Changing Places: The Nature And Importance Of A Place Flashcards
What is a place?
A place can mean a definite location on a map - its latitude and longitude coordinates.
However it is more of a location with meaning.
Apart from location, all aspects of places and the meanings they have are changing
- physical characteristics (long term - rivers, etc, short term - volcano erupting and changing the landscape, etc)
- Human characteristics (whole lifetimes spent in a place or people migrating in and out)
- the flows in and out of a place (money, people, etc.)
- the sense of a place (emotional meanings, e.g. someone’s home or childhood home or where they travel to)
What is an insiders perspective of a place?
Someone with a strong relationship with a place, they are familiar with it, e.g. may have grown up there. Feels welcome and safe in the area and is aware of the norms and customs there. Feel you belong there
What’s an outsiders perspective to a place?
Less familiar to the place, as may not have lived or spent much time there (e.g. tourists, visitors, etc.) or they may live there, but feel out of place, or unwelcome to the place - don’t feel like they belong there. E.g. a lack of community, or language barriers, etc - socially excluded. (E.g. in Glastonbury, outsiders will visit the area for the festival and think it is buzzing and full of energy - yet insiders will know the place all year round is not like that)
What are the 4 categories of a place?
- Near places
- Far places
- experienced places
- media places
What is a near place?
Thought as geographically near to wear someone lives, people are more likely to feel like insiders to near places as they are more likely to have experienced them and feel comfortable in them (e.g. Paignton is a near place for people who live in Torquay, so people that live in Torquay may feel comfortable in Paignton)
What is a far place?
Geographically distant from where someone lives, people are more likely to feel like outsides to far places as they are less likely to have experienced them before and not feel very comfortable in them (e.g. someone from UK going on holiday to Greece, Greece is a far place and people living in the UK may not feel very comfortable visiting there)
What is an experienced place?
Places people have lived or spent time in. When a person visits or lives in a place, their experiences, such as things they see and the people they meet, shape their sense of that place. The longer we spend in a place, the stronger the sense of place
What are media places?
Places people have not been to, but have created a sense of place for through their depiction in media (e.g. books, art and films)
Although, a persons sense of a media place can be very different to the lived experience of that place, this is because the media may present a place in a particular way and for a particular purpose (e.g. tourist industries advertising a place as beautiful, when in reality it might not be)
What can places be shaped by?
Endogenous and exogenous factors
What are endogenous factors?
The internal factors that shape a places character. They refer to the physical and human features that distinguish one place from another.
What are some examples of endogenous factors?
- Topography (relief, altitude, aspect)
- Built environment (housing and building age, type, density, etc.)
- Cultural factors (language, religion, heritage, events, etc)
- Demographics (populations size, structure, age and ethnicity)
- Political factors (role of local council and/or resident groups)
- Socio-economic factors (employment, education, income, crime, health, etc.)
- Proximity to water (e.g. near the coast)
- Land use (retail, offices, factories, open-space, parkland, etc)
- Geology (e.g. rock type)
What’s an example of endogenous factors affecting a place?
E.g. many Northern and Welsh mining towns owe their existence to rich seams of coal underground
E.g. Totnes is lowest ‘bridging point’ on the river Dart. This was important as its role of a market town
What is exogenous factors?
External factors that shape a places character. This includes the relationship to other places and the flows in and out of a place (money, people, resources). E.g. a village may supply worker from a nearby town, etc. also decisions and politics made somewhere else.
- these can affect the character of places, for example, people live in a little village for the nice environment, but work in the city where their is greater employment opportunities.
What do we mean by the ‘character’ of a place?
- socio- economic (employment, income, deprivation and health)
- cultural (ethnic diversity, immigration, language, food, festival, etc.)
- demographic (age structure, gender)
- built environment and infrastructure (housing type/age, land use, derelict lands, transport links)
- sense of place (place meaning, emotional attachment)
- lived experience (deprivation, crime and safety, community cohesion/conflict, environmental quality, facilities available, etc.)
Why are places important?
- identity - how people see themselves and how places develop someone’s identity (e.g. through religion - church’s, mosques, etc bring people of similar faiths together, and politics - places can develop their own political importance or identity, which people may use or engage with)
- belonging to a place - people define themselves through a sense of place
However - globalisation of places - leading to homogenisation, where local cultures and variation are eroded and more global chains introduced, making a place feel less important (clone towns) - e.g. McDonald’s
- localisation of a place - places fighting against place globalisation, for many there is now a greater focus on the promotion of local goods and services. (E.g. Totnes has anti-chain stores, Totnes pound, etc)
