Sense of Place

Sense of place refers to subjective human reactions to places. With roots in early forms of humanistic geography, the concept appears in various forms in a considerable body of works expanding on human experience, memory, imagination, emotion, and meaning; accordingly, it is a core value in a broad and varied range of endeavors from theory (i.e., placing humans in Earth's time-space continuum) to practice (e.g., building “green” or selling places as commodities). In sum, the sense of place contributes depth and understanding to what it means to be human.

Among myriad approaches to sense of place, a key strand begins with the individual. Each person brings his or her own personality, background, and previous experiences into the process of forming a sense of place. People draw on their own use of the human senses, their own sense of aesthetics, and their own intellectual and emotional responses that they have developed with regard to places; these are based on their experiences and perceptions and the development of cognitive understandings of places. One's reactions and responses are not static, however, and the way one looks at places continues to evolve as one's life cycle develops and as the landscapes and places around one are transformed. Through those processes, it can be argued that people develop (at varying levels of sophistication) their own landscapes of memory and previous experiences. In some cases, this leads to bonding with places—love of place—while in others, it can lead to ambivalence, disinterest, and/or rejection, that is, the placelessness of interchangeable superficial identities that can be found anywhere. Furthermore, in invoking sense of place, many humanistic geographers and others from the humanities are attempting to understand the nonreductionist uniqueness of individual responses, as well as the distinctiveness that different places possess, and to open the minds of people to the richness of the world through place-based approaches and, specifically, to think about the role that places play in their lives.

Many individuals share a sense of place with others in a subgroup or across broader social and cultural lines. Within other social and behavioral sciences, and for some geographers as well, there are attempts to understand the psychological aspects of a subgroup's perceptional and behavioral approaches to sense of place. Some group studies of places have been conducted in the humanities and by the cultural landscape school of geography, and they usually involve historically tracing an understanding of places at local and regional levels or through folklore and hand-me-down stories.

In contrast, other geographers and some space/environment disciplines tend to look more at the role specific places play in that process, including studying the character of places themselves and why particular places evoke a sense of [Page 2533]awe or attachment. Thus, the shift is away from studying humans toward a concern for the qualities or attributes of places that move the individual; this has been called genius loci, or the spirit of place. Along this line, most humans have their favorite places (often stemming from their early experiences) as well as a memory bank of their own special landscapes. Most people are searching ultimately for a place to live that “feels right” to them and that they can call home. Some studies of sacred and indigenous places have focused on the concept of the power of place that in some cases has existed through time and many generations.

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