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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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