Pragmatic Sense of Place

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Environmental & Architectural

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A Pragmatic Sense of

Place

Edward Relph

Ted Relph is a Professor of Geography in the Division of

Social Sciences at the University of Toronto at

Scarborough, a suburban Toronto campus. In his

research and writings (sidebar, below), he has explored

the nature and importance of places, landscapes,

environments, and other taken-for-granted geographical

dimensions of peoples everyday lives. A slightly

different version of this essay appeared in Making Sense

of Place: Exploring Concepts and Expressions of Placethrough Different Senses and Lenses,edited by FrankVanclay, Matthew Higgins, and Adam Blackshaw

(Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2008).

The editor would like to thank Frank Vanclay and NMAP

Editor Julie Simpkin for permission to include Relphs

essay here. [email protected]. 2008, 2009

Edward Relph. From Environmental and ArchitecturalPhenomenology, vol. 20, no. 3 (fall 2009), pp. 24-31.

The flexibility of the word place allows it to encompass

a rich range of possibilities. It can refer to social contextbut more generally implies something about somewhere.No definition is needed to understand what it meanswhen we say, for instance, Save a place for me orVictoriathe place to be (as license plates claim), oreven when it is suggested by philosopher Thomas Nagelthat the world is a big, complex place [1].

On the other hand, this range of uses suggests that a

New Page 0 http://www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/Relph2

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place can be pretty much whatever we want it to be. Iagree with John Cameron that the breadth of the notionof place is both a strength and a weakness and thatways have to be found to avoid its being so inclusivethat it means all things to all people [2].

In this essay, I argue that a pragmatic sense of placemust be an essential component in the development ofeffective ways to cope with twenty-first-centuryenvironmental and social challenges. If place can meanwhatever we want, this argument would be a vacuousexercise, so I will begin with some clarifications andrestrictions.

Place & PlacelessnessAnthropologist Clifford Geertz suggests that cultureconsists of webs of significance woven by human beings,

in which we are all suspended [3]. Places occur wherethese webs touch the earth and connect people to theworld. Each place is a territory of significance,distinguished from larger or smaller areas by its name,by its particular environmental qualities, by the storiesand shared memories connected to it, and by theintensity of meanings people give to or derive from it.

The parts of the world without names areundifferentiated space, and the absence of a name isequivalent to the absence of place. Conversely, wherecommunities have deep roots, it seems that their named

places fuse culture and environment, and this fusion isthen revealed in striking cultural landscapes. There is ascale implication here because, when the term place isused geographically (as in the expression, The placewhere I live is), the reference usually seems to be tosomewhere about the size of a landscape that canpotentially be seen in a single viewfor example, avillage, small town, or urban neighborhood.

This sense of focus is, I think, a core notion of placecorresponding closely with ideas of community and

locality. I stress, however, that, since in ordinarylanguage a place can be at any scale from the worlddown to a chair, large places must be loosely comprisedof smaller ones, and smaller places are nested withinlarger ones [4]. In other words, while place may bespatially focused at the scale of a landscape, it is notspatially constrained.

The antithesis of place isplacelessness,a sort of


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non-place quality manifest in uniformity, standardizationand disconnection from context. If a place is somewhere,placelessness can be anywhere [5]. It is tempting to seeplace and placelessness as opposite types oflandscapeto contrast, for instance, the distinctivenessof a small town on the Costa Brava with a placeless

industrial suburb of Torontoand to assume that place isgood and placelessness is somehow deficient.

But this oppositional thinking is simplistic. Rather, placeand placelessness are bound together in a sort ofgeographical embrace so that almost everywherecontains aspects of both. Place is an expression of whatis specific and local, while placelessness corresponds towhat is general and mass-produced. Thus, even thestandardized uniformity of placelessness always hassome unique characteristic, such as the arrangement ofbuildings.

And no matter how distinctively different somewheremay appear, it always shares some of its features withother placesfor example, red tile roofs and white wallsare a common feature of Mediterranean towns. Thesesorts of similarities make exceptional qualities andmeanings comprehensible to outsiders.

In a world of unique places, travel would be enormouslydifficult because nothing would be familiar; in a perfectlyplaceless world, travel would be pointless. It is helpful,

therefore, to think of place and placelessness arrangedalong a continuum and existing in a state of tension. Atone extreme, distinctiveness is ascendant and samenessdiminished; at the other extreme, uniformity dominatesand distinctiveness is suppressed. Between theseextremes there are countless possible configurations.Theoretically, at the midpoint they are equal, but inactual landscapes such a balance is probably impossibleto identify [6].

In short, things are rarely straightforward. For instance,distinctive identities can be borrowed, plagiarized, orcontrived. At least two towns in the North AmericanRockies have reinvented themselves as Bavariancommunities, and there are gondolas in Las Vegas andon Lake Ontario. This geographical borrowing of strongplace identities is not uncommon, and where it occursthe qualities of place distinctiveness have been madeplaceless.


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Spirit & Sense of PlaceSpirit of place is a translation of the Latin genius loci.The Romans believed in a pantheon of gods, manyassociated with specific places. Each house, town, grove,and mountain was possessed by its own spirit that gaveidentity to that place by presence and actions. Though

elements of a belief in sacred spirits of place persistforexample, in geomancy and feng shuispirit of place nowgenerally refers to a mostly secular quality, eithernatural or built, that gives somewhere a distinctiveidentity.

In this profane meaning, spirit of place is understoodas an inherent quality, though subject to change. When asettlement is abandoned, as has happened with manyCanadian prairie towns, buildings collapse and spirit ofplace fades. Alternatively, as somewhere is built up and

lived in, spirit of place grows. In this way, even aninitially placeless suburb gradually acquires its ownidentity, at least for many who live there.

Sometimes sense of place is used to refer to whatmight more accurately be called spirit of placetheunique environmental ambience and character of alandscape or place. I prefer to keep a distinction betweensense of place and spirit of place, though clearly they areclosely connected.

As I understand it, sense of place is the faculty by which

we grasp spirit of place and that allows us to appreciatedifferences and similarities among places. Spirit of placeexists primarily outside us (but is experienced throughmemory and intention), while sense of place liesprimarily inside us (but is aroused by the landscapes weencounter). From a practical perspective, this liveddifference means that, while it is possible to designenvironments that enhance or diminish spirit of place, itis no more possible to design my sense of place than it isto design my memory.

Sense of place is a synaesthetic faculty that combinessight, hearing, smell, movement, touch, imagination,purpose, and anticipation. It is both an individual andintersubjective attribute, closely connected tocommunity as well as to personal memory and self. It isvariable. Some people are not much interested in theworld around them, and place for them is mostly a livedbackground. But others always attend closely to thecharacter of the places they encounter.


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Some Writings by Edward Relph

1970 An Inquiry into the Relations between Phenomenology

and Geography, Canadian Geographer, 14:193-201.

1976 Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.

1977 Humanism, Phenomenology and Geography,Annals,

Association of American Geographers, 67:177-79.

1981 Phenomenology. In M. Harvey & B. Holly, eds.,

Themes in Geographic Thought. London: Croom

Helm.

1981 Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography.

London: Croom Helm.

1984 Seeing, Thinking, and Describing Landscapes. In

T. Saarinen, D. Seamon, & J. Sell, eds.,Environmental

Perception and Behavior. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago:

Dept. of Geography Research Paper No. 209.

1985 Geographical Experiences and Being-in-the-World:

The Phenomenological Origins of Geography. In D.

Seamon and R. Mugerauer, eds,Dwelling, Place and

Environment. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

1987 The Modern Urban Landscape. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins Univ. Press.

1993 Modernity and the Reclamation of Place. In D.

Seamon, ed.,Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing.

Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

1997 Sense of Place. In S. Hanson, ed., Ten Geographic

Ideas that Changed the World. New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers University Press.

2001 The Critical Description of Confused Geographies. In

P. Adams, S. Hoelscher, and K. Till, eds., Textures of

Place. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

2004 Temporality and the Rhythms of Sustainable

Landscapes. In T. Mels, ed.,Reanimating Places.

Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

2008 Sense of Place and Emerging Social and

Environmental Challenges. In J. Eyles, and A.

Williams, eds., Sense of Place, Health and Quality of


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Life. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Exclusion & ExtensibilityA strong sense of place appears to be partly instinctivebut can also be learned and enhanced through thecareful practice of comparative observation andappreciation for what makes places distinctive [7]. Thedeepest sense of place seems to be associated withbeing at home, being somewhere you know and are

known by others, where you are familiar with thelandscape and daily routines and feel responsible forhow well your place works.

There are two crucial qualifications regardingresponsibility for place. First, while it is mostly a positiveattitude that contributes to social and environmentalresponsibility, sense of place can turn sour or bepoisoned when it becomes parochial and exclusionary.NIMBY-ism and gated communities are familiar examplesof negative place attitudes, but far more serious is ethnic

cleansing [8]. This exclusionary tendency is alwayslatent in sense of place. It can, however, be deliberatelycountered through the self-conscious development of acosmopolitan perspective that grasps similarities andrespects differences among places.

Second, sense of place varies over time. ThomasHomer-Dixon notes that, until about 1800, most peoplelived in rural areas, met, in their lifetimes, only a few


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hundred people, communicated by speech and walking,and rarely traveled more than a few miles from theirbirthplace [9]. A century later, this situation still appliedto my grandfather, who lived most of his life in a villagein South Wales where he ran a small construction firmand built the house in which he died 30 years later. Such

a geographically-focused life must have led to profoundplace associations, where each person, house, field,road, and custom was familiar and known by name. Insome remote areas and in nostalgic beliefs, this intimatefamiliarity lingers into the present, but it is mostly apre-modern experience.

In dramatic contrast, our sense of place at the start of

the 21st

century is spread-eagled across the world. Mydaily 25-kilometer commute to work in Toronto is fartherthan probably most residents in my grandfathers village

traveled in their lifetimes. Conferences on the other sideof the world, vacations in distant places, emails tocolleagues on other continentsall are commonplace.

In less than a century, both direct and vicarious placeexperiences have been enormously expanded. For largenumbers of people today, it is normal to visit hundreds ofplaces and meet thousands of people in a lifetime. Thegeographer Paul Adams uses the term extensibility todepict the unexceptional fact that lives now extendeasily among many places across scales from the local toglobal [10]. Modern networks of communication allowand even require that we continually situate ourselves inwider contexts and make comparisons with distantplaces, many of which we may have visited or at leastseen on television.

In short, sense of place today is far more diffuse anddistributed than even two generations ago. As a result,sense of place must, in some ways, be shallower. Isimply have not spent long enough living in one place todevelop the deep associations that, for my grandfather,must have been taken for granted. I do not mean to

suggest that the current extended sense of place is weakor deficientonly that it differs from pre-modern, rootedexperiences.

Indeed, some familiarity with different places facilitatesan appreciation of the lives of others and provides anantidote for a poisoned, exclusionary sense of place.Familiarity with other places is also essential for graspingthe connections between global processes and


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challenges and their manifestations in particular places.

Emerging ChallengesThe twentieth century began with optimisticexpectations that social and environmental problemscaused by industrialization would be corrected through

technological innovation and political reform. There wereremarkable improvements in productivity and standardsof living, but there were also genocidal wars,technologies of annihilation, irresponsible environmentaldamage, and a remarkable failure to reduce globalpoverty. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that thetwenty-first century began pessimistically with numerousexpressions of concern that our civilization is generatinginsoluble problems usually characterized as globalbecause they are widespread. What strikes me, however,is that their consequences will manifest locally,

synergistically, and probably unpleasantly in the diverseplaces of everyday life. Attempts to deal with theseconsequences will need to be at least partially groundedin a carefully articulated sense of place.

In her Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs suggests that weare rushing headlong into a dark age. Among othercauses, she blames the decline of scientific objectivity,systems of taxation remote from local problems, anddemise of community [11]. Martin Rees, the AstronomerRoyal, discusses the challenges posed by climate

change, terrorism, and possible technological error. Hegives our civilization no more than a fifty percent chanceof surviving to the end of the century [12].

Yet again, Thomas Homer-Dixon speculates that theproblems we have created might exceed our capacity tosolve them [13], while Howard Kunstler argues that weare sleepwalking into a future of converging andmutually amplifying catastrophes [15]. It is possible, ofcourse, that such pessimistic predictions will amount tonothing. Critics highlight previous dire predictions thatturned out to be wrong. This time, however, there are

many interconnected, large-scale challenges arisingsimultaneously. The key message of commentators likeJacobs and Rees is that our responsibility to cominggenerations requires that we take action now.

The consequences of these challenges are uncertain, buteven brief reflection suggests they will be locally variedand will, at least in part, require place-based strategiesfor their mitigation. For example, climate change is


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global but its consequences will be as locally varied asthe weather. As droughts, floods, and hurricanesintensify and become more commonplace, one realizesthat the infrastructure of both agriculture and citieswater supply, storm drains, flood walls, and soforthhas been designed for the weather of the past and

is rapidly becoming obsolete.

This shift suggests that, regardless of the causes ofclimate change, substantial modifications to existingfarms and cities will be needed to keep them productiveand habitable. If they are to be effective, thesemodifications must be founded in the specifics of places,since the changes in weather patterns andenvironmental risks are regional or local [16].Adaptations to protect New Orleans against more intensehurricanes have little relevance for dealing with longerdroughts in Sydney or Melbourne.

The challenges of climate change will be exacerbated byrising costs of energy. It is widely anticipated that oil andgas supplies will peak globally in the next few years anddecline thereafter, precisely as Chinese and Indianeconomic growth drives demand rapidly upward. Energycosts will rise dramatically, and the spatially distributedways of modern life will be seriously compromised. In thereduced energy economy of the future, it is inevitablethat, for most people, high energy and travel costs willmotivate an everyday life much more locally focused

than currently.

Living with Differences LocallySince the early1970s, a demographic imbalance hasdeveloped with rapid population growth in the ThirdWorld and stagnation or decline in the First World. Theeconomic disparities associated with this imbalance havebeen contributing factors to major migrations fromdeveloping to developed nations. One result has beenthe emergence of what Leonie Sandercock callsmongrel citiescities with racially and culturally mixed

populations.

Sandercock argues that a major challenge for

21st

-century urban planning is to find ways for stroppystrangers to live together without too much violenceinother words, to find ways to deal with ethnic conflictsand the politics of difference [16]. Sense of place is verymuch at stake here because of the extensibility ofimmigrants experience back to their home countries and


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because immigrants must establish connections withplaces originally built by cultures often vastly differentfrom their own. One likely result will be tensions amongdifferent cultural groups.

The solutions to these tensions, Sandercock claims, will

need to be worked out at the local level so that differentgroups can find ways to express their identities inneighborhoods that are neither ghettos nor zones ofexclusion. For this, she suggests, there is no appropriategeneral theory. Instead, the need is a continuous processof place making that is curious about spirit of place,learns from local knowledge, and respects diversity.

Global & Local TogetherInternational migrations are one component ofglobalizationthe integration of the world into a single

economic system connected by supply chains and flowsof people, capital, and information. These global flowsare controlled and monitored through a network of some100 world cities such as Tokyo, London, New York,Sydney, and Singapore [17]. World cities arecharacterized by hub airports, stock exchanges,corporate headquarters, international institutions, andfacilities for media production.

In many ways, these world cities are infused withplacelessness in that they are oriented more to theglobal marketplace than to their region or nation. But

these global cities also incorporate a local aspect. Whiletransnational offices and manufacturing facilities canbring jobs, kudos, and economic prosperity, they canalso be abruptly relocated to other world locations wherelabor costs are lower or circumstances more profitable.When this happens, local communities suffer as jobsmove away, people lose income, and inequities intensify[18].

Municipalities everywhere, but especially world cities,must find ways to protect themselves against such

sudden shifts in the global economy over which theyhave little or no control. Even Thomas Friedman, ajournalist with an unalloyed enthusiasm for globalization,suggests that such shifts pose a major challenge forfinding a healthy balance between preserving a sense oflocal identity, home, and community, yet doing what isnecessary to survive in a global economic system [20].In other words, the need is a clear sense of place thatalso acknowledges the spatially-extended character of


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the economic systems underpinning our lives.

Climate change, the end of cheap energy, globalization,ethnic tensions in mongrel cities, and other complexchallenges have arisen as pressing issues only in the last25 years. The impacts of these challenges have a global

reach, but their individual and combined consequenceswill be very different in quartiers of Paris, villages ofSomalia, suburbs of Las Vegas, exurbs of London,skyscrapers of Shanghai, or favelas of So Paulo.

Mitigation strategies will need to be founded in theparticularities of places because there the consequenceswill be most acute. But there is another, morephilosophical, reason why place will be central to futureplanning strategies: There has been a deepepistemological shift away from the rationalisticassumptions of modernismassumptions that promoted

universal, placeless solutions to environmental andsocial problemsto an acknowledgement of thesignificance of diversity.

Deep Epistemological ChangeSandercock celebrates the demise of scientific objectivitybecause she sees it as a repressive instrument ofpowerful groups with vested interests [20]. In contrast,Jane Jacobs considers its demise to be one cause of apotential dark age [21]. What both thinkers agree on isthat scientific objectivity is in retreat, a view supported

by many philosophers of science.

Stephen Toulmin, for example, notes that earlytwentieth-century scholars shared a confidence inscientific method but then declares: How little of thatconfidence remains today [22]. In 1989, Thomas Nagelsuggested bluntly that objectivity is just one way ofunderstanding reality [24]. Modernist, rationalistic waysof thinking (which prevailed for 400 years andunderpinned the development of industrial civilization)have lost their impetus as we enter a period of

postmodernity.

It is difficult to assess the depth of this epistemologicalshift, not least because it is partly masked by thepersistence of elements of the modernist paradigmlocked into habits of thought, legislation, and establishedpractices. Nevertheless, the shift is revealed inincreasing political and legal challenges to thosepractices, in the importance given to heritage


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preservation (modernism swept aside everything old), inthe widespread acknowledgement of the merits ofdifferences of all kinds (modernism celebrateduniformity), and in the empowerment of women,Indigenous peoples, and minorities (modernism waspatriarchal and colonialist).

In postmodernity, no single approach, including scientificobjectivity, is arrogated above others. Instead, there aremultiple discourses to be heard and considered.Scientific objectivity has, of course, proven to be aparticularly effective way of dealing with the world, andJacobs is right to suggest it should not be quicklydismissed.

One can no longer assume, however, that scientificobjectivity is the single best way to understand theworld. The postmodernist position demands that every

situation be grasped in its own terms; every actionscientifically based or notcan be contested. Whereasmodernist planning aimed to provide comprehensivesolutions to what were considered universal problems,postmodernity requires negotiated strategies adapted tospecific individuals, groups, and conditions. In otherwords, in both theory and practice, postmodernity isoriented to diversity and therefore to place.

A Practical Sense of PlaceThere has always been a practical aspect to sense of

place whereby it might be translated into buildings,landscapes, and townscapes. This transformationinvolves not just construction but all means of design,planning, making, doing, maintaining, caring for,restoring, and otherwise taking responsibility for howsomewhere appears and works.

Until the nineteenth century, a practical sense of placewas mostly unself-conscious as towns, villages, andfarms were made without much attention to place as anidentifiable phenomenon of human existence. Builders

presumably followed some combination of experience,necessity, tradition, and sensitivity to site. This localdistinctiveness (which we now admire as tourists or asdevotees of place) developed in large measure becauseit was difficult and expensive to move building materialsvery far. Traditions arose for the use of whatever waslocally available.

Industrialization and modernism undermined these local


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practices, partly through the use of placeless materialslike iron, concrete, metal, and glass; partly through theinvention of cheap means of transport; and partlythrough the invention of styles that were self-consciouslyinternational. Guiding design principles were efficiencyand standardization.

The outcome was an International Stylebe it officebuildings, multi-family housing, or interiorsthat couldfit almost anywhere. This largely placeless approach todesign peaked in the 1960s and has faltered since, asmodernism lost momentum. Today, the more dominantapproach is that the diversity of communities and placesshould be emphasized rather than minimized in design.How this is to be done, however, is not entirely clear,although heritage preservation, ecosystem planning, anda critical reinterpretation of earlier regional traditions aresome of the ways offered.

What is clear is that a postmodern approach to diversitycannot be based in a simple return to a pre-modernsense of place. Postmodernism may celebrate diversityin design and appearance, but air travel, electroniccommunications, and standardized technologies areinvaluable for reasons of efficiency, safety, andconvenience. A postmodern sense of place issimultaneously local and extended.

I have already suggested that, although the 21st

century

will present social and environmental challenges at aglobal scale, the individual and combined effects will belocally diverse. A practical sense of place will need be anessential aspect of any strategy to mitigate the globalchallenges. This practical sense of place must reflect theextensibility of postmodern life and grasp the broader,global aspects of the challenges it confronts.

What is needed is a pragmatic sense of place thatintegrates an appreciation of place identity with anunderstanding of extensibility. A central aim would be to

seek appropriate local actions to deal with emerging,larger-scale social and environmental challenges.

PragmatismOver a century ago, William James wrote thatpragmatism is the attitude of looking away from firstthings, principles, categories, supposed necessities;and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences,facts [24]. Pragmatism is an attitude that acknowledges


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change and variety: The world we live in exists diffusedand distributed in the form of an indefinitely numerouslot of eaches, coherent in all sorts of ways and degrees[25].

In founding pragmatism as a philosophical movement,

James and his contemporary, Charles S Peirce, declaredthat it should not be merely practical. Rather, they saw itpotentially as a philosophical means of resolving logicaland methodological confusions in science andphilosophy.

Today the philosophical understanding of pragmatismhas changed. Scientific research is a corporate andstate-aided activity expected to get practical resultsadevelopment occurring at the same time rational,scientific arguments have lost much of theirepistemological authority. One consequence is that

neo-pragmatic philosophers like Stephen Toulmin andRichard Rorty now associate a tone of commonsensepracticality with pragmatist philosophy. In the absence ofa firm foundation for choosing between courses ofaction, these philosophers suggest the best strategy is toattend to James realm of consequences and facts. Wehave to return to the world of where and when, writesToulmin, to get back in touch with the experience ofeveryday life, and manage our affairs one day at a time[26]. Rorty proposes that critical thinking must nowinvolve playing off various concrete alternative

strategies against one another rather than testing themagainst criteria of rationality [27].

The relevance of pragmatism to a postmodern sense ofplace is clear. In postmodernity, diversity isacknowledged in all its forms, and places are the diversecontexts of everyday life. Since there is no longer anoverarching ideology that justifies scientific approachesas better than other points of view, new buildingdevelopments and other place changes are almostalways contested. It is nevertheless essential to get

things done and respond to challenges like climatechange and cultural conflict that, if nothing is done, willundermine the quality of life

A pragmatic approach may be able to accomplish thistask through careful assessment of facts andconsequences, engaging people in discussions of theplace and reaching imperfect but workable agreementsin regard to which strategies are most appropriate for


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dealing with the challenges as they impact particularplaces.

A Pragmatic Sense of PlaceA pragmatic sense of place combines an appreciation fora localitys uniqueness with a grasp of its relationship to

regional and global contexts. It is simultaneously place-focused and geographically extended. It is not a newway of thinkingin fact, aspects of it have always been apart of place experience but are now widely latent.

A pragmatic sense of place is apparent in contrastingcontexts like the designation and restoration of WorldHeritage sites, locally inspired artworks and festivals thatawaken sense of place, supermarket chains that selllocal produce, and advocates of the slow-food movementand regional cuisine.

More generally, everyday life involves concerns such ashealth, education, pollution, and new developmentalllocal, practical concerns that are part of place familiarityand affection. At the same time, everyday life involvesdistant travel and economic and electronic connectionsaround the globe. In short, a firm basis for a pragmaticsense of place is to be found in the experience of placeand in the background of contemporary everyday life.

It will not be easy to make explicit what many peopleknow implicitly and to turn this knowledge into

consistent actions. To resist the poisonous placetemptations of parochialism and exclusion, a pragmaticsense of place requires the difficult exercise of whatmight be called cosmopolitan imagination, which cangrasp both the spirit and extensibility of places, seeingthem as nodes in a web of larger processes.

Cultural conflicts, climate change, water shortages, andthe effects of escalating energy costs will not fademagically into the background, nor is it enough to hopethat muddling through will be sufficient to deal with the

problems. Strategies based on finding technical orpolitical fixes may be possible but are hardly wise, giventhat new problems will almost certainly arise fromunintended consequences of new technologies.Furthermore, there is no way to push the epistemologicalgenie of postmodernism back into the hermeticallysealed bottle of rationalism, so there can be no questionthat rationalistic, top-down solutions will be deeplycontested.


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Perhaps the most hopeful, reasonable strategy fordealing with emerging social and environmentalchallenges is to find ways to mitigate their effects inparticular places. This strategy requires that everylocality, place, and community must adapt differently. Apragmatic sense of place can simultaneously facilitate

these adaptations, contribute to a broader awakening ofsense of place, and reinforce the spirit of place in all itsdiverse manifestations.

Endnotes1. Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An IntellectualHistory of the 20th Century(NY: Perennial Books, 2001),p. 674.

2. John Cameron, ed., Changing Places: Re-imaginingAustralia(Sydney: Longueville Books, 2003), p. 309.

3. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures(NY:Basic Books, 2000), p. 5.

4. An account of this nesting and the way in which placesopen out to larger sets of places is given in Jeff Malpas,Place and Experience(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.Press, 1999), p. 105.

5. Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion,1976).

6, Yi-Fu Tuan, in Cosmos and Hearth: A CosmopolitesView(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996),suggests that individuals are oriented either to a localistor cosmopolitan perspective. He argues that, althoughaspects of both are combined in our experiences of theworld, they cannot be perfectly balanced, so individualsfall to one side or the other. He identifies his ownorientation as cosmopolitan.

7. See, for example, Peter Hay, Writing Place:Unpacking an Exhibition Catalogue Essay, in Cameron,Changing Places, pp. 27285.

8. This idea of a poisoned sense of place is developed inEdward Relph, Sense of Place, in Susan Hanson, ed.,Ten Geographical Ideas that Changed the World

(Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1997).

9. Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap(NY: Knopf,2000), p. 25.

10. Paul Adams, The Boundless Self(Syracuse, NY:S racuse Univ. Press, 2005).


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