed through choice.  Place now is as much chosen as it inherited. Retirement communities in locations with pleasant climates, the choice of place to go to university, and gay villages are indications of this. Taylor suggests that for the women she studied identity with place has evolved to become an open-ended process, partly personal and partly related to changing social contexts. A place, she suggests, is chosen because it matches who a woman want to be.

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Diversification of Identity and Place
That identity with place is shifting away from the born and bred narrative  is reinforced by an annotated bibliography prepared by Marco Antonsich (2014). This focuses on work by geographers, but also includes contributions by philosophers, psychologists and others. It demonstrates the increasingly wide range of recent research on identity and place, which he puts into three broad categories.

• Phenomenological accounts by humanistic geographers and the empirical research of environmental psychologist into place attachment that stress aspects of belonging to a physical environment such as a home or neighbourhood.  In various ways these tend to contribute to the born and bred narrative.

• Geographies of difference associated with gender, sexuality, race and class that raise issues about inclusion and exclusion in place identity. This research emphasizes the roles of society and politics rather than a geographical setting in place experiences, and that for some groups these can mean identity with place can be a negative rather than a positive experience. For refugees and migrant workers living in camps, prisoners, the homeless or poorly housed, women experiencing violence at home identity with place involves unpleasant necessity, drudgery, disconnection, tension rather than belonging.

• Investigations of globalization explore how processes of global economic flows transnationalism and cosmopolitanism challenge the role of geographical contiguity in place identity because they involve attachments and relationships to several different places. For migrants these can be profoundly different, both environmentally and culturally. However, electronic communications, international travel and social media have facilitated identity with many places, eased the intensity of differences, and made choice of places increasingly possible, not for everyone but for many.

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On the left, “A place where people want to be” is Mississauga, a city adjacent to Toronto. “Vote Green because we love this place” was an election poster in British Columbia, 2018.

Comment
It’s obvious that the identities of actual places, both large and small, have undergone huge changes in the last half century. Skyscrapers, suburbs, big box stores, tourist resorts, container ports, deforestation, homeless camps, deindustrialization, gentrification, industrial scale agriculture, mass migration from less to more developed countries, international airports. These may have change the identities of places. They have not undermined the logic of place identity. The basic components of forms, activities and meanings still apply, and sharing aspects between places has simply intensified with increased international travel and communication.

It is less obvious how changes in the identities of places have affected and been affected by shifts in how people identify with places.  Inherited, born and bred identities with places, which prevailed for much of history, have recently given ground to attachments with many places, either because of migration or through options to work in or travel to different parts of the world. Over the course of one or two generation, identity with place has for many people become a matter of choice rather than necessity. 

Lockdowns and travel restrictions because of the Covid-19 pandemic have halted this trend.  The identities of places have changed little, but our relationship to the places where we live has been abruptly brought in sharp focus as the choice to move elsewhere has been dramatically reduced.  My sense is that responses to this are mixed.  There is support for whatever is local – businesses, outdoor recreation, volunteering for those in need, street performances by musicians. But there is also a frustration with, in effect, being confined to a place and with lost opportunities to travel.  As the pandemic subsides the outcome seems likely to be a surge of enthusiasm for travel to other places, a return to trends previously underway  to form identities with many places and to choose places with communities of like-minded people. My hope is that these trends might be tempered by an enhanced identity with the places we live in them because we have learned out of necessity to appreciate their value.

Antonsich. M., Identity and Place, 2013 in B. Warf (ed.) Oxford Bibliographies in Geography, New York: Oxford University Press, available online here.

Durrell, Lawrence, 1969 Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel,  London: Faber and Faber.

Lewicka M,. 2011 “Place Attachment: How far have we come in the last 40 years?” Journal of Environmental Psychology, 31(3), 207-230

Liotta, Elena. 2009 On Soul and Earth: The psychic value of place. London: Routledge.

Manzo, Lynne and Devine-Wright, Patrick (eds), 2014 Place Attachment: Advances in theory, Methods and Applications, New York: Routledge.

Placemeter was a company that from 2013 developed “computer vision and machine learning algorithms to transform video streams from public cameras into data about the volume and direction of pedestrians, bicycles, bikes, and vehicles.” I believe it was acquired by Netgear in 2016.

Seamon, David, 2014 “Place Attachment and Phenomenology: The Synergistic Dynamism of Place” in Manzo, L. and Devine-Wright, P (eds) Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, New York: Routledge

Taylor, Stephanie, 2010 Narratives of identity and place, London: Routledge,