![Sample our Urban Studies journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110826/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Urban-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
Land-use changes can interrupt relationships to place, threaten community identity, and prompt instability, altering the social and physical context and impacting the present and future state of the social–ecological system. Approaches that map system changes are needed to understand the effects of natural resource decisions and human–nature interactions. In this article, we merge theories of articulation, the event, and symbolic territory into a critical framework to analyze online newspaper article responses and blogs referencing a land-use controversy in the State of Maine, USA. Application of this framework reveals land-use controversies as place-making events that alter contexts and sense of place, and precipitate the re-articulation of identity in relation to, and through, symbolic territory.
Acknowledgements
Portions of the manuscript were presented in a panel for the Environmental Communication Division as part of the 2010 National Communication Association Annual Convention. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation award EPS-0904155 and Maine EPSCoR at the University of Maine.
Notes
1. Maine's Land Use Regulation Commission governs 10.4 million acres of land in the largely undeveloped territories of the state.
2. Complex social–ecological systems (SESs) are composed of multiple subsystems which “are relatively separable but interact to produce outcomes at the SES level, which … affect these subsystems and their components … ” (Ostrom, Citation2009, p. 419).
3. Following Santana (Citation2011), online respondents to news stories are “commenters.”