Place Theory Research Articles

Continuing bonds and place

ABSTRACTWhere do people feel closest to those they have lost? This article explores how continuing bonds with a deceased person can be rooted in a particular place or places. Some conceptual resources are sketched, namely continuing bonds, place attachment, ancestral places, home, reminder theory, and loss of place. The authors use these concepts to analyze interview material with seven Swedes and five Britons who often thought warmly of the deceased as residing in a particular place and often performing characteristic actions. The destruction of such a place, by contrast, could create a troubling, haunting absence, complicating the deceased’s absent-presence.

The mediated politics of place and people: picturing the ‘contested place-making’ of Irish Travellers at Dale Farm

ABSTRACTThis article discusses meanings of people–place relationships, relating to ethnicity–class–gender intersections. The case examined concerns the ‘contested place-making’ of Irish Travellers at Dale Farm (UK), where the Travellers were eventually evicted from a place they owned. The material consists mainly of online slideshows in the Guardian. Visuals and place share the role of concretizing news, situating them and underlining their truth claims. Hence, news visuals are well suited for discussions of relationships between places and peoples. The study comprises theories of media, place and identity, relating to mobility, minorities and globalization. Methodologically, compositional analysis, discourse-theoretical method and an intersectional approach are combined. The place conflict is rarely understood in terms of justice. Instead, ethnicity–class–gender intersections appear as significant in the imagery, countering certain old stereotypes, but also connecting to discourses of ‘threatening minorities’, and ‘bad mobility’. Manifested through excessive imagery of barricades/fences/walls/gates, ‘identity management’ meets ‘place management’, detaching some identities from some places. The Travellers thus appear as anomalies, separated from others. This is partly connected to the slideshow format, where linguistic elaboration on motifs is very limited, partly to the selection of certain themes and motifs in the slideshows, and partly to the societal politics surrounding the issue.

The Role of Hospitality Service Quality in Third Places for the Elderly: An Exploratory Study

This study examines the role of hospitality service quality in a third place for the elderly using a Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC) setting. The study builds from the relational theory of third places testing the causal relationships among resident needs, place meaning, and loyalty outcomes. The study extends the theory by applying it to the CCRC context through using data that were collected from 157 CCRC residents in the southeastern portion of the United States. The proposed relational third-place model using the construct of place meaning was tested using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM). Results indicated that resident needs (tangibles, instrumental support, and emotional support) positively influenced place meaning, and in turn place meaning positively impacted resident loyalty outcomes. Through the relational theory of third places, the CCRC is a meaningful place to residents, and CCRC residents are loyal to the community. Most importantly, the results of the study identified that service quality strongly impacted place meaning in the CCRC. Theoretically, the study provided valid and reliable support suggesting that the construct of place meaning is applicable to the CCRC setting. Practically, this study provides empirical support for the importance of providing a rich hospitality service culture through strengthening instrumental support, emotional support, and tangibles. In this way, management should establish a culture that is rich in hospitality and service through the enhancement of tangibles, empathetic and interactive staff care. Finally, this rich culture will lead to enhanced place attachment as supported by this exploratory study.

Performing Moretonhampstead: rurality, participation and cultural value

ABSTRACTThis paper is based on a multi-sited ethnography of subjects engaged in performance-based participation – amateur theatre, community-based theatre and Carnival – in the market town of Moretonhampstead on Dartmoor in the South West of England. Given its setting, the case study examines the rural dimensions of participation and cultural value. In addition to understanding the meaning and value of performance-based participation taking place in shared communal spaces, including the parish hall and the high street, this article seeks to understand everyday participation as a fundamentally embodied and emplaced practice. Place is not simply a venue or site for performance (or any other type of) participation. Drawing on the place theory of Edward Casey, who follows the European school of phenomenology, it is argued that place is, rather, the fundamental ground of human experience: embodied subjects and places co-evolve in a dialogic process of inter-animation. The main question we ask is how rurality shapes participation and how participation re-produces material and imaginary rural spaces. A key characteristic of government funding of arts and culture in the UK is extreme inequality in the distribution of funds to the City of London compared to the rest of the UK. While the cultural ecosystems of all UK regions outside London are equally disadvantaged in this respect, economic and cultural development in the South West region exacerbates this unequal situation by focussing investment and service provision in urban hubs, leaving contrasting rural areas doubly disadvantaged. This case study argues that an idyll-ised rural imaginary re-produced in and through everyday participation is only compounded by government deficits. Furthermore, it asserts that cultural policy making concerned with the value of equality must adopt a co-ordinated approach that takes into account complex interdependencies of national, regional and local registers of place.

Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó's Fight for Just Livelihoods by laura zanotti

Reviewed by: Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó's Fight for Just Livelihoods by laura zanotti Christopher Jarrett laura zanotti, Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó's Fight for Just Livelihoods. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2016. 229 pp. Laura Zanotti's Radical Territories offers a historically grounded, politically astute, and ethnographically vivid account of how the Kayapó of the Brazilian Amazon build diverse livelihoods in plural landscapes. With a keen sense of ethics and a commitment to justice, Zanotti provides a complex picture of an indigenous Amazonian people who actively maintain and defend the ceremonial and material practices of their ancestors while thoughtfully and open-mindedly engaging with new opportunities for collaboration with a range of external allies. Zanotti's narrative describes how the Kayapó sustain "beautiful" living in geographies defined at once by their political potency as legally recognized indigenous "territories," their complexity and particularity as meaningful places, and their liberating potential as spaces of experimentation with different kinds of economies. Zanotti situates the book in a "territorial turn" in Latin America (36; Offen 2003, Bryan 2012). The focus of the text is on how the Kayapó have not only gained legal recognition for their territory through political struggle, but also continously make their territory. They do so through long-term occupation and adaptation to changing circumstances, ceremonial and spiritual engagement, productive practices that sustain their lifeways, and experimental alliances with outside groups. Kayapó territorialities are thus composed of historically sedimented, socially meaningful landscapes populated by multiple human and non-human actors. Such a wide-ranging account invariably leads Zanotti to engage with diverse theoretical movements, but the core of her approach is rooted in theories of space and place, feminist political ecology, and post-colonial [End Page 1283] scholarship. She skillfully depicts an example of "place as process" (12), and demonstrates the ways in which Western notions of abstract and capital-defined space both fail to capture and do violence to indigenous forms of territorial construction. She also tells "stories" of indigenous people that simultaneously support their struggles in regional and global arenas and carefully convey the heterogeneity of their positionalities, perspectives, and experiences (40). Radical Territories opens with an introduction that discusses Kayapó efforts to secure their current territory and to enact territorialities that reflect both a Kayapóspecific cosmological orientation and global efforts to construct "new geographies of well-being and living well" in contexts of neodevelopmentalism and neoextractivism (10). Zanotti explains that Kayapó livelihoods are dependent on "healthy lands and waters, but also demand creative entrepeneurship and political acumen to generate income and foster pathways to success" (4). Accordingly, she describes how Kayapó territory construction complicates simple critiques of the commodification of nature, for instance. At the same time, she outlines how Kayapó notions of well-being, and struggles in pursuit of such notions, contribute to movements for hope and justice. In the introduction, she also explains her methodological approach, which was grounded in community-based work in the Kayapó village of A'Ukre, but was also attentive to how this village is linked to outside places through "intersections of commodity chains, visual economies, rights-based efforts, and daily routines" (45). In the subsequent five chapters, Zanotti addresses various dimensions of Kayapó territory-making, such as history and political struggle (Chapter 1), ceremonial life (Chapter 2), foodways and swidden agriculture (Chapter 3), the non-timber forest product trade (Chapter 4), and community–conservation alliances (Chapter 5). Chapter 1 outlines Kayapó history and struggles to obtain and protect their formal territory, as well as ways in which Kayapó place-making is more expansive than juridical definitions. Here, it would have been interesting to learn more about Kayapó understandings of their identity beyond its articulation in the context of political struggles. Chapter 2 provides vivid, detailed descriptions of naming ceremonies and other Kayapó social processes that sustain collective life. Zanotti emphasizes that the Kayapó understand their lifeways as involving a multitude of species with whom they co-inhabit the landscapes in their territory. This chapter contributes to current efforts in Amazonian anthropology to examine the [End Page 1284] relationship between cosmology and politics without conceptually isolating the two (Cepek 2012). Toward...

Central place theory and the lost national land planning of Poland after World War II

Central place theory and the lost national land planning of Poland after World War II

The contribution of sense of place to social-ecological systems research: a review and research agenda

To develop and apply goals for future sustainability, we must consider what people care about and what motivates them to engage in solving sustainability issues. Sense of place theory and methods provide a rich source of insights that, like the social-ecological systems perspective, assume an interconnected social and biophysical reality. However, these fields of research are only recently beginning to converge, and we see great potential for further engagement. Here, we present an approach and conceptual tools for how the sense of place perspective can contribute to social-ecological systems research. A brief review focuses on two areas where relation to place is particularly relevant: stewardship of ecosystem services, and responses to change in social-ecological systems. Based on the review, we synthesize specific ways in which sense of place may be applied by social-ecological systems researchers to analyze individual and social behaviors. We emphasize the importance of descriptive place meanings and evaluative place attachment as tools to study the patterned variation of sense of place within or among populations or types of places and the implications for resilience and transformative capacity. We conclude by setting out an agenda for future research that takes into account the concerns of resilience thinking such as the effects of dynamic ecology, interactions between temporal and spatial scales, and the interplay of rapid and incremental change on sense of place and place-related behaviors. This future research agenda also includes concerns from the broader sense of place literature such as the importance of structural power relationships on the creation of place meanings and how scaling up a sense of place may influence pro-environmental behavior. (Less)

FRONTLINE: Place-makers of the mind: Symbolic reconstruction of an inner city park

In 2016, a specialist unit of study that teaches university journalism students how to report in partnership with Indigenous community organisations extended its story range to an exclusive news feature produced in collaboration with members of the wider Nyoongar community of Perth, Western Australia. The story asked and answered the question of what happened to a stalled proposal to co-badge a major inner city park with a Nyoongar name. In conceiving the story, and producing it with assistance from our students, we intervened to achieve clarity on a local government decision where due process had not been followed. With the help of Nyoongar sources, we sought to explain the cultural importance of the park, and raise awareness of the decolonising potential of Indigenous place names. The story is appended after an exegesis that melds sense of place theory with Bourdieusian field theory to situate the story and its producers in social space.

Why Neighborhoods (and How We Study Them) Matter for Adolescent Development.

Adolescence is a sensitive developmental period marked by significant changes that unfold across multiple contexts. As a central context of development, neighborhoods capture-in both physical and social space-the stratification of life chances and differential distribution of resources and risks. For some youth, neighborhoods are springboards to opportunities; for others, they are snares that constrain progress and limit the ability to avoid risks. Despite abundant research on "neighborhood effects," scant attention has been paid to how neighborhoods are a product of social stratification forces that operate simultaneously to affect human development. Neighborhoods in the United States are the manifestation of three intersecting social structural cleavages: race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and geography. Many opportunities are allocated or denied along these three cleavages. To capture these joint processes, we advocate a "neighborhood-centered" approach to study the effects of neighborhoods on adolescent development. Using nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), we demonstrate the complex ways that these three cleavages shape specific neighborhood contexts and can result in stark differences in well-being. A neighborhood-centered approach demands more rigorous and sensitive theories of place, as well as multidimensional classification and measures. We discuss an agenda to advance the state of theories and research, drawing explicit attention to the stratifying forces that bring about distinct neighborhood types that shape developmental trajectories during adolescence and beyond.

Service failure and problems: Internal marketing solutions for facing the future

The issues of elderly consumers remain under researched despite a rapidly aging population in most countries across the globe. We examine the service failure and complexity of problems of a nursing home for seniors and seek to contribute to the field of research in terms of exploring internal marketing solutions based on two theoretical frameworks- Service Profit Chain and the Relational Third Place theory. We aim to provide insights about why elderly people are not treated as consumers. Besides, based on comprehensive review of literature and analysis of an important case situation, we develop a new framework called Complex Organizational Problems and Solutions (COPS) by generalizing the insights we gained through the study. We find that internal marketing practices help improve employee satisfaction and service quality, which in turn leads to satisfied consumers.

Permakultura a teorie environmentální výchovy (EV): mapující přehledová studie

The text deals with the concept of permaculture in the context of environmental education (EE). It shows the position of permaculture as a concept in the context of established theories of EE. The review is based on library research of approximately 400 texts from Czech and foreign library sources. The texts were chosen based on the following key words: environmental education (theory, values, and history), ecological education global education, education towards care of the environment, education for environmental protection, education for the sustainable development (Czech sources); theory of environmental education, permaculture (foreign sources). An own typology of EE theories (micro-theories, medium-range theories, macrotheories and philosophical and ethical theories) is used in the text for framing the concept in the field. The main finding is that permaculture as a concept lies on the periphery of theoretical discussions in EE, at the moment it is more of a tool of practical EE (mostly in the form of manuals for using gardens in EE) rather than a component of EE theory. The biggest overlap is between permaculture and global education and theories of place based education and experience based education. In general, permaculture is not a sufficiently sophisticated theoretical concept, but it has theoretical potential. In this respect permaculture is a challenge for theoretical research in educational sciences.

Strukturen Sehen. Über die Karriere eines Hexagons in der quantitativen Revolution

Abstract. Publications from the early quantitative revolution in geography saw a significant change in the use of visual material. While the old regionalist paradigm of "Länderkunde" was dominated by images of "geographical individuals" the new geography was dominated by abstract models and visualized laws and theories. Overall visual material gains in importance, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This paper follows the changed functions, possibilities and promises of visualizing epistemic things in geography's new paradigm. This is done by following the translations, transformations and mobilizations of the famous hexagon Walter Christaller published in his 1933 "Theory of central places in South Germany". Since the 1940s this Hexagon has become not only an icon of the new geography, but an instrument for making quantitative-theoretical thinking in the geography plausible and at the same time to build a visual bridge between the old and the new geography.

Portuguese food retailers – Exploring three classic theories of retail location

This article sets forth results from an exploratory empirical study that aimed to test the predictive validity of three classic location theories: central place theory, spatial interaction theory and the principle of minimum differentiation. Correlation, linear regression and analytical procedures in a Geographic Information System were used to reveal relationships between variables. The results show that all theories find significant support. It was possible to relate store location with distance to the centre, population density and competitor's location. It was also found that store location is related to consumer's proximity to the store (when stores are smaller) and the store's attractiveness to the consumer (when stores are larger).

Grow Old With Me! Future Directions of Race, Age, and Place Scholarship

AbstractThis article reviews current theories of age and place to demonstrate a more inclusive perspective in sociology that considers race, age, and place. Scholars who study age have advanced our knowledge about what place means to old people or how environment operates in an oppressive way to aged bodies. Likewise, race scholars have advanced our knowledge about the ways oppression and White supremacy are rooted in place. Yet the two bodies of literature do not inform one another, and there are potentially dangerous gaps in our knowledge that contribute to oppression. The result is age scholarship about environment that lacks a critical race perspective and race scholarship on place that ignores the oppressive conditions of age. By reviewing these pieces, I argue that scholars must inform themselves of the ways in which we overlook important analyses and may potentially contribute to our own ageism.

Without Place, Is It Real?

This article reviews Matthews’ (2014) Realist Criminology as an opportunity to address larger shortcomings within critical criminology, which is the failure to develop an alternative theory of crime and place to the mainstream theories of social disorganisation and collective efficacy. It uses rural criminological work related to violence against women and substance use, production and trafficking to illustrate the importance of place for development of a realist criminology that can consider localised expressions of power and inequality, and the multiplicity of networks and roles by which people can simultaneously be involved in both conforming and deviant/criminal behaviours. The article also suggests that a critical theory of crime and place would be useful to the synthesis and re-interpretation of criminological literature that is either theory-less or lacks a critical perspective.

Reading with a Crayon: Pre-conventional Marginalia as Reader Response in Early Childhood

Child-produced marginalia, annotations written or drawn in the margins of a text by a young reader, have been stigmatized as devaluing the book on which it was created and often dismissed as “graffiti.” Recent historical studies of marginalia created by older children, those who have mastered conventional writing and drawing, have challenged this notion by looking at extratextual annotations as a means to understanding children’s diverse uses of books as both intellectual and physical objects. However, pre-conventional scribbles on books by very young children have not been explored as artifacts of emergent literacy practices or reader response. Yet, scholarship in the fields of literacy education, art education, early childhood education and theories of place suggest that children can develop expectations for books in the first few years of life and that their earliest drawing experiences show evidence of intentionality. This reader response study draws from video data of three-year-old Elijah and his eighteen-month-old sister, Hannah, to explore the production, of pre-conventional marginalia in early childhood. The findings of this study suggest that toddlers and preschool-aged children can understand books as distinct and pleasurable artifacts in their immediate environments, that the marks they make in their picturebooks are evidence of reader response, that the act of drawing enables them to engage in a fictional landscape, and that pre-conventional marginalia can provide us with insight into very young children’s earliest aesthetic responses to texts.

Subjectivity and social-ecological systems: a rigidity trap (and sense of place as a way out)

The fundamental point of this paper is that constructs such as system identity stability and changes (tips, transitions, transformations from one identity to another), are subjectively perceived, and acted upon by the social actors that occupy these systems. However, social-ecological systems (SES) research has not yet adequately engaged this subjectivity. I argue, here, that this relative lack of recognition of subjectivity has become a “rigidity trap” for SES scholars. Subjectivity is messy and difficult, and does not fit particularly well within the systems perspectives that characterize resilience work. As such, this lack of engagement has led to self-reinforcing perspectives that emphasize some elements and de-emphasize others, creating a systematic neglect of some principles that might productively challenge existing notions and expand our thinking. Sense of place theory, which emphasizes the creation of meaning as systematically distributed throughout society, is offered as a mechanism for helping SES researchers more fully engage subjectivity.

The capital agglomeration of the Republic of Korea as a fuzzy central place system

Abstract Explosive urbanization in the Republic of Korea from 1950 to 2010 marked by a growth in extensive urban agglomerations rendered unproductive the approach that was commonly used in the central place theory and which considered every element of the settlement system as a point in a homogeneous space. The paper suggests an alternative concept of fuzzy central place that makes possible the understanding of an internal heterogeneity in the distribution of central functions within the limits of urban agglomerations. This research was conducted using the example of the Capital agglomeration - the main element of the Republic of Korea’s urban settlement system. This “island” country, isolated by North Korea, has seen fantastic economic growth in the second half of the 20th century.

Personality, Interpersonal Disagreement, and Electoral Information

Interpersonal disagreement has been linked to a variety of democratic outcomes, and classic theories of social influence place it at the heart of opinion formation. We examine the relationship between exposure to disagreement and information seeking during elections, while developing and testing a theory of heterogeneous effects based on recent work on personality and discussion (e.g., Gerber et al. 2012). Using a simulated campaign experiment (Lau and Redlawsk 2006) and data from the 2008–9 ANES panel study, we find consistent evidence that personality conditions responses to disagreement in expected ways—it enhances effects for those with certain traits, while suppressing it for those with others. We close by reflecting on this pattern of results, discussing broader implications while moving toward a more general theory of social influence.

STABLE ECONOMIC AGGLOMERATION PATTERNS IN TWO DIMENSIONS: BEYOND THE SCOPE OF CENTRAL PLACE THEORY

ABSTRACTThis paper elucidates which agglomeration patterns exist in two‐dimensional economic space and how such patterns appear stably. Hexagonal lattices, that with and that without a boundary, are advanced, respectively, as practical and theoretical spatial platforms of economic activities. Agglomeration patterns on these lattices include hexagons in central place theory, but also encompass megalopolis and racetrack‐shaped decentralization. As the transport cost decreases, stable economic agglomeration undergoes the formation of the smallest hexagon and transition to patterns with larger market areas, often undergoing downtown decay but finally leading to a megalopolis. Formulas for break points are provided in an economic geography model.