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

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

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