Putting “Place” in a multiscale context: Perspectives from the sustainability sciences

Abstract

This paper summarizes a number of perspectives that have emerged from the sustainability sciences in recent decades that shed light on the role of place in multi-scale sustainability science and vice versa, related to such topics of broad interest as “resilience” and “adaptation” and ranging from the importance of the “co-production” of knowledge for sustainable development to threats to a “sense of place” from global environmental and economic changes. Clearly, scholarly attention to place in a multiscale concept is shared by a number of research communities, especially a rich tradition of research on place as politically contested space. These two traditions intersect in ways that have been little-explored. For example, sustainability science traditions have been focused on challenges in integrating knowledge about nature and society as a research objective, where “scale” is used as one of a number of structural organizing concepts in unraveling natural system – human system interactions in geographical areas from microbial to global, where it has found that a small regional scale is the one where such integrative analysis is often most fruitful but “place” is not usually an organizing concept. Concurrently, the political-economy oriented place traditions have viewed place as a frequent focus of struggles over power, control, and equity, with scale only one of many factors shaping how places work. These intersections, some of them noted below, offer potentials for integrated research that might interest both communities and benefit a number of space/place research discourses.