We address the intersection of place-based identity and environmental outcomes. We focus on an indigenous tribal community, the Bodos residing both within and in proximity to one of the key spaces for biodiversity conservation in north-eastern India – the Manas Tiger Reserve. We illustrate that the Bodo sense of place, the meanings they ascribe to the landscape, is indelibly linked to identity. We conduct a historical exploration of the politics underlying the development of a modern Bodo identity and the implications of its deployment for the governance of Manas. The strategic manipulation of place meaning for political and territorial gain by the Bodos lies in contrast with much of the sense of place literature that has predominantly focused on the essential role of place for human well-being. Our account moves beyond the static depiction of place meaning to reveal the social, historical and political processes that shape and contest place-making.

Social-ecological transitions are fundamentally about places – especially how place meanings and attachments act as lenses for interpreting change. Our chapter focuses on energy transitions in rural agricultural landscapes in New York. Agricultural place meanings underpin attachment for many residents, but are challenged by proposals for large-scale renewable energy development. This chapter explores how people interpret these proposed facilities using the perspective of social representations of place. multiple interpretations of proposed facilities are promoted by different groups based on their position towards the development: developers and energy advocates strategically portray solar installations as ‘farms’, replete with images they believe support agricultural meanings; those who resist these developments emphasise the large-scale industrialisation of the landscape and the loss of services such as open space and amenity value. These narratives of place contribute to understanding perspectives on energy transitions and broader rural change.

Since the mid-1980s, China has experienced an unprecedented wave of internal migration from rural to urban areas. However, due to the lack of formal residential registration status (Hukou in Chinese), these rural–urban migrants have faced difficulties in re-establishing a sense of belonging to the host city. By using a nationwide survey (2013, n = 12,807) and multilevel logistic regressions, this study has found that, beyond social capital, institutional and financial support are most likely to help migrants adapt to their new lives. The Hukou reforms indeed are helping to construct their belonging to the host city. This study and its emphasis on place-related belonging enriches the meaning of sense of place, especially as it encourages a pluralistic concept. It attempts to understand place-related belonging as an embedded relationship between the individual and the local structure, a relationship that arises from the institutional, social and economic context.

Climate change adaptation demands a deeper appreciation of plural senses of place and how these pluralities can create synergies as well as frictions in adaptation practice. In this chapter we aim to explore one highly overlooked dimension of this global challenge – the plural temporalities embedded within senses of place. Here we explore the dimensions of time in place-focused adaptation efforts by drawing on a series of case studies that utilise scenario-based futures methods. These methods have rapidly become critical tools in tackling the exigencies of the climate crisis but too often they presume a singular temporal mode and marginalise other temporalities and senses of place. This chapter concludes by offering new ways to reconceptualise plural senses of place and time in both theory and practice.

The rising wave of nationalism and xenophobia in the world triggers interest in processes underlying ethnocentric tendencies in humans. In this chapter we focus on the issue of ethnocentrism in perception of places and describe processes that facilitate the ethnocentric closure to the presence of the ‘other’ in the city space. We present data that demonstrate that one of the factors responsible for this ethnocentric closure is type of the perceived continuity of a place: essentialist vs anti-essentialist. We show, on the basis of studies carried out in cities of Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania, that perception of places in terms of essentialist continuity facilitates place identity but is also a powerful trigger of the ethnocentric bias in perception of the places’ multicultural past and present. In contrast, interpretation of the place continuity as a chain of interconnected events (anti-essentialist continuity) helps to accept the ethnic and social diversity of places.

Taking IKEA catalogues from 2010 to 2017 as the objects of analysis, this chapter examines how this global furniture retailer constructs the ideal homes that offer Chinese consumers aspirations for good homes and good lives, and their cultural implications. We argue that IKEA’s popularity in China is attributed to a ‘cultural odourlessness’, which, for its ease in travelling globally, has also become an odour in itself in the Chinese context. In its global circulation, IKEA’s transcultural odourlessness attracts – rather than rejects – diverse translocal experiences of different places and therefore powerfully enriches and pluralises senses of place. IKEA exemplifies how transcultural flows de-territorialise and re-territorialise home, endlessly pluralising senses of home.

The specific context of urban migration in West Africa provides a fertile field from which to pluralise currents concepts of sense of place. If research on sense of place is to address the global phenomena of mobility and migration, then this requires an immediate implementation of calls to consider roots and routes and fixity and flow in the production of senses of place. This chapter presents two key findings in relation to West African migrants’ sense of place, both in relation to their place of residence and their place of origin. This first is that new migrants with weak people–place bonds have a heightened quality of life in comparison to locals. This runs counter to assumptions that strong place attachment is beneficial for well-being. The second is that migrants invest considerable efforts into maintaining sense of place in locations where they no longer reside.

In spatial planning, sense of place mostly entails singular, universal conceptualisations. This paper reflects on a case study of 22 purposively selected participants’ senses of place on the farm Kromdraai in Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site, South Africa in order to integrate pluralised senses of place into global policy principles for the purpose of spatial planning decision-making. A qualitative, transdisciplinary research approach was utilised to generate textual (interview) and visual data (photographs and collages) that were analysed using non-computerised thematic analysis. The research illustrates a shift away from singular universal conceptions towards the politicisation of senses of place in spatial planning by means of a democratic participatory process where power imbalances are minimised and that allowed senses of place to emerge spontaneously from the bottom-up, instead of imposing a preconceived framework in which senses of place are categorised or universalised. A flexible framework is suggested towards pluralising senses of place in spatial planning by using normative global principles in international policy.

Living under the Israeli occupation continues to affect all aspects of Palestinians’ everyday lives. This chapter considers the testimonies of Palestinians who were displaced after their homes were damaged during the urbicidal 2002 Israeli Ejtiyah on the old town of Nablus. This analysis is to assess the fundamental role of a sense of place, and the significance of its multiscalar nature, in gaining stability through rebuilding of damaged homes. The Palestinians experience home as a place where sense of place is lived and interpreted in multiscalar forms of spatial justice that relate to everyday life, community and socially constructed meaning, a state of mind, and as they relate to nostalgic memories and fear of displacement. Urban violence not only ruptures the spatial incubator of the Palestinians’ sense of place but also demonstrates the ways in which the colonial power dominance is controlling their homeland in general, and the very place where they intimately nurture it at home. In this context, Palestinians’ relationship with home and sense of place is considered a form of moqawameh (resistance) and sumoud (steadfastness) against the Israeli colonial strategies.

We seek to analyse the appropriation of space by people living in the streets (PLS), focusing on Brazilian cities, from a materialistic, historical and dialectical conception of reality, problematizing traditional conceptions of sense of place. The spaces in the city that need to be appropriated as a condition of survival are the same ones that reject PLS as subjects, and the set of elements they can appropriate and that unfold in multiple senses of place is largely determined by urban social and racial inequalities. Thus, to understand senses of place by this group, we must pay attention to the historical determinations in the process of appropriation–objectivation of PLS. In this sense, because of its power to synthesise the humanization–alienation dialectics taking into account both social structures and the elements of people’s living spaces, appropriation of space is a category that allows us to historicize and pluralize senses of place.

Human ability to adapt to shifting ecological regimes is tied to flexibility in our senses of place to engage and expand spatial and temporal scales. The challenge of regional conservation is to build intelligible senses of place from a mosaic of land uses that seemingly compete with one another and have difficulties scaling-up to characterise a regional geography. A regional place-making framework is developed that connects ecological relationships, structural forces of society and socio-cultural meanings in ways that negotiate tension between narratives of stability and change. Place-making asserts change as aspirational narratives of what should be, and inclusion of a temporal scale that recognises future states of conditions and relationships across communities. Place-making asserts stability due to concerns for restoring native ecosystems and production of socio-cultural heritage. Regional place-making is where global narratives meet local particularities in ways that integrate and prioritise narratives linked to stability and change.

It is now well established that humans are the most powerful influence on the environment. The scale, pace and intensity of human activity is fundamentally altering earth’s climate system (IPCC, 2014) and driving global biodiversity and ecosystem decline (IPBES, 2019). Simultaneously, new forms and patterns of mobility are emerging and accelerating in a world driven by globalised market forces, new technologies, media transformations and related cultural trends of late modernity (Stokols, 2018; Boccagni, 2017; Cresswell, 1996). Indeed, during the final stages of preparing this volume we are experiencing a global pandemic of COVID-19 that is reshaping society – from the way we travel to how we relate to one another (see the Preface). While many of the global challenges addressed in this volume are not new, they are accelerating to such a degree that they are challenging our sense of ‘ontological security’ in the world, a concept that has been useful in international relations research, and most recently climate change research, to articulate relationships between identity and security (Farbotko, 2019; Kinnvall, 2004). Our expectations for the stability and continuity of our habitats and lifestyles are increasingly being challenged.

We unpack the role of sense of place in relation to urban experimentation. We conceptualise urban experimentation as a governance approach to foster and activate innovation capacities of communities and places for climate adaptation and institutional trialling of novel approaches. We focus on an urban living laboratory (ULL) as one specific type of urban experiment that has received increasing attention in European cities recently, and use experimentation in ULL as an example to reconsider a dynamic and pluralistic understanding of place. We find that our case study, BlueCity Lab in Rotterdam, NL provides a space where new place-related narratives of change, novel practices and relations emerge, while being embedded within wider, translocal networks of practice. Backed by these insights, we contend that a translocal, pluralised and dynamic concept of place promises to be a valuable lens in order to understand the impacts, manifestations and appropriate responses to global challenges in everyday life.