Changing Places (Booklet One) Flashcards
What is location?
Where a place is, e.g. coordinates on a map
What is locale?
Setting where everyday activities take place. Takes into account the effect that people have on their setting. A place is shaped by the people, cultures and customs within it. Locales are setting for everyday life e.g. workplaces and churches. Can bring people together and exclude people.
What is sense of place?
The subjective and emotional attachment that people have to a place. Differs from person to person.
What is topophilia?
A strong, emotional attachment to a place is known as topophilia.
What is topophobia?
An aversion or hatred to a place is known as topophobia.
What is a cultural sense of place?
A set of characteristics of a particular area of the world: an idea of sense of place is intersubjective i.e. possessed by a group of people and recognised by outsiders.
What is Genius Loci?
Genius Loci is the spirit or guardian deity of a place. However, this has become more secularised and so the meaning has changed similar to that of “sense of place”.
What is the descriptive approach to theorising place?
The idea that the world is a set of places and each place can be studied as is distinct. This approach focuses on the unique characteristics of place.
What is the social constructionist to theorising place?
Sees place as a product of a particular set of social processes occurring at a particular time. This approach focuses on why a place is the way it is.
What is the phenomenological approach to theorising place?
Interested in how individuals experience place, and the personal relationships between person and place. This approach focuses on how places are perceived, experiences and given meaning.
What is positionality?
Factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, politics and class that influence how we perceive different places.
How has gender effected women’s experience of place?
Fear of sexual harassment on public transport, so bad in Mexico City that women only buses were implemented. Perception of place is based on the people they encounter there.
As their journeys are unpleasant, they might have bad experiences of the place they travel to.
How has race/ethnicity effected people’s experience of place?
In Berlin people stare at Black women
People’s race can lead to a sense of unwelcomeness in New Orleans.
People of colour feeling unsafe and out of place.
Discuss Kos, Greece
Can think about the sense of place at both a cultural scale and an individual scale. Two different individual meanings: for tourists it is a place for everyone to be enjoyed, however, migrants have a different experience being alienated and frowned upon by locals.
What is a contested place?
The fact that people experience places differently can lead to the meaning of place being contested i.e. not everyone can agree on what it means.
What are Jon Anderson’s ideas about the material and non-material traces of place?
Material = physical additions e.g. buildings Non-material = events or emotions.
What is an insider perspective of place?
A viewpoint from an individual within a place who lives there and has an experience of the place.
What is an outsider perspective of place?
Viewpoint of someone who is not from the certain place/doesn’t live there/little or no experience of that place.
How can insider and outsider perspectives of place could lead to conflicts and issues?
E.g. conflicts over fracking in Lancashire
Insiders may be protective over their place
If outsiders make decisions that effect insiders they may feel upset by this/protective.
What is socio-spatial exclusion?
The concept that the dominant groups who have the economic, cultural and social power in society determine who is allowed to be in a place and how they should behave. This leads to the exclusion of some groups in society from those places, often those who are also excluded socially, politically and economically.
Give examples of spatial exclusion.
Move towards ‘hostile’ architecture in cities, e.g. sloping benches, anti-homeless spikes, benches divided by armrests. Increasing numbers of laws criminalising homelessness e.g. against sleeping in public.
Give examples of social exclusion.
(Homeless) Separated from family, friends, community. Unemployed so often excluded from the world of work. Often on margins of society e.g. mentally ill, suffered from domestic violence etc.
