Abstract
This introduction positions the special issue by highlighting the inherent relationality of place as well as how place is not just an object of analysis but something that shapes thinking, writing and experiences of the world. We reflect on why sociology has found it somewhat more difficult than its social science counterparts to give place the centrality it merits, and discuss whether this reflects a problem with dealing with questions of ‘scale’ and thinking the ‘in-betweenness’ of place. We assess important formulations of place in recent place theories, including non-essentialist framings of place such as ‘progressive’ and as ‘assemblage’. We make a case for seeing the articles in this special issue (and Thesis Eleven’s own long history of publishing writing on the topic of place) as resonating with the themes of place as materiality, atmospheres and spaces of belonging.
As Tim Cresswell (2015: 55) notes in his elegant overview of the field of place studies, place is ‘a complicated concept’ that ‘is all the more confusing because, at a first glance, it appears to be obvious and common-sense’. But the diversity of disciplines that make up place studies and place theory – which range from obvious fields like geography, architecture, heritage studies, urban and regional studies through to less obvious ones such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, history, literature, creative arts and sound/music studies – reflect a variety of theoretical and practical differences in approach including the ‘different ways that different writers have written about place’ (Cresswell, 2015: 55). When it comes to place, the object of analysis is also more varied than might first appear. As humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977: 149) suggested: ‘Place exists at different scales. At one extreme a favorite armchair is a place, at the other extreme the whole earth.’ In addition to the issue of scale – which we will return to shortly – the complexity present in thinking place relates to questions of politics, styles of writing, epistemology and ontology. In his overview of the field, Cresswell (2015: 55) discerns the following key tension in approaches to place: ‘The central argument about place in geography and beyond seems to be between those who write of place in terms of individual places – their locations, their boundaries, and their associated meanings and practices…and those who want to argue for a deeper primal sense of place (humanistic geographers, philosophers of place).’
The tensions present in place thinking and writing (between micro and macro, empirical and philosophical, poetic-cum-phenomenological and more objectivist-cum-scientistic approaches) could be said to stem from the relationality or in-betweenness of place itself. Place may refer to concrete somewheres, but these exist in relation to, and in dynamic tension with, various elsewheres. Formulations such as ‘this plaza’ or ‘this park’, ‘this city’ or ‘this region’, ‘this coastline’ or ‘this mountain range’, involve chains of association that are simultaneously material and symbolic, and practices that are both close to the action and generated much further afield (for a case study in how the material and aesthetic value of specific landscapes – in this case, Tuscany – is mediated by local, national and global factors we refer readers to Gaggio, 2011).
In her much-cited manifesto essay in Marxism Today, ‘A Global Sense of Place’, Doreen Massey (1991) poses the question of how are we to think place in a progressive and outward-looking manner (see also Massey, 1994, 2005)? In other words, how are we to avoid treating ‘place and locality a[s] a foci for a form of romanticised escapism from the real business of the world’ (Massey, 1991: 26)? Such escapisms can become the basis not only of theories which treat place as fixed and static; they can also manufacture reactionary or ‘defensive’ approaches to space (for example nationalisms, regionalisms and localisms that are hostile to outsiders). Massey’s proposal is for a theory of place that captures the flows and multiplicity present within and beyond places. She thinks this is all the more important in the context of a global situation where social forces involve what David Harvey (1996) has termed increased ‘time-space compression’. Massey asks us to zoom in (quite literally from a satellite looking down towards Earth) on the types of connections that go into making place what it is: If one moves in from the satellite towards the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one’s head, then each ‘place’ can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection. It is, indeed, a meeting place. Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local. (Massey, 1991: 28) [A] street is not a thing nor is it just a collection of discrete things. The buildings, trees, cars, sidewalks, goods, people, signs, etc. all come together to become a street, but it is the connections between them that makes it an assemblage or a place. It is the relations of buildings-sidewalk-roadway; the flows of traffic, people and goods; the interconnections of public to private space, and of this street to the city, that makes it a ‘street’ and distinguishes it from other place assemblages such as parks, plazas, freeways, shopping malls and marketplaces. (Dovey, 2010: 16)
A popular explanation is that sociology has lagged behind geography, and sometimes seen itself in opposition to it, because the ‘geographical imagination is a concrete and descriptive one’ while the ‘sociological imagination aspires to the explanation of human behaviour and activities in terms of social process abstractly…construed’ (Agnew and Duncan, 2013: 1). While sociology and social theory have been predisposed to thinking about social processes in epochal terms such as modernity, late-modernity and post-modernity, in our opinion this alone is not an adequate explanation for the eschewing of place. As alluded to earlier, binary thinking and problems dealing with questions of scale are much more likely causes. Finnish Simmel scholar and proponent of a relational sociology Olli Pyyhtinen (2017: 298) suggests sociology has traditionally had a problem encountering issues of ‘scale’ and the most obvious instance of this is the micro-macro binary which ‘presents a nested vertical hierarchy that tends to be assumed in advance, as something like a transcendent model’. Such models fail to recognize the ‘multiple, rich, and messy’ loci in which the ‘scales’ of social life are ‘produced in action’ (Pyyhtinen, 2017: 298). It is no surprise then that interesting recent work in the humanities and social sciences has started using terms such as ‘habitus of place’, ‘habitus of the city’ and ‘habitus of the urban region’ so as to capture the multidimensionality of social life alongside ‘place specific structures of experience’ (Löw and Steets, 2014: 211-224). Similarly, one of the most important recent sociologists to tackle questions of place, the late UK sociologist John Urry (2005: 4), put forward a relational framework that emphasized how ‘places are about relationships, about the placings of materials and the system of difference they perform’. Emotions, the senses, mobility, time and space, material networks and nature-culture relations are all part of Urry’s (1990, 1999, 2005, 2008) various forays into a place-inflected sociology.
In this special issue, the emphasis is on ‘thinking place’ understood both as the theorizing and writing of place and the kinds of theorizing and writing that place serves to create and shape. Thinking place requires that thought itself be topographical and that we keep in mind that ‘place is not identical with our thinking of it’ (Malpas, 1999, 2015: 1). The articles assembled here share the view that ‘place is less a geographic fact than a human accomplishment. It is both socially produced and socially productive’ (Griswold, 2008: 4). Places are also subject to various types of processes such that places can ‘become lost and found; landscapes [can] move in and out of visibility’ (Griswold, 2008: 10). When it comes to place-based cultural forms, such as, for example, ‘regionality’ and ‘regionalism’, these refer to ‘cultural objects – arts, crafts, ways of speaking, cooking styles, modes of dress, architecture – that bear a socially recognized relationship to place’ (Griswold, 2008: 13). Emotional styles and ways of working or producing things also play their part. Even humour and irony point to place practices and ‘structures of feeling’ regarding place-specific histories, identities and struggles. Sociologist of design and political economist of place Harvey Molotch (2003: 193) proposes social life has an ‘artful’ character and that this ‘artfulness…has a geographically local quality, generating styles of activity particular to a place’. In a formulation that echoes the emphasis on place atmospheres in this special issue, Molotch adds that place-based practices often draw on things that are in the ‘air’: The mode of local…artfulness is in the air. People breathe it in through stories, jokes, manners, architectures, street styles, sounds, odors, and modes of maintenance that surround, as well as what they remember and what they anticipate. They enroll in particular projects with special attention and even gusto because they have the local means to ‘get it’…[Local artfulness] is the source of taken-for-granteds that inform – sometimes loudly and sometimes only with the vaguest whisper – how to do something together. (Molotch, 2003: 193)
Edensor’s article is an exquisite piece on the materiality of stone that thinks about the possible affective palpability and atmospheric resonances of a city. Firstly, the paper sets up, in a general way, considerations of different kinds of stone that may be geologically native to a city to reflect upon the affective qualities of stone textures touched by hand or underfoot, or the way different stone might capture or absorb light, absorb or repel the sun’s heat. All of these things – and more – enable place to be thought of in its most elemental ways. Edensor’s contribution offers the reader an evocative encounter with the city of Melbourne as he takes us on journeys through streets, and also provides an imaginative landscape of thinking place that is not static or discrete but messy, alive and entangled with traces of the past that haunt the present. Through Edensor’s account of streets and buildings comprised of Melbourne’s native geological stone of basalt, we come to understand, even feel, the textural qualities which make Melbourne different from Sydney or indeed other Australian cities and cities of the world. Through storying a city’s stone combined with storying weathers and seasons, light and shade, sonic elements, shifting smells and atmospheres, Edensor creates pathways into thinking place that are vital, sensuous and embodied.
Lupton’s article draws the reader into a detailed account of scenes, affective atmospheres and complex negotiations of space and time during phases of COVID-19 in the Australian cities of Canberra and Sydney. It is a first-person account of Lupton’s development of a COVID-19 photographic archive and her processes of decision making about what to photograph. As an ethnography of everyday, Lupton documents COVID-19’s impact through mobilities and modes of habitation in a context where people responded to measures of social distancing, mask wearing (or not), vaccine roll-outs, and the closure of once more densely peopled places of sociality, play, education, consumption and commerce. This article provides an intricate and diverse visual ethnography through photographs taken in moments of time on her smartphone to things that stood out as material signs and effigies of COVID-19’s living presence. It draws us into images of a virus imagined and invoked on the surfaces of things, in the air, and passing between bodies. The reader is also taken into the idea of stranded and haunted places impacted by COVID-19 and the experience of those places of necessity such as supermarkets and chemists where QR codes and signs aiming to adjust bodies, limiting contact and tracking the infection spread, became normalised and routine. Lupton’s scholarly piece draws richly on the methods of visual ethnography, explaining her embodied reflexive practice attuned to the work of documentation inclusive of more-than-human agents of affective experience and atmospherics. The article enables readers to imaginatively inhabit her trajectories of familiar places becoming strange, even unhomely. Examining and incorporating a range of scholarship on affective and ephemeral atmospheres and the more-than-human agents of place materiality, this article gives a vivid account of COVID-19 as a future archive of memory and forgetting.
Gibson and Burstow’s article examine the contested process of memorialization and the making of place in publics of commemoration through an investigation of memorials to murdered women. Drawing on interviews with family and friends, as well as visual documentary evidence, the article offers a fascinating account of how memorials to murdered women in the form of disruptive commemoration bring into focus hidden rules regarding the political-cultural hegemonies of public commemoration. As they argue, the presence of femicide memorials represents a defensive response that entwines with narratives of established dominant memorials that become evident when considering the contentious cultural reception such memorials can elicit in the already established conceptions of masculinities in public culture. Gibson and Burstow’s account provides insight into the role that material cultures play in these places of commemoration, representing instances of vernacular grassroots memorialization in the form of plaques, benches and even trees (with their special adornments), that enable a transformation from a place of trauma into something offering solace and peace. The material culture of these spaces offers insight into placemaking in that – as the authors argue – trees become ‘a vital object and place of interaction and exchange where signs of remembrance and care through objects re-cover this place from a raw, visceral imprint of violence and trauma’. While conventional commemoration to violence against women risks positioning women as ‘victims’ by not unsettling that position through passive, familiar and assimilationist design forms and narrative tropes, memorials can – when viewed through a placemaking lens – ‘produce dynamic and disruptive possibilities of encounter where the onus of responsibility is placed on the consciousness/conscience of interlocuters’.
Cantillon and Baker’s article provides an insightful account of place, heritage and belonging in relation to Norfolk Island’s Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area. Their article contributes a rich case study of the Paradise Hotel on Norfolk Island and provides insights into how a sense of place can become generated, but also how issues pertaining to heritage management must go beyond aesthetics and materiality to incorporate the intangible and imaginary dimensions of place. Drawing on interviews and participant driven methods, belonging becomes engendered by the Paradise Hotel, a structure which – while physically removed – nonetheless remains in the imaginary of the community and offers a role in generating place and connection for inhabitants of the island. Compellingly, the observations made in relation to the concept of place go beyond the more typically narrow confines of material culture. Here – as argued by Cantillon and Baker – in determining the role of place (if this is even something that is possible in an enduring sense), heritage conservation, while previously focused on the narrowly configured ‘materiality and fabric’ of place, now looks to how communities view place via the socially affective and emotional dimensions of a locality. As a result, the article contributes to the less explored dimensions of place as imagined and remembered through a consideration of the Paradise Hotel as a place for tourists, locals, workers, for those who found love there and, finally, as a place for home. The insights established across these themes are exemplified using empirical data and provide a rich sense for which place becomes dynamically represented and imagined (and even reimagined) years after these experiences occurred.
Osbaldiston and Buckle’s contribution to the special issue provides a captivating account of the concept of lifestyle migration in relation to the fundamental role of place. Offering a theoretical examination of the notion of place, the authors argue that much of the lifestyle migration literature has overlooked the concept, rendering it as diminished or not as central to explaining lifestyle. They argue for the importance of place to decode how lifestyle migration is experienced and undertaken. Supplementing this theoretical argument, the authors draw on revealing empirical work examining the definitive role that place plays in relation to lifestyle migrants in Tasmania and on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. The authors identify the use of a topographical approach that deploys the apparatus of ‘survey marks’ that seeks to sensitise the researcher to the components of place, enabling an awareness of the variable dimensions of place in a more wholly imagined form. These marks are identified by the authors as: ‘natural marks’ that accustom us to the role of landscape and the ‘natural rhythms of nature’, provoking subjective impressions that connect people deeply to a place; ‘built marks’, that point to the way infrastructures from the built world matter, such as the juxtaposition of suburbia and the sea or the infrastructures that define and mediate how lifestyle migration is experienced for those who move to infrastructure-rich regions; and lastly ‘social marks’, that speak to interactions that occur between people that are anchored by place and that enable opportunities for social relations. Ultimately, through reassembling this bolstered understanding of place, the authors suggest we can reinsert the important role of place that they suggest is largely missing from the canon of lifestyle migration scholarship.
De la Fuente and Walsh’s article investigates the sonic framing of place in the urban context. The theoretical approach is constructed by employing Goffman’s microsociology of sounds studies and music as well as the urban atmospheres literature. The authors offer an interesting perspective for analysing cities by paying attention to their sonic urban atmospheres. Drawing on the work of French urban sociologist Jean-Paul Thibaud, de la Fuente and Walsh explore the sound in the urban environment in which ‘the sonic is a fundamentally interwoven or textural form of framing the world’ (de la Fuente and Walsh, this issue). They argue that sound can affect our perception of places as more or less hospitable. This argument is developed further in their case study of Quiet Hour shopping – the idea based on the principle of minimising noise and sensory overload. Their analysis suggests that, although Quiet Hour was initially created to support the neurodiverse population, silence and quietude can also be beneficial for creating an environment that supports non-invasive or hospitable human interactions in certain places. In recent years, atmosphere has become an important element of city branding, but the authors emphasise it isn’t branding alone that is at issue. To the extent urban atmospheres constrain and facilitate bodies in space there is more research necessary into how the sensory framing of place impacts participation and levels of comfort in urban spaces.
Franklin and Tranter’s article examines loneliness in Australia during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020–21 and its impact on people’s sense of belonging. Drawing on a national survey (2020–21) about loneliness, the article offers insights into how lockdowns affected a sense of belonging for different age groups based on connections between various places and ‘age-specific cultural scripts’ (Franklin and Tranter, this issue). The authors seek to explore loneliness that is not only limited to its psychological understanding but as a phenomenon that can be identified on both personal and structural levels, associated with what Bauman called ‘the age of uncertainty’ (Franklin and Tranter, this issue). The article suggests that since the start of lockdowns many Australians have felt lonelier than during pre-pandemic times, with the highest rates of loneliness experienced by the younger population. Interestingly, the older population was less affected. The difference between the experience of loneliness among those groups can be attributed to different ‘belongingness relationships’ (Franklin and Tranter, this issue) with a place, that are based on distinct orientations towards time. The younger groups’ sense of belonging is formed by focusing on their place in the present and the future. This sense of belonging for 18–29-years-olds was particularly disturbed during the COVID-19 pandemic, causing the feeling of uncertainty and missed life opportunities during the time of transition into adulthood. On the other hand, the major impact of lockdowns on people in their 40s was the loss of emotional connection with their workplaces, coupled with intensified neoliberal restructuration of the work environment. In contrast, the oldest group constructs their sense of belonging in relation to the past, by developing the ability to ‘belong from afar’ (Franklin and Tranter, this issue), which can indicate various periods of life experienced in multiple places.
Malpas and Jacobs’ article examines the relevance of Mills’ notion of social milieu for analysis of contemporary society. Mills’ best known work, The Sociological Imagination (1959), is based on the argument that individual life is emplaced in the wider world history and cannot be analysed separate from that context. Central to the idea of the sociological imagination is the concept of ‘social milieu’, which is defined as ‘the social setting of a person that is directly open to his personal experience’ (Gerth and Mills, 1954: 354). As the authors argue, the relevance of the concept of social milieu to the contemporary sociological reflection lies in an understanding of human action ‘as situated or placed – which includes spatial and material situatedness as well as historical’ situatedness (Jacobs and Malpas, this issue). Jacobs and Malpas assert the significance of Mills’ work is rooted in being able to pay attention to both the situatedness of ‘social milieu’ and its embeddedness in the larger socio-political context. Thus, the notion of social milieu opens the door to constructing a more politically engaged approach to sociology, especially in the face of climate change, social alienation, or other global challenges.
In conclusion, we would like to state that Thesis Eleven is the perfect forum for the types of reflections on place offered here. Unlike many other social theory journals, Thesis Eleven has a long tradition of engaging with questions of place and the geographies underpinning critical reflection on social life. Over the years, the journal has included such innovative pieces as a discussion between novelist David Malouf and cultural historian Paul Carter (1989) on ‘Space, Writing and Historical Identity’, as well as essays reflecting on regional identity such as ‘Way Out West: Mapping Western Australia’ (Stratton and Beilharz, 2016).
Long-time Thesis Eleven editors Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan (2006, 2012) have also made compelling arguments on behalf of the teaching of undergraduate sociology through the themes of place, time and division, and Beilharz (2009: 232) elsewhere sought to locate the sociology of culture in Australia and New Zealand in terms of an ‘antipodean’ attitude that reflected not only the vagaries of place, nation and global culture but also the ‘reciprocal movement of culture from centre to periphery and back’. The latter also developed a form of cultural analysis that bore the relational ethos we are promoting via this special issue by claiming that ‘the antipodes is a relationship rather than a place’ (Beilharz, 2009: 229). Hogan (2001) and Beilharz (2003) were also instrumental in ensuring that critical social theory take seriously the reflections of Australian polymath George Seddon (1997, 2006) on landscape, gardens and sense of place. The latter was a perceptive critic of what he saw as the mis-placed imaginaries European settlers brought to the Australian continent and especially its plant life. Thesis Eleven honoured these critical reflections by publishing a special issue in 2003, entitled ‘George Seddon: Landprints over Boundaries’, featuring articles by Beilharz, Hogan, environmental historian Tom Griffiths, Seddon himself, Michael Crozier and Suzi Adams, amongst others. Given this longstanding interest by the journal and its editors/contributors in matters of place it is appropriate that Beilharz and Hogan publish here a piece reflecting on their own intellectual and personal journeys to thinking and writing about place. We appreciate their willingness to revisit their roles in Thesis Eleven’s place thematics, and we think their reflections round out the special issue nicely, forming an arc between the journal’s history, its present and its future.
Finally, we would like to offer this special issue in light of the role Thesis Eleven has somewhat uniquely played in interweaving the concerns of ‘Grand Theory’ with those of specific contexts and everyday life. This is an achievement that perhaps has gone underrecognized in mainstream social science and social theory. Thesis Eleven has both given us new concepts with which to think place and also consistently asked us to think about the places from which we write theory. When it comes to contributions to new social theoretical conceptions of place, we would like to mention that one of the terms in the special issue subtitle, and which is central to two of the articles (Lupton and de la Fuente and Walsh), has a very strong Thesis Eleven provenance. Long before critical social science had made its celebrated material and spatial ‘turns’, the journal published Gernot Böhme’s (1993) pioneering essay ‘Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of the New Aesthetics’ (for other important work by the same author on atmospheres and space see Böhme, 1998, 2000, 2017). The essay and its central concept of ‘atmospheres’ has become highly cited in place studies (Seamon, 2020), in accounts of material and affective geographies (Anderson, 2009) and in studies of urban ambiences (Thibaud, 2015; de la Fuente and Walsh, 2021).
In short, the necessity of thinking place has always been palpable in the pages of Thesis Eleven. We trust the essays and the commissioned book reviews on place-related topics in this special issue will continue that conversation.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.