Many countries are considering the deployment of renewable energy technologies in marine or coastal locations to mitigate climate change. Here, we consider ways that senses of place have implications for the deployment of offshore wind, tide and wave energy projects. We use in-depth interviews with auto-photography to explore multiple senses of places in an island context with the aim of gauging public views about the acceptability of potential deployment of wind, tidal and wave energy technologies. The study captured many instances where senses of place were invoked to construct arguments around the fit (or lack of) between place and technology, with place used flexibly to refer to specific marine or coastal locations, the island itself and its relation to other places. Auto-photography revealed the diversity of ways in which the land and the sea were meaningful to islanders – as a place for social relations, a place for fun and sport, a place for escape and a place for aesthetic beauty. By combining visual and verbal data to reveal multiple senses and scales of place, the study provides a rich foundation for understanding the acceptability of renewable energy projects.

We explore the tensions and dynamic connections between the place narratives of Faroese residents and those of Tourism Faroe Islands. Our findings demonstrate the need to shift from sense to senses of place in order to accommodate the multiple narratives of people–place relations, which are embedded in different standpoints on mobility and place change. Residents and brokers adopt different senses of place in order to respond to social and ecological pressures wrought by mobility, and the potential economic benefits of tourism growth and development. Concurrently, important relations exist among place meanings, one’s understanding of system variability and behavioural responses. Thus, senses of place emerge as a result of dynamic and complex relationships between different types of narratives on place that are constantly unfolding in response to social-ecological change.

In recent years, scholarship in environmental psychology has drawn on a qualitative narrative methodology in order to better understand the temporally dynamic development of different senses of place over the life course, in the form of distinct ‘life-place trajectories’. This research problematises a monistic and static conceptualisation of sense of place, pointing to the development of a plurality of senses of place that evolve temporally across the entire life course, and points to a need to conceptually expand our notions of the concept by recognising the interrelated role of ‘linked lives’ – the influence of interpersonal relations and wider socio-economic, cultural and political forces in the formation of different senses of place and residential mobility decisions over time. Furthermore, this chapter outlines how this life course approach has been applied to better understand the social acceptance of low-carbon energy technology developments.

In this chapter we examine multiple, competing senses of place in a rapidly changing city in the USA through a lens of critical theory. In particular, we analyse discourses around urban change in the city of Seattle, one of the fastest growing and most dramatically changing cities in the USA, in order to uncover how hegemonic discourses are constructed and deployed to establish a normative order, and how those dominant narratives are challenged by divergent perspectives. Although the specifics of the urban change and discourse we highlight are fairly unique to Seattle, the broader dynamics around multiple competing senses of place vying for expression pertain to any city undergoing transformation. In analysing competing narratives and demonstrating the power of dominant discourses to create a falsely homogenised sense of place, this chapter offers a cautionary tale for vigilance against the erasure of multiple senses of place.

This chapter elucidates different pathways of how sense of place changes in response to shifts in social-ecological dynamics. In Bengaluru, sense of place in relation to urban lakes is changing and evolving. It is shaped by factors such as urbanisation, climate change and changing demographics, as well as by reinvention of historical uses as they clash with modern activities. Changing sense of place is furthered by the activist work of local lake groups. Through their active work to shape lake meanings, we show how community activists nurture a sense of place that can be collectively harnessed for conservation in the face of ecological deterioration. Importantly, the exchange of memories and place meanings between different stakeholder groups helps facilitate this and also generates new understanding regarding how to manage lakes as sites with multiple social and ecological place meanings.

Given global social and environmental change, understanding how resulting place change affects people–place bonds is of pressing importance. However, given traditional views of these bonds as static, understanding the fluidity of people’s relationship with place remains nascent. We examine how people’s sense of place relating to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef changed over a four-year period during which the reef suffered climate-change-induced mass coral bleaching. Operationalising sense of place with seven indicators representing place attachment, identity and meanings, we found increases in attachment, identity and two meanings (pride, biodiversity) and decreases in three meanings (lifestyle, aesthetics, scientific value). We suggest that place change heightened the emotional and intangible elements of sense of place, while having a negative effect on the more instrumental meanings. Our results challenge a notion of people–place bonds premised on fixity, stability, and low dimensionality, instead suggesting the need to consider them as dynamic and multidimensional.

This chapter aims to describe the psychology of nonbelonging through co-constructed accounts by informal settlement residents who belong – yet also struggle to not belong – to ‘non-places’ such as the informal settlement. It illustrates how (non)belonging is performed as unspoken affective senses of place that are resonant in narratives. Using Lacanian psychoanalytic insights, the chapter contributes to an expanded conceptualisation of ‘senses of place’ by showing that we also perform place belonging in an ‘unconscious’ sense – beyond our discursive performances (place identity) or expressed feeling states (place attachment). This epistemological stance highlights senses of place belonging as coordinated via an unspoken social contract with the hovering interlocutor (Other), who offers the navigational cues to situate where we are (place) and to define who we are (identity).

We opened this volume with sobering stories of the dire global challenges before us. Indeed, one would not be hard pressed to find stories of the urgency of our various environmental and social crises. While we wrote this book, the COVID-19 pandemic raged, towns in the Arctic reached unprecedented temperatures, countless hectares of forests fell while fossil fuels continued to be violently extracted from the earth, and Black, Indigenous and people of colour continued to be exploited and oppressed. Yet, despite all this, or rather because of it, we wish to begin our conclusion with hope and determination. Drawing on Solnit (2016), we believe that there is a spaciousness in the uncertainties posed by the challenges before us in that they offer new possibilities for being, thinking and acting – for renewal and purposeful redirection in our trajectory – and it is through a reawakened awareness of our rich and dynamic relationships to place that we can find a better way forward.

This chapter argues that a better understanding of people–place relations and their role in the local reception – and frequent contestation – of today’s supra-national legal orders for biodiversity conservation requires considering the epistemic dimension. This means paying more attention to local knowledge and the epistemic bonds to place it weaves, recognising local cultural-worlds not just as meaning and identity-worlds, but also as knowledge-worlds. It illustrates these arguments with extracts from fishers and farmers governed by Natura 2000 biodiversity laws, showing how local knowledge provides a relevant lens for local assessment of such laws, a process sometimes leading to contestation, sometimes to acceptance, and a process always done together with others. This calls for the creation of these legal orders to not rely exclusively on expert views, instead incorporating local inputs. By adding the epistemic dimension, senses of place can become a more relational, dynamic and plural concept, encompassing the three processes of attachment, meaning-making and knowing.

The chapter focuses on people’s experiences of natural places and changes in their sense of place through the use of social media. It explores how social media are linked to senses of place and experiences of nature from a social–ecological–technological systems perspective. This is illustrated through four empirical cases representing specific people–place–tech systems, i.e. systems where different social, ecological and tech contexts interact. From a system perspective, those couplings are integrated parts of people’s experiences of nature that bridge virtual and physical worlds, thereby facilitating and communicating cognitive, affective and behavioural social-ecological interactions. These interactions foster novel individual and co-constructed meanings of place and thus plural senses of place; they can also mobilise people around shared meanings of place that are used to question dominant views. Thus, it is argued that social media can mediate and proliferate plural meanings of place, leading to new conceptualisations of senses of place.

This chapter is an examination of the various ways senses of place have been changed by the development of electronic media since the invention of the telegraph, with particular attention to developments since the invention of the World Wide Web in 1990. Impacts of electronic communications on five aspects of sense of place are considered. Neurological and ontological aspects are largely immune, but individual, social and public aspects are affected in ways that have been variously interpreted as diminishing sense of place by distracting us from our surroundings, or alternatively as enhancing it with rich data about places and increased global awareness. However, as electronic media have become increasingly pervasive, concerns have been raised about their role as agents of corporate power and their role in surveillance of places.