What does sense of place mean

The complexity of meaning surrounding urban places and our understandings of such contested meanings make a powerful context for personal inquiry and collective learning. In the U. Their results suggest implications for equity and social justice in environmental education, such as the damage that prevailing environmental education narratives could do to communities of color in terms of power and positioning.

Although not always explicitly stated, sense of place is inherent to many environmental learning initiatives Thomashow, Place-based education has goals important to urban life, including raising awareness of place, of our relationship to place, and of how we may contribute positively to this constantly evolving relationship, as well as inspiring local actors to develop place-responsive transformational learning experiences that contribute to community well-being.

With the global population increasingly residing in cities, ecological urbanism requires new approaches to understanding place. How does sense of place contribute to human flourishing, ecological justice, and biological and cultural diversity?

Using a theoretical basis from literature described above, we offer examples of activities to help readers construct field explorations that evoke, leverage, or influence sense of place.

Also, see a relevant diagram in Russ et al. In practice, urban environmental education programs would combine different approaches to nurture sense of place, perhaps most prominently place-based approaches Smith and Sobel, , which teach respect for the local environment, including its other-than-human inhabitants, in any setting including cities.

Making students more consciously aware of their taken-for-granted places is an important aspect of influencing sense of place. What does this place mean to you? What does this place enable you to do? Another activity could use conceptual mapping to highlight places and networks that are important to students, for example, related to commuting and transportation, the internet, food and energy sources, or recreation. Maps and drawings also might focus on sensory perceptions—sights, sounds and smells—or locate centers of urban sustainability.

Such maps can help students learn about specific neighborhoods, investigate the relationship among neighborhoods, or create linkages between all the places they or their relatives have lived. Further, mapping activities may help students recognize how their own activities connect to the larger network of activities that create a city, as well as allow them to reflect on issues of power, access, and equity in relation to environmental concerns such as waste, air pollution, and access to green space.

Other observational and experiential activities to instill sense of place might include: 1 exploring boundaries or borders, for example, space under highways, transition zones between communities, fences and walls; 2 finding centers or gathering places and asking questions about where people congregate and why; 3 following the movements of pedestrians and comparing them to the movements of urban animals; 4 tracing the migratory flows of birds, insects and humans; 5 shadowing city workers who are engaged in garbage removal or other public services as they move around the city; 6 observing color and light at different times of the day; 7 observing patterns of construction and demolition; and 8 working with street artists to create murals.

All of these activities could serve to develop new meanings and attachments to places that may or may not be familiar to people.

Activities that allow people to explore and interpret places together could contribute to developing a collective sense of place and corresponding place meanings. For example, photo-voice and mental mapping used during a participatory urban environment course allowed students, many of them from marginalized racial and ethnic groups, to experience a shift from viewing a community as a fixed geographic place to a dynamic, socially constructed space, and to describe how they experience and understand urban phenomena such as decay, gentrification, and access to green spaces Bellino and Adams, These activities enabled students to expand their notions of what it means to be urban citizens, and to transform their ecological identities in ways that prompted them to take steps towards imagining environmentally, economically, and culturally sustainable futures.

Other social activities, such as collective art-making, restoring local natural areas, or planting a community garden, could contribute to a collective sense of place that values green space and ecological aspects of place. New socially constructed place meanings can in turn help to promote community engagement in preserving, transforming, or creating places with unique ecological characteristics e. Environmental educators who are able to engage with a community over time can watch these initiatives take root and grow, and can observe individual and collective changes in sense of place.

In addition to paying attention to social construction of place, environmental educators can nurture ecological identity, which fosters appreciation of the ecological aspects of cities. Humans have multiple identities, including ecological identity, which reflects the ecological perspectives or ecological lens through which they see the world.

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Oxford Reference. The term is used in urban and rural studies in relation to place-making and place-attachment of communities to their environment or homeland. The numerical value of sense of place in Pythagorean Numerology is: 3. Once again the halls of Congress reverberate with odes to rugged individualism, state sovereignty, and contempt for the centralized super-state, these are bloodless battles Jefferson Davis could never fight but, they are no less vital for the future of American civilization.

As our cities decay and our standards and spiritual traditions deteriorate, America is searching for a better way. Walker Percy urged us to look South to recover community, stability, and sense of place in God's order which we have regrettably lost. That is a tall proposition but it is certainly one Jefferson Davis would understand and certainly one for which Jefferson Davis would fight.

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Word in Definition. Freebase 2. We urge a more spatial and relational view of these dynamics recognizing how individual minds and bodies and constituted within places that are both perceived and socially constructed, and how both direct perception and abstractions can lead to formation and change in behavior across places and time. If urban settings are repositories for a range of socially constructed and perceived meanings Research Direction 1 then these settings need to be designed with both fast and slow cognitive processes in mind and thus multiple layers of place meaning.

By layers we mean planning, designing, and implementing new forms of architecture in urban landscapes that cater for clusters of different types of immediately perceived and socially constructed place meanings, including functional, affective, and symbolic.

These clusters could be tailored to different user groups so as to address important elements of environmental justice Raymond et al. Stemming from Research Direction 2, it may be possible for urban environments to be designed with affordances that immediately evoke different forms of place meanings. Such urban designs may have multiple important uses for highly mobile individuals or migrants seeking to integrate into new communities rapidly.

Certain types of affordances could be created in urban environments to bridge place meanings between their place of origin and their new sometimes temporary place of residence. However, we acknowledge that designing urban environments for a diversity of meanings can lead to the potential for conflicts between different interest groups, which also needs to be managed Stedman, Accepting place attachment as an emergent property Research Direction 3 requires urban planners to take account of both short-term and long-term processes of cognition when designing cities.

In this paper, we urged a systematic consideration of how both slow and fast processes of cognition inform sense of place scholarship.

We asserted that sense of place scholarship has been conservative, non-dynamic, and principally focused on aspects of place meaning that unfold over time through a process of social construction. Theory development has largely excluded the role of immediate sensory and direct perception—action processes in meaning making, otherwise referred to as immediately perceived place meanings, but instead focused on place meanings formed through longer-term processes of social construction.

In response, we suggest how affordance theory could overcome a number of blind spots in sense of place scholarship and then suggest research directions for empirically justifying how place as perception—action processes a subset of Type 1 thinking in the dual-process model and place as socially constructed processes a subset of Type 2 thinking relate to each other across place experiences and time.

Reconceptualizing sense of place as fast and slow presents opportunities to consider how immediate perceptual processes can contribute to longer-term processes of social construction and vice versa.

It also paves the way to addressing one of the most contentious aspects of sense of place scholarship and wider psychology: how processes of intellectual abstraction and computation based on interactionist worldviews can be united with immediate sensory experience based on transactional worldviews to better account for not only for place meanings and place attachment, but also environmental behavior across the life course.

CR reviewed the literature and developed the key arguments for the paper, also wrote most sections of the paper with additions from MK and RS. MK provided insightful contributions to the affordance theory section of the paper, and to the future directions and management implications sections. RS provided insightful contributions regarding the argumentation and framing of the paper, and also provided key theoretical insights into sense of place, and the discussion section of the paper.

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