A nature reserve near Rice Lake in Southern Ontario protects a remnant of the tall grass prairie that once extended across much of the region.

Every place, no matter whether it is wild, rural or urban, has an ecosystem. And ecosystems, rather like places, extend across a range of scales from woodlots to the entire planet. This post is a summary of publications that reflect diverse ideas about the ecology of place, beginning with the importance of place for site-based field ecologists, then considering the ecology of imagination, and suggestions about ecology in place-based planning and environmental management. References are at the end.

Place for Ecologists
The chapters in The Ecology of Place: Contributions of Place-Based Research to Ecological Understanding, edited by Ian Billick and Mary Price (2010), are written by ecologists who have spent much of their research career working in specific places. In this they are not unlike many other field scientists – geomorphologists, biogeographers, botanists, entomologists – who can spend years investigating natural processes in a small area.

In the introduction to their book Billick and Price write: “We reserve ‘place’ to represent all of those idiosyncratic ecological features – including spatial location and time period – that define the ecological context of a field study.” They emphasize that the ecology of place assigns to the idiosyncrasies of place, time and taxon, a central and creative role in both the design and the interpretation of research. In other words, place is not a problem to be overcome or circumvented. It is a source of invaluable information that requires deep understanding of organisms and processes in a specific setting, and is something to be celebrated .

Another nature reserve in Southern Ontario – a restored marshland on the migratory route of terns, and the type of place that is deeply familiar to local ecologists as well as birders. For conservation purposes ecology is necessarily place specific.

Nevertheless most science publications do not encourage place-based accounts, and favour research that deals with the diversity, complexity and contingency of ecological systems by searching for broad patterns, or uses empirical data to test theories about general processes. However, the contributors to Billick and Price’s book argue that the results of place-based research are rarely parochial and the ecological specifics of a place contribute invaluable insights to general scientific understanding about ecological processes. In short, specific place research and general scientific explanations are complementary rather than incompatible.

In one of the chapters D.M. Waller and S. Flade claim that: “Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is…grounded in both ecological understanding and love of place.” It seems that Leopold’s work serves as an inspiration for many of those writing about the ecology of place, especially his observation that the motivation for conserving the ecological health of the land, and the knowledge of how to do this, arises from deep personal involvement in the natural history of a particular place. In their conclusion Billick and Price suggest that it is this motivational power of place that draws ecologists back to their specific field sites year after year, and that this power has the capacity to draw citizens and scientists together in the collaborative effort needed to solve environmental problems.

An imaginative ecological grafitto (photographed in 1988, now long gone) in Toronto titled “The Coniferocentric Veiw of the World” shows a conifer at the apex, with birds (looking like planes, then fish and dragonflies, and what I think are people at the base.

The Ecology of Imagination
Edith Cobb’s remarkable book on The Ecology of Imagination (1977) is an indirect reinforcement of the motivational power of place. For her the ecology of imagination has to do with “the genius of childhood”, by which she means the spontaneity and creative imagination of children in the their relationships with nature. “Experience in childhood,” she writes, “is never formal or abstract… the world of nature is not a ‘scene’, nor even a landscape. Nature for the child is sheer sensory experience.” An experience that combines the cultural and the natural, self and world.Cobb suggests that the ecology of imagination implicated in this nature-mind-body-society continuum is actually a phenomenon of evolution at bio-cultural levels, a phenomenon that begins with the natural genius of childhood and the spirit of place. Although the character of individual experiences in the ecology of childhood imagination can influence environmental attitudes for the rest of a person’s life, it is the case, that with maturity the child (which is to say all of us) effectively evolves out of nature into culture and “experience of environment becomes thought about environment.” I don’t doubt the general truth of this, but I do think that the essays in Billick and Price’s book indicate that at least for place-based ecological scientists the motivational power of the ecology of place is never lost.

This also may be the case for others who seek to uncover the imaginative ecology of place. For instance, Carl Lavery and Simon Whitehead are respectively a theatre scholar and a professional dancer who meet regularly in West Wales to discuss shared interests in place, ecology and embodiment. They draw in part on a critical reading of Heidegger’s ideas about dwelling in order to develop what they call “an ecology of place performance research” (2012). Whitehead says: “As I see it, home doesn’t start with language, as it does in (Lavery’s) explanation of Heidegger, it starts with the body. The body is an amazing ecological resource…In a sense, the body is the first home, and the place or territory where you live is the second home.” Ecology, he suggests, teaches that everything is connected and brings into question the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power. Place has specificity yet is relational. It is part of network in which, as in ecology, everything is connected. These qualities he then attempts to disclose through dance and in works of performance art.

Kim Dovey’s diagram of the Ecology of Place, from his 1988 publication.

Ecology, Place, Design and Planning.
An altogether more prosaic understanding of the ecology of place regards it as an approach that can lead sustainable, healthy plans and designs for urban development. Kim Dovey, (a leading contributor in a books and essays to ideas about place and design), wrote a paper in 1985 about the ecology of place and placemaking in which he claimed that: “The more we understand of the concept and meanings of place…the more we realize the interdependencies of people, form and meaning.” His diagram indicates that what he understood by ecology was primarily the interaction of social processes rather than natural ones, an indication reinforced by his propositions for making what he called “healthy places” with a self-sustaining dynamism. These propositions include: Embodying an emotional connection; Bringing people together; Creating a tangible image and distinctive character; Acknowledging both constant change and connections with the past and the future.

A rather different interpretation is offered approach is provided by Beatley and Manning in The Ecology of Place (1997). They offer a “vision” of how we might plan for places (which means built/urban places) by attending to the interconnections of ecological and social processes. They draw especially on the ideas of Ian McHarg, a landscape architect, about designing with, rather than against, nature, attending to natural cycles, minimizing waste and resource demands, greening cities, building community resilience, and studying the character of the bioregion. They are especially critical of low-density, environmentally damaging urban sprawl, and regard the ecology of place as a foundation for the types of sustainability and environmentally sensitive design approaches that are advocated in new urbanism. These approaches, they argue, offer a vision of a future in which land is used sparingly, landscapes are cherished and cities are compact, vibrant and green. “This vision of place emphasizes both the ecological and social, where quantity of consumption is replaced with quality of relationships.”

The ecology of place in urban planning. This diagram is of a proposed new town called Seaton that may be built to the east of Toronto. It is designed to protect the existing valleys, promote habitat continuity, include permaculture, and general respond to and celebrate the ecology of the site.

Home Place and Parochial Ecology
If it could be widely applied this ecological approach to urban development might allay the concerns of Stan Rowe, an environmentalist from the Canadian prairies, who, in his book Home Place: Essays on Ecology (1990), argues that in cities the instinctive sense of ourselves as related ecologically to the land has slipped away. Though he writes about many local places, Rowe’s ‘home place’ is actually Gaia, the Earth as an ecosphere, and his book is a plea for environmental awareness that echoes Leopold’s call for a land ethic.  He concludes his book dramatically the statement that the “Human history will end in ecology, or nothing.”

Michael Northcott is a theologian with, I think, not dissimilar views. In his recent book Place, Ecology and the Sacred (2015) he invokes Leopold’s notion of “land pathology” (which is similar to Rowe’s concern about the ecological blindness of city life) and argues that the loss of sense of place, which he thinks began about 1800 with industrialization and industrial agriculture, is central to the modern ecological crisis. The thrust of his book is that the sense of the sacred that emanates from local communities of faith in Christian and Jewish tradition amounts to what he calls a “parochial ecology.” In pre-modern ages this was a powerful force, and if it can be rediscovered it might again be the foundation for creating places that are “politically just, economically productive and ecologically sustainable.” He writes that: “Places of dwelling become places, and indeed sacred places, as they are shaped by human experience in interaction with local and specific ecological qualities.”

Comment
The books I mention here are, as far as I am aware, the most substantial and explicit ones about the ecology of place. There are not many of them and they offer a striking range of interpretations. While I like to hope that the place-based ecological arguments of Beatley and Manning, Dovey, and Northcott  might have some influence on future place-making and place-adaptation, intellectually what I find most important are Edith Cobb’s ideas about the ecology of imagination in childhood, and the demonstration in Billick and Price’s book that place-based research can involve emotional attachments to places without compromising scientific integrity. The great majority of writing about place is about human-made places. They are excellent reminders that every place is part of a nature-mind-body-society continuum and that the nature part should not be overlooked.

History will end in ecology. A dead oak tree on a farm estate near Ludlow in Shropshire, England that supplies the nearby Ludlow Food Centre, where locally grown foods are sold.

References
Beatley, T. and Manning K. 1997 The Ecology of Place: Planning for Environment, Economy and the Community, Island Press
Billick, I. and Price, M.V. (eds) 2010 The Ecology of Place: Contributions of Place-Based Research to Ecological Understanding, University of Chicago Press
Cobb, Edith, 1977 The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, Columbia University Press
Dovey, K. 1985 “An Ecology of Place and Placemaking” 93-109, in Dovey, K., Downton, P, Missingham, G (eds) Place and Placemaking, Proceedings of Paper 85 Conference, Melbourne.
Lavery, Carl, and Whitehead, Simon 2012 “Bringing it all back home: Towards an Ecology of Place” Performance Research 17(4), 111-119
Northcott, Michael S. 2015 Place Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities, Bloomsbury Press
Rowe, Stan, 1990 Home place : essays on ecology NeWest Press

My previous post on the Future of Place was triggered by a conference that focused on placemaking and the importance of creating small urban spaces to foster community participation. This is a commendable initiative. However, I think that a much larger challenge for the future of places lies in the uncertain local impacts of economic inequality, climate change, loss of stable jobs, urban growth, water shortages, escalating house prices, gentrification, and all the other social and environmental challenges that seem to be hallmarks of the present century. Cities, neighbourhoods, rural communities and towns, are, and will continue to be, in the front-line of the impacts of these challenges, which will have to be addressed, at least in part, through what I think of as a pragmatic sense of place.

A Definition
By a pragmatic sense of place I mean a locally based, yet outward looking attitude that combines an appreciation of the complex unity of a particular place with an understanding of the diffuse global character of the social and environmental processes that affect it. I wrote about this several years ago (references are at the end) but I want to restate and update some of the ideas I had then, partly because of the very unsettling character of recent political events and partly because these global challenges seem to intensify every year – the ultra-rich get richer, each year is warmer than all previous years, neo-liberal globalization continues apace.

A T-Shirt from 2004, the year Toronto was an epicentre of the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic, which was carried from Asia by aircraft passengers. There were several deaths, local confusion and no contingency plan for dealing with a global epidemic.

Historian Jonathan Glover has written: “Most of the time what matters most is the personal and the local. But great public disasters can strike the most unlikely places.” He was referring primarily to the world wars of the 20^th century but his comment applies equally well to the fact that even though, for example, climate change may have widespread and diffuse origins, its effects are felt in diverse ways in different places. Miami floods as sea level rises, California withers in persistent drought, ice and tundra melt in the Arctic. Particular places have to respond as best they can to problems that have remote causes, and those responses need to be as varied as the places themselves. One adaptation to climate change does not fit all, and there is no universally appropriate response to economic inequities, epidemics of emergent diseases, or ragged wars and terrorism.

In practical, political terms what this means is that responsibility for dealing with these uncertainties will lie increasingly at the local, municipal level rather than at the national level. Climate change deniers may blather on as international agreements set the tone and establish directions for action, but the real, precautionary work of adaptation will have to be done in places where the immediate effects are most likely to be experienced.

A Note on Pragmatism
A pragmatic sense of place has its philosophical roots in pragmatism, the movement founded by William James and Charles Pierce in the late 19^th century as a philosophical approach that looked away from what they regarded as pointless theoretical discussions towards consequence and facts. As our own era slides into post-fact politics this is something that resonates. Pragmatism has been reinterpreted by subsequent philosophers (for instance, Rorty, Toulmin, Putnam, Davidson) as a basis for making decisions about social and political issues in age when there are deep ideological and epistemological disagreements. I particularly like Stephen Toulmin’s idea of reasonableness that suggests a middle way between abstract theory and personal opinion. He argues that “we need to return to the world of where and when, get back in touch with the affairs of everyday life,” and he offers Médecins sans Frontières as an example of pragmatic reasonableness, doing what is possible to save lives and to prevent things getting worse, acknowledging that root causes are important yet dealing with immediate needs.

Balance versus Extremes
A pragmatic sense of place is about getting things done to deal with global challenges, by finding some sort of balance between distinctive local conditions, and universal or global processes. This derives from my understanding of place and placelessness as two inversely related continua rather than an either/or opposition. Everywhere, no matter how placeless, has some degree of distinctiveness; and everywhere no matter how distinctive, shares some standardized characteristics with other places. This diagram gives an indication of what I mean.

Distinctiveness pushed to the extreme results in parochialism, exclusionary attitudes, even ethnic cleansing. Such attitudes have to be regarded not just as narrow-minded but as naïve in a world now interconnected by electronic communications, air travel and intermittent epidemics of emergent and other diseases. They will not keep out the next flu pandemic nor protect against tidal surges and ideas communicated on the Internet.

Standardisation pushed too far leads to non-places and the sorts of universal designs advocated by modernists for social housing, many of which have had to be demolished because they proved to be unlivable. Modernists and the neo-liberal agents of globalization may believe that standardized, universally applied approaches are the most efficient and profitable ones, but cities and communities caught up in the global economy have discovered that too much standardization is a bad thing and a distinctive brand identity provides a competitive edge.

Between the extremes of exclusion and universalism lies a pragmatic sense of place that seeks a reasonable balance between maintaining the distinctiveness of local identity, and doing what it takes to survive in social, economic and environmental systems that are globally interconnected. It requires thinking about what solutions and adaptations will work best here, in this place, to deal with changes and challenges originating elsewhere. It offers no magic solutions, no rule-books, no grand theoretical answers; it does involve a continual effort to find ways that balance distinctiveness and standardization, that aim to reduce social injustices and to reverse ecological deterioration, and to facilitate a locally-based precautionary approach to address emerging global challenges.

Elements of a Pragmatic Sense of Place
There are at least four elements to a pragmatic sense of place:

• like all forms of sense of place, it is ontological, because to exist is always to be somewhere, to be in a place.
• it is focused on the particularity of a place, a quality that is associated with belonging somewhere, being embedded, knowing and being known there.
• it is open to other places because everywhere, in various degrees, is inevitably affected by and contributes to what happens elsewhere.
• it is active rather than passive because to live somewhere inevitably involves taking some practical responsibility for it, and transforming it in some way. This can involve such modest gestures as recycling or cutting the lawn, or more substantial ones such as facilitating or protesting developments, protecting heritage, volunteering to help the homeless, or celebrating place by organizing festivals or installing artworks. These may not be explicitly regarded as aspects of a pragmatic sense of place, but that term does embrace the many acts of place responsibility that happen all the time in everyday life.

This text from Genesis, which I photographed on the wall of a small, remote church in Churchtown on the border of England and Wales, and probably dates from the 17th century, conveys the sense of a place open to and opening to other worlds.

The Openness of Places

A pragmatic sense of place requires thinking beyond the confines of a particular place, beyond the bubble of self, the walls of home, the boundaries of city and region, in order to grasp the differences, similarities and interconnections between places. It regards this place and every other place as distinctive , yet simultaneously open to the world and an opening to the world.

An understanding of the openness of places has probably always played a role in religious and aesthetic experience, even when lives were narrowly confined. The sheer mobility of people nowadays should serve as a foundation for its considerable enhancement. In 2016 there were 3.7 billion Internet users around the globe (Internet World Stats); and in 2015 there were slightly over 1 billion international air passengers (IATA) and 1.2 billion international tourist arrivals (UNWTO). In other words, a substantial minority of the world’s population, presumably the most affluent minority, is either directly familiar with a range of different places and landscapes or electronically linked to them (though I acknowledge that much of this is tempered because it channeled through the non-places of airports, hotel chains and manicured resorts). This range of place experiences needs to be brought to a greater degree of awareness in order to find locally appropriate, balanced and sustainable ways to respond to global changes. A pragmatic sense of place should contribute to this.

Maps of global interconnections. Left, flights in a single day, 2014. Right Facebook in 2013, 

Local responses to global problems
Places are territories of local experience that open into the world and are open to global change. Nowhere is an island entire unto itself. The UK Stern Report on Climate Change (2006, Summary of Conclusion, vi) was explicit about this… “Such a radical change in the physical geography of the world must lead to major changes in human geography – where people live and how they live their lives.”

A cartoon by Ron Cobb that conveys the sense that local and natural forces will always push against the forces of uniformity.

In other words, specific places have to be the foundations for resilience and adaptation to economic, social, political and environmental challenges that already confront us in the 21^st century, because no matter how diffuse or remote the causes may be, their geographically diverse consequences will be experienced locally and will have to be dealt with locally. For this I believe a pragmatic sense of place is necessary. Whether it is actually called that is unimportant. What matters is the recognition that challenges and changes that originate elsewhere will require policies and courses of action that reflect the distinctive circumstances of particular places yet do not lose sight of the cosmopolitan, interconnected character of the world.

[A Footnote:  a week after posting this I came upon the following article about place attachment, sense of place and climate change in the Canadian Arctic that I think reinforces my argument well – Willcox, Ashlee et al, “From this place and out of this place: Climate change, sense of place and health in Nunatsiavut, Canada” Social Science and Medicine, Vol 75, No 3, pp.538-547. Because the impacts of climate change in the Arctic are so advanced what is happening there should serve as a precursor for what might happen in more temperate regions.]

References
• Jonathan Glover 1999 Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Random House).
• Edward Relph, 2008, “A Pragmatic Sense of Place” in Frank Vanclay et al (eds), Making Sense of Place, National Museum of Australia, 311-323
• Edward Relph 2008 “Senses of Places and Emerging Social and Environmental Challenges”, in John Eyles and Allison Williams (eds) Sense of Place, Health and Quality of Life, (Ashgate, 31-44).
• Nicholas Stern 2006 The Economics of Climate Change (The Stern Review)
• Stephen Toulmin 2001 Return to Reason Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press

The Future of Places forum in session in the non-place of the Grand Ballroom at the Sheraton Hotel, Vancouver September 2016

When I first saw notices for a conference in Vancouver on placemaking which included a forum on “The Future of Places”  in Vancouver I was intrigued. I have been thinking about time and place (heritage, tradition, the implications of environmental, economic and social trends for place, etc) for several years, and this was an opportunity to focus my thinking. I quickly learned that The Future of Places title has been used for three international conferences held since 2013 (two in Stockholm, one in Buenos Aires)  to discuss placemaking and public space in sustainable urban development, and that these have been preparation for a discussion of The New Urban Agenda at the UN Habitat III conference held in Quito in October 2016. The Project for Public Spaces, based out of Washington D.C., has been very actively involved from the outset.

So I went to the Future of Places forum in Vancouver in September 2016 where I heard impressive arguments about placemaking and the importance of designing public spaces, borrowing heavily from the inspiration of Holly Whyte’s Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and Jan Gehl’s Life Between Buildings. The symposium was syncopated with a ProWalk/ProBike/ProPlace conference (with a trade display of electric bikes and innovative bike racks), which gives a clear indication of the scale and types of places and placemaking that are being promoted as the future of places. Despite the fact that the forum was held in the massive ballroom of a non-place conference hotel (though there were field trips to real urban places in downtown Vancouver), much of the discussion was about ways to get main streets to bustle and thrive, filled with people rather than cars. “We don’t close streets to traffic,” one participant said, neatly flipping conventional language, “we open them to people.”

The grander aim of The Future of Places forum is to create a transformative urban agenda, based both on treating streets as places, and also on creating small urban spaces that strengthen equity and inclusion, use sensitive architecture, serve as innovation hubs, are well governed, sustainable and resilient (which are some of the transformative themes listed at the Future of Places website).

Some apartment towers in downtown Vancouver

Enthusiasm at the forum was palpable, and I agree that the particular placemaking goals being advocated are admirable, not least because I have chosen to live in a walkable, bikeable, place-oriented part of the small city of Victoria in British Columbia. Nevertheless, I have some misgivings about what I heard. From the broad perspective of place that I am exploring in this website the focus seems narrow. In the context of the variously towering and sprawling cities of the present day much seems to be missing. There was little or no consideration of automobile suburbs where most people in North America live, of industrial campuses and business parks, of homeless communities, of big box shopping plazas, of international airports, of new immigrant neighbourhoods, or of districts of apartment towers, such as those in downtown Vancouver, where half the population moves on every four or five years and communities are ephemeral.

“A place of mind”. The UBC downtown campus at Robson Square, a few blocks from The Future of Places forum.

In the context of the idea of place, there was little or no consideration of personal experiences, of topophilia and topophobia, of gender differences in place experience, of mobility, of places being sequentially occupied by different cultures and social groups, of transnationalism, of the quasi-public spaces being created through public-private partnerships, of the role of media and virtual experiences of places, or of non-places and placelessness. It seems to be assumed that placemaking can be facilitated through a combination of local community participation, collaboration, and appropriate urban design. There was little discussion of the varied and powerful forces that manipulate or counter placemaking – neoliberalism, most forms of globalization, corporate and municipal branding, surveillance by CCTV, displacement, civil wars. In some degree all placemaking involves place unmaking, because somewhere regarded as unattractive or unused is being remade, and it is not necessarily the case that newly-made places are seen by everyone as an improvement on the former ones.

In a session about “The Wrong Kind of Urbanization” Patrick Condon, a professor of urban design at the University of British Columbia, did take a broader and more critical view of the future of places. He discussed what he called the next “five crucial decades of city building” during which global population is expected to continue to grow, and the proportion in cities will increase to 70-80 percent. These decades could be the last period of significant urban and economic growth and therefore offer opportunities for placemaking that may never be repeated. However, current trends of do not bode well. Economic inequities are intensifying, climate change is happening more rapidly than expected, there is a growing likelihood of global pandemics, international refugee movements are challenging political stability, intolerance is rising, and half the world’s urban population will be in what he called “flat cities” of low-rise high density developments, mostly self-built, the product of individual decisions rather than deliberate placemaking, where crowded streets, walking and cycling are the product of necessity rather than design.

Flat cities – shanties alongside the railway north of Delhi in 1989, and a shantytown made by the homeless in Toronto in 2004 and subsequently demolished

A street canyon in downtown Vancouver.

A geographically inclusive view of the future of places has to consider more than small public spaces and main streets. It has to take into account the street canyons and arterial roads of what Condon called “concentrated cities” of towers (think Dubai, Shanghai, Sydney, and downtown Vancouver) that reflect concentrations of state power and global capital, and automobile oriented suburbs, international airports, business parks, wind farms, and intermodal facilities. It has to consider changing identities of places as refugees and migrants from the South move into cities in the North, and the associated tensions and resistance to change that have already become apparent. It has to consider how much heritage can be preserved and whose heritage it is. It has to attend to transnational allegiances to several places. Climate change and rising sea levels are already changing place experiences, income inequalities manifest in gentrification are displacing populations and unmaking places occupied by communities who have lived there for generations. International tourism is turning desirable destinations into rivieras filled with AirBnBs, transient populations and service employees. It is rapidly becoming far from clear what constitutes the community responsible for collaborating in placemaking.

Identifying the community in places is not easy. A 1950s strip plaza in North Toronto, variously occupied by North American chains, Koreans and Iranians.

My opinion is that places and how we experience them are both in a state of enormous flux, and that the future of places is deeply uncertain. The thriving public spaces and streets envisioned by The Future of Places comprise no more that one relatively small, albeit important, aspect of what will be required to adjust to demographic, social, political and technological changes already well under way. I suspect that this era of economic stagnation, electronic interconnectedness, the apparent failure of rational government and growing environmental challenges, could be the beginning of a widespread collapse of expectations about progress, growth, and quality of everyday life. If this is the case, all types of places will have to become more resilient to unpredictable change and more self-dependent. If this is to happen without particular places descending into self-serving exclusionary enclaves, it is necessary to think of place not so much as a desirable urban form as a flexible, adaptable, pragmatic foundation for coping with environmental and social uncertainty. And from this perspective, what is important about the initiative of The Future of Places is not advocacy for small urban spaces and peopled streets; it is the seed that it is planting for models for collaboration that might be used to develop more nuanced and critical interpretations for a wide range of types of urban places and communities.

———-

Some years ago I developed some initial thoughts about a pragmatic sense of place needed to address emerging social and environmental problems. I hope to update these ideas in a future post.

Edward Relph “A Pragmatic Sense of Place” in Making Sense of Place edited by Frank Vanclay et al, Australian National Museum, Canberra, April 2008.

Edward Relph “Coping with Social and Environmental Challenges through a Pragmatic Approach to Place” in Sense of Place, Health, And Quality of Life, edited by John Eyles and Allison Williams, Ashgate, 2008

I wrote in Place and Placelessness that: “Home is the foundation of our identity as individuals and members of a community, the dwelling-place of being. Home is not just the house you happen to live in, but an irreplaceable centre of significance.” In other words, home is at the heart of place. This is a not uncommon view and Lynn Manzo claims that numerous phenomenological interpretations of place have been explored through literal and metaphorical treatments of home.

However, others who have written about place are more equivocal. Indeed, only about thirty of the 300 or so books and articles about place for which I have detailed notes, refer to home in more than a cursory way. For example, in The Experience of Place Jeff Malpas mentions it in only passing in discussions of the works of Wordsworth, Proust and other writers. And Yi-fu Tuan’s consideration of home in Topophilia is limited to a few comments in a couple of pages devoted to familiarity and attachment. For many others who have written about place and placemaking, home is apparently not something that warrants much attention.

While positive views of home are both enormously popular, as the screen capture from Google Images shows, many of those who have written about it in relation to place have stressed that experiences of home are malleable and not necessarily pleasant. This post is mostly a review with fragments of interpretations of what I happen to have read about place and home. It consists more of fragmented snapshots of what has been written about home than a comprehensive review. Most of these fragments warrant more attention, perhaps in future posts.

Screenshot from a Google Images search on Home. Bottom left are quotes from William Morris and Robert Frost.

The Multiple Meanings of Home
I’ll begin in 1986, which is way back in the modern history of place discussions, when environmental psychologist Judith Sixsmith identified nineteen of different notions of home on the basis of in depth interviews with 22 graduate students. These notions don’t fall into neat categories presumably because “home”, like “place”, is a fluid word, and some, such as “student residence” are clearly idiosyncratic to group she studied.

The categories she identified included:
• ideal home • future home • parents’ home • family home • owned home • childhood house • room • geographical area • Country (homeland) • County (this was in England; in the US the equivalent might be State) • Town.

This odd list from a small sample reveals how difficult it is to pin down what home means to people. As with place, it is a word that slides across geographical and time scales.

House and Home
The basic idea of home as a house, and especially a house where you grew up, is the foundation of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, in which he claims that “all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home” (p.5). This is because our house with its “intimate immensities” of inside space is effectively our first universe. Bachelard’s ideas are widely reference in phenomenological accounts of place, and his interpretation of home parallels the phenomenological recognition that place precedes space in everyday experience. Place and home are immediately experienced; space and world are abstractions.

Home and Body
Important aspect of the connection between house and home are, according to Mindy Fullilove in Rootshock, the way that home is inscribed into our bodies and the street we call ours is the setting for our communal longing. Janet Donohue argues similarly that our homeworld carries more than aesthetic norms with it because we inhabit a place through our lived bodies. Rooms, doors, stairs, sights, sounds, smell are so deeply familiar that body and place, body and home, are inseparable. This is perhaps especially true for the places of childhood, but it applies throughout our lives. Philosopher Edward Casey draws on the interpretations of Bachelard about house and home to argue that place is “the immediate ambiance of my lived body and its history, including the whole sedimented history of cultural and social influences and personal interests that compose my life history.”

Tensions between home, escape and change
Anne Buttimer has proposed that our relationship to place lies in an exchange between the complementary poles of home and horizons: home embodies the desire for rest, security, community; horizons represent movement, range, adventure, innovation. There is an obvious tension in this, most apparent in the desire of teenagers and young adults who want nothing more than to escape from home, but conversely apparent in elderly people who see home as a place to escape from the dangers of the outside world. Marc Fried has written that, if we grow and age in one place, the environments in which we are born and reach adolescence are no longer the same as the places in which we become adults. In other words, what constitutes home, and the tension between home and horizons ,change throughout the course of our lives, and Fried refers to the “deep and pervasive meaning” of Thomas Wolfe’s title You Can’t Go Home Again as a recognition of this.

Stone plaque in Island Park in Fargo, North Dakota. A place to call home.

Home as where you belong can be elusive
A lot of sentiments about home have to do with feeling you belong somewhere – home is where the heart is, and so on. The very popularity of these sentiments, even though they may seem cliches, is a reflection of the widespread experiences behind them.

But it is not always easy to know where you belong, where home is. An excellent account of this existential uncertainty is Susan Armbrecht’s Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home (2009). She is an anthropologist who spent her career studying Nepal. The last part of her book is about the difficulty she had adjusting when she returned to America. She writes: “I had travelled halfway around the world, all the way across my own country, looking for a place in the land to come home to. If only I found that place, I had thought, everything would fall into place. It was only in this year of moving from house to house that I came to realize – really realize – that home is not a place we ever reach. It is those moments – in time, not in space – where the wind cannot reach, the eddies and pools where things do not tremble. It is less a noun than a verb, an attitude and an action, living from the inside out…”

Women, home and oppression
Stephanie Taylor, in her book Narratives of Identity and Place (2010) pays considerable attention to the fact that home, as a Western ideal, is “inescapably associated with certain identities for women, as mothers, wives and homemakers,” yet is somewhere in which they do not have authority. Rowan Wilken describes home as a place of regressive nostalgia and a contested zone marked by gender differences, with role of housewife/homemaker role for women.

Feminists, such as Gillian Rose have adopted a stronger tone, noting that women are scarcely mentioned in discussions of place (she was writing in 1993 and I think this has been partially corrected; half the writers about home I cite here are women). She also notes that in the late 1970s feminists came to see the family and by implication the home as the major site of women’s oppression, so there seemed to be little reason to celebrate a sense of belonging to the home or to support the claim that the home provides the ultimate sense of place. All too often family violence creates places where people are housed but not at home, and basic needs for security and rest are violated.

Memory, collective memory, refugees and home
DylanTrigg in The Memory of Place (2012) begins his book with an account of a return to his childhood home and describes home as the locus of familiar personal memories. The geographer David Harvey in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996) goes one step further when he refers to place as “the locus of collective memory”, and argues that place is somewhere with historical meanings that provide continuity across generations and define what can be considered home.

A sign in Dublin in 2014 advertising an exhibit to protest the way refugees were being accommodated. No place to call home.

In this latter collective sense the idea of finding a new home or the myth of return and going home can help to sustain people who are exiled or displaced. Those and a who have researched this, such as Johnathan Bascom in Losing Place: refugee populations in East Africa, 1998, have noted that the strength of the factors that tie people to a specific place, including familiarity, traditions and relatives, depreciate over time. In other words, the continuity of place memories is not constant.

Home region, homeland, exclusion
The idea of home place as being associated with collective memory is treated differently by. John Cameron in Changing Places: Re-Imagining Australia (2003), where he writes that loyalty to the earth can be achieved through developing loyalty and commitment to one’s home region. Loyalty to one’s region in this sense means personal affection for its landscapes and weather. Belonging to a region is also collectively apparent in being from somewhere with distinctive and familiar accents, dialects and customs. And regional loyalty is also apparent in a rather different way  in the now widespread celebration of locally produced foods.

Home Place is an apparently imaginary somewhere. This sign is at the foot of a wind generator which is adjacent to a nuclear power station in Pickering, near Toronto. I can’t explain why it’s here.

Loyalty to home neighbourhood, town, region or homeland are spatial expansions of the experiences of belonging and security that are associated with one’s own house and home. This is fine when belonging involves an open and inclusive recognition of distinctiveness. But there is always the possibility that this can swing out of balance, become excessive and lead to exclusion, keeping others out because they are different and don’t belong. (I am writing this the day after the Brexit vote in the UK, which seems to have been partially informed by such attitudes, so this is an immediate and real possibility, not a theoretical one).

Protection of one’s home place from others might be considered a form of nimbyism, but exclusion of different others from home town, home region or homeland is at the very least a gesture towards possible fascism. I think it may well have been Heidegger’s philosophical enthusiasm for home region and homeland that led him to join the Nazi party (see his “Memorial Address” in Discourse on Thinking, published in 1959, where he still expresses dismay about the loss of rootedness and the fact that many Germans have lost their homeland or have wandered away and are now “strangers in their former homeland.”)

Homelessness in different senses
Roberto Dainotto in Place in literature: regions, cultures, communities (2000) cites a comment of Heidegger’s, who had observed a group of tourists in Greece: “Modern man feels at home anywhere.” This he relates to Heidegger’s idea of unheimlich (it doesn’t translate literally, but roughly it means homeless) as that which casts us out of the familiar and prevents us from making ourselves at home, and which recognizes the human tendency to make things unfamiliar through acts of violence against nature and against others. Dainotto suggests that that this means that every person is, in their essence and their nature without a place –  we are un-heim. And without a home, we have to struggle constantly to try to build a home for ourselves.

Tent City in Victoria, British Columbia in May 2016. This is an encampment of homeless people on small park next the Provincial court house, where the homeless have made a home for themselves.

This is the philosophical, existential sense of homelessness. The more immediate one, all too familiar in present day cities, is of those who have for various reasons fallen off the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder and have no home. In a perverse way their presence, and the very idea of homelessness, are expressions of the fact that having a home is fundamental right in modern, generally affluent societies.

A store in Palm Springs that sells things for the sustainable home. A new mode of being at home.

New Modes of Being at Home
The intriguing idea of new modes of being at home is suggested in passing in S. Bergmann and T Sager (eds) The Ethics of Mobilities: Rethinking Place, Exclusion, Freedom and the Environment (2008). Others have discussed in some detail changes in experiences of home associated with mobility and telecommunications. Stephanie Taylor, for example, writes that: “The born and bred narrative is linked to a concept of home as based in long-term personal and family connections to a place. The ordinary mobility of contemporary Western societies mean that many people lack such a connection; they lack ‘easy identities’ in relation to place.” Rowan Wilken cites bell hooks: “Home is no longer just one place. It is locations” and raises the question of how place, community and teletechnology function in the highly personalized context of home. Do they modify conceptions of home, and what happens when conventional ideas are displaced by mobile technologies? Computers and other teletechnologies, he suggests, have been integrated into domestic life, including restructuring space in the home – they have been domesticated. At the same time mobile devices extend the boundaries of the home.

Lucy Lippard, whose book The Lure of the Local is largely about multicentred place experiences that have become common – living somewhere, developing an affection and association with it, then moving on and repeating the process – writes: “We are living today on a threshhold between a history of alienated displacement from and longing for home and the possibility of a multicentered society that understands the reciprocal relationship between the two.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

What I understand from these fragments of interpretations of home and place is that while born and bred narratives of home as somewhere secure and familiar, probably where you grew up or the family lives, endure as myths supported by some experiences, the broader reality is that home is malleable concept and it is undergoing radical transformations.

References
Armbrecht, A. 2009 Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, (Columbia University Press)
Bachelard, G. 1969 (1958) The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press)
Bascom, Johnathan, 1998 Losing Place: refugee populations and rural transformations in East Africa (Berghahn Books)
Bergmann, S., and Sager, T., (eds) 2008 The Ethics of Mobilities: Rethinking Place, Exclusion, Freedom and the Environment (Ashgate)
Cameron, John (ed) 2003 Changing Places: Re-Imagining Australia (Longueville Books)
Casey, Edward 2004 “Body, Self and Landscape: A Geophilosophical inquiry into the Place-World” in Adams, P., Till, K., Hoelscher, S. (eds) 2001 Textures of Place (University of Minnesota Press), pp. 403-420
Dainotto, Roberto 2000 Place in literature: regions, cultures, communities (Cornell University Press)
Donohue, Janet, 2012 “The Place of Home,” Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter, Vol 23, 2, Spring 2012
Fried, Marc 2000 “Continuities and Discontinuities of Place” Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20, 193-205
Fullilove, Mindy, 2004 Rootshock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It, (Ballantine)
Harvey, D. 1996 Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Blackwell)
Heidegger, M. 1966 Discourse on Thinking (Harper Torchbooks)
Lippard, Lucy 1997 The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a multi-centered society (W.W.Norton)
Malpas, Jeff 2000 Place and Experience: a philosophical topography (Cambridge University Press)
Manzo L. C., 2005 For better or worse: Exploring multiple dimension of place meaning Journal of Environmental Psychology 23 (1) 47-61
Moore, Jeanne, 2000 “Placing Home in Context” Journal of Environmental Psychology 20, 207-217
Relph, Edward 1976 Place and Placelessness (London: Pion)
Rose, Gillian, 1993 Feminism and Geography (University of Minnesota Press)
Sixsmith, Judith, 1986 “The Meaning of Home: An Exploratory Study of Environment Experience” Journal of Environmental Psychology 6 281-298
Taylor, Stephanie 2010 Narratives of identity and place (Routledge)
Trigg, Dylan, 2012 The memory of place: a phenomenology of the uncanny (Ohio University Press)
Tuan, Yi-Fu 1974 Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes and values (Prentice Hall)
Wilken, Rowan 2011 Teletechnologies, place, and community (Routledge)

I have been prompted to write about placemaking partly because the Official Community Plan of the City of Victoria in British Columbia, where I have recently moved, devotes a substantial section to “Placemaking – Urban Design and Heritage”, and partly because a recent article in the Guardian about gentrification refers to placemaking not in its usual positive sense, but pejoratively, as a tool used by developers to attract the creative class to potential urban villages that displace relatively poor populations.  [There is, by the way, inconsistency in whether place-making is hyphenated. I prefer it without.]

I have read a number of books and articles about placemaking, but unsystematically, and mostly published before 2005. However, when I looked up placemaking in the University of Toronto Library search engine over 7500 books and articles were listed, along with this intriguing bar graph showing numbers of publication by decade (this recent explosion in number of publications is not the norm for every topic – I checked). The recent growth is daunting, so what I will do in this post is to examine the origins and early development of the idea. I haven’t been able to find the publications before 1970 and comments on more recent stuff will have to wait.

The current popularity of placemaking revealed in the name of this New Zealand chain of home improvement stores.Whakatane, 2014.

Origins
It’s not clear where or when the idea of placemaking arose, or who first used it. Wikipedia says it is a term that came into use by architects, planners and landscape architects in the 1970s, and that the idea derived from the work of Jane Jacobs and W.H. Whyte. This is the claim of the Project for Public Spaces (mentioned in the last section of this post), and while it is consistent with the view that PPS advocates, as far as I know neither Jacobs nor Whyte wrote explicitly about placemaking. Indeed, the first book with the word in the title that I have found is an archaeological study by George Andrews, published in 1975: Maya Cities: Placemaking and Urbanization, Andrews uses the word to mean simply the founding of settlements.

I was recently reminded that in Place and Placelessness (1976, pp.67-78) I wrote explicitly about placemaking in terms of how distinctive places are made, and on what grounds these might be considered authentic or contrived. Authentically made places arise when the physical, social, aesthetic and spiritual needs of a culture are adapted to particular sites, and this can happen unselfconsciously through vernacular practices, or selfconsciously through thoughtful design; contrivance is when identities are invented or imposed. I suspect I borrowed the word ‘placemaking’ from someone else, but I didn’t identify any specific source. And to the extent that this section of my book attracted any attention, it was authenticity and not placemaking that interested critics.

Five Different Early Approaches to Placemaking

Implicit Placemaking in The Timeless Way of Building: Christopher Alexander’s 1979 book The Timeless Way of Building is about qualities inherent in vernacular architecture, and how the ability to create these qualities might be recovered. His book is, however, implicitly about placemaking. “It is not essential that each person design or shape the place where he is going to live or work,” he wrote. “Obviously people move, are happy in old houses…It is essential only that the people of a society, together, all the millions of them, not just professional architects, design all the millions of places.” This, he suggested, can be achieved through the development what he called “a pattern language,” a design approach he explicated in several subsequent books.

 Explicit Placemaking and Community Identity: In the late 1980s the planner Dolores Hayden began to study the mostly suppressed cultural histories of ethnic minorities and women in Los Angeles, and their possible value for a concept of historic preservation that she discussed to in her 1988 paper in the Journal of Architectural Education 41 (3), 45-51 “Placemaking, Preservation, and Urban History” . “Places make memories cohere in complex ways,” she has suggested, but 5,140 5,memories also make places cohere and the formal recognition of these places through restoration and preservation can be powerful ways to reinforce community identity.

Explicit Placemaking in Archeological Contexts: Placemaking: production of built environment in two cultures, by David Stea and Mete Turan in 1993, defined placemaking as being about the context of built form and the production of architecture and settlement. Their interest, which continued the archaeological notion of placemaking first used by Andrews, was in the generative forces and purposes of ordinary building activity in abandoned settlements in Cappadocia in Turkey and of the Anasazi in New Mexico.

Explicit Placemaking in Planning and Design: Much of the current enthusiasm for placemaking seems to stem from Lynda Schneekloth and Robert Shibley (eds) 1995 Placemaking: the art and practice of building communities. This was the first book to consider both the idea and the practice of placemaking at length and with reference to community-based approaches to planning and design.

An illustration taken from Spotify illustrating the community approach to placemaking as employed by Project for Public Spaces

The authors gave placemaking a broad definition (p.1) as “the way all of us as human beings transform the places in which we find ourselves into places in which we live. It includes building and tearing buildings down, cultivating the land and planting gardens, cleaning the kitchen and rearranging the office, making neighborhoods and mowing lawns, taking over buildings and understanding cities.”  Placemaking is sometimes invisible and sometimes dramatic. It includes everything from everyday acts of maintenance, renovation and representation, to exceptional events such as moving into a new house or master planned developments.

Their book is based on four case studies (two were in Roanoke) in which architects and planners had recognised the importance of place, and treated placemaking as a community based approach to design. Schneekloth and Shibley put these into a conceptual context. “Each act of placemaking,” they wrote (p.191)., “embodies a vision of who we are and offers a hope of who we want to be as individuals and as groups who share a place in the world.”  The tasks of placemaking are therefore inherently political and moral acts, and if they are poorly conceived, the authors noted, placemaking can actually result in destruction of people and places.

A capitalist view of placemaking. I took this photo of a sign in Melbourne airport in 1985.

Placemaking as Place Production and Reproduction: The Marxist geographer David Harvey devoted considerable attention to place in his 1996 book Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. He wrote about place production (which he also refers to as place construction and place formation, though he rarely used the word placemaking). He drew on the novels of Raymond Williams to argue for a dialectical conception of places as being “received, made and remade,” rather than fixed entities (p.29-34). And he argued that it is the activity of place construction and production that allows us to achieve a sense of belonging somewhere.

For Harvey place production/placemaking is a social process that has momentum, meaning and political-economic implications. It is a process of carving out relative permanences that are nevertheless always subject to change, dissolution and replacement.

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai made much the same point in Modernity at Large (1996), though he referred to it as the production of locality. Locality, he suggested, is reproduced in neighbourhoods, and requires hard and repeated work to produce and maintain, work that requires deliberate, risky and even destructive actions.

 Placemaking since 2000
Of these five early approaches to placemaking it is, I think (admittedly without having read a substantial sample of recent literature), the community-based design approach to placemaking that has taken off, though the other ideas are not entirely dormant. For example, David Seamon and others have linked Alexander’s ideas to a phenomenological interpretation of place, and his ideas have been translated into practice by architects such as Gary Coates. Hayden’s proposals for placemaking through recognition of the importance of place for disadvantaged communities seems to have been translated into the use of artworks for placemaking. See for instance Rhona Warwick’s 2006 book, Arcade: Artists and Placemaking, which is about the importance of artwork in former slums in Glasgow.

Notwithstanding these, placemaking now usually seems to refer to community-based design of small urban spaces. This is especially apparent in the work of the influential consulting group, Project for Public Spaces. Their website is replete with discussions and suggestions:

• “Placemaking is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region. It has the potential to be one of the most transformative ideas of this century.”
• “Placemaking is the process through which we collectively shape our public realm to maximize shared value. Rooted in community-based participation, Placemaking involves the planning, design, management and programming of public spaces…Placemaking is how people are more collectively and intentionally shaping our world, and our future on this planet.”
• “It takes a place to create a community, and a community to create a place.”

Here are two images from the PPS website:

More generally, urban designers and planners almost everywhere seem have adopted the idea of placemaking as a key aim of their work (see for example, Carmana and Tiesdell (eds) 2006 The Urban Design Reader, the publications of CABE (Centre for Architecture and Built Environment) in the UK, the City of Victoria Official Community Plan), though the emphasis on community engagement is variable and the usual impression is that placemaking is always a good and positive practice. A more critical notion of place production and reconstruction nevertheless sometimes rises to the surface, as in the 2010 book The Placemaker’s Guide to Building Community by Nabeel Hamdi, who once worked for the GLC on social housing. In it he writes (p.222): “We now recognise that there will always be limitations to community participation and good governance, given the networked rather than place-based structure of community in cities, and given the persistence of unequal power relations and corruption locally, nationally and globally.” And Dylan Trigg, in his 2012 book The Memory of Place suggests an entirely different notion of placemaking as a personal act that involves self-awareness of experiences and memories of somewhere, and in which imagination is an act of placemaking for the future.

A Final Cautionary Note – mostly copied from my post on Non-Place/Placelessness
• Unmaking of Place (or placeunmaking). This infrequently used term is, I think, invaluable as a caution about placemaking – best laid plans too often go awry. Jame Kalven, who spent many years working and placemaking in public housing projects in Chicago, uses it to describe the consequences of the Plan for Transformation in which the city demolished projects in order to make places supposedly better but which were, in his view, an assault on the identities of those for whom these doomed places were home. The transformation was, in a sense, the polar opposite of preservation and placemaking.

The fact is that all placemaking is a process of creative place destruction, replacing an existing place with one that is thought to be an improvement. Those whose places and communities are being replaced, even if they are in aging standardized apartment towers that were the products of clean-sweep renewal, are unlikely to regard it positively, especially when it is part of the planning toolkit used by developers to create urban villages that promote gentrification.

Place cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of the processes that work to undermine experiences and identities of particular places, and the recent rise of academic, artistic, and other interest in place is, I think, in part a reaction to a sense of loss associated with rapid urbanization, environmental decline, and the globalization. Place offers continuity and a way of bringing order to a world in turmoil. Yet in the hundreds of essays, books, papers and websites about place that I have read, only a scattered few consider processes that dilute sense and spirit of place. One of those is a brief but informative mention by philosopher Ed Casey in the preface for Getting Back into Place (1993). He suggests a simple thought experiment – imagine what it would be like if there were no places, the world was a placeless void, but continues that our lives are so place-saturated that this is impossible to imagine. He does, however, remark that: “The emotional symptoms of placelessness–homesickness, disorientation, depression, desolation…involves a sense of unbearable emptiness.”

My purpose in this post is to summarise terms and ideas I have identified,that are about processes and practices that are in some way opposed to place, and to offer an annotated overview in order to offer a sense of how they reinforce one another. In due course, I hope to devote additional, separate posts to the most important ideas

Non-place/Placelessness terms and practices
• Place destruction, whether as the result of environmental events (e.g. earthquakes, rising sea levels, e.g. Barbara Allen et al, 2006 “New Orleans and Katrina: One Year Later” Journal of Architectural Education, 1-31) or planning and urban renewal. There’s a large literature about the latter using a variety of different ideas such as place unmaking, rootshock and displacement, all of which are noted below. Urban historian Lewis Mumford in The City in History used the German word abbau, or unbuilding, to describe place destruction.

• Place annihilation refers to place destruction in wartime, for example carpet bombing of cities in World War 2, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that left almost nothing except memories and place names. (Ken Hewitt 1983 “Place Annihilation: Area Bombing and the Fate of Urban Places” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73 ( 2 ), 257-284). Destroyed and annihilated places sometimes find ways to rebuild, so in a sense the destruction is temporary.

Placelessness haunts the streets of Truro in Cornwall. Source: Bernard Deacon’s website

• Placelessness is the term (which I may have coined – I’m not sure) I used when I wrote Place and Placelessness the 1970s. It refers to what I called the casual eradication of distinctive places and the deliberate making of standardized landscapes and the weakening of the identity of places to the point where they both look alike and offer the same bland possibilities for experience. It is less deliberate and more subtle than place destruction. Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere is about the placelessness of suburban America.

• Nowhereness is a term used by M. Arefi  (“Non-Place and Placelessness as narratives of loss” Journal of Urban Design Vol 4 No 2 1999, 179-193). He draws on Kunstler in his assessment of built environments with manufactured meaning and bleak sterility and a hodgepodge of contrived history and geography

• Homelessness. Heidegger’s claim in A Letter on Humanism is that: “Homelessness consists in the abandonment of beings by being…the symptom of oblivion of being.” If Heidegger is regarded as a pre-eminent philosopher of place, then placelessness can be regarded a particular manifestation of this ontological homelessness. Roberto Dainotto, in his 2000 book on Place in Literature suggests that: “the possibility of placelessness, offered for instance by modernity, remains for Heidegger a debasement of what ought to be authentic and rooted” and that it was the threat of placelessness (or more specifically unheimlichkeit – homelessness) that stimulated Heidegger’s fascination with place. Dainotto, incidentally, sees the greater threat as being place, and the rooted exclusionary attitudes associated with it.

• Unmaking of Place (or placeunmaking). This infrequently used term is, I think, invaluable as a caution about placemaking – best laid plans too often go awry. Jame Kalven, who spent many years working and placemaking in public housing projects in Chicago, uses it to describe the consequences of the Plan for Transformation in which the city demolished projects in order to make places supposedly better but which were, in his view, an assault on the identities of those for whom these doomed places were home. The transformation was, in a sense, the polar opposite of preservation and placemaking.

Webber’s diagram of the non-place urban realm. Geographical space extends horizontally and level of specialization vertically, so the top bars are global and the bottom bars are local. Individuals participate first in one realm and then another as they play first one role and then another.

• Non-Place Urban Realm was the term proposed by Melvin Webber in 1964 to suggest a new era in which accessibility has become more important that propinquity, in which place operates at many scales, some local and focused and others extended through behaviour and connections with relatives and colleagues across regions, continents, and around the world. (“The Urban Place and the Non-Place Urban Realm” pp.79-153 in M.Webber et al 1964 Exploration into Urban Structure, University of Pennsylvania Press).

• Non-Place is also used by the French anthropologist Marc Augé, but in a more specific sense to refer to a space that, in contrast to places in traditional cultures, is not relational, historical or concerned with identity. Non-places are products of supermodernity, such as clinics, hospitals, expressway service stations, and airports, where experiences are contractual because we have bought a ticket, are a driver, patient, customer etc. (Marc Augé, 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, London: Verso.)

 The image on the left is from a website discussing Schiphol airport in Amsterdam as a non-place. The photo on the right is my photo of Schiphol taken in 2014.

• Noplaceness – the title of an exhibition by Atlanta Art Now on “the feeling of not belonging anywhere, even when connected directly to a physical space.” The exhibition was “a manifesto for 21st century geographies” which are marked by the absence of distinct and historical place identity. “Geography has failed. The logic of globalization continues to throw into question an endless number of paradigms the 20th century taught us to love. Borders, stable identities and local languages all find themselves now under assault…All places threaten to become noplace in particular.” (Cullum, J., Fox, C., and Hicks, C., 2011 NoPlaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape, Atlanta Art Now)

• Atopia is a word used by Massimo di Felice, a sociologist at the University of Sao Paulo, to comment about the Noplaceness show in Atlanta. Atopia is no longer tied to geographic coordinates or genius loci, but to information flows and a mutant spatiality. Paul Virilio (1997 Open Sky, Verso) uses atopia in the context of “teletopia,” by which he means our age of the speed of light in which we live with paradoxes such as meeting at a distance and remote interrelationships. Virilio’s idea has similarities to the non-place urban realm, but understood through the lens of electronic communication which was in the far background when Webber wrote in the 1960s.

• Unplace is another term coined by artists (http://unplace.org/ Unplace: A Museum without a Place). The unplace project discusses the notion of “intangible museography” in which contemporary art exhibitions are specifically produced for virtual and networked contexts.

• Dystopia – the opposite of utopia, familiar in futuristic novel and movies, where the world and everywhere in it is a bad, violent, threatening, dispiriting, autocratic place.

• Polytopia means one space occupied by several different geographies contexts. It is a useful way to describe multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan cities. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz puts it this way: “We live more and more in an enormous collage, with the migration of cuisine, of peoples, furnishings, and it is difficult to know where to enter this “grand assemblage of juxtaposed difference.” (“The Uses of Diversity” Michigan Quarterly Review (25(1) 1986)

A image of polytopia at Metamaps. I am not sure I could understand it even if I could read the captions.

• Heterotopia strictly means something that is out of place, such as a cancerous growth. The concept was popularized by Michel Foucault who used it in The Order of Things to refer to polytopic situations in which “fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately, without law or geometry,” where things are laid, placed or arranged in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to define a common locus beneath them all. “We are,” he wrote “in the epoch of simultaneity, we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed” (“Of Other Spaces” Diacritics, Vol 16:1 1986, p.22). In other words, places lose their meanings because their contexts are unstable.

• Disembedding is the term used by sociologist Anthony Giddens (1990 The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford University Press) to refer to “the lifting out of social relations from local contexts and interactions and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.” It is related both to transnationalism and the non-place urban realm.

• Displacement refers to forcible removal from a familiar place and it is the undoing (opposite of?) of place attachment. It is a specific and imposed form of disembedding. Marc Fried, author of a seminal study in the 1960s of the uprooting of a poor community in Boston, has written that forced displacement can be among the most severe psycho-social impacts an individual or community can suffer (“Continuities and Discontinuities of Place” Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20, 193-205).

• Rootshock is Mindy Fullilove’s neologism for the emotional impact caused to African-American communities by uprooting and displacement because of urban renewal. She argues that the place we call home is inscribed into our bodies, the street we call ours is the setting for our communal longing, and rootshock caused by urban renewal destroys the individual’s working model of the world, creates anxiety, and destroys social, emotional and financial resources. (2004 Rootshock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It, New York: Ballantine).

• Uprooting is an older and more widely used word for rootshock. Robert Coles wrote in Uprooted Children (1970, Harper and Row): “It is utterly part of our nature to want roots, to need roots, to struggle for roots, for a sense of belonging.” Uprooting is the disruption of this sense of belonging, whether for social, political or environmental reasons.

• Drudgery of Place. I wrote about this in Place and Placelessness (p.41) as the sense of being bound by routine and familiarity and what Henri Lefebvre called “the misery of everyday life.” It is not so much anti-place as a negative aspect of place experience.  The sentiment is captured in the following lyrics by a group called The Postal Services, presumably from Seattle.

This place is a prison
And these people aren’t your friends
Inhaling thrills through $20 bills
And the tumblers are drained and then flooded again
And again.
Ther’re guards at the on-ramps armed to the teeth
And you may case the grounds from the Cascades to Puget Sound
But you are not permitted to leave.

• Deterritorialization is a term that comes from French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1987 A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia University of Minnesota Press). It means the severance of social, political, or cultural practices from their native places and populations, and has relationships to uprooting, displacement and disembedding. However, they use the term in a more general sense of decontextualization or lifting out of context that can refer to mental illness or the practices of capitalism (the latter uses deterritorialization and repeated innovation as mechanisms of creative destruction to generate change). For Deleuze and Guattari deterritorialization is usually followed by reterritorialization and is part of process of continual transformation.

Former oppositions of place and placelessness have been transcended
Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of deterriorialization and reterritorialization is a reminder that while the contrast between place and placelessness seemed a simple, binary opposition when I wrote about it in the 1970s, it has changed into something much more complicated.

An image by Fatemeh Aminpour of the Built Environment Programme at the University of New South Wales that captures the complex relationships of place, placeness and placelessness.

Indeed in 1984 Yi-fu Tuan (reference is below) wrote eloquently about a balance between roots and detachment from place: “We need to be rooted in place, for without roots we cannot develop those habits and routines that are essential components of sanity. We need to have a sense of place, because without it we shall have failed to use our unique capacity for appreciation. And finally, we need to be detached from place, because whether from a religious perspective or a clear-eyed humanistic one, place is necessarily a temporary abode, not an enduring city.”

Since then there have been mass migrations from less to more developed countries, electronic communications have come into widespread use, inexpensive air travel has allowed people to move rapidly and frequently around much of the world. This has been recognised, for instance, by Lucy Lippard in The Lure of the Local when she writes about the role of place in what she calls a multicentred society. Augé is careful to point out that non-place is not in opposition to place, but is tangled up with it: “In the concrete reality of today’s world, places and spaces , places and non-places intertwine and tangle together. The possibility of non-place is never absent from any place” (p.107). Giddens writes about re-embedding as well as disembedding. The non-place urban realm has been both reinforced and tempered by local and place-based communities that are the basis for social interaction, consumption and conflict that are nevertheless electronically and otherwise interconnected in many ways with other communities in far distant places.

The world in which we now live is filled with complex patterns of multicentred experiences and transnationalism that blend elements of place and placelessness in countless different ways. Processes that reinforce place and those that diminish it are tangled together and both can be celebrated. Place is where we feel we belong, non-place makes it convenient and easy to experience elsewhere and communicate with other communities in different places. We need both roots in places, and a clear-eyed detachment from places.

I hope to write more about multicentred place experiences and the intertwining of place and placelessness in future posts.

Tuan, Yi-Fu 1984 “In Place, Out of Place” in Place, Experience and Symbol, ed Miles Richardson, Geoscience and Man Series, Volume 24, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, pp. 3-10.

One of the quintessential place branding campaigns. The epicentre of I amsterdam at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Place branding does to places what advertising does for products – it aims to sell them. Place branding is said to attract tourists, investment and industries looking for a new home. And it promotes places even to their own inhabitants by creating stronger and more coherent place identities.

The promotion of places has a deep history. Stephen Ward’s 1998 book Selling Places examines, for example, how land in California and Oregon was advertised to attract people to make the hard overland journey across America, and the ways health resorts and spas such as Blackpool and Saratoga Springs attracted visitors a century or more ago, and how suburbs in Britain and America were sold in the 1930s. This romantic illustration of Tunbridge Wells is from London Transport’s Metroland campaign of the 1930s (it was in a 2015 calendar on my office wall). Nevertheless, since 1990 such promotion has become formally named place branding and a widely adopted marketing approach to place. Most cities, and tourist destinations, and many universities and even nations are now branded.

This recent surge of interest seems to be a manifestation of the neo-liberal reality that places now have to compete with one another for a slice of the economic pie. Torril Nyseth and Arvid Vikken claim that in the context of globalization and fluid capital it has become important for everywhere to appear attractive and to have a strong place brand. “Routes,” they write (p.3) in a particularly striking turn of phrase, “become more important than roots…Every place is a global space.”

The Supposedly Complex Processes of Place Branding
The aim of place branding is to differentiate somewhere from its competitors by creating and managing distinctive images of it. These images might be visual or consist of a catch-phrase or logo, but they should, as just about every book or website on place branding stresses, reinforce actual assets. In other words it’s not enough just to come up with a good logo or to invent a compelling story. Simon Anholt expresses this neatly in his book on brand management: “Good advertising,” he writes (p19), “can only make a bad product fail faster: and the same is most certainly true of places.” Nevertheless, many places have adopted generic, placeless brands.

 
Brampton, a city in southern Ontario, was for a long time a major centre for commercial flower cultivation. Its brand connects to its history.  The brand tag for Surrey in British Columbia is generic – the future presumably lives everywhere. 

Place branders are well aware of this tendency to be generic because they claim their task is more difficult than advertising products. For instance,  the UK consulting firm Saffron  argues in a post on how to create a place brand that: “Places are complex things – even the smallest of them are much more complicated than a can of soup or a mobile phone. People live there, visit there, play there, work there, study there and even die there.” Similarly Anholt suggests (p 4) that ”nobody doubts that places have their brand images, and that those images are critical to the success in the many international competitions that characterize the modern economy….But the tiniest village is infinitely more complex, more diverse and less unified than the largest corporation.”

This image (I have also used it in another post) captures the link between branding and commodification of place. The ad/sign was for the 350th year of Montreal’s founding..

In spite of this assumed complexity what branding actually does is to package a place as a sort of commodity. The intention and hope is that the brand will encapsulate actual place assets and reinforce place identity in ways that turn it from being somewhere in the doldrums into somewhere where people want to live, work, visit and invest. Even though this may not always work, it has clearly become a standard requirement for cities and institutions alike. If somewhere doesn’t have a brand, it’s almost as though it has given up, not even bothering to compete.

Aspects of Place Branding
In practice branding involves tag-lines, slogans, and themed packages of fonts, colours and images, all which can be variously used in brochures and websites, on posters, on letterhead and lamppost banners, in promotional campaigns and economic development strategies. The more compressed and flexible the brand is, the better, because that allows them to be used either in a wide range of circumstances or to serve as metaphor for the place itself. I ❤ NY is the quintessential example. People writing about place branding also like Iamsterdam and What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. However, I think it is fair to say that most are not this catchy and many are downright obscure. For instance, I have no idea what to make of the tag “Absolutely. Positively” that has been adopted by Wellington in New Zealand, or Sunderland’s “See it, Do it”, shown below.

If somewhere doesn’t have many assets that can be used as the basis for branding, what does exist can be physically amplified or even created, more or less on the build it and they will come principle. This is sometimes done by small towns, such as pseudo-Bavarian Leavenworth in Washington, which adopt attractive foreign identities and thus turn themselves into tourist attractions. At a larger scale it is clear that the Eiffel Tower, the CN Tower in Toronto, and the Sydney Opera House all serve as instant identity markers for those cities, even though they were built for other purposes. A more intentional approach to place branding aims to achieve the same effect by building spectacular destination architecture – a process that has been called the Bilbao Effect after Frank Gehry’s curvy, bulbous Guggenheim Museum that brought the the city to global prominence and boosted the regional economy. There are many other strategies that aim to enhance place brands by building or amplifying assets – waterfront restoration, cultural festivals, the designation of world heritage sites, gay pride parades, Olympic Games can all attract lots of publicity and draw in people and money.

The Place Brand Observer
Numerous consultants offer services to assist places identify their brands, for example, Place Matters, and Place Brand. Resonance Consulting “creates development strategies, plans and brands that shape the future of places around the world,”  and claims to have cities and communities in more than 70 countries to help them realize their full potential.

            
Sunderland, in North-East England is known as the City of Light because it was here that Joseph Swan invented the incandescent electric light bulb independently and at the same time as Edison. It is where George Washington’s family came from and claims to be the only city in the world twinned with Washington DC, which has a trademarked brand in the colours of the American flag.

Place branding has become an academic discipline with university degree programmes dedicated to it (e.g. the Institute of Place Management at Manchester University in the UK, Programme in Place Branding at Stockholm University, and others in Aix-en-Provence and Los Angeles). There is at least one academic journal explicitly dedicated to it (Place Branding and Public Diplomacy) and several that are closely related (Journal of Place Management and Development, The Journal of Destination Marketing and Management).

This flurry of both business and academic interest in place branding is conveniently synthesised at The Place Brand Observer, a “niche portal and think-blog” website. This has entries targetting professionals that include, for example, interviews with experts and tutorials on how to brand places. It also has entries for academics that include discussions of place-branding theory, links to relevant journals, and lists of academic programmes. In December 2015 it also included a discussion of place branding and sustainability in which it is argued that sustainability offers a competitive advantage because environmental and social best practices are essential for providing rewarding tourism experiences and creative business environments.

Mississauga
The Place Brand Observer also reports on actual cases, and one of those reports is about Mississauga in southern Ontario, somewhere I know well. It is the sixth largest city in Canada, but it is also part of the conurbation of over six million people that is centred on Toronto. Even though it has a high rise downtown, some internationally famous building and a culturally diverse and enthusiastic population it has an identity problem. So Mississauga appointed a brand manager who has developed a Brand Book that led to the creation of a new logo that is intended to consolidate the cultural diversity, settlement history and economic vitality of the city.

I have no idea how successful this logo and brand will be, whether to take the semiotic analysis of it seriously, or how to judge its success. The Brand Book indicates the logo was developed through an elaborate consultation process, but to me it looks almost exactly like the back of an envelope. I prefer the Mi-Way brand used on the side of Mississauga’s buses, no doubt dreamt up by some Sinatra fan.

Place branding, reinvention, sustainability and hyperreality
The proponents of place branding stress that it is more than providing a quick fix to try to boost a local economy. They regard it as an aspect of a long-term, sustainable strategic process of that will lead to genuine change. Nyseth and Vikken describe this as a process of “place reinvention” that involves ongoing planning as well as branding, and emphasise that both have to be allowed to develop together as “something that just happens with more or less unintended consequences.” In other words place branding is something that can set a process in motion leading both to economic development and to enhanced commitments by residents to the place where they live and work.

Regardless of whether this is actually the case and regardless of whether place branding has any tangible effects, there is no doubt that the identities of places at all scales – stores such as the Body Shop, universities and their campuses, towns, World Heritage sites, cities, regions and even nations, now find it necessary to create brand identities that blend reality (their assets) with some degree of invention (their brands). Staci Zavattaro in her 2014 book Place Branding through Phases of the Image: Balancing Image and Substance, argues that the way cities use promotional strategies inevitably blends fiction and reality. And she borrows from arguments of the social philosopher Jean Baudrillard to suggest that place branding involves a shift from reality towards simulacra in a society drifting towards hyperreality.

I am more inclined to regard place branding in less theoretical terms as a particular form of advertising. Like all advertising it can sometimes be amusing, sometimes persuasive, and sometimes deceitful.  It is an almost omnipresent component of the identities of places in this century, and sometimes it reinforces those identities and sometimes it detracts from them.

Branding of the University of British Columbia

Books Referenced
• Simon Anholt 2010 Places: identity, image and reputation (New York : Palgrave Macmillan).
• Torill Nyseth and Arvid Viken 2009 Place Reinvention : northern perspectives (Farnham: Ashgate)
• Stephen Ward 1998 Selling places; the marketing and promotion of towns and cities 1850-2000 (New York E & FN Spon)
• Staci Zavarotto 2014 Place Branding through Phases of the Image: Balancing Image and Substance (New York; Palgrave Macmillan)

There’s another topo- word, toponymy, which means the study of place names, their origins and history. It’s an arcane field that has been given almost no attention by those geographers (including me), psychologists, architects and philosophers who have written about place and spirit of place. This is a bit surprising because place attachment, roots, dwelling, attachment, openess, thrown-togetherness, boundaries and sense of place all involve particular places with their own names, and none of those theoretical discussions have much substance except in the context of experiences of particular places.

Solina is a hamlet in Central Ontario in Canada. I have been unable to find the origin of the name.

Deroy and Mulon suggest in the preface to their 1992 Dictionnaire de Noms de Lieux that the proper names of places are like money (dollar bills and euros and so) because they are used with no more attention to them than their everyday utility. They serve as a sort of geographical shorthand that helps us find our way around the world and is indispensable to communication because they obviate the need for cumbersome descriptions (such as “the cupboard under the stairs” – a description that by its very lack of a proper name conveyed that Harry Potter didn’t really belong on Privet Drive). Place names are so taken for granted that their importance as symbols of particularlity is largely overlooked by those who want to contemplate place at a more abstract level. [I intend to write about particularity in a future post.]

A bench in a small square just inside the medieval town gate at Chepstow.

Traditional Toponymy
The traditional approach of toponymists who study place names, has, it has been suggested by Reuben Rose-Redwood, “been characterized by political innocence.” They mostly dig into etymology, archives and local histories to unravel what names mean, but don’t consider the processes behind the naming. In fact, many Anglo-European place names probably don’t have much of a story to tell, and simply arose as descriptions that made sense for local inhabitants. These give individuality to somewhere yet can also have broader connotations, and the spelling may have shifted over the centures. Chepstow, one of the towns I regularly visited as a child, is a straightforward combination of the Old English cheap, meaning market, and stow, meaning place. There are countless places in Britain with names that have generic elements such as these. A simple guide to generic elements in British place names, such as -stow and -ton and coombe can be found here.

Some place names do summarise narratives, though it is not always clear what these are. Corstorphine in Edinburgh is said by some to derive from croix d’or fin and is where Mary Queen of Scots is said to have lost a gold cross. Alternatively it could mean Torfin’s Crossing because the earliest recorded use is Crostorfin in 1178. Nevertheless, where place names embed history toponymists can reveal obscure origins that can be of great value to historians, archaeologists and even in support of environmental protection. Gwaun Henllan in Carmarthen is the oldest recorded field name in Wales, first noted in the 8^th century. When it was threatened with open pit mining the place name history proved to be critical in the prevention of the mining.

For cultures other than Angle-European ones, place names can serve as ways not only of remembering geography but also as means of reinforcing traditions and cultural memories. When the anthropologist Basso asked an Apache native American “What is wisdom?” the answer was: “Wisdom sits in places.” For the Apache the names of places have stories associated with them that are used to teach others and to convey correct behavior (Feld and Basso, p56). Basso calls this “the ethnography of lived topographies.”

Classifying and Standardizing Place Names
It is possible to see similarities in names and to classify them. Randall suggests the following categories:

• commendatory (Pennsylvania for William Penn, or Victoria)
• descriptive (Mont Blanc, Fisherman’s Terminal)
• commemorative (Victoria)
• possessive (Tom’s Place, Hank’s Place)
• associative (New York and New York State)
• incident or activity (Coal Harbour, or Corstorphine)
• manufactured (Disneyworld)
• folk-etymological (Seattle from Chief Si’ahl
• political (Great Britain, United States

Tom’s Place is a store in Kensington Market in Toronto, 2012, where Tom is a long-time resident and store owner. I took the Peterlee is the Place to Be sign on the side of a London bus in 1975 (you probably have to click to enlarge it to read the sign). Peterlee is a New Town in County Durham, founded in 1948 and named for Peter Lee who promoted a better life for the inhabitants of depressed mining villages in Durham.

Toponymy involves more than classification and digging into etymological origins. It also plays an essential role in ensuring consistency in spelling and usage, something that is overseen in most political jurisdictions by formally constituted boards or committees. For instance the UK has a Permanent Committee on Geographical Names. The US Board on Geographic Names is Federal board created in 1890, and Canada established a Geographical Names Board in 1897. It is interesting to note that the late 19^th century was also when standardized time zones were created (before then towns had their own times, which made it difficult to coordinate train timetables and so on), so the regulation of place names seems to have been part of broader trend to government imposed standardization.

Most towns and cities have place signs at their borders. This is at Toronto’s northern boundary on Yonge Street.

Critical Toponymy, Colonisation and Commodification
Since the turn of this century toponymy has moved beyond etymological and taxonomic research to consider the politics involved in place naming. It has always been the case that a colonizing or imperial expansion has involved displacement of local names with new ones imposed by the conquerors. In the European expansions of the 18^th and 19^th century this was done partly to demonstrate authority and partly to honour those involved in the act of colonization by using names of the colonisers or the monarchs and aristocrats who supported them – Georgia, Victoria, Alberta, Sydney, Melbourne, Halifax, and so on in British colonies. Imported place names also provided a measure of familiarity for new settlers. Scarborough, which is now the eastern suburb of Toronto, was named by Elizabeth, the wife of the first Lieutenant Governor, John Graves Simcoe, because the cliffs along the lakefront reminded her of Scarborough in Yorkshire. What is now Toronto was named York at its founding in 1793, officially in honour of the Duke of York, son of George III (the same Grand Old Duke of York who marched his men to the top of the hill and marched them down again) but I suspect homesickness for a familiar bit of England had something to do with it.

The name was changed to Toronto in 1832 apparently because of confusion caused by having too many places called York, but York lingers on in the names of other municipalities and a university. Toronto is an indigenous place name that means something “trees standing in water” that described a weir on a lake about 90 kilometres north of the present day city. Eighteenth century fur traders used it to refer to the lake, and then to describe a portage to rivers flowing into Lake Ontario, and then for a trading fort near the current city. There was no First Nations settlement on the site of York when the British arrived, but Fort Toronto had been close by so it was the closest thing to a local place name that could be adopted.

The rewriting of place names is, as one toponymist has said, an uneven process. When it is done in the deliberate way of Simcoe it is often part of a process of claiming territory and making clear who the new owners are. But even when the naming is well-intentioned, the process can still be contested. Alderman and Inwood have written, for example, about how the renaming of streets Martin Luther King Way was often done without consulting local Black American communities, some of whom therefore felt further marginalized by a process that was intended to be inclusive. [Something similar is noted by Lucy Lippard who has recently written about place names in New Mexico. She writes that: “One way of reading places is to look at the history of their naming,” and “sites are constantly re-identified according changing regimes and local power structure,” a point she illustrates with examples of Indian and Spanish place names being converted to English, and in some cases back again.]

Snidcel – a place on Vancouver Island that has regained its First Nation’s name.

In some small ways place name injustices in North America and elsewhere are being undone as features and places once named for Europeans are winning back their indigenous names. What was previously called Mount McKinley in Alaska, named for a US President and the tallest mountain in North America, has in 2015 been renamed Denali, the locally used indigenous name. In an announcement about the change the US Secretary of the Interior declared: “With our own sense of reverence for this place, we are officially renaming the mountain Denali in recognition of the traditions of Alaska Natives and the strong support of the people of Alaska.”

Reuben Rose-Redwood suggests that an increasingly important concern for critical toponymists is the commercialization of place names. This is more than a matter of developers finding names for new projects that will be attractive to prospective investors and home-buyers. Corporate developers now often have streets in major projects named for themselves, and sports stadiums (Etihad Stadium for Manchester City, Rogers Centre in Toronto for the Blue Jays) named for the major sponsor, and when the sponsor changes the stadium name can change. The names of metro rail stations in Dubai were sold to corporate sponsors as a form of advertising for them and revenue generation for the transit authority. It seems that toponymic commodification and place branding are merging. My favourite example is the conflation of Montreal with Coca Cola that happened for the 350th anniversary of the founding of the city in 1992. I understand that this is the only time that Coca Cola’s distinctive calligraphy has been used for other purposes. I hope it is the only time a city allows itself to merge with a corporation and a commodity.

References:
– Derek Alderwood and Joshua Inwood, 2013, Street Naming and the Politics of Belonging: Spatial Injustices in the toponymic commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr, Social and Cultural Geography
– L. Deroy, et M Mulon, 1992 Dictionnaire de Noms de Lieux, (Paris: Les Usuels)
– S. Feld. and K.H. Basso  (eds) 1996 Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press)
– Lucy Lippard 2015 “Place and Histories” in Jeff Malpas (ed) The Intelligence of Place, (London: Bloomsbury Press), pp 55-59.
– Richard Randall, 2001 Place Names: how they define the world – and more (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press)
– Reuben Rose Redwood, 2011, Rethinking the Agenda of Political Toponymy, Acme
– Edward Relph 2014 Toronto: Transformations in a City and its Region, University of Pennsylvania Press) [where I discuss the erratic origins of the name of Toronto]
– S. Taylor  (ed) 1998 The Uses of Place Names (Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural Press) [Corstorphine and Gwaun Henllan]

http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/acme/article/viewFile/884/740

A Dread of Certain Places and other Negative Responses to Place
Topophobia is defined in the OED as a morbid dread of certain places. From a medical perspective it is regarded as an anxiety disorder. I have no idea how common this is, but apparently  in extreme cases it can warrant psychiatric treatment.

My understanding is that has a much broader meaning than this. I first wrote about it in 1976 (in an obscure discussion paper: “The phenomenological foundations of geography,” University of Toronto, Department of Geography, Discussion Paper No 21, 1976; available at Academia.edu), in which I suggested that the components of topophilia, such as environments of persistent appeal, the pleasure gained from direct encounters with nature, or knowing places through good health and health and familiarity, all have a topophobic equivalent. Topophilia involves positive affective bonds between human beings and environments; topophobia refers to the dislike or fear of places, and includes all the negative emotional responses people have to spaces, places, and landscapes that they find distasteful or frightening. Think of Mirkwood in The Lord of the Rings. To put it succinctly, topophilia is about pleasant experiences of places, and topophobia is about the nasty experiences.

An army base near Lago de Atitlan, Guatemala in 1998, shortly after the end of a civil war in which the army had razed entire villages. The cute sentry post belies the deep topophobia inherent both in those actions and in the reactions of survivors to this particular place fragment.

Diverse Manifestations of Topophobia
Most negative language about place – for instance placelessness, non-places, dislocation, uprooting, dystopia, displacement, delocalization, disembedding – has to do with processes that have suppressed or undermined positive place experiences. Some of these are primarily about loss of topophilia, but others involve topophobia because a once pleasant place has become abhorrent. This was the case with uprooting during the Dust Bowl, or the “landscapes of death” in north-east Brazil described by Josue de Castro in his book Death in the North-East, (Random House, 1966).

But topophobia has to do with more than loss of place. In my 1976 essay I cited an article about the coal-mining districts of Appalachia, a region where it had been estimated that 50% of the population suffered from depression, compared to about 4% in the United States. A local doctor explained: “I feel depressed here myself just from the ways things look. That includes the roads, housing, everything.” (C. McCarthy, “Whose Who in Appalachia” Atlantic Monthly, July 1976). Something similar could probably be said about the impoverished settlements on reserves of aboriginal peoples in northern Canada, about ghettoes of social housing in high rise apartments, about the devastated cities of Syria. In such cases the ugliness of the place itself, the everyday challenges of surviving there, and the depression and anxiety of inhabitants, seem to reinforce one another in a vicious cycle.

A B movie with the name of the song. A good movie with the same theme is The Last Picture Show, with Jeff Bridges and Cloris Leachman, 1971.

Many experiences of places are far from agreeable, for reasons that have to do with our moods, environmental events, or the character of the setting. If you happen to be depressed or upset for some reason, landscapes will not appear cheerful. Experiences of the natural environment, so often benign and pleasant, can be filled with anxiety and even panic as the weather worsens, tornado warnings sound, a brush fire approaches, the drought intensifies, the earthquake happens. In cities we avoid urban neighbourhoods that are dangerous because they are gang territories, or simply because they are unfamiliar and seem threatening. An isolated place, caught in drudgery, far from the centres of fashion, lacking any sense of possible change or opportunities for personal growth, is stultifying for most young people. The places of childhood and home are rejected as intolerable burdens; the priority is to get away. This sentiment was captured perfectly in the song”We Gotta Get out of this Place” by Eric Burdon and The Animals, released in 1965. It is a theme in numerous movies and novels.

Topophobia can be aesthetic, such as a dislike of modernist buildings or graffiti. It can opinionated and intellectual, for instance in the attitude that stands behind condemnations of urban sprawl and suburbs. It can be physiological; a former student of mine suffered migraines whenever she went into an enclosed shopping mall. Or ideological; one of my uncles refused to go into the great country houses of England because he considered them manifestations of decadence and oppression. The forms of topophobia are no less diverse than those of topophilia, though academics and artists pay much less attention to them.

Paradoxical Topophobia
Because topophobia, like topophilia, is associated both with the personality of places and with our attitudes, our experiences can switch from topophilic to topophobic, and vice versa, as our moods change and as the place itself changes. The desire of those young people who got out of the places where they grew up – the small towns and farms and slums is often transformed later in life into nostalgia about them.

This poster with a paradoxical topophobic/topophilic quote from Henry James about London, is in the London Museum.

Indeed it seems to be possible, if somewhat paradoxical, that in some circumstances positive and negative reactions to a place can be held almost simultaneously. Beatriz Munoz-Gonzalez has a paper titled “Topophilia and Topophobia: The Home as an Evocative Place of Contradictory Emotions” (Space and Culture, May 2005), in which she considers how home in south-west Spain is place of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction, somewhere for belonging and creation, yet also a prison and place of conflict. The very term “domestic violence” captures this contradiction succinctly. (I expect to explore this contradiction more when I write a post about “Home and Place.”)

The cover of the publication Topophobia that describes LondonTopophobia’s performance events.

Knowing more about topophobia as a means of avoiding where we don’t want to be.
A group of musicians, dancers and electronic artists organizing performance events in London has adopted the name “LondonTopophobia.” They use trepidation and confusion about places to raise the existential question of how we find our place in the world. If I understand their intention correctly, their aim is to convey the idea that we end up where we are in part by avoiding where we don’t want to be. A related publication on Topophobia and the fear of place in contemporary art describes some of these performance events, which include making a video that treats an urban wasteland as a spectacle, a “filmic pan” of the aftermath of a car accident, a depiction by a Finnish/Sami artist of her sense of being out of place, and an imaginary journey in virtual space.

To my knowledge there has been no study of topophobia that is an equivalent to Tuan’s account of topophilia. In some respects this is not altogether surprising because most people writing about place, or painting and photographing places, have chosen to illustrate their nice qualities, and place is treated as an aspect of belonging and a source of pleasure. Topophobia is about the dark side of environmental experience, and because it is, like topophilia, not the strongest of human emotions it is quite easily pushed aside, avoided or ignored, so that we can turn our attention to nicer experiences. Nevertheless, I think it would be very helpful to know more about why we avoid where we don’t want to be.

Finally, a Google search turned up two images of Topophobia, the one on the left to illustrate a show of works of the LondonTopophobia group, the more compelling one on the right from a website called Polyvore, which seems to be about fashion or something I cannot quite grasp.

The cover of my tattered, well-used 1974 edition of Yi-fu Tuan’s Topophilia.

The Various Inventions of Topophilia
The word topophilia, which literally means love of place, was popularized by Yi-fu Tuan, a human geographer in his book Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values, published in 1974. He apparently thought he had coined the word because he refers to it as a neologism that includes all of “the human being’s affective ties with the material environment” (p.93). I’ll discuss that book in a moment, but there were a couple of prior and significant, albeit brief, uses of the word.

The first use seems to have been by the poet W.H. Auden when he wrote in 1947 in his introduction for Slick but not Streamlined, a book by the English poet John Betjeman, that he hoped it “will inspire American topophils to take poetry seriously and American poets to take topophilia seriously.” The places Betjeman loved and wrote poems about were mostly the interwar suburbs of England.

So tophophils are lovers of place, and I suppose I must also be sort of intellectual “topophil” because I have devoted so much energy to writing about place.

A few years later Gaston Bachelard, the French phenomenologist, gave topophilia a slightly different and methodological meaning in The Poetics of Space. He used it to refer to his investigations of poetic images of “felicitous space” that “seek to determine the human value of the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against adverse forces, the space that we love” (p.xxxi). It is unclear whether Bachelard had borrowed the word from Auden or coined it for himself. Whatever is the case, the word appears to be an invention of the late-twentieth century, though the sentiments it encompasses are presumably as old as humanity.

Tuan’s Topophilia
For Tuan, who refers neither to Auden nor Bachelard, topophilia is “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (p.4). It is, he wrote, “not the strongest of human emotions” (p.93). And it varies greatly in emotional range and intensity, including fleeting visual pleasure, the sensual delight of physical contact, the fondness for familiar places such as home, and joy because of health and vitality (p.247). But for all that, it strikes a chord. It is a familiar sentiment, a word that encapsulates the pleasantly varied relationships we have with particular bits of the world both as individuals and as participants in cultures with long histories.

Tuan’s book is more about –philia than about topo-, more about environmental attitudes and perceptions, as the subtitle indicates, than about the characteristics of places that contribute to those perceptions, although he is well aware that topophilia is a two-way relationship between humans and environments. The word place appears neither in the index, nor in any of the chapter titles or section headings. And in fact only two of the chapters discuss topophilia in depth (one on topophilia and environment, the other, shorter one on environment and topophilia).

A diagram from the chapter on topophilia and environment in Tuan’s book that indicates his interest in all types of places – urban, rural and wilderness.

What is remarkable about Tuan’s approach is, first, that it broke from contemporary studies of environmental perception, which mostly involved the use of psychological methods, and offered an interpretation of environmental experience from the broad perspective of a humanist scholar and geographer who wove together ideas drawn from poets, classical Greece, art critics, anthropologists, cosmology, garden cities, New York, the Middle Ages, suburbs and skid row. And secondly, it is a wonderful account of the complexity of sense of place and the diverse aspects of place experience that is elliptical and indirect. It encircles place, which is always at the centre yet is scarcely mentioned.

As soon as we become aware of topophilia, its importance becomes obvious, It is apparent in many forms of experience outdoors – skiing, hiking, sitting in the sun, we experience it when we travel to attractive places, whether resorts or historic towns, it stands behind the attempts of architects and planners to create aesthetically pleasant designs and compatible settings for people to work and live; it is demonstrated in the attention home-owners give to gardens in their front-yards, which are both for their own pleasure and the pleasure of those who pass-by; it is reinforced in community festivals and parades. It is involved, in fact, whenever somewhere gives us pleasure, and whenever our moods enable us to take pleasure from those places, regardless of whether they are primarily human constructions or natural or a blend of both. Topophilia can be comfortable and subdued, or ecstatic. Its importance is known to anybody who bothers to attend to the world around them.

The Diversity of Approaches to Topophilia Now
Tuan’s Topophilia has been widely referenced and very influential in human geography and other environmental disciplines. It has been reprinted at least twice. But like any incisive idea it has taken on a life of its own. For example, a 2005 paper titled “Topophilia and Quality of Life: Ultimate Restorative Environments”, by Oladele Ogunseitan and published in Environmental Health Perspectives, defines topophilia as an abstract psychological construct whose meaning can only be observed indirectly through its effect on measurable responses. Several hundred individuals on the Irvine campus of the University of California were asked about topophilia and their quality of life (using a standard WHO quality of life survey), and their answers submitted to various statistical techniques that generated four domains of topophilia – ecodiversity, synthetic settings (which blend natural and built elements), environmental familiarity, and cognitive challenges. This sort of approach Tuan selfconsciously avoided because he wrote simply in the introduction to Topophilia that “Research methods are not presented” for the reason that such methods miss the crucial problems.

A diagram from Ogunseitan’s paper indicating the relationship of topophilia to quality of life and the statistical strength of the four domains of topophilia.

A Google search in fall 2015 indicated that topophilia, is currently experiencing a diverse resurgence of interest. For instance:

• the “topophilia hypothesis,” understood as something to do human affiliation with the natural world, has become a minor research theme in the subdiscipline of ecopsychology and linked with the “biophilia hypothesis.”
• In May 2015 Planitzen had a blog entry titled: “The difficult task of creating Topophilia: Reflections on 40 years of the Project for Public Spaces,” though there is no subsequent discussion of what this might mean.
• “Topophilia” is the title of an avant-garde Japanese music album.
• “Topophilia”
  

  “Sense of Being”, from Stephanie Dawda’s Topophilia photography project

  is the title of Stephanie Dawda’s photography project “to capture the energy of the powerful sensations humans experience from natural environments.”

• “Studies in Topophilia” is the name of an exhibition by Carol Wenning of charcoal sketches inspired by her experiences of Portuguese landscapes and marble quarries.
• Jeffery Hirst offers “Topophilia- A Visual Poem” of muted photos that speak of specific places and relationships (I provide no link because there seems to be no way back from his site).
• Liz Toohey-Wiese has a drawing of a snow-covered mountain top that she titled “Topophilia.”
• A blog entry with the intriguing title “Topophilia, Tobacco and Tactical Weapons” by somebody (unidentified except for the initials jdp) from the University of Kentucky, is an account of a drive on Highway 70 east from Raleigh to the coast, which is not scenic but where he/she grew up and which “triggered fond associations with eastern North Carolina – topophilia I guess.” The blog describes tobacco farms and billboards advertising guns.
  

  The image used by MOMA in February 2015 to advertise Peter Bo Rappmond’s film Topophilia, about the Trans-Alaska pipeline

  More substantial than any of these is “Topophilia,” an art film by Peter Bo Rappmund, which was shown at MOMA in February 2015. This is more consistent with Tuan’s breadth of interpretation. It shows the Trans-Alaska pipeline in all its diversity from end to end, and explores the complex interactions of industrial and natural landscapes. Here’s a vimeo clip.

A bar somewhere between Minneapolis and St Paul in 1976

Topophilia, Topo-apathy and Topophobia
What I gather from all these websites is that love of place is an idea and emotion as diverse as places that are loved and liked, and the different uses of the idea of topophilia reflects some of that diversity.  Of course, not everyone is particularly interested in or loves places. When I was teaching in Minnesota in the 1970s I recall reading a mid-Western literary journal that had surveyed regional authors about their sense of place. One replied that his sense of place had to do with being in a bar with a beer in his hand – a reply that nicely pricks the assumption that place is a romantic interest for everyone. I suppose this attitude could be called topo-apathy. I suspect it is not uncommon.

[Since writing this I have been reminded of an essay by James and Nancy Duncan “Sense of Place as a Positional Good” in Textures of Place (2001) edited by Paul Adams, Steve Hoelscher and Karen Till, in which they suggest that there is a dark side to topophilia.  They studied Bedford, an affluent and beautiful outer suburb of New York, where the residents have a very strong place identity yet do not know their neighbours. The Duncans suggest topophilia here serves a sort of positional good or form of symbolic capital associated with acquired tastes, and aesthetically pleasing forms, as a way of asserting a socially superior status, and promoting exclusion.]

And while love of place is part of our “affective ties to environments,” to quote Tuan, these ties also include antipathies to place – apprehension, dislike, revulsion, even fear of places. This is topophobia. Academically inclined topophils, such as me, are no less interested in such adverse reactions to places, and I am trying to make contact with a book edited by Xing Ruan and Paul Hogben in 2007 titled Topophilia and Topophobia: reflections on twentieth century human habitat, which includes an essay by Yi-fu Tuan .  When I can find it and have read it I will update this post.  In the meantime I will write a separate post about topophobia, something which I first considered in the 1970s.