Thin places are sites where the reality of the unseen is experienced by individuals. They are, to repeat phrases that are frequently used to define them, places where heaven and earth seem only a few feet apart, where the veil between this world and the eternal world is stretched thin,  places that allow a quiet shift in being, portals to another world that rejuvenates and heals. Thin places may or may not have buildings and distinctive topography. Their essential quality, their reality, is that they are felt, which is to say experienced through some other sense than sight, hearing, smell or touch.

The notion of thin places is frequently said by those who have written about it to have a long history, but the actual term appears to be quite recent, mostly used since the turn of this century. It is a valuable idea that coincides with phenomenological interpretations of place which aim to explicate place in all the ways in which it is sensed and experienced. This post is a cursory overview of what I have discovered about its origins and the diverse yet connected ways in which has been interpreted.

[I realise it is contradictory to have images in a post about unseen reality. I include them to suggest the variety of types of places where there could be some sort of quiet shift in being.]

Origins of the Idea of Thin Places – Christian, pre-Christian, Folklore
The idea of thin places is generally attributed to Ireland, or more generally to Celtic spirituality or Celtic Christianity. As far as I can gather, it was rarely used in publications before the twenty-first century.  I have found one brief use of it in a 1946 publication by Evelyn Underhill to refer to Iona. Mark Roberts, a Biblical scholar, notes that he first heard the term about 1990 from a woman who was a devotee of Celtic spirituality. For devout Christians, who identify thin places in old churches or even accounts in the Bible, it is now associated with the earliest Christians who arrived in Ireland in 431 (St Patrick may have come in 432), and with the founding in 563 of a monastery at Iona (then considered part of Ireland and now part of Scotland) which quickly became a missionary base to convert the pagan populations of Ireland and Scotland.

Celtic spirituality is older than the arrival of Christianity. The numerous Neolithic monuments and burials sites in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Cornwall are testament to this.  Mindie Burgoyne, who organises tours of thin places, writes on her website: “The Pre-Christian and Celtic people of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England had a keen sense for thin places.  The landscape is littered with monuments, markings, and ruins that once boldly stated, ‘This is a thin place. This is holy ground’. The very ground itself seems to call out, ‘Come here and be transformed.'”  Christian activities were often imposed on previous sacred sites. For instance, Croagh Patrick, the mountain in western Ireland where  St Patrick is said to have fasted on the summit, where there has been a chapel since the fifth century, and which is now an important site of pilgrimage, is surrounded by Neolithic and bronze age monuments, some clearly oriented towards the mountain.

Martin Gray, in his book The Power of Place, suggests a possible reason for pre-Christian thin places: “Simply stated, many of the megalithic stone structures are situated at places with measurable geophysical anomalies (the so-called earth energies) such as localized magnetism, geothermal activity, specific minerals, and the presence of underground water. While there is nothing paranormal about these forces, what is fascinating is that ancient people located the specific sites where these energies were present.”

Kerri ni Dochartaigh’s 2022 book Thin Places, which was the stimulus for this post, is a remarkable autobiographical account of the healing power of places in the Celtic parts of Britain that she sought out as a way to recover from the deep distress of growing up in Derry in Northern Ireland during the civil war known as the Troubles. She says she first learnt of thin places from her grandfather, and her suggestion is that some sense of them has long been part of popular Irish folklore that has to do with fairies, leprechauns, and the Otherworld of gods and the dead. Nevertheless I can find no instance of its use in several books about Irish folklore (or, for that matter in histories of Celtic Christianity).

More probably it has been a term long used in everyday Irish speech to refer to places where you might feel the unseen reality of something otherworldly. It appears that in the last twenty-five years the idea of thin places has been borrowed from its Irish roots as a way to describe any site that somehow facilitates spiritual experiences, perhaps because they are where a miracle happened, a pilgrimage destination associated with a holy person, or, more informally, because they offer some awareness of the natural magic of the world.

Pilgrimages, Liminality and Placelessness
At least two organizations, Progressive Pilgrimages, led by pastors, and Mystical Tours, offer guided tours for small groups to thin places.

Progressive Pilgrimages notes that people participate in these for a variety of reasons, including seeking spiritual renewal, seeking a deeper understanding of their own spirituality, or perhaps simply looking for a sense of peace and calm in their lives. These probably apply to most pilgrimages to locations sanctified by some holy person or event, including the Haj and the Kumbh Mela, both of which attract millions of people. In effect, pilgrimages are journeys to a thin place that has been recognized and experienced by others for its spiritual significance and which therefore offers the possibility of an equivalent experience for oneself. The Camino de Compostela to Santiago, where St James the apostle is thought to be buried, has recently attracted almost half a million pilgrims a year. While only about 40 percent of those indicate on their registration forms that they are doing it for strictly religious reasons, the large numbers of participants in the Camino and in other pilgrimages show how widely valued are possible experiences of thin places, whether religious or not.

In their anthropological study of pilgrimages Vincent and Edith Turner describe the character of these experiences as “liminal”, which means they lie somewhere between everyday life and a world of different, deeper levels of existence (Turner 1978, p. 8, p.30). Though they had participated in the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick, the Turners don’t refer to thin places. Indeed, they suggest that liminality is an experience of “a no-place and a no-time that resists classification” (Turner 1978, p. 250). This accords with the observation of the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in his short book Religion: Place to Placelessness, that “in religion, placelessness is a precondition for – and a sign of – enlightenment” (Tuan 2012, p. 51). In Hinduism and Buddhism, enlightenment means that the limits of space and time vanish and the very idea of place as something human in scale vanishes (Tuan 2012, p. 38).

This may be so, but I think that if the Turners had been aware of the expression they might have preferred “thin place” to “no-place.” And Tuan might have accepted that thin places, including the destinations of pilgrimages such as Santiago de Compostela or Croagh Patrick, are best thought of as portals where material and spiritual worlds are adjacent and which open to the placelessness of enlightenment or Heaven.

Thin Places are Multicultural
Tuan’s comments about Hinduism and Buddhism are a reminder that while the idea of thin places may have Celtic origins, they are elements of all cultures and religions.  Progressive Pilgrimages comments that the concept of thin places where people feel awe, wonder, and a sense of the divine, is found in many different cultures and traditions and is associated with churches, shrines, or natural landscapes.

Martin Gray’s suggestion that pre-Christian Celtic sites are often situated at thin places marked by geophysical anomalies or distinctive earth energies, has a strong family resemblance with feng-shui, the Chinese practice of harmonizing the vital energy, or chi, of the lands with the chi of human beings for the benefit of both. Temples, monasteries, dwellings, tombs, and seats of government were established at propitious  places with an abundance of appropriate vital energy.

It appears that almost every culture has room for thin places marked by structures and events of currently practiced religions, whether cathedrals, temples, or humble shrines. A more subtle perspective that involves no structures or even names, is given by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, perhaps reflecting the important role of the types of thin places she experienced for herself: “The folklore of almost every culture holds room for these liminal spaces – those in-between places – those unnamable places, not to be found on any map” (Chapter Three).

The Character of Thin Places, and the role of Nature
Kerri ni Dochartaigh elaborates what she means by unnameable thin places. They are where we can more easily hear the land, the earth talking to us or where we are able to feel more freely our inner selves. “They do not have to be beautiful,” she writes (Chapter One), “or what might be described as wild, not just forests, mountains and coves”; they could be “a supermarket parking lot with just one tree, the back of housing estates where life has been left to exist.” They somehow make us feel larger than ourselves, held in a place between worlds, allowing for a pause in time, to see a way through.

Implicit in these comments is the acknowledgement that the experience of thin places depends perhaps as much on the sensitivity of individuals as on the character of the place. Just as some people have a heightened sense of smell or awareness of colour, so some are more open to appreciating the qualities of thin places.

Her descriptions of the thin places she experienced, the ones that helped her to overcome the enduring deep psychological stress resulting from a traumatic childhood on the front lines of violent civil war, where her home was fire-bombed, and a close friend was murdered, are all marked by encounters with the natural world, especially with birds and flying insects that know no borders. She attends to and cares for the fragments of the natural world she encounters. And it is these that seem to lead to experiences in which she finds she can stand outside the harsh realities of the material world.

Other recent commentaries about thin places mention the possible role of nature or natural landscapes, but with little elaboration. Nevertheless, I think this is an important connection that the Romantic poets and others (Thoreau, Ruskin, John Muir, Aldo Leopold) have often implied. William James (1961, pp. 69-71) gives several examples of individuals who experienced from the tops of mountains a rushing together of inner and the outer worlds, a feeling of the infinite, and a temporary loss of identity, accompanied by an illumination  which revealed a deeper significance of life. Wordsworth captured this sense of a shift away from materiality in his poem composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey: he describes the “beauteous forms” of steep and lofty cliffs, hedgerows, pastoral farms, and then succinctly captures the profound emotional reaction these stimulated :

“To them I owed another gift…that blessed mood …
In which the heavy and weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened…”

Similar experiences probably lie behind the commitments of many dedicated conservationists and, perhaps in more modest form, many of us who seek recreation in natural settings.

Secular Experiences of Thin Places
The idea of thin places is given a very broad interpretation by some of those who have written about it, effectively applying it to any moment of pleasure or insight that is derived from a place. Carrie Knowles, writing in Psychology Today compares them to “happy places” which provide an opportunity to step away, even for a moment, to refuel. More substantially Eric Weiner, a travel writer, acknowledges in a column he wrote in 2012 for the New York Times that the idea of thin places has origins in Irish folklore, but suggests that the term refers to all  “places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again.” A thin place for him not necessarily a tranquil place, or a fun one, or even a beautiful one, but is part of the transformative magic of travel. To make his point he gives examples of thin places he has experienced, including St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, Hong Kong airport, and a tiny bar in Shinjuku in Tokyo. His conclusion is that thin places offer glimpses not so much of heaven but of earth unencumbered, as it really is,.

Weiner also reinforces that experiences of thin places depend on the attitude of the person as much as the character of the place. To some extent thinness, like beauty, he suggests, is in the eye of the beholder, but there are steps you can take to increase the odds of an encounter with thinness, beginning with having no expectations and exploring the world with an open mind rather than a predetermined focus. 

The Enigmatic Healing Power of Thin Places.
Clare Cooper Marcus, a professor and practitioner of  landscape architecture, decided that as part of her recuperation after a life-threatening illness she should to go to Iona, the cradle of Celtic Christianity and widely regarded as a thin place, though she makes no mention of that. She writes of her initial experiences: “I am content to be in this place. It is a relief to be in a place where words are few but sounds are many… Perhaps on Iona I can find contentment in not-knowing, not-thinking. Perhaps I can just learn to be” (2010, p.34). And after spending many months there her conclusion is: “My soul is soothed…I cannot say why this particular place nurtures me as no other, what particular resonance draws me back. Yet I know this is my place of healing. That is enough” (2010, p.376).

Marcus returned from Iona to found a landscape architecture practice called ‘Healing Landscapes’, based on the idea that nature-oriented landscapes can promote recovery from stress via passive contact, which can be as simple as looking out of a window, or physical activity such as walking and sitting outside in a “healing garden”. Her commissions have included gardens for hospitals and long-term care facilities for patients with dementia. My sense is she has effectively turned her own experience of a thin place into designing potentially thin places for others to help them cope or heal.

This conclusion is appealing but perhaps too simplistic. Kerri ní Dochartaigh, in her explicit autobiographical consideration of the role thin places played in helping her recover from the psychological consequences of her traumatic childhood, is more cautious and complex about their capacity for healing. She concludes her book Thin Places (Chapter 13) enigmatically with the following remarks:

“The places we are from do not define us, they do not make us, they do not root us, they cannot hold this earth from its inescapable turning…
Places do not heal us, they do not take the suffering we have known and bury it in their bellies…
Places do not take away our sorrow.
Places only hold us, they only let us in.  Places only hold us close enough that we can finally see ourselves reflected back.”

Bibliography

James, William 1961 (1902), The Varieties of Religious Experience, Collier Books: New York, especially Chapter 3 The Reality of the Unseen

Marcus, Clare Cooper, 2010 Iona Dreaming: The Healing Power of Place, Nicolas Hays Fort Worth Florida, 2010

Marcus, Clare Cooper, https://www.cultivatingplace.org/post/2017/09/21/the-therapeutic-power-of-the-garden-with-clare-cooper-marcus

McCann, Fiona 2021 “Earth Care and Recovery in Kerri Ní Docharthaigh’s Thin Places” Estudios Irlandeses, Issue 19, 2024, pp. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2024-12415

Ní Dochartaigh, Kerri, 2022, Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home, Milkweed Editions (I read the e-version of this book, which is why I have not included chapter references rather than page numbers for quotes).  

Roberts, Mark, 2012  Thin Places: A Biblical Investigation, accessed at
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/markdroberts/series/thin-places/

Tuan, Y-F. with Strawn M. (2012) Religion: From Place to Placelessness. The Center for American Places at Columbia College, Chicago.

Turner, V. and Turner, E. (1978) Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Columbia University Press: New York. (Second edition, 2011).

Underhill, E., 1946, Collected papers of Evelyn Underhill, Longmans, Green & Company, New York, NY. 

Weiner, Eric, 2012 “Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer” New York Times, accessed at
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/travel/thin-places-where-we-are-jolted-out-of-old-ways-of-seeing-the-world.html

There have been four major events or episodes in the last eighty years that have had worldwide effects with lasting consequences for places. These are the invention and deployment of nuclear weapons, explosive population growth, anthropogenic climate change, and almost universal engagement with electronic media. I don’t consider other important events, such as the mass production and distribution of antibiotics, decolonization, the discovery of DNA and genetic modification, computing, satellites and space exploration, and the shift towards gender equality, because their consequences for places are arguably more limited. The four I have identified stand out as exceptional because, like plate tectonics, they are manifestations of fundamental processes of change that move quite slowly and in the background, yet have affected and are continuing to affect places in substantial ways on a worldwide scale.

By ‘places’ I mean here the geographical parts of the public world that are encountered in everyday life and with which people often have some emotional attachment – neighbourhoods, towns or cities, and regions. Although these consist of many juxtaposed and intertwined things – buildings, roads, traffic, trees, people, landscapes, memories and so on – we experience them as whole environments that are familiar, usually taken for granted, and can be simply identified by their names which serve as metaphors for their complex whole identities.

Places, it has been suggested, are openings to the world because they are first of all things; our experience of whole places necessarily precedes the elaboration of scientific theories or ideologies. They are manifestations of what the political philosopher Hannah Arendt called “The common-sense world which neither the scientist nor the philosopher ever eludes.” (1978, p 26). But places are also open to world. Nowhere is an island, everywhere is affected by processes and events that originate elsewhere and which function at a large scale – trade, fashions, ideologies, technological innovations, plagues, imperial domination.

This essay is about the way places and experiences of place appear to have been profoundly affected by four transformative events that have originated since the end of the Second World War, and whose consequences will continue to be felt long into the future.

1. The Background Threat of Place Annihilation

Since the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki places everywhere have existed in the shadow of possible destruction by nuclear weapons. Hannah Arendt considered this to be one of two destructive turns in the modern age (the other was totalitarianism), and a turning point in all human existence because humanity had for the first time acquired the power to destroy itself. Worries about about a possible apocalypse from some speculative cause have probably always existed, but now the world faces the known risk of self-inflicted, worldwide, mutually assured place annihilation.

This has had remarkably little impact on places and placemaking. Since 1945 populations have grown, cities have expanded, greenhouse gas emissions have increased, life expectancies have become longer. Nevertheless the missiles and nuclear arsenals are real, and the risk of their use is the omnipresent background to place experiences everywhere; it would take little more than an impetuous decision by an upset political leader for the worst to happen. The Doomsday Clock, introduced by atomic scientists in 1947 to suggest how close the world is to the midnight of nuclear catastrophe, and which now also includes risks of extinction posed by biotechnology, climate change and AI, is currently set at 89 seconds, the closest it has ever been.

A Place Corollary: The United Nations
The United Nations was founded in 1945, in the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to achieve international co-operation and prevent future world wars. The UN is notable as the first institution that treats the Earth as a single place consisting of the many smaller places of its member countries. Since 1950 it has systematically gathered and provided data about global and national issues affecting places, such as population and the size of cities (which I have used in this post). The UN promotes global and local sustainability, including the preservation of specific places that are considered to have global significance, such as World Heritage Sites. It therefore signals an important shift in sense of place away from a focus on what is mostly local to interactions between local experiences and global processes.

2. Population Growth, Urbanization, Population Decline

It is impossible to overstate just how exceptional global population changes since 1945 have been. It took about 10,000 years for the world’s population to grow from probably less than 4 million at the end of the last Ice Age, to about 2.3 billion people in 1940. Since then growth has been about  a billion people every twelve years, a total of almost 6 billion in seventy years. Nothing remotely like this has happened before. And it will not happen again, because paradoxically, in the midst of this growth fertility rates have dropped below replacement levels in all developed countries, including China and India, so that before the end of this century populations everywhere are going to age rapidly and then for the first time ever slide into absolute decline.

A few decades ago there were predictions of catastrophic outcomes from overpopulation. That didn’t happen because somehow resources did not run out and economic development kept pace. Nevertheless, the sudden addition of almost six billion people has had a huge impact. In 1950 there were 2.5 billion people occupying the lived-in places in the world. In 2025 there are 8.2 billion. That’s an additional 5.7 billion (70 percent of global population) who live in newly created places of some sort – high-rise apartments, new cities, suburbs. Somewhere between one and two billion new dwellings (the number depends on average household size) have had to be constructed. Building, maintaining and servicing all these these has required quadrupling supplies of resources, products, food and energy, which has in turn required the widespread construction of new non-places with no resident population and no history, such as oil fields, power plants, manufacturing facilities, container ports, shopping malls, and international airports. In short, at least three quarters of all the places where people currently live, and most of the non-places supporting them, have been created since 1950 (about half have been made since 1975)..

The clearest effect of this surge of population growth has been to turn the world urban. Four billion of the additional 5.7 billion people have been accommodated in cities and towns. When the UN made its first systematic estimate in 1950, 29.6 percent of the world’s population was urban. Around 2006 for the first time in human history more than half the world’s population was living in cities. The percentage is now 56 percent, and is expected to keep climbing, even where populations are declining, to the 80 percent levels of developed countries.

The effect of urbanization has been that cities around the world have metastasized into denser and ever larger megalopolitan regions that can be a hundred or more kilometres across with several centres linked by quasi-urban corridors of suburbs, industrial subdivisions, discount malls and distribution centres. In 1950 there were two megacities with populations of more than 10 million and another 74 cities with more than a million people. There are now 44 megacities and over 600 cities with a million or more. Together these house a quarter of the world’s population.

What all this growth means is that while place in 1950 could be reasonably be understood in terms of rural settlements and small towns or cities that had communities of neighbours sharing a local sense of place, it now has to be understood as primarily an urban phenomenon involving strangers living in high density, artificial environments which take hours to drive across, comprised mostly of buildings in the placeless styles of modernist architecture, where communities are based as much on shared interests as proximity.

The place consequences of population decline are more subtle than the huge scale of placemaking associated with growth, in part because they have been disguised by immigrations, and in part because they are just beginning to become apparent. The global fertility rate (number of live births per woman) peaked at 5.2 children in the 1960s then began to fall everywhere, and now only in sub-Saharan Africa and a few Middle Eastern countries are populations growing. In North America, and many European countries, where fertility had fallen below replacement by the early 1970s, national populations would already have declined if they had not been bolstered by immigration from less developed parts of the world. This immigration has transformed the identity of many places, especially urban ones, from the cultural homogeneity that previously prevailed to cultural and ethnic diversity.

Where immigration has not compensated for a falling population, for instance Japan, the evidence of population decline is already visible in abandoned houses and depopulated small towns. This will be the future wherever fertility rates fall below replacement, including China, where current UN population projections suggest that by 2100 the population could have shrunk by as much as 800 million. A decline of even of few million in a nation’s population will pose significant problems initially as populations age, and for places at all scales there will be significant issues and then as former priorities about placemaking to accommodate more people will have to shift towards finding ways to shrink cities and abandon existing communities.

3. Climate Change

In 1981 atmospheric physicists at NASA (most notably James Hansen. who a few years later made a presentation about climate change to a Senate committee that triggered widespread awareness) published a paper in the journal Science on the “Climate Impact of Increasing Carbon Dioxide” (Hansen et al, 1981).This identified a clear correlation between human sources of rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and increasing temperatures and projected that, depending on the rate of economic growth, global average temperatures would rise between 2.5°C and 4.5°C by 2100. Its conclusion was that this is something “of almost unprecedented magnitude” in both geological and human history, “not seen since the age of dinosaurs.”

This conclusion has been reinforced by numerous subsequent studies, and evidence of it has become apparent in steadily rising mean global temperatures and intensifying extreme weather. In spite of numerous promises, policies and initiatives to reduce emission, concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere have steadily gone up since the 1980s and are now higher than at any time in the last 16 million years.

While climate change is mostly described at a large scale – global mean temperature and so on –  the fact is that greenhouse gas emissions come from specific places, and it is in specific but mostly different places that the damage caused by increasing extreme weather happens. National and international strategies to mitigate emissions and encourage adaptations are essential, but these have to implemented in ways that are tailored to local circumstances – rising sea levels for coastal locations, wildfires where there are forests near cities, melting permafrost in the Arctic, severe floods almost anywhere near a river. In cases where individual places are especially vulnerable to extreme weather events, the only feasible adaptation is a strategy euphemistically called “planned retreat”, in other words abandonment and relocation of communities.

We are at the relatively early stage of anthropogenic climate change. The stark choice presented by the climate crisis is either to make transformative changes now to the ways everyday life is lived in places – to eliminate fossil fuel use, cut use of plastics, reduce travel, modify diets, buy local – in an attempt to reduce emissions and stave off the worst consequences from a climate not experienced in millions of years. Or to continue life pretty much as usual and so ensure that over the next century buildings and infrastructure in most cities will have to be rebuilt to accommodate the realities of unprecedented extreme weather, and in all probability many places both urban and rural will have to be abandoned because they will have become unliveable.

4. Electronic Media and Sense of Place

The impacts of electronic media on place, and specifically sense of place, are more speculative than those of demographic and climate change. The reason I think they are important is implicit in the fact that since 1994 internet use has gone from a miniscule 0.01percent of the global population, perhaps 500,000 academics and computer scientists, to 68 percent, or 5.6 billion people, and it is continuing to grow at about 560,000 every day. There are currently 5.2 billion people with social media accounts, and 5.8 billion mobile phone subscribers Data Reportal, ITU Facts and Figures). The average daily time spent online by users worldwide in 2024 was 6 hours 38 minutes (Statista Daily Time Spent Online).

This astounding growth has released the transformative but previously mostly latent social effects of electronic communications, and it has significant implications for places because everyday life everywhere is now caught in an electronic web.

The first electric communications were by telegraph, invented in the 1840s, which made it possible to deliver messages faster than a messenger. This was followed by a century of slow innovation as telephones, then radio television and electronic technologies insinuated themselves into society. In the 1960s, when radio and television were in their heyday, Marshall McLuhan realized that innovations in media of communication had social effects that went well beyond the convenience of new technology. Printing, after it was introduced in Europe in the 15th century, hadn’t just provided an easier way to copy manuscripts than doing it by hand, it made possible the mass production of books and documents, which democratized literacy and education, and fostered the orderly, rational and detached ways of thinking that lie behind most practices and institutions of modern society.

Electronic media, McLuhan argued, are fundamentally different because they shrink distance by communicating at light speed, circling the world in seconds, turning it back on itself in “a global embrace” in which “we everywhere resume person-to-person relations as if on the smallest village scale.” They create  a new version of preliterate societies where emotional engagement and feelings prevail over reason and evidence. He was not enthusiastic about this. “The global village,” he once declared in a moment of remarkable prescience, “is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations” (cited in McLuhan and Staines, 2003: 265). In short, electronic media are displacing print media and the social order they have supported for half a millennium.

In spite of their deep intrusions into everyday life, the impact of electronic technologies on the landscapes of places is mostly incremental and minor: cell phone towers and satellite dishes; server farms in innocuous buildings in out of the way locations; fibre is mostly buried, wireless signals pass through walls. Instead it is sense of place, or how places are known and experienced, that they affect. They do this in diverse ways, in some cases obviously and in others indirectly. These are the early stages of the electronic internet age: the following list, which summarize the place impacts of electronic media that can be identified, is necessarily tentative and provisional.

• They simply undermine sense of place. No Sense of Place was the title Joshua Meyrowitz used for his book elaborating McLuhan’s ideas about the impact of radio and television, because these communicate the same top-down  messages to mostly passive audiences regardless of where they are. The internet and social media differ because they are participatory rather than passive, anybody can have their say online (which is probably a reason for their enormous popularity). But they also also have no sense because where the influencers and their followers actually are is of no consequence.
• The internet is placeless. It is separate realm detached from geography, where communities consist not of neighbours who know one another, but of individuals have similar views about truth and reality could be located anywhere. For all the language of home pages and web sites, it has no places.
• The erosion of everyday place experiences. Sharon Kleinman has called this “displacing place” because individuals communicating through their devices are distracted, not quite present in the place. On a slightly larger scale electronic media intrude into most everyday activities – writing, reading, banking, shopping, photography, driving, booking flights and concerts. In this respect electronic media have displaced place by reducing the need to go somewhere to interact with other people.
• A poisoned, exclusionary sense of place is facilitated. A poisoned sense of place develops when connections to a place become so narrow and intense that outsiders are seen as undesirable, and in extreme cases to be removed from it. The placeless echo chambers of social media have fostered such exclusionary attitudes, which have in several instances been transposed into violent actions in actual places.
• Breadth of place experience replaces depth of place experience. In combination with rapid air travel (aircraft are flying computers, which shrink distance and fly in and out of non-places) electronic media have facilitated inexpensive travel, which is a form of voluntary displacement, through online booking that has made in possible for many people (there are more than a billion international tourist arrivals a year) to directly experience many different and exotic places even as it shrinks the apparent distances and differences between them. This is a substantial change from previous eras when travel was expensive, difficult and slow, and the majority of people spend most of their lives in one or two places.
• Smart mobs. A smart mob is the crowd of people who don’t know each by act together in response to online promotions or memes of some attraction, place or event. They contribute, for example, to overtourism at places that are apparently on everyone’s bucket list, where they can take selfies to post online.
• The global is reduced to the hyperlocal. Electronic media, for instance in news coverage, tend to shrink them to what is local on the smallest scale; they make everywhere, no matter how distant or exotic, seem nearby by focussing on specific details and effects on individuals. This is a particular aspect of simplification.
• Simplification of identities of places. Electronic media tend to simplify complex issues and large places (cities and regions) to video bites, snapshots and brief descriptions that can be conveyed on little screens and short messages. For tourists this is perhaps related for travel that is primarily to collect place visits and take selfies.

• Emphasis on emotions and feelings over evidence. This general characteristic, which McLuhan identified as central to the global village, is manifest in the frequent attention to feelings, for instance in brief interviews of individuals coping with widespread destruction caused by wildfires, or conflicts. The larger causes and processes affecting places, which are difficult to convey in easily accessible formats, are dealt with briefly. The emphasis on feelings also contributes to the way social media facilitate the spread of misinformation, for instance denial of climate change, because evidence is treated as less important than opinions based on feelings, .
• Openness of places to the world. Places have always been both open to the world and openings to the world. When information travelled slowly and was edited, as in newspapers, this openness was constrained. Electronic media, especially the internet, have made places wide open to the world. News from everywhere now arrives as a constant flow with few or no constraints. At the same time almost every aspect of local and personal life can be widely shared, even with others on the far side of the world.

The places we currently live in and experience, including most of those constructed to accommodate population growth since 1950, been created in accordance with ideas about the organization of spaces, roads and activities that were developed in an age when print media and its rational foundations prevailed. It is too soon to know with clarity where the shift from this to a global village immersed in electronic media might lead, though current political developments give hints of the sorts of upheavals that can happen when conventions are pushed aside. What is clear is that the enormous global popularity of the internet and social media indicates that electronic media already intrude deeply into everyday life in places everywhere. In some ways they have enriched place experiences by making information about them so readily available and allowing individual experiences to be widely shared. In other respects, they have weakened attachments and changed relationships to place, at least to the extent that the more time we spend alone online, in the placeless often misinformed world of the internet, the less time and attention we have to experience places in the real world. 

Comments

What I have suggested in this essay is that the character of both individual and shared experiences of places has changed since 1945 because they have been caught in the backwash of several exceptional worldwide social transformations. Unprecedented population growth means that the great majority of neighbourhoods in the world are now urban and less than eighty years old, while continual development and redevelopment of existing places dramatically remakes their identities. Climate change means that past weather in localities is an increasingly poor indicator of future conditions. and is pushing an unprecedented burden of responsibility for mitigation and adaptation onto places at every scale from neighbourhoods to nations. Electronic media seem to distract us from where we are in numerous different ways that generally seem to undermine the importance of place. The risk of place annihilation is a constant background presence.

Furthermore, the global scale of these changes suggests that they are largely indifferent to diplomatic solutions, political ideologies, cultural attitudes or technological fixes. Indications are that in the not too distant future they will present serious challenges for municipalities, cities and regions as populations age and decline, extreme weather becomes more aggressive, and social media spread misinformation about causes and solutions.

Place is a fundamental and adaptable aspect of human life, not easily pushed aside. These changes, for all their extent and scale, have not completely undermined continuity. Place names, and roads and streets that have been rights of way for centuries, have not disappeared; maps made at the height of the print era in the 18th century have a strong resemblance to electronic maps of the 21st century; local histories and customs of places are widely celebrated. What they have done is to ensure that most place experiences are now unlike they were eighty years ago because they are urban, encompass a range of different places, and are continually shifting their forms. But probably the most important conclusion is that, just as climate change means that past weather is no longer a useful indicator of future weather, so past experiences and conventional ideas about place have limited relevance for the present and future.

References

Arendt, Hannah, 1978  The Life of the Mind, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2025 https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2025-statement/

Hansen, J., et al, 1981 “Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide” Science, 213, 957-966, accessed at https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html.

Kleinman, S. (Ed) (2007) Displacing place: mobile communication in the twenty-first century. New York: Peter Lang

McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: the extensions of man, Scarborough, Ontario: A Mentor Book, New American Library.

McLuhan S and Staines D (eds) (2003) Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews/Marshall McLuhan.Toronto: McLelland and Stewart.

Meyerowitz, Joshua, 1985 No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (London: Oxford UP)

Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org. This is an excellent single source for data and diagrams about population growth, fertility, urbanisation, the internet, and climate change.

UNESCO (1972) Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage. https://whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext/.

UN World Urbanization Prospects  https://population.un.org/wup/

UN World Population Prospects  https://population.un.org/wpp/

UN World Fertility Report 2024 https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/

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

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

Types of Displacement

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

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

Forced Displacement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voluntary Displacement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Concluding Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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