The term sense of place refers to a multidimensional, complex construct used to characterize the relationship between people and spatial settings. It is a characteristic that some geographic places have and some do not, while to others it is a feeling or perception held by people (not by the place itself). It is often used in relation to those characteristics that make a place special or unique, as well as to those that foster a sense of authentic human attachment and belonging. Others, such as geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, have pointed to senses of place that are not "positive," such as fear. Some students and educators engage in "place-based education" in order to improve their "sense(s) of place," as well as to use various aspects of place as educational tools in general. The term is used in urban and rural studies in relation to place-making and place-attachment of communities to their environment or homeland. The term sense of place is used to describe how someone perceives and experiences a place or environment. Anthropologists Steven Feld and Keith Basso define sense of place as: 'the experiential and expressive ways places are known, imagined, yearned for, held, remembered, voiced, lived, contested and struggled over […]’. Many indigenous cultures are losing their sense of place because of climate change and "ancestral homeland, land rights and retention of sacred places".
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👉 Sense of place in the context of Location
In geography, location or place is used to denote a region (point, line, or area) on Earth's surface. The term location generally implies a higher degree of certainty than place, the latter often indicating an entity with an ambiguous boundary, relying more on human or social attributes of place identity and sense of place than on geometry. A populated place is called a settlement.
Sense of place in the context of Place identity
Place identity or place-based identity refers to a cluster of ideas about place and identity in the fields of geography, urban planning, urban design, environmental psychology, ecocriticism and urban sociology/ecological sociology. Place identity is sometimes called urban character, neighbourhood character or local character. Place identity has become a significant issue in the last 50 years in urban planning and design. Place identity concerns the meaning and significance of places for their inhabitants and users, and how these meanings contribute to individuals' conceptualizations of self. Place identity also relates to the context of modernity, history and the politics of representation. In other words, historical determinism, which intersects historical events, social spaces and groups by gender, class, ethnicity. In this way, it explores how spaces have evolved over time by exploring the social constructs through time and the development of space, place and power. To the same extent, the politics of representation is brought into context, as the making of place identity in a community also relates to the exclusion or inclusion in a community. Through this, some have argued that place identity has become an area for social change because it gives marginalized communities agency over their own spaces. In the same respect, it is argued that place identity has also been used to intervene social change and perpetuate oppression from a top-down approach by creating segregated spaces for marginalized communities.
Sense of place in the context of Neighbourhood character
Neighborhood character refers to the 'look and feel of an area', in particular a residential area. It also includes the activities that occur there. In everyday usage, it can often be synonymous with local character, residential character, urban character and place identity, but those terms can have more specific meanings in connection with urban planning and conservation.
The neighborhood character ascribed to an area can be both descriptive and prescriptive, and may or may not form an explicit component of planning policy. However, planning policies inevitably impact upon the way a place is used and how it feels to be there, along with a range of other social, cultural, ecological, physical, and economic factors that shape human settlements. As interest in the concept of place has increased since the 1970s, urban designers and planners have accordingly become more focused on issues of character. The way that character is regulated varies from place to place, with some planning systems making more overt references to it than others.
Sense of place in the context of Place-based education
Place-based education, sometimes called pedagogy of place, place-based learning, experiential education, community-based education, environmental education or more rarely, service learning, is an educational philosophy. The term was coined in the early 1990s by Laurie Lane-Zucker of The Orion Society and Dr. John Elder of Middlebury College. Orion's early work in the area of place-based education was funded by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Although educators have used its principles for some time, the approach was developed initially by The Orion Society, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization, as well as Professor David Sobel, Project Director at Antioch University New England.
Place-based education seeks to help communities through employing students and school staff in solving community problems. Place-based education differs from conventional text and classroom-based education in that it understands students' local community as one of the primary resources for learning. Thus, place-based education promotes learning that is rooted in what is local—the unique history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art of a particular place—that is, in students' own "place" or immediate schoolyard, neighborhood, town or community. According to this pedagogy, grade school students often lose what place-based educators call their "sense of place" through focusing too quickly or exclusively on national or global issues. This is not to say that international and domestic issues are peripheral to place-based education, but that students should first have a grounding in the history, culture and ecology of their surrounding environment before moving on to broader subjects.