The spirit of place of Bhaktapur,Nepal

There is no clear approach to defining the authenticity of the ‘spirit and feeling’ of a place or how it could inform heritage conservation. I argue that the notion of spirit of place may be defined in a manner that directly links it with the concept of cultural significance of historic places, how it is understood by a community and with heritage conservation goals and development needs of that place. Residents in the World Heritage Town of Bhaktapur, Nepal, were interviewed to explore their shared understanding of its spirit of place. The residents identify the spirit of place of Bhaktapur in terms of four interrelated place dimensions; that is, the ‘sense of sacrality’, the ‘sense of community’, the ‘sense of historicity’ and the ‘sense of serenity’.     

Gendered and generational experiences of place and power in the rural Irish landscape

The out-migration of young people from rural regions is a selective and highly gendered process suggesting considerable differentiation in the way young men and women identify with and experience rural life. Gender imbalance in rural youth out-migration has prompted feminist researchers to consider more carefully linkages between the gendered nature of rural space and place and the social and spatial mobility of rural young men and women. Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a rural Irish fishing community, this article explores the gendered dimensions of rural youth experience. Theoretically grounded in the conceptual triad of gender, power and place, this article considers how young men and women experience ‘the rural’ as masculine and feminine subjects. Special attention is given to the ways in which relations of power in ‘the rural’ are articulated, contested and accommodated in the everyday lives of local young men and women. As well as highlighting the ways in which rural space and place is male-dominated, this article foregrounds other power relations at play in the rural. As part of this effort, I problematize male power and point to the ‘effectivity of girls as conduits of power’. I argue that subjectivities of intra-gender relations are a critical dimension of rural youth experience and cannot be overlooked in research on rural youth experience and emigration.     

‘It’s a very isolating world’: the journey to HIV care for women living with HIV in British Columbia,Canada

HIV health services research conventionally defines place in terms of proximity to care. However, understandings of place must also include the social spaces that women living with HIV (WLWH) occupy which shape their experience of health and access to care. Drawing on focus group data from the Canadian HIV Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Cohort Study, we explored how 28 WLWH navigate geographic place and social space in attempting to access HIV-related healthcare within and across a range of urban to rural localities in British Columbia (BC), Canada. We describe how existing services, even if physically close, can be socially marginalizing as women confront HIV stigma, racism, and classism, which operate to exclude women from the places and spaces they must access for care. We also emphasize how women enact ‘geographies of resistance’ and succeed in carving out their own safe options for care and support. Finally, we share recommendations identified by women themselves towards developing local and community-driven ‘geographies of change’ that support the health and healing of diverse communities of WLWH. Our findings stress the urgent need to acknowledge and redress socio-spatial barriers to care and to work with WLWH to co-create a therapeutic landscape that reflects women’s diverse identities, localities, emotions, and experiences.     

Local history as productive nostalgia? Change,continuity and sense of place in rural England

Local history groups are often negatively associated with a tendency to indulge in nostalgic practices that yearn for a romanticized past and propagate resistance to change. Their role in local politics and power networks (particularly in relation to planning and development processes) has also been critiqued as exacerbating issues of social inequality and exclusion. While not contesting the realities of such arguments, this paper adds nuance to such debates using the notion of ‘productive’ or ‘mobile’ nostalgia to explore possibilities for more positive renderings of local history and heritage activities. Empirical evidence from qualitative research in a rural village in Norfolk, England, is drawn on to demonstrate the role of these practices in providing a sense of continuity amid a continuously changing locale through the reassertion of place identities and attachments. Although by no means apolitical, this process need not necessarily be one of preservationism and resistance to change, but can be a mechanism through which residents are able to accept, or even welcome, changes to the social and physical constitution of their village. The paper also critically considers the value of productive nostalgia as a concept through which to explore local history practices and wider heritage movements.     

‘The Official Feast’: cultural tensions in U.K. carnival

Abstract

This paper reveals how U.K. street carnival is located within policy discourses that facilitate notions of creative economy, inter-place competition and the representation of institutionally-preferred versions of local, regional and national place-identity. The paper draws on ethnographic research within two community town carnivals and the professional Battle for the Winds carnival performances that launched the 2012 Olympic sailing at Weymouth. It considers the evolution of policy-driven carnival vocabularies that were designed to articulate preferred ‘Jurassic Coast’ and Olympic place identities for the south-west U.K. during 2012, and their effect on two vernacular, community street carnivals in East Devon and Dorset. The paper exposes the cultural tension between these vernacular events and the ‘official feast’ of Jurassic Coast and Olympic carnival, in terms of their performance of contradictory place-identities and contested notions of artistic community. It describes the popular challenge to aesthetic hegemony that these community carnivals presented during 2012. Finally, the author argues for a reassessment of the artistic value of vernacular carnivals, and affirms their status as a culture of resistance that creates alternative, sometimes inconvenient, symbolic constructions of community and place to those preferred by institutional actors operating within a neo-liberal discourse of inter-place competition.     

Commoditizing the safari and making space for conflict: Place,identity and parks in East Africa

Increased resource scarcity, the social construction of nature, the disintegration of moral economy and associated policy shifts are often cited as the main drivers of resource conflicts in East Africa. Research in geography, anthropology and rural sociology has unveiled how common explanations of resource conflicts overlook multi-scalar political, economic, social, cultural and environmental tensions. The purpose of this study is to provide more nuanced explanations of resource conflicts by incorporating three disparate but related threads of literature. Using literatures on the commodification of nature, multi-stranded notions of identity and geographical conceptualizations of ‘place’, I demonstrate how three transformational moments structure and propagate conflicts between herders and protected area managers around a national park in Kenya. I argue that the rise of a commoditized form of nature tourism coupled with idealized notions of ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ have altered the micro-geography of interaction between herders and protected area managers. These altered geographies of interaction have diluted the shared history and traditional relations of reciprocity, created new social milieux, and lead to the creation of binary identities among herders and protected area managers. The enforcement of these binary identities culminates in conflict.     

Villagizing the city: turning rural ethnic heritage into urban modernity in southwest China

This paper examines the rural ethnic heritage-inspired transformation of the built environment of a relatively small county town in China. The paper explores the ways village-based ethnic heritage is being repositioned by local leaders as a resource for tourism-oriented revenue generation and for ‘improving’ the ‘quality’ and behaviour of town residents. Viewing heritage as a ‘technology of government,’ the paper provides an analysis based on three interrelated themes: the discourses by which town leaders and planners have conceived the heritage development project as one of improvement, the spatial practices by which those discourses have been realised in the built environment, and the ways residents themselves have appropriated and ‘inhabited’ this new ‘villagized’ city as they go about their everyday urban lives. Based on ethnographic field work, a survey, and extended interviews over a period of four years, the paper finds the town leadership’s faith in the ability of the built environment to shape and improve the conduct of citizens to be overstated. While the town’s transformation has generated a new sense of urban modernity among residents, their ways of inhabiting and using urban space have little relevance to the ‘heritagized’ environment in which they now live.     

Planting Roots,Making Place: Urban Autochthony in Port Vila Vanuatu

A contentious issue for Pacific Islanders, as well as researchers of the Pacific Islands, is ni-Vanuatu notions of ‘belonging’ to urban centres. Previous research in Vanuatu has shown that despite generations of people born and raised in Port Vila, the nation's capital, the urban centre is not generally perceived as a ‘place’ to which urban migrants can say they are from. For many, exclaiming that one is ‘from’ town is tantamount to admitting one has ‘no place’. This paper, based on fieldwork among a group of urban young men in Freswota, a residential community of Port Vila, argues that in contrast to this, Freswota young men are generating a new locative identity. Their urban community rather than their parents' home island places is emerging as their primary location of belonging and the source of their sense of self, personhood and social identification. As such, these young men are the urban autochthones of the country.     

There's No‐Place Like Home: emotional geographies of researching ‘race’ and refuge provision in Britain

In this article we draw on feminist and psychodynamic theory to discuss processes of researching service provision for minoritised women escaping domestic violence. Our aim is to take seriously the ways particular contexts, in this case as produced by the process of researching this topic, elicit specific responses. In particular we offer some conceptual tools for analysing the emotions generated in these geographies. Taking the ‘space’ of the research team as our focus, we analyse how culturally defined meanings of ‘home’, community and refuge that were the focus of our research topic also functioned as a lens through which tensions and dynamics within the project team could be understood. Just as secrecy, silence and shame figured in our participants' accounts, so they circulated between the team. Drawing on the motifs of the intersection of ‘space’ and ‘place’ (as they occur within discourses and practices around domestic violence and minoritisation) as well as the psychodynamic notions of ‘mirroring’ and ‘parallel process’, we consider the extent to which the combined racialised, gendered and institutional relationships structuring the research team constituted it as a ‘non‐place’. This is because it was a space produced by the research process which, other than this, had no acknowledged tradition of history or memory to anchor it. We discuss how this space functioned paradoxically to foster creativity and innovation in generating discourses and practices working across difference, as well as inevitably at times recapitulating prevailing power (including racialised) relationships. We end by evaluating the usefulness of such concepts for wider analyses of intercultural and antiracist feminist practice.     

On plantations,prisons, and a black sense of place

The complexities of black geographies—shaped by histories of colonialism, transatlantic slavery, contemporary practices of racism, and resistances to white supremacy—shed light on how slave and post-slave struggles in the Americas form a unique sense of place. Rather than simply identifying black suffering and naming racism (and opposition to it) as the sole conceptual schemas through which to ‘understand’ or ‘know’ blackness or race, it is emphasized that a black sense of place, black histories, and communities are not only integral to production of space, but also that the analytical interconnectedness of race, practices of domination, and geography undoubtedly put pressure on how we presently study and assess racial violence.     

CHORA IN CURRENT GEOGRAPHICAL THOUGHT: PLACES OF CO‐DESIGN AND RE‐MEMBERING

Reading places is integrally linked to geographical studies. One of the oldest Western formulations of place is chora, which was introduced in Plato's Timaeus and has thereafter contributed to a rich tradition of interpretations. The geographical interest in chora has gradually increased as it has proven its value in making sense of the flowing conditions of contemporary social change. The gradual turn towards chora is also due to intense methodological rethinking in geography during recent decades. This article discusses the latest formulations of the geographies of chora, and focuses especially on the interpretations inspired by Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. Their formulations of chora, including succeeding critiques, have encouraged us to rethink places of co‐design and re‐membering as illustrations of the paradoxes of chora as a ‘place in‐between’.     

地方感的多态与分异：不同人群对旧城街区的感知

地方感指人与地方的情感关联,是地理学特别是人文主义地理学的关键概念。快速城镇化使得“地方”剧变,地方感也变得复杂多样,多元主体的地方感形成机制值得探讨。本文基于人文主义地理学视角,选取江苏省如皋市东大街为典型案例,通过实地调研,运用半结构化访谈等方法,将不同主体的地方感归纳为三类：根植型、创造型和关怀型。老年原住民形成了根植型地方感,其重点在血缘联结、归属感、身份认同;沿街商户生成了创造型地方感,主要涉及美学、经验与私人空间等;虽从地方抽离但仍与地方保持着积极情感纽带的“乡邻”们则形成了关怀型地方感,主要涉及关注、社会互动、熟悉等。借助案例剖析和质性研究方法,本文对地方感多元类型和形成机制的深入探讨将有助于理解地方感的多态性和分异性。     

Refusal,circulation, refuge: young (im) mobilities in rural Israel

Recent years have seen the Israeli state investing considerable efforts in the alleviation of unprecedentedly high inter-regional inequalities. Improved transportation networks intended to better connect peripheral residents to centrally located opportunities have been at the heart of this policy known as ‘periphery cancellation’. In this article, we study strategies deployed by young peripherals as they engage with the statist call for enhanced mobility between regions. Drawing on qualitative research conducted at ‘A Center for the Young’ in a small town in the predominantly rural Upper Galilee, we examine the extent to which young adults negotiate the recent state-led mobility turn. Taking a critical nobilities approach, we argue that statist aspirations of mobilizing peripherals to central hubs collide with socio-spatial constraints faced by many young residents. The official call for mobility is frequently met by a sense of spatial (im)mobility articulated by young agents who deploy instead alternative strategies to achieve socio-spatial mobility. Termed refusal, circulation, and refuge, these strategies draw on notions of peripheral stagnation, attributed to both state policies that have long marginalized the area as well as rooted conventions about the social and cultural inertia of peripheral residents. These strategies, we contend, widen existing inequalities between central haves and peripheral have nots while solidifying a sense of socio-spatial disenfranchisement among many of its young inhabitants.     

The Land of Allium: an exploration into the magic of place

Magical. A common adjective used to describe places. But does the magic of place spring from genius loci? Or could it be that we are the magicians, casting spells to transform places into what we desire (or what we fear)? Our sense of place is not a mirror on reality. We come to know places by inscribing our fantasies atop them, by writing onto the landscape our own imagined geographies. C.S. Lewis provides an intriguing glimpse into sense of place through the Pevensie children and their experience in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: a mere wardrobe becomes a complex fantasy world in which the children play and interact. As adults, and as societies, we take real geographies and treat them as Lewis's wardrobe, creating Narnias in the depths of our most mundane landscapes. In this paper I explore the magic of place through an autobiographical photo essay set in a nature preserve in eastern Kansas. The stories I tell highlight in a literary and artistic way the phenomenological aspects of sense of place and the potential political import of the geographical imagination.     

Street child spaces: belonging,conflict and resistance in the city of Durban through the eyes of street youth

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned with the everyday ‘spatial tactics’ deployed by children in a street situation in order to deal with notions of public space that define them as ‘out of place’, marginal and deviant. Using photovoice, we reconstruct former street children’s definitions of and feelings about their spaces in the city, bringing into view a complex set of social problems, attitudes and strategies that moves beyond the traditional binary notion of street children as either deviants or victims. This work points to the importance of finding ways to ensure the voices of marginalized and disadvantaged children are heard and presents the narratives that are important to our understanding of their worlds. Analyzing their spatiality in contexts of conflict, belonging and resistance, we found that children and youth in a street situation are mainly concerned with empowering themselves and resisting dominant labels and police repression.     

Planning with communities in regeneration projects: toward a gendered civic capacity

This article explores the central role that gender plays across a variety of scales in the development of civic capacity among residents of Meonot-Yam neighborhood in Bat-Yam, Israel. The article proposes a new, gendered reading of civic capacity which involves transforming women’s and men’s ways of thinking and acting out of the ordinary in this regeneration project, with the aim of updating and revising the term as related to planning with communities approaches. Using a performative understanding of gender based on feminist poststructuralist analysis to identity knowledge/power and place, we combine the analysis of community and personal scales, looking at ‘paradoxical moments’ to understand how the transformation in power relations has taken place and how civic capacity is developed. We do so by conducting a critical analysis of biweekly meeting minutes and in-depth interviews held over a three-year period (2010–2013). This civic capacity development is particularly important for women who manage to enhance and increase their social capital throughout those years.     

Intersectionality in feminist geographies

This paper introduces a special themed section that arose from an International Conference on Feminist Geographies and Intersectionality: Places, Identities and Knowledges, held in 2016 at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Six scholars of Canada, France, Greece, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States seek to deal in five short papers with the intersectional dynamics of power structures and the central role of place within them. Here we situate the developments of intersectionality in feminist geographies in relation to the role of place and space in constituting intersectional relations, the relevance of context for the development of intersectionality and the use of different methodologies for research on it.     

‘A house for dead people’: memory and spatial transformation in Red Location,South Africa

One of several new South African post-apartheid memory projects, the Red Location Museum in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth opened in 2006, in a century-old informal settlement with strong histories of resistance. The museum was intended to acknowledge the area’s contribution to the liberation struggle, and contribute to dismantling apartheid urban geographies by producing a tourist and cultural economy. However, the project was highly contested from its inception by residents who felt that the priority for the neighbourhood should be housing and service delivery. Major housing-related protests erupted on the museum’s doorstep between 2003 and 2005, and in late 2013 the new cultural precinct was closed down indefinitely. This paper examines the politics and controversies surrounding the Red Location developments between 1997 and 2013, using this case study to consider the ways in which the protests around the museum are rooted in historical and political histories made visible through residents’ radical claiming of ownership of the museum building. The Red Location example offers a useful consideration of the complexities of applying notions of ‘participation’ and ‘community ownership’ in practice in fraught situations where major change is needed, and makes a case for the thorough historicisation of contemporary conflicts over development and spatial change.     

The Parkes Elvis Revival Festival: Economic Development and Contested Place Identities in Rural Australia

This paper discusses the annual Elvis Revival Festival in the small town of Parkes, 350 km to the west of Sydney, in rural Australia. It explores the way in which a remote place with few economic prospects has created a tourism product, and subsequently captured national publicity, through a festival based around commemoration of the birthday of Elvis Presley, a performer who had never visited Australia, and certainly not Parkes. The Festival began in the early 1990s, when a keen Elvis fan rallied promoters (and other fans) around the idea of bringing Elvis impersonators to the town for an annual celebration. Since then, the Festival has grown in size, with notable economic impact. The town now partly trades on its association with Elvis, constituting an ‘invented’ tradition and place identity. Yet the festival is not without tensions. The images of Elvis and the traditions generated by the festival challenge those who wish to promote Parkes through more austere, staid notions of place and identity. For some, Elvis is a means for the town to generate income and national notoriety, while others prefer less ‘kitsch’ tourism attractions such as a nearby (and nationally famous) radio telescope. Results from interviews with key players and surveys of visitors demonstrate how ‘tradition’ is constructed in places (rather than being innate), and how small places, even in remote areas, can develop economic activities through festivals, and create new identities – albeit contested ones.     

Living in commodified history: constructing class identities in neotraditional neighbourhoods

This paper examines how residents of neotraditional neighbourhoods in the Netherlands socially construct a ‘classed’ place identity and what role the historicised architecture plays within that process. Given that place identity is constructed through social and cultural practices, the paper argues that residents' consumption of historicised environment is bound up with drawing symbolic boundaries that have been explored here by analysing residents' narratives. Three prominent types of narratives were found: (1) residents' locational choice, (2) their aesthetic judgement of the residential environment and (3) the way they use it. Through these layered narratives, all interviewees appear to use historicised aesthetics to classify themselves as part of a valued social category. However, the way of boundary drawing took several forms, based either on fostering moral judgements of social behaviour accompanied by sophisticated efforts to keep neighbourhoods' historicised image unchanged, or by conducting cultural practices shared with fellow residents by which ‘the other’ living outside the neighbourhood is ‘bracketed out’ symbolically and socially.