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Global challenges ranging from climate change and ecological regime shifts to refugee crises and post-national territorial claims are rapidly moving ecosystem thresholds and altering the social fabric of societies worldwide. This book addresses the vital question of how to navigate the contested forces of stability and change in a world shaped by multiple interconnected global challenges. It proposes that senses of place is a vital concept for supporting individual and social processes for navigating these contested forces and encourages scholars to rethink how to theorise and conceptualise changes in senses of place in the face of global challenges. It also makes the case that our concepts of sense of place need to be revisited, given that our experiences of place are changing. This book is essential reading for those seeking a new understanding of the multiple and shifting experiences of place.

Data come in many forms. They can be numbers, images, stories, sounds, and feelings; they can be biological tissue samples, colors on a digital screen, or blips on a radar. Each form of data can of...

This paper develops a theoretical argument for how place attachments are forged and become dynamically linked to increasingly common mobility practices. First, we argue that mobilities, rather than negating the importance of place, shift our understanding of place and the habitual ways we relate to and bond with places as distinct from a conception of place attachment premised on fixity and stability. Second, we document how the body of research on place attachment has both reinforced and contested 'sedentaristic' assumptions criticized within the so-called 'mobilities turn' in the social sciences. Third, we present a conceptual framework, built around different modes of interrelation between fixity and flow, as a way to re-theorize, link and balance the various studies of place attachment that have grappled with mobility. Finally, we sketch out the main research implications of this framework for advancing our understanding of place attachment in a mobile world.

The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted a reconsideration, perhaps even a fundamental shift in our relationships with place. As people worldwide have experienced ‘lockdown,’ we find ourselves emplaced in new and complex ways. In this Commentary, we draw attention to the re-working of people-place relations that the pandemic has catalysed thus far. We offer insights and suggestions for future interdisciplinary research, informed by our diverse positionalities as researchers based in different continents employing diverse approaches to people-place research. The article is structured in two sections. First, we consider theoretical aspects of our current relationships to place by proposing a framework of three interdependent axes: emplacement-displacement, inside-outside, and fixity-flow. Second, we identify six implications of these dialectics: for un-making and re-making ‘home’; precarity, exclusion and non-normative experiences of place; a new politics of public space; health, wellbeing and access to ‘outside’ recreational spaces; re-sensing place, virtual escapes and fluid places, and methodological and ethical considerations. Across these topics, we identify 15 key questions to guide future research. We conclude by asserting that learning lessons from the global pandemic is necessarily tentative, requiring careful observation of altered life circumstances, and will be deficient without taking relationships with place into account.

As we move into the age of the Anthropocene and urbanization continues at an unprecedented rate, questions about city life and its impact on our well-being are posed with renewed vigor. What happens to people who live in cities? This chapter will address several prominent areas of urban research on the experience of living in cities as related to well-being. It begins with a brief consideration of the nature of cities and urban life more broadly, and then goes on to examine specific aspects of urban design, such as density, housing form, and the public realm, as well as the psychosocial phenomena that unfold within that physical frame, particularly, social ties and social capital. While there is no universal conclusion that can be drawn about city life, the chapter will highlight trends from the research and consider current and future directions for studying 21st century cities.

The recent global financial crisis increased the volatility of housing markets and furthered the ongoing disinvestment in public sector housing. This disinvestment has been manifest in urban restructuring programmes involving both the privatisation and the wholesale demolition of public/social housing. For example, programmes like HOPE VI in the USA have radically altered the landscape of public housing through the demolition of tens of thousands of housing units nationwide. However, what of the people who occupied this housing, and what of the lives they had built there? In such a context, deliberating on the notion of being at home becomes a pressing task, necessitating serious consideration of the lived experience of place and place attachments among those who have been displaced by such programmes. While research has studied outcomes such as the quality of the new neighbourhood and household economic stability, it does not adequately address the lived experience of place and the disruptions that force...

The HOPE VI programme in the US displaces tens of thousands of low-income households to disperse pockets of poverty and transform sites of `severely distressed' public housing into mixed-income housing. A complete evaluation of this programme's impacts on residents must examine the meanings and functions of these communities before they are dismantled. Therefore, this paper examines residents' lived experiences of place in one site before redevelopment. This socially well-functioning community allowed residents to lay down roots, form place attachments and create bonds of mutual support with neighbours, contrary to typical depictions of severely distressed housing. Implications for US public housing policy and parallels with the discourse on social housing and social inclusion in western Europe illuminate overarching trends in housing policy for the poor.

As the HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) program redevelops public housing, residents must relocate. Little is known about how they make the choice to stay or to go, if they are given one. Survey interviews with 200 residents of Seattle's High Point HOPE VI project provide the data to address four questions about such moves. First, what factors predict residents’ initial choice to stay on site during redevelopment or to move permanently away? Second, how does the initial choice predict actual behavior? Third, what is the role of place attachment and place dependence on residents’ relocation choices? Fourth, what is the role of other trade‐offs in decision making? Findings suggest that family situations and place‐dependent considerations shape initial relocation preferences of public housing residents and that their family situations may be a more important influence on the actual move. Implications for the HOPE VI program are discussed.

This paper explores the nature of people's emotional relationships to places in order to learn about the kinds of places that are meaningful for people, the role these places play in their lives and the processes by which they develop meaning. Because such relationships have been most commonly explored through positive experiences of the residence, this research was undertaken to explore other dimensions of our relationships to places. To accomplish this, in-depth interviews were conducted with 40 participants in the New York metropolitan area. Qualitative analysis reveals the diversity and richness of people's emotional relationships to places, indicating that place meaning develops from an array of emotions and experiences, both positive and negative. Moreover, findings demonstrate the socio-political underpinnings of our emotional relationships to places, particularly the impact of gender, race, class and sexuality, suggesting a need to further incorporate the full magnitude of the human experience into the current discourse on people–place relationships.

An extensive and ever-growing body of literature exists that explores the nature and nuances of people's emotional relationships to place. This includes writings on sense of place, place attachment and place identity. A review of this literature suggests that while these concepts are broadly defined and discussed in theory, their application in research does not fully embrace all of the important dimensions they suggest. Empirical research, influenced by the notion of ‘home’, consequently focuses on residential settings, positive affect and a depoliticized view of individual experiences. This has limited our understanding of a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. Recent literature demonstrates a need to better incorporate the full magnitude of human experiences into the current discourse on people–place relationships. Recent research that works toward this end is discussed here. Consequently, this paper focuses on several strengths in the literature that warrant further investigation: First, people's emotional relationships to places encompass a broad range of physical settings and emotions. Second, people's relationships to places are an ever-changing, dynamic phenomenon, and as such, they can be a conscious process in which people are active shapers of their lives. Third, people's emotional relationships to places exist within a larger socio-political milieu.

Historically, dominant groups have used the rhetoric of place in the service of certain social agendas, particularly regarding the poor and the minority, as evidenced in the discourse on slum clearance in the 1960s. This rhetoric has emerged anew in the recent discourse on mixed-income housing programs both in the United States and in Western Europe. In the United States, one such federal program, known as HOPE VI, Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere, has advocated for the eradication of “severely distressed” public housing, resulting in the demolition of tens of thousands of public housing units since its inception in 1993. Given that as many as 206 cities across the country have implemented 559 of these redevelopment projects, the magnitude of this program, and its effects on poor communities of color, cannot be understated.

Engaging in Participatory Action Research (PAR) and practice raises critical issues for research ethics. These issues emerge in two ways. First, participation pre-supposes a commitment to a set of values that more traditional research and practice do not necessarily require or embrace. These values have distinct implications for ethical decision making and can potentially augment and extend ‘classic’ ethical principles such as beneficence and respect for persons in ways that enhance research ethics as a whole. Second, the unique and complex characteristics of participatory work raise ethical questions and practical challenges not typically encountered when working within more traditional research paradigms (see also Kindon et al., Chapter 2 in this volume). Advocates of PAR must therefore call for reform of existing institutional ethical review procedures so that they can accommodate rather than frustrate ethical practice in and through participatory research.

This investigation explored the factors that produce a significant behavioral commitment to environmental protection. Interviews were conducted with members of the Sierra Club: 47 who were active in Club activities and 46 who were not active. The variables for which significant between-group differences were found include: Club-related friendships, values, perceptions of the efficacy of citizen action, feeling personally harmed by an environmental problem, political orientation, and activity in other organizations. A number of other plausible hypotheses about differences between the groups were not confirmed. The results are discussed in terms of two explanations for involvement: differences between the groups existing prior to membership and differences in experiences after becoming members. The present data tend to suggest that the latter may be more important than the former.

People’s relations to place are crucially relevant for their engagement with, or resistance to, measures adopted in view of biodiversity conservation. Today, a considerable share of such measures are legal ones. Many are supranational legal orders: originating in multi-country agreements that are transposed into national legal frameworks, becoming then laws to be implemented at the local level. This chapter focuses on one such supranational legal order, the one governing EU ‘Natura 2000’ protected sites. It explores Natura’s legal-local relational dynamics - where laws affect people-place relations, and those relations affect the reception of the laws - by focusing on how two groups directly impacted by Natura laws: farmers and artisanal fishers. It presents a dynamic perspective in which epistemic labour – i.e. knowledge as process, not just content (Maranta et al., 2003) – takes a central role, and argues that a better understanding of these dynamic requires reconceptualising people-place relations in a way that is more attentive to the epistemic dimension, i.e. to local knowledge and epistemic bonds to place. This perspective also posits that meaning and knowledge, although interdependent, are not the same. The perspective is illustrated with examples of how fishers and farmers living in Natura 2000 sites discuss their places, knowledges and laws. The chapter thus shows how by including the epistemic dimension, the conceptualisation of senses of place can become more relational, plural and dynamic, allowing us to understand people’s engagement with place through three dimensions: engagement through meaning, resulting in belonging and identity bonds; engagement through affection, resulting in attachment; and engagement through knowledge, resulting in epistemic bonds. info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion