As touched on already, sense of place is important for providing people with a feeling of belonging. Taking this further, Kamani-Fard et al. (2012) suggest that“…the physical
environment can define one’s self-identity” (p. 224). Norberg-Schulz (1976) agrees and argues that this is demonstrated by a common linguistic usage: when a person wants to tell you who they are they are likely to say “I am a New Yorker” or “I am a Cantabrian”, establishing their connection with their home and community. Heidegger (as cited in Norberg-Schulz 1976, p. 282) considers that a sense of belonging and a connection to the landscape is vital to people’s ability to exist. Heidegger considers that a human’s primary need is to “dwell” meaning to belong to a concrete place (Norberg-Schulz, 1976). Johnson and Zipperer (2007) consider the loss of place to be a form of cultural loss and they are concerned with the lack of value placed on this by Western societies; “People do not have an inherent right to a perpetual
connectedness to place although numerous scholars argue that place…is integral to the development of the self”(p. 461).
45 This issue is further debated by Ray Oldenburg (1989) who argues that the lack of meaningful places mean that the typical suburban home is easy to leave behind; what people cherish most can be taken with them. There are no sad farewells because there is no community; in fact there is often more encouragement to leave a subdivision because they are not equipped to see families or individuals through the cycle of life. They are designed for families of particular sizes, incomes and ages; “there is little sense of place and even less opportunity to put down roots” (Oldenburg, 1989, p. 287).
Sense of place also creates value for biodiversity, resilience and sustainability. The use of plants suitable to the location provides habitat for local wildlife as well as increasing their chance of survival. Designing around natural landscape systems can help avoid areas unsuitable for certain land uses and can improve capacity for storms by leaving those areas most vulnerable to flooding or other natural cycles (Beatley, 2008; Hough, 1990; McHarg, 1967). And by having greater attachment to the local environment, residents are more likely to develop a sense of community that is so vital in the case of disaster (Allan & Bryant, 2011). An indication of our increasing need for meaningful places while the number of them
continues to decline is illustrated in this quote from Rem Koolhaas (1994): This thinning [of history] is exacerbated by the constantly increasing mass of tourists, an avalanche that, in a perpetual quest for “character,” grinds successful identities down to meaningless dust (p. 361).
Can this need for a sense of place be satisfied in the everyday environment to remove this feeling of desperation?
4.3.1
Sense of place and the home, community and disaster
As already established, the connection to the home environment is vital to our sense of belonging. In a disaster this connection becomes even more important to our well-being and ability to cope and recover. As proposed by Sims et al. (2009) “the social, cultural, and emotional dimensions of place are now considered to be just as important as its material and physical qualities…Such evolving and complex meanings result from the fact that “homes” are highly emotional landscapes with a strong degree of personal significance for their occupants” (p. 305).
46 This is further illustrated by Sims et al. (2009) when describing what happens to care when the home is disrupted:
…disruptions to the meanings, objects, and routines that help make up the home also can have profound consequences for the material and affective landscapes of care. When you disrupt the home…you also disrupt the reference point by which [carers] make sense of themselves and their role in relation to friends, family, and the community more generally (p. 313).
This affect could be extrapolated to apply to all people who have had their home disrupted. This is particularly relevant in the case of Christchurch where approximately 10,000 homes have been lost as a result of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes (Simcox, 2011). Many of these homes were in older, established parts of the city with distinct characters and communities. The areas where replacement homes are being built are, to paraphrase Hough (1990),
standard subdivisions for standard people, with a single housing type in a controlled and sterile environment. The people who have been displaced from their homes and communities have already suffered the disconnection from their sense of place, and the environments that they are moving to are likely to increase this feeling of loss and slow their speed of recovering. As reported by Kamani-Fard et al. (2012) in their study of post-Bam6 earthquake
reconstruction “...post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is reported as a common psychological impact of home loss” (p. 223). Also noted was the deep attachment to nature that residents had developed due to the number of established trees and gardens that were part of their daily lives and was the thing they missed most from their homes that they had lost (Kamani- Fard et al., 2012). This suggests a further impact on Christchurch residents who are relocating from areas of large established trees and gardens to subdivisions where all trees have been removed to be replaced with small street trees, or in some cases, no trees at all. As observed by Johnson and Zipperer (2007) “…such interruptions can cause extended periods of grief and severely threaten self-identity” (p. 461). They go on to say that attachment to objects or places… are vital for psychological and social well-being.
In their study of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina Chamlee-Wright and Storr (2009) found that displacement from the community can result in widespread grief and the evacuation experience can separate people from their identity as well as their homes, i.e. their role in their community has gone and their new role is determined by the perceptions of the people
6 The city of Bam is located in Iran and was hit by a 6.6 magnitude earthquake in December 2003 resulting in extensive damage to buildings (Kamani-Fard et al., 2012)
47 in their new community. Further to this they suggest that “Disasters can…lead to
dissatisfaction with any (temporary) replacement site” (p. 618). I would suggest that this would lead to even greater dissatisfaction from a permanent site if it did not attempt to provide some of the elements that people have left behind.
It is important to consider as part of this issue that large scale subdivisions built in rural areas can impact on the sense of place of those who already live there. Bengston et al. (2005) remark that “…the core of the debate about sprawl…is the emotional impact people
experience when they lose places in their own communities they feel deeply attached to” (as cited in Johnson & Zipperer, 2007, p. 462). They go on to say that “When such growth occurs in a relatively short time span, it can destabilize rural community social, cultural and
environmental/ecological structures” (Johnson & Zipperer, 2007, p. 463). As such, to create healthy and successful environments, sense of place is an important issue to consider in any development both for the people moving into the area and for the people who already live there.
4.3.2
Sense of place, resilience and sustainability
Sense of place design is not only important to our identity but also to biodiversity, resilience and sustainability (Hough, 1990). Hough (1990) asserts that “the connections between
regional identity and the sustainability of the land are essential and fundamental” (p. 526). He suggests that design philosophy should be tied to the notions of environmental and social health and the essential bond of people to nature. Through employing techniques similar to Ian McHarg’s (1967) ecological layering method described in his book Design with Nature, and by increasing native planting, it is possible to incorporate natural systems into new
developments; this can help protect key amenities from storm events and improve the microclimate and biodiversity. Randy Hester (2006) considers that “Self-aware design likely serves biological and cultural diversity in the same actions; it creates internal unity and worldwide diversity” (p. 187).
Sense of place can further improve resilience by providing visibility and understanding of our landscape through revealed processes and history; this can help us to remember important events that we may otherwise forget. In his article Trauma Within the Walls, Andrew Benjamin (2010) states that trauma does not come from the outside, the thing that will unravel a town is already within it as a repressed memory. He suggests that the urban field
48 has been “constituted by a form of systematic forgetting” and that “the city will always have contained that which falls beyond the work of the memory” (p. 27).
This speaks of our ability to forget about historical disasters over time, therefore making ourselves more vulnerable from future events. For example, Christchurch is built on a swamp in a seismically active landscape; the 7.1 magnitude earthquake of 4th September 2010 came as
a complete shock to residents, most of who did not realise that Christchurch is in a seismically active area. This is despite the fact that a similar sized earthquake in 1888 caused the spire of the Christchurch Cathedral to fall and extensive damage to buildings (GeoNet, 2014). By 2010 this event was long forgotten; the Cathedral and buildings were repaired, all traces of the 1888 earthquake removed. As a result of this memory loss, numerous developments had been built on unstable land, city infrastructure was buried with few (if any) natural systems making repairs time-consuming and damage wide-reaching, resident’s lifestyles had become highly dependent on centralised systems, emergency kits were not in place. By keeping those memories alive in the landscape we can retain that knowledge which falls away from the human consciousness helping us to live in a more appropriate manner in our uncertain landscape.
As explained by Benjamin (2010), the source of our trauma is here and internal and it requires wisdom to negotiate with the unaccustomed or unpredictable events that will occur again in our future. However, our forgetting becomes the repressed memory which is destructive to this very future; we need wisdom to keep our memories at the forefront of our projects, to reduce the destruction that the unpredictable can create.