Perception and Sense of Place

Perception and Sense of Place

In this quotation from his book Great Plains, Ian Frazier provides an evocative description of awakening by the side of a road in the American heartland. His impression, colored by road weariness and a case of the early morning blues, conveys a different world than the same scene as it might be depicted on a map, captured in a photograph, or conveyed by the simple facts of his journey, the miles driven or the towns visited. Instead, Frazier conveys his impressions and emotional reaction to what he sees and feels.

Frazier's perception of the world beyond his windshield is a vivid example of what geographers would call “sense of place,” one of the most important concepts of contemporary geography. Rather than assuming that people know and act on unambiguous, objective knowledge of the world in which they live, geographers now realize that understanding how people experience, perceive, and ascribe meaning to place and environment is a key to knowing their spatial and geographic choices and behavior. Attention to perception and sense of place focuses attention on the more realistic questions of what people know at a given place and time, what conditions constrain or extend this knowledge, and how such factors affect the decisions people make.

Although the idea of considering perception and sense of place can be traced back to the influential writings of geographers like Carl Sauer, William Kirk, and J. K. Wright, the ideas only began to move into the mainstream during the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the credit for this widespread acceptance can be given to the more applied work on environmental risks and perception of Gilbert White and his students.

White, in his research on the human response to floods, found it paradoxical that money invested in flood control and mitigation tended to increase, rather than decrease, losses in subsequent floods. It was as though the money invested to reduce risks actually encouraged people to take greater risks in the future. Flood control measures did reduce some risks but led residents to overestimate their safety and build even closer to flood-prone rivers. The extent to which people misjudge environmental risk, particularly the dangers of natural hazards like floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes, has developed into a major area of geographical research. Some of this research has sought to explore the factors that help to explain both the overestimation of some risks and the underestimation of others. For example, Thomas Saarinen, in an influential work on farmers’ perceptions of the risk of drought, found that farmers’ worldviews had a notable influence on how they managed their land. Those who felt they had a hand in controlling their fate were much more likely to take precautions and plan for drought than those farmers who felt they had little control of nature and had to let it take its course.

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