People-place Relations Research Articles

METHODOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL REFLECTIONS FROM RESEARCH ON NEIGHBOURHOOD-BUILT ENVIRONMENT AND DEMENTIA

Abstract The neighbourhood is widely regarded as a setting that affords emotional and practical support and opportunities to maintain community-based activities and social participation for people living with dementia (PLWD). Creating a supportive neighbourhood built environment that facilitates outdoor mobility, wayfinding, and access to community destinations is key to making our communities dementia-inclusive. Research on the built environment and dementia-inclusive planning is relatively sparse in the broader research domain of neighbourhoods and dementia. Further, how PLWD perceive, interpret, and interact with the neighbourhood built environment is not adequately understood. Although it is acknowledged that PLWD should be more meaningfully included and engaged in research in this area, there is a lack of guidance on methodological and ethical considerations necessary to explore people-place relations in the neighbourhood built environment through the lens of the lived experience of PLWD. To address this gap, our paper draws from the Dementia-inclusive Streets and Community Access, Participation, and Engagement (DemSCAPE) study to highlight reflections on conducting walk-along interviews, embodied videography, photo documentation, semi-structured sit-down interviews, and visual elicitation to explore the influence of the neighbourhood built environment on the outdoor walking experience of PLWD. We discuss 1) methodological strengths, including the triangulated strategy of capturing experiential data in-situ in real time and in retrospect, and flexibly working around memory and communication-related challenges experienced by PLWD, 2) ethical challenges and measures for mitigation, 3) logistical difficulties in undertaking complex fieldwork with PLWD, limitations of the research methods, and potential alternative methods to explore in future research.

Constructing the places of young people in public space: Conflict, belonging and identity.

Building on the growing discursive approach to people-place relations, we examine how young people negotiate people-place tensions and relations, and how they establish their everyday sense of place in contemporary public spaces. Facilitated by the use of Collaborative Spatial Mapping, analysis of focus group data from 51 young people focuses on three aspects of participants' talk about the places that make up their everyday lives: appropriation of micro-geographical spaces, the construction of autobiographical insideness and the mobilization of shared socio-spatial histories. Our analysis illustrates young people's responses to a broader problematic of being 'troublesome' in public spaces, demonstrating how they construct a deep-rooted attachment to, and sense of themselves as located members within, such spaces. We argue that place appropriation and autobiographical insideness are important concepts for understanding the practice of citizenship by young people, and how such practice is embedded in wider political processes of spatial conflict and exclusion.

Industrial risks by the coast: how people-place bonds impact acceptance of a red mud recycling project (Riesgos industriales en la costa: cómo afectan los lazos persona-lugar a la aceptación de un proyecto de reciclaje de lodo rojo)

ABSTRACT Industries sometimes leaves invisible yet dangerous chemical memories of their activities. Because these compounds are invisible, people rely on heuristics informed in part by people-place relations to make a risk judgment. The Marseille region of France provides an interesting case to analyse how local risks are judged in relation to people-place variables. The perceived risks of a depollution project where ‘red mud’ (an industrial residue) is used to neutralize lead-contaminated soil are analysed in relation to (1) place attachment and (2) trust in several types of organization. Results show that participants with stronger local attachment perceive their local environment as less polluted and consider the project as a greater threat. Furthermore, risks vs. benefits associated with the project are significantly explained by age (associated with perceived risk) and trust in societal organizations (associated with perceived benefits). Discussion considers how the diversity of local publics could lead to widely different reactions to the depollution project across the city’s social tissue.

Reconceptualising Sense of Place: Towards a Conceptual Framework for Investigating Individual-Community-Place Interrelationships

While sense of place has been increasingly used in planning literature over the last five decades, its conceptualisation varies by discipline and theoretical orientation, with disjointed elements. This study develops a three-theme conceptual framework articulating individual-community-place interrelationships by critically reviewing the literature on sense of place and place-based constructs of attachment, identity, and satisfaction. Theorising the interactions in-between contributes to theoretical debates on sense of place and developing conceptual clarity to understand the planning context, processes, and outcomes, informing decision- and policy-making. It also facilitates the analysis and synthesis of complex narratives in qualitative studies of people-place relations.

A Critical Framework to Develop Human-Centric Positive Energy Districts: Towards Justice, Inclusion, and Well-Being

Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) are a new energy initiative from European member states. They are, simply put, local districts which produce more energy than they consume. PEDs are expected to adopt a more human-centric perspective in order to create more liveable and sustainable urban neighbourhoods. However, as previous research on energy transitions has demonstrated, the mainstream approach and technocratic tradition of research and policy vis-à-vis energy transitions could result in the perpetuation of social inequalities, energy injustices, and the passive participation of citizens also within PEDs. Hence, it is crucial in these early days of PEDs to discuss what a human-centric approach should entail and how it should be enacted. Based on a narrative literature review of critical social sciences' energy research (and specifically from social and environmental psychology), this paper will propose a critical framework containing five key dimensions which are relevant for creating more just and inclusive PEDs. These are: uncertainty, risk perception and trust; distributive justice; recognition justice and people-place relations; procedural justice; and, routines, capabilities and lived experiences. To that end, it will also discuss the different implications of mainstream and critical approaches in energy research and social sciences in relation to the deployment of human-centric PEDs. The review concludes that in order to successfully deploy human-centric PEDs, a critical approach is needed and presents some concrete recommendations for future research and policy in order to adopt such an approach. These include: considering justice, inclusion and the well-being of affected socio-ecological systems in the whole-life cycle of PEDs; better integration of indigenous capabilities; and, an ethos of de-growth and circularity in their deployment.

Place Attachment in Land Use Changes: A Phenomenological Investigation in Residents’ Lived Experiences with a Renewable Energy Project Deployment

Despite growing interest in issues of place attachment and land use changes, scholars of renewable energy have tended to overlook the ways that people–place relations affect local acceptance/opposition of renewable energy projects. We address this gap drawing on the concept of customer experience to capture the meaning of place attachment in a specific context of climate change adaptation (e.g., proposals to site large-scale low-carbon energy technologies such as wind farms) and deepening understanding of the role of place attachment in shaping community responses to the local siting of renewable energy technologies. This research adopts a phenomenological approach that focuses on exploring the residents’ experiences with the local place where they live (a village in Northeast Tunisia) as well as the meanings they attribute to the project. Results show that according to the evaluation of change, whether the renewable energy project enhances or disrupts the different aspects of place experience, residents will exhibit respectively either positive or negative emotions and attitudes and will take action accordingly either by supporting or protesting the project.

Too attached to let others in? The role of different types of place attachment in predicting intergroup attitudes in a conflict setting

What is the role of emotional attachment to a place in predicting intergroup attitudes in a conflict setting? Here, we examined whether different types of place attachment would have distinct consequences for intergroup attitudes. Research was conducted in Jerusalem, where two conflicting groups fight for the territorial occupancy of the same land. We tested our hypotheses in three studies among Israelis and Palestinians and we measured their attitudes towards each other. The results showed that in case of Israelis, a traditional (natural and unintentional) form of attachment predicted prejudice towards out-group but an active form of attachment (i.e. conscious identification with a place) was negatively related to prejudice; in case of Palestinians, there was no effect of attachment (neither traditional, nor active), but place relativity (i.e. an indifferent attitude towards place) positively predicted acceptance of the outgroup. The implications of people-place relations in the contested city are discussed.

People, place, and space: Theoretical and empirical reflections in studying urban open space

People, place, and space are the main domain of spatial research which is widely discussed in the geographic discipline. Geographers always focus on the meanings related to space and human interactions to explain people, place, and space. The concept was explained by Richard Harsthrone (1959), Fred E Lukermann (1964), David Harvey (1969), Henri Lefebvre (1974), Yi-fu Tuan (1974), Edward Relph (1976) and Doreen Massey (2005), etc. As a human geographer, Yi.fu Tuan has a great contribution to explain people-place relations and further explained by Relph, Massey, and other scholars. Grounding on the geographic research traditions, this paper presents the concept of people, place, and space reviewing the historiographical literatures and some empirical research studies on people-space relations. Theorists have argued that people and space are deep-rooted in studying place attachment creating people’s sense of place. People’s actions and behaviors create meaning through their individual and communal behaviors in that space where they live and interact. Moreover, theoretical perspectives argue that placemaking is always associated with the social and cultural dimensions of a society. Empirically, as an indigenous society, people from the core area of Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) have been perceiving urban open space as a commonplace for social and cultural life activities whereas migrants’ people living in the newly growing settlements have been perceiving the open space as a place for recreation and social capital enhancement.

“Re-placed” - Reconsidering relationships with place and lessons from a pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted a reconsideration, perhaps even a fundamental shift in our relationships with place. As people worldwide have experienced ‘lockdown,’ we find ourselves emplaced in new and complex ways. In this Commentary, we draw attention to the re-working of people-place relations that the pandemic has catalysed thus far. We offer insights and suggestions for future interdisciplinary research, informed by our diverse positionalities as researchers based in different continents employing diverse approaches to people-place research. The article is structured in two sections. First, we consider theoretical aspects of our current relationships to place by proposing a framework of three interdependent axes: emplacement-displacement, inside-outside, and fixity-flow. Second, we identify six implications of these dialectics: for un-making and re-making ‘home’; precarity, exclusion and non-normative experiences of place; a new politics of public space; health, wellbeing and access to ‘outside’ recreational spaces; re-sensing place, virtual escapes and fluid places, and methodological and ethical considerations. Across these topics, we identify 15 key questions to guide future research. We conclude by asserting that learning lessons from the global pandemic is necessarily tentative, requiring careful observation of altered life circumstances, and will be deficient without taking relationships with place into account.

Place attachment and negative places: A qualitative approach to historic former mental asylums, stigma and place-protectionism

Research exploring place attachment, place identity and people-place relations often adopts a quantitative approach and focuses on positively perceived places with negative or ambivalent places being largely omitted. This study investigated patterns of attachment of former staff members from three conventionally stigmatised places: historic mental asylums in the north of England. Semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted with 16 former staff from the three sites that were in the process of being redeveloped into residential use. Firstly, the study demonstrated that strong, positive attachments were present for the former staff members, created through length of time spent working within these institutions and the sense of belonging and community experienced. Secondly, these attachments were linked to strong senses of individual identity born of the personal and career developments that these sites had offered. Thirdly, the findings expand on the literature exploring both place-protective action and negatively perceived places and demonstrate the value of employing qualitative methods in investigating these.Furthermore, the article demonstrates that strong positive place attachments can support place change as a way of preserving and retaining a place. This challenges the existing assumptions within literature concerning place-protective action, that assumes this occurs primarily in opposition to place change.

Wind in the sails or choppy seas?: People-place relations, aesthetics and public support for the United States’ first offshore wind project

The primary social challenge of offshore wind power development may be local community members’ struggle to come to terms with the transformation of the ocean. In this study of local residents’ perceptions of the first wind power project off the North American coast, we consider whether factors such as aesthetics and place attachment, dependency and identity might serve as barriers or gateways toward an offshore wind power future. Respondents are 420 coastal Rhode Island and Block Island residents who were randomly sampled by mail or internet prior to turbine installation and after project commissioning. Data were analysed using weighted descriptive statistics and multiple imputed regression analysis. 87% of respondents who live in census tracts bordering the coast support or lean toward supporting the project despite paying significantly above-market prices for the electricity generated. Regression models show that support for the project is influenced, at least in part, by general disposition toward wind power and whether a respondent likes the turbines’ appearance, with place-related measures having less influence. Descriptions of the wind turbines that resonated with supporters and opponents include respectively, “Symbolic of progress towards clean energy” and “Cause the loss of something intangible, where all you see is the ocean”.

Redefining community based on place attachment in a connected world

The concept of community is often used in environmental policy to foster environmental stewardship and public participation, crucial prerequisites of effective management. However, prevailing conceptualizations of community based on residential location or resource use are limited with respect to their utility as surrogates for communities of shared environment-related interests, and because of the localist perspective they entail. Thus, addressing contemporary sustainability challenges, which tend to involve transnational social and environmental interactions, urgently requires additional approaches to conceptualizing community that are compatible with current globalization. We propose a framing for redefining community based on place attachment (i.e., the bonds people form with places) in the context of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, a World Heritage Area threatened by drivers requiring management and political action at scales beyond the local. Using data on place attachment from 5,403 respondents residing locally, nationally, and internationally, we identified four communities that each shared a type of attachment to the reef and that spanned conventional location and use communities. We suggest that as human-environment interactions change with increasing mobility (both corporeal and that mediated by communication and information technology), new types of people-place relations that transcend geographic and social boundaries and do not require ongoing direct experience to form are emerging. We propose that adopting a place attachment framing to community provides a means to capture the neglected nonmaterial bonds people form with the environment, and could be leveraged to foster transnational environmental stewardship, critical to advancing global sustainability in our increasingly connected world.

Optimal Experience and Personal Growth: Flow and the Consolidation of Place Identity.

This study examined the relationship between flow experience and place identity, based on eudaimonistic identity theory (EIT) which prioritizes self-defining activities as important for an individual’s identification of his/her goals, values, beliefs, and interests corresponding to one’s own identity development or enhancement. This study focuses on place identity, the identity’s features relating to a person’s relation with her/his place. The study is also based on flow theory, according to which some salient features of an activity experience are important for happiness and well-being. Questionnaire surveys on Italian and Greek residents focused on their perceived flow and place identity in relation to their own specific local place experiences. The overall findings revealed that flow experience occurring in one’s own preferred place is widely reported as resulting from a range of self-defining activities, irrespective of gender or age, and it is positively and significantly associated with one’s own place identity. Such findings provide the first quantitative evidence about the link between flow experienced during meaningfully located self-defining activities and identity experienced at the place level, similarly to the corresponding personal and social levels that had been previously already empirically tested. Results are also discussed in terms of their implications for EIT’s understanding and enrichment, especially by its generalization from the traditional, personal identity level up to that of place identity. More generally, this study has implications for maintaining or enhancing one’s own place identity, and therefore people–place relations, by means of facilitating a person’s flow experience within psychologically meaningful places.

Using a narrative approach to understand place attachments and responses to power line proposals: The importance of life-place trajectories

Research on people-place relations, incorporating place attachment and place identity, has often adopted a structural approach, overlooking the dynamic nature of these relations over time. More process-oriented research has tended to investigate the impacts of single moments or events, neglecting a broader focus upon people's life course. To address this gap, this study investigated patterns of residential place attachments ('life-place trajectories') and used these to better understand current place relations and responses to change, including disruption to pre-existing place bonds. Narrative interviews (n = 25) were conducted in 2013 with residents living in Nailsea, a UK town affected by proposals to construct a high voltage power line. Three notable findings emerged. First, the study indicated five novel lifeplace trajectories characterised by diverse configurations of residential mobility and continuity of settlement type. Second, the study extends our understanding of varieties of relationship with the current residence place, including identifying a novel variety of 'traditional-active attachment'. Third, the study indicates the relevance of the trajectories for understanding responses to place change proposals, including acceptance and opposition. The findings show the value of the narrative interview method for revealing place relations across the life course, informing understanding of people-place relations and infrastructure siting.

Law's rurality: Land use law and the shaping of people-place relations in rural Ontario

This paper considers law's role in constructing rurality in the context of land use disputes in Ontario, Canada. In particular, highly contested aggregate mineral developments are examined to demonstrate how legal and policy conceptions of the rural shape people-place relations to construct rurality as residual. In this context, rurality is considered as a dimension of a broadened and relational politics of environmental justice that extends to the more-than-human world. At the same time, this paper explores how environmental justice perspectives are critical to deepening and strengthening the transformative potential of rural land use and environmental activism. Land use conflicts are considered as one strategic opening for an ecologically just rural politics of place that can shift the way law structures relationships of rurality in particular places.

The role of (de-)essentialisation within siting conflicts: An interdisciplinary approach

Large-scale renewable energy and associated technologies (RET), such as high voltage power lines (HVPL), often meet opposition from the local communities living nearby. Research has suggested that one of the main aspects that might contribute to this is the fact that RET are represented as industrial and urban, and thus, as having a different essence from rural landscapes, where they are usually deployed and which are represented as natural and unspoilt. However, this ‘hypothesis’ of landscape essentialisation shaping people's responses to RET has not been explicitly examined. By drawing upon research from Social Psychology and Human Geography on essentialisation, we will examine if and how landscape (de-)essentialisation plays a role in people's responses to RET. Namely, by examining it as a rhetorical construction that can be strategically used to negotiate and legitimize given relations with place and associated responses to RET.Focus groups were conducted in the UK and Norway with members of local communities to be affected by the construction of HVPLs that will connect to new low carbon energy technologies. Analyses show that participants present British and Norwegian rural landscapes in general and HVPL as having two different essences, which justifies opposition to those infrastructures. However, analyses also show that essentialisation of the countryside is strategically used. Namely, participants also present the countryside in the place where they live as having more of the essence of the British or Norwegian countryside than other areas of the UK and Norway. In turn, this allows them to legitimize claims that whereas HVPL are ‘out of place’ in the countryside in general, they are more so in the place where they live.The implications of these results for the definition of acceptable locations for RET and for research on people–place relations and responses to place change, are discussed.

My country or my planet? Exploring the influence of multiple place attachments and ideological beliefs upon climate change attitudes and opinions

Research on people-place relations, specifically place attachment and place identity, is beginning to make an important contribution to understanding human responses to climate change. However, to date there has been a dearth of research on how place attachments at multiple scales, particularly the global, and individual level ideological beliefs combine to influence climate change attitudes and opinions. To address these gaps, survey data was collected from a representative sample of Australian citizens (N=1147), capturing attachments at neighbourhood, city/town, state/territory, country and global scales, as well as a range of climate change belief and individual difference measures. Results show the importance of the interplay between national and global place attachments. Individuals expressing stronger global than national attachments were more likely to attribute climate change to anthropogenic causes, to oppose hierarchy-enhancing myths that legitimize climate inaction, and to perceive positive economic impacts arising from climate change responses, in comparison to individuals indicating stronger national over global place attachments. Individuals with stronger global than national attachments were more likely to be female, younger, and self-identify as having no religion, to be more likely to vote Green and to be characterized by significantly lower levels of right wing authoritarian and social dominance beliefs. Right wing authoritarian and social dominance beliefs mediated the effects of place attachments upon climate change skepticism. Explanations for the findings and implications for future research are discussed.

Place matters: pedagogies of food, ecology and design

The purpose of this study has been to consider children’s embodiment of food gardens and school ground places. What pedagogies support children’s inhabitation of these places? What teaching and learning opportunities do these places enable, and how are they incorporated into the broader school curriculum? These questions offer an important starting point for understanding the contributions of garden and place-based education in primary (elementary) schooling contexts. I conducted extensive semi-structured interviews with students, gardening and environmental teachers and principals in three schools to gain a sense of the significance of garden-based curriculum. During this time I listened to, and observed how students and teachers interpreted and worked with local outdoor learning spaces in embodied and experiential ways through growing food and land conservation/rehabilitation. I investigated comments and stories about children’s attachment to, and affinity with a number of school ground settings that included food and indigenous gardens, wetlands, creeks and trees. The study found that food gardens and school ground contexts are important pedagogical sites that renew children’s meaningful relationships with personally significant environments. Across all schools, pedagogical frameworks underpinned by deep pedagogies for sustainability assist to extend children’s connection to, and relations with local and people, within and beyond school boundaries. Overwhelmingly, participants expressed a desire to care for the places where their regular learning and play occurred. The research draws attention to the ways schools are engaging with emergent 21st century environmental and social issues. The initiatives undertaken by each school and their wider communities are positive and hopeful, and play a critical role in the renewal of people-place relations, which remains a key element of education for sustainability.

Place matters: pedagogies of food, ecology and design

The purpose of this study has been to consider children’s embodiment of food gardens and school ground places. What pedagogies support children’s inhabitation of these places? What teaching and learning opportunities do these places enable, and how are they incorporated into the broader school curriculum? These questions offer an important starting point for understanding the contributions of garden and place-based education in primary (elementary) schooling contexts. I conducted extensive semi-structured interviews with students, gardening and environmental teachers and principals in three schools to gain a sense of the significance of garden-based curriculum. During this time I listened to, and observed how students and teachers interpreted and worked with local outdoor learning spaces in embodied and experiential ways through growing food and land conservation/rehabilitation. I investigated comments and stories about children’s attachment to, and affinity with a number of school ground settings that included food and indigenous gardens, wetlands, creeks and trees. The study found that food gardens and school ground contexts are important pedagogical sites that renew children’s meaningful relationships with personally significant environments. Across all schools, pedagogical frameworks underpinned by deep pedagogies for sustainability assist to extend children’s connection to, and relations with local and people, within and beyond school boundaries. Overwhelmingly, participants expressed a desire to care for the places where their regular learning and play occurred. The research draws attention to the ways schools are engaging with emergent 21st century environmental and social issues. The initiatives undertaken by each school and their wider communities are positive and hopeful, and play a critical role in the renewal of people-place relations, which remains a key element of education for sustainability.

Varieties of people-place relations and place change: UK electricity transmission grid development

With a projected increase in electricity demand and low-carbon energy generation in the UK, the increased deployment of the existing electricity network is foreseeable (DECC, 2011). Public controversy over the proposed sitting of overhead transmission lines (often termed NIMBYism) has, in some cases, led to active opposition and resulted in planning delays and financial cost for developers. In going beyond the NIMBY concept, Devine-Wright (2009) posits a place-based approach to understanding responses to energy infrastructure proposals, highlighting the importance of people's subjective emotional and symbolic associations to particular places. This paper critically reviews existing literature on varieties of people-place relations, pointing to limitations of cross-sectional studies and outlining the value of narrative interviews for establishing the dynamic nature of place orientations over time. Furthermore, the case is made for novel research that explores relationships between forms of non-attachment to place (Lewicka, 2011) and responses to a power line proposal.