Place Matters Research Articles

A drop in the sea or catalyst for change: diverse effects of the place-based approach in Europe

ABSTRACT The place-based approach has been the guiding principle of EU policies for a decade. Building on the idea that place matters, the place-based narrative aims to promote local development and spatial justice through the utilization of local potentials and deliberative policy decisions. Institutional capacity for place-based action requires good quality governance and place leadership with transformative capacities. The domestic institutional environment can provide frames for the governance of local development by fostering local agency to (re)frame local issues and build coalitions across the horizontal spectrum and vertical scales. By focusing on the institutional processes of three place-based interventions, this comparative research paper maps out the ways domestic conditions can change parameters of place-specific institutional arrangements by influencing local agents’ capacities for coalition-building and deliberation. Based on the selected case studies of the RELOCAL project, we specifically study the evolution of local coalitions, the effects of different actors’ ambitions and commitment to development, and the process of planning and implementation through horizontal and vertical linkages.

Challenging Queer Metronormativity

Challenging Queer Metronormativity

Just Adapt: Engaging Disadvantaged Young People in Planning for Climate Adaptation

The visibility of young people in climate change debates has risen significantly since the inception of the Fridays for Future movement, but little is known about the diversity of positions, perspectives and experiences of young people in Ireland, especially with respect to climate change adaptation planning. To close this knowledge gap, this article first interrogates key emergent spaces of public participation within the arena of climate action in Ireland in order to identify the extent of young people’s participation and whether any specific consideration is given to disadvantaged groups. It then tests the impacts of workshops specifically designed to support disadvantaged young people’s engagement with climate change adaptation which were rolled out with a designated Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools school in inner-city Dublin, Ireland. We found limited attention to public participation in climate change adaptation planning generally, with even less consideration given to engaging young people from disadvantaged communities. However, positive impacts with respect to enhanced knowledge of climate change science and policy processes emerged following participation in the workshops, providing the bedrock for a greater sense of self-efficacy around future engagement with climate action amongst the young people involved. We conclude that what is needed to help ensure procedural justice around climate action in Ireland are specific, relevant and interactive educational interventions on the issue of climate change adaptation; interventions which are sensitive to matters of place and difference.

African Christian Biography: Stories, Lives and Challenges

In the wake of the Dictionary of African Biography (2011) and the Dictionary of African Christian Biography (DACB), the present volume, African Christian Biography, emerges as another important contribution to scholarly discourse at the intersection between “African,” “Christian,” and “Biography.” Dana Robert, the editor, argues that at the heart of the volume is the affirmation of biography as an important form of historical writing that broadens the sources and methodologies for reading Africa’s Christian history. Through biography, she claims, “people become . . . subjects of their own history” (viii). In corroboration, Emmanuel Egbunu, in one of the chapters, laments that the absence of biographical writing has fueled the pervading conception of African Christianity as “a late comer within Global Christianity” (63). Robert’s and Egbunu’s assessments provide a clear trajectory toward understanding the purpose and organization of the book as well as its invaluable contributions to the field of World Christianity. The volume consists of papers presented at a conference marking the twentieth anniversary of the Dictionary of African Christian Biography held at Boston University in 2015.The book’s seventeen chapters are divided into four parts. The first, “The Importance of African Christian Biography and the Role of the DACB,” earmarks the vision and historical trajectory connecting this volume to its parent publication, the DACB. Authors in this section respond to the question of why such a scholarly enterprise should matter in the first place as well as how the DACB sought to awaken this consciousness in view of the new phase of world Christianity as captured in World Christianity studies. According to Jonathan Bonk,Bonk’s vision is clearly expressed in the second and third parts of the volume. While the second, entitled “Biographies of Christian Leaders,” focuses on biographical histories of male and female Christian religious leaders, the third, “Retrieving Women’s Lives,” focuses specifically on the biographical renderings of herstorical characters. Christian leaders such as Krәstos Śämra of Ethiopia, King Afonso I of Kongo, Queen Njinga of Angola, Kgosi Sechele and Seth Mokitimi of South Africa, John Chilembwe of Malawi, Bernard Mizeki of South Africa and Mozambique, and the itinerant prophet William Wade Harris, who transversed across Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana, were all engaged alongside female figures such as Nokutela Dube of South Africa, Sikhawulaphi Khumalo and Nellie Maduma Mlotshwa of Zimbabwe. Their biographies are constructed with a view toward the complexities of lived experience at the intersection of Christian and African identities and the colonial and patriarchal powers-that-be.In the last part, “Challenges in Writing African Christian Biography,” the authors return to the core question of reading African Christian history through biographical interpretations and draw out the factors militating against a more robust engagement with this form of historiography. For example, Paul Grant explicitly examines the problem of rupture in the biographical construction of people who endured dehumanization as enslaved persons, colonial subjects, victims of genocide, famine, poverty and other forms of violence. Shining a spotlight on Catherine Zimmerman, who was stolen from the streets of Angola, survived enslavement in the West Indies, and died in Ghana while serving as a missionary with Switzerland’s Basel Missionary Society, Grant examines the various levels of rupture in her lived experiences vis-à-vis his own obligations as a researcher, concluding that “the real problem is moral: it is the problem of historians’ appropriate humility towards the horrible experiences of the African past and the witness offered by the survivors to their heirs” (294). Grant’s observation poignantly underscores the underlying message of faithful interaction with historical sources and resources in the re-enactment of the humanity of biographical figures.African Christian Biography must be praised for its contribution to making scholarship on African Christianity more open to the often-neglected role of biography and oral history using a bottom-up approach. Although most of the contributions come from Southern Africa, the book’s rich collection of remarkable but little-known African Christian figures who helped create Christianity on the continent and beyond, makes it an invaluable resource for scholars of world Christianity, African religions, and African colonial history.

Disaster preparedness, perceived community resilience, and place of rural villages in northwest China

Disaster preparedness is an essential way to improve community resilience. This study examines the linkage between Chinese villagers’ adoption of disaster preparedness activities and their perception of community resilience, measured by the Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit. Survey data from three villages with different landscapes (loess plateau, plain and mountain) in northwest China with great earthquake risks but no occurrence for many years is used. Regression analyses demonstrate that the awareness related preparedness and public participation preparedness are significantly and positively associated with the community resilience assessment, while the material preparedness is not significant nor consistent across the domains of community resilience. Moreover, place (i.e., landscapes) matter in residents’ assessment of their community resilience: villagers from the plain area and mountainous area reported much higher resilience scores, compared to those who live in the loess plateau.

Place matters: Exploring Native Hawaiian youths’ cultural selves, pride, and generativity.

Place matters: Exploring Native Hawaiian youths’ cultural selves, pride, and generativity.

Do Third Places Matter?: The Effects of Foot Traffic Concentration in Gathering Places on Financial Distress and Physical Health in Communities

Do third places (e.g. cafes, taverns, diners) matter in communities? We propose that when foot-traffic are concentrated in third places in a community, incidental interactions among strangers and place attachment flourish. Using data on billions of cell phone interactions, we introduce a new measure called ``Third Places Foot-Traffic Concentration'' (TPFC). After controlling for community demographic characteristics, the stringency of COVID precautions, and established measures of neighborhood social capital, we find that TPFC is related to lower personal bankruptcy rates, COVID-19 infections, and deaths in communities. However, these effects of TPFC weaken as the degree of racial residential segregation in a community increases. Taken together, our results suggest that third places act as sociological WD-40 that foster incidental interactions, and thereby, complement other conventional sources of neighborhood social capital.

Concept of space of places in social sciences

The article examines the concept of space of places — a theoretical framework in social sciences and the humanities for analyzing phenomenon of places and social practices used to produce and reproduce it. The purpose of the presented research consists of the following: 1) to reveal the main theoretical and methodological approaches to the construction of the concept of space of places; 2) present an interdisciplinary concept for describing and explaining the social foundations of the space of places; 3) describe the significant social practices of the reproduction of the space of places and socio-cultural integration. The article shows that key approaches to studying space of places are represented by quite different research perspectives such as neo-Marxism (H.Lefebvre, M.Castells), phenomenology (A. Schutz, G.Bachelard), P.Nora’s theory of places of memory and A.Assman’s theory of cultural memory and identity, M.Augé’s anthropology of non-places and humanist geography (Y.-F.Tuan, Ed. Relph, T.Cresswell, D. Seamon). The article discusses the social, intellectual, ontological and epistemological bases of the concept of space of places. In a narrow sense, the unifying thesis of the research strategies is centered around the assumption of the corpus of ideas built upon the assertion that place matters. Broadly defined, the space of places is one of the fundamental foundations of the living world of individuals and groups. Space of places includes the world of everyday life (the perceived) and the world of symbolic life (the experienced). These living worlds comprise spatial practice and spaces of representation (following Henri Lefebvre’s logic). Abstract space, a prevailing form of the era of neo-liberal capitalism, opposes them and imposes its own models and production / consumption logics. Hence, a value-based contradiction between two kinds of space arises. Space of places is a historically grounded way of organizing our common experience. It is a world of meanings and cultural codes united by history and identity (following the logic of Manuel Castells). The article analyzes in detail the phenomenological tradition of place; the relationship between place, memory and identity; the theoretical contribution of humanist geography to the concept of space of places.

Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad by Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt and William Burgwinkle

Reviewed by: Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad by Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt and William Burgwinkle Andrew Taylor Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad. By Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad emerged from a large collaborative research project that initially set out to explore the varieties of medieval French in manuscripts produced outside of France and their transmission along “two main axes: a northern route that stretches from England across the Low Countries to Burgundy and the Rhineland; a southern route across the Alps to Northern Italy and out into the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas, to the Middle East” (http://www.medievalfrancophone.ac.uk). So far the project has compiled data for the bulk of the manuscripts of Guiron le courtois, the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, the Roman de Troie, and the Tristan en prose, and is working on the Lancelot en prose and the Roman d’Alexandre. This volume shows where the project might eventually take us, sketching out a new literary history that supplants the most familiar texts (the Chanson de Roland, the lais of Marie de France, and the Tristan of Thomas) with histories and the later prose romances. Shifting focus from Paris to the Low Countries, Italy, and the eastern Mediterranean, it treats manuscripts as participants in complex, shifting, and contested networks. The book follows what has become a familiar trajectory—insisting that Old French “belongs to no one” (26), rejecting nationalist histories of the development of standardized French—but it goes further. Moving away from the recent emphasis on French’s relation to English, the authors challenge the model of westward translatio studii (a master narrative for both medieval and modern France), showing instead that texts emanated from or circled back to eastern cultural centers. The metaphor that structures the database—that of two axes—gives way, in the book, to the metaphor of the network, which the authors explore, in ever subtler ways, from one chapter to the next. Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad is an extraordinarily stimulating and ambitious book—not so much a comprehensive literary history as an exploration of how such a history might be written. The volume draws on a wealth of theoretical models, most of them mentioned too briefly to permit full critical assessment, but Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory is central. Gilbert, Gaunt, and Burgwinkle approach the manuscript as an actant, “an entity which induces mediation [End Page 343] or translation, therefore not simply an ‘actor’ or ‘agent’” (201–2)—in other words, quoting Latour, as “mediators [that] render the movement of social visible to the reader’” (202). Similarly, the French language, always varying, localized but with global associations and ambitions, is seen as “an actant, a means and a message, a double agent” (242). A fuller discussion of Latour’s terms and the questions they raise would have been helpful, but the overall direction is clear. The authors focus on manuscripts not as points of origin but as objects in transition that acquire new meanings as they move from one cultural situation to another. They emphasize the multiple paths along which the manuscripts moved; the routes of trade, crusade, and pilgrimage; and the complexities of shifting political situations. Yet, following Latour, they also stress the role of “the aleatory, contingent, and unpredictable” in these movements and the ways in which the movements often “take priority over the immediate concerns or intentions of their makers or owners” (197, 202). The book highlights the diversity of medieval French, which it analyzes with philological precision, as well as the political and cultural work performed by these various kinds of French in specific locations at specific moments. Places matter a great deal in this approach, individual human agents less. Each of the book’s six chapters offers a number of micro-studies to illustrate these networks. Chapter 1 explores two texts emanating from what might once have been considered the periphery of the medieval francophone world and written in what might once have been considered impure French. The first, Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, is an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in what is sometimes almost franglais; the...

The Toughest Kid We Knew: The Old New West, a Personal History by Frank Bergon

Reviewed by: The Toughest Kid We Knew: The Old New West, a Personal History by Frank Bergon Elliott J. Gorn Frank Bergon, The Toughest Kid We Knew: The Old New West, a Personal History. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2020. 208 pp. Hardcover, $24.95. I grew up in Los Angeles and went to college in Berkeley back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dozens of times I drove back and forth on old US 99 or Interstate 5, a couple of hundred miles each way through California's Central Valley. More precisely, I drove through the southern half, the San Joaquin Valley; the northern half is called the Sacramento Valley. Together the two are almost five hundred miles long and fifty miles across, Bakersfield in the south, Lake Shasta to the north, the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the east, and Coast Ranges to the west. The land always seemed dull, flat, and empty to me, cattle here and there, crops (I didn't know what they were, didn't think to find out), farms, and dusty little towns with names like Chowchilla, Buttonwillow, Firebaugh, Coalinga, and Los Banos (literally "the baths" but we called it "the toilets"). America's breadbasket, drive through territory, California's equivalent of "flyover country," something to get past on the way to more cosmopolitan places. I wish I had Frank Bergon to set me straight back then. Bergon taught at the University of Washington and, until recently, Vassar. [End Page 398] He is the author of four novels set in the region, as well as poetry translations and essay collections. His most recent, The Toughest Kid We Knew: The Old New West, A Personal History, is a bit of a hybrid: short essays, criticism, memoir, these genres sometimes blending into each other. It is a fine, vivid book. The Central Valley has produced its share of writers—Maxine Hong Kingston, Leonard Gardiner, Joan Didion, and most famously John Steinbeck, who set much of The Grapes of Wrath in the Valley. Place matters to them all, but none quite so much as Bergon, who might legitimately be called the poet laureate of the Central Valley. His powerful evocations reveal how distinctive and interesting it truly was during the middle decades of the twentieth century. "My father and aunt went to a valley school whose pupils represented a mixed heritage of Japanese, Italian, German, Mexican, Chinese, Basque, Béarnais, African, Assyrian, Swedish, Portuguese, Russian, and Armenian. …" Bergon's grandfather, Prosper, though born in America, lived and worked primarily in communities made up of immigrants from the Pyrenees, who continued speaking their local dialects. Visiting his ancestral village as an old man, he felt fully at home, though he'd never been to Europe before. The Valley's polyglot mix had not vanished entirely over the coming generations but had melded into a shared rural and small-town culture. While The Toughest Kid We Knew is not merely a work of literary criticism, two writers in particular clarify Bergon's vision of the Valley. On the one hand, in "Reading Joan Didion" Bergon points out that the celebrated California writer, a daughter of white settlers going back to the nineteenth century, barely took note of families like the Bergons, let alone the children of the Dust Bowl—the "Oakies" and "Arkies"—and their descendants. Didion had little interest in such people, leaving blank "the details of social history and the realities of American social class" (164). A generation earlier John Steinbeck was far more attuned to rural working-class folk, though he depicted them as admirable yet overwhelmed by social forces they neither understood nor controlled. They were, in a word, proletarians. Steinbeck's writerly tradition included journalist Carey McWilliams, whose famous phrase, "factories in the fields"— [End Page 399] corporate agribusinesses—influenced subsequent authors, such as the historian Patricia Limerick. For all their strengths, they often missed the richness and texture of middling lives. What comes through in Bergon's Central Valley is tremendous diversity of background, experience, and ideas. Sometimes there is fatalism, as with Bergon's elementary school friend Richard Palacioz. Palacioz spent the first half of his adult life in the military...

Autobiography in the Anthropocene. A Geological Reading of Alice Munro

In the autobiographical stories of Nobel Prize award-winning author Alice Munro, questions of ontology and mortality are inextricably connected to matters of space and place. Fundamental existential dilemmas expressed in Munro’s corpus – signaled by the title of her second short story collection Who Do You Think You Are? – are linked to basic questions concerning orientation. Although autobiographical fiction frequently interweaves concerns about identity and deceased parents with recollections of ancestral spaces, as the literary critic Northrop Frye famously stated, the question ‘Where is here?’ is characteristic of the Canadian imagination. It is now also fundamental to the epoch of the Anthropocene. Although critics frequently praise Munro for her skill in presenting haunting, epiphanic moments, she is less often credited for her far less conventional tendency to tell stories covering years, even decades. My paper explores Munro’s preoccupation with these vast temporal arcs and their impact on her recursive autobiographical fiction. I argue that Munro’s penchant for ‘return and revision’ in her non-fictional works affords an opportunity for her protagonists and, by extension, her readers to revisit and ponder ancestral connections and the non-human dimensions of existence, which include sublime geological features and deep time.

Land and territory: competing spatial modes

ABSTRACT This paper explores how coal extraction activities in La Guajira and Cesar, Colombia, are confronting the territorial claims of the local communities with the land claims of the coal companies. I argue that for the communities affected, this is not just a matter of land; it is also a matter of place. The paper introduces the concept of “territorial grabbing” as a way of understanding our spatial surroundings beyond considerations of land tenure, ownership, use, and occupation, taking into consideration symbolic and emotional structures, power relations, and social configurations involved in contexts of social occupation and appropriation. The paper presents how the actions and activities of the mining companies triggered processes of territorial grabbing, thus, confronting the communitieś spatial understandings with the spatial logic of the mining companies.

White Sanctuaries: White Supremacy, Racism, Space, and Fine Arts in Two Metropolitan Museums

In this article, we compare two nationally recognized museums located in Chicago and Boston: The Art Institute of Chicago and the Boston Fine Arts Museum. We find that while both museums are colonial projects and White sanctuaries, there are variations in the racial mechanisms in place that help maintain White supremacy. Specifically, we look at three such mechanisms and compare and contrast between the two museums. We contend our findings suggest that while White supremacy is universal in its national (global) depth and breath, place matters. We argue that the physical context of the museums—their location within each city, the lay out of their locations, and the physical space of the museums themselves—help explain this variation. We end with specific implications for our work, centering on how we might dismantle current ideas of high culture (read: White) in favor of museums that are more inclusive, recognize their colonial project histories, and have antiracism in their mission as socially responsible institutions for the cities in which they reside and the people who reside there.

Place matters: Thinking about spaces for humanities practices

This essay reflects on the role of place for humanities practices and contributes to emerging discussions on infrastructure for the humanities and socio-material conditions of scholarly knowledge production. I provide a theoretical framework for studying venues for humanities work drawing on the phenomenological approach to the concepts of place and space, the pedagogical perspective on learning spaces in higher education, and epistemological studies of scientific places. Next, I analyse the landscape for the reconfiguration of humanities venues and present arguments for engaging with space by referring to the functioning of digital humanities. This essay shows that place is an extremely important resource, seeing as it is endowed with the power to drive new practices, institutionalize a community, and consolidate a discipline. Therefore, humanists should reflect critically on the ‘architecture of the humanities’ and engage in making their own spaces that determine practices, communication, and well-being.

Pandemic and the planning of resilient cities and regions

The emergence of the coronavirus pandemic motivated this paper, which revisits the nexus of public health and the city, itself a main source of a pandemic which similarly threatens the lives and properties of the world population gradually one glacier at a time: climate change. We argue that pandemics expose both the vulnerability and resilience of the urban system expansively, from rooftop to the region, but also serve as change agents for the planning of resilient cities and regions globally. The discussion of the urban system and the pandemic is comparative, with the recent coronavirus and climate change, a persistent, long-lasting pandemic. The historical and critical review and synthesis of the durable concepts of the urban system at the kernel of the theories and practices of urbanism is highlighted by place matters, cyberspace, density, access, and the city-region. We note the implications for reconfiguring the resilient urban system of the future effectively with pandemic as change agent and the comprehensive plan and its regulatory zoning ordinance as implementation tool.

Place matters: government capacity, community characteristics, and social capital across United States counties

AbstractCommunities with high levels of social capital enjoy an array of positive economic and community development outcomes. We assess the role of several key community characteristics, including the strength of government institutions, in explaining local social capital variation. The analysis draws on data from United States counties and includes regression modelling and a Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition to explore differences in social capital across an area’s metropolitan status and region. The data show social capital determinants vary by place both due to the endowment levels of these determinantsandthe productive value of their coefficients. For example, the coefficient productive values of government capacity explain some differences in social capital levels across metropolitan status (butnotacross region). Concurrently, variations in government capacity endowment levels help explain some differences in social capital levels across region (butnotacross metropolitan status).

Smart, Sustainable and Citizen Centered: A Network Analysis of Urban R&D Trends in Seoul, South Korea

Although it is now recognized that place matters for urban development policy, most case studies focusing on particular cities tend to adopt a high-level perspective that imperfectly captures the full spectrum of context-relevant urban development issues. This study applies semantic network analysis to a corpus of 13,852 accepted R&D project proposals on issues related to the urban development of Seoul, South Korea. Through our analysis, we highlight important research trends and also make connections between these trends and the policy orientation and priorities of successive mayoral administrations over a period of 16 years. Although the results suggest that there is significant overlap between policy orientation and scientific research activity, the interests of research scientists cannot be reduced entirely to political priorities. The study contributes to the literature by fusing the place-based approach to urban development studies with the computational content analysis methodology. We raise several questions for future research, including questions about the relationship between policy priorities, scientific research, and academic research.

Why place and space matter for intimate partner violence survivors’ mental wellbeing and communities in Northeastern Uganda

ABSTRACT The context of place matters for mental health. Employing a feminist framework, this study used key informant interviews and focus group discussions in May 2012 with 77 conflict-affected adults, children, and adolescents in Northeastern Uganda to understand the relation of place and the symbolic space of family to IPV survivors’ mental wellbeing to shape intervention possibilities. Using Grounded Theory methods, narratives identified numerous negative mental health experiences, such as having a disturbed mind, associated with inhabiting a violent domestic space. Place-associated qualities interacted with the symbolic space of the family to impede women’s ability to enhance the safety of their domestic space, discourage separation, and encourage reunification in the case of separation, all of which related to negative mental health experiences. Interventions should not assume that IPV survivors’ exposure to violence has terminated and look beyond mental health as an individual outcome.

Significance of Place in the Lives of Recreation Practitioners

This paper is a narrative inquiry into the experiences of two recreation practitioners, as well as the author, as they each learned how to live in relationally ethical ways in recreation practice. By drawing on the field texts of the author as he participated in a community garden project as a researcher-practitioner over two years, this paper shows that place matters when contemplating how lives come together in recreation practice. The purpose of this paper is to show that place is part of the fabric of our relational space as practitioner and participants lives come together in the meeting place of a recreation program. Place shapes who we are and are becoming, particularly when it is understood simultaneously with temporality and sociality (i.e., a narrative understanding of place).

Re-placing soil and its mattering in more-than-human cities

ABSTRACT What role does soil play in sustainable design interventions and can it help to reconfigure human place experiences and human-nature relations in cities? Cities are home to a host of nonhuman actors that are overlooked or under-acknowledged in design and planning practices and in everyday dwelling. Soil is one such under-acknowledged urban inhabitant. In a period where cities and their inhabitants must adapt to the challenges of a changing climate, the paper draws together theory in design, planning and geography and empirical research with designers and residents in Australian cities to re-place soil as mattering in place(making) practices, everyday urban dwelling and urban sustainability transitions. The research contributes to recent work in (post)human geography to discuss ‘soil-planty mattering’, or the active role of soils and their intra-actions with other urban matter in shaping place. Soil-planty mattering is shown to disrupt human place(making), extending cities in material, temporal and spatial ways. In these extensions, the research suggests that soils have particular potential to re-orient human relationships with nonhumans in urban realms.