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Concerns have been raised that destination branding often overlooks the destination's internal stakeholders, and in some cases, has resulted in a brand identity that does not reflect the meanings and emotions that residents attach to places. Consequently, scholars have advocated for a more participatory approach to destination branding in which residents’ sense of place can be acknowledged, represented, and operationalized. This paper synthesizes these arguments and demonstrates that such an approach can be achieved by embracing residents’ place stories. Through storytelling, residents construe different facets of the place identity that is the foundation of destination brand identity. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the role, constituents, and effects of storytelling in destination branding, particularly exploring whose stories should be told and how these stories should be conveyed. In doing so, a participatory approach to destination branding is presented that employs residents’ place stories as a genuine form of participation in the destination branding process. Lastly, an agenda for future research is proposed, and practical implications for destination marketing practice are discussed.

Place identity studies have attracted considerable interest in South Africa because of its history of separate racial development. However, there is a paucity of studies that have reviewed such studies in the country. This article, therefore, aims to present a selective review of place identity studies in post-apartheid South Africa. A literature search was conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses. Studies published in English between 1994 and 2020, relating to changing place identities as a result of apartheid in South Africa, were included in our search. The search yielded studies from which four key themes were identified – these being identity and belonging, social identity and discursive practice, cultural symbolism and group identity, and social inclusion and exclusion. These themes attest to the social construction of place identity, with people forming cognitive and affective bonds within groups. In addition, these themes show that mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are crucial for identity formation in which the self is contrasted with ‘the other’. The studies collectively point to the intricacies surrounding attempts at desegregation and building social cohesion in post-apartheid South Africa.

Placemaking is a valuable place-based development and integration tool in rural communities. This study examines how placemaking processes and outputs are associated with residents’ bonds with local places through survey data collected in rural communities in Indiana. Results reveal that policy communication and localized public spaces design are critical for increasing residents’ place dependence and place identity. These findings help pinpoint how local governments utilize placemaking in rural communities to effectively strengthen residents’ ownership of public spaces while further providing implications for residents’ empowerment and community planning in local governance scholarship.

La Unión is a city located in the southeast of Spain with a long mining tradition. Along the twentieth century, this place faced a severe industrial crisis. Building on its history, heritage, and resources, the local economy changed towards the mining heritage tourism business. This article describes such a process of sustainable development and urban resilience through a two-stage approach. First, the focus is on explaining how the locality moved from being a mining industrial area to a mining heritage tourism place. In doing so, the study highlights the key role played by the cooperation of the local government and the nearby university. The second stage shows how the new economic model is firmly rooted on the mining identity of the place and what provides higher levels of sustainability to the destination from a social and cultural view. In this context, the article shows how the place identity model of tourism would be eager to limit the negative impacts usually associated with the spread of tourism, consequently receiving further support by the local population. To better understand the second-stage process, the study defines a theoretical framework and tests it empirically through a structural equation modeling approach. Results of the research provide regional policy advices.

A burgeoning literature provides evidence that neighborhood matters, especially in relation to urban adolescent development. Exposure to crime and poverty has been shown to negatively impact key aspects of development, such as physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Traditional theoretical frameworks identifying the social mechanisms of place fail to critically examine how neighborhood effects are socially constructed at the individual level, and rather assume aggregate community narratives. Such blanket measures of neighborhood effects do not account for individual interpretations of space or the impacts of larger structural forces on decision making and developmental processes. A unique combination of qualitative GIS methodologies was utilized to explore how urban adolescents define, navigate, and engage their surrounding environment to better understand the mechanisms of neighborhood effects, and how these interactions shape development. Sedentary and walking interview data were paired with GPS data to develop a real-time understanding of the spaces across which youth were navigating. The findings from this work suggest that how youth perceive space is a complex process, stemming from the interaction of structural and social systems, and highlight the value of understanding varying resident experiences when considering definitions of neighborhood. This study begins to fill a gap in the neighborhood effects’ literature by developing an argument for the social construction of place as an alternative to traditional methodological and theoretical frameworks.

Amid a globally increasing trend of urban segregation, this article asks why a particular urban place, the Gangnam area in the city of Seoul, has come to symbolize the rich and the powerful, consolidating both socioeconomic segregation and political conservatism in a short span of time. While different approaches exist that partially explain Gangnam’s luxurious lifestyles, fervent real estate speculation, obsession with education, and political conservatism, this article seeks to provide a holistic explanation for the rise of Gangnam and draws particular attention to the social construction of place identity. Based on the analysis of historically and contextually grounded evidence, imaginations, and cognitive scaling of different stakeholders, it suggests bidirectional formations of self–other and present–future identities, highlighting the sociopsychological aspects of place identity formation. Specifically, it explains political conservatism as the attempts of Gangnam residents to sustain the area’s entrance barrier and pass on their exclusivity to future selves and children.

The purpose of this study is to test hypotheses regarding the effects of commuting on commuters’ access to community-based communication resources and their level of community engagement. This study is guided by communication infrastructure theory. Online survey interviews were conducted with 1,028 Seoul residents between May 30 and June 17, 2014. We found that (1) commuters showed a higher level of community engagement than noncommuters; (2) among commuters, there was a negative relationship between commuting time and a sense of neighborhood belonging; (3) commuting time showed a positive relationship with access to community-based communication resources (i.e., integrated connectedness to community storytelling network [ICSN]) and community participation; (4) among four place-based identity groups (integrators, home-dominant group, workplace-dominant group, and disconnectors), integrators, who connected to both home and workplace, showed the highest level of ICSN and community engagement; and (5) ICSN mediated between commuting variables and community engagement variables.

This article explores the place-making and identifications practices of two high school girls in the out-of-classroom spaces of their school. We employ Henri Lefebvre's spatial triad, consisting of the interaction between the physical, social and mental dimensions of space, as the conceptual foundation for understanding how these girls turn space into place at their school. The article is based on an ethnographic study in which we utilised a range of methods, including unstructured, semi-structured and photo-elicitation interviews; participant observation; focus group discussions; student-produced photography and photo-diaries. We found that the ways in which the girls inhabited and ‘made place’ in the school's out-of-classroom spaces are determined by their unique biographies, interactions with the school's expressive culture, and the subsequent social networks, movements and practices that they mobilise in these out-of-classroom spaces. Via these daily practices, they turn their school spaces into a place which, in their unique ways, they are able to call home.

The quest for tourist destinations that few have visited, and the experience of a journey that few can share, is becoming even more difficult for those individuals who seek a reputation as tourists. Although this search for authenticity has already been studied, there is still much to be explored. Tourists can enhance their identity as travellers by place attachment with destinations they have visited, and that no longer exist. The fact that these destinations have vanished makes their experiences unrepeatable, turning them into connoisseurs of a gone place. The narration of that past visit enters into a re-interpretation process, especially by those who have not been to these places. Through this transformation of the visit into a chance event, this article shows the connection between chance, tourism and social spatialization. Through a content analysis approach, visitors’ online comments to three tourist sites are used: the World Trade Centre in New York before 9/11, the historical sites of Nepal before the destructive earthquake of 2015 and the ‘Pioneer Cabin Tree’, a giant thousand-year-old sequoia in Calaveras Big Trees State Park, before it was blown down in a storm in 2017.

Top–down processing has been highlighted as a potential, but as yet understudied, aspect of restorative environmental experience. In an online study, N = 234 adults resident in Finland rated their favorite Finnish place on measures of perceived restorativeness, perceived restorative outcomes, and place attachment, and provided qualitative descriptions of the place and a positive memory associated with it. Thematic analysis of qualitative data revealed seven themes underpinning place memories: the environment itself, activities within it, cognitive responses, emotional responses, social context, self, and time. Mediated regression analyses showed positive and significant relationships between restorative perceptions and the presence of memories of self and time, as mediated via place attachment (place identity factor). These findings emphasize the contribution of the person to the perception of their restorative experiences in places, particularly in the form of personal memories that can enhance place identity.

This article examines Advocacy Planning through the lens of political–economic urban governance theories—primarily Growth Machine. The first part of the article engages Advocacy Planning and Growth Machine in a conceptual dialogue to search for new insights into the causes of, and potential solutions to, planning’s hitherto inability to significantly mitigate urban social inequity and injustice. The analysis corroborates long-standing assertions of planning’s ineffectiveness in redressing inequitable urban planning outcomes as being resultant of the unequal—and dominant—power held by the governing growth coalition. The second part proffers three lessons that Growth Machine offers to Advocacy Planning, specifically, and urban planning, generally. These lessons constitute the axes of plannitizing urban politics by way of bridging planning’s long-standing power gap through an evolved normative planning education and praxis—a political urban planning.

Motivations and place attachment constructs have been previously used as antecedents of behavioral intentions regarding a destination. Nevertheless, previous studies investigating behavioral intention models have paid little attention to the influence of motivations on place attachment and the influence of place attachment on behavioral intentions within the same structural model. This article develops an integrated model to investigate these relationships. Data were collected from recreational scuba divers in Catalonia, Spain. The results suggest that personal escape and personal seeking are the main motivations, and these factors influence place dependence and place identity. Other findings indicate that place dependence influences behavioral intentions more than place identity. In addition, the level of involvement in the activity moderates the links between constructs in some of the relationships.

When a traditional Indigenous identity is submerged beneath a cloud of contemporary politics and power relations, how might such a situation undermine its educational and developmental aspirations? This article examines the case of Te Riu o Hokianga (the valley of Hokianga) in Aotearoa New Zealand, where the imposition of a contemporary political identity is adversely affecting the development of a more culturally appropriate identity, otherwise known as Hokianga whānui (the wider Hokianga family community). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six participants who shared an ancestral whakapapa (genealogy embodying layered connections) with the Hokianga. Voicing their interpretations, experiences and aspirations, participants disclosed how they envisioned educational and developmental success in Hokianga. Our interpretation of Te Ihomatua (a positive active essence for transformation)—informed by a hybrid theoretical framework that interweaves Marxist, elite and kaupapa Māori (based on Māori worldview) theory—is employed to discern the multifaceted whakapapa of place and how that might inform Indigenous arrangements that support identity and developmental aspirations.

While researchers increasingly address place meaning and place attachment as the cornerstones for understanding human–place relations, the factors that make a tourism destination meaningful have received less attention. Using Q method, this study investigated the dynamic nature of place meanings from the tourist perspective, and developed a theoretical framework to explain the construction of destination meanings. Data analyses identified four subjective views toward the meanings of destination and four underlying continuums that illustrate how a complex process of co-construction reveals distinct patterns of destination meanings. This study makes theoretical as well as practical contributions to the literature.

Conceptualizations of urban context and place in research, practice, and policy are relational, ranging from spatial dimensions to cultural practices of children, families, and communities in metropolitan areas. In this article, we focus on the inherent complexity of these conceptualizations and long-standing debates in education and social science research that label urban as a point of both identity and designation. We position urban context itself as a genre of thinking and imagining; challenges complicated in research, scholarship, and policy; practice and pedagogy; and public will and political rhetoric, influencing educational options and spanning issues from poverty to schooling.

The well-known and much investigated rise of urban entrepreneurial policies has fuelled a transformation of urban spaces and landscapes, and has led to changes in the social composition of city centres. This is the case for Oslo, Norway’s capital, where increasingly urban policies are designed to attract transnational companies and those in the creative class. A key strategy to achieve this has been to transform the city’s waterfront through spectacular architecture and urban design, as has taken place in other European cities. Transnational and local architects have been commissioned to design the Barcode, one of the most striking waterfront projects. This article investigates the role of architecture and architects in this process, because architects can be seen as influential generators of urban spaces and agents for social change, and because there is remarkably little published empirical research on this specific role of architects. It is argued that although there was an overall planning goal that the projects along the waterfront of Oslo should contribute to social sustainability, with the implication that planners and architects possessed information about the local urban context and used this knowledge, in practice this was not the case. It is demonstrated that the architects paid little attention to the social, cultural and economic contexts in their design process. Rather, the architects emphasized the creation of an exciting urban space and, in particular, designed spectacular architecture that would contribute to the merits of the firms involved. It is further argued that because of this the Barcode project will not contribute to the making of a just city.

The success of the campaign for a dedicated urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) reflected a consensus on the importance of “cities” in sustainable development. The relevance accorded to cities in the SDGs is twofold, reflected both in the specific place-based content of the Urban Goal and the more general concern with the multiple scales at which the SDGs will be monitored will be institutionalized. Divergent views of the city and urban processes, suppressed within the Urban Goal, are, however, likely to become more explicit as attention shifts to implementation. Acknowledging the different theoretical traditions used to legitimize the new urban agenda is an overdue task. As this agenda develops post-2015, the adequacy of these forms of urban theory will become more contested around, among other concerns, the possibilities and limits of place-based policy, advocacy and activism; and ways of monitoring and evaluating processes of urban transformation along multiple axes of development.

In this article, the authors contend that contemporary urban streets are over-regulated, preoccupied with surveillance, commercial requirements and rapid transit, aesthetically homogeneous and sensually sterile. As an exemplary site of contrast, the article focuses on the recently redesigned Blackpool Promenade. First, it argues that this redesign honours the resort’s popular traditions, its potent heritage and the importance of innovation. Second, it explores how the promenade fosters playful interactions, conviviality and lingering. Third, the article focuses on sensory attributes that enhance the experience of promenaders.

This article attempts to ‘rethink’ place brands after examining in detail how people form them in their minds. The article starts with a very brief account of the place branding literature to provide the necessary background and goes on to identify what we see as a shortcoming in current understanding of the place brand: the dominant idea that brands are formed as sums of mental associations. The article attempts to take current understanding of place brands further by going beyond associations and adding a missing element: the interactions between those associations. We propose a rethinking of place brands based on two pillars: first we incorporate more geographical understanding into place branding and, second, we outline a process that allows place elements and placebased associations to combine and form the place brand. The place brand formation process starts when people use place-making elements (materiality, practices, institutions and representations) to form mental associations with the place. These associations are not static but evolve and change over time as they interact with each other on several dimensions. These interactions constitute the way in which the place brand is formed. The argumentation leads to a novel conceptualization of the role of place branding in the above processes. The practical applicability and implications of the proposed rethinking of place brands suggested here are explored in detail through the examination of the branding process followed recently in Bogotá, Colombia, where our approach to place branding has found practical application.

This article uses examples of problem gambling and help seeking among Chinese international students in New Zealand to demonstrate place identity transformation. Two-wave narrative interviews were conducted with 15 Chinese international students. Place identity among participants is shown to be a process that features the transformation of participants’ identity. While the casinos in which the Chinese international students gambled gave rise to negative place identities, positive place identities facilitated the participants to change their problematic gambling. Through the investigation of place identity transformation, this article promotes a strength-based, non-labelling approach to intervention for people who are concerned about their gambling behaviours.

Throughout this article, I argue that within the mainstream field of urban education, “the urban” is floating face down, lifeless, and devoid of significant meaning. “City” and “urban” function as taken-for-granted variables that stand in the rightful place of rich explanations, based in theory and evidence, of the city and its intersection with cultural transformations, pedagogies, movements, and knowledge(s) that comprise educational processes. To resurrect the urban concept, I present an overview of urban perspectives in two categories: old school (passive spatial theories) and new school (instrumental spatial theories). I highlight four recent urban education publications that reflect an emerging scholarly cypher on what I refer to as the urban education question. I then outline four spatial dimensions of hip hop and use these as a springboard for arguing that hip-hop pedagogues are uniquely positioned to be resurrectors of the urban concept. I conclude by exploring what such a theoretical pivot entails.

It has been hypothesized that as individuals become attached to a place, they are more likely to protect that place. Managers of natural area tourism destinations may be able to use this relationship to assist in sustainably managing such places. An on-site visitor survey was administered at Ningaloo Marine Park, Australia, to examine the effect of a multi-dimensional place attachment construct on pro-environment behavioral intentions. The behaviors encompassed three categories based on the perceived level of commitment and where the behaviors physically occurred. They included on-site actions by visitors, visitors telling others how to act on-site, and off-site actions to conserve the Marine Park. Structural equation modeling revealed place identity directly affecting all three behavioral categories, the effect increasing with the level of commitment required to undertake the pro-environment behaviors. This suggests that a sophisticated understanding of place identity is essential for the management of natural area tourism destinations.

Recent case studies of receiving communities have established that translocal immigrants are transforming their neighbourhoods, producing spaces of identity. While these studies have focused on the reshaping of local power dynamics, less attention has been given to the spaces, themselves, and the qualities that influence identity. This study utilises place identity literature, from environmental psychology, to explore the remaking of MacArthur Park, a public space at the centre of a Mexican and Central American immigrant community in Los Angeles, California. We find that new ‘place identities’ are influenced by the specific physical, social, and cultural elements of the park, as study participants attempt to maintain identities influenced by important places in their sending communities. The result is a park that has emotional significance for participants, significance that leads to agency – everyday and political practices – to protect the park, sometimes in the face of immense challenges.

Drawing on theories from environmental psychology, social psychology, and entrepreneurship, this study examines a nonrecursive (simultaneous equation) model of entrepreneurs' place identity, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and performance across male and female tourism entrepreneurs. Data were collected from 150 male and 148 female tourism business owners in Australia. The results found that place identity (sense of identity with their town of residence) was positively related to entrepreneurial self-efficacy (beliefs in their capabilities as entrepreneurs). Furthermore, self-efficacy is a direct driver of performance, and not vice versa, for both male and female entrepreneurs. However, multigroup invariance analysis suggests that the nonrecursive model is partially moderated by the entrepreneurs' gender. The relationship between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and performance was significantly greater for the male group. The findings have implications for scholars in tourism and entrepreneurial studies, and for policy makers trying to support the sustainable development of tourism destinations. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Tourism and cultural agencies in some English provincial cities are promoting their popular music ‘heritage’ and, in some cases, contemporary musicians through the packaging of trails, sites, ‘iconic’ venues and festivals. This article focuses on Sheffield, a ‘post-industrial’ northern English city which is drawing on its associations with musicians past and present in seeking to attract tourists. This article is based on interviews with, among others, recording artists, promoters, producers and venue managers, along with reflective observational and documentary data. Theoretical remarks are made on the representations of popular musicians through cultural tourism strategies, programmes and products and also on the ways in which musicians convey a ‘psychogeographical’ sense of place in the ‘soundscape’ of the city.

Entrepreneurship research has begun to examine the construction of an occupational identity for entrepreneurs, arguing that this identity is intersected by a variety of discourses, including gender, class and race/ethnicity. Yet, these studies only partially account for the myriad ways that entrepreneurial identity, and occupational identity more broadly, may manifest across the US or globally. In this article, we discuss how high-tech entrepreneurial identities are constructed in conjunction with place-based ‘transcendent’ and ‘locale-specific’ discourses. Empirical results from two studies of high-tech entrepreneurs in the western US demonstrate that place both shapes and constrains the possibilities for constructing an ‘ideal entrepreneurial self’. The implications of our research suggest: (i) the importance of ‘relocating place’ to understand the regional shaping of entrepreneurial identity and occupational identity; (ii) the significance of place serving as a rich organizing discourse for studies of intersectionality; and (iii) the complex ways in which entrepreneurial and occupational identities are shaped by place while simultaneously engaged in ‘place-making’.

Our cities are undergoing a rapid transformation of public spaces due to different factors, such as economic and cultural globalization, demographic transformations, marketing strategies, urban planning and design approaches, medialization reinterpretations, social networks, and others. The urban realm itself is the collection of public spaces and places—buildings, squares, streets, landscapes, and ecosystems, as well as processes, mindscapes, and people that make up and shape any environment. In that respect, urban planning and design is really characterized by two distinct processes that transubstantiate space and place: static and dynamic. This qualitative, reflective article discusses these issues, taking a standpoint from the notion of public space as a common good. This notion is discussed in relation to the factors that transform our cities and is analyzed in relation to the concept of public good. We reflect this discussion vis-à-vis the views of the leading paradigms in urban planning and design, and their intake on and outlook on these complex issues.

This article engages with recent debates surrounding non-representational theory and the affective turn in the social sciences, arguing that such thinking offers a particularly useful set of concepts for the discipline of planning. This includes a widened notion of agency to the inclusion of more-than-human bodies (i.e. material agency) and a focus on daily practice and the embodied experience of place. Calling upon the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the author puts forward affective atmospheres as a post-humanist way of studying socio-spatial processes associated with place identity and the spatial imaginaries that animate planning activity. Recognising the co-constitutive nature of research and social worlds, the article offers a performative methodology that situates researchers directly within the material and discursive environments they seek to investigate.

Visitors on sight-seeing tours in contemporary globalizing Shanghai observe the futuristic ambitions, exponential development and chaotic polyrhythmicity of New Shanghai. The nostalgia industry simultaneously ‘teleports’ the tourists on tours back to a time when Shanghai was a legendary world metropolis; the Golden Age of the inter-war era. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's critical rhythmanalysis, and by Jonathan Sterne's conceptualization of communication as organized movement and action, this paper explores bus tours by commission of the municipal government. Shanghai is the place where the movements of the buses, as well as the tourists on board, become part of communicating the place identity and multiple rhythms of the city. The buses are conceived as means of communication, in a twofold sense, and as both underscoring and binding together the many incommensurabilities of place: old and new, Western and Chinese, industrialism and post-industrialism, nationalism and globalism. The author argues that mobility, media modernity and a confounding mixture (reflexively manifested on the tour ‘Confused and Mixed Shanghai’) constitute a collective memory of the city, and that the buses in all their seeming banality, communicate Shanghai's particular rhythms of retromodernity.

Place is central to many research projects in the social sciences, but it is often taken by researchers as a given. Recently, discourse analysts have devoted more attention to the construction of place in interaction. We focus on one aspect of this construction, the process of drawing inferences from place categories and place names, in transcripts of oral history interviews. We apply membership categorization analysis (MCA) to descriptions of house types and houses, showing how some categories are presented as being shared and recognizable, and how inferences are projected. Then we apply a similar approach to the ways inferences are drawn from place names, focusing especially on proximity. Participants’ categories can be investigated by examining the ways they are used in question–answer pairs, and in the construction of turns using elaborations, contrasting pairs, negatives and qualifications. This analysis shows the work these place references do for the participants, for instance, in categorizing themselves and others and giving accounts for behaviour.

In this investigation, we adapted identity theory to reassess a conceptualization of place attachment—conceived herein as an attitudinal construct used by environmental psychologists to describe people’s bonding to the physical landscape. Past work has conceptualized the construct in terms of three components: cognitive, affective, and conative elements. Based on the tenets of identity theory, we hypothesized that the cognitive component—reflected in the dimension place identity—is an antecedent of these other affective and conative facets. We empirically tested this reconceptualization using data collected from two spatial contexts in Southern California: residents living in the wildland–urban interface outside of San Diego and Los Angeles. Analyses of both data sets provided strong empirical support for our conceptualization of place and its associated measures. Rather than existing on the same temporal plane, we suggest that identification processes drive other affective and conative elements that underlie people attachments to physical environments.

Much research concerning the Dominican Republic and baseball focuses on globalization. In acknowledging the importance of such research, this study contributes a particular understanding of sport in a rural heterogeneous community, by addressing landscape and place identity. Villa Ascension and Caraballo are adjacent rural communities in the northern Puerto Plata Province. Currently there exists one usable sports space, designated as a football field, where Haitian residents practice football. Although this landscape is representative of Haitian identity, this designation transcends common sporting landscapes in the Dominican Republic, where Haitians typically use baseball fields to recreate. Dominicans also use the football field for baseball, and have forged a baseball landscape in an attempt to maintain the presence of their sporting culture. Conceptual social-geographical perspectives of sense of place and staging/performing identity in the landscape are reinforced through participant observations and interviews/conversations with local Haitian and Dominican participants to support critical understandings in this particular locale.

This article introduces a novel approach towards place branding theory, adopting a view based on the relationship between the place brand and place identity. The article first evaluates the dominant conceptualization of identity within place branding. It is argued that better understanding of the relationship between place identity and place brands might advance the theory of place branding. In its current state, place branding practice and, to a great extent, place branding literature adopt a rather static view on place identity as something that can easily be articulated and communicated for the purposes of branding the place. This approach is limited as it does not reveal the full complexity of place identity and limits the role and potential of place branding. The article, drawing on a combination of the literatures on place identity and organisational identity, proposes a more dynamic view of place identity that considers identity a constant dialogue between the internal and the external. The role of branding within the identity dialogue is then clarified leading to an appreciation of the full dynamics of place brands. The true nature of place branding is revealed as one of interaction and dialogue between stakeholders.

What could the addition of a variegated spatial approach contribute to planning studies? Planning studies, by and large, rely on Euclidean space as a ‘reality’ to be planned. However, Euclidean space may only be one of many spaces enacted in planning practice. Thus, this article proposes that most urban planning practice features at least a severe spatial imaginative challenge to our understanding of it. First, there is the problem of how to manage at a distance, which is solved by a translation and hence mobilization of place. Second, there is the problem of how mobilized place is done ex situ, which suggests that it must become somewhat fluid and be translated into plassein. These features are discussed in light of brief empirical illustrations drawn from a study of urban waterfront redevelopment in Swedish cities. In concluding the argument, a note is made on the relevance of plassein with a suggestion that fluidity is a requirement for achieving democracy in planning practices.

Mergers as a type of organizational change call attention to questions of identity. In this article, the authors ask: How do people collectively reconstitute their group identities for themselves and others, and in particular, how do they renegotiate understandings of sameness and difference called into question by merging? The authors draw on qualitative case data from two different merger contexts within the health care sector to develop rich descriptions and a deeper understanding of the identity struggles of four groups of employees. They identified four patterns of identity work ranging from more proactive forms of positioning as “mavericks” or fighters” to more passive forms as “adapters” or “victims” as each group struggled to navigate an altered, fluid, and emerging landscape of potential resources for self-understanding and affiliation. The authors show how identity regulation and identity work manifest themselves in three domains of language, practices and space, and how identity regulation and identity work mutually interact. Thus, the negotiation of identity in merging is a dialectic process in which managerial identity regulation aimed at enhancing convergence across groups may be undermined both by groups’ attempts to reestablish differences and by a countervailing managerial need to accommodate (and thus sustain) differences in order to enable groups to locate themselves in the emerging entity.

In a globalized world, place may play a much larger role in shaping occupational identities than scholars realize. Rather than serving as mere context in which identity work is conducted, cities, states, and regions are highly influential in shaping various parts of identity. This study of high-tech entrepreneurs in a city in the Rocky Mountain West of the United States shows that place was significant for framing identity narratives related to occupation. In addition, place helped to frame and organize other discursive resources for identity work such as gender, class, and race. This study highlights the ways in which attention to place can (a) surface important contemporary discursive resources for identity work, (b) allow scholars to see how aspects of complex identities are organized, and (c) show how the material, geographic world shapes the ways in which people socially construct their identities.

In this paper we investigate the cultural imageries of place and their relation to the politics of difference within China's emerging space of modernity. Using a case study of the place politics in Xiaozhou Village, Guangzhou, we consider how particular subject positions in relation to the ideologies of modernity and rurality shape particular imaginative structures of place and cognitive mappings of social relations. We argue that Massey's theory of a global sense of place needs to include a dimension concerning how concrete subject positions can be negotiated and challenged in the imagination of place. We also contend for a face-to-face politics of difference to analyze the anxieties and tensions between particularized subject positions. In concluding this paper we also suggest that the political potential of this model of place politics lies in its recognition that, while conflicts which are grounded in place-based social relations will not vanish, place should not to be mobilized as a citadel within which an enclosed subjectivity is protected from the interference of otherness. Thus the Other is also ascribed with the political potential to reproduce the cognitive mapping of the lifeworld of mine.

The aim of this essay is to propose a common basis of definitions and principles for the field of urban planning. A general thesis places a number of dilemmas and paradoxes at the heart of planning; the next nine theses explain the meaning and origins of planning; another ten pertain to the substance and uses of professional planning; ten more suggest what makes for good planning and good plans; the following fifteen concern urban planners as individuals; the final five deal with planning education and research.

In spite of the frequent use of landscape representations in planning, ‘the urban landscape’ is rarely the focus in discussions within planning practice or planning theory, be it in terms of representations or as a socio-material framework for planning actions. Instead it appears to be taken for granted and in this way affects planning theory and practice, leaving planning activities (professional as well as participatory) as rather haphazard events, hard to contextualize and to foresee any consequences of. Taking the landscape for granted excludes the possibility of discussing the differences between understanding the changing urban landscape from representations and understanding it in relation to experienced realities. This text argues for increased interdisciplinary elaborations on the meaning and content of urban landscape, by linking it to discourses in planning theory, urban theory and landscape theory.

Studies on place identity show positive relationships between the evaluation of a place and mechanisms involved in place identification. However, individuals also identify with places of low social prestige (places that bear a negative social image). Few authors investigate the nature of place identity processes in this case. The goal of this study is to highlight the specific connections between the three components of place identification, place attachment, place dependence, and group identity, which depend on the social evaluation of the environmental context (negative vs. positive image). The author uses self-administered questionnaires to interview 542 high-school students, to collect data on the basis of these three dimensions of their high school place identity, and their evaluation of their high school’s image. Results show positive relationships between the students’ evaluation of his or her high-school’s image and his or her place identity. However, findings show that some students reported strong place identification even though they had rated their high school as having low social prestige (negative image). Findings also show that such place identification occurred through strong attachment ties, which were a strong influence.

Today, people are highly mobile and identify themselves with various places. Mobility affects the decisions that a person makes about his or her final resting place and how his or her remains will be disposed. A semistructured, face-to-face interview is conducted with residents of Paris and Madrid. Data analyses consist of content analysis and correspondence analysis. The choice of corpse disposal method is related to one’s religious affiliation and the spouse’s decision for his or her own disposal method. The choice of final resting place is related to mobility, degree of attachment to the actual place of residence and to one’s birthplace, and parents’ decision for their final resting place. Younger and more mobile people prefer cremation as a burial procedure. Future research should consider how place identity and place appropriation contribute to one’s choice of a final resting place.

This article discusses cultural studies approaches to the role of media and communication technologies in the constitution of place. The discussion emerges out of the author’s ongoing study of the Shibuya district of Tokyo. Known for its trendsetting youth cultures and as a site of conspicuous consumption, Shibuya is also marked by an unusually intense proliferation of screen technologies, from the large scale (such as television screens embedded in building structures) to the miniature (individual mobile telephone screens). An examination of the articulation of these ubiquitous media technologies with a range of human and institutional actors in Shibuya provides broader insights into contemporary spatial practices and formations. It is argued that a combination of Law’s notion of “punctualization,” drawn from actor-network theory, and Hendy’s social anthropological concept of “un/wrapping” provides a generative framework for conceptualizing and describing the processual production and experience of Shibuya’s mediated place identity.

Visitor loyalty is necessary to generate a virtuous cycle of people—park symbiosis, but knowledge about loyalty expectations is insufficient. A survey of 300 repeat visitors to South Carolina’s Francis Beidler Forest, a private protected area, yielded a hierarchical pattern of loyalties, with positive overall place identity attitudes and positive intentions on site referrals, future visits, and engagement in advocacy. However, also evident were ambivalent place dependency attitudes, ambivalent intentions about donating and paying higher entry fees, and unwillingness to volunteer. Cluster analysis yielded exclusive loyalists (23%) preferring Beidler above other sites, nonexclusive loyalists (31%) not preferring the site, referral and repeat loyalists (33%), and ambivalent loyalists (13%) displaying low levels of loyalty uniformly. Attribute satisfaction levels were very high across clusters. Income, education, residency, and birding skill level all significantly differentiated the clusters. Implications for the marketing and product development of such sites are considered.

■ The public identity of a neighborhood does not always reflect its demographic composition. Some groups sustain their collective visibility as they experience demographic decline. Oakwood, a neighborhood in Los Angeles where African Americans once made up the largest segment of the population, is still known as the ‘black section of Venice’ despite the fact that Latinos have outnumbered African Americans since 1980 and whites have outnumbered them since 1990. Historical and ethnographic research illuminates the divergent processes through which African Americans and Latinos became associated with Oakwood, established qualitatively distinct ties to the area, and maintained differing degrees of influence over its local culture. African Americans’ social institutions, political organizations, visible patterns of public interaction, and periodic celebrations and commemorations enabled them to sustain their claim to the neighborhood, while Latino immigrants’ marginal citizenship status, avoidance of public spaces, and affiliation with other places prevented them from attaining collective visibility.

In an extension of organizational identity research, we draw on place identity theory (PIT) to argue that employees’ identification with their place of work influences their perceptions of large-scale organizational change. To determine how different types of employees respond to threats to their sense of place identity, we conducted 34 interviews with senior and middle managers, supervisory and nonsupervisory staff, and external stakeholders at a public hospital undergoing change. Groups of employees at lower levels of the organizational hierarchy experienced a stronger sense of place and belongingness and greater disruption to their place identity than those at higher levels. We discuss how place identity operates as a component of social identity as well as the responses managers can make to ways in which employees with different place identifications deal with change.