Perhaps the greatest omission in my writing about place is how it relates to health.  My inclination has been to consider the emotional stress caused by uprooting, displacement and destruction of place as important mostly for the way it demonstrates the existential significance of belonging to a place. But there is substantial evidence, supported by a body of scientific literature, that many characteristics of places and local environments have an impact on the physiology of health.

The connections between health and place have been part of medical understanding since the origins of medicine, but there has been a flurry of academic research exploring these connections since about 1990. As I wrote this post I became increasingly aware that this aspect of place deserves far more consideration than a single post can provide. Indeed, I think a comprehensive account could take years. So this very short overview of the history of place in health, plus some links to recent researchand a few comments about how place seems to be understood in that research, is no more than a sort of outline introduction.

Historical Background
Connections between health and place have been acknowledged since the beginning of modern civilization, usually by linking the quality of health to the environmental conditions in specific locations.  For example, the Ancient Greek philosopher Hippocrates, widely considered the father of medicine, began his book Airs,, Waters, Places, which was written about 400 BC, with the statement that anyone who wants to investigate medicine properly should first of all consider the seasons, winds and waters “such as are peculiar to each locality.” He elaborated these and then recommended that, “if one knows all of these things well, or at least the greater part of them, he cannot miss knowing, when he comes into a strange city, either the diseases peculiar to the place, or particular nature of common diseases…” [Section 6].

Hippocratic ideas that health was related to the environmental quality of a place endured through the centuries, and, for instance played a role in the Middle Ages when citizens protested against foul air and stench from slaughterhouses, and also in the belief that, for those with the means, it made good sense in times of epidemics to escape from cities to the countryside (see, for example, Carole Rawcliffe, 2021, “A Breath of Fresh Air: Approaches to Environmental Health in Late Medieval Urban Communities.” Palgrave Macmillan).

It was, however, not until the mid-nineteenth century that the actual causes of place-based disease and ill-health began to be identified. In this regard, John Snow’s epidemiological study in 1854 that linked cases of cholera to a specific water pump in London was especially significant. He demonstrated through careful investigation of the location of the cases of cholera and where the families had obtained water that it was not bad air that was responsible, but water contaminated with sewage. Causes of diseases are rarely quite this specific (though the search for a precise origin for COVID suggests it is an idea that is hard to shake). Nevertheless, the recognition that health conditions, whether in their manifestations or their causes, often have a geography that can be mapped and that this can help in their treatment continue to be very important.

The Journal Health and Place
Subsequent studies of the environmental determinants of health have mostly followed along the lines of Snow’s systematic, scientific investigation of manifestations and causes. With the rise of interest in place and sense of place in the late twentieth century these began to be framed specifically in term of place and health, culminating in 1995 in the creation of the academic journal Health and Place. Initially this was a modest publication – four issues a year with a handful of articles and research notes, but it got increasing international attention, has expanded to six issues a year, each one with more than twenty articles and numerous research notes, many of which address public health issues. At the top of every online issue of Health and Place is a statement that makes its aim explicit: “Designed to the study of all aspects of health and health care in which place or location matters.”

The first edition of Health and Place in 1995 had an editorial by Graeme Moon, “(Re)placing research on health and health care”, in which he stated the aim of the journal is to publish “research into health and health care which emphasises differences between places, the experience of health and care in specific places, the development of health care for places, and methods and theories underlying these in geography, sociology, public health, anthropology, and economics.” (Volume 1, No 1, 1995, pp.1-4).

Moon noted specifically that communicable diseases spread geographically, which is to say from place to place, and that chronic disease can vary geographically. Furthermore, health policies vary between nations and regions, and often have singular local impacts because access to health services are not the same everywhere. It is, he suggested, a trivial observation to say that conditions affecting health are different in different places: the key questions are why is this the case, what are the issues of location and mobilitiy, and in what ways do people in different places experience sickness and use health services differently?.

My impression, after a rather cursory investigation of the recent research published in Health and Place, is that these questions are ones that continue to be explored in the Journal, with an emphasis on public health, and now across a wide international range of case studies.

How Does Place Affect Health?
This question is addressed in a program of the Center for Disease Control of the United States.

The places of our lives, it suggests – our homes, workplaces, schools, parks, and houses of worship – affect the quality of our health and influence our experience with disease and well-being. And it uses a variety of geographical and GIS methods to explore how this might be the case, including a framework for the “geographical determinants of health”. The aims of the program are to define the geospatial drivers of health with an emphasis on factors that vary by place. Place is described simply as “… a broad and evolving concept… the places of our lives define, shape, and influence the health determinants we face throughout our lifetimes.”

The intention of this branch of the Center for Disease control is to promote research into the relationship between geographic variations of disease and environmental, demographic, behavioural, socioeconomic, genetic, and infectious risk factors. Examples of the fields of research include investigations of space and time trends in the spread of Ebola and Zika viruses, geographical variations in cancer incidence, and spatial components of the opioid crisis in the US, such as where overdose deaths and drug-seeking behaviours happen.

Epidemiology
Books and websites about epidemiology often note that three basic variables in the investigation of patterns of disease, are person, place and time (or Who, Where and When, as Wikipedia has it). Person here refers both to individuals and to social circumstances, and time acknowledges that diseases wax and wane over years, decades and ccenturies. Place, is not always defined, but one book notes that it can refer to more than one thing, for instance “a location, an area, a city, a state, or a country.” However, since place is primarily a spatial concept, it is now frequently described and understood in terms of the coordinates used in geospatial data and GIS, which means that place patterns are defined primarily by what the data indicate. 

An important idea in epidemiology is that where somebody lives, works, and travels can provide clues about relevant exposures to particular diseases. Disease frequency can vary geographically between regions, or between neighbourhoods in cities, or between urban and rural areas, and clues to the reasons for this might be found in social conditions (relative wealth or poverty), proximity to polluting industries, or possibly aspects of the natural environment.

The Definition of Place in Health and Place Research
My impression is that the notion of place in much research into health and place is taken to be straightforward and self-evident. A place consists of a any relatively distinctive, two dimensional spatial fragment of geography, whether a neighbourhood, a city, an ecosystem, a region, or a country.  This “broad and evolving concept” as the Center for Disease Control describes it, allows “geospatial data”, in other words any information that has a geographical location, to be analysed using GIS methodologies as way to find statistical, spatial connections between diseases and environments.

Some Further Ideas about Place in Health Research
There is no question that this is an invaluable way to grasp the reasons why the qualities of health and disease vary from place to place.  But place also an experiential phenomenon, something with depth, filled with meanings and associations, often an essential part of the very identity of individuals and communities. My impression is that these are peripheral to much of the research on place and health. However, they are not entirely ignored. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but the following are some instances of topics that, implicitly or explicitly, consider relationships between health and place as an experiential phenomenon. Of these, I think only Therapeutic Places have been studied with regard to the phenomenological importance of place.

• Healthy Cities
The initiative to consider cities from the perspective of health does not consider place explicitly, but the top page on the WHO website on healthy cities begins with this quote from the Ottawa Charter of 1986 about health promotion: “Health is created and lived by people within the settings of their everyday life; where they learn, work, play, and love.” In other words, the widely promoted idea of healthy cities is about the urban places where people live, and with which they are practically and emotionally engaged, and about finding ways to enhance that engagement.

• Pollution and Solastalgia
Environmental scientists in Australia have identified a connection between solastalgia – the deep emotional feeling of a loss of attachment to place without ever leaving it – and the effects of air pollution on deteriorating health (see my post on solastalgia). In other words, local pollution and forms of environmental damage that cause physiological health problems also undermine people’s attachment to place. (see Nick Higginbotham et al, 2010 “Environmental injustice and air pollution in coal affected communities, Hunter Valley, Australia,” Health and Place, March 2010, 16(2), pp. 259-266).

• Aging in place
A growing issue in much of the developed world as populations age is the tension between people’s wish to continue living in their homes and communities, in the places to which they belong, even as their needs for health care become more pronounced. See for example, this website of National Institute of Health

• The Experience of Quarantine
Quarantine is a disruption to the everyday experience of place. It can mean escaping to somewhere thought to be safe from an epidemic (Newton was quarantining from an outbreak of plague Cambridge at the family estate in Woolsthorpe when he saw the apple fall). It can mean being confined to a colony of individuals who have been excluded because share the same disease (historically, colonies of lepers, sanitoriums for tuberculosis patients). It can mean being confined to one’s own house until the epidemic has subsided, which happened in numerous cities during COVID-19, which caused serious psychological problems for some. This demonstrated that while home might be an intensely meaningful place, that relationship needs to be mitigated by the freedom to get away from it. Too much home is not a good thing.   See, for example, this website on aging in place.

• Homelessness
The widespread epidemic of homelessness is, more or less by definition, the loss of attachment to place. It is also a circumstance that exposes individuals to disease, whether because of exposure to the weather, or because of exposure in crowded shelters, or because of inadequate access to sanitary facilities. This is explored, for example, in Lisa Vandemark 2007 “Promoting the Sense of Self, Place and Belonging in Displaced Persons: The Example of Homelessness” Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 21(5), pp. 241-248.

• Therapeutic places
Therapeutic places are those which are believed to have the power to heal. They includes places of pilgrimage, such as Lourdes in France, where miraculous cures are said to have occurred.  They also include social and natural environments that appear to facilitate convalescence. This 2018 bibliographic survey on therapeutic landscapes and healthy places in Social Science and Medicine, lists many publications on the topic.

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I recently had a long stopover at the enormous airport in Dallas-Fort Worth. It involved the usual sorts of airport activities –  getting from one terminal to another (in this case by the monorail that connects the five terminals), looking for lounges and a place to eat, trying to get information about another flight, going up and down on escalators, walking crowded corridors, studying screens of flight departures, and looking out through windows at the vast spaces devoted to aircraft and other machines.

In the course of all these activities I began to think about placelessness, and specifically about the way I was temporarily trapped in what the French ethnographer Marc Augé has called a “non-place”. I took some photos to try to capture my experiences, but my travel had started long before dawn and I had two more flights that day, so it wasn’t until I got home to an actual place that I was able to reflect on those experiences. 

Non-Place and Placelessness
In 1995 Augé proposed that “supermodernity,” the globally interconnected condition of the late 20th century, was producing non-places. Previous types of places, he suggested, have a history and culture, and residents who share an identity and sense of commitment to them. In contrast, the non-places of supermodernity, such as motorways, clinics, hospitals, and airports, are experienced in fleeting, temporary ways that have no room for history or belonging. In non-places we are in transit, passing through them as customers, passengers, clients, or patients (see p.77 and p 102). But this does not mean the erasure of place distinctiveness, and Augé was careful to point out that “place and non-place are like opposed polarities – the former is never completely erased and the second never totally completed (p.79).”

I understand non-places as specific manifestations of placelessness, which is the broader process of undermining attachment to place by diluting geographical distinctiveness with standardised ways of doing things. While elements of this have a long history, it has been especially powerful since the mid-twentieth century, first with the surge of post-war rebuilding, then the need to accommodate population growth, coupled with globalisation and the widespread use modernist design practices that put undecorated functionality ahead of sense of place. This tendency has been partially countered since the 1970s by the protection cultural and natural heritage that is vested in particular places, as well as a growing sense of the ecological value of locality.

In other words, the polarities of place and placelessness are always shifting.  What I encountered in Dallas-Fort Worth Airport seemed to that offer clues about the ways that this is happening.

Background on The Airport
Here are some basic facts about Dallas-Worth Airport. It started operations in 1974, about when what Augé calls the age of supermodernity is usually considered to have begun, to replace two older small airports. In 2022 it was, in terms of passengers, the second busiest airport in the world (Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta is the busiest with about 94 million). It is a major hub in international and national networks of air travel, with links to 193 domestic destinations and 67 inte rnational non-stop destinations. It has 60,000 employees. It covers 26.9 square miles (70 square kilometers), an area slightly greater than the island of Manhattan. And significantly it has its own city designation and postal Zip code, which makes it easy to check for data about it in the US Census; that indicates its residential population is zero.

So Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, the second busiest airport in the world for passengers, is a city with tens of thousands of employees, visited on average by about 200,000 people a day, where nobody lives. It is, in Augé’s terms, clearly a huge non-place, intended to facilitate customers in transit from one place to another but lacking a deep history or cultural identity.

But Augé’s point that place and non-place are like opposed polarities warrants consideration.  While the non-placeness of DFW prevails, there are some distinctive place characteristics.  One is the unique layout of the airport, with a highway running down the middle of its five terminals the provides easy access for parking close to each terminal, and with a monorail that weaves sinuously around them for passengers transferring to connecting flights. And in the the passenger zone that there are signs that do refer to its location in Texas, some with photos of the respective mayors of Dallas and of Fort Worth, though my sense was that these are few and far between. And, of course, for the  60,000 people who work but do not live in the airport, there is presumably some sense of community and engagement with place.

The Importance of Airports as Non-Places
What DFW suggests to me is that airports have become the paragons of non-place. They are its largest manifestations, and, globally, more than 10 million people pass through them every day. In 2019 the number of airline passengers worldwide was about 4.7 billion (the peak year before Covid, but it could well be reached again in 2024). Of course, that includes many passengers who fly several times, and even in the developed countries of Europe, North America and Australasia flights per capita each year amount to only between 2 and 4. In most less developed regions the great majority of people never fly. Nevertheless airports are both leading symbols and have keys roles in the infrastructure of modernity and globalization.

• First, there is their enormous size. Airports are among the most prominent landscape products of modern civilization (along with skyscrapers, apartment towers, shopping malls and the sprawling cities which they serve).  They have no historical precedent, did not exist before the 20th century, and until about 1950 were relatively humble facilities, little more than large fields with hangars. Since then they have expanded spatially to occupy more land than the downtowns of the cities with which they are associated. In terms of the They are incomparably larger than other types of non-places that Augé identified, such as motorway service centres, clinics, hospitals, railway stations and shopping malls.

• Second, they attract almost no aesthetic attention. Airports occupy space that it greater than landscape gardens of the 18th century and the great urban parks of the 19th century, which are widely admired for their aesthetic merits. And the runways have a spatial scale is unquestionably awesome but treeless and seems to attract no aesthetic attention. While most airports have installations and artworks in passenger areas, their engineered, functional landscapes are apparently regarded as elements of urban infrastructure designed most for machines and easily ignored. In other words, airports are experienced fleetingly as blank landscapes.

• Third, the importance in people’s experience of the world is growing. More people travelling by air means more people experiencing the huge non-places of airports. The number of passengers carried by air transport has grown steadily from 310 million in 1970 to 4.7 billion in 2019. The optimistic projection of the airline industry is that, after the pandemic dip,  air travel will soon exceed 2019 levels and could well double by 2040, with much of the future growth in Africa and South Asia.  The case is that more and more people are passing through the non-places of airports. This is indicated by the rapid growth of international tourism. In 1950 there were about 22 million international tourist arrivals, then equivalent to less than one per cent of the world’s population travelling internationally; by 1975 the number had grown to 222 million, equivalent to 6 per cent of the world’s population; in 2019 there were almost 1.5 billion such arrivals equivalent, to almost 20 percent of the global population. In short, more and more people are experiencing the non-places of airports in order to travel for vacations.

• Fourth, many of the non-place characteristics of airports extend into the urban zones around them, which are filled with parking lots, chain hotels, networks of expressways and wide roads, and distribution centres for handling air freight and supplying services to the airport that are housed in very large, undistinguished buildings with blank walls and loading bays for trucks. It seems that the non-placeness of airports is mestastasizing into the surrounding landscapes.

A Concluding Comment
What my experience at Dallas-Fort Worth, combined with my experiences at t other large international airports, suggests to me is that the mitigation of processes of placelessness that has happened with protection of cultural and natural heritage since about 1970, does not apply to non-places. Airports are the pre-eminent instance of non-place, and they have grown significantly both in spatial extent and in the number of people who pass through them. Whether this is also the case with other types of non-places I do not know. What I do know from my own airport experiences is that as non-places they are not exactly alienating, but neither are they engaging.  They involve neither commitment nor antipathy. They are somewhere to be tolerated, with a sort of detached neutrality, as increasingly unavoidable and necessary aspects of travel between places that do matter to us.  

Marc Augé, 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, (London: Verso)

and on this website see my post about Non-Place and Placelessness

This is a brief post stimulated by something I recently read online in The Atlantic that took me by surprise because it adds an entirely different aspect to the idea of what might be considered placeless. Charlie Warzell, who writes about trends in social media, began by putting things in a context which applies to anybody reading this post: “You are currently logged on to the largest version of the internet that has ever existed…one of the 5 billion-plus people contributing to an unfathomable array of networked information…” Then he declared:

“The sprawl has become disorienting. Some of my peers in the media have written about how the internet has started to feel ‘placeless'”.

But isn’t the internet inherently placeless – a network of flows and websites that are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.? Cables and radio waves that carry the flows are either buried or invisible; there’s no easy way to know where websites like this one are based, and the computers and devices with which they are accessed are mass produced. The large data centers that house the cloud are clusters of unremarkable, industrial buildings in obscure locations; the smaller data centers with “meet-me rooms” where intercity fiber connects with local providers are mostly anonymous. Of course, you can use your devices to search for local shops or for wayfinding, and software does prompt us to turn on location services, but these are little more than gestures to place in an overwhelmingly placeless system.

_{Networks and Nodes of the Placeless Internet [Source: Mountpeaks]}

Bu I think that what Warzell means when he says “it “the internet has “started to feel placeless” has nothing to do with what I have always thought of as ‘placeless.’ What it suggests is that for him, as a devotee of online communication and social media, the internet once seemed to have distinct ‘places’ that gave it both coherence and diversity. He doesn’t say, but perhaps these were like communities of users, or perhaps it was just that the big apps – Facebook, You Tube, Twitter and so on – had identities that was embedded in how they conveyed information and how they were used. Anyway, his comment suggests that what he previously experienced as organized diversity of the internet is fragmenting into incoherence with no consistency, no discernible pattern. Online experiences, he suggests, are become increasingly “unique to every individual.”

Warzel references an article in NY Times Magazine by John Hermann, who also uses the word “placeless” to describe the fragmentation that he thinks is currently happening to media in the US: “As the election looms, the media — old but also new, niche but especially mainstream — is falling to pieces.” It will, he writes, “be a placeless race, in which voters and candidates can and will, despite or maybe because of a glut of fragmented content, ignore the news.”

^{A word cloud that gives a sense of the new meaning to the placeless internet [Source: Graph Design]}

The only conclusion I can take from this is that the internet has contributed to the development of a metaphorical meaning of ‘placeless’ as a way to describe whatever in the world seems to have become so unstructured and incoherent that you can no longer see where you are or how to find a way through it (which at the moment seems to apply to many things). And in the particular case of the internet, place is, to borrow a phrase from Huw Halstead, significant only in its absence.

A Footnote on the Development of this new sense of “Placeless”
That comment of Halstead’s was in an edition of the journal Memory Studies devoted to the impact of digital media on memory, in which he describes how the rapid growth of the internet in the 1990s prompted contrasting opinions from ‘cyber-visionaries’ and ‘cyberpessimists’.

The optimistic visionaries then envisaged the digital world as creating a sort of progressive placelessness that permitted greater freedom, enhanced democratic participation, and promoted global solidarity because it was unencumbered by the restrictions and antagonisms of boundaries and rootedness. This was a digital version of modernist, international style architecture, which promoted (and still does) the idea that one style is good for any climate and any location.

Cyberpessimists, on the other hand, feared that digital technologies, such as those of the internet, would lead to a different form of placelessness in which citizens would be separated from real neighborhoods and communities where daily life takes place, and memories would be cut loose from the distinctive places in which they were formed and which gave them meaning.

What the recent comments about the emergence of “the placeless internet” suggest is that with the subsequent development of social media and mobile phones, the internet came to be experienced not so much as placeless but as creating new types of communities or digital places on Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Tik Tok and so on, and there seemed to be a coherence to this. It now seems that these and other uses of the internet have fragmented into a constantly shifting kaleidoscope that involve unexceptional everyday use for messages and searches, influencers with short half-lives, sparks of viral activity, and echo chambers filled with almost indecipherable mixture of information and misinformation about the world. It’s an expanding universe moving in many directions at once.

The feeling that the world or some aspect of it has lost its familiar patterns and become become incomprehensible is nothing new. In 1611 John Donne wrote in his poem The Anatomy of the World : “Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.” In 1919 William Butler Yeats wrote: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.” What is new is that this feeling is now being characterized as ‘placeless’.

Perhaps that is a good thing. It implies that place, no matter how it is understood, is about coherence, order and comprehensible meaning. One obvious way of resolving placeless uncertainty, metaphorical or otherwise, is to attend to places.

Solastalgia” is the word coined in 2003 by Australian professor of environmental studies Glenn Albrecht to refer to the “place-based distress” that people experience when the places where they live in are negatively impacted by environmental changes over which they have no control (Connor et al, 2004, Albrecht et al, 2007).

This seems to have given a name to what had previously been widely felt but unspecified emotional reactions to unwelcome environmental changes. It was very quickly adopted as a way to encompass various types of eco-anxiety and psychological syndromes associated with both artificially and naturally caused environmental damage, and especially with climate change. It has also become popular in the arts – paintings, documentaries, music of all sorts, videos, poetry – perhaps in part because it’s a new idea but also, I suspect, because it captures some of the current underlying angst about the state of the world. At the beginning of 2023 National Public Radio in the US listed solastalgia as one of the buzzwords of the year.

Solastalgia lies at the intersection of health and place (which is a topic that has been extensively studies which has a major journal devoted to it with a number of articles about sostalgia). In this post I concentrate specifically on the relationships between place and solastalgia. The images I’ve included are screen captures that give an indication of the diverse ways solastalgia is being interpreted: the captions provide links to the sources, but I have not explored many of these.

Place, Nostalgia and Solastalgia
In his book Earth Emotions (2019, p.37) Albrecht reflects on the origins of the idea of solastalgia in terms that indicate both a strong connection to place and the force of the emotions it represents: “I thought we needed, in English, [a word for] the idea of a place-based emotion that captures the feeling of distress when an external force, one that we are powerless to prevent, enters the biophysical location or “life-space” within which one lives out a life (the private home, the property, and the region) and chronically desolates it. The place becomes literally toxic, and at the same time one’s sense of place becomes negative.” 

What solastalgia embraces is this combination of negative or damaging environmental changes (in Albrecht’s initial work these specifically involved an open-pit coal mine and persistent drought in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales in Australia), the unpleasant effects these have on the psychological health of those who live in places directly effected by those change, and the lack of control people in those places over the causes or the causes.

The word itself’ combines the idea of solace (as associated with the comfort and security of home) and the Greek root –algia, meaning pain or suffering. It was conceived as a variation of ‘nostalgia,’ a word coined in the 17th century to describe homesickness and depression experienced by those separated from their home place. It now means little more than a gentle longing or wistful affection for the past, but until the early 20th century it was regarded as a diagnosable, psychosomatic disease. Solastalgia, in contrast, is the distress and depression people suffer in their home place because of adverse environmental changes of some sort.

Thomas Dodman (2023) puts it succinctly: “Solastalgia is nostalgia in reverse: the consequence not of having to leave a particular place, but of having that place leave us, or dissolve before our very eyes.” One further difference is that, as Albrecht has written solastalgia “…is in your face, existential, raw, and Earthly” (2019, p.37). But the fact is that it can vary a lot depending on the intensity of the changes and people’s personalities, and may be, as he has also written, merely a sense of “homesickness when you are still at home” (Albrecht et al, 2007).

The Vagueness of Place in Studies of Solastalgia
A systematic review of academic research about solastalgia by Galway et al (2019) observes that while most discussions and case-studies of solastalgia describe it as a place-based phenomenon they actually leave the meaning of ‘place’ undefined. Place is apparently regarded as something more or less self-evident, a malleable backdrop to the physical and mental health issues of solastalgia which are the main focus of the research. This has the disadvantage that the active role of place in the distress of solastalgia is mostly left unexplored. But it has the advantage that solastalgia can be understood in relation to any spatial scale of environments – local communities, regions or even, especially in in the context of climate change, the whole world, without worrying much about how things are related. Naomi Klein, in her influential book This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate, (2014, p. 165), describes solastalgia as an expression of dread about the consequences of global warming and suggests, without elaboration, that it is fast becoming universal because the Earth itself is under assault.

The Academic and Popular Reach of Solastalgia
The comprehensive bibliographic review of solastalgia by Galway et al (2019) made it clear that it is a topic that has been identified as important in many disciplines. They identified 49 substantial academic articles that represented research in psychiatry, regional and city planning, sociology, ecology, agriculture, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, geography, environmental studies, and especially public and mental health.

They did not pay attention to the substantial parallel interest in solastalgia that is artistic rather than academic My unsystematic Google search including images, identified hundreds of websites that discussed, illustrated or interpreted solastalgia in some way – art shows, music compositions and videos, performance pieces, community discussions of eco-anxiety, magazines, documentaries, programmes on the BBC and PBS (Public Broadcasting Service in the US), poetry, several in . A number of the in French, Italian, Greek or Spanish, or in English but about events in Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Slovenia and the Netherlands. I haven’t explored all of these sites, but I get the impression that most are explorations of the emotions of solastalgia, that environmental degradation and climate change predominate, and the role of place is scarcely mentioned. Here are six images from all those websites that show different attempts to illustrate the emotions of solastalgia. Links and sources are in the captions.

Top Left: An Eco-Anxiety Zine. Centre: Biko audio CD; Right: a book of Irish Poetry
Bottom Left: Dutch Pop Concert; Centre: Fundación Meri; Right: Sheet Music

Solastalgia, Place, Placelessness
I understand place as the primary way people everywhere relate to the world. First of all we live in, visit and experiences places; concepts of neighbourhood, city, environment and so on, which are often used as equivalents to place, are abstractions that are secondary to place. Places are territories of concentrated meanings, associations and appearances, which may not always be pleasant but which always inform the identities of individuals and communities. All our lived experiences are to some degree grounded in and made specific by places. As territories of meanings places are subtle and elusive, which makes them difficult to analyse, but the names of places serve as metaphors for their complex meanings and make it possible to share understanding about them. Some places may have political or property boundaries, but from the perspective of experience these don’t mean a great deal because for individuals, communities and economies every place connects to the larger world, continually giving to it and receiving from it.

This sort of understanding of place and how it is experienced matters for solastalgia because it gives an indication of the depth, subtlety and complexity of the values that are threatened by external forces. In other words, solastalgia varies in its manifestations not only because of the character of the external environmental change that promotes it, but also because of the character of the place that experiences it and because of the diverse ways people in that place relate to it.

Some of this was indicated by a study of the health implications of climate change for the small Inuit community of Nunutsiavut in Labrador in Canada (Willox et al, 2012, p.545). One resident suggested that people there think of themselves “not only from this place, but of this place” because the land and way of life are deeply integrated with the setting. The authors of the study acknowledged this and suggested that: “A place-based approach …understands that even subtle alterations in climate and environment can have profound impacts on health and well-being” because for the residents their identities, well-being, livelihoods, histories, and emotional/spiritual connections emerge from the place they live. In some measure this is in fact the case for places everywhere. Our identities as individuals, members of communities, citizens and human beings are unavoidably influenced by the diverse connections we have with places. Solastalgia can dismember those connections.

This sort of understanding of place suggests to me that Albrecht is wrong when he states bluntly (2019 p.37) that solastalgia “.. is not a case of ‘placelessness’ as people are still firmly emplaced within their ‘home.'” On the contrary, I think solastalgia is a clear a manifestation of a sense of placelessness, of no longer belonging somewhere, of the feeling that follows when some external change over which people have no control ruptures the web of meanings that link them to particular places. They may continue to live in the same location, but it is a far less meaningful place.

Of course, this reaction to ruptures in place attachment is not uniformly shared by everyone. While some people recognize the quality of their place has diminished, but adapt to it and get on with their lives, others may experience it as a profoundly upsetting, pathological psychosomatic syndrome.

A promotional video for “The Terrasitic Infestation North American Headline Tour by West Coast Deathgrind Practitioners Capital Decapitation” suggests something towards the angry pathological side of Solastalgia. Here’s the link.

Two Reasons for the Rise of Interest in Solastalgia
I think there are two reasons why solastalgia has rapidly attracted such widespread interest.  One is historical. Presumably people have always been distressed by how environmental changes impacted the places where they lived, but until quite recently environmental destruction, for instance by damming rivers, open-pit mining, development of oil fields, constructing expressways, urban expansion, power generation and so on, was mostly accepted as a by-product or cost of progress, and rarely challenged.  Since about 1970 the shift to environmental protection, sustainability, and heritage preservation has given cultural value to natural environments; damage to them is now regarded as something to be minimised. Solastalgia is an outcome of this increased sensitivity, and a sign that economic progress at any cost has become morally and emotionally unacceptable.

The other reason has to do with uncertainty about the future. Solastalgia, especially in its popular manifestations, is an emotional response to the looming presence of the climate crisis (plus other global problems such as the loss of biodiversity). Global warming is a transformational change that, in the likely absence of equally transformational changes to social and economic life, will negatively affect everyone on the Earth. Especially or those who have been born since the beginning of the century and might well live to the beginning of the next one, future environmental conditions are deeply uncertain. Solastalgia is an anticipatory emotional reaction to the expectation that places everywhere and at every geographical scale will become increasingly difficult to live in as temperatures and sea levels rise, weather events become more extreme, and the entire Earth as the place of human life becomes increasingly challenging and unhomely. 

References

Albrecht, Glenn 2006 “Solastalgia” Alternatives Journal, Waterloo, Vol 32 4/5, pp. 34-35

Albrecht, Glenn et al 2007 “Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change”, Australasian Psychiatry 15 Issue 1, Suppl 1:pp. S95-8 accessed here

Glenn Albrecht 2019 Earth Emotions; New Words for a New World, Cornell University Press.

Connor, Linda, et al 2004 “Environmental Change and Human Health in Upper Hunter Communities of New South Wales, Australia”, EcoHealth Volume 1

Dodman, Thomas, 2023 “Nostalgia and what it used to be” Current Opinion in Psychology Vol 49.

L. Galway et al, 2019 “Mapping the Solastalgia Literature: A Scoping Review Study,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16, 2662 accessed here.

Klein, Naomi, 2014 This Changes Everything, Toronto: Knopf Canada

Willox, A.C. et 2012 “From this place and of this place: climate change, sense of place and health in Nunutsiavut, Canada” Social Science and Medicine. 75 538-547 accessed here

While searching websites for my recent post about Place on Google I discovered a number of diagrams that illustrate the concept of sense of place. These are the five I think most useful and informative.

1. A Triangle of Identity and Attachment
   

This triangle of triangles puts the emphasis on the sense aspect of sense of place by emphasizing identity and attachment. These are concepts that are important in psychological studies of place, so I find it intriguing that this diagram is in a chapter an edited volume about water quality in which most of the chapters focus on pollution and technical concerns. The authors argue that “sense of place offers promise as a tool for measuring an important aspect of the social value of water quality.”

Source: Kate K. Mulvaney, Nathaniel H. Merrill and Marisa J. Mazzotta, 2020, “Sense of Place and Water Quality: Applying Sense of Place Metrics to Better Understand Community Impacts of Changes in Water Quality” in Kevin Summers, ed. Water Quality: Science, Assessments and Policy, InTech Open [an open access peer-reviewed edited volume], accessed online here.

2. An Inverted Triangle of Built Form and Activity

Another triangle diagram that identifies three different components because it puts the emphasis on the place aspect of sense of place, reflecting how it is viewed in terms of built environments by planners and some geographers. The context is also interesting because this is in a paper that examines the ways electronic media are impacting sense of place, though this diagram does not capture those.

Source: Mai Ahmed and Peter Zelle 2020 “Places’ representation on social media – A study to analyze the differences between the virtual communities and the offline environment” Conference paper REAL CORP 2020 Proceedings/Tagungsband, accessed here. (They acknowledge that this is partly based on a diagram in J. Punter, 1991 “Participation in the design of urban space” Landscape design , 200, 24-27.)

3. A Web of Indicators

This more complex diagram includes components from the two triangle diagrams above, adds others, and suggests links between what the authors call “place indicators.” The suggestion is that sense of place, as it relates to houses and built forms, can be understood as the centre of a web of interconnected social, individual and environmental aspects of places and experience of place’.

Source: Duygu Gokce and Fei Chen 2018 “Sense of Place in the changing process of house form: Case studies from Ankara, Turkey”, Environment and Planning B, 45 (4) p. 774 July 2018, accessed online here

4. A Venn Diagram of Individual, Community and Place

This Venn diagram combines elements of the three previous diagrams, and is I think the most sophisticated of all five images I show here. Sense of place is not labelled, but is implicitly in the centre where the three loops overlap. Although the emphasis is social and psychological, the details about global-local linkage, familiarity, power and discourse, intersubjectivity, etc, extend the range for how sense of place needs to be understood, and also suggest its the subtleties and complexities. The way that the various sub-components are loosely clustered acknowledges that their relationships are flexible and varied. It is worth noting that the- the author teaches in a Department of Nursing – interest in place has few disciplinary boundaries.

Source: Goran Erfani 2022 “Reconceptualising Sense of Place: Towards a Conceptual Framework for Investigating Individual-Community-Place Interrelationships”, Journal of Planning Literature, Vol 37, No. 3 accessed online here

5. Circles, Radii, and Words

This visually powerful diagram of sense of place is based on ideas about urban design that are taken from Kevin Lynch’s work on the image of the city (cited bottom left). It can be read, I think, as an elaboration of the inverted triangles about built form and activity shown above. At first glance I found it striking. and it certainly has a lot of information with the combination of diagram and text. However, on reflection I think there is too much going here for the diagram to be really effective; it is cluttered with circles, radial patterns, the ring of little badges, the outer band divided into segments, lists of landmarks, events, world’s best public art, most visited cities. And in spite of this it conveys fewer ideas than the Venn diagram. However, if your interest in specifically in sense of place from the perspective of urban and built environments, this should be helpful.

Source: Ric Stevens 2011 “Sense of Place: An approach to environmental perception/cognition and placemaking”, Prepared for the Oregon Planning Institute, accessed online here:

One of the earliest entries I did for this blog was the page Place on Google, in 2015.  I wanted to get some sense of the wide range of ways the idea of ‘place’ is used, and was curious what on online search would produce. What I got was “an eclectic, jumbled set of results.” The exercise was a good reminder that ‘place’ is powerful and versatile word with a solid core and many, diverse branches.

When I recently went back to look at that page I found that a number of the links no longer worked, which led me to wonder what else might have changed. A quick search suggested some differences, which in turn led me to follow my previous strategy of looking at about the first 100 entries or so for ‘place’ and about 50 each for ‘sense of place’ and ‘spirit of place’. This post summarizes the results.

My search for ‘place’ found over 20 billion results In half a second. For ‘sense of place’ it was 3.3 billion, and ‘spirit of place’ a mere 1.25 billions. Very impressive, but the fact is that after the first 100 or so the results mostly are a blend of inconsequential and repetitive.

What’s New About Place on Google in 2023

Definitions and Meanings: In 2023 definitions and synonyms dominate the top search results. This was not the case in 2015 when I identified about 18 different ways ‘place’ was used in websites, for instance in the names of shelters, in teaching resources, mathematics, architecture, social networking, writing computer code, building names, heritage, and no sense of place. I had no category for definitions.

The following sites were in the top twelve results.
Google’s definition based on Oxford Languages. Then Cambridge, Dictionary, Thesaurus, Collins, Britannica, Wiktionary, Merriam Webster
Each offers maybe twenty or more dictionary definitions of place, both nouns and verbs, and most also suggest synonyms such as ‘ambience’, ‘spot’ and ‘vibe’. My impression is that this plethora of definitions offers almost no clarity about the idea of experience of ‘place” except to demonstrate that it is a remarkably flexible word with many different uses and meanings.

Books: I do not recall if in 2015 there was a separate search category on Google for Books, but in 2023 there is, and it lists hundreds that have ‘place’ in the title – novels, autobiographies, poetry, accounts of regions and of cities.

About 10 percent of all the titles Iare about academic research, and many listings have fragments of the text that discuss the meaning of place. Merely glancing at these is an easy way to get some sense of the range of recent thinking about place across a range of disciplines. In the first five screens I looked at there were books about indigenous places and colonialism, place in architecture, landscape painting, place names, neighborhoods, poetics, diasporas, politics, heritage, and geography.

Real Estate: Another new category. It consists mostly of online listings for buildings or streets that have ‘place’ in their name, but there is also a highly ranked website providing services for real estate agents, with the succinct URL  https://place.com – an all-in-one technology platform for real estate agents.

Locational Bias. This is not a category of place websites but rather a clear orientation I found in the search results towards where I live. This was the case even though I thought I had blocked access to my location. Presumably search engines have a built in assumption that you want to know about what is relevant in your part of the world. What I got were numerous websites that had something to do with Canada that ranged in scale from Earth: Spirit of Place, a book of photographs from space by the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, to Toronto: Spirit of Place, to Our Place, a shelter for the homeless a few blocks from where I live.

This sort of locational bias was not evident in 2015.  From a place perspective it is difficult to regard it as anything other than positive. On the other hand, place is no more concentrated in my part of the world than it is anywhere else, so it is important to note this bias and to look beyond it.

Continuity and Discontinuity

Continuities: Except for the new categories of Definitions and Real Estate there is considerable continuity in how ‘place’ is revealed in website searches. Especially notable  is the continuing and perhaps increasing use of the word ‘place’ in names of shelters and support groups – e.g Rosies’s Place, the first women’s shelter in the US, also Nina’s, Maggie’s, Stella’s, My Sister’s Place. etc, which provide similar support services. I think this reflects the fact that ‘place’ is a neutral term in the name of a facility, it has connotations of comfort, safety, and security.
Place continues to be important in education websites that provide resources for teachers and the promotion of place-based learning.  It remains popular as as focus in design and planning. There are still some active sites that refer to place in relation to computers; Schema is important because it has to do with writing code that captures place and location data.

The locational bias in my search results drew my attention to the Quebec Declaration on the Preservation of The Spirit of Place, approved in 2008 at the meeting of the International Council of Monuments and Sites, an NGO that works to protect cultural heritage places and is an advisory body to UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee. This sort of thinking about place has trickled down and now seems to be a common element in heritage conservation at all levels (though there are rather different ways of thinking about spirit of place, as these two recent books indicate)

Discontinuities In 2015 I identified categories of place in my Google Research that had to do with Social Networking, Placemeters (Placemeter), Science Research about Place, and No Sense of Place. Most of the links for these have disappeared, and I found little evidence in 2023 that these are significant themes.

A Concluding Comment about Placeness
I find it mildly encouraging that this website on Placeness, Place and Placelessness, with absolutely no attempts to get a high ranking and out the billions of results of the searches, is identified in the top 100 or so websites on Place that I looked at, in the top 50 for Sense of Place and in the top five for Spirit of Place.

About a year ago I came upon a sign in Paris about Rene Descartes (shown below) that led me to wonder if place might have had some role in facilitating the insights of philosophers and scientists. I began to read biographies and autobiographies of some of them with whose work I was modestly acquainted, to see whether they suggest anything of note about the role of place in their lives. Understandably those books deal mostly with intellectual history, and many convey nothing of interest, but some offer intriguing though brief comments about the places where ideas where conceived or developed. This post is a sort of experiment based on just ten cases to see if the biographies of famous philosophers and scientists suggest anything of value about place.

René  Descartes (1596-1650)
In Discourse on the Method of Reason Descartes developed an approach that lies at the foundation of rationalism and modern science. His method was, in his words, “never to accept anything as true that I did not incontrovertibly know to be so; carefully to avoid both prejudice and premature conclusions; and to include nothing in my judgements other than that which presented itself to my mind so clearly and distinctly, that I would have no occasion to doubt it.” From the perspective of place Discourse on the Method of Reason is significant because it includes clear descriptions of the places where Descartes formulated this method (though it’s important to note he concluded paradoxically that it led to the conviction that he himself “was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which doesn’t need any place or depend on any material thing.”)
In 1619 while he was returning to his position as an officer in the army of the Duke of Bavaria he was unexpectedly held up, probably somewhere near Munich, by the onset of winter, and it was then that his philosophical reflections began. “Finding no conversation to help me pass the time,” he wrote,” and no cares to trouble me, I stayed all day shut up alone in small room heated by a stove where I was free to talk with myself about my own thoughts.”
His life then immediately took a different turn, and he set aside his reflections for nine years when he “did nothing but roam from place to place, trying to be a spectator rather than an actor.” When he finally was about to settle in France it became clear that his scientific views were likely to be repressed by the Catholic church, so he moved to Holland, a Puritan country, where he could continue to develop his method of reason without fear of reprisals. In his words, he decided “to move away from all the places where I might have acquaintances and to retire here, in a country in which … people enjoy the fruits of peace with correspondingly greater security, and where amid a teeming, active, great people that shows more interest in its own affairs than curiosity for those of others, I have been able to live as solitary and as retiring a life as I would in the most remote of deserts, while lacking none of the comforts found in the most populous cities.”
Descartes lived at a time when war and religious orthodoxy were almost constant companions of everyday life. It appears that what mattered most for him were not places attractive for aesthetic or social distinctiveness but rather places attractive primarily for what they were not, ones free of distractions and ideological prejudice that allowed him the opportunity to pursue his own thoughts as he chose.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
Hobbes, considered the founder of modern political philosophy, was a contemporary of Descartes, and they exchanged letters on a number of issues. The remarkable title page of his major work, Leviathan, shows the state as a monster comprised of the bodies of countless individuals, but it also identifies the author as “Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury.”

Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
Newton was born at Woolsthorpe, a village in England, in 1642, at the beginning of the English Civil War. In 1664 he was a student studying classics at Cambridge when he came upon the works of Descartes and Galileo and, following their leads, his mind turned to science and mathematics. In the summer of 1665, the university was closed because of an outbreak of the plague, and he returned to Woolsthorpe to quarantine for almost two years. It was there that he made his initial experimental discoveries in optics and astronomy, and developed his understanding of mathematics, including the calculus, and and where he is said to have seen an apple falling from a tree that led him to the notion of gravity. In other words, rather like Descartes in the Netherlands and Hobbes in Paris, the important aspect of place for Newton was freedom from distracting concerns that allowed him time for contemplation, though in his case he found this at his familiar childhood home rather than a foreign country.

David Hume (1711-1776)
Hume was born and educated in Edinburgh, then moved to Bristol to work in business. He soon abandoned that and, as he wrote in his short autobiography My Own Life, “went over to France with a view of prosecuting my studies in a country retreat; and I there laid that plan of life, which I have steadily and successfully pursued…During my retreat in France, first at Reims, but chiefly at La Flèche, in Anjou, I composed my Treatise of Human Nature.” La Flèche was a small village where, whether coincidentally or not, Descartes had studied a century earlier. It provided the quiet and seclusion Hume initially wanted, but he soon moved to Paris. “There is,” he wrote, “a real satisfaction in living at Paris, from the great number of sensible, knowing, and polite company with which that city abounds above all places in the universe.”
Hume’s empirical approach to philosophy, that aimed to “reject every system … however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation”, explicitly influenced the work of Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant and Charles Darwin (who regarded it as a central influence on the theory of evolution).

Adam Smith (1723-1790)
Adam Smith was born and went to school in the small town of Kirkcaldy near Edinburgh, then studied at the University of Glasgow and at Oxford (which he he found to be an intellectual desert compared with Glasgow). When he graduated he returned to Glasgow as a professor of moral philosophy and became deeply involved in the social life of the city, including with merchants and businessmen. These years he described afterwards as “by far the happiest, and most honourable period of my life.” But his university job paid poorly and after a few years he left for a higher paying position as tutor to a young English aristocrat. This took him to Toulouse in France (where, out of boredom he started work on The Wealth of Nations), and then to Paris, where David Hume introduced him to the intellectual society of the city, including social reformers (some called themselves les economistes) who had a very significant influence on his economic thinking.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Kant is a key figure in modern philosophy because he both brought together the themes of early modern rationalism, and set the terms for most 19th and 20th century discussions. It was Hume’s work, he noted, that woke him from his “dogmatic slumber.” Kant lived in the small city of Koningsberg, then a major German commercial centre and port, now called Kaliningrad in Russia. Unlike most of his philosophical predecessors of the 17th and18th centuries, he spent his entire life in that one place. The reasons for his commitment to Koningsberg are not altogether clear. He constantly worried about his health, and may thought that travel would affect it adversely. He was also compulsively systematic, following exactly the routines every day, and it seems possible that he would have been unable to cope with the disruptions involved in moving to an unfamiliar place. Whatever the reason, he never traveled more than a few kilometres away from the city.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)  
Mill’s autobiographical essay is mostly devoted to his education, but gives hints about the importance of some places for his thinking. He was born in a suburb of London, and educated at home. There he met his father’s acquaintances, including utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham who had a house in the west of England where Mill spend a summer when he was about twelve and which he describes in his autobiography as “an important circumstance in my education.. a fine old place, so unlike the mean and cramped externals of English middle class life.” It was, he wrote in a statement that seems to anticipate his writing about liberty, somewhere that “gave the sentiment of a large and freer existence.” 
A few years later, in his teenage years, he accompanied the Bentham family to France for several months, where he visited the Pyrenees, of which he wrote: “This first introduction to the highest order of mountain scenery made the deepest impression on me, and gave a colour to my tastes through life.” No less important was the fact that the trip included a visit to Paris where he was “exposed to continental liberalism” for the first time and started to become “a firm believer in the agency of the revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity.” France, and specifically “the enjoyment of country life” in the house he lived in near Avignon, became the place where he worked with his wife Harriet on many of the ideas of his seminal work On LIberty. After she died he made infrequent trips to England, and he was buried beside her in Avignon.

Friedrich Engels (1820-95)
The place experience of Engels, though more or less contemporary with that of Mills, could scarcely have differed more.  He was born into a wealthy family of industrialists in what is now Wuppertal in Germany, and was sent to Manchester in 1842, when the city was by many accounts the epicentre of the industrial revolution, to supervise a cotton mill that was owned by his family. However, he had a radical view of the world, and as a keen observer of landscapes and places he systematically explored the city’s neighbourhoods, especially the poorest one. These he described in The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844 as a “planless, knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness.” In his book he described the poverty, filth and squalor, including families in single, windowless rooms, where many families lived “in defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health.” The contrast with the clean and orderly areas where the middle classes lived could hardly have been greater. “When I consider in this connection the eager assurances of the middle-class, that the working-class is doing famously,” he wrote, “I cannot help feeling that the liberal manufacturers, the ‘Big Wigs’ of Manchester are not so innocent after all.”

Charles Darwin (1809-82)
Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, a small English city close to the mountains of North Wales where, in his youth, he frequently walked and appears to have developed his initial interest in the natural world. His formal education in Edinburgh and Cambridge he found “dull”, but his incidental interests in natural science, especially geology and etymology, led to his appointment in 1831 as a naturalist on the Beagle, a Royal Navy survey ship. In the five years of the voyage, which he described in his autobiography as “by far the most important event in my life,” he collected specimens and kept detailed notes about the natural history of all the places the Beagle visited in South America and elsewhere.  
When the Beagle reached the Galapagos Islands his main focus was on their volcanic geology, and his field notes included only brief mentions of animals and plants. His autobiography, written towards the end of his life, describe the Islands as the place merely as important for their “singular relations of its plants and animals.” He had no epiphany about evolution while he was there. But as the Beagle sailed on to Tahiti he examined the specimens that had been collected by himself and others from the different Galapagos Islands and noticed that similar birds from different islands, though related to species he had seen on the mainland of South America, had developed features that suggested they were different species. However, it was not until 1845, nine years after the Beagle had returned to England and he had had time to confirm his observations with ornithologists and the work of other naturalists, that he realized the importance of what he had observed. He wrote then in his Journal of Researches (p. 394): “I never dreamed that islands about 50 or 60 miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted… It is the fate of most voyagers, no sooner to discover what is most interesting in any locality, than they are hurried from it…”
From the perspective of place Darwin’s life was a contrast between mobility and stability. A few years after the voyage of the Beagle he began to suffer from chronic illnesses (which he described as involving violent shivering and vomit attacks) that made both travel and social activities almost impossible. The most important place for him then became his house at Down, in the countryside south of London.  In his autobiography he wrote: “We found this house and purchased it. I was pleased with the diversified appearance of vegetation proper to a chalk district, and so unlike what I had been accustomed to in the Midland counties; and still more pleased with the extreme quietness and rusticity of the place.” It was a retreat where he could concentrate on his scientific work when he was feeling well enough. “Few persons can have lived a more retired life than we have done. Besides short visits to the houses of relations, and occasionally to the seaside or elsewhere, we have gone nowhere.”

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Kierkegaard is generally regarded as the first existential philosopher. He was a contemporary of Darwin and Engels, but his experiences of place had no similarity to either of theirs. He lived most of his life in Copenhagen within a one kilometre radius of Copenhagen’s Vor Frue Kirke (Church of Our Lady) and his place experience involved a complicated relationship with that city. “I regard the whole of Copenhagen as a great party,” he wrote. “But on one day I regard myself as the host who goes and talks to all the many invitees, my dear guests; on the next day I imagine that it is some great man who is giving the party and I am a guest.”
George Pattison has written that the city of Copenhagen is no less important a part of the background to Kierkegaard’s authorship than any intellectual and cultural movement. It was a crucial part of his writing process because he formulated his thoughts by walking around the city and talking with people, then wrote as soon as he returned to his house. Its streets, churches, parks, entertainments, and burial grounds were integral to the very fabric of his his critique of modernity and struggle to redefine what it meant to be Christian. Kierkegaard was a sort of flaneur for whom the place where he lived was replete with the meanings and attitudes of the age. His task deciphering those meanings made him increasingly dismayed about the degree to which belief and faith had been displaced by false convictions and rationalism.  He began to refer to the city as “a market town” occupied by a “human swarm” and and to seek specific places, such as the Church of our Lady and the countryside outside the city, where he could be free of its influences and find inner peace.

A Concluding Comment
On the basis of these biographical summaries I think no firm conclusion can be drawn about the role of place in stimulating profound thinking and insights of notable philosophers and scientists.
For Descartes and Hobbes finding places free from ideological oppression was important. Newton’s innovative thinking seems to have benefitted from being quarantined at home. Hume, Mill and Smith were intellectually stimulated by life in Paris. but to write The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith presumably found it advantageous to live with his mother in his home town. Places encountered through travel were important to some, especially Darwin of course, though he, too, needed a quiet home place to write about those. Engels was an acute observer of places, and his radical ideas were stimulated by the inequality he saw in them. Kant lived his life in one place but it had no apparent role in his thinking. Kierkegaard also spent his life in one place but his experiences there were essential to his thinking .
In short, while associations with particular places were not unimportant in their lives, those associations took diverse and inconsistent forms. T

The Impact of Philosophers and Scientists on Places
The most notable relationships between philosophers and places, as indeed with many famous people, is actually in posterity. The various places where they were born, lived, studied and died have been given some lasting recognition, usually in plaques, signs and statues, sometimes by turning their houses into heritage sites. The site of the house in Malmesbury where Hobbes was born has a simple sign. So does the site of the long-demolished house in Kirkcaldy where Adam Smith spent most of life. Mill’s grave in Avignon has a decorative fence, and there’s a statue of him in London where he lived and worked for many years. Trip Advisor ranks the statue of Immanuel Kant as #37 of 238 things to do in Kaliningrad.
On a more elaborate scale the University of Glasgow has an Adam Smith Business School, an Adam Smith chair of Political Economy, an Adam Smith building, an Adam Smith Research Foundation and an Adam Smith Library. Newton’s estate in Woolsthorpe is now owned by the National Trust and, in some process of scientific place transference, grafts from the apple tree have been shipped to universities around the globe. Down House in Kent where Darwin lived is owned by English Heritage whose website recommends it as “A Great Value Family Day Out for Just £41.60”; the Galapagos Islands are marketed as an important destination for environmental tourists. Copenhagen has Søren Kierkegaard walking tours. Engels had largely been ignored In Manchester until 2017 when the rock musician Phil Collins got a statue of Engels he had found abandoned in Ukraine installed in front of the HOME performing arts centre.
I am not sure why identifying or visiting a place associated with a person famous should be considered worthwhile, though I often do it myself. Perhaps it is a way for us to admire and recall famous individuals, but I suspect we also quietly hope that by going to those places some of their insights or abilities will somehow rub off on us and we can share a little bit of their fame.

Darwin’s Down House as promoted on the website of English Heritage in 2023, and rubbing the toe of the statue in Edinburgh of David Hume, a person who did not believe in miracles, in the hope that it will bring good fortune.

References
• A general source I have found informative for this post is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has excellent biographies of philosophers and essays about their contributions to philosophy. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu
• René Descartes, Discourse on the Method trans Ian MacLean, Oxford World Classics, 2006 https://docslib.org/doc/10835580/descartes-1637-discourse-on-method-pdf
• David Hume, 1777, My Own Life, available at https://davidhume.org/texts/mol/
• John Stuart Mill, Autobiography available at https://www.utilitarianism.com/millauto/
• Friedrich Engels, 1845, The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844, available at https://archive.org/details/conditionworkingclassengland/page/49/mode/2up?view=theater
• Charles Darwin, 1881, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2010/2010-h/2010-h.htm
• Charles Darwin, 1845, Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Countries visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, available at http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F14&viewtype=text&pageseq=1
• Kierkegaard – I have relied on George Pattison, 2013, “Kierkegaard and Copenhagen” in J. Lippet and G Pattison (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, Oxford University Press. Available at https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34339/chapter-abstract/327336322?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

[Note: I have not included the philosopher Martin Heidegger in this post because because he is a sole exception to general disconnection between place and philosophical or scientific insight and because I have written about elsewhere in this website about his thinking, for instance in the posts Home and Place, and the Politics of Place.]

This topic that has been on my place radar for some time. Taking students outdoors to learn about and from places has been done for centuries, and I did it in many of my classes when I was teaching. In the last thirty years this practice has been formalized and explicitly named as ‘place-based education’ or ‘place-based learning’.  It has been widely promoted and adopted, especially in North America and Australia, but also in Japan, Norway, Britain and elsewhere.

Here I consider it as an example of one of the ways that the importance of place is now being explicitly recognized in different fields and disciplines, and note its alignment with the notion of learning through doing that was first articulated about a century ago by the American philosopher John Dewey. An account of its background and origins from an educational perspective, particular how it developed from attempts to find ways to teach children about environmental issues is provided by Greg Smith in “The Past, Present and Future of Place-Based Learning” at Getting Smart 2016.

Definitions and Principles of Place-Based Education
David Sobel, in the first book devoted to place-based education provides a comprehensive definition that is frequently referenced by others : “Place-based education is the process of using the local community and environment as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum…Hands on, real world learning experiences help students develop stronger ties to their communities, enhance appreciation for the natural world and create a heightened commitment to serving as an active citizen” (Sobel, 2004).

Another more succinct and enigmatic definition, which also seems to be frequently cited, is: “Place based education is anywhere, anytime learning that leverages the power of place to personalize learning” (see: Getting Smart 2017)

These definitions are elaborated in what are often described as the six key principles of place-based education. (See for example: castschool, maine, teton science, and particularly vander Ark et al which is summarized here ).

• A place that is beyond the confines of the school can be a classroom.
• Local learning can serve as basis for understanding global issues (sometimes phrased as the need to develop a sense of place before trying to understand abstract global problems).
• The process is learner centred, which makes it personally relevant to students.
• Lessons are enquiry based, which involves making careful observations about a place, asking relevant questions, and collecting data in systematic ways.
• Students learn the sorts of critical skills needed to make an impact on the local community.
• It is holistic and interdisciplinary because traditional subject area content and skills are taught through an integrated interdisciplinary approach that responds to real places.

While some of the ideas and practices in these six principles have long  been a part of the curriculum, for instance in geography, in place-based education they have taken on a more forceful and focussed role which recognizes that where and how a student learns are as important as what a student learns. Unlike conventional text learning, which is both passive and siloed into subject areas, place-based learning is multidisciplinary, participatory, connects students with a community, and gets them directly engaged in making sense of environment processes and problems.

Place in Place-Based Learning
In place-based education the idea of place seems to be taken mostly as self-evident, unproblematic concept: it is simply a fragment of geography, somewhere local with a particular identity, usually but not necessarily the community or area where the school is located because this is easily accessible. However, implicit in the six principles is the acknowledgement that places/localities are rather more complex than this, that they are the contexts of everyday life, tangled knots of social and environmental features and processes that in various ways are both openings to and open to the larger world, and that it requires some effort of observation and interpretation to disentangle them.

I think the approaches of place-based education are important because they convey to students that we all unavoidably live in places with all their thrown-together complexities, contradictions, and contestations. Places are what we know first in the real world, before we learn about mathematics and language arts and social studies. Accounts and explanations provided by conventional disciplines, no matter how complicated they may sometimes seem, are always simplifications of our experiences of places.

Place-based education is also important because teachers have to educate students in ways that will help their students to deal with what they will encounter in the rest of their lives. It is easy to despair about the unprecedented local and global challenges of the 21st century, including climate change, ongoing degradation of natural environments, and persistent inequalities, but the advocates of place-based learning bring a very positive attitude to handling these. Peter Renshaw (2017), for example, is confident that place-based learning can provide the personal connectedness and interdisciplinary flexibility that are essential tools for dealing with them. And Tom vander Ark, Emily Liebtag, and Nate McClennen are utterly optimistic about the value of learning from place (vander Ark, 2020, p. 132):
“Despite mounting risks, the second decade of the 21st century is a wonderful time to be a young person on this planet. It has never been easier to make an impact by coding, launching a campaign, starting an organization that will have an impact on the world, and many of these will be the result of an adult working with a young person and a place.”

John Dewey: “Local geography is the natural starting point”
In the background of place-based education, and frequently referred to by its proponents, are the ideas of the early 20th century American philosopher John Dewey. He didn’t write explicitly about place but he did argue that schools needed to move away from memorization of received knowledge to experiential learning. In his 1916 book Democracy and Education (Chapter 16, The Significance of Geography and History) he claimed that if geography and history are taught as ready-made studies which somebody studies simply because they are sent to school, it easily happens that “ordinary experience…is weighed down and pushed into a corner by a load of unassimilated information.” On the other hand: “With every increase of ability to place our own doings in their time and space connections, our doings gain in significant content;” in schools, he suggests, “local or home geography is the natural starting point” to encourage this.

Dewey did acknowledge that some content, facts and values had to be taught in classrooms, but his pedagogical philosophy emphasized above all the principle of learning by doing. Abstract knowledge needs to be grounded in activities in the real world. And because education is unavoidably connected to community and social life, this necessarily involved engaging directly with the community and its local or home geography. It took another eighty years for Dewey’s suggestion to be realized, but grounding abstract knowledge is exactly what place-based learning aims to achieve by deriving it from the investigation of local communities and places.

Two Qualifications: Non-Places and Learning from Places
This straightforward interpretation of place as local community and geography, which seems to be assumed by many proponents of place-based education, is problematic according to Joy Berling (2018). She raises the matter of non-places, the ones without history or culture that are described by Marc Augé (1995) in his book about them, and argues that rooting place-based learning in the local environment and emphasizing place awareness fails to address the fact that place is “increasingly ephemeral or even non-existent in the world of supermodernity.” I think this is an important caution. In order to help students makes sense of the modern world it is just as worthwhile to investigate uninspiring, placeless settings apparently empty of culture, as it is to examine conveniently local fragments of geography.

Moreover, if education is understood in its broadest sense as learning about the world, and places are understood as complicated territories of meanings with or without distinctive identities, then it is clear from the insights of numerous artists, poets, philosophers and scientists that there are many ways individuals have learnt from them that owe little to the pedagogic approaches of place-based education. Some that spring easily to mind are Alexander von Humboldt, Gilbert White, Wordsworth, Cézanne, van Gogh, Thoreau, Darwin, Heidegger, even Descartes whose philosophy explicitly disavowed place but nevertheless carefully described the places where he conceived that philosophy. I don’t know that place-based education has much to learn from the place experiences of such remarkable people, but from the perspective of place they suggest some intriguing possibilities that I hope to explore in a future post.

References
Augé, Marc, (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, (London: Verso)

Joy Berling (2018) Non-Place and the Future of Place-Based Education, Environmental Education Research, Vol 24, Issue 11

John Dewey, (1916), Democracy in Education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. Available at Project Gutenberg

Peter Renshaw, ed., (2017) Diverse Pedagogies of Place: Educating Students in and for Local and Global Environments, Taylor and Francis, London

Sobel, D. (2004) Place-Based Education: Connecting Classroom and Community, Great Barrington, MA, The Orion Society.

Tom Vander Ark, Emily Liebtag, and Nate McClennen (2020 )The Power of Place: Authentic Learning Through Place-Based Education, Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development

This post differs from all my others because it consists simply of extracts relating to place and landscape that I have taken from Eric Dardel’s 1952 book L’Homme et la Terre: Nature de la Réalité Géographique (Man and the Earth: The nature of geographical reality). It has no images. It does, however, offer what I consider to be valuable insights into the phenomenological foundations of geography, place and landscape. These directly informed my book Place and Placelessness, and have permeated much of my subsequent writing.

I have recently posted a translation of Chapter One of Dardel’s book on Academia.edu. This chapter is about ‘Geographical Space,” and because the book only has two chapters my translation covers about half of it. I have not translated the second chapter, which is on the History of Geography.

In this post the first two items on ‘Geographicality’ are a précis of several sections of Dardel’s book and they are almost entirely in my words. However the items on Landscape, and on Existence and Geographical Reality, are mostly taken directly from my translation of Dardel’s book, and are, in effect, quotations though I have not used quotation marks. What I have done is to omit long discussions about examples that support his arguments, and selected statements that might be of some value to those interested in place or landscape. If you want to cite something from these two items you should acknowledge them as: Eric Dardel, L’Homme et la Terre: Nature de la Réalité Géographique Presses Universitaires de France, 1952, as translated by Edward Relph, 2022.  

Geographicality versus geometric space
Dardel’s premise is that before and behind all objective, formal and scientific accounts of the world, including those of academic geography, there lies the curiosity and wonder of direct, unmediated experience. For Dardel these beforehand experiences constitute a relationship that he calls “geographicality” (géographicité in French) that binds us to the Earth and the world. It is how we encounter what he refers to as “the Earth” which for Dardel is synonymous with “geographical reality’, and equivalent to what is often simply referred to as ‘the world.”

Geometric space and the space of atlases is “homogeneous, uniform, neutral.” However, the space of geographicality is everywhere differentiated because human initiative gives to each place a distinctive appearance and its own name. It involves a sort of complicity of existence that is expressed in curiosity about places, landscapes and environments. Geographicality involves a mix of perceptions, emotions, our bodies, habits, mobility, that are so taken for granted they are mostly overlooked or forgotten in much the same way that we forget our own physiology. Yet it is there when we contemplate the ocean, enjoy walking in a forest or down a picturesque street, look out over a landscape from a scenic viewpoint, get annoyed by some new development that seems out of context, or admire spring blossoms. It is, Dardel suggests, mostly “hidden yet ready to reveal itself,” something that happens, for instance, when we have to move away from a place we love or through some exceptional environmental experience.

Space in Geographicality
The ways we encounter the world are colored by what Dardel describes as the spaces of geographicality. Space here means almost something like ‘atmosphere’ and the ones he identifies are material, telluric, aquatic, aerial, and built, all of which interact in diverse ways in our experiences of places and landscapes.  

• material space is filled with mountains, rivers, oceans, cities, with distances and directions; it welcomes or challenges human freedom; it is somewhere we can get lost in or find ourselves. I think of it as the space of the surface of the earth as we see it or move across it.
• “telluric” means originating in the earth. Telluric space has density and depth, it provides a foundation for human existence. “Granite is the fundamental substance,” wrote Hegel in his Philosophy of Nature. “The rock stands firm against tempest and erosion; it is unshakeable, unalterable, like the very seat of the world.” We experience telluric space in the sheer mass of  mountains, in canyons, quarries, cliffs, caves, almost anywhere bare, solid rock is exposed.
• aquatic spaces of lakes, rivers, the ocean, are always in motion, often gentle, sometimes still and like a mirror but mostly flowing, and occasionally violent and tempestuous in floods and storms. Telluric space provides a foundation; aquatic space has power to erode, and change.       
• the space of air is atmospheric, “invisible yet always present, permanent yet changing, imperceptible but pulled about by the wind as though insignificant,” varying according to time of day, the season and climate and therefore modifying the geographicality of other spaces.
• Built or constructed spaces are all those those made by people, including fields, terraces, roads, and the range of dwelling places from villages to cities. These differ in their qualities and meanings, constituent, enduring, casually accepted, almost unconscious elements that frame everyday life. Built environments, whether roads or towns or transmission towers on mountain tops, given definition to material space, can rearrange and give meaning to aquatic space, and create their own horizons and atmospheres.

Landscape
The constant interactions of the forms of geographical space are manifest in landscape. Something more than a juxtaposition of picturesque details, landcape is an assemblage, a convergence, a lived-moment. There is an internal bond, an ‘impression’, that unites all its elements. It implicates the totality of what it is to be human and our existential attachment to the Earth, our original geographicality, because the Earth is the foundation and the means of our accomplishments. Landscape is a presence that can be attached or estranged, and yet which is lucid in the way it affects our bodies and minds.

Landscape is not a closed circle but an unfolding that opens beyond what can be seen. … a glimpse of the entire world because geographicality is written in the landscape as an expression of humanity, of how we search for identity and our personal and social intentions. Landscape, in its essence, is not made to be looked at but is rather the insertion of people into the world, a place of life’s struggles, the manifestation of personal and social being. For instance, there are regions of slow death, such as North-East Brazil, where famine imposes its dismal presence on the entire landscape. “Death dominates all the North-East. It is always present. It floats over the landscape. It becomes part of life” (Josue de Castro, Geography of Hunger, p.149). A truth of the landscape stands out not as a geographical theory, nor even as some aesthetic value, but as an expression of existence. It tells of a world in which human existence has been realized in distinctive and circumspect ways.

Existence and Geographical Reality
Geography is not initially a form of knowledge; geographical reality is not at first an ‘object’; geographical space is not a blank space waiting to be colored and filled in. Geographical science presupposes a world that may be understood through geographicality and also that a person may feel and know themselves to be tied to the world as a being called to understand themselves in their earthly situation.

Geographicality does not have an indifferent or detached conception of things; it has to do with what matters to me – my anxieties and concerns, my well-being, my plans, my relationships. Though it usually remains unobtrusive, more lived than expressed, for each person it involves first of all the place they are in, the places of childhood, the environment which summons them to its presence. It is the land where they walk or work, the edge of their valley or street or neighbourhood, their everyday movements across the city. It restricts and encloses life, it is a connection to the land, an horizon imposed on actions and thoughts. Color, shape, the smell of the soil and vegetation mix with memories, emotions and ideas.

Geographicality acts on us through an awakening of consciousness. Sometimes it even operates as a reawakening, as though it was already there before we are even aware of it. It is a particular way for us to be permeated by land, by sea, by distance, to be overwhelmed by mountains, and to be animated by landscape. in this there is something over which we have no control because it intervenes, usually without any awareness, into geographical experience. This enlightening (éclairage), as Merleau-Ponty has called it, can surrounds us and lead us away from the commonplace.

 It is from this ‘place’, as the foundation of our existence, that we renew our awareness of the world, and from here that we leave to confront it or to work in it. To live in a country is first of all to entrust ourselves quite literally to whatever is underneath us. To exist is, conversely, also to go away from there, from something that is deeper than our consciousness, from this foundation. This is not abstract and conceptual, but concrete. Before any choice, there is this ‘place’ that we have not chosen, where the foundations of our worldly existence and human condition establish themselves. We can change places, move, but this is still to look for a place. We need a base to set down our being and to realize our possibilities, a here from which to discover the world, a there to which we can go. Everyone has their own country and their own perspective on the world. Consider the distress of the exile or the refugee for whom their own firm foundation of being has been taken away. They may keep with them in memory some ‘objects’, such as trees, hills, houses, but it is their very subjectivity that is wounded, and no ‘reasoning’ can return to them the lost value of those ‘objects’ for they cannot set them down to establish roots. The fact of being at home exceeds any material contact with the ground, but because the Earth is the most definite yet normal aspect of being at home it is there, where the Earth is most directly implicated, that the very foundations of existence hide themselves. (Emmanuel Lévinas, D l’Existence à l’Existant, p.120).

The Earth as foundation is the advent of the subject that is basic to all consciousness becoming aware of itself. Before any objectivity the Earth blends into all consciousness, and for human beings it is that from which we emerge into being, on which we create, it is the site of our living places, it provides materials of houses, the source of suffering, and it is the Earth to which we have to adapt our intentions for building and doing.

That there is, in the final analysis something inexpressible and obscure in this fundamental relationship with the Earth was shown by Heidegger in his study The Origin of the Work of Art.  He describes the sight of a Greek temple built to overlook the sea: “The building stands as a silent presence on the rock. A human work resting on the rigid supports that the rock provides for it, although the rock by itself is just a shapeless mass piled up without purpose. It stands unshakeable in raging storms and reveals them in all their violence. The brilliance and radiance of the stone, which shines only with the gift of sunlight, gives to the day all its light, to the sky all its immensity, to the night all its darkness. The building dominates; its rigid structure makes visible the invisible space of air. Unshakeable, this building resists waves, and its silence make their roaring reverberate. In this setting the tree, the grass, the eagle and star, the snake and the cicada, take on the distinct form that is theirs, and it is then that they should appear as that which they are. This fact of clarification and opening out in totality is what the Greeks meant by the term Physis. Physis clarified that on which man lays the foundations of his habitat. We call it the Earth.” It goes without saying that in stating it this way the Earth loses its particular geographical sense and refers to the obscure depths from which all beings come into the light. Human effort in constructing a temple consists of pulling stone, shoreline and night from their apathy, from their original obscurity, without ever taking them completely away from the Earth which remains in shadow.  Human beings are involved in an incessant struggle – that between the day which gives to things a meaning and distinctiveness; and that of the night, of the “Earth,” of the depths to which all human endeavours return when they are left abandoned to become again stone, wood and metal.

Some Summary Comments
Dardel’s book is an account of the remarkable and diverse ways in which we experience the world around us when the formal concepts and theories of Geography and other sciences do not intervene. As his starting point he takes experiences of space, and space he understands not in the geometric way that has come to prevail in current geographical thought, but as the diverse and ‘colored’ spaces that are manifest in our unmediated experiences of the world around us, its materials, its depths and heights, its air, aquatic and built places. He considers how these are involved in the ways we see landscapes, and the fundamental role of the various manifestations of geographical reality for existence and being. 

            I think it is helpful to emphasise three aspects of Dardel’s argument. The first, which he mentions several times, is that these direct, often wonderful, experiences come before and lie behind formal, scientific knowledge of the world, and, though they may seem to be of less importance than that, they are in fact, to a greater or lesser degree, fundamental, inescapable aspects of everybody’s existence. And they are constantly implicated in our everyday experiences of the world.

            The second aspect, which is not apparent in the abbreviated account I provide here because I have left out all the examples Dardel uses to support his ideas, is that poets and novelists are important sources for identifying the character of experiences of the Earth and its environments because they often find words to express what we may have felt but cannot articulate well. In effect, poetry and poetic language can make our own experiences real for us.  What Dardel does for me is to clarify many of my own experiences when I go hiking in the mountains or the forest, contemplate the ocean (which happens to be at the end of the street where I live), watch the changing sky at sunset, or walk out into the teeth of a storm to feel its winds and rain. He tells me why these experiences are existential as well as aesthetic.

            The third point is that ‘the Earth’ or the world stands for everything that surrounds us – the land, farms, mountains, rivers, lakes, places and landscapes of all kinds whether cities, villages, oil fields, farms, or container ports. in short, they stand for geography in the broadest sense of the word. Although Dardel’s choice of examples, which I have omitted here, suggest a rural and romantic bias towards natural environments, there is, as he notes, really nothing romantic or sentimental in existential encounters with the places and landscapes of the Earth because these places and my encounters with them define the character of human being and existence.

[I updated this post, especially in the Comments sections at the end, in August 2022, to reflect several recent reports about the impacts of military activity on carbon emissions, and relocation of places because of climate change.]

On Monday, March 4th 2022, the fifth day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the greatest act of inter-state, territorial military aggression since the1940s, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published its Sixth Assessment Report. The coincidence that they occurred so close together has led me to think about the very different roles that place plays in war and peace from the perspective of global warming. More specifically, modern warfare involves the deliberate destruction of places, displaces their populations and contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. But the Sixth Assessment Report assumes a geopolitical background of peace will be needed for the mitigation and adaptations needed to keep climate change, which destroys places and displaces populations through fires, floods, droughts and rising sea levels, within reasonable limits

In its effects, global warming is a self-inflicted, slowing intensifying world war that will impact most of humanity. But this is not a war that can be fought with weapons or violence. It has to be fought with peaceful cooperation at every geographical scale from nations to regions, cities and towns.

Nation States and Sense of Place
I’ll begin with some general comments in order to clarify how I understand relationships between place, war, and peace and place.

”Sense of place’, as it is used in everyday language, can refer to the attachment we have with the home we live in to a feeling of responsibility for the entire Earth as the home of humankind. Within this wide range of places the country where we live is likely to stand out as especially significant, not least because our connections with it are constantly reinforced by elections, passports, national sports teams, anthems, flags and patriotic feelings. However, for all its emotional connotations the word ‘country’ has little political or legal status. What we usually call ‘countries’ are more formally ‘nation states’ (usually referred to simply as nations), which are defined by political borders established in treaties, shown in maps and usually demarcated on the ground. The idea behind them, which seems to have originated in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries from some strange combination of political theory, capitalism, and improvements in cartography, is that they somehow fuse a ‘state’, or an area under a single government (it could be a monarchy, a republic or a dictatorship), with a ‘nation’, which involves some combination of ethnicity, culture, language, and shared history.

The United Nations, and various parallel and subsidiary organizations such as the International Olympics Committee, the World Trade Organization and the IPCC, currently recognizes 195 nation states. This formal recognition gives them an aura of permanence. But the fact is that many nation states in their current forms are relatively new, created in the 19th century (e.g. Italy, Germany), or in treaties after the world wars of the 20th century (e.g. Poland, Austria, Hungary, Israel), or as an outcome of decolonization (e.g. India, Nigeria). Their borders and identities are not carved in stone, but are the consequence of negotiated settlements.

Different interpretations about the geographical extent of nations and where state borders should be drawn have led to separatist movements, and more significantly to the violent military confrontations of two world wars, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These territorial wars are, in effect, conflicts between two opposing political or ideological senses of place. On the one hand the aggressors wish to expand the place that constitutes their sense of what their nation should be. On the other hand, countries that are threatened fight to defend their nation as a place with a distinctive culture that is shared by all its communities and citizens. For those caught in the war zone, if they survive, one consequence of these ideological disagreements is that many of the actual places where they live will be destroyed.

War and the Annihilation of Place
Strategies of warfare have often included the deliberate destruction of places where people live and conduct their everyday lives because this is regarded as a way to undermine popular resistance and ensure subjugation. In 146 B.C. the Romans reduced the city of Carthage to such complete ruin it could not be rebuilt. In the 14th century the English Black Prince conducted a chevauchée in France, a campaign to instil terror and to weaken the supply lines of the French by burning and pillaging villages and towns. In 1565 Vijayanagar, a city at the heart of an empire that ruled southern India, was captured and destroyed by Muslim armies, and then completely abandoned; the remnants of the ruins are now a World Heritage Site.

In the Second World War these strategies were brought to a terrifying new level with technologies of area bombing. Ken Hewitt has described the result with brutal simplicity as “the annihilation of place” (Hewitt, 1983, 1994). The bombing, he indicates, was systematically directed at city centres, where population densities were highest, and a deliberate attack on the inhabitants of cities and the infrastructure and amenities of civic life. It was an explicit manifestation of the idea of  ‘total war’ in which everyone, soldier or citizen, is considered to be somehow involved in the conflict and therefore a potential target. The aim of place annihilation was, and still is, to undermine civilian morale, generate terror, displace populations, put leverage on political leaders, and perhaps to reduce casualties among one’s own troops by bringing an early end to war.

Germany used area bombing in the London blitz and in numerous raids on other cities in Britain. The Allies then responded with even more devastating raids on German cities, including Dresden, where a firestorm incinerated almost all the city centre, and on Hamburg, Berlin and about 70 other cities, destroying more than a million houses and making more than seven million people homeless. In Japan the level of destruction was even greater, partly because of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but also because of the enormous firestorm created in 1945 by American bombing of the Asakusa district of Tokyo which destroyed more than 250,000 houses and probably killed about 130,000 people. In every one of those instances, whether in Britain, Germany or Japan, most of those who died or were forced to evacuate were women, children and the elderly. For those who survived, the physical place where they had lived, its buildings, streets, parks, trees, had disappeared. Their sense of place was utterly shattered.

Remarkably, in spite of this astounding scale of destruction, powerful elements of topophilia and attachment to place survived. Almost all these annihilated places were rebuilt. Some, such as the centre of Warsaw and the Asakusa Kannon Temple in Tokyo, are faithful reconstructions of what they had been. Most were rebuilt with modern identities, new buildings and street patterns, with only a few monuments to recall their catastrophic destruction. These acts of reconstructive placemaking may have been indirectly encouraged by the formation in 1945 of the United Nations, which had as its primary aim the prevention of future wars and, by implication, their destruction of places.

The decades since then have been relatively peaceful, at least for European and other developed nations that had been drawn into the two world wars. Major conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and most recently Iraq and Afghanistan were relatively localized (and also seemed remote from more developed nations). Furthermore, the Cold War threat of mutually assured destruction through an exchange of nuclear missiles effectively discouraged conventional wars that might have escalated into global place annihilation.

In this period of enduring peace the widespread assumption (much as it had been before the First World War, see MacMillan, 2013) seems to have been that peace, at least between developed nations, had become a geopolitical condition that would persist indefinitely into the future. This assumption was upended by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the systematic destruction of places in Ukrainian cities, apparently on the pretext of annexing somewhere Russia considers part of its ethnic national place.

Place in Peace at a Time of Climate Change
The Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC, released just a few days after the attack on Ukraine, begins with the blunt statement that the effect of human activity on the Earth’s climate has become unequivocal, increasingly apparent and widespread (IPCC, 2022). Impacts of climate change and extreme weather events have already caused the loss of ecosystems, reduced food security, contributed to migration and displacement, damaged livelihoods, adversely effected the health and security of people, and led to increased inequality. The world is rapidly moving towards temperature, climatic and weather conditions that have not happened in the last 12,000 years (and possibly a much longer period) and will pose enormous challenges. To mitigate and adapt to these challenges require “transformative actions” in political and socio-economic systems need to be taken internationally and immediately. It is very clear from numerous but scattered comments in the Report that these transformative actions will require both peace and the extensive participation of local places, which is to say places at the scale or nations, regions, cities, towns and villages.A context of peace is implicitly assumed in almost everything written about place because it has been written in the peacetime that has generally prevailed for seventy years since the Second World War. Of course, there have been civil wars in Syria, Colombia, Rwanda, and elsewhere, and major regional conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, but until Russia invaded Ukraine there had been no inter-state wars in seventy years.

I think it is no exaggeration to suggest that, in the absence of transformative changes, the destructive, place annihilating consequences of climate change could equal or even exceed those of the two world wars. Rather than missiles and bombs, the damage will be done by wildfires, floods, rising sea levels, droughts, rising wet bulb temperatures and all forms of extreme weather. With global warming the entire world has, in effect, acquired a common enemy with the power to contribute to widespread deaths and destruction of places, and forced mass migrations of tens of millions. But unlike inter-state conflicts, the war against warming cannot  be fought and won with weapons or violence. It has to be fought from a foundation of peace and cooperation in order to implement universal measures needed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and to coordinate strategies for adaptation.

The invasion of Ukraine challenges some fundamental, mostly implicit assumptions both about both place and about strategies for mitigation and adaptation to global warming. First, almost everything written about place, sense of place and placemaking has been published since 1970, and has assumed a peaceful political context. To my knowledge there have been no discussions of the place consequences of civil wars in Syria, Colombia, Rwanda, the Balkans, and elsewhere, or of major regional conflicts in Afghanistan,Vietnam and Iraq. Secondly, the IPCC is an agency of the United Nations, which was created to promote international peace, and all the conferences and reports about climate change that it has created have been in the context of the peace that has prevailed globally since it was created in 1988.

As a first step to try to grasp the implications of substantially changed circumstances created by the war in Ukraine, I studied the Sixth Assessment Report to determine what it suggests about war, peace and the importance of place.

[ A brief note on method: The Sixth Assessment Report is thorough, comprehensive and backed by a huge amount of scientific research. But it is also very long, dense and difficult to read. Because my interest here is in place, peace and war, I employed the Find function to identify uses of these terms (and related terms such as violent conflict, cooperation, and local) and then paid attention to those instances where they are discussed rather than just cited in book titles or used as figures of speech. The numbers given below (14-72 etc) are page references – each chapter has its own pagination (i.e .Chapter 14 page 72); SPM is Summary for Policymakers, the first section of the Report.]

War and Violent Conflict are mentioned only about twenty times each in the 3700 pages of the Report, and most of those suggest that climate change probably contributed to civil wars in Syria and Sudan. More generally it is noted that: “major armed conflict” is much less likely to happen because of climate change than “low-intensity organized violence” and perhaps civil wars (16-3, 16-22, 16.72), and these will most likely happen where extreme weather exacerbates poverty and food shortages (see 7-80, 7-118). In other words, conflicts will probably be localized, perhaps in ragged wars. The solutions to these cannot be military, but have to be linked “to development and people’s vulnerabilities in complex social and politically fragile settings” (18-22). In other words, the solutions lie mostly in development to reduce poverty and food insecurity.

Peace. The IPCC, as a branch of the UN, implicitly assumes a mostly peaceful future for its prognoses and proposals. In the Sixth Assessment Report there are over 500 mentions of peace (perhaps half of those are in titles of articles and books). An important theme in these is that “climate resilient peace” and “peace building” can be promoted through adaptation and inclusive development that reduces exposure to extreme weather (7-8, 7-107). This reflects ideas promoted in the Paris Agreement and in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, especially the goal for peace and justice (9-12).

A major risk to peace-building comes with involuntary displacements and migrations across state borders that could result from drought, crop failure, sea level rise and flooding (16-72). This risk, it is suggested, might be reduced by pursuing “climate resilient pathways.” These are shown in a diagram in the final chapter of the Report (18-11) which indicates the five pillars of development used in the Sustainable Development Goals (People, Prosperity, Partnership, Peace, Planet) and a “narrow and closing window of opportunity” to make the transformational changes needed for development futures that are “climate resilient and sustainable.” In other words, mitigation and adaptation have to involve policies for social justice and equity that will facilitate peace.

Place and Local Knowledge. It is clear from numerous references in the Assessment Report that climate resilient pathways have to run through places and involve local knowledge. Although ‘sense of place’ is mentioned a mere 20 times, ‘place’ and ‘places’ are used over 1000 times and the word ‘local’ almost 3000 times, often in association with ‘knowledge’. It is clear that these are fundamental ideas in climate resilience. Exactly how important can be pieced together from these numerous mentions.

First, the Report emphasizes the importance of Indigenous and local knowledge, as well as scientific knowledge, for understanding and evaluating climate adaptations (SPM-5). ‘Indigenous and local’ are frequently combined (see for instance Cross-Chapter Box INDIG 18-74 ) because they both hold relevant knowledge about specific environments and environmental changes, and the impact of those on ecosystems and livelihoods. Indigenous/local knowledge is defined as the “understandings and skills developed by people specific to the places where they live” (1-44). The scale of what is meant by ‘local’ is not explained, but my reading suggests that they mostly refer to somewhere below the national level, roughly at the spatial scale of municipalities, metropolitan areas, or distinctive topographical/ecological areas, where lower levels of government and other agencies can engage directly with communities impacted by extreme and changing weather, and use building codes, urban planning, and land-use management policies that are appropriate for the specific or unique circumstances in their areas (see, for example, section 17.14.2 on Governance; also comments on 6-120, 10-95, 14-17, 18-21, 18-80). This is, I think, consistent with the Report’s recommendation that adaptation and mitigation options should be aligned to local contexts in order to take advantage of bottom-up initiatives, engage with individuals and communities, protect local resources and ensure that existing inequities in particular communities are not worsened (18-21,18-6).

Secondly, the word place mostly seems to be used interchangeably with local, for example, knowledge may be place-based and rooted in local cultures, (1-44), and locally-driven, place-based approaches can help build adaptive capacity to climate change impacts (5-143). The distinctive importance of place is recognized in terms of place attachment and place-based adaptations, (CCP5-18, CCP5-34).

Thirdly, place-based adaptation is frequently referred to in the Report, perhaps because there is substantial evidence from case studies that place-based approaches can build capacity for transformative action (e.g. 6-89, 5-143). This responsibility for effecting change is, of course, shared with national governments and international agencies because climate change is a “multi-scale phenomenon from the local to the global” and all levels need to work together to advance climate resilience and adaptation (1-46, 1-4).

Fourthly, a conclusion of the Report, explicitly stated with very high confidence, is that Indigenous and place-based local knowledge shapes how climate change risk is understood and experienced, and offers the possibility of significant solutions for the challenges of climate change, though these do need to be integrated with broader national and international policies and practices. (18-7)

Comments
First let me summarize the role of place in both war and in the peaceful conditions needed to address global warming. In territorial, inter-state wars, such as the one in Ukraine, some perverse national sense of place is often a driving cause for starting the war, and then in the fog of what follows actual, everyday places on both sides become objects to be destroyed in the hope this will give some strategic advantage. In the context of the mostly peaceful circumstances that have to prevail if almost 200 nation states are to co-operate to moderate the processes and impacts of climate change, place matters because local places are an essential foundation for establishing constructive practices for mitigation and adaptation. The optimistic hope expressed by the IPCC is that while the extreme weather that follows from global warming will cause some places, such as coastal settlements, to be destroyed or abandoned, and will lead to migrations and other social upheavals, any associated conflicts will be localized and mitigated through international cooperation and appropriate forms of sustainable development. The possibility of inter-state warfare, such as that in Ukraine, was simply not considered in the Sixth Assessment Report, which was consistent with most prevailing expectations until the Ukraine invasion.

However, the U.S. National Intelligence Agency in its March 2021 projection for the next two decades, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World, seems to have sensed a possible shift in geopolitics. It argues cogently and succinctly that a mixture of demographic, economic, technological, and environmental forces, including climate change, will probably generate significant social and political divisions at both national and international levels in the near future. It notes first that the Covid-19 pandemic has shaken assumptions about resilience and adaptation, and rather demonstrating the capacity of international cooperation  to address a common problem it has reinforced nationalism because individual countries have followed their own strategies prioritizing their own needs. More specifically it suggests that climate change could generate social cleavages within countries because the costs of damage from extreme weather, mitigation and adaptation will require difficult trade-offs with other priorities, and internationally it could lead to increasing competition for food, minerals and energy. Climate change alone might not be the cause of inter-state conflicts, but it is certainly a very significant multiplying factor as deterrence becomes more difficult as treaties weaken, geopolitical relations are destabilized by new technologies such as artificial intelligence, and more major political actors emerge (e.g. additional states with nuclear weapons). There is, in fact, a significant possibility that localized struggles and civil wars could escalate into inter-state ones.

Should this happen, what are the implications for places and climate change? First, war will detract attention and resources from transformative actions urgently needed for mitigation and adaptation. Even before the Ukraine war many climate scientists were sceptical that actions would be insufficient to keep global warming to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the target of the Paris Accord; indeed, many expect the average global temperature rise by the end of the century will be at least 3.0C. This will have catastrophic consequences for places almost everywhere.”If we fail in meeting the 1.5C target [of the Paris Accord], Michaelova (2022, p.16) has written in a recent report on Military and Conflict-Related Emissions, “the repercussions will be more deadly than all the the conflicts we have witnessed in the in the last decades.”

Secondly, given past and current experience it is probable that any inter-state wars will involve the deliberate destruction of everyday places. And if the wars persist, the resource hungry military machines, explosions, destruction, and dependence on fossil fuels, will accelerate greenhouse gas emissions that will rush climate change towards its worst possible trajectory and future environmenal conditions that will make the sort of post-war place reconstruction of the 20th century impossible.

However, it is also the case that the character of modern warfare is changing for a variety of technological and economic reasons (National Intelligence Council, 2021, Future of the Battlefield). Ukraine is a 21st-century conflict in which military, technological and financial elements are intertwined. Place destruction will continue to happen, but will be by long range, perhaps hypersonic weapons, with precise targeting, and may be more more focused than in the past. It will, however, be accompanied by economic sanctions, cyberwarfare, and campaigns of misinformation that will infiltrate everyday life and everyday places that are remote from material destruction. This is currently happening, for instance, both through sanctions imposed on Russia, and in countries in Western Europe where energy costs have risen astronomically as supplies of Russian gas have been reduced.

Even if further inter-state warfare is avoided, the Ukraine war does not escalate, and the sort of peaceful cooperation envisaged by the IPCC is achieved, there will still have to be transformative social and economic changes to keep global warming at reasonable levels. These will involve major adaptations to the physical character and everyday life of many villages, towns and cities, in order to cope with the consequences of extreme weather. Many places will be destroyed, not in the traumatic manner of war, but incrementally through modifications or even slow abandonment. Migrations away from (mostly less developed) regions of the world where drought and other weather conditions have undermined hope for the future have already begun, and the World Bank projects that as many as 261 million people could be forced to move within their own countries by 2050 (World Bank, 2021). In developed nations global warming will mean displacement and the relocation of communities from coastal zones, flood plains and wildfire regions (McAdam and Ferris, 2015).

With the intensification of extreme weather events triggered by global warming, many places will, in effect, be destroyed, attachments to them eroded or broken. Some towns, even cities, along coastlines and in regions affected by drought and insufferable heat, will have to be abandoned, their communities relocated or dispersed. Some will be spontaneous, but when they are planned these relocations have been described as “managed retreats” (O’Donnell, 2022), a military metaphor that reinforces the sense that the world is now engaged in a war against global warming. It is a war that has to be waged from a position of widespread peace.  All the indications are that military warfare, especially if it is widespread or protracted, will ensure failure in the battle against climate change and its consequences.

References

Kenneth Hewitt, 1983 “Place Annihilation: Area Bombing and the Fate of Urban Places” Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol 73(2), pp. 257-284

Kenneth Hewitt, 1994 “Civil and Inner City Disasters: The Urban, Social Spaces of Bomb Destruction”, Erdkunde, 48(4) pp. 259-274.

IPCC 2022, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC

McAdam, Jane and Ferris, Elizabeth, 2015, “Planned Relocation in the Context of Climate Change: Unpacking the Legal and Conceptual Issues”, Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law, 2015 , Vol 4, No 1, 137-166.

MacMIllan, Margaret (2013) The War the Ended Peace: the Road to 2014. Penguin Books

Michaelova, Alex, et al, 2022, Military and Conflict-Related Emissions: Kyoto to Glasgow and Beyond. Perspectives Climate Group, Freiburg Germany available here

Oliver Morton, 2022, “The Climate Issue” The Economist March 7 2022 available here (a brief discussion of the invasion of Ukraine and the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report)

Adrian Mourby 2015 “Where are the world’s most war-damaged cities?” The Guardian available here

O’Donnell, Tayanah, 2022, “Managed retreat and planned retreat: a systematic literature review” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, available here

Office of the Director National Intelligence, 2021, “Future of the Battlefield” in Global Trends 2040: A More Contested Future, National Intelligence Council, Global Trends, available

Office of the Director National Intelligence, 2021, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested Future, National Intelligence Council, Global Trends available here

Jeff Tollefson 2021 “Top climate scientists are sceptical that nations will reign in global warming,” Nature, November 2021, available here

White House. 2021 Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration, The White House, Washington D.C.

World Bank, 2021 “Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration”, available here