Sense of Place

Sense of place refers to the way in which places are experienced subjectively. It describes a complicated set of emotions and feelings that are evoked by a particular place. Often this is experienced as a sense of attachment and belonging. However, there are also negative emotions such as fear, claustrophobia, and unease that can form a sense of place. The issue of sense of place was not one that geographers engaged with in any depth until the advent of humanistic geography during the 1970s. It was only then that subjectivity, feelings, and emotions were considered worthy of geographic contemplation. Since then, geographers have produced a considerable body of work on the production, maintenance, and transformation of senses of place in a wide array of contexts ranging from the individual and idiosyncratic to the widely shared.

At one level, sense of place refers to a particularly personal set of feelings for some part of the earth's surface. Think, for instance, of the way in which a person feels about his or her childhood home place. All of the memories that are the product of individual biography make such a place particularly evocative. Often these feelings are nostalgic, but they also may be negative—colored by memories of abuse or poverty. Smells, sounds, and tastes all can evoke a particular sense of place that may be completely idiosyncratic.

Beyond the emotions produced through individual experience, there are relatively durable senses of place that are the product of shared lives and shared representations. Many of us, for instance, might have a strong sense of place of New York City or Paris even if we rarely—or never—have been there. This is because these places are constantly being projected into our lives through film, literature, music, and the news media. Indeed, the successful evocation of a sense of place is crucial to the development of fictional works in novels and films. Many people believe that they know the London of Sherlock Holmes or the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler novels through the successful evocation of place in these novels. There is a long tradition of geographers writing about the senses of place developed in novels.

Despite the power of shared senses of place, they never are completely uncontested. Any place has a myriad of meanings attached to it—some widely shared and some idiosyncratic. For instance, to some people New York City might be a bastion of tolerance and liberalism, whereas to others it might be experienced as a place of oppression and violence. A lot depends on who the person is and how he or she experiences the place. When these different senses of place[Page 425] are both public and (to some degree) shared, there often is conflict over what the appropriate meaning of a place may be. When a Catholic church raised a huge cross adjacent the concentration camp at Auschwitz, for instance, there was an enormous international outcry and debate over the meaning of Auschwitz as a site of memory. Similarly, many travelers, musicians, and artists in Britain during the 1980s saw Stonehenge as a place to be enjoyed through festivals on the site, whereas the people who ran it believed that a heritage site needed to be kept separate from the people so as to be sacred. Indeed, the production and maintenance of senses of place often involve the deliberate exclusion of subversive senses of place that might threaten the image of a cohesive, positive, and uncontroversial place image. This often is the case with the production of heritage sites and places of memory where painful memories of the past (e.g., slavery in the American South) are ignored or glossed over.

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