Who Defines and Manages the Environment? The Significance of Lay Senses of Place
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine the significance of the images of the environment held by ordinary people, i.e., those using a particular environment as an arena of everyday living and who are not "environmental professionals", such as architects and planners. Although some of the suggestions of the paper may be of relevance for such professional practice, it is couched in terms of a humanistic geography which recognizes, along with Ley (1978), that this geography must take account of three dimensions: the centrality of anthropomorphism, the social nature of experience and (the often forgotten) constraints of context. These three elements shape not only the study of sense of place, but sense of place itself. Further, it must not be assumed that images and senses of place are significant for all people at all times and in all places. This seems to be particularly the case when most of our places-work, neighborhood, internal structure of the dwelling-are designed and built for us by architects, planners and developers. Over one-half of the British population now lives in suburban developments. Thus, most people do not create the spaces and places in which they live in a physical sense. Those spaces and places are largely given and predetermined. They remain amenable, however, to manipulation in the senses of physical re-arrangement and re-definition and of psychological and social creation.References
Ardrey, R. (1967) The Territorial Imperative. London: Fontana.
Castells, M. (1977) The Urban Question. London: Arnold.
Coleman, A. (1985) Utopia on Trial. London: Hilary Shipman.
Cullen, G. (1961) Townscape. London: Architectural Press.
Eyles, J. (1985) Senses of Place. Warrington: Silverbrook Press.
Eyles, J. (1986) Environmental images: Barriers to resource development in sparsely settled regions? CERUM Seminar on Resource Exploitation in Sparsely Populated Areas, Umea, Sweden.
Eyles, J. (1987) Housing advertisements as signs. Geografiska Annaler 69B:93-105.
Eyles, J. and M. Evans (1987) Popular consciousness, moral ideology and locality. Society and Space, 5: 39-71.
Fried, M. (1963) Grieving for a lost home. In L. Duhl (ed.) The Urban Condition. New York: Free Press.
Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the City. London: Arnold.
Harvey, D. (1975) Class structure in capitalist society and the theory of residential differentiation. In R. Peel et al. (eds.) Processes in Physical and Human Geography. London: Heinemann.
Ley, D. (1978) Social geography and social action. In D. Ley and M. Samuels (eds.) Humanistic Geography. Chicago: Maaroufa Press.
Lynch, K. (1960) Image of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Melbin, M. (1978) The colonisation of time. In T. Carlstein et al. (eds.) Human Activity and Time Geography. London: Arnold.
Michelson, W. (1977) Environmental Choice, Human Behaviour and Residential Satisfaction. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Newman, O. (1972) Defensible Space. London: Macmillan.
Pawley, M. (1971) Architecture versus Housing. London: Studio Vista.
Susser, I. (1982) Norman Street. New York: Oxford University Press.
Therborn, G. (1980) The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. London: Verso.
Tuan, Y. F. (1977) Space and Place. London: Arnold.
Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford Univ. Press.
- The contributor(s) (authors) warrant that the entire work is original and unpublished; it is submitted only to this Journal and all text, data, figures/tables or other illustrations included in this work are completely original and unpublished, and these have not been previously published or submitted elsewhere in any form or media whatsoever.
- The contributor(s) warrant that the work contains no unlawful or libelous statements and opinions and liable materials of any kind whatsoever, does not infringe on any copyrights, intellectual property rights, personal rights or rights of any kind of others, nor contains any plagiarized, fraudulent, improperly attributed materials, instructions, procedures, information or ideas that might cause any harm, damage, injury, losses or costs of any kind to person or property.
- The contributor(s) retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- The contributor(s) are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- The contributor(s) are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
- Geography Research Forum may disseminate the content of the publications and publications’ Meta data in text, image, or other print and electronic formats to providers of research databases (e.g. EBSCO, GeoBase, JSTOR) to facilitate publications' exposure.