Discursive displacement and semantic diffusion of sense of place: revisiting Tuan

ABSTRACT

Sense of place is a key concept in geography, which resonates with an audience outside of disciplinary geography. And yet, sense of place no longer has the prominence in geography that it once held. We argue that this is due in part to ‘discursive displacement' or shifts in meaning that have occurred as the concept circulated amongst different disciplines (e.g. geography and environmental psychology) and competing paradigms within geography (e.g. humanistic and critical human geography). Within this process of circulation, geographers and other scholars have overlooked Yi-Fu Tuan's distinction between rootedness and sense of place. This ‘semantic diffusion' contributes to the profusion of competing terms in the literature. It also contributes to the displacement of a practical concern with place-making and enhancing place experience, by academic debates over basic definitions and underlying philosophical commitments. In this paper, we pursue two related goals: First, we present a selective history of sense of place as a concept. Second, we argue that the time has come for a reassessment of a ‘Tuanian' sense of place. This offers both a path through the discursive field of ‘sense of place', and an opportunity to revitalize the attentive geography at the heart of Tuan’s humanistic project.

KEYWORDS:

• Sense of place
• rootedness
• place
• Yi-Fu Tuan
• attention

Acknowledgements

We wish to dedicate this article to Yi-Fu Tuan. He will be missed. We would like to thank Miranda Meyer, Ron Davidson and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In addition to being a best seller, How to Do Nothing was listed as a ‘best book of the year’ by Time, The New Yorker, NPR and other media outlets, and was included on Barack Obama’s list of his favourite books of 2019.

2 Aside from the line quoted in this paragraph, the phrase ‘sense of place’ appears only in a brief discussion of Joshua Meyrowitz’ 1985 book No Sense of Place.

3 As we will make clear below, Agnew and Massey do not define ‘sense of place’ in their work in relation to humanistic geography; Massey, at least in part, defines her understanding of the concept in opposition to humanistic geography. Massey develops her ‘progressive sense of place’ vis-a-vis David Harvey’s (1989) critique of the ‘Heideggerian view of Space/Place as Being’ (Massey 1993a, 86). Agnew defines sense of place as a ‘structure of feeling’, a concept borrowed from Pred (1983), based largely on the work of Bourdieu, Giddens and other contributors to ‘structuration theory’. In terms of why sense of place did not remain central in geography, we would argue that it had to do in large part with critical geographers’ critique of humanistic geography as being ‘uncritical’ and ‘essentialist’ (e.g. Rose 1993).

4 Much of this emphasis stems from Agnew’s (1987) influential definition of place that posits sense of place as one of the three central features of place, along with location and locale (e.g. Cresswell 1999, 226).

5 Sense of place is also a prominent concept in urban planning, residential and commercial design, landscape architecture, historical preservation and other ‘applied’ disciplines related to geography, environmental psychology, etc.

6 Our review of sources is selective in two ways. First, we focus on sources from geography and (to a lesser extent) environmental psychology. Although the concept of sense of place has been taken up in other disciplines, most publications on the topic are by geographers or environmental psychologists. We do not have space to address this point in more depth, but in most cases researchers in other disciplinary traditions draw upon geography or environmental psychology for basic definitions and methods. Second, our time frame is primarily focused on the mid 1970s-early 1990s. This is due to three factors: First, most of the paradigmatic writings on sense of place in both geography and environmental psychology were published in the late 1970s-early 1980s. The most widely cited works in humanistic geography, for example, were published during this time (e.g. Ley and Samuels 1978; Relph 1976; Tuan 1977). Second, substantial critical engagement with humanistic geography (and sense of place literature more narrowly) peaked in the late 1980s-early 1990s (e.g. Harvey 1989; Massey 1993a, 1994; Rose 1993). Third, few geographers have self-identified as ‘humanistic geographers’ since the early 1990s. Some of the ‘old guard’ (e.g. Relph and Seamon) continue to work on broadly humanistic concerns, but are more likely to identify their approach as ‘phenomenological’, but as we argue below, we do not think ‘humanistic’ and ‘phenomenological’ are strictly synonymous.

7 Daniel Williams is a research social scientist with the US Forest Service. His research focuses broadly on resource conservation and the role of place in recreation and resource management. Williams draws on diverse traditions in his own research, from environmental psychology (e.g. Williams and Patterson 1999) to hermeneutics (Patterson et al. 1998) and humanistic geography (Williams and Stewart 1998). Since the late 1990s, Williams has led the charge for pluralism in sense-of-place research.

8 Paradigms refer to broad normative commitments in ontology, epistemology and methodology. While paradigms may be closely associated with particular disciplinary research programmes, properly defined they supersede disciplinary boundaries. The psychometric paradigm, for example, has been most thoroughly developed within the discipline of environmental psychology, as well as related fields such as social psychology and community psychology, but it has also been applied in geography, environmental education, tourism and leisure studies, etc.

9 It is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is noteworthy that Tuan more frequently cites the work of Merleau-Ponty and phenomenological psychologists such as Alfred Schutz and Erwin Strauss, than the work of Heidegger.

10 For a counter to this, see Cindi Katz and her idea of ‘time-space expansion’ (2001).

11 Neither Harvey nor Massey cite any specific sources for ‘Heideggerian’ geography, but Dovey (2016) suggests that this is a thinly veiled reference to Relph.

12 We should note that the tendency to ‘reduce’ place to mere location within space is common in certain Marxist and other radical approaches which subsume specific place to social forces or flows.

13 At these different scales, the relative importance of precise boundaries differentiating inside and outside varies. A home (or, more precisely, a house) is an enclosed space, physically separating an inside and outside; moreover, the inside must be protected from intrusion by the outside. Neighbourhoods and regions, in contrast, do not have well-defined boundaries. While streets may demarcate the borders of neighbourhoods in conventional usage, they rarely serve as functional or formal boundaries; likewise there is no exact line or border demarcating cultural regions such as ‘The Midwest’.

14 While the citation history of this paper suggests that his arguments ultimately had little influence on the subsequent development of sense-of-place research, we think that this paper is in actuality very important for highlighting some general themes (and blind spots) in sense-of-place research more broadly, and for ‘placing’ Tuan’s work within this research tradition specifically. Incidentally, he later recognized three concepts that all were necessary for a full engagement with place: rootedness, sense of place and being out of place (Tuan 1984).

15 Aside from being an attempt to lend greater specificity to terms –‘rootedness’ and ‘sense of place’ – which are otherwise often conflated, Tuan’s argument raises some important points about place and sense of place generally. One, perhaps most broad, is that the concepts of place/sense of place cannot be dissociated from the experience of place (this is true not least for place/sense-of-place researchers). Tuan contextualizes the argument of this paper within a growing movement in pursuit of ‘a feeling for and an attachment to place rather than the ideal of a shared national culture’ (Tuan 1980, 3). This movement is expressed, among other ways, by an increasing interest in genealogy (which, if anything, has been heightened in the last decade by commercially available genetic testing), historic preservation and heritage tourism. But these practices, as noted above, make sense only against a background awareness of the passage of time and dislocation or uprootedness from traditional places.

16 The importance of place and the development of a sense of place is premised on our experience as embodied, social and political beings. Additionally, ‘as beings endowed with mental capabilities, we belong to even larger worlds’ (Tuan 1997, 47). Thus far, the argument of this paper recapitulates themes familiar from Tuan’s earlier work. However, he notes that a growing literature on sense of place is typically focused on small-scale and well-defined place. Tuan builds from the micro-scale into the macro-scale, tying into themes of Cosmos and Hearth (Tuan 1996) and Escapism (Tuan 1998). In a sense, this short paper elaborates a sense of place on the basis of the themes of large scale ‘places’ (worlds, the cosmos) and escape from the confines of the local.