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This study addresses place identity among native minorities by focusing on the Arabs in Israel. It follows a recent trend in geography—the environmental-psychology approach to place identity—which ...

Attachments are intrinsic to the human condition. Geographers and related scholars are especially interested in place attachments and how they shape everyday routines (e.g. routes to work, shopping...

Place attachment is recognized as integral to addressing place-based challenges, such as environmental degradation. In combination with place identity and place meaning, place attachment can contri...

We assess Montana highway maps produced between 1914 and 2000 to identify how the Montana Department of Transportation and its predecessors used maps to frame Montana’s place identity and heritage ...

Imaginative geography is lived. It is grounded in everyday life, embedded in local context, and influences place identity and place making. By using Chinese immigrants in Flushing, New York...

The Goutte d'Or neighborhood of Paris has long been seen as an impoverished yet colorful quarter of the city. In recent years, it has also developed a reputation as a center for immigrants. Three p...

The three Pueblo mission churches of San Esteban del Rey, Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, and San Jose de Laguna are the most visually striking structures in the western New Mexico pueblos of Acoma, Zuni, and Laguna. Prime examples of "structures of permanence" on the landscape, the churches define local cultural identity. Church permanence and Pueblo identity are expressed in a five-part typology of visible characteristics: natural materials and hand labor, massive exterior form, adjoining cemeteries, syncretism of interior decorations, and structural decay and rebirth. Permanence must, however, be understood as an evolving condition, undergoing new representations as multicultural relationships evolve. Keywords: mission churches, New Mexico, permanence, place identity, Pueblo Indians, In many cultures, people desire to create something that outlasts them, to leave a mark that says, "We were here." The visually prominent and enduring cultural hallmarks are commonly forged through the built environment, as the New Mexico cultural geographer and landscape historian J. B. Jackson suggested: "All that we ask of our landscape... [is] a monument or two of stone, a series of landmarks to remind us of what we believe and of our origin and identity ... that these landmarks have a permanent, visible character, that they be an integral part of the landscape, part of the cosmic order, and that they have the immediate emotional appeal of a widely recognized archetype" (1984, 107). A construct at once architectural, emotive, and social, the structure of permanence is a material expression grounded in local landscape and integral to cultural identity. Such structures shape place attachment because of what they represent, and they can serve as powerful sources of memory (Hayden 1997). Although permanence i s measured relative to the human life span, it also is one element in an adaptive process over multiple generations. With notable exceptions, much recent architecture has ceased to symbolize hierarchy, permanence, sacredness, and collective identity (Jackson 1994), yet these characteristics are embedded in New Mexico's Pueblo mission churches (Figure 1). All architecture is contextual; it serves particular purposes, modifies environments, and communicates ideas about relative permanence, change, and time (Saile 1990). In this essay we interpret the development, maintenance, and revival of permanence as a hallmark of cultural identity at three western New Mexico Pueblo mission churches (Figure 2). We offer case studies in how a distinctive architectural landscape takes on specific meanings at the pueblos of Acoma, Zuni, and Laguna. [1] Although existing work has provided detailed interpretations of the architecture and ornamentation of Spanish-era mission churches in New Mexico (Kubler 1940; Dominguez 1956; Kessell 1980; Treib 1993; Wilson 1997), our intent is to explore how cultural identity is manifest through permanence. [2] We first explain our conceptual framework and methods, following that with a discussion of the culture-nature interplay on the Colorado Plateau and the historical context of the Spanish mission system in northern New Spain. Then short historical sketches for each church precede an examination of specific symbols of permanence. Multiculturalism, ties to the land, increasing local control, and adaptations to new values are each found to contribute to a bonding of place, permanence, and identity. STRUCTURES OF PERMANENCE Structures of permanence put down foundations in the psyche of place and become icons of local culture. Like time capsules, these structures reflect the values of a particular era, but interpretations of their form and content change over time (Pollan 1999). And unlike time capsules, structures of permanence are open to constant visitation, modifications, and redefinition. Structures of permanence may have a strong religious component, as do ancient pyramids, the Taj Mahal, and European cathedrals; others, including lighthouses, the Great Wall of China, and the Sydney Opera House, serve transportation, political, or entertainment functions. …

This study is a delayed response to Wilbur Zelinsky's celebrated article on the Pennsylvania town, a groundbreaking attempt to typify, statistically and otherwise, and map a strong regional urban type that has yet to be replicated with similar specificity for any other cultural region of comparable size in the United States. According to the model, the essence of the Pennsylvania town lies in its "dense aggregation of spatially mixed functions in regionally distinctive structures, closely spaced and often built of brick, set along a generally rectilinear lattice of arboreal streets and well-kept alleys frequently focused on a diamond-shaped central square" (1977, 138). Geographers and other scholars have long understood U.S. cities and towns to be the loci of progressive economic and social development and modernity within the nation. Consequently, the analytical emphasis has been much more on seeing them as components of a growing functional system--displaying a unitary, hierarchical, and homogeneous character--than as an array of regionally distinct urban place types. Yet, for all the obvious functional similarities between cities large and small across the land, regional urban traditions have long existed and continue to play a role in national and local life, whether in such aspects as political culture, ethnoreligious expression, building preferences, or environmental accommodations. Zelinsky's portrait of the Pennsylvania town is an inspiring attempt to measure and characterize an observable regional urban type, but the need for similarly rigorous typifications in other American cultural contexts remains poorly met. This study aims to define some equally essential characteristics of a regional complex of towns in the Pacific Northwest as a contribution to enlarging the basis for comparison. Though distant, the Pacific Northwest is intimately related to the rich array of cultural forces that shaped towns and cities in the eastern United States, as so ably examined in Pennsylvania. Zelinsky's synopsis relied heavily on urban morphology as a reflexive and accessible key to the cultural personality of communities, and it showed how systematic townscape features can define and delimit regional urban complexes distinct from those found elsewhere. He argued persuasively that the Pennsylvania town was--and still is--qualitatively and measurably different from its colonial-origin counterparts in New England, the Hudson Valley, Virginia, and points south. But if the Pennsylvania town developed so characteristic an identity, did it serve as a compelling design template for urban replication on the successive frontiers of the American West? James Lemon (1972) argued long ago that the Pennsylvanian worldview--economically liberal, tolerant, commercial, and energetic--helped develop the national character as much as, if not more than, that of the Yankee-Yorkers or of southern culture, and at least rural features of the Pennsylvania culture region without question spread to key parts of the Midwest (Rose 1988; Ensminger 1992, 147-180). The latitudinal migration streams that carried eastern seaboard settlement traditions westward have been well documented (Hudson 1984, 1988; Meyer 2000), and one might expect the Pennsylvania town to have found physical footing in the West in ways similar to that of the New England town, featuring the meeting house or church facing a generous central common (Larson 1975; Wood 1997). But Zelinsky concluded that the Pennsylvania town was an artifact of its time and place and that other forces rose up to redefine towns to the west with different characteristics, most notably a greater looseness in overall density and texture associated with more generous physical dimensions. (1) It is often argued that urban places by their nature have always been more cosmopolitan than their rural hinterlands, well connected as they are by interregional trade and communication with other centers, where innovations, if not necessarily originating in towns, are quickly adopted and diffused through the network. …

Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, when the Turkish nation was defined as ethnically Turkish and Muslim, the issue of ethnic minorities has been at the root of a deep insecurity concerning cultural identity and what it means to be Turkish. The movement to “recover” ethnic minority in history and in place is most visible in Istanbul, the city identified as the location of European culture in Turkey and Turkey's most culturally pluralistic city. The movement has gained pace since the formal acceptance of Turkey as a candidate for membership in the European Union and the push for reforms in human rights. It is promoted by a very small cultural and economic elite and works together with gentrification to produce elite spaces in the city, as exemplified by two neighborhoods: Kuzguncuk, a historic minority neighborhood on the Asian shore of the Bosporus; and “French Street,” a new commercial development in Beyoglu, on the European side of the city west of the Bosporus. These landscapes articulate a European, cosmopolitan, and multicultural place identity for Istanbul and reflect a particular notion of Turkey as modern and European, providing insight into the contemporary debate in Turkey concerning the tensions embedded at the core of Turkish cultural identity.

The grandest mountains and mountain scenery are found in Colorado. The highest peaks rise, snow-clad, proudly and defiantly in the clear blue sky; their gray sides and white crests being visible in this clear atmosphere for many, many miles away. George A. Grofutt, 1881 From mountain gloom to montane glory the world's highest peaks have long commanded center stage in the symbolism of natural landscapes. Language and culture mold the circumstances by which mountains have been judged, and these verdicts are recast to fit the fleeting ideals of different times (Nicolson 1997). Romanticism and geomorphic knowledge prompted a shift from an almost Biblical fear of the mountain fastness toward more favorable attitudes about mountains in Europe during the nineteenth century. At the heart of the taste for mountain scenery was familiarity through personal experience and an appreciation for grand size (Rees 1975). These led to the development of an American mountain aesthetic in the mid-1800s, with the Transcendentalist ideals of Emerson and Thoreau molded at first hand in the raw-hewn terrain of the Appalachian Mountains. For many New Englanders the position of humanity in the cosmos is defined by a roll call of celebrated summits: Katahdin, Greylock, Chocorua, Wachusett, and Grand Monadnock (Rydant and Bayr 1992). In addition to a mountain's height and shape, direct experience through alpine hiking contributes to the character of a mountain (Stier and McAdow 1995). Throughout the eastern United States various clubs promote hiking a collection of high peaks, including the Adirondack Forty-Sixers, White Mountain 4,000-Footers, New England 4,000-Footers, New England 100 Highest, Northeast 111ers, Catskill 35005, and South Beyond 6000s (Heinrichs 1997). Although the mountains in these collections have attained great fame, equaled by peaks in the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range, America's fascination with mountains as ideal nature reached its pinnacle in the Colorado Rockies. Colorado's fifty-four Fourteeners--mountains with a summit elevation more than 14,000 feet above sea level--affirm the state's long-heralded status as the rooftop of a continent (Figure 1). (1) Including such famed summits as Pikes Peak, Longs Peak, Mount of the Holy Cross, the Maroon Bells, and Uncompahgre Peak, the Fourteeners influence how Americans identify with nature. As a barrier to easy movement and communication, a zone of concentrated timber and mineral resources, islands of moisture, areas of government control, and restorative sanctuaries, the Fourteeners well illustrate these five historic themes of the Mountainous West (Wyckoff and Dilsaver 1995) (Figure 2). Since the mid-1980s, however, these summits have experienced an unprecedented wave of hiking popularity, which has led to severe environmental threats. The headlines fairly shout, "Peaks in Peril" and "Fourteeners under Siege," as the wilderness character of the mountains is loved to death (Kelly 1994). The Fourteener phenomenon is played out on the national stage as coverage of the climbing allure and environmental perils reaches widely read publications such as the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, and Time magazine (Benner 1992; Kenworthy 1998, 2001; Woodbury 1999). The imprint of Colorado's Rocky Mountains on place identity is also illustrated through architectural design with the soaring, white, translucent roof of Denver International Airport, which is an oft-derided attempt to evoke the snow-capped Fourteeners to the west (Sommers 2000). Given the tendency of mountain studies to emphasize physical, ecological, or natural hazard topics, cultural geography is a research direction that is essential if a complete mountain geography literature is to be created (Price 1981; Smethurst 2000). A cultural geographical perspective on the evolution of the Fourteeners is presented here as a contrived yet iconic construct, for mountains sustain a symbolic role in place identity, whether at the national, regional, state, or local scale. …