Excerptattached: WilkieRandRoberson,G(2012)AttachmenttoPlacein21stCenturyGeography:AReference Handbook,JStoltman,ed.ThousandOaks,CA:SAGE,p13548. Copyright2011SAGEPublications.

Notforsale,reproduction,ordistribution

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

13
AttAchment to PlAce
RichARd Wilkie And GeoRGe F. RobeRson
University of MassachusettsAmherst

he importance of place(s) in the lives of humans is one of the most compelling forces in the realm of human action. Even other basic human needs nourishment, protection, bonding with family and friends, and social interactionsall occur within the context of place. People readily identify with places; for example, ask any person to name a favorite place, and most will launch into a description of a special place that, for one reason or another, has an aura of sacredness about it that is tied to prior life experiences or events. In this chapter, we will be reviewing the broad interdisciplinary literature attachment to place that supports the argument that human attachment to place at all stages in the life cycle helps keep people connected to nature and the world and is fundamental to what it means to be human. For many people, attachments to special places begin in childhood, and certain places stand out for their importance in first discovering the joys of nature through childhood exploration and discovery. For youth in the countryside, it might be along a stream at a special swimming hole, a secret fort in the woods, or a special place deep in a marsh to catch frogs or observe an otter. In the city, it might be an interactive place where friends meet or a more secret discarded place like an abandoned building or even a rail junkyard. In such places, children have control over the spaces they have created. Throughout

ones life, a range of places stand out and may include, for example, places of solitude and reflection, places of shared adventures, and even imaginary places of the mind. A much deeper range of places and themes will unfold as we progress, with references to studies and writings that might help the reader establish in his or her own mind the meaning and importance of place in ones own life. Attachment to place refers to subjective human attraction to, and bonding with, places that are considered to hold special meanings and even sacred qualities for that person. Special places also operate on an aggregate level, when there is a collective sense of importance of particular places of different types. For example, as of July 2011, the UNESCO World Heritage Centre has designated 936 heritage sites (725 cultural, 183 natural, and 28 mixed) that are considered to be places of outstanding universal value to all of humanity; these include such places as diverse and evocative as Stonehenge, the Statue of Liberty, Machu Picchu, and Mount Kilimanjaro (World Heritage Centre, n.d.). Attachment to place is an important concept in geography in several ways: First, it is a key entry point into geography for students, because it is an idea to which they can quickly relate. Place attachments in ones own life can open the door to geographical awareness and the richness of the field of geography. In explaining geographys unique and inclusive perspective, for example, Abler, Marcus, and

135

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

136 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Olson (1992), in Geographys Inner Worlds: Pervasive Themes in Contemporary American Geography, stated,
Geographers use procedures that are common to science and the arts, but . . . a small set of basic concepts permeates geographic thinking and distinguishes geography from other disciplines. One such concept is a focus on the knowing the world through the perspectives of Location, Place, Region, and Space. (p. 4)

Second, geographers have a long history with concern for the importance of place in the lives of people and with aspects relating to sense of place. British geographer Andrew Herbertson, for example, writing in 1915 observed,
There is a genius loci as well as a Zeitgeista spirit of a place as well as of a time. . . . The spirit of place changes with the spirit of the time; it alters with mans relation to the region. The historian has to reckon with both in his great cycle, the geographer has to consider both in trying to understand the present regional consciousness. (quoted in Loukaki, 1997, p. 308)

uniqueness, and genius loci of places; these themes are natural environmental factors, human-built environmental factors, and societal factors. When looking at the overriding concept of memory and knowing (the realm of heritage and history of places), three themes stand out: formal histories through document-based records of the past; informal histories that are shaped by stories, songs, traditions, and is memories of past events and people living in local places; and displacement, where loss of place has occurred and is often lamented. Finally, under the idea of imagination and discovery, which involves identity, creativity, and growth, are the three themes of favorite/ideal places, identification and the power of place, and imagining places of the mind as well as through literature.

Childhood Places
Most people are deeply marked by their earliest childhood experiences in places, and it can be argued that our memories of those place-based experiences, both positive and negative, frequently influence the kinds of places we are drawn to and where we later form place attachments. Although this is true throughout our lives, it seems to be even more important as people get older and reflect on their past lives. Many return on pilgrimages to where they had their earliest explorations and interactions with nature and the world around them. Many of those places live on in our memories and deep within our souls, and they are at the core of what we see ourselves to be. In the case of coauthor Richard Wilkie, it was in the Salmon River Mountains of central Idaho at his parents North Shore Lodge on a mile-high mountain lake bordered with giant ponderosa (yellow pine) trees, near the South Fork of the Salmon River filled with spawning Chinook salmon in summer and surrounded by rugged peaks, including Cougar Rock, Thunderbolt, Blue Point, Landmark Rock, Square Top, and the Needles. For coauthor George Roberson, it was the trails near his home in the Berkshires (an upland region in western Massachusetts), where he spent countless hours exploring by foot, bike, and skis. The dense wooded trails are punctuated by the changing New England seasonsthe bursting green of mud-season, the deerflies and humidity of summer, the crispness and orange leaves of autumn, and the stark ice and blue sky of winterand the interplay with the occasional openness of mountain vistas, meadows, lakes, and settlements. There is a broad literature on the importance of childhood places and what they mean to people later in life. One view on the meaning of early childhood experiences later in life was expressed by geographer Anne Buttimer (1980):
Im sure that many of the attitudes that I bring to my geography . . . derive from my childhood experiences of life in Ireland. It is difficult for me to find words to describe what experience of living in Ireland still means to me. It is a total

Third, although yet to be fully developed and appreciated, the need for a subjective approach in human geography has long been recognized and advanced in the discipline, as chronicled by R. J. Johnston (1986). Wooldridge (1936) claimed that historical geographers must seek to view the countryside through the eyes of the farmer; Ralph Browns (1943) classic historical geography of the American Eastern Seaboard in 1810 presented it through the eyes of a mythical inhabitant, Thomas Keystone; and in 1947, John Wright introduced the term geosophy as part of his contention that geographical knowledge is part of the mental stock of all humans (Johnston, 1986, p. 74). In this way, a concern for humans place in the world and attachment to it and, ultimately, the search to understand the worldprovides a crucial form of inquiry and understandings that reach far beyond reductionist methods. This chapter is organized around two anchor points, four concepts, and twelve themes of attachment to place, presented as a model in Figure 13.1. For this discussion, we begin with an anchor point childhood places, then trace through the other concepts and themes on the way to a final anchor point: finding home. The major themes are grouped under four overarching concepts: (1) sense of placeperception, cognition, and experience; (2) spirit of placeessence, uniqueness, and genius loci; (3) memory and knowingheritage and history of places; and (4) imagination and discoveryidentity, creativity, and growth. We will use this intellectual framework to discuss the history and importance of this subfield to geography. Under the concept of sense of place, three aspects on perception, cognition, and experience are discussed: background and previous experiences, human responses to their senses and emotions, and experiencing places through transition, migration, and travel. And under spirit of place, three dominant themes stand out when considering the essence,

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

Attachment to Place 137

(h M er e i ta m ge ory an a d nd hi st Kn or o y wi of n pl g ac es )

Formal Histories Document-based records of the past, including key people, major events and conflicts, pivotal innovations, population changes and movements, technological and scientific advancements, etc.

Childhood Places Ones earliest experiences in places often result in lifelong influencesboth positively and negatively on attachment to new places.

Informal Histories Hand-me-down folklore stories, songs and local knowledge of the invisible landscapes of past events, architectural artifacts and other visual traces of the past, family memories, stories and photographs, etc.

Displacement Feeling the LOSS of PLACE or homesickness through self-exile, forced evacuation from wars, natural disasters or economic losses, as well as escape from political or social oppression, family problems, harassment, need for a healthy climate, etc.

Backgrounds Ones unique personality, 1 background and origin of place, prior experiences, memories, mental maps, perceived aesthetic sense, knowledge of the world, climate preferences, or how urban or rural places are, etc. Sensuous New Places: Responses Transition, Sight, sound, touch, Migration, Travel, etc. smell, taste, direction, Opportunities to discover new location, elevation, and other. places, heighten concentration, Emotional Responses use all of ones senses, observe Connectedness, inspiration, changes in nature and global surprise, illusion, nostalgia, diversity, contrast cultures and topophilia (love of place), countries, leave home and renewal, mystery, joy, leave work issues sadness, loss, behind, etc. etc.

Identification Natural Environment Life experiences often Societal Factors Favorite Places Factors such as climate lead to bonding and Family and friends, gender, provide feelings of familiarity, and global location, temperature, sexuality, ethnicity, social class, identifying with places. nostalgia, and comfort; often places humidity, elevation, amount of light Power of Place arts and culture, politics, for pilgrimage back to re-energize and color across the landscape, Embodied places, especially ideology, religion, economy and renew ones innersoul. shape and form of the terrain, among traditional indigenous and production, sports, sense Ideal Places amount of wind and storms, seasonal of being part of a community, peoples; also perceived forces have persistent appeal: changes, types of vegetation and of site locations in feng shui, tolerance, diversity, They are often unique, but wildlife, color of the sky, water Celtic geomancy, openness, etc. classic themes quality, etc. etc. also exist. Human-Built Environment Factors Imagining Places including the personalities of through literature, art, music, cities and towns through site performance, storytelling, poetry, locations and layouts, architecture place-names, film, visualization, etc. of buildings, public spaces, parks, Imaginary Places Finding Home modes of transportation, vistas of the Mind Searching to live in a place that and overviews, restaurants and 2 Mentally creating fantasy feels right. Home starts with the markets, places for social interaction places to dream about. structure and setting, and the local and people watching, area, but often includes ideas of sports venues, etc. place making, gardening, and stewardship. Home provides a grounding for love, roots, inspiration, and creativity.

Figure 13.1

Major Themes of Attachment to Place

experience of milieu which is evoked: I recall the feel of the grass on bare feet, the smells and sounds of various seasons, the places and times I meet friends on walks, the daily ebb and flow of milking time, meals, reading and thinking, sleeping and waking. Most of this experience is not consciously processed through my headthat is why words are so hard to findfor this place allows head and heart, body and spirit, imagination and will to become harmonized and creative. (pp. 172173)

In this study on attachment to place, the role of childhood exploration of places will resurface in several related themes, partially because so many learned experiences from that time have become embedded in how individuals have learned to see and way find in the world. Coauthor

Wilkie learned to read the landscape and to grasp what he was seeing instinctively through a wilderness upbringing, by learning that survival often depended on remembering details in the landscape and how they varied at different times of day, by constructing accurate mental maps to find the way back home or to find the safest and best route up or down a mountain face. These skills came into play later in life while he was living in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, although in metropolitan mazes. Along these same lines, coauthor Roberson sees a parallel between his youthful trail explorations with his research on city forms in later lifeespecially nonlinear cityscapes like the medina (the old Arab city contained within the city walls) in Tangier, Morocco.

(p Im ro ce ag ss ina es ti of on cr an ea d tiv D ity isc an ov d er id y en tit y

ce er (p c n, io pt

e per lac ex f P and e o n, ns itio Se ogn

ce ien )

(e ss en ce ,u

n ce e la d g f P , an t o ss iri ne Sp que

ni

iu

lo

ci

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

138 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

The importance of childhood places in helping to shape a persons lifelong sense of place has been expressed strongly in Cooper Marcuss Remembrance of Landscapes Past (1978); Gordons Place Matters: The Significance of Place Attachments for Childrens Well-Being (2008); Harts Childrens Experience of Place (1979); Kingsolvers The Memory Place (1996); Nabhan and Trimbles The Geography of Childhood (1994); Porteouss Childscape (1990, pp. 145173); and Stegners The Question Mark in the Circle (1962, pp. 320).

Three aspects of sense of place follow: backgrounds, sensuous and emotional responses, and new places through transition, migration, and travel. Recommended additional readings on an overarching understanding of sense of place include The Betweenness of Place (Entrikin, 1991); Jacksons A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (1994); Jorgensen and Stedmans Sense of Place as an Attitude (2001); Patterson and Williamss Maintaining Research Traditions on Place (2005); Relphs Sense of Place (1997); and Wilkies Sense of Place and Selected Conceptual Approaches to Place (2003).

Sense of Place
Sense of place refers to human feelings and experiences of our worlds great range of places, be they natural or human built, personal or shared, real or imagined (Figure 13.2). The term evolved from early forms of humanistic geography, and the concept is now important in many disciplines and is a core value in a broad and varied range of endeavors from theory (i.e., placing humans into earths time-space continuum) to practice (i.e., building green or selling places as commodities) (Wilkie & Roberson, 2010, p. 2532). As such, sense of place involves a broad and complex range of an individuals subjective perception and cognition, sensuous and emotional responses, or the poignant contrasts between the familiar, the new, and the unknown. Thus, it can be argued that throughout their lifetimes, people develop their own landscapes of memory and previous experiences (in varying degrees of simplicity and sophistication), and those memories and emotions lead them to form particular attachments to placesmany positive, others filled with ambivalence or disinterest, and some of rejection or sadness, and often loss.

Backgrounds
Each individual has a unique background and set of experiences that he or she brings to places. Ones origins and previous experiences are multilayered, and they help shape the way people react to places throughout their lives. As Wilkie and Roberson (2010) previously stated,
Among myriad approaches to sense of place, a key strand begins with the individual. Each person brings his or her own personality, background and previous experiences into the process of forming a sense of place. People draw on their own use of human senses, their own sense of aesthetics, and their own intellectual and emotional responses they have developed in regard to places; these are based on their experiences and perceptions, and the development of cognitive understandings of places. (p. 2532)

It is important, however, to remember that a persons reactions and responses are not static, and the way an individual looks at places evolves throughout ones life, especially as one continues to grow and learn and have new experiences. People are also affected by larger forces of modernization, new technology, growing populations, and evolving land uses that lead to dramatic changes in the nature of places and how we view them. The importance of childhood places in helping to shape a persons lifelong sense of place has been expressed strongly in Greenbies Social Evolution (1976, pp. 141144); Harts Childrens Experience of Place (1979); Kingsolvers The Memory Place (1996); Marcuss (re)visiting his childhood experiences in Rio de Janeiro (2011); Nabhan and Trimbles The Geography of Childhood (1994); Rydens Epilogue: Feeling Every Bump in the Ground (1993, pp. 289296); and Stegners The Question Mark in the Circle (1962, pp. 320).

Sensuous Responses/Emotional Responses

Figure 13.2 Childhood Places

NOTE: Impromptu games organized by children on available sites are often important places in ones early years. This photo of children playing a homemade game of wheel ball on Air Sanih Beach on Balis north coastfinishing after dusk in virtual darknessincluded Richard Wilkies then 8-year-old son Gavin, who was invited to join the game.

The importance of human senses, and the memories we attach to them, help to bring places alive again in our memories. As Barry Lopez (1998) noted, It is through the power of observation, the gifts of eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our mind; afterward it is memory that carries the place, that allows it to grow in depth and complexity (pp. 142143).

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

Attachment to Place 139

An important element of place attachment, at least for many people, is how our emotional responses bond us with certain places. The range of possible responses is extremely broad, but some of the most resonant feelings about places are inspiration, excitement, surprise, mystery, serenity, bonding or connectedness, gratitude, nostalgia, and sadness or loss when a place changes or is lost to the forces of change. Renewal of ones soul is often expressed when one is in a special place, and these feelings are paramount in connecting us with places in a way that lives on in our memories. Urban planner Kevin Lynch (1978) captured this sense of imaging the environment:
At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences. . . . Every citizen has had long associations with some part of this city [Boston], and his image is soaked in memories and meanings. (p. 151)

For many people the discovery of special places through ones explorations can be nearly as powerful as revisiting ones own pantheon of sacred places. Some wanderers and adventurers spend a lifetime exploring the world piecing together a worldview out of the unique mosaic of places that existeach with different combinations of climate, ecology and landforms, and each with a unique mix of cultures, built environments and organization of cultural landscapes. (Wilkie, 2003, p. 31)

Additional readings that grapple with these issues include: Bunkes Wonders of the World and Knowing Oneself (2004, pp. 5981); Lopezs The American Geographies (1998, pp. 130143); Robersons Tangier: Visualizing the City (2007); Stegners Finding the Place (1992); and Wilkies Dangerous Journeys (2006).

Spirit of Place
Spirit of place is a feeling about the importance of a place that is different from sense of place, where the focus is on how and why humans respond to places the way they do. Within spirit of place, emphasis is more on the places themselveswhat is it about particular places that attract humans to them? What is the range of attributes that come into play as people respond to particular places? Are those responses unique for each individual or, in the case of some places, are the human responses to them more agreed on and universal in nature? Even when there are places of consensus with regard to the feeling of spirit, geographers continue to be interested in the attributes that result in the spirit of place. Every person has feelings about places they have known and experienced. Many feel that a number of those places reached out to them, even spoke to themmost often to attract and draw them inbut with some places, a love/hate relationship might exist, whereas in other places, ambivalence or rejection might be the response. Many times, our relationships with a place are entirely unique to a particular time or series of events. Often, however, some special places have a general appeal in that a number of people have had similar kinds of feelings of awe and attachment to them. Perhaps it is that we remember both the best and the worst of our experiences, and those places hold sacred attachment to us. Often they are the kinds of places that give us opportunities to feel the power and forces of nature and they provide an opportunity to connect to the earth, or they are places that help make us more thoughtful and reflective human beings. Most ordinary places do not elicit such dramatic responses, but what is an ordinary place for one person might be a place filled with important experiences and memories for someone else. Three aspects of spirit of place are discussed here: natural environmental factors, human-built environmental factors, and societal factors. Additional insights into spirit of place can be found in Evanss The Personality of Ireland (1992); Hughess

Additional readings on the importance of human senses and emotional responses in a persons attachment to places include Abrams The Ecology of Magic (1996, pp. 329); Pococks Sight and Knowledge (1981, pp. 385393); Porteouss Landscapes of the Mind (1990); and Stilgoes Beginnings (1998a).

Experiencing New Places Through Transition, Migration, and Travel

Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) has observed that because people move around so much and things change so fast in modern society, the relation between mobility and a sense of place can be very complicated (p. 182). Periods of movement and transitions in lifefrom heading off to college, relocating to a different city for work, or traveling through Europe by Eurail for the summer uniquely and powerfully impact our experiences of places. Unlike the rootedness and familiarity we feel at home, as people travel to explore and discover new places, their attention and senses often become hyperfocused, and they notice and appreciate details, changes of scale, diversity, and contrasts more intensely (Wilkie, 2006, pp. 112114) and we become specialized and unanchored beings, sightseers who sample life effortlessly (Tuan, 1977, p. 146). Accordingly, not only are such experiences great venues for learning and growth, they also (aided by our cameras) form many of our most treasured lifetime memories. In this way, even brief visits to new or far-flung places engender powerful experiences that are often place attachments in the making. Nearly everyone can remember the feelings of exploring the back roads and byways of new landscapes, whether they are remote and rural or in the heart of a major metropolis. The importance of this kind of travel has been expressed as follows:

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

140 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Spirit of Place in the Western World (1991); Matsubayashis Spirit of Place: The Modern Relevance of an Ancient Concept (1991); Relphs Essence of Place (1976, pp. 2943); Tuans Genius Loci (1976, pp. 1619); and Wilkies search to capture a sense or spirit of place in Mexico (2006).

Natural Environmental Factors

The importance of the natural world to human attitudes and values about placesand ultimately to ones attachments to particular placesis fundamental to being human and feeling connected to the earth. Everyone responds to an array of environmental factors: climate, temperature, amount of sunlight, and humidity; whether the seasons vary or are relatively constant; the kinds of dynamic forces of nature that bring us storms, wind, waves, lightning, and rapidly changing qualities of light and color across the landscape; and the shapes and natural forms of the terrain. The kinds of places where humans live or want to live (or to visit) are a broad kaleidoscope of landscape choices. Global locationespecially latitude with distance from the equator to the polesaffects our view on all of these individual factors, as elevation above sea level does. Humans live in a narrow band of elevation from sea levelmost under 1 mile high (5,280 feet), and virtually none above 3 miles (15,840 feet). People also prefer to live close to oceans and shorelines of lakes and rivers; thus, close association with water is a key element in ones attachments to place. Research has found that many people are attracted to zones of transitionmagical hot spots where two ecologies come togethersuch as forest meeting meadow, bodies of water meeting the land, or where a

panoramic viewpoint provides an overview (Figure 13.3). Wildlife is drawn to sites of transition as well, where changes in vegetation, food possibilities, and protection are nearby. The physical attributes of the landscape and the language used to define them are also an important part of the feeling attachments to place. See, for example, Barry Lopezs edited volume of more than 850 landscape elements as defined by 45 writers and poets in Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (2006). Other readings on the importance of natural environmental factors in the spirit of place include Bassos Wisdom Sits in Places (1996); Leopolds A Sand County Almanac (1949); and Tuans Topophilia (1974).

Human-Built Environmental Factors

Conversely, factors of human-built environments also contribute powerfully to attachments to place, including the structure and layout of cities and towns, land use patterns, architecture, buildings, parks, markets, sports stadiums, places of human social interaction and peoplewatching, and the importance of site locations relative to other places, to mention a few. But spirit of place in the built environment is far more than the design and arrangement of buildings and urban spaces, although they are as important as anything else with regard to connecting to particular places. Fritz Steele (1981) put it this way:
Experience of place on the [New York City] Fifth Avenue sidewalk can never really be described as simply a function of its physical attributes; we must also take into account the eyes, ears, intentions, and moods of the persons who are experiencing it. It is not a place, in a vacuum: it is a setting in which people may experience a sense of place, given the right conditions . . . and the spirit of place . . . is the combination of characteristics that gives some locations a special feel or personality (such as a spirit of mystery or of identity with a person or group). (pp. 4, 11)

Additional readings on the importance of attributes of spirit of place in the built environment include Gaffneys study of soccer stadiums in the cultural landscape (2008); Greenbies Social Evolution (1976, pp. 141154); Kaplan and Kaplans Humanscape: Environments for People (1976); Lynchs The Image of the City (1960); Norberg-Schulzs Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1984); and Seamon and Sowers look at existential geography and architecture (2009).
Figure 13.3 Physical Attributes of Rio de Janeiro
NOTE: The port city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is located on one of the most dramatic coastlines and harbors in the world, as seen from Corcovado Peak in early morning light. Sugarloaf, a 1,300-foot granite and quartz peak, appears to stand guard over the entrance into Gunabara Bay from the Atlantic Ocean, from where it also shelters the Botafogo neighborhood and beach in the foreground. In the distance, waves of coastal hills fade to the east along the Atlantic coast toward Cabo Frio.

Societal Factors
The influence of societal factors on the essence and uniqueness of placesthe spirit of a placeis fundamental. Where one is born and within which subculture of family and friends one is raised has a profound impact on the attachment to place that one develops over time. These attachments to place are also shaped by an array of forces: ones gender,

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

Attachment to Place 141

as they relate to ones attachment with places. The meaning to ones past experiences and the important role of, and attachment to, places is beyond question. Just how accurate those perceptions and understandings really are is another question, but most people feel that without a sense of the past in their home community or local region, they would lack identity and connectedness that is essential for living in those places (Figure 13.4). Knowing the history and heritage of places helps give people roots and a sense that they are involved in the flow of human history as part of earth history and even feelings of home and stewardship of those places. David Lowenthal (1988) stated it well:
Figure 13.4 Built Environment in Greece The past is everywhere. All around us life features which, like ourselves and our thoughts, have more or less recognizable antecedents. Relics, histories, memories suffuse human experience. Each particular trace of the past ultimately perishes, but collectively they are immortal. Whether it is celebrated or rejected, attended to or ignored, the past is omnipresent. (p. xv)

NOTE: The spirit of place of the built environment is clearly evident in the village of Mykonos, with its honeycombed setting of whitewashed houses and buildings set off by the deep blue water of the harbor and orange- and yellow-trimmed boats. Lawrence Durrell (1978) noted how the magic of Greece differs from that of Italy and Spain: The light! One hears the word everywhere To Phos and can recognize its pedigree among other derivatives in our English word phosphorescent, which summons up at once the dancing magnesium-flare quality of sunlight blazing on a white wall; in the depths of the light there is blackness, but it is a blackness . . . [with] a magnetic ultra-violet throb. This confers a sort of brilliant skin of which light on material objects, linking near and far, and bathing simple objects in a sort of celestial glow-worn hue (p. 18).

ethnicity, religion, sexuality, social class, religion, occupation, and politics, as well as through the local economy and modes of production, the arts and culture of an area, and the role of sports in ones life. The kind of community one lives in is also vital to ones sense of attachment to it, including such issues as openness to outsiders, tolerance and diversity, and how well the social spaces for human interaction work in that particular place. Attachment to place implies, as Relph (1976) has noted, belonging to your place both as individual and a member of a community, and to know this without reflecting upon it (p. 65). Additional readings on the importance of societal factors to place attachment in the spirit of a place include Buttimers studies on the dynamism of lifeworld and the social milieu (1976, 1980, 1993); Glassies Passing the Time in Ballymenone (1982); Greenbies Design for Diversity (1976); and Haydens look at urban landscapes as public history (1995).

That past, for better or worse, plays out in all communities and places throughout the world, and it is a key element for many people as they form attachments with the places in which they live. Three aspects of memory and knowing stand out that link people to the past: formal histories, informal histories, and displacement. Recommended additional readings on an overarching understanding of memory and knowing include Buttimers Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld (1976); Jacksons A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (1994); Lynchs What Time Is This Place? (1972); and Stilgoes Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places (1998c).

Formal Histories
The past is all around us and is an essential element of who we are as people. As students and teachers, when we want to know about something, one of our first steps is to read or listen to what has already been said on the topic. A document-based understandingusing things like written records, original documents, formal written and oral histories, and documentariesprovides context and perspectives on key people, major events, pivotal innovations, and so forth. Although the authenticity and accuracy of such documents and narratives always requires scrutiny, knowing the history and heritage of places helps give people roots and a sense that they are part of the flow of human history and even feelings of home and stewardship of those places. However, as Tuan (1977) has cautioned, geographers knowledge of space and place is not exclusively derived from books, maps, aerial photographs, and structured field surveys (p. 201).

Memory and Knowing

The history of the earth and life on Earth provides a framework for understanding human heritage from prior times, and it is an essential element of who we are as people with regard to everyday understanding of places and their past

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

142 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Informal Histories
Whereas some major human events are recorded on the landscape and handed down to future generations, most stories at the local level are lost to history since most people who experienced life in those places later died without passing their memories on to others. Even ordinary places have their human stories that are invisible to others, except where folklore stories or songs have survived, and even they fade with time and the passing of generations. Most people live their lives in a few different places, and some only one. An important aspect of their attachments to places comes through memories of places from their own experiences and through those of neighbors and acquaintances, but also from hand-me-down folklore stories, songs, and local knowledge about the invisible landscape of past places; through curiosity triggered by architectural artifacts and visual traces of the past, and through family memories, stories, and photographs (Figure 13.5). The literature is rich on studies of local communities and regions. One such book is Henry Glassies Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (1982). Glassie spent 7 years collecting stories of their daily lives and shared village history, and he noted that at night, village neighbors gathered in open farmhouse kitchens, drinking tea and telling tales, often exploring topics of moral values. He maintains that the Irish location in space rather than timelocus classicusprovided their sense of connections with the past. Their preoccupations with local history were ever present in the ground they farmed and the living space of their lives. Additional readings on the importance of informal histories of places include Cronins A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative (1992); Haydens stories of urban landscapes as public history (1995); Rydens Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place (1993); Stegners history and memory of a plains frontier (1962); and J. B. Wrights stories of land and life in Montana (1996).

Figure 13.5

Storyteller Bob Barr in His Paradise Valley Cabin Retreat

SOURCE: Photo by James Wilkie. NOTE: Bob Barr was an oral historian for the Warm Lake/Salmon River region of Idaho. His stories of places, people, and events in that mountain wilderness region between the 1890s and the 1950s fired the imagination of many who heard them. Bob named the meadow where he built his cabin next to a small creek filled with trout Paradise Valley because he said it was the closest place to heaven that [he] could find on earth. Inside the cabin, the walls were pasted with magazine covers depicting adventure, fishing and hunting, animal and bird life, and nature. It was in his cabin later in life that he told his memorable stories of the region, about mountain legends Cougar Dave Lewis, Deadshot Reed, Beanbelly Dick, and others. Starting at age 14 in Texas, Bob was on four cattle drives to Dodge City in the early 1880s, before later working his way to Idaho to become a prospector, forester, lookout builder, and hunting and fishing guide. He died in 1954 at age 86.

Displacement
Leaving ones home region or homeland is often a stressful loss of place, which may entail loss of family, friends, community, and a landscape that one knows intimately or, if not through direct experiences, through the stories, legends, and traditions that tell about those places. The word homesick is a word that resonates with nearly everyone. Some people are exiled for political reasons or forced migrations that result from the breakup of a country, such as Yugoslavia, into separate smaller countries. Others leave home because of natural disasterslike the Irish in the late 1840s (potato blight) or the 2005 exodus from New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Even if one is not from those places, songs about homelands can have an emotional impact, and it is clear that the world one longs for can never be replaced. Other forms of displacement

arise when ones previous place attachments are altered or lost. This would include the loss of a patch of forest or a meadow marsh where one played as a child because a shopping mall was built there, or it might involve the flight of young people from dying farm towns for both economic and social reasons. Some people are fortunate enough to return later in life to find or reclaim some of their past place attachments, but for many, it will never happen. Still, those places of importance in ones past continue to shape ones place perceptions and influence ones decisions about where to live in the future. Representative readings on displacement include Stacks (1996) history of African Americans feeling displaced in the urban North and returning to reclaim the rural South and J. B. Wrights (1996) look at the loss of public lands and forests in Montana.

Imagination and Discovery

Special places and place attachments, and peoples searches for them, provide individuals with the opportunity to

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

Attachment to Place 143

explore, discover, create, and use their imaginations. Being absorbed into such places gives people a chance to dream and feel inspiration; it also helps solidify and express their own sense of identity. Just seeing nature at work in its holistic interplay of forces makes many people feel a strong urge to be creativeto write poetry, to sketch or paint, to photograph, or just to think. Have you noticed that when walking for leisure, problems or issues one has pondered for some time suddenly have solutions? The imagination, as Schroeder (2010) has explained, encompasses a diverse set of phenomena, including visualization, dreaming, reverie, and the use of metaphors and symbolism in language and thought (p. 10) and, as such, can be much more than a playful pastime. The imagination, when properly engaged, is where the worlds of tomorrow are first conceived and negotiated. As Wilkie and Wilkie (1980) found among migrants in Argentina, the ages that children in a rural farm village began to explore their surroundings crucially affected how they later viewed the world:
If a child explores the neighborhood and the physical environment around the home community and gains both an understanding of the complexities of the physical and spatial systems and a trust in his or her own abilities to understand them, this trust is later transferred to the physical environment. Children whose explorations are overly restricted and controlled and who do not gain an understanding of these systems or of their own abilities to control and work with the environment often develop mistrust and fear of the physical world. (p. 142)

There are three aspects of imagination and discovery that relate to attachment to place. They are favorite/ideal places, identification and the power of place, and imagining places. Additional readings on the overarching importance of imagination and discovery to attachments to place include Abrams The Spell of the Sensuous (1996); Gregorys Geographical Imaginations (1994); Lowenthals Geography, Experience, & Imagination: Towards a Geographical Epistemology (1961); and J. K. Wrights Terrae Incognitae: The Place of the Imagination in Geography (1947).

Ideal and preferred places are related to favorite places, but they are quite different in important respects. Favorite places are already very close to a person, whereas ideal places often incorporate fantasy and desire for perfection. Tuan notes that people dream of ideal places. One of the themes regarding ideal place that Tuan discusses is the cabin in the forest clearing that he sees as a power lure to the modern man who dreams of withdrawal. He notes that at different times and places historically, human imagination concerning ideal places revolved around an additional three dominant place ideals: the seashore, the valley, and the island (Tuan, 1974, pp. 114120). The coauthor of this chapter, Richard Wilkie, has had a long-term interest in favorite places and incorporated them in his teaching at the university level. One such experience involved an ongoing research project in which 140 older graduate students writing about favorite places produced support in part for Tuans concept of ideal places, but with several differences. Seashore-related places were strong (20%) and, together with islands (6%), resulted in the concept of coastal (26% total) being quite significant. Tuans concept, the valley, was more difficult to group, as only places that could be associated with valleys, or middle landscapes, could be notedfarm-related places, gardens, small towns, or places for traveling back roads. This group accounted for 16% of favorite places. Thus, 40% of favorite places did not appear in Tuans discussion of ideal places, including the category of mountain landscapes (high peaks, hidden lakes, remote wilderness, waterfalls, and streams, etc.), which were 26%. Tuans cabin in the forest clearing should have been in this category, but no one expressed it that way, although cabin on a lake was named by several people. An additional 14% were more idiosyncratic in reference to their favorite places.

Identification and Power of Place

According to Jorgensen and Stedman (2001), place identity is a major construct in the environmental psychology literature that is related to place attachments (p. 234). Proshansky (1978) referred to place identity as those dimensions of self that define the individuals personal identity in relation to the physical environment by means of a complex pattern of conscious and unconscious ideas, beliefs, preferences, feelings, values, goals and behavioral tendencies and skills relevant to this environment (p. 155). In addition, Proshansky, Fabian, and Kaminoff (1983) described place identity and physical world socialization of the self (Figure 13.6). There is also an extensive literature on power of place and identity, especially among indigenous peoples and landscapes (Abram, 1996; Basso, 1996; Matsubayashi, 1991) that involves a bonding with places in the embodied (living) landscapes. Related literature on spiritual (religious) places includes works by Kelley and Francis (1994) and others. In addition, some people have responded to the

Favorite Places/Ideal Places

Thinking about ones favorite places can be an exciting adventure of the mind. When students are asked to write about favorite places, they often respond with enthusiasm and vigor because they have been asked to write about something that is close to their hearts. Favorite places tend to be uniquely individual, but they also cluster around reoccurring overall themes. One common response revolves around renewal to ones inner soul through pilgrimages back to ones favorite place(s), but other responses involve a feeling of comfort, familiarity, or the excitement of returning to ones earlier place of fantasy and makebelieve, with its aura, mystery, and secrecy.

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

144 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY on modern maps we see spaces labelled unexplored, rivers shown by broken lines, islands marked existence doubtful. In this address I shall deal with terrae incognitae, both literal and as symbolizing all that is geographically unknown; I shall discuss the appeal that they make to the imaginative faculties of geographers and others and the place of the imagination in geographical studies. (p. 1)

Figure 13.6

Favorite Places/Ideal Places: A Beach on an Island

Furthermore, the imagination is where ideas, actions, and new things are formulated, often leading to the manipulation of existing places and the creation of new places. Variously termed place making, place design, and performing place, such processes usually involve aspects of advocacy, activism, democracy, dialogue, and community building (Roberson & Amine, 2008).

NOTE: South Beach on the island of Marthas Vineyard, Massachusetts, is a place where a series of natural forces converge. It is where the sandy barrier beach meets the ocean surf, where clouds often meet open skies, where the warmer Gulf Stream from the south meets the colder Labrador Current from the north, where migratory birds on their seasonal flights to the north or south make important stops to rest and feed for their next flight segment, and where the terminal moraine of the ice age glaciers shaped the cliffs on the west end of the island above the beaches. Finally, it is a place for humans to experience the feel of bare feet in the sand and surf while walking for miles, to swim gently in the rolling ocean swells while watching the clouds above form and re-form their shapes, or to canoe on the tidal ponds behind the beaches. This photo shows a lone person along the Chilmark Pond section of beach below Abels Hill with calm surf and September skies.

Finding Home
The theme finding home is the final anchor point for this chapter, which is exploring the array of factors involved with human attachment to place. Beginning with childhood places, where attachments to place are first formed, it logically ends with the idea of finding home. At the heart of the concept is the idea that most people ultimately search to live in a place that feels right to them, and that starts out with a specific geography, or site location, and regional landscape. Home for some can mean feeling connected to nature where the world itself is home. This outward look from home was noted by Relph (1976): In authentic experience home, whether a house, a village, a region, or a nation, is a central point of existence and individual identity from which you look out on the rest of the world (p. 83). We make the case here, however, that home starts with the dwelling structure, the structures setting, and the local area, but it also includes the ideas of place making, farming or gardening and growing some of ones own food supply, and stewardship of the land. Home provides a place for grounding and connections through friendship, love, and roots, as well as for inspiration and creativity. One feels a place is right when one experiences emotional contentment and personal affirmation, the comfort of being at home (Figure 13.7). Home also entails looking inward to intimate relationships with a local place. Wallace Stegner (1992), in reflecting about Wendell Berrys many writings about life in rural Kentucky that are rooted in his home place, noted,
Back to Wendell Berry, and his belief that if you dont know where you are you dont know who you are. He is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign. He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the sense, the memory, the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge of place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investments

perceived forces of site locations based on alignment with the heavens, as in Celtic geomancy or the folk sciences of ideal locations for buildings, housing, and living spaces as found in Chinese feng shui.

Imagining Places and Imaginary Places of the Mind

Imagining places begins early in life, and the ability to invent places and explore them in our minds eye has remained with humans as long as the species has dreamed, anticipated, read, or heard stories about places. Accordingly, fertile ground for place imaginations abounds: novels, travel writing, art, poetry, film, music, and so on. As Porter and Lukermann (1976) argued, Those who write about the good place warrant the scrutiny of geosophers. To define utopia as a way of looking at the world is itself a worthy geographical proposition (p. 218). Innovation and discovery often begin in the freedom, creativity, and excitement of the imagination, as discussed by J. K. Wright (1947):
TERRA INCOGNITA: these words stir the imagination. Through the ages men have been drawn to unknown regions by Siren voices, echoes of which ring in our ears today when

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

Attachment to Place 145

Figure 13.7

Finding Home

SOURCE: Photo by James Wilkie. NOTE: Billy Mitchell found home on Marble Creek off the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho, a place that fits the cabin in the meadow theme of ideal places. His homestead predated the U.S. Forest Service, founded in 1908, and was located in what might have been the most remote home place in America at the timedeep within the heart of the largest wilderness area in the continental United States. Even today it is more than 40 to 70 miles by trail to the closest road in any direction. Richard Wilkie and his horse Cinnabar are seen crossing the old Mitchell Ranch ruins in 1955.

the location where these writings and representations occurred. It allows us to relate and identify with the places, the authors, and the characters, and it can give us an appreciation of the diversity of places and ways of thinking and feeling. During the next several decades of the 21st century, an area of study, research, and writing in geography will be the importance of attachment to place in a world that is both socially and visually networked by emerging technologies. Will remote but instantaneous network communications between individuals, nuclear families, and extended families disperse attachment to place in a particular spatial arrangement? Future investigations into the dynamics of sense of place will need to bring together a more inclusive dialogue between those who see themselves as doing positivist, more narrowly based, quantitative science and those who see themselves doing a more humanistic, or holistic, qualitative study into humans sense of place. These approaches began to divide positions in the 1960s, but within a decade these contrasting approaches were seen by some as increasingly complementary. Golledge and Stimson (1987) noted,
Within the space of a decade [late 1960s to late 1970s], therefore, a large segment of research in human geography changed from one that was interested primarily in classifying and categorizing phenomena on the earths surface through a theoretical and quantitative revolution that sought to build normative models of where things ought to be and to define ideal patterns that were abstractions from reality, to a processdriven search for knowledge of the various aspects of our spatial existence. In particular, the processes on which researchers focused were behavioral, and included things such as learning, thinking, forming attitudes, perceiving, sensing, giving meaning and value, imaging, representing, and using spatial knowledge. (p. 3)

of labor or feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it. He is talking about the knowing that poets specialize in. It is only a step from his pronouncement to another: that no place is a place until it has had a poet. (p. 205)

The search for homewhether found, made, or born in (or most likely a combination of these)is a personal poetry and a lifetime process. Additional readings on the importance of finding home with all the attachments to place involved in the process include Bunkes Searching for Home (2004, pp. 8398); Buttimers Home, Reach, and the Sense of Place (1980); Sauers Finding Home (1992); Sophers Landscapes of Home: Myth, Experience, Social Meaning, (1979); Stacks Call to Home (1996); and Wilkie and Wilkies study of Argentine migrant preferences for the urban or rural size of place in which they prefer to live (1980).

Geography, Attachment to Place, and the 21st Century

The strength of attachment to place is that it resonates powerfully with most people. Few concepts in any discipline have such deep emotional meaning to people. Place is also a key aspect of relating to the lives of others, especially through novels, autobiographies, travel writings, movies, poetry, and art. Place provides an emotional grounding in

While these different approaches continue to be debated in the interdisciplinary literature, some are still working on building appropriate bridges between the two camps. Patterson and Williams (2005) completed an extensive review of the various research traditions on placeespecially sense of place, as often used by geographers, and attachment to place, as often used by environmental psychologistsand came up with the conclusion that seeing systematic cohesion requires a pluralistic world view that understands place, not as a single research tradition but as a domain of research informed by many disciplinary research traditions (p. 361) and that an attitude of openness to, and appreciation for, other paradigms (p. 377) is a requirement. They went on to say the following:
An attitude of openness to alternative paradigms simply requires a researcher to recognize that the world is undisciplined and multifaceted; that all abstractions and models of it are, to some extent, limited and imperfect representations; and that, at some level of abstraction, it is always the case that relevance is in the eye of the beholder. This does not require the

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

146 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY suspension of critical thinking, though it does require that once a research logic is adopted, critiques about its implementation be made in [a] manner consistent with the assumptions underlying the adopted logic. (p. 377)

When discussing how research findings are often used, Patterson and Williams (2005) pointed out that the managers world of planning and design seems to be founded on synthesis rather than analysis and that it is a synthetic act that must sift, weigh, and incorporate the findings from divergent approaches to science and other forms of knowledge (p. 314). In the 21st century, another important part of attachment to place for geography is to help prepare students to think geographically and to strengthen their own attachments to place. This involves the development of specific geographic literacy skills as part of students experiences, both in and out of school. They must be focused on achieving and practicing (a) space and place literacy, (b) visual and experiential place literacy, and (c) sense of place and time literacy.

6. Visual and Aesthetic Awareness: Developing an ability to see shapes, patterns, form, and textures in nature and to think about how changes in light, shadows, and color tones relate to ones sense of place. Many believe that the ability of individuals to see patterns in nature strongly influences their overall sense of harmony and beauty in the world.

Sense of Place and Time Literacy

7. Understanding the Processes of Change: To gain a holistic understanding of the forces and processes of change that have helped shape both natural and cultural landscapes. In understanding change, it is also important to gain a sense of cycles, be they daily, weekly, or seasonal. 8. Sense of Time and Sense of Place Knowledge: To develop a historical understanding of places from the visible artifacts from previous eras; to gain a feeling for the invisible landscapes of past events and conflicts, through folklore and stories about the lives of people who lived there; and to be able to map and visualize previous settlement patterns and activities that occurred in those places. 9. Spirit of Place Understanding: To learn to uncover the intrinsic nature of places, from the sacred, to the common, to the profane. Observers have long felt that emotional attachments to special places enrich the lives of people by giving them direct connections to the power of places and to our planet in general. Understanding ones own favorite places is also important, as is an openness to learn from others on this topic. The 21st century could well become a geographic century, just as the 16th century had earlier unfolded the accounts of exploration and discovery on the ever more detailed map of the world. While the new geographic century will not focus on the explorations of new continents, it will focus on the ways that people sense the places to which they are attached or feel a deep sense of fulfillment. Environmental science regularly alerts the worlds people that stewardship of this place called Earth is absolutely essential. In the 21st century, geography has a major role in ensuring that sense of place (perception, cognition, and experience), spirit of place (essence, uniqueness, and genius loci), memory and knowing (heritage and history of places), and imagination and discovery (identity, creativity, and growth) become deeply rooted in the way we view and relate to the earth on the global scale, and to our neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions. Geography and how we form attachments to places are indisputable companions through the journey of life.

Space and Place Literacy

1. Global Spatial and Situational Skills: To have a sense of where you are on the globe in relation to other places (global positioning) and to be able to visualize in the minds eye where other countries, bodies of water, mountain ranges, and other places are in any direction from that location. 2. Wayfinding and Spatial Networking Skills: On a personal level, to be able to find ones way when traveling, to have an understanding of networks and connections between places, to grasp relative size and distance relationships, and to travel between places confidently both physically and mentally. 3. Map and Graphic Skills: To be able to read and interpret maps, graphics, and other forms of visualization models, and to use them in everyday life. One needs to learn to think spatially.

Visual and Experiential Place Literacy

4. Visual Place Awareness: It is important to be able to locate types of environments and cultures from around the world when viewing pictures of places in the media and elsewhere. Gaining a visual sense of places and their locations goes hand-in-hand with what we learn from reading, hearing, and learning factually about places, and it helps us develop an integrated global awareness and a more accurate worldview. 5. Experiential and Sensuous Awareness: Becoming more aware of all of ones senses as they are used to perceive and experience the world. Field trips into natural and urban environments help students learn to use all their senses, especially when they are asked to write about their experiential and sensuous reactions to places.

References and Further Readings

Abler, R., Marcus, M., & Olson, J. (Eds.). (1992). Geographys inner worlds: Pervasive themes in contemporary American geography. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

Attachment to Place 147 Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous. New York: Pantheon. Basso, K. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Notes on a Western Apache landscape. In S. Feld & K. Basso (Eds.), Senses of place (pp. 5390). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Brown, R. (1943). Mirror for Americans: Likeness of the eastern seaboard 1810. New York: American Geographical Society. Bunke, E. (2004). Geography and the art of life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Buttimer, A. (1976). Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 66, 277292. Buttimer, A. (1980). Home, reach, and the sense of place. In A. Buttimer & D. Seamon (Eds.), The human experience of space and place. New York: St. Martins Press. Buttimer, A. (1993). Geography and the human spirit. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cooper Marcus, C. (1978). Remembrance of landscapes past. Landscape, 22(3), 3543. Cronin, W. (1992). A place for stories: Nature, history, and narrative. Journal of American History, 78(4), 13471376. Durrell, L. (1978). The Greek Islands. New York: Viking Press. Entrikin, J. (1991). The betweenness of place. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Evans, E. (1992). The personality of Ireland: Habitat, heritage and history. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Gaffney, C. (2008). Temples of the earthbound gods: Stadiums in the cultural landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. Austin: University of Texas Press. Glassie, H. (1982). Passing the time in Ballymenone: Culture and history of an Ulster community. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Golledge, R., & Stimson, R. (1987). Analytical behavior geography. London: Croom Helm. Gordon, J. (2008). Place matters: The significance of place attachments for childrens well-being. British Journal of Social Work, 40(3), 755771. Greenbie, B. (1976). Design for diversity. New York: Elsevier. Gregory, D. (1994). Geographical imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hart, R. (1979). Childrens experience of place. New York: Irvington. Hayden, D. (1995). The power of place: Urban landscapes as public history. Cambridge: MIT Press. Herbertson, A. J. (1915). Regional environment, heredity and consciousness. Geographical Teacher, 8, 147153. Hughes, J. (1991). Spirit of place in the Western world. In J. Swan (Ed.), The power of place: Sacred ground in natural & human environments (pp. 1527). Wheaton, IL: Quest Books. Jackson, J. B. (1994). A sense of place, a sense of time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Johnston, R. J. (1986). Philosophy and human geography (2nd ed.). London: Edward Arnold. Jorgensen, B., & Stedman, R. (2001). Sense of place as an attitude. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21, 233248. Kaplan, S., & Kaplan, R. (1976). Humanscape: Environments for people. North Scituate, MA: Duxbury Press. Kelley, K., & Francis, H. (1994). Navajo sacred places. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kingsolver, B. (1996). The memory place. In J. Barbato & L. Weinerman (Eds.), Heart of the land: Essays on last great places (pp. 281289). New York: Vintage Press. Kyle, G., Graefe, A., Manning, R., & Bacon, J. (2004). Effects of place attachment on users perceptions of social and environmental conditions in a natural setting. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24, 213225. Leopold, A. (1949). A Sand County almanac. New York: Oxford University Press. Lopez, B. (Ed.). (1998). About this life: Journeys on the threshold of memory. New York: Vintage Books. Lopez, B. (2006). Home ground: Language for an American landscape. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press. Loukaki, A. (1997). Whose genius loci? Contrasting interpretations of the sacred rock of the Athenian Acropolis. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 87(2), 306329. Lowenthal, D. (1961). Geography, experience, & imagination: Towards a geographical epistemology. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 51(3), 241260. Lowenthal, D. (1988). The past is a foreign country. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lowenthal, D., & Bowden, M. (Eds.). (1976). Geographies of the mind: Essays in historical geosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Lynch, K. (1960). The image of the city. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lynch, K. (1972). What time is this place? Cambridge: MIT Press. Lynch, K. (1978). The image of the environment. In S. Kaplan & R. Kaplan (Eds.), Humanscape: Environments for people (pp. 150155). North Scituate, MA: Duxbury Press. Marcus, A. (2011). Transnational Rio de Janeiro: (Re)visiting geographical experiences. In M. Friedman & S. Schultermandl (Eds.), Growing up transnational: Family and kinship in a global era (pp. 2135). Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Matsubayashi, K. (1991). Spirit of place: The modern relevance of an ancient concept. In J. Swan (Ed.), The power of place: Sacred ground in natural & human environments (pp. 334 346). Wheaton, IL: Quest Books. Nabhan, G., & Trimble, S. (1994). The geography of childhood: Why children need wild places. Boston: Beacon Press. Norberg-Schulz, C. (1984). Genius loci: Towards a phenomenology of architecture. New York: Rizzoli. Patterson, M., & Williams, D. (2005). Maintaining research traditions on place: Diversity of thought and scientific progress. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25, 361380. Pocock, D. C. D. (1981). Sight and knowledge. Transactions, 6, 385393. Porteous, J. (1985). Smellscape. Progress in Human Geography, 9(3), 356378. Porteous, J. (1990). Landscapes of the mind: World of sense and metaphor. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Porter, P., & Lukermann, F. (1976). The geography of utopia. In D. Lowenthal & M. Bowden (Eds.), Geographies of the mind: Essays in historical geosophy (pp. 197223). New York: Oxford University Press. Proshansky, H. M. (1978). The city and self-identity. Environment and Behavior, 10, 147169. Proshansky, H. M., Fabian, A. K., & Kaminoff, R. (1983). Place identity: Physical world socialization of the self. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3, 5783. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Relph, E. (1981). Rational landscapes and humanistic geography. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble.

Copyright 2011 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

148 HUMAN GEOGRAPHY Relph, E. (1997). Sense of place. In S. Hanson (Ed.), 10 Geographic ideas that changed the world (pp. 205226). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Roberson, G. (2007). Tangier: Visualizing the city. In K. Amine (Ed.), Performing/picturing Tangier (pp. 2731). Tetouan, Morocco: Abdelmalek Essadi University and Aberystwyth, Wales: University of Aberystwyth. Roberson, G., & Amine, K. (2008). Tangier: Sensing the city. In B. Tharaud, J. Goni Perez, & G. Roberson (Eds.), Tangier at the crossroads (pp. 4151). Tangier, Morocco: International Centre for Performance Studies. Ryden, K. (1993). Mapping the invisible landscape: Folklore, writing, and the sense of place. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Sauer, P. (Ed.). (1992). Finding home. Boston: Beacon Press. Schroeder, H. (2010). The role of imagination in experiencing natural environments. In C. E. Watts Jr., & C. L. Fisher (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2009 Northeastern Recreation Research Symposium (Gen. Tech. Rep. No. NRS-P-66, pp. 1015). Newtown Square, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station. Seamon, D., & Sowers, J. (2009). Existentialism/existential geography. In R. Kitchen & N. Thrift (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of human geography (Vol. 3, pp. 666671). Oxford, UK: Elsevier. Sopher, D. (1979). Landscapes of home: Myth, experience, social meaning. In D. Meinig (Ed.), The interpretation of ordinary landscapes (pp. 129149). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stack, C. (1996). Call to home: African Americans reclaim the rural South. New York: Basic Books. Steele, F. (1981). The sense of place. Boston: CBI. Stegner, W. (1962). Wolf willow: A history, a story, and a memory of the last plains frontier. New York: Viking Press. Stegner, W. (1992). Finding the place: A migrant childhood. In W. Stegner, Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs (pp. 321, 205). New York: Penguin Books. Stilgoe, J. (1998a). Beginnings. In Outside lies magic (pp. 119). New York: Walker. Stilgoe, J. (1998b). Endings. In Outside lies magic (pp. 179187). New York: Walker. Stilgoe, J. (1998c). Outside lies magic: Regaining history and awareness in everyday places. New York: Walker. Tuan, Y. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Tuan, Y. (1976). Geopiety: A theme in mans attachment to nature and place. In D. Lowenthal & M. Bowden (Eds.), Geographies of the mind: Essays in historical geosophy (pp. 1139). New York: Oxford University Press. Tuan, Y. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wilkie, R. (2003). Sense of place and selected conceptual approaches to place. CRIT, 55(1), 2931. Wilkie, R. (2006). Dangerous journeys: Mexico City college students and the Mexican landscape, 1954-1962. In D. Bloom (Ed.), Adventures into Mexico: American tourism beyond the border (pp. 88115). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Wilkie, R., & Roberson, G. (2010). Sense of place. In B. Warf (Ed.), Encyclopedia of geography (Vol. 5, pp. 25322534). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Wilkie, R., & Wilkie, J. (1980). Environmental perception and migration behavior: A case study in rural Argentina. In R. Thomas & J. Hunter (Eds.), Internal migration systems in the developing world (pp. 135151). Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. Wooldridge, S. (1936). The Anglo-Saxon settlement. In H. Darby (Ed.), An historical geography of England before A.D. 1800 (pp. 88132). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. World Heritage Centre. (n.d.). World Heritage list. Retrieved July 26, 2011, from http://whc.unesco.org/en/list Wright, J. B. (1996). Montana ghost dance: Essays on land and life. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wright, J. K. (1947). Terrae incognitae: The place of the imagination in geography. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 37(1), 115.