Pacific Northwest

Research Station DEPA RTMENTOFAGRICULT URE

Forest 

Service

United States 

Department of 

Agriculture

General Technical Report

PNW-GTR-744

May 2008

Rec

reation & 

Tou

rism Initiative

Understanding Concepts of 

Place in Recreation Research 

and Management
The Forest Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is dedicated to the

principle of multiple use management of the Nation’s forest resources for sustained yields of wood, water, forage, wildlife, and recreation. Through forestry

research, cooperation with the States and private forest owners, and management of the national forests and national grasslands, it strives—as directed by

Congress—to provide increasingly greater service to a growing Nation.

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programs and activities on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, disability,

and where applicable, sex, marital status, familial status, parental status, religion,

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1400 Independence Avenue, S.W. Washington, DC 20250-9410, or call (800) 795-

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employer.

Technical Editors

Linda E. Kruger is a research social scientist, U.S. Department of Agriculture,

Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Forestry Sciences Laboratory,

2770 Sherwood Lane, Juneau, AK 99801; Troy E. Hall is associate professor of

protected area visitor studies, Department of Conservation Social Sciences, College

of Natural Resources, University of Idaho, P.O. Box 441139, Moscow, ID 83844-

1139; and Maria C. Stiefel is a science writer, U.S. Department of Agriculture,

Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Alaska Wood Utilization

Research and Development Center, 204 Siginaka Way, Sitka, AK 99835.
Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation

Research and Management

Linda E. Kruger, Troy E. Hall, and Maria C. Stiefel

Technical Editors

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service

Pacific Northwest Research Station

Portland, Oregon

General Technical Report PNW-GTR-744

May 2008

Published in cooperation with:

University of Idaho
Abstract

Kruger, Linda. E.; Hall, Troy E.; Stiefel, Maria C., tech. eds. 2008. Understanding concepts of place in recreation research and management. Gen. Tech.

Rep. PNW-GTR-744. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest

Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 204 p.

Over a 3-day weekend in the spring of 2004 a group of scientists interested in

extending understanding of place as applied in recreation research and management

convened a working session in Portland, Oregon. The purpose of the gathering was

to clarify their understanding of place-related concepts, approaches to the study of

people-place relations, and the application of that understanding in recreation

management for the purpose of integrating perspectives from different disciplines,

discussing approaches to understanding and measuring sense of place, and other

questions around the study and application of place-related concepts. Topics that

generated the most discussion included how social processes influence place meanings, how place meanings are shared and negoitated within social groups, and when

and how place meanings and attachments focus, reduce, or avert conflict in natural

resource planning and management. This collection of papers is a result of that

meeting.

Keywords: Place, sense of place, place attachment, recreation management.
Contents

1 Chapter 1—Introduction: Gathering to Discuss Place

Linda E. Kruger and Troy E. Hall

1 Interest in Place is Growing in Research and Management Applications

2 An Exploration of Place

5 Literature Cited

7 Chapter 2—Pluralities of Place: A User’s Guide to Place Concepts, Theories,

and Philosophies in Natural Resource Management

Daniel R. Williams

7 Introduction

10 The Popularity of “Place”

13 Four Approaches to Place in Natural Resource Management

14 Place as an Attitude Object

16 Place as Relationship and Meaning

19 Place as Environmental Ethics

21 Place as Sociopolitical Process

23 Conclusions

25 Literature Cited

31 Chapter 3—Creating Social Senses of Place: New Directions for Sense of Place

Research in Natural Resource Management

Patricia A. Stokowski

31 Introduction

33 Attaining a Sense of Place: The Traditional Model

37 Toward a “More Social” Sense of Place

40 The Theoretical Basis for a Social Sense of Place

41 A Theoretical Diversion: From Consciousness, to Language, to Social Action,

and Meaning

44 Creating Place

50 Sense of Place in Resource Management

54 Conclusion

56 Literature Cited

61 Chapter 4—What Do We “Mean” by Place Meanings? Implications of Place

Meanings for Managers and Practitioners

Richard C. Stedman

61 Introduction

62 Literature Review: “Enough on Attachment, Already?”

64 Using Research to Illustrate the Themes: Sense of Place in Vilas County,

Wisconsin

65 “What Do We Mean by Meanings”: Emergent Themes
66 Illustration: Between-Group Differences in Meanings

70 Illustration: Shoreline Development, Meanings, and Attachment

73 Illustration: Predicting Attachment From Meanings

74 Illustration: Meanings and Environmental Support

75 Conclusions

76 Messages to Managers

78 Setting-Specific Caveats

79 Literature Cited

83 Chapter 5—Place Meanings in Stories of Lived Experience

William Stewart

83 Introduction

86 Place Meanings Are Derived From Lived Experience

90 Place Meanings Are Difficult to Express

92 Place Meanings Are Different Than Dominant Environmental Meanings

96 Place Meanings Are Audience-Sensitive

98 A Crisis of Representation

100 What To Do About Place Meanings?

101 Literature Cited

109 Chapter 6—Understanding Cultural Variation in Place Meaning

Gerard T. Kyle and Cassandra Y. Johnson

109 Introduction

113 The Importance of Understanding the Meanings Specific Populations Ascribe

to Natural Environments and Public Lands

115 Theoretical Perspectives Used for Understanding Variation in Place Meanings

Among Specific Populations

115 The Marginality/Ethnicity Hypotheses

116 Place Interaction and Place Meaning

118 Meaning-Based Approaches

121 Integrating Place Meaning in Public Land Management

128 Conclusion

129 Literature Cited

135 Chapter 7—Understanding Human Relationships to Place and Their

Significance for Outdoor Recreation and Tourism

Lynne C. Manzo

135 Introduction

137 Overview of Critical Concepts

142 The Need for Multiple Perspectives and Levels of Analysis

143 Contribution of a Qualitative Approach

144 An Empirical Exploration of Relationships to Place
146 Research Procedure

147 Demographics

147 Experimental Dimensions of Relationships to Place

148 Identity Confirmation and Development

149 Privacy, Introspection, and Reflection

152 Places as Bridges to the Past: Continuity and the Value of Memories

154 Childhood Experiences of Place

155 Social Experiences of Place

156 Political Dimensions of Place Experience

159 The Process of Developing Meaning

161 Conclusions

162 Implications for Natural Resource Recreation and Tourism

164 Directions for Future Research

166 Literature Cited

175 Chapter 8—Collaborative Place-Based Forest Planning: A Case Example

From the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison National Forests in

Western Colorado

Antony S. Cheng and Linda E. Kruger

175 Introduction

176 Place as a Locus of Conflict or Collaboration in Public Lands Planning

180 The Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison National Forests Plan

Revision Process

182 Theme 1: Natural Processes Dominate

183 Theme 2: Minimal Use Special Areas

184 Theme 3: Natural Landscape With Management

184 Theme 4: Recreation Emphasis Special Areas

185 Theme 5: Modified Natural Environments

185 Theme 6: Grassland Condition

185 Theme 7: Residential-Forest Intermix

186 Theme 8: Permanently Altered Areas

186 Public Involvement in Theme Mapping

191 Implications

194 Literature Cited

197 Acknowledgments

197 Metric Equivalents

199 Appendix 1: Workshop Participants

201 Appendix 2: Research Questions

203 Appendix 3: Gunnison Basin Landscape Working Group Summaries
This Page Left Blank Intentionally
1

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Chapter 1—Introduction: Gathering to Discuss Place

Linda E. Kruger and Troy E. Hall

Interest in Place Is Growing in Research and

Management Applications

Increasing numbers of managers and scientists are recognizing the importance of

understanding the meanings and attachments people have for places that are special

to them and are designing ways to incorporate this knowledge into resource planning and management. This is important because people create “bonds with a locale

based on a sense of place that involves sentiments extending beyond the use value

of the land” (Eisenhauer et al. 2000: 438). In other words, attention to places has

expanded beyond the notion of settings as clusters of attributes that are valued

primarily for the commodities or activities they offer. More attention is being

focused on the role of specific places and how they influence people’s recreation

and tourism choices, participation in stewardship and volunteer activities, and the

acceptability of resource management decisions, for example. The geographical

specificity and variety in place meanings and attachments have created a new

challenge for resource managers, whose traditional planning processes are based on

assumptions that locales can be functionally grouped into interchangeable, generic

types. In response, managers and researchers are designing ways to understand and

map local knowledge and meanings of places and other social and cultural information for use in planning and management.

In recent years, social science researchers have explored place as both an

influence on and as influenced by a variety of factors and contexts, including

public involvement, conflict, recreation management, recreation use, resource

planning and management, community capacity, and resilience. As a result, the

concepts of sense of place, attachment to place, place meanings, place dependence,

place identity, and place-based planning are appearing more frequently in academic

literature, agency publications, and even in the popular press. Place-oriented approaches to natural resource planning and management and community visioning

are receiving increasing attention from academics, policymakers, citizens, and

resource managers. In academia, place is considered in landscape architecture,

environmental ethics, environmental psychology, rural sociology, human geography, and the humanities. A variety of methods are used to explore the meanings,

experiences, attitudes, and behaviors that enable us to understand place and the

relationship of people to their environments. There is a sizable and growing literature on place and related concepts (see Farnum et al. 2005).
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

Understanding symbolic dimensions of environments is critical to understanding the implications of environmental stasis or change and why conflicts over resource management become so contentious (Krannich et al. 1994). Recognizing the

socially constructed nature of these symbolic meanings associated with settings and

locations people care about is also important, because it draws attention to the role

of social groups and processes in the formation, perpetuation, and change of sense

of place over time (Brandenburg and Carroll 1995, Greider and Garkovich 1994,

Kemmis 1990).

Slowly, planning processes are recognizing the importance of meanings and

values people ascribe to places and the emotions, experiences, benefits, and satisfaction people experience in places (Galliano and Loeffler 1999). Place-based planning processes provide a venue for managers to interact with people who live,

work, and play in a place and care about it. This is important because planning in

itself is a place-making or meaning-creation process wherein certain meanings and

values are privileged in certain geographic spaces (Galliano and Loeffler 1999,

Williams 1995, Williams et al. 1992). Place-based planning that engages the public

enables an understanding of what Clarke (quoted in Galliano and Loeffler 1999:

24) calls “the interactive unity of people and place.” Knowledge of the politics of

place can help managers understand natural resource conflict and better evaluate

potential effectiveness of decisionmaking processes (Cheng et al. 2003). Understanding contested meanings of place is important for managers because sense of

place and place meanings are often connected to attitudes and expectations about

appropriate and inappropriate management or use. Paying attention to both shared

and contested meanings may lead to more productive dialogue.

An Exploration of Place

In the spring of 2004, the Pacific Northwest Research Station’s Focused Science

Delivery and Human and Natural Resources Interactions Programs sponsored a

workshop in Portland, Oregon. The workshop brought together a group of scientists (app. 1) interested in synthesizing and extending understanding of place and

applying these ideas specifically to recreation management on public lands. The

group identified the following objectives:

• Clarify place concepts.

• Clarify approaches to the study and application of our understanding of

people-place relations to natural resource management.

• Integrate perspectives from different disciplines.

• Discuss approaches to understanding and measuring sense of place.

Sense of place and

place meanings are

often connected to

attitudes and expectations about

appropriate and

inappropriate management or use.

Paying attention to

both shared and

contested meanings

may lead to more

productive dialogue.
3

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

• Discuss how place meanings and sense of place form.

• Explore the influence of scale and how to understand sense of place at

multiple scales.

• Identify institutional factors that interact with sense of place by facilitating

or impeding social justice, discourse, power shifts, and meaning changes.

Over a 3-day weekend (April 30–May 1), the group discussed place-related concepts, the process of forming place meanings and attachments, and methods and

tools to study and measure sense of place, attachment, dependence, identity, and

satisfaction. The group developed a list of research questions (app. 2). The following questions held the highest degree of interest for the group.

1. How do local and nonlocal social processes interact to influence the creation of place meanings? The group recognized that stakeholders of varying types

and proximity to places hold meanings for and attach value to places. Past research

has not typically spanned different populations to understand whether and how

those who live in proximity to a resource develop place meanings that differ from

those held by people who live elsewhere. For instance, differences may arise based

on the direct experiences local residents have, whereas citizens who have never

visited may have meanings that derive primarily from symbolic awareness of

“national forests.”

2. How do relevant management groups (e.g., demographically defined

groups, activity groups, gender groups, ethnic groups) differ in place meanings? A major point of discussion in the group focused on the extent to which

meanings are shared and the processes by which they become shared. Whether and

how meanings are shared within and between stakeholder groups has important

implications for the ways managers can learn about and use place information in

making resource decisions.

3. How do meanings for specific recreation and tourism sites become negotiated within social groups? Much research has focused on describing the place

meanings or level of place attachment that visitors or local populations have. Much

less is known about the processes by which such meanings consolidate. In particular, there has been a lack of attention to the way power and social resources operate

to impose certain meanings.

4. Under what conditions (planning and management activities) does a place

attachment and place meaning focus, reduce, or avert conflict? Many authors

have promoted place-based planning as a more sensitive, fair, and/or effective way

to make decisions about resource use. However, the group recognized a need to
4

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

evaluate such assertions, which would include close attention to defining “success”

and identification of the types of procedures that are more or less “successful.”

In addition to identifying research questions, the group acknowledged the need

for tools, processes, and conceptual frameworks that enable managers to access,

assess, inventory, and monitor sociocultural meanings of places and incorporate

socially relevant meanings into social inquiry and planning processes. These new

tools would supplement current approaches, accommodating participation by

diverse interests and integration of a variety of types of knowledge. They would

provide a venue for expression and negotiation of meanings. Managers are leading

the way in exploring a variety of processes, activities, and forums to access meanings people hold for places. By studying these management activities, we can

extend our understanding of place-based processes and better answer the question

“What processes work in what situations and why?”

Near the conclusion of the gathering, many of the participants were interested

in continuing the dialogue and writing and publishing a collection of papers. This

collection of seven papers is a product of the gathering. It provided an opportunity

for participants to draw on each others’ collective knowledge and the perspectives

shared during the workshop, begin to address what the group identified as important needs, and move research on place in new directions. In the first paper, Dan

Williams provides a conceptual guide to distinguish among approaches to place

and explains why resource managers should care about the relations people develop with places. He draws together the wide range of efforts, classifying them

into four approaches to the application of place concepts to management of natural

resources. In her paper, Pat Stokowski describes sense of place as a social practice

and calls for a focus on interpersonal communication as the primary vehicle for

social interaction. She recommends attention to alternative theories that are more

social and that move beyond internal psychological phenomena to incorporate

social interactions and social context. She also discusses how reconceptualizing

place to be more social can foster new ways of thinking about and addressing

resource management issues. Rich Stedman focuses his contribution on the notion

of place meanings, suggesting that they should be distinguished from the evaluative

concept of place attachment. He notes that managers create and influence the kinds

of meanings that people attribute to a place through management activities that

alter the landscape, provide for some experiences and exclude others, and through

communication and interpretation. He presents findings from a study of property

owners in Wisconsin to illustrate his themes. Bill Stewart also focuses on place
5

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

meanings. In contrast to Stedman’s more individualistic perspective, his comments

echo Stokowski’s emphasis on a more social approach, recognizing that places take

on meaning through lived experience that includes conversation and interactions

with others. He acknowledges the importance of venues that provide opportunities

for articulation and negotiation of place meanings.

Gerard Kyle and Cassandra Johnson bring attention to the importance of

understanding the meanings different cultures ascribe to the natural environment

and the role these understandings play in attitudes, behaviors, and preferences.

There have been few attempts to integrate the perspectives of the growing populations of ethnic and racial groups into the management of public lands. The authors

present a framework for understanding the cultural dimensions of place meaning

that incorporates self-identity, cultural identity, and place identity. Lynne Manzo

adds to the literature on place attachment and sense of place by locating the development of place meanings in social and political processes and sheds light on experiences that make people value places and why some people use places that others

do not. Like Stedman, she notes that it is important to pay attention to the messages

that management actions, interpretation, and communication convey to a variety of

audiences, including those of different cultures. She calls for a more holistic perspective that integrates physical, social, political, and economic domains as well as

multiple levels of analysis and includes an array of different methodologies in

order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of people-place relations.

In the final paper, Tony Cheng and Linda Kruger review an experimental,

adaptive approach to forest planning from the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and

Gunnison National Forests plan revision process. The process that is presented

provided an opportunity for shareholders to contribute to the production of information and knowledge about the local landscape and people-place relations. The

activity itself is described as a place-making process and is one example of a

variety of place-based planning processes that are being applied around the country.

These papers present overlapping, and in some cases divergent, perspectives. It

is our hope that readers will find them interesting and useful and that the ideas

presented will provoke discussion and further attention to this important topic.

Literature Cited

Brandenburg, A.M.; Carroll, M.S. 1995. Your place or mine? The effect of place

creation on environmental values and landscape meanings. Society and Natural

Resources. 8: 381–398.
6

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

Cheng, A.S.; Kruger, L.E.; Daniels, S.E. 2003. “Place” as an integrating concept

in natural resource politics: propositions for a social science research agenda.

Society and Natural Resources. 16: 87–104.

Eisenhauer, B.W.; Krannich, R.S.; Blahna, D.J. 2000. Attachments to special

places on public lands: an analysis of activities, reason for attachments, and

community connections. Society and Natural Resources. 13(5): 421–441.

Farnum, J.; Hall, T.; Kruger, L.E. 2005. Sense of place in natural resource

recreation and tourism: an evaluation and assessment of research findings.

Gen. Tech Rep. PNW-GTR-660. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 59 p.

Galliano, S.J.; Loeffler, G.M. 1999. Place attachments: how people define ecosystems. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-462. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of

Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 31 p.

Greider, T.; Garkovich, L. 1994. Landscapes: the social construction of nature and

the environment. Rural Sociology. 59(1): 1–24.

Kemmis, D. 1990. Community and the politics of place. Norman, OK: University

of Oklahoma Press. 150 p.

Krannich, R.S.; Carroll, M.S.; Daniels, S.E.; Walker, G.B. 1994. Incorporating

social assessment and public involvement processes into ecosystem-based

resource management: applications to the Eastside Ecosystem Management

Project. Report submitted to the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Walla Walla,

WA. 141 p.

Williams, D.R. 1995. Mapping place meanings for ecosystem management. Report

for Interior Columbia River Basin Ecosystem Management Project. Walla

Walla, WA: Icon Printing. 35 p.

Williams, D.R.; Patterson, M.E.; Roggenbuck, J.W.; Watson, A.E. 1992.

Beyond the commodity metaphor: examining emotional and symbolic attachment to place. Leisure Sciences. 14: 29–46.
7

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Chapter 2—Pluralities of Place: A User’s Guide to

Place Concepts, Theories, and Philosophies in Natural

Resource Management

Daniel R. Williams1

Abstract

Place ideas are capturing increasing attention in recreation and natural resource

management. But there are important and sometimes incompatible differences

among the various concepts. In this paper I describe some of the reasons for the

growing interest in place concepts and distinguish between four basic approaches:

attitude, meaning, ethical, and political. My aim is to provide a guide to managers

so they can better appreciate the implications of these different approaches. Finally,

I try to highlight throughout how and why these ideas apply to recreation and

natural resource management issues.

Keywords: Place concepts, place meanings, environmental philosophy.

Introduction

In the English language the word “place” is a common but complex term that, in

recent years, is showing up more prominently in the technical vocabulary of natural

resource management. Place concepts are finding their way into technical documents including the Forest Service’s Handbook for Scenery Management and a

2003 draft Recreation Resource Management Plan Revision Technical Guide.

Likewise, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently published Community Culture and the Environment: A Guide to Understanding a Sense of Place, and

place ideas are popping up in texts on ecosystem management. Managers increasingly talk about managing for “sense of place” and “special places,” measuring

“place attachment” among recreation visitors and community residents, and instituting collaborative “place-based planning” processes (Kruger and Jakes 2003).

In the resource management literature, “place” has surfaced along with “ecosystem,” “community,” and “landscape” as geographically tinged alternatives to the

more traditional term “resource.” Professional interest in these ideas is growing

even though their seemingly elusive, murky, and controversial nature would make

1

 Daniel R. Williams is a research social scientist, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest

Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, 2150A Centre Avenue, Fort Collins, CO

80526-1891, email: drwilliams@fs.fed.us.
8

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

them difficult to plug into quantitative decision models and geographic information

systems (GIS) databases. Despite these difficulties, talk of place resonates surprisingly well with professionals and the public involved in the management of wildlands, regional tourism planning, as well as community issues of sprawl, open

space preservation, and community development.

In this paper, I describe the underlying richness and variety of place ideas

that are being discussed and debated in natural resource management and related

fields. My goal is to provide a guide to managers so they can better distinguish

among differing approaches to place that are sometimes hard to discern within

the din of superficially similar terminology. I do not intend to give a taxonomic

account of terminology, but rather explain some of the important assumptions

underlying various formulations of place concepts. Along the way, I will try

to address the question of why place ideas have captured so much attention and

highlight how and why these ideas apply to natural resource issues.

My interest in a place perspective goes back to the late 1970s when I was

working with colleagues at Utah State University on what we called “relationship

to resource” as a way to understand outdoor recreation behavior (Williams and

Schreyer 1981) and conflict (Jacob and Schreyer 1980). Drawing on geographer

Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974, 1977) writing about “topophilia” (love of place) and the “experience of place,” we suggested recreationists may at times develop “feelings of

possession” for the resource, that these relationships can serve as powerful symbols

of self-identity, and that with these strong ties and feelings for a resource come

strongly held social norms and expectations about what kinds of uses and behaviors

are deemed acceptable in that setting. Recreation conflict resulted, at least in part,

when diverse users held strongly to different norms about what uses and behaviors

are appropriate in a setting. Yet, as I suggested at the time, “few studies in wildland

recreation recognize the importance of the meaning the user attaches to the place”

and how these meanings developed over time (Williams 1980: 1).

Beyond the issue of conflict, what really caught my attention was how the idea

of a relationship to resource contrasted with the dominant “goal-directed” ideas

embedded in recreation management concepts such as the Recreation Opportunity

Spectrum (ROS). I was troubled by the prevailing operational concepts of outdoor

recreation in which activities and settings were viewed as collections of fungible

(replaceable, substitutable) properties—properties that recreationists were thought

to associate in varying degrees with their desired experience goals (hence the goaldirected model). In those days, outdoor recreation was understood in a way analogous to any other consumer good derived from the resource, in principle just as
9

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

fungible as timber, water, or forage. The very definition of “resource” dictates a

capacity for finding or adapting properties to achieve some end or goal. Timber

resources are ubiquitous, harvestable from virtually any place that supports forest

vegetation. In contrast, the World Heritage status of Redwood National Park along

California’s northern coast is testimony to its unique, nonfungible character. That

places could be unique did not seem to square with the goal-directed model, where

the benefits that accrue to recreation participants are presumed to be substitutable

from one setting to another so long as the substitute site possesses similar attributes

(Hendee and Burdge 1974).

I could not imagine a substitute for my favorite places in the Desolation

Wilderness, a landscape I had come to know intimately through the many visits I

had made in my teens and early twenties. I could not imagine John Muir thinking

that Yosemite Valley was just a big granite-enclosed playground (indeed, for Muir it

was God’s sacred temple). There must be some other explanation for many of the

benefits and satisfactions I received from my recreational use of these places. But

the dominant models of the day, based as they were in economics and consumer

psychology, saw the setting as merely a collection of potentially attractive, but

fungible features. The visitor’s history with that setting meant very little other than

to suggest frequent visitors should be more satisfied because they would be more

likely to have “accurate” expectations about the setting features.

As a recreation participant, the outdoor recreation resource did not strike me

as some kind of supermarket of potential recreation opportunities organized, packaged, and managed by recreation resource professionals for public consumption as

leisure experiences. Instead it was a collection of specific places, each with its own

unique history and set of rituals and meanings. Not only did the concept of recreation opportunities fail to capture much of the meaning and significance that a

resource held for me as a participant, my personal reflections were reinforced by

an emerging critique of traditional goal-directed, consumer choice models within

the field of consumer behavior research (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982, Ölander

1977, Olshavsky and Granbois 1979).

The essential difference between an approach to understanding recreation

behavior from a resource and consumer perspective versus an approach potentially

involving deep emotional and symbolic relationships to places is one of recognizing

that at least in some important respects places are not fungible. Certainly, in many

instances recreationists’ relationship to a resource may be such that they view it as

a source of goods and services and therefore perceive places as ultimately tradable

The outdoor recreation resource is a

collection of specific

places, each with its

own unique history

and set of rituals

and meanings.
10

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

commodities. But any given place likely has some unique value and meaning

(e.g., there is no substitute for the Grand Canyon experience), at least for some

recreationists (fig. 1). The argument I have been making here is only that consumer

relationships are not sufficient to capture the range of meanings and values recreationists are likely to assign to places, particularly those places that, from experience, they have come to know intimately. Although the place approach does not

deny instrumental meanings, it is ultimately more inclusive and more easily accommodates the resource/commodity approach than the reverse.

In one guise or another, my research has continued to emphasize the relationship to place (in contrast to consumer/goal-directed/resource models) as a basis

of outdoor recreation participation and choice. The basic idea I have been exploring is that people value their relationships to leisure places just as they might value

enduring involvements with certain people or particular “free time” activities. We

choose recreation places not merely because they are useful settings for pursuing

outdoor recreation activities, but to convey the very sense of who we are.

The Popularity of “Place”

Interest in place ideas extends well beyond the academic margins of recreation

resource management. Even in the broader culture of scientific management, which

has historically dominated natural resources, such seemingly difficult-to-quantify

concepts have become a popular refrain (see Beatley and Manning 1997, Grumbine

1992, Hansson and Wackernagel 1999, Waage 2001). Although place ideas have

Figure 1—The Grand Canyon experience represents a unique value and

meaning.

National Park Service
11

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

been widely used in geography, architecture, and regional planning since the early

1970s, the growing emphasis on collaborative ecosystem management has amplified

interest in place concepts within the natural resources field. For that matter, the

popularity of place is more than a recent fad of academic rumination: place ideas

also have currency within the wider public imagination (Kunstler 1993, Spretnak

1997). There are a number of societal and resource management reasons for their

growing appeal.

A leading sociological explanation is a general reaction against the commodified view of nature that has dominated our modern, technological society

(Macnaughten and Urry 1998). Some see a broad public disenchantment with

the tendency to reduce places to mere resources (Spretnak 1997). Treating nature

as a collection of products or commodities to be sold, or isolating properties of

the environment in order to study them scientifically leaves many people, lay and

professional, with a sense that the larger whole, the “place” itself, has somehow

been lost along the way. This was much of the reaction described in the Forest

Service’s own critique of the first round of forest planning (Larsen et al. 1990).

Although ecosystem management attempts to put the silvicultural/forest management science of the first round of forest planning into a broader spatial and

historical context, it has not fully addressed the richness of human meanings and

relationships to the land that people express and want to see represented in the

planning process. Place, in contrast, is seen as encompassing both natural and

social history.

A second, sociological explanation for the increasing discussion of place can

be found in public angst about globalization and the accelerating pace of change in

society. The look and layout of most American communities has undergone rapid

change in recent decades. Concerns about the character and quality of places have

increased with the spread of mass culture and consumption through entertainment

and retail goliaths like Time-Warner2

 and Wal-Mart. To many people, the social,

technological, and economic forces of globalization appear to have weakened local

distinctiveness. In addition, relatively inexpensive transportation and new information technologies mean people can experience more parts of the world through

international trade, travel, and the media.

Ironically, these forces of homogenization have made place more important,

not less (Harvey 1996, Mander and Goldsmith 1996). With the onset of globalization, what were once taken-for-granted, subconscious meanings of a place now

2

 The use of trade or firm names in this publication is for reader information and does not

imply endorsement by the U.S. Department of Agriculture of any product or service.

Although ecosystem management attempts to

put silviculture and

forest management

into a broader spatial and historical

context, it has not

fully addressed the

richness of human

meanings and relationships to the land

that people express.
12

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

come to the surface and seem threatened by nearly every proposed change to the

local landscape. Efforts to introduce new land uses—whether theme parks, prisons,

wildlife preserves, timber harvests, land exchanges, or shopping malls—become

symbols of external threats to the local sense of place (Appleyard 1979). These

proposed new uses express the sense of place defined by the outsider (e.g., the

scientist, government official, or special interest group) and thus represent the

power of the outsider over the local.

At the same time that globalization threatens local control over place, it invites

more and more stakeholders to make claims on what a place means and how it

should be used (Massey 1993). In other words, a more global (pluralist) culture

supports a more expansive set of place meanings. Ironically, some of these more

distant claims may be to appreciate a place (e.g., as wilderness or a world heritage

designation) in ways that go beyond traditionally prescribed meanings for commodity development. In this way, globalization is sometimes seen as a benign force

for the protection of sense of place otherwise threatened by indigenous or corporate

exploitation rather than a dangerous and destabilizing force reshaping places from

afar (Williams 2002b).

A final and related reason is simply that the meanings of many remote recreation places have become more apparent, complex, and thickly layered with

intensification of public use. A sense of place is partly about building up a personal

history with a locale. In the early days of public lands management, relatively few

people had direct experience visiting specific places on national forests, rangelands,

and parks. They were largely unknown and unused in the modern sense. With few

claims and norms for how a place ought to be used, both users and managers had

more latitude to define appropriate use and meaning. Today, with the expanding

wildland-urban interface and large metropolitan populations within easy reach of

wildlands, there is far greater potential for competing senses of place to be established and fought over. Where only hearty hikers and anglers once tread, a host of

relative newcomers (off-highway vehicle [also known as OHV] users, mountain

bikers, target shooters) now compete for access (fig. 2). These high-powered and

high-tech newcomers bring with them conflicting ideas about what constitutes

desirable or acceptable use and establish their own attachment to and sense of the

place.

Under the earlier conditions, it was easier to manage places as settings or

opportunities to fulfill specific goal-directed experiences. Because fewer visitors

had much history in the landscape, and the variety of users was smaller, managers
13

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

had more latitude to negotiate meanings and norms for use and to zone potentially

competing uses. As places become increasingly accessible and popular among a

wider diversity of users and interests, it has become much more difficult to manage

for any particular experience on a given piece of ground. Now, in this era of highintensity use among a greater plurality of users, the concept of place helps managers recognize that users form allegiances to specific places (with specific meanings

attached) as well as norms of appropriate use and management. These meanings

sometimes can accommodate a wide diversity of other users and sometimes not.

Four Approaches to Place in Natural Resource

Management

As implied above, the popularity of place concepts comes, in part, from people

drawing on varying place ideas to bolster a particular view of how a place should

be developed, managed, or preserved. But what at first appear to be common or

compatible approaches, may represent diverse, if not contradictory, viewpoints

(Patterson and Williams 2005). Thus, it is important for managers to recognize

some of the variations in use and meaning of these concepts. In this section, I will

highlight some of these differences by describing four more or less distinct approaches (or discourses) underlying the application of place ideas to the management of natural resources. But before I begin, let me recap some features that most

place concepts tend to share in common.

Figure 2—Off-highway vehicle users now compete for access to public places.

Maria Stiefel

As places become

increasingly accessible and popular

among a wider

diversity of users

and interests, it has

become much more

difficult to manage

for any particular

experience on a

given piece of

ground.
14

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

At a basic level, most place concepts emphasize a holistic and spatially and

temporally explicit view of resources. Just as ecosystem management attempts to

put traditional forest management science into a broader spatial and historical

context, place and sense of place ideas pay more attention to the human or social

history of a particular locale. Among academic geographers, the term “place” is

also used to denote a more holistic notion in comparison to a more abstract notion

of space or geographic location (e.g., in a coordinate or Euclidean space). Space is

little more than location or container. It is only when we begin to fill it up with

particular events and meanings does a space become place. Each place, thus, is

unique from every other place in the particular pattern of events and meanings that

come to be associated with it.

Beyond a general desire for a more holistic and historical understanding of

place, however, my attempt to organize place discourses into four categories is

meant to emphasize the differences among them that often go overlooked. Still,

although there are some incompatibilities that need to be recognized, these discourses are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and hybrid views are possible.

Place as an Attitude Object

The most straightforward approach is to think of place or, more typically, place

attachment as something akin to an attitude toward a geographic locale or resource (Jorgensen and Stedman 2001, Stedman 2002). Attitudes are assessments

of whether some object or behavior is considered a good or bad thing. For example, a person may hold attitudes toward an agency, a political candidate, a

consumer product, a behavior (e.g., smoking), or a concept (e.g., wilderness or

wildfire). These attitudes are usually built upon various beliefs about the object

(e.g., smoking causes cancer, wildfires damage watersheds) and presumably determine one’s behavior toward the object.

Attitudes involve strength as well as valence (positive or negative reaction).

Thus, there is a natural tendency to measure the strength of individuals’ attachment

toward any particular resource. Much of the work on measuring place attachment

in recreation and tourism implicitly or explicitly follows the attitude tradition. A

common approach to place attachment has been to build on concepts (e.g., consumer loyalty and product involvement) found in literature on consumer behavior

(Bricker and Kerstetter 2000; Jones et al. 2000; Kyle et al. 2003, 2004; Warzecha

and Lime 2000; Williams and Vaske 2003; Williams et al. 1992). Although this

does not explicitly draw from attitude theory, consumer loyalty and product
15

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

involvement can be considered a kind of “brand” attitude. In any case, Stedman

and colleagues have made an explicit plea to study place attachment as an attitude

(Jorgensen and Stedman 2001, Stedman 2002).

In natural resource management, place ideas are sometimes used to characterize

one type of attitude among many potential attitudes or beliefs people might hold

toward a resource (Williams and Stewart 1998). For example, the term “sense of

place” is sometimes used to describe varying degrees of specialness or authenticity

of a place. In this case, landscapes can be compared and ranked by the strength or

integrity of their sense of place and management actions evaluated by how this

sense of place is enhanced or diminished (see also the later discussion of place as a

philosophy of environmental ethics).

There is important value in the attitude approach, in part, because it ties place

attachment to well-established concepts and methods in social psychology. For

example, social psychological research has developed relatively direct methods for

measuring the strength of attitudes and provides insights into how attitudes form

and how they change. It also makes place attachment highly compatible with the

traditional consumer-utility (benefit) approaches to natural resource management—

strength of attachment becomes one factor in a multifactor consumer decision

framework.

In terms of managing natural resources, place attachment is also attractive

because it attempts to quantify the strength of connections between people and

geographically specific places directly rather than trying to establish such connections indirectly in terms of how well they fit or function in satisfying specific

recreation goals. This is significant in two ways. First, people often care passionately about the management of specific sites in ways not easily captured as in an

inventory of fungible properties. Place attachment reminds resource managers

that the public is involved with specific places under their jurisdiction, not just

land uses classified as one type of opportunity or another to be allocated to various

uses during a planning cycle. Secondly, place attachment reminds managers of

something the consumer approach often misses. People not only evaluate products

and services as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, they come to cherish some as prized

possessions and symbols or markers of identity (Belk 1988).

Still, it is debatable whether place attachment is best thought of as an attitude

toward a place. The question is whether place attitudes adequately characterize

the relationships recreationists hold toward certain places. At one level, place

attachment has all the hallmarks of an attitude in that it involves both valence and

Place attachment

reminds resource

managers that the

public is involved

with specific places

under their jurisdiction, not just land

uses classified as

one type of opportunity or another to be

allocated to various

uses during a planning cycle.
16

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

strength and it does little harm to treat it as such. But part of the reason for considering place attachment is to address something deeper and more fundamental than

is typically associated with attitudes. People do not usually characterize their

relationships to cherished objects, home, or family in terms of attitudes. To say that

I have a favorable attitude toward my wife and children would seem to degrade the

emotional intensity of these relationships. In any case, even if place attachment is

something broader than an attitude, it is certainly likely to predict or explain more

specific attitudes toward the place.

In my judgment, an attitude approach to place does not do justice to the

broader concerns that motivate professional and public interest in the concept of

place. Something important is lost when place attachment is reduced to an attitude.

The idea of attitude tends to be narrowly evaluative and judgmental and lacks the

holistic, emotive, and contextual qualities of the place idea that was part of its

original appeal (Altman and Low 1992). Likewise, place as attitude poses little

challenge to the dominant utilitarian (commodified) view of nature in which

natural landscapes (places) are reduced to a collection of parts.

Place as Relationship and Meaning

The second approach involves the relatively straightforward recognition of a

broader range of meanings that people associate with a place than with a resource

(Williams and Patterson 1996). As resource management has moved toward recognizing more holistic, systemic, and contextual qualities, it is increasingly concerned

with capturing the full range of meanings the public ascribes to places—meanings

that may differ widely across individuals and social groups and evolve over time.

In the long-standing tradition of utilitarian resource management, the legitimate

meaning of a resource was necessarily limited to the tangible and fungible commodities that it could provide. The value of a resource was defined by the uses or

products that could flow from it. Even uses that we sometimes think of as “intangible” such as recreation were rendered more tangible by thinking of them as

products or services supplied by the resource.

The term “meaning” is used to convey a deeper notion than attitude by emphasizing the “relationship” between a person or group and the place. The notion of

relationship implies past experience or history with the site as well as connectivity

or identification. In addition, whereas attitude necessarily occurs in the individual

mind, meaning often refers to a shared or collective belief. In effect, emphasizing

meaning expands the narrower psychological approach of attitudes by recognizing
17

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

the sociocultural nature of (often intangible) ideas, symbols, beliefs, and values that

characterize the relationship between the person or group and a place.

Our relationship to a place serves as a testimonial to who we are. This can

occur at both an individual and cultural level (Williams 2000). At an individual

level, a place like Desolation Wilderness in California is an indelible part of me,

an expression of both my personal and professional interests. At a cultural level,

we designate places as wilderness or national parks as a way to sanctify them as

special places marking important events in our collective American history. At

either level, social interactions, shared experiences and stories, and broad cultural

narratives are important in creating, modifying, and transmitting place meanings

within a population.

In the place-as-meaning approach, sense of place sometimes refers to the

intangible meanings and symbols that are hard to recognize or articulate (and

hard to quantify), especially if one is unfamiliar with the place or is an “outsider”

to the social world that associates particular meanings with the place (Hester

1985, Williams and Stewart 1998). As an example, those schooled in the Angloprofessional culture of resource management often have a hard time recognizing

place meanings of people from minority/ethnic communities (Williams and Carr

1993). But even the smaller differences between long-time locals and recentarriving managers who otherwise share cultural backgrounds may create barriers

to understanding the meaning of places. One of the features of ecosystem management, for example, is to give greater consideration to local ecological knowledge.

Place effectively extends this edict to include local social and symbolic meanings.

This is not always easy, as even insiders sometimes may lack full awareness of

these qualities until some event or proposal threatens them (Hester 1985).

An approach emphasizing place meanings, particularly shared cultural meanings, is sometimes distinguished from the idea of place attachment or place identity.

Most places have shared meanings, but the intensity with which individuals hold or

identify with those meanings likely varies. Gettysburg National Battlefield, for example, is rich in meaning for America society, but some Americans identify more

strongly with these meanings than others. For some people, it may be that their

ancestors fought in the Civil War. For others who may be history buffs, they take

great interest in knowing the details of the events that occurred there. As managers,

we generally need to understand the range and variety of meanings the public

assigns to a place, as well as how their intensity differs across stakeholders and

constituencies (Brandenburg and Carroll 1995).
18

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

As managers, if we think of our traditional tasks of resource inventory as

efforts to identify and map landscape meanings, the place perspective argues

for employing a wider conception of meaning. Resource maps, in effect, describe

how certain kinds of meaning are spatially distributed. Natural resource management has sought, with considerable success, to map certain tangible forms of

meaning (e.g., commodity and amenity uses). As intangible meanings (e.g., cultural/symbolic, expressive, and even spiritual meanings) have become increasingly

legitimized within the ecological or systems concept of resource management, the

scope of resource mapping needs to be similarly expanded.

Although in theory, meaning can be mapped like other spatial properties, the

problem has been that the more intangible meanings, by definition, leave few, if

any, physical indicators, behavioral evidence, or cultural markers in the landscape

to tell us they exist. Thus for managers to identify the full range of meanings requires an expanded set of inventory techniques (for promising examples see Brown

2005, Eisenhauer et al. 2000).

Meanings can be likened to stories about places rather than physical properties

of places. The job of the resource manager is to learn about these stories and to

recognize when different groups of people have different and sometimes conflicting stories. Relatively passive approaches to gathering these stories would include

identifying narratives, documents, and histories about a place or consulting key

informants including long-time managers (Davenport and Anderson 2005). More

active approaches would be to engage the public in constructing and negotiating

their various stories through various forms of collaborative planning itself (Kruger

and Shannon 2000, see also the discussion below on place as a sociopolitical

process).

Implicit in the place-as-meaning approach is the controversial idea of social

constructionism (cf., Cronon 1996, Soulé and Lease 1995). To critics like Soulé

and Lease, a social constructionist view of nature implies that people can assign a

virtually infinite range of meaning to a place, and, therefore, physical or ecological

reality would seem to have little influence on what a place means and how it should

be managed (see also Stedman 2003). Social constructionism (i.e., meaning is not

inherent in a thing, but a product of social convention) strikes some ecologists as

dangerous relativism, giving license to society to make places however they choose,

thereby threatening ecological systems. Ironically, others see the study of resource

meanings and values as often insufficiently socially constructed and little different

from the usual attitudes, perceptions, and motives that recreation managers have
19

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

traditionally catalogued (Stokowski 2002). In this view, traditional social psychological and economic notions of individually held attitudes and values are seen as

insufficiently “social” in origin.

Controversy aside, in some ways the place-as-meaning approach is among the

least prescriptive of the various place discourses. At one level, it merely acknowledges that place meanings exist and are often diverse, malleable, and continuously

created and contested by people (including scientists and resource managers). I see

it mostly as suggesting that different kinds of meanings (from traditionally recognized commodity meanings to the more elusive emotional and spiritual meanings)

all have something to offer in our understanding of relationships to places. Although place-as-meaning need not advocate that any particular meanings should

rule, it does help managers to see that places are complex and contested and that

managers play a critical role in the ongoing give-and-take of place creation. At the

same time, the fact that people do contest place meanings gives rise to philosophical arguments and political wrangling aimed at validating some meanings over

others as I shall discuss below.

Place as Environmental Ethics

The third approach invokes place ideas as moral or ethical claims for protecting

or restoring the presumably genuine meaning (character or personality) of a

place. Accordingly, every place is presumed to have some authentic ecologically

or culturally defined essence, some true and timeless character, often threatened

(if not already destroyed) by larger distant forces (e.g., environmental degradation,

modernization, and globalization).

This moral dialogue also is popular among certain environmental philosophers

and scientific ecologists. Representing both the philosophical and ecological

perspective, Grumbine (1992) suggested that humans once had an authentic relationship to place that has “atrophied” under modern modes of life. We have become

alienated from our true relationship to nature, place, and community. Modernity

has bred within us an “anthropocentric arrogance” and failure “to adapt to the

ecological conditions that limit human existence” (Grumbine 1992: 245). Likewise,

these arguments resonate with some ecologists because they appear to provide

normative guidelines for how society ought to treat landscapes—that is, by following some indigenous ecological pattern (Samson and Knopf 1996).

Moral arguments also come from architects, planners, and a variety of social

critics. Some planners and urban designers condemn forms of commercial development and mass culture for homogenizing the built landscape (e.g., Kunstler 1993).
20

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

For other social critics, the issue is often one of preserving some vestige of traditional community against the threat of large-scale forces of economic restructuring

and the bureaucratic state (Mander and Goldsmith 1996). Within the design professions (e.g., landscape architecture) and among restoration ecologists there is a

tendency to reify aesthetic and/or ecological standards for landscape management

based on a presumed integrity with respect to a natural, historical, ecological range

of conditions (Norberg-Schultz 1980, McGinnis et al. 1999). The core idea here is

that each place, community, landscape, or ecosystem possesses some inherent true

character. Proper management does not destroy that character, but protects it or, if

necessary and possible, restores it.

There are a variety of social and environmental movements founded on this

underlying premise of alienation from the modern world (for a discussion, see

Williams and Van Patten 2006). Bioregionalism is one example of a place-based

philosophy that harkens back to a more sustainable relationship to places (Flores

1994). The bioregional model envisions an ecological utopia of small-scale societies as an alternative to the large-scale processes favored by global, industrial

capitalism. Bioregionalists believe there is an authentic biocentric (natural) way

of acting and dwelling in the world, a true sense of place to be discovered or recovered. Bioregionalists mix ecological science and environmental ethics to argue

that society should be organized around decentralized natural or “organic” regions.

Politically they emphasize decentralized, nonhierarchical social and political systems. The guiding principle is that nature should determine the political, economic,

and social life of communities. The conscientious study of nature can guide us in

organizing human settlements and ways of life.

Just as some environmental philosophers revere bioregional living on the basis

of an organic interpretation of regionalism, communitarians tout the virtues of

small local communities on the basis of their presumed thicker ties of tradition and

custom as an antidote to modernism and globalization (Bell 1993). For some, the

ecological relation to nature is closely tied to communitarian ideals of civic virtues.

For example, communitarians such as Kemmis argue that decisionmaking in the

public sphere should depend less on a set of procedures, laws, regulations, or

bureaucracies and more on human virtues and patterns of relationships—“the set

of practices which enables a common inhabiting of a place” (Kemmis 1990: 122).

Rural life is presumed to be the good life in need of protection. Within natural

resource management, some versions of place-based planning draw on the assumption that local decisionmaking is necessarily better (Kemmis 2001).
21

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

The presumption that places are given by nature is challenged by some geographers and environmental philosophers (Harvey 1996). Hayward (1994), for example, identified three problems with bioregional admonitions to follow nature

and seek local self-sufficiency. First, there is little evidence from human history

to expect that decentralized bioregional/communitarian societies will necessarily

respect the positive values of human diversity, democracy, liberty, and justice.

Second, there is the problem of distributive justice. The various bioregions, unfortunately, are not uniformly or equally endowed with resources. It is much easier to

create a local, communal self-sufficiency in a lush productive landscape than a

barren, impoverished one. Deciding who gets to live in a given region is no small

problem. Finally, bioregional self-sufficiency ignores the interdependence and

hierarchical structure of ecosystems. Actions in one bioregion may have significant

impacts on adjacent ones. Nor is decentralization necessarily the most efficient for

nature. Assuming anything approaching the present world population, it may not be

realistic to believe that a decentralized bioregional strategy is likely to lessen

human impact on the biosphere.

The main reason here for highlighting place as an environmental ethic is that

managers need to be mindful of how they describe and employ place ideas. The

moral arguments for some sort of pre-given sense of place animate specific views

for how society should value place, nature, or landscape. As I noted earlier in

discussing reasons for elevated interest in place ideas, sense of place is sometimes

invoked as a way to correct what is perceived to be an overly modern or mechanistic view of nature (nature as a storehouse of commodities).

Although some people use place ideas in strongly prescriptive ways, this is by

no means universal. As we have seen, not all place ideas are calls for preservation

or restoration of some “authentic” sense of place. Rather they may represent an

expanded understanding of place meanings, without endorsing some meanings over

others (the place-as-meaning approach). In the end, however, any attempt to

expand the definition of what meanings should count in a land management decision will necessarily open up resource management to a larger political debate.

Place as Sociopolitical Process

The fact that people not only assign diverse meanings to place, but often ground

meanings in a moral language of ecology or community, implies a political dimension to how place ideas affect natural resource management. Recent years have seen

a growing interest in the idea of the politics of place (Cheng et al. 2003, Kemmis

1990, Stokowski 2002, Williams 2002a, Yung et al. 2003) to account for the fact

Managers need to

be mindful of how

they describe and

employ place ideas.

Any attempt to expand the definition

of what meanings

should count in a

land management

decision will necessarily open up resource management

to a larger political

debate.
22

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

that different groups of people make competing claims on the meaning of a place.

Likewise, place attachments and sense of place are necessarily political because

place meanings serve to define social group differences (serve to define “us” and

“them,” locals and outsiders). And not unlike bioregional philosophy, any claim on

what belongs to a place (what kinds of meaning and practices are deemed authentic

to the place) is often invoked to assert power and authority over a place. Recreation

use involves making and resisting claims about places, about what a place means or

what constitutes the true character of sense of it. Jacob and Schreyer’s (1980)

original work on conflict recognized that conflicts are often over different relationships to the resource. The politics of place is a more up-to-date way to describe

these conflicting relationships to resources.

Once resource managers begin to recognize places as repositories of meaning,

they must also come to terms with the fact that more than one set of meanings is

possible as various communities of place and interest compete to represent the

meaning of a place according to their own systems of meaning. Historically, the

utilitarian view of places recognized that different parties assign different levels

of utility to various resource commodities, but that the potential commodities

themselves (the meanings) were inherent properties of the resource. In contrast,

the sociopolitical view recognizes that meanings exist beyond those traditionally

acknowledged as commodities (e.g., ritual, symbolism, identity) and that there may

be little consensus on meanings among stakeholders. In addition, the sociopolitical

approach must admit that landscape meanings are but a temporary snapshot of a

continuous social and political process of negotiation and contestation. Much of the

political conflict in natural resource planning is over whose meanings for the

landscape will prevail. Resource plans themselves constitute a sense of place that

often elevate and empower the planners’ meanings over other stakeholders

(Appleyard 1979).

As I have alluded to in contrasting the different place discourses, one of the

basic ways that different senses of place provoke conflict is over whether place

meanings (or sense of place) are seen as innate in a particular landscape (and

therefore an ecological or social norm worthy of protection and/or restoration)

or constructed in the minds of users (and therefore open to varying interpretations

that are often contested by various enthusiasts of one sort or another). This is also

sometimes described as whether there are true, authentic senses of place or whether

place meanings are entirely constructed through experience and social interaction

and subject to political or administrative adjudication. The former would imply that
23

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

management should endeavor to uncover and perpetuate the authentic place or in

some cases restore lost places to their former authentic state. The latter says that

places are subject to multiple competing claims, but no claims of sense of place can

be validated on their conformance to an authentic normative prescription without

politics.

From the standpoint of managing public lands, I favor the latter, political

view for the simple reason that as public servants, managers, and natural resource

planners, our job is not to tell people what the authentic sense of place is, but to

facilitate a public dialogue as to what it can and should be. To take the other course

and suggest that there is a right and true sense of place is to advocate or endorse a

particular management regime based on our presumed technical or professional

capacity to identify and prescribe the correct sense of place on behalf of society

and goes against the trend toward more collaborative stakeholder involvement in

decisionmaking. This amounts to perpetuating our untenable legacy of the technical

view of natural resource decisionmaking.

Conclusions

Different theories of place (attitudinal, relational, ethical, and political) tend also

to emphasize different kinds of meanings (see Williams and Patterson 1999 for a

taxonomy of place meanings). Some are seen as “inherent” in the human-nature

connection, others are seen as products of culture and experience. In other words,

meanings differ based on the degree to which we assume meaning is biologically

determined, objective, and generalized versus socially constructed, subjective, and

contextual.

The core idea behind thinking of resources as places is to recognize that people

form varied and complex relationships (uses, meanings, values) with specific

locales. These relationships often extend beyond the kinds of relationships we

normally imagine in a consumer’s relationship with a commodity, to include emotional, symbolic, and even spiritual meanings that have little direct correspondence

with the usefulness of the setting for some activity. In other words, places are not

merely useful for delivering specific recreation benefits. They also embody a sense

of meaning and identity for the user that is built up as the user establishes experiences and memories in that place. The challenge for managers is that we are

unlikely to discover, let alone map, most place meanings as if they are strewn about

on the landscape waiting for us to come by and “inventory” them. In contrast to our

resource training, it is difficult to identify meanings through some “archeological”

technique that looks for evidence on the ground (e.g., physical properties) that

People form varied

and complex relationships (uses,

meanings, values)

with specific locales.
24

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

would reliably indicate specific meanings. Rather, the meanings of each place are

revealed in the stories people tell about it (fig. 3). Knowledge of place meanings

requires delving into the human history of use, settlement, or occupation of the

landscape.

Not only are meanings cloaked in stories that require some effort to uncover,

but our pluralist society produces competing stories or senses of a given place.

Thus, a second important idea behind thinking of resources as places is to recognize

that whereas managers may have some (often important) influence over what a

place means, the meanings themselves are not subject to the kinds of rational

control envisioned in 20th-century traditions of scientific management. Again the

commodity metaphor breaks down. Unlike managers of private markets, managers

of “places” do not really control the types of recreation resource products “on the

market” for users to choose among based on their particular interests and values.

Instead, the individual and collective acts of recreation and other users or stakeholders, as well as resource managers, make (and sometimes resist) competing

claims on a place. For managing public places, there is no single or inherently

correct sense of place that trumps other senses of places. Negotiating among

different senses of public place is an essentially political process, one that can be

informed by collaborative efforts by stakeholders and managers to identify and

possibly map social differences in uses, meanings, and values of geographically

specific places.

Figure 3—The meanings of each place are revealed in the stories people tell about it.

Maria Stiefel

Negotiating among

different senses of

public place is an

essentially political

process, one that

can be informed by

collaborative efforts

by stakeholders and

managers.
25

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

As managers, we face an ever-increasing plurality of contested place meanings

and, in my view, we are unlikely to discover a scientific basis for affirming one set

of meanings over another. Thus, a source of much confusion in discussions of place

and attempts to integrate place ideas into management is the inevitable mixing of

prescriptive arguments for how places ought to be managed (which meanings

ought to prevail) with more descriptive or process-oriented statements that merely

suggest that managers need to be open and receptive to a wider arena of public

meanings and values that attend to a place. In other words, management needs to

recognize the potential for competing claims or senses of place while at the same

time remaining open to a wider array of meanings and recognizing all claims (even

their own) as potentially prescriptive arguments for a particular sense of place. The

challenge, as Appleyard (1979) cautioned several decades ago, is that environmental planners often consciously or unconsciously try to impose their own meanings

on the environment, meanings that differ from public stakeholders.

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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Chapter 3—Creating Social Senses of Place: New

Directions for Sense of Place Research in Natural

Resource Management

Patricia A. Stokowski1

Abstract

To understand social aspects of sense of place, this paper contrasts traditional

cognitive approaches with more recent social constructionist approaches to analyzing place. The paper argues that a more social sense of place rests on the intersection of three fundamental elements: social relationships, interactions, and contexts.

The role of language is critical in the development of place meanings. Created

through language practices, places and senses of place can be seen as imaginative

social productions that gain meaning in the telling, and persist in personal and

collective memory. A primary focus of constructionist theorizing applied to studies

of sense of place should be analysis of how people collectively create and develop

understandings about the nature of and meanings of place. To this end, a range of

research and managerial implications are offered by the author.

Keywords: Social constructions of place, place meanings, social and cultural

contexts, language, interpersonal communication.

Introduction

The past few decades have witnessed the emergence of considerable academic and

public interest in the topic of place. In the social sciences, studies of place once

typically fell within the purview of geographers, urban planners, and landscape

architects—scholars who generally used the concept to refer to physical settings

(natural sites, built locales, regions) that could be designed, transformed, and

managed for human goals. In these conceptions, places had objective, observable

qualities—a place was a bounded site or locale, it had dimensions (size, shape,

verticality), it contained natural or built features, and so on. Places were also

functionally useful and meaningful based on the specific kinds of activities they

could support. Places, as Tuan (1974) observed, were spaces made meaningful as

a result of human intent and action.

1

 Patricia A. Stokowski, Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources,

University of Vermont, 305 Aiken Center, Burlington, VT 05405, email:

Patricia.Stokowski@uvm.edu.
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Beyond their physical and utilitarian qualities, places have historically also

been conceived as centers of symbolism and sentiment. Philosophers, artists,

writers, and politicians have long acknowledged the emotional, affective, social,

cultural, and spiritual qualities of place—topics that have generally been grouped

under the notion of a “sense of place.” In its broadest usage, the concept of sense of

place has been used to refer to human interpretations of the sensory and emotional

experiences that accompany awareness of, and relationships with, specific locales

or sites (places). Although it seems difficult to exactly measure levels of sense of

place, the academic literature about this concept can generally be subdivided into

two broad categories: (a) formal studies evaluating the attitudes and sentiments

of individuals who are studied during participation in specific activities in welldefined places (often home-based, or leisure-based settings) and (b) analytical,

creative, and philosophical writings about the importance of place relationships for

individuals and societies. Within both categories, researchers have tended to highlight positive senses of place (rather than negative, or neutral), and to study individual (rather than social or cultural) experiences and responses.

Common to both of these analytic approaches is a concern with “meaning.” The

concept of meaning can be understood in a variety of ways, but in colloquial usage,

meaning simply refers to what is conveyed from one person to another (e.g., the

“meaning of what someone says”), or the purpose or significance of something

(i.e., what an action or thing “means”). However, social scientists have attempted

to develop more precise measures; two perspectives are often applied. First, traditional social psychological perspectives are elaborated in Shaw and Costanzo’s

(1970: 176) definition of meaning as “a consequence of a categorization process

that is basic to perception.” The human mind translates the importance or value of

perceived objects or events into knowledge; thus, “the potential meaning inherent in

symbols (or in sets of symbols) is converted into differentiated cognitive content”

(Shaw and Costanzo 1970: 176). That is, meaning develops independently in the

minds of individuals. Second, a behavioral perspective—in which meaning is a

consequence of social action—is elaborated by sociologist Shibutani (1986: 36),

who wrote:

Meaning is often thought to be an attribute of words, or...the

inherent characteristic of an object; sometimes we view it as an

idea mysteriously floating about in the mind...[But] the meaning

of any object is the manner in which we are organized to act

toward it...meaning is primarily an attribute of behavior.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

That is, meaning is in what people do.

These are not the only approaches to defining meaning, but they are widely

accepted and applied in social research about sense of place. In the research literatures of outdoor recreation and natural resource management, analyses relating to

the discovery and importance of “the meanings of place” have recently become

quite common. Recent journal articles claim to present the “meanings of a place”

expressed by recreation groups or a community. Implicit in this literature, though,

is an ongoing debate about how place meanings become manifest; the extent to

which personal place meanings affect an individual’s future behavior; whether

place meanings differ across social groups onsite; the extent to which researchers

can identify, access, and analyze place meanings; and what different types of place

meanings might imply for resource management.

Attaining a Sense of Place: The Traditional Model

What do we mean when we say that someone has a sense of place? Researchers

studying outdoor recreation and natural resource management have historically

used that phrase to refer to the cognitive and emotional processes of place attachment that occur onsite during an individual’s activity participation at leisure,

recreation, or resource places. Williams et al. (1992: 31) observed that, “Sense of

place is often associated with an emotional or affective bond between an individual

and a particular place; this bond may vary in intensity...” Clark and Stein (2003:

869) agreed, “Sense of place [is] also referred to as place attachment...[and]

manifests itself as an emotional bond between an individual and specific place.”

An analysis of the scholarly literature published in the fields of outdoor recreation and leisure suggests that the process of achieving a sense of place can be generalized as follows. Something internal to a person (a mind, a soul, an aesthetic

sensibility) grasps or intuits something felt to be deeply important about his/her

relation with a place (an objectively defined center of action, a locale, a site), and

interprets this knowledge or sentiment as meaningful (having a plausible reality)

in the context of life. This meaning is identified in consciousness as a “sense of

place”—a coherent explanation of understanding that is linked with external environmental stimuli. Because the person lives in a world of others, the attributed

meaning or sense of place has been filtered socially and culturally, so it appears as

a reasonable conclusion drawn from personal experience, verified by others, and

appropriate for sharing socially.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

Although this description clearly over-simplifies the process, it does reveal

several notable features of traditional theorizing about place and sense of place.

First, this model is inherently individualistic and psychological in orientation—the

focus is on the cognitive capabilities of individuals and their emotional capacity to

feel sentiment for places, their efforts to consolidate and interpret those internal

phenomena as meanings, and their actions in sharing those meanings with others.

Second, an objective definition of place is implicit—places are bounded areas that

are distinguishable from other places/sites, such that place meanings relate to specific geographic areas. Third, positive place meanings are predicted to arise from

some level of activity involvement, situated onsite—so, dependence on a setting

(home, recreation place, resource area) is often assumed in this model. Fourth, the

internal cognitive and external communicative aspects of the model are implied but

not elaborated. The model fails to explain or predict how meaning emerges from

the transformation of personal knowledge or emotion—or the methods used in

sharing meanings across sets of people.

The model described above facilitates scholarly and managerial dialogue about

individuals and their experiences relative to particular geographic places (or generalized types of places; e.g., beaches, wilderness). Researchers studying sense of

place under this traditional model will thus attempt to access both personal and

shared meanings through place-based studies of the behaviors, cognitions, and

attitudes of individuals. In resource-based recreation, the research questions supporting these types of sense of place studies are nearly always about visitor’s

preferred places—places people choose to visit, places people enjoy. Researchers

ask questions about the objective features of sites, and about the internal characteristics of individuals under study—whether people are knowledgeable about the sites

they visit, the extent to which people like specific places or feel happy in or have a

history with those places, and whether a chosen activity site is comparable to other

places. The goal is ultimately to explain people’s behavioral choices, including

their motivations for visiting a site, their satisfactions with experiences there, the

strength of their feelings for the place, their potential conflicts with others at that

site, their likelihood of returning, and so on.

With its highly individualistic focus, the traditional model discussed here is

deeply rooted in early theoretical approaches in cognitive psychology. In asking

questions about how specific places become meaningful to individuals, traditional

“mental state” concepts (attitudes, motives, preferences, information, emotions)

are used. The overall intent of research conducted under this model is to provide
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

managers with relevant technical data and analyses of visitor behavior at recreation

places; from this information, managers may be better able to develop workable

strategies for land management.

The cognitive model described above is the basis for a considerable amount

of sense of place research in leisure and outdoor recreation. Many of the studies

done from this perspective have focused on onsite recreationists, and have applied

empirical methods (survey methods for data collection, and statistical techniques

for data analysis). These studies typically focus on analysis of “place attachment”

as combinations of “place identity” (emotional attachments to objective settings)

and “place dependence” (attachments related to functional uses of sites). For example, early work by Williams et al. (1992) analyzed how outdoor recreationists

developed place attachments based on personal identification and activity dependence at wilderness areas in the Southeastern United States and Montana. The

place attachment scales developed by these authors have remained the primary

analytic tool used in later research of this type. Other researchers that drew from

traditional sociopsychological theories and applied or extended the place attachment scaling approach include Bricker and Kerstetter (2000), Hammitt et al.

(2004), Kyle et al. (2003), Kyle et al. (2004), Moore and Graefe (1994), and

Moore and Scott (2003), among others.

This sociopsychological model has also been adapted and applied in some

interpretive research studies about sense of place. For example, Mitchell et al.

(1993) used grounded theory perspectives and interviews to differentiate “attachment (emotion) oriented visitors” and “use oriented visitors” to a national forest

in Washington state; the authors argued that forest planners should consider the

affective relationships people have with specific natural resource places in public

land use planning. Another example is provided by Hull et al. (1994), who asked

Charleston, South Carolina, residents to discuss their relationships to iconic urban

places damaged by a hurricane. In these studies, researchers have typically conducted interviews to obtain a respondent’s own words describing a locale and his/

her emotions and feelings toward that place. Statements are subsequently grouped

and categorized, and emergent themes are identified.

Whereas the sociopsychological survey-based studies tend to result in conclusions that support two dimensions of place attachment (place identity and place

dependence), many of the interview-based studies find that place attachment is

supported by one or more of five general themes, which may potentially constitute

“ideal types” of sense of place categories. These studies usually conclude that a

place is meaningful because of (a) family heritage and history (our family has a
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

history here, our grandfather built this cabin, etc.), (b) current family connections

(our family meets here together for events and special occasions), (c) memorable

events (something important happened to me here), (d) individual well-being (I

feel alive and free here), and (e) the beauty of the resource itself (fabulous scenery,

great fishing, best ocean beach, etc.). Though some of these reasons appear, on the

surface, to be “more social” than those produced in the empirical studies, in fact

they are still based in analysis of aggregated individual feelings and perceptions.

The mere mention of other people (family, generally) in a response is not a sufficient condition to make a place-meaning either “social” or socially shared.

Thus, even in cases where interpretive research approaches have been used,

data analysis methods often fall back on individualistic psychological theorizing,

ignoring the potential for more complex, emergent social and cultural theories.

Under this method, too, a respondent’s language and intentions are usually assumed

to be self-evident, and meanings inherent in utterances are assumed to be obvious,

subject only to researcher interpretation and categorization. (Whether researchers

and respondents coincide in their understandings of “what respondents really

meant”—or even “what researchers really asked”—remains unaddressed.) And,

because of methodological choices often unsuitable to the task (e.g., over-reliance

on objective content analyses), at least some of what outdoor recreation and natural

resource researchers currently call place meanings may result from a coding

scheme that merely sums similar words—rather than providing indepth, interpretive

understandings of senses of place.

With its focus on internal psychological phenomena, the traditional model

tends to ignore interpersonal interaction, social processes, historical context, and

cultural influences on behavior. It implies that achieving a personal sense of place

requires an individual to develop personal ties to a specific place—and the model

assumes place stability. We do not know what happens to sense of place as places

change physically (owing to natural transformation or to human manipulation), or

as peoples’ circumstances or interests change over time. Moreover, whether people

can develop place meanings even if they do not have site-specific linkages or placebased activity dependence remains an open question. Additionally, this model’s

emphasis on positive senses of place limits understanding of situations in which

negative or neutral feelings toward sites may arise (see literature about “dark

tourism,” war, exile and displacement, Holocaust studies, and border regions where

place may be indeterminate).

The traditional

model tends to

ignore interpersonal

interaction, social

processes, historical context, and

cultural influences

on behavior.
37

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Nevertheless, traditional cognitive approaches to sense of place in recreation

and resource management—where place meanings arise in the minds of individuals—have produced notable scholarly advances, particularly in scale development.

The limitations of this model have also stimulated a variety of new questions, many

of which move the traditional model into considerably more complex psychological, social, and cultural theoretical concerns. These include questions about how

meanings arise, the circumstances under which different meanings become articulated, whether and how meanings vary across time and setting, the extent to which

meanings are dispersed beyond individuals and across groups or societies, the social

mechanisms by which some meanings are shared, and even how a researcher might

recognize a meaning when it is revealed.

From the perspective of the traditional model, though, a social sense of place

still remains elusive. What is made visible from its vantage point is a researcher’s

categorization scheme—one that attempts to capture the essence of respondents’

statements about what is in their minds (cognitions). Factored categories (in the

survey work) or derived themes (in the interpretive work) are outlined and displayed as evidence that the real meanings of place can be identified. Such a

research program might best be described as an inventory approach to place meanings. Alternative psychological, social, and cultural approaches to sense of place—

involving theories that move beyond individual emotions, site-specific and objective

behaviors, and researchers’ categorization schemes—are needed.

Toward a “More Social” Sense of Place

Researchers studying sense of place issues in outdoor recreation have tended to

focus on individuals as their units of analysis, but some have also acknowledged the

importance of social contexts in developing senses of place. Kruger and Jakes

(2003: 819), for example, wrote that, “‘Sense of place’ involves individual or

group identification with a place resulting from interaction with it.” Eisenhauer et

al. (2000: 422) inferred a social aspect to sense of place, writing, “‘Sense of place’

refers to the connection people have with the land, their perceptions of the relationships between themselves and a place, and is a concept that encompasses symbolic

and emotional aspects...” Stedman (2003: 822) included the concept of meanings

in his definition: “Sense of place, or the meanings and attachments held by an

individual or group for a spatial setting, is a potentially useful tool for forest

management...” Cheng and Daniels (2003: 842) wrote that, “Place is defined

as a physical setting imbued with meaning as a result of human action and
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

interaction...‘sense of place’ (refers to) the nuanced, multilayered ways of knowing a particular place.” Although these examples suggest an emerging interest in the

social components of sense of place, specific research studies still tend to remain at

the level of individual analyses, with limited attention given to the specific roles

and actions of others in collaboratively producing sense of place.

But some researchers are attempting to move beyond measurement of cognitive

aspects of place attachment. Applying more contemporary psychological and social

theories, these researchers also often use different kinds of methods. Some, for example, have approached sense of place from “off-site”—that is, they begin with

studies of community and society, and work back toward understanding behaviors

and meanings made visible at recreation resource sites. Other scholars have brought

broader psychological, social, political, and cultural theories to their analyses,

conceiving of sense of place as a product of social relationships and interactions.

Many of these researchers consider place to be a broader social and cultural representation of contextualized interpersonal experience—not simply a physical backdrop to individual activity (fig. 4).

The sense of place research associated with these viewpoints typically draws

from constructivist, interactionist, critical, and social constructionist approaches.

In an early paper in the sociology of leisure, Lee (1972) offered a sociocultural

analysis of place, and evaluated the power of verbal images to organize people’s

behaviors in everyday life. His study focused on people engaged in recreation at

different kinds of parks and outdoor resource areas. Basing their work in phenomenology, Fishwick and Vining (1992: 57) studied the experiences of college students at Illinois state park sites. In analyzing students’ taped reports, they found

that outdoor recreation sites were “sensed” as a complex assortment of “setting,

landscape, ritual, routine, people, [and] personal experiences,” and were contrasted

with other environments. Applying social constructionist theorizing, Stokowski

(1996) used local newspapers as a source of data to evaluate the community images

expressed publicly as two Colorado mining towns debated the adoption of casinos

for tourism development. She found that promoters crafted a “rhetoric of despair”

to support the legitimacy of their claims and reinforce the need for gambling; their

efforts both drew from, but also called into question, historical symbols supporting

community senses of place. Other work in this tradition includes Brandenburg and

Carroll’s (1995) application of analytic induction to study processes of place creation in a Washington state national forest, Eisenhauer et al.’s (2000) comparison of
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

peoples’ emotional connections to public lands in southern Utah, a series of commentaries about leisure and the politics of place (McAvoy 2002, Stokowski 2002,

Williams 2002a), Yung et al.’s (2003) analysis of the politics of place-naming along

Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, and Stedman et al.’s (2004) study of resident

photographs of special community places near a national park in Canada.

The classic, oft-cited article in this tradition is Greider and Garkovich’s (1994)

conceptual analysis of the social construction of nature and landscapes. Drawing

from social interactionist and constructionist thought, they asserted that, “Our

understandings of nature and of human relationships with the environment are

really cultural expressions used to define who we were, who we are, and who we

hope to be at this place and in this space” (Greider and Garkovich 1994: 2). In the

context of landscape changes, then, this interpretive perspective “highlights the

need to explore the symbolic creation of landscape, the cultural meanings of aspects

of the physical environment and biophysical changes in the environment, and the

values and beliefs that sustain these symbols and their meanings” (Greider and

Garkovich 1994: 21). The authors suggested that researchers study the symbols,

beliefs, communicative processes, and cultural artifacts of a set of people to understand how people think about and negotiate the meaning of landscapes—a process

that is quite different from thinking about sense of place as a quality of the individual mind.

Figure 4—Some researchers consider place to be a broader social and cultural representation of contextualized interpersonal experience.

Linda Kruger
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

Theoretically, these interpretive studies have in common a grounding of

personal place meanings in social and community relationships—rather than a

reliance on individual cognitions and feelings as the explanatory basis for a sense

of place. In these studies, the behaviors of individuals are contextualized within

broader social and cultural processes. In addition, the research subjects are seen

as active participants in creating sense of place. Places and meanings are created

and brought to life as a result of respondents’ involvements and interactions with

others. Interpersonal relationships that support social interactions related to place

may also have historical basis. Together, these studies hint at an evolving model

of place meanings grounded in social process—a model that links psychological,

social, and cultural considerations (Williams 2002b).

What would a “more social” approach to understanding sense of place require?

Theories that focus on the intersection of at least three fundamental elements—

relationships, interaction, and context—are needed. First, an emphasis on relationships would require that researchers study people in relation to one another, rather

than focus primarily on the traits, internal states, and sentiments of individuals.

Second, people in relation are people interacting—the basic qualities of social life

are produced, developed, and elaborated through verbal and nonverbal communication. As Perinbanayagam (1985: xiii) wrote, “social acts are created by human

agents engaging in signifying moves and eliciting certain response—from which

flow a number of consequences.” Third, the actions of people are not independent

of the surrounding world—context, history, and culture influence and are influenced by social life.

The three issues of relationship, interaction, and context, taken together,

support theories of meaning as alternatives to those evident in early cognitive

approaches to understanding place—theories that are drawn from the perspectives

of social interactionism, social constructionism, and critical theory. In the sections

below, the theoretical foundations for a more social sense of place are explored.

The Theoretical Basis for a Social Sense of Place

Traditional studies about sense of place in outdoor recreation and natural resources

research were based in sociopsychological theorizing—and so, they focused on

describing cognitive and affective place meanings felt and expressed by individuals.

Such analyses are useful if resource managers intend to manage resource sites

primarily for individuals (impractical) or to “engineer” sites so that client groups

achieve precise benefits (overly idealistic). A focus on individuals also becomes

Places and meanings are created and

brought to life as a

result of respondents’ involvements

and interactions

with others.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

problematic when social meanings are imagined to follow directly from individual

sentiments for places (some of the research about “community meanings of places”

commits this intellectual error, an example of what researchers refer to as the

“ecological fallacy”).

In conceptually recasting sense of place studies away from the internal workings of individual minds and toward people engaged in social processes, theories

concerned with communication and symbolic representation, grounded historically

and contextually, will be most useful. Interpretive social science (rather than

empiricism) will be most appropriate; theories that begin with the basic assumption that what we perceive and know as “reality” is socially constructed rather than

objectively “given” are needed. A wide swath of 20th-century theorizing in the

fields of sociology, anthropology, philosophy, geography, psychology, linguistics,

and discourse studies, among other disciplines, supports social constructionist interpretive perspectives. Such theories share a focus on the communicative, relational,

and contextual bases of meaning. The next section offers a brief theoretical diversion away from the main points of this paper; it summarizes some of the important

scholarly contributions to interpretive theories of meaning. The ideas developed in

this section are then applied in recrafting sense of place in social terms for application to resource management.

A Theoretical Diversion: From Consciousness, to Language, to

Social Action, and Meaning

Edmund Husserl’s development of phenomenology—a philosophy of the mind

focused on the nature of meaning and of being, which assumes that people live in

a taken-for-granted world known only through their own senses, experiences, and

consciousness—provides a starting point for analysis and reconceptualization of

sense of place. Husserl proposed that “all notions of an external world (i.e.,

“reality”)...are mediated through the senses and can only be known through

mental consciousness” (Turner 1982: 391). In this view, researchers must study

the “essence of consciousness” to understand “how humans create a sense of

reality” about the external world (Turner 1982: 392-393). This approach privileges

individual consciousness, and typifies much of the traditional psychological research about place, sense of place, and place meanings in recreation and natural

resources (an observation echoed by Stedman [2003] and Williams and Vaske

[2003]).
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

Developments across the social sciences challenged Husserl’s emphasis on the

autonomous individual who single-authors a life. The philosopher Heidegger proposed an alternative “hermeneutic phenomenology” based on social and historical

context rather than on internal states of mind. In his view, language was the basis

for understanding and social meaning. Sociologist Alfred Schutz considered how

people come to intersubjectively take the world for granted—a question also asked

by the social interactionist G.H. Mead, the literary critic Kenneth Burke, the

ethnographer Bruno Latour, and many others. In their classic paper on marriage

and the construction of reality, sociologists Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner

(1964: 4) outlined a social constructionist approach to that question in which the

“subjectively experienced” world of an individual becomes, through interaction

with others, a world that is “inter-subjectively shared”—a reality that is taken for

granted by the participants jointly involved in the conversation (Frank 1979).

Language serves as the basis for the development of both individual consciousness

and also social meaning—and it is the foundational element of all personal and

social behavior. Social relationships provide the structure facilitating both transitory and more permanent language encounters; these relationships tend to be

patterned and repetitive, especially those that are the most meaningful in the

conduct of one’s life.

The production of meaning, then, arises from interpersonal interaction, such

that meaning is intentional as well as social. A person’s language utterances are

intended to obtain responses from other people, and are subject to interpretation

by others. Generated in conversational behavior, meaning is not simply relayed

from one mind to another. As Eagleton (1996: 52) explained, “meaning is not

simply something ‘expressed’ or ‘reflected’ in language; it is actually produced by

it...we can only have the meanings and experiences in the first place because we

have a language to have them in.” As a result, meanings are malleable, continually

massaged, revised, and replaced in the interactional contexts of daily living. Some

meanings may, over time, even assume an air of permanence, appearing to be

“stable” features of social life. What we call icons and myths, for example, exhibit

this character of assumed stability. Meanings that persist provide coherence and

organizational structure to life. They have what Smith (1979: 18) called “governing

potential”—they “aid [people] by making [the] world [appear to be] a more

ordered place.”

Because languages are systems of signs and symbols, structuralist researchers

in linguistics, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology attempted to understand the
43

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

fundamental laws of organization governing language systems such that meaning

could be produced. Eagleton (1996: 93) wrote,

The structuralist emphasis on the “constructedness” of human

meaning represented a major advance. Meaning was neither a

private experience nor a divinely ordained occurrence: it was the

product of certain shared systems of signification...It was

impossible any longer to see reality as simply something “out

there,” a fixed order of things which language merely reflected.

Structural theories helped reveal patterns in linguistic styles, in the application of language forms (narratives, fables, myths, and others), and in the social

organization of people (kinship systems, discourse communities, and so on). But

structuralism tended to ignore the characteristics and intentions of human actors.

Poststructuralists (Derrida, Barthes, and Bakhtin, among others) brought the actor

(the “speaker” in social interaction) back into the conversation, making language

more active because, as Frank (1979: 179) noted, language “competence can only

be realized in performance.” Social action is the evidence that language has been

effectively understood and shared.

The use of language is always social; a speaker is always “speaking to” someone. Poststructural theorists focused on language as “the concrete utterances of

individuals in particular social contexts...there was no language which was not

caught up in definite social relationships...social relationships [that] were in turn

part of broader political, ideological, and economic systems” (Eagleton 1996:

101–102). From this vantage point, the study of language-in-use (conversations,

story-telling, jokes, argumentation, reports and written texts, public pronouncements, and so on) is the vehicle for understanding the variability as well as the

stability of language practiced and negotiated across diverse settings. From social

action, meaning emerges. As Watkins (2000: 99) wrote, “knowledge or meaning is

embedded in participatory forms of social practice and is subject to the structuring

influences of historical processes and sociocultural beliefs that surround those

practices.”

And so, meaning differs by context. Further, as Eagleton (1996:112) observed,

if meaning is malleable, then traditional theories of meaning are called into

question:
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

For such theories, it was the function of signs to reflect inward

experiences or objects in the real world, to “make present” one’s

thoughts and feelings or to describe how reality was...[But]

nothing is ever fully present in signs...meaning is always somehow

dispersed, divided and never quite at one with itself.

It becomes the work of researchers to describe the range and types of meanings

that derive from and support social behaviors, to “seek to explain the underlying

rationale of these meaning systems [to] reveal the rules and ‘logics’ inherent” in

them (Smith 1979: 79). Beyond the structure of meaning systems, researchers

should also study the networks of interpersonal relationships sustaining the interactions that produce meanings. If meaning is constructed socially, then the social

patterning of people will affect the types of meanings that are created, a point

reinforced by Shotter (1993: 2), who encourages researchers to orient their studies

to analyses of “the dynamically sustained context of...actively constructed relations

[from which] what is talked about gets its meaning.”

Creating Place

Theoretical background—

With the theoretical and historical foundations of social constructionism outlined

above, we turn back again to the central topic of this paper: How do people achieve

a sense of place? Constructionist theorizing suggests that the concepts of place,

sense of place, and place meanings should be seen as deriving from language in use.

Places are actively created in social interaction, and people come to have senses of

place and share meanings about place through symbolic communication (of which

language is the most common symbolic system). Whereas most people can agree

that identifiable places do exist physically as independent objects in the world, the

constructionist argument asserts that places have no inherent meanings other than

those created and imposed by humans. That is, meanings about places are created by

people engaged in social interaction, not intrinsic to physical sites themselves and

not products of individual minds. Ultimately, space becomes place when it is

identified, named, and talked about, shaped by human experience (individual,

social, cultural), and expressed across communities of interacting, interlinked

people.

The fundamental questions introduced from within constructionist perspectives

are about the nature of the socially-shared meanings of place—not primarily about

the objective characteristics of places, or whether (or which) place meanings arise

Researchers should

study the networks

of interpersonal

relationships...If

meaning is constructed socially,

then social patterning of people will

affect the types of

meanings that are

created.
45

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

in the minds of individuals visiting a site. This is not to say that physical qualities

of place, or cognitive and emotional aspects of place meanings, are unimportant.

Rather, individualized meanings of place are viewed by social constructionists (and

their sociopsychological counterparts, social constructivists) as personal outcomes

of the social construction of place. Whether resulting meanings and representations

of place are “true” in the factual sense is less important than whether they are

assumed to be “real,” sensible, and credible by the people who participate in their

production.

The role of language is critical in the development of place and its meanings.

Language is not only the primary tool people use to talk about places—language

is also the raw material people use to “speak” or “act” places into existence. The

meanings of place arise from contextualized social interaction in which people

describe, explain, and tell the world into reality by categorizing ideas, linking

experiences, and making claims about why and how things are the way they are

(Potter 1996: 98). It is in this sense that Ryden (1993: 241) wrote, “Unlike simple

geographical locations, which exist objectively, places do not exist until they are

verbalized, first in thought and memory and then through the spoken or written

word.”

Place-making, then, is a social process—not an internal, mental, individualized

activity. It is, in the language of sociology, the product of a “social transaction...[a]

joint enterprise involving the coordinated efforts of two or more participants”

(Shibutani 1986: 5). Although efforts to create places may occur at all levels of

social organization (from interpersonal, to interorganizational, to mass mediated),

some efforts may be more complex than others. Interpersonal interactions, where

peers converse about their experiences related to meaningful places, may be qualitatively different from the carefully crafted pronouncements of agencies and

organizations concerned with public perceptions of specific environments (e.g.,

federal government efforts to shift public opinion about oil drilling in the Arctic

National Wildlife Refuge seems to be one example where the use of place imagery

is highly strategic and perhaps even covert). The political use of sense of place

imagery is a rich topic for future research.

The methods of place-making—

Ideas about place, and about how people sense places, and about what places mean

to people as individuals, groups, societies, and cultures, are crafted, elaborated,

transmitted, transformed, and stabilized symbolically through interpersonal communicative practices. Research about sense of place might be undertaken at a variety of
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

levels, including that of linguistic discourse analysis (Schiffrin 1994); analysis of

the rhetorical intentions, strategies, and effects of discourse (Brock et al. 1980);

semiotics (Johansen and Larsen 2002); narrative analysis (Gergen and Gergen

1984); discourse analysis (Titscher et al. 2000); and cultural analysis (Wuthnow

et al. 1984), among other approaches.

Created through language practices, places can be seen as imaginative social

productions that gain meaning in the telling, and persist in personal and collective

memory. There are many communicative devices used to create places into being,

including myth-making, argumentation (rhetorical techniques supporting persuasive

aspects of talk and text), visual symbolism, and others. One of the most common

and useful of these devices is narrative. Narratives are stories, and space is shaped

into place through storytelling. Places become “populated” over time by speakers

and listeners, experiences, and memories. “Narrative construction can never be

entirely a private matter,” wrote Gergen and Gergen (1984: 184). Identities (individual and collective) are shaped, people learn their history, they encounter “otherness,” grasp the essence of nature, make sense of local events, and anticipate the

future through stories about local places. As Johnstone (1990: 5) explained, “...our

sense of place and community is rooted in narration. A person is at home in a place

when the place evokes stories, and, conversely, stories can serve to create places.”

Narrative is also used to remember places. Often, stories draw attention to

particular symbols, images, and artifacts that have become visible historic reminders of important meanings in local culture. As Stegner (1992: 202) wrote, “No

place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history,

ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments.” Thus, personal and collective identities

form and persist around aspects of local culture. Narratives offer a coherent scheme

of symbolic evidence—evidence used to provide a public rationale supporting or

challenging conceptions of community and of self within that environment. Symbols are especially useful because they are imprecise, as Cohen (1985: 21) explains:

“They are, therefore, ideal media through which people can speak a ‘common’

language, behave in apparently similar ways, participate in the ‘same’ rituals....

Individuality and commonality are thus reconcilable.”

Narratives typically have structure (a beginning, middle, and end) and coherence (a subject, action, and result), and may reflect stylized and ritualized ways of

communicating. The study of narratives is not yet common in analysis of recreation

and natural resource place-making, but even a cursory review of recreation research

literature suggests some narrative types that might be fruitful for revealing recreation place meanings. These include stories of personal revelation and change,

Narratives offer a

coherent scheme

of symbolic evidence supporting or

challenging conceptions of community

and of self.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

discourses of spirituality, action stories, hero stories, travelogues, “man conquering

nature,” and so on. Within these and other genres, a range of meanings (about use

values, ownership, resource protection, identity and self-identity, awe, heroism, and

so on) will be elaborated. These topics may serve as “master narratives” in the

creation of sense of place; research will surely reveal other topics that work at

middle and micro levels of theorizing.

Beyond the independent stories and meanings they can support, narratives are

sometimes linked together in histories of place. Interconnections among stories

support resilient discourses that offer coherence to the socially-produced “real”

world. The term discourse is often used colloquially to refer to public speech, or

to ways of speaking. Social scientists, however, more precisely define discourse

as “talk and text in context” (van Dijk 1997: 3), a definition that includes spoken,

written, and nonverbal communications. Hajer (1995: 44) explained, “Discourse

is...defined as a specific ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorizations that are

produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices and through

which meaning is given to physical and social realities.” Stories about place appear

to be organized and coherent when they are consolidated as discourses—discourses

that are upheld and promoted by communities of interlinked people and interests.

Van Dijk (1997: 21) reasoned that,

If we want to explain what discourse is all about, it would be

insufficient to merely analyse its internal structures, the actions

being accomplished, or the cognitive operations involved in

language use. We need to account for the fact that discourse as

social action is being engaged in within a framework of understanding, communication and interaction which is in turn part

of broader sociocultural structures and processes.

In short, researchers must evaluate discourses on a variety of criteria, including

their content, structural arrangements, contextualization, sequencing with other

discourses, and also the ways in which they are used strategically. Indeed, Potter

(1996: 15) suggested that we strive to understand two fundamental aspects of

discourse: “an offensive orientation concerned with undermining alternative descriptions and a defensive orientation concerned with resisting discounting.”

Research and managerial applications—

A primary focus of constructionist theorizing applied to studies of sense of place

should be analysis of how people collectively develop understandings about the
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

nature of and meanings of places. A complete social constructionist model of sense

of place awaits development, but at least several of its guiding characteristics can

be identified. First, the model would be circular, with interlinked communicators

(people interacting, involved in social relationships, and enmeshed in social networks). The components of relationships, interactions, and contexts would also

be linked by language practices, communicative methods and devices, discourse

structures, and social actions and intent. The model would show an intersecting

and contingent model of social interaction that may occur at interpersonal, group,

organizational, societal, or cultural levels. Realities of place would be socially

constructed within contexts of already-existing social relationships, history, and

context.

Considering place, sense of place, and place meaning as products of contextbound social interactions and relationships has implications for research and managerial application. First, if place is assumed to be socially constructed, then any

given setting will likely have many different communicators using it—and thus,

many different discourses of place will emerge. That is, physical space will be

made into different kinds of places by different kinds of visitors—and a single

place may support many kinds of meanings. Second, and related to this point, the

correspondence among, or differences between, multiple discourses of place may

not be obvious to either those involved in the independent conversations or to

communicators outside specific discourse communities. But overlapping discourses

may indicate a degree of consensus in meanings about a place and across networks

of people, whereas divergent discourses may reflect incompatible meanings and

conflicting discourse communities. Some physical sites, moreover, may be able to

“contain” or “accommodate” more divergence than others (i.e., some place contestations may have very minor repercussions).

Third, place meanings are not necessarily stable or long-lived (though they

may be). Languages and discourse are always evolving and contingent, as the

circular model implies. Moreover, places are always, at least in potential, evolving.

Re-evaluation of historical circumstances produces new symbols, traditions develop

in use, conflicts change language and meaning interpretations, and so on—and

place meanings will change as the social activities of naming, claiming, identifying,

contesting, challenging, and reforming places occur. As Wuthnow et al. (1984: 247)

observed, “the principal questions...not only include the ‘meaning’ of symbols but

the conditions, patterns, and rules of use which render symbols ‘meaningful.’”
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Finally, the constructionist perspective applied to studies of place should allow

researchers to more clearly differentiate concepts of place, place attachment, and

sense of place. Of these concepts, the term “place” is perhaps the most straightforward, based as it is on tangible, observable, physical spaces. The additional perspective brought by constructionist theorizing, though, is to see physical sites and

their specific features as taken-for-granted “places” whose meanings are created

from the communicative processes of people in interaction. Therefore, meanings

will be highly malleable and variable, depending on the interactions of the relevant

social actors and the influences of others.

Under constructionist theorizing, the concept of “sense of place” should refer

to the broad discourses that are contextualized around specific places. From this

theoretical perspective, the emphasis will be on the content, structures, and forms

of discourses, as well as on how those socially constructed (even if individually

received) impressions, realities, and shared understandings (meanings) are produced

and established as a particular set of social practices. A resulting sense of place

should be seen as a working definition, not an “absolutely real” sense of place

reported by a respondent in reply to a researcher’s query.

“Place meanings” can be defined, then, after Lofland and Lofland (1984: 71),

as “the linguistic categories that make up the participants’ view of reality and with

which they define their own and others’ actions....meanings do more than describe

behavior—they define, justify, and otherwise interpret behavior as well.” Meanings

range in scope—they can be broad and ideological, in the form of worldviews, or

they can be more situated, contained, and strategic. Meanings are expressions about

how people (as individuals and as collectives) explain situations, but meanings also

appear as shared rules, norms, and typifications “taken for granted” by people in

social situations. They are also “rhetorical-responsive”: that is, people “are not

making a reference to the nature of their already existing minds, but are taking part

in a contested [or at least contestable] process, a tradition of argumentation, in

which they are still struggling over the constitution of their own mental make-up”

(Shotter 1993: 31). To access the meanings of place, researchers must ask about

what a speaker is attempting to communicate, with whom, for what reasons, and

with what historical or contextual contingencies. Meanings should then be interpreted within discursive contexts of past, present, and potential communicative

practices of specific social actors and discourse communities.

Under a social constructionist model, then, the concepts of place and place

meanings are subsumed under sense of place—unlike in the traditional cognitive

model, where place meanings and sense of place are subsumed under a physical
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

notion of place. “Discourses involving particular places and place meanings are

dynamic,” wrote Yung et al. (2003: 857); they are “continually created and actively

contested, and not necessarily compatible. Sense of place and place meanings are

thus political, based as much on difference as commonality.” The task of researchers under a new constructionist approach to sense of place will be threefold: (a) to

move away from reductionist accounts of behavior (including language behaviors)

that are said to produce objective meanings about place; (b) to study how language

practices, communicative devices, and discourse techniques are manipulated in

social interaction to organize the “reality” of places; and (c) to draw upon the

intersections of sociopsychological, social, and cultural research approaches to

inform more complete understandings of places, senses of place, and place

meanings.

In this regard, it is useful to remember that there is an “ongoing dialectic

between subjectivity [perception, intentionality, etc.] and an objective sociocultural

reality. Human subjectivity [in the course of social interaction] is externalized in

objectified social products and, in turn, this objective reality acts back on subjectivity, influencing and even reconstituting it” (Wuthnow et al. 1984: 242). Thus,

what is “social” about sense of place is not only that it involves people—but that

the social realities and meanings that are created are produced as a result of social

interaction expressed within social relationships, bounded by contexts, and implicated in all the social processes people are engaged in relative to natural resource

places. The resulting communicative and behavioral actions people take toward

place, then, have important social and cultural implications, as well as important

psychological consequences.

Sense of Place in Resource Management

Reconceptualizing place, sense of place, and place meanings in social constructionist terms fosters new ways of thinking about and addressing resource management

issues. Several implications of constructionist thinking for research and practical

application in natural resource management are discussed below.

First, the social constructionist approach should sensitize researchers and managers to think about how language and discourse support development of individual

cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. Many recreation behaviors (e.g., development

of shared senses of place, activity specialization and involvement, intergroup conflicts, onsite behavioral norms, patterns of activity participation, knowledge transfer across generations, and so on) might be seen as the behavioral outcomes of
51

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

processes of reality construction in social interaction. In such cases, studies of

communicative interactions within social relationships might be more useful than

studies of individual cognitions and attitudes. Moreover, it is not only recreationists

who intersubjectively develop consequential senses of place. Place meanings are

expressed by others engaged in social interactions both at, and away from, resource

places, including resource managers, underrepresented recreation groups who visit

rarely or not at all, local and nonlocal interests, legislators, people who have

developed sentiments for places based on mass-media exposure, and others. Comparisons of place meanings across various collectives may reveal new ways to think

about places and about management strategies for protecting places.

Second, if the communicative practices that shape landscapes are specific to

discourse communities, then research that studies place meanings in the context of

discourse communities (collectives that likely extend beyond traditional park or

forest visitors) should be very useful to mangers. Longitudinal research may reveal

how social relationships and social contexts influence place meanings. Whether

socially constructed meanings of place become shared or divisive, persistent or

transitory, may be a function of how well those meanings are entrenched in the

language practices of specific types of social groups and discourse communities.

Because the creation of meaning is intentional as well as social, managers would

find it useful to understand the strategic manipulation of place-related symbols by

people who have covert or overt interests in protecting or revising the meanings

of a place. These persons may be valuable contacts (whether supportive or antagonistic) for managers seeking to share public messages and strategic planning

initiatives.

Third, the social constructionist perspective also reinforces the idea that resource places are not neutral, or single-authored; they are multivocal and value

laden. The voice of the natural resource agency is often the most prominent among

all spokespersons, as managers and administrators speak places into being by using

specific communicative techniques (such as making official pronouncements, posting signs, offering interpretive programs, granting interviews, and writing planning documents). But, other voices are also present. For example, citizens react to

agency actions with public input; recreationists write in log books or on comment

cards; travel magazine writers present visions of places in words and in photos;

private businesses seeking partnership opportunities with resource agencies promote

shared values; and so on. Many of these communicative situations bring people

from different social circles in contact with one another, creating opportunities for

place-making both within and beyond the borders of the resource place.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

Fourth, the overlap of these social circles raises issues that may have implications for management practices. How do the senses of place created by some

spokespersons achieve dominating force publicly? Who are the key communicators needed to establish and reinforce meanings of place? The answers to these

questions may not be as obvious as one might think. In a study of the communication patterns of visitors to a U.S. Forest Service site in Texas (Bajc 1996), many

respondents said that the primary contributors of useful recreation information

were “the men in green trucks” (the USFS campground maintenance staff). It

should not be a surprise that front-line staff members (compared with agency

leadership) often have more interaction with publics, and thus more opportunity

to disseminate useful messages and participate in the discursive development of

senses of place (fig. 5). Researchers should attempt to understand the informal,

often nearly hidden onsite communicative opportunities that may influence

place-making, asking about spontaneous encounters onsite, power relationships,

marginalized groups, and voiceless others, in determining who influences placemaking. How sense of place changes over time, and how managers can positively

influence these changes in a social environment of divergent communicators is at

issue.

Fifth, language is sometimes used strategically to create notable places, such as

extraordinary landscapes that people revere as natural icons. There are many iconic

places in natural resource settings (Old Faithful, for example) that symbolize longstanding, taken-for-granted meanings shared across some or many segments of

Figure 5—Front-line staff members often have more opportunity to

participate in the discursive development of senses of place.

Ashley Atkinson

Researchers should

attempt to understand the informal,

often nearly hidden

onsite communicative opportunities

that may influence

place-making.
53

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

society. But, managers should also study the social practices of people who create

“small icons”—that is, places of meaning in local resource areas—places that, in

their substantive history and familiarity, serve as small symbols of community and

sense of place. A neighborhood park, or a gathering place for community members

(see Hester 1985), or a family’s secret blackberry picking spot in the forest (Carroll

et al. 2003) are symbolic places that anchor intersubjective meanings for people. A

focus on discursive aspects of sense of place from the standpoint of everyday life

and commonplace social interactions may reveal how positive environmental values

emerge and are fostered in home communities. Resource managers may also learn

how to foster new senses of place and meaning at natural resource sites, thus

dispersing visitors more fully across landscapes to enjoy richer experiences.

Sixth, narratives and other language devices may stimulate the creation of

discourse communities comprising social actors living far from resource places.

The mass media, for example, expose people to new ideas and images, and people

are likely to hear about and even talk about places they have never visited. Writing

from the perspective of sociopsychology, Backlund and Williams (2003: 324)

proposed that,

Some of our own attachment to places like National Parks, Wilderness areas, and National Forests stems not from direct experience

of a place, but as a consequence of hearing others’ stories and

memories of those places.

Whether this is true and whether communicative practices related to creating

place will build interest and support for environmental topics is a hypothesis for

future study. For managers, the opportunities inherent in creating mobile interpretive programs should also focus on fostering senses of place for sets of people who

may not yet have visited.

Seventh, natural resource planning can be conceived as a strategic social and

discursive process. Public involvement aspects of planning processes—based as

they are in communicative processes of public discussion, negotiation, and deliberation—have discursive qualities that can reveal citizens’ depths of feeling for

particular resource settings, the historical relationships of people with specific

places, and the ways in which different place meanings are produced by different

discursive or primary groups. Natural resource planners should analyze the discourses that surround resource uses, and consider how resource users might be

organized within discourse communities. The application of specific types of

planning processes (social learning, deliberative planning, expert-driven planning,

Public involvement

can reward citizens’

depths of feeling for

a setting, historical

relationships with

specific places, and

ways in which different place meanings

are formed by different groups.
54

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

and so on) is also a discursive process, and should be studied for how different

approaches contribute to or detract from building public consensus about management alternatives and plans. Knowledge of this kind will help facilitate more

participatory and substantive citizen input processes.

Eighth, beyond questions about the content and form of discourses about place,

senses of place, and meanings of place, one might also ask about the range of

participants (both speakers and listeners) involved in place-related conversations.

Some typical forms of interpersonal and mediated communication may be identifiable among recreation user groups. People tend to go to recreation places with

others close to them—so, both intimate and casual conversations with close others

(family and friends) will provide a forum for interaction that can lead to development of place meanings. In addition, people meet others onsite—so, informal

conversations with new acquaintances is also typical of these settings (as is overheard conversations from unknown others). Visitors also interact with agency

personnel in verbal and textual ways (attending interpretive talks, chatting with

rangers, and in reading published mass media, such as brochures, newspaper

articles, management planning documents, and Web sites). Given the variable

nature of strong and weak ties within and across recreation groups, though, many

interesting research questions should be raised about the nature and implications of

interethnic, interage, and intercultural communication in place creation.

Finally, some authors have proposed that resource managers should inventory

place-based meanings to develop strategies for serving publics and reducing site

conflicts. But, if senses of place are discursive and place meanings are fluid (not

simply objective categories), then inventories will always be serving past interests,

not proactively addressing current (or future) concerns. A manager’s imperative,

then, should be to understand the emergent qualities of place-making and place

meanings in order to respond to patterns of discourse shaped by structured communicators linked across social networks. In this effort, managers should err on the

side of variety rather than constraint in allowing resource settings to be as open as

possible to social and cultural behaviors through which place meanings may be

expressed. In this way, connections between people and place may be fostered.

Conclusion

Creating and achieving a sense of place is, ultimately, a social practice: people

create senses of place and meanings of place through language use in social interaction, bounded within social relationships, and influenced by context. This paper has
55

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

attempted to argue for a more social sense of place in recreation and resource

management. One of the productive consequences of this analysis has been to

propose new conceptions of place, sense of place, and place meanings—concepts

that have implications for the types of research that might be possible, as well as

the types of management applications that may be considered.

The social constructionist approach departs considerably from others that typify

place and sense of place as individualized feelings, emotions, “rootedness,” or

knowledge. Traditional sociopsychological theorizing about place asks questions

about the workings of the minds of people, but cognitive versions of reality should

be seen as socially informed and constructed. Language with significant others,

general public discourse, mass mediated messages, and other forms of talk and text

all contribute to what a person knows and feels, what a person thinks about what

they know and feel, and what they share with others about what they know or feel.

The analysis in this paper does not deny the utility of studies of cognition, emotion,

or affect in apprehending places—these characteristics are central to the experience

of personhood, and thus implicated in the ways in which individuals become social

beings. But a social constructionist account of place finds its foundations in interactional and relational aspects of life.

There are several place-related topics that have not been discussed in this paper,

but which may take on new meaning and utility under the constructionist approach

described here. One of these is identity. Constructing a sense of place also involves

constructing a sense of self (and others) through interaction. For example, in speaking of Peter Berger’s social philosophy, Wuthnow et al. (1984: 46) wrote that, “The

reality of everyday life of which personal identity is a significant part, is maintained as plausible only as long as it remains plausible in the ongoing conversations

one has with others....” The domains of leisure—where we locate places of meaningful experience with close family and friends—should have special influence in

shaping (and continually re-making) identity. Shotter (1993: 63) went so far as

to propose that, “instead of a ‘politics of power,’ a new ‘politics of identity’ is

beginning....To the extent that people’s identities are a function of their social

relations, if they want to sustain their identities...they must sustain...both the

identities of those around them, and the social relations which sustain those identities.” Recreation and resource places provide settings for this to occur through the

language and discourse practices supporting emergent senses of place.

In this paper, the focus has been on interpersonal communication as the primary vehicle for social interaction. But a social constructionist approach can also

accommodate mediated and intrapersonal communication, as well as interpersonal
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

communication. Additionally, this paper has also focused on what people think

of as “real” places—that is, objective, physical settings and acreages of landscape.

Imaginary places, such as technologically manipulated “virtual” spaces, have not

been discussed, although they might be useful topics for future analysis of the

social construction of place, sense of place, and place meanings. For example,

what techniques of language use and conversational practice create senses of place

in these settings, and what are the implications of these settings for social interaction? To the extent that resource managers may wish to create opportunities for

resource users to engage in virtual experiences, these and other questions will

become important.

“No one lives in the world in general,” wrote the anthropologist Clifford Geertz

(1996: 262). “Everybody...lives in some confined and limited stretch of it [known

to them as] ‘the world around here’.” This paper argues that those places we know

as “the world around here” are only made apparent to us as a result of our communicative engagement within discourse communities. The act of seeing a place is

not equivalent to understanding its meaning; having a feeling for a place always is

preceded by contextualized social interaction. Understanding of place—and of

one’s place in place—is always circular, growing increasingly complex as a result

of interpersonal and mediated conversations, enhanced by personal reflection.

Thus, we come to have senses of places by participating in the social practices of

symbolic communication. And we come to share meanings about place through

language and discourse in verbal and textual forms—meanings that come to be

expressed in the minds and hearts of individuals, and in the collective memory of

a society and culture.

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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Chapter 4—What Do We “Mean” by Place Meanings?

Implications of Place Meanings for Managers and

Practitioners

Richard C. Stedman1

Abstract

Much place-related research has focused on place attachment. Much less attention

has been paid to place meanings, or descriptive statements about the nature of

place. Using survey data to illustrate the themes, this paper examines how place

meanings are created, their relationship to place attachment, and their relevance to

resource managers. Several primary themes are identified: (1) settings have the

potential to embody multiple meanings, which are formed on the basis of differences in social interaction and role behaviors; (2) this experience is both volitional

and shaped by structural factors, such as the material environment itself, and by

land management strategies; and (3) meanings may help managers understand

phenomena such as conflict over land use.

Keywords: Sense of place, place meanings, place attachment.

Introduction

The recent spate of research on sense of place, place attachment, and related

concepts has emphasized the strength of attachment to settings and sought to

understand factors associated with strong attachment. In comparison, far less work

has focused on place meanings. Questions about “what kind of place this is” tend to

get short shrift. Although place meanings are often referred to as an important

component of sense of place, we know relatively little about how they are produced

and how they contribute to place attachment. Further, these meanings should be of

keen interest to resource managers: while management for attachment per se may

be problematic, managers have the capacity to shape the meanings people are likely

to derive from the landscape and use meanings to understand the needs of a diverse

stakeholder base.

1

 Richard C. Stedman, Department of Natural Resources, 122 D Fernow Hall, Cornell

University, Ithica, NY 14850, email: rcs6@cornell.edu
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This paper examines place meanings: how they are created, how they contribute

to evaluations such as place attachment, and their potential utility to resource managers. I describe a number of themes: (1) settings have the potential to embody

multiple meanings that are not unique or ad hoc but formed on the basis of differences in experience: patterned social interaction and role behaviors; (2) this

experience is partially volitional, but also is shaped by structure: factors outside

the control of the individual/group, such as the nature of the material environment

itself, and land management strategies, or power interests that have a role both in

the production of the material environment and the direct creation, packaging, and

communication of meanings; and (3) meanings may or may not be tied to affective

sentiments such as attachment, but also may help managers understand other

phenomena that might be of greater interest, such as conflict over land use. Such

conflict often entails conflict over meanings rather than attachment (acrimonious

conflict rarely occurs between groups with differing strengths of place attachment). The themes imply that recreation and land managers should pay attention to

the myriad ways in which their actions create or influence meanings via (a) their

land management activities that affect the material landscape, (b) their provision

for certain experiences (while inhibiting others) that foster meanings, and (c) their

“teaching” of meanings through environmental communication/ interpretation.

Literature Review: “Enough on Attachment,

Already?”

The sense of place/place attachment literature has proliferated over the past few

years. As demonstrated by Farnum et al. (2005), the sense of place concept has

been poked and prodded by many different fields, from many different angles; for

groups of people ranging from long-time community residents to urban tourists, to

whitewater paddlers. Sense of place has been suggested as a tool for forest management, a way to understand public involvement, environmental perception, recreation conflict, attitudes toward user fees, level of environmental concern, and a

myriad of other outdoor recreation and management issues.

It appears that gone are the halcyon days in which a sense of place researcher

or theorist could label a section “literature review” and thus encircle much of what

has been written about sense of place. This should stand as testimony to the enthusiasm with which academics, resource managers, and the general public have

embraced the term as something real, something important, that has “gone over the

wall” and escaped the ivory towers of academia (a quick Google search on “Sense

Sense of place has

been suggested as

a tool for forest

management, a way

to understand public

involvement, environmental perception, recreation

conflict, attitudes

toward user fees,

level of environmental concern, and

a myriad of other

outdoor recreation

and management

issues.
63

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

of Place” in January 2006 resulted in approximately 158,000,000 hits). As such,

this chapter does not attempt to present an exhaustive review of the sense-of-place

literature. Nor does it re-tread the ground covered by Relph (1976) and Tuan

(1974, 1977), original and prolific sowers of the sense-of-place seeds. Readers are

encouraged to examine the work of Farnum et al. (2005) that reviews the burgeoning literature on sense of place, and to examine the work of Relph and Tuan for

themselves. As an anonymous reviewer of a paper of mine recently pointed out,

“Tuan is [so] panoramic in his writings that one can find a quote to support almost

anything about place.”

My literature review is short, based on the organization of this chapter. Several

thematic areas are presented, and the literature that pertains to each is reviewed in

the context of its particular theme. However, a few points, raised in the introduction, are worth supporting in brief. First, the recent spate of research on sense of

place, place attachment, and related concepts has emphasized the strength of attachment as a strong (usually positive) emotional bond between people and their environment (Riley 1992, Shumaker and Taylor 1983, Williams et al. 1992). One

focus of this work is to understand the factors associated with strong attachment to

a setting, and how attachment may differ between individuals and groups. In this

vein, some posited a biological foundation to attachment (e.g., Low and Altman

1992) that suggests we are “hard-wired” to prefer certain types of settings (Kaplan

and Kaplan 1989). Others have suggested that attachment is socially constructed

through individual or group experience with a setting. Some have emphasized the

role of culture and group membership (Greider and Garkovich 1994). Stedman

(2003) also noted that characteristics of the setting may be associated with the development of attachment (see also Beckley 2003); one should not be too quick to

assume that settings really are blank slates waiting to be filled with the memories

of human experiences. Others (e.g., Blake 2002) have suggested that people may

become attached to symbolic places with which they may not have had direct contact. Some have focused on scale issues: i.e., do people form attachment to specific

sites? To regions? To entire nations (see Shamai 1991)? How do local and nonlocal

people differ with respect to their attachment (e.g., Kaltenborn and Williams

2002)? Does attachment increase if people are more specialized in the recreation

activities they pursue there (e.g., Kyle et al. 2003), or does activity participation

per se foster attachment?

The preceding briefly illustrates the attention paid to understanding attachment:

how it functions, how it is produced, and how it may differ between groups. The
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particular works cited above only skim the surface of what is out there. In comparison, there has been far less emphasis on understanding place meanings: answers to

the question “What kind of place is this?” Where do meanings come from? How do

they differ between groups? Are certain meanings tied to stronger attachment? How

can an increased understanding of them be used to understand group consensus or

conflict?

Using Research to Illustrate the Themes: Sense of

Place in Vilas County, Wisconsin

The remainder of this paper suggests and examines a number of themes related

to place meanings. In some instances, quantitative research findings are used to

illustrate these principles, but I would like to invoke two disclaimers. First, this is

not a traditional “research paper” per se: I do not use a hypothesis-testing framework. Rather, the quantitative findings are invoked to highlight particular themes.

Second, I do not believe that quantitative analysis such as that demonstrated here

is the only way to apprehend the themes described below. Many of the complex

themes dealing with the interplay between the physical environment, human volition, and social structure, are exceedingly complex and not easily captured by

quantitative analysis.

The findings presented are drawn from a study of property owners in Vilas

County, Wisconsin. Vilas County is a tourism-intensive and recreational home landscape with a preponderance of lakes. Seasonal and year-round population has been

growing rapidly. New construction has resulted in a dramatic decline in vacant

lakeshore property, and it is clear that wild lakeshores matter to sense of place

in Vilas County. Several Vilas County town planning documents (Town of Arbor

Vitae 1996, Town of Eagle River 1996) reflect these concerns, as they focus on

clean water, lakes, and woods as critical to quality of life and threatened by unplanned sprawl, inadequate shore land zoning, and recreational conflict (see

Stedman 2002, 2003 for more detail on Vilas County, and the survey methodology

briefly described below).

In 1999, I sent a mail survey to a stratified (by gender) random sample of

1,000 Vilas County property owners, drawn from the 1998 property tax rolls.

The research used a three-contact mailing procedure, resulting in a 72.1-percent

response rate. Respondents were asked to describe and evaluate a particular lake

of their own choosing: either one on which they owned property or one that they
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

visited often. These survey data were then matched to several Vilas County lakes

databases for the purposes of exploring the relationship between environmental

quality and human response (see Stedman and Hammer 2006).

“What Do We Mean by Meanings”: Emergent

Themes

Symbolic meanings are beliefs or cognitions about place and can be measured

and analyzed as such. At the outset, meanings should be clearly differentiated

from evaluations. Even in a field of inquiry as replete with confusion about important terminology as sense of place, meanings suffer from an exquisite lack of

clarity. At the risk of creating an infinite regress, it is fair to ask “What do we mean

by place meanings?” Farnum et al. (2005) noted that place meanings are often used

interchangeably with sense of place. Meanings are part of sense of place. They are

important to sense of place. But they are not equivalent concepts. And they surely

are not the same thing as attachment. Perhaps we can lay part of the blame on one

of the oft-cited quotations of Tuan (1977) who stated a quarter century ago that a

place is a “center of meaning or field of care.” This statement, besides contributing

to a full-fledged research scrum among academics ranging from environmental

psychologists to humanistic geographers, may be misleading in that the “or” at the

center of the statement suggests that the two phrases that bracket it are interchangeable. They are not. The former implies description, the latter connotes evaluation.

Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (Mirriam-Webster 1970) defines a

meaning as “an idea conveyed to the mind...requiring or allowing of interpretation.” Even “meaningful,” which is often used casually in a manner that sounds

suspiciously consistent with attachment (i.e., “this is a meaningful place to me”

implies a strong positive bond) is defined by Webster’s in more descriptive terms,

as “having a meaning, purpose, or function.” Meaning and attachment, so often

touted as important components of sense of place (Brandenburg and Carrol 1995,

Relph 1976, Tuan 1975) are empirically separable, but have been treated as nearly

synonymous in research. This is a crucial neglect.

Social psychology, despite those who claim that it minimizes the role of social

structure, adds analytical clarity to our discussion of meanings and attachment.

Attitude theorists assert that attitudes include affective (evaluative), cognitive, and

conative (behavioral) components. Beliefs are the cognitive building blocks of attitude (Bem 1970). The relationship between cognitive and evaluative components

of attitude is a traditional focus of social psychology (see Eagly and Chaiken 1993

for a cogent review).

Symbolic meanings

are beliefs or cognitions about place

and can be measured and analyzed

as such. At the

outset, meanings

should be clearly

differentiated from

evaluations.
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Key to translating sense of place—and especially meanings—through social

psychology is the idea that the physical setting and its attributes take on the role

of attitude object or locus for cognitions and evaluations. Symbolic meanings

about place can be translated into cognitions or beliefs: descriptive statements about

“what kind of place this is.” Subsequently, this approach suggests that our evaluations—i.e., attachment, satisfaction, etc.—of a setting are a function of the kinds

of meanings we attribute to it. Some might respond that this kind of model takes

complex phenomena like symbolic meanings and attempts to reduce them to simple

cognitive belief statements that can be measured by using “true/false” or “agree/

disagree” matrices. Let me be clear: analytical precision and the separation of

concepts that are begging to be separated are my objectives, rather than quantitative

measurement per se of the components. Our ability to be precise may be enhanced

through quantitative measurement, but retreating to numbers is hardly required to

differentiate between meaning and attachment.

A setting is more than one “place”: settings contain multiple meanings

based on patterned experience. If a setting has meaning, surely it does not mean

the same thing to everyone. This point is hardly novel: long ago, Lynch (1960)

noted that the identity of a place provides its individuality or distinction from other

places, its basis of recognition as a separate entity, but that this identity may differ

among people. Some suggest radically individualistic place meanings: a given

setting will contain as many different meanings as there are people using the setting

(Meinig 1979, Relph 1976). Others (e.g., Greider and Garkovich 1994, Ryden

1993) emphasize common meanings based on shared (or similar) experience: there

will be a degree of commonality in meanings among people who interact with a

setting as recreationists and not as real estate developers.

Illustration: Between-Group Differences in Meanings

The emergence of distinct meanings based on different modes of encounter is

explored by using the Vilas County data. Two dominant meanings are explored:

“home” and “escape,” testing the idea that a second home setting has the capacity

to simultaneously embody both of these sets of meanings. Tuan (1977) made a

process-based distinction between attachment to ordinary, or “home places” rather

than “chosen places” (see also Meinig 1979). In home places, the accumulation of

ordinary experiences produces deep feelings of attachment to places that—to the

outsider—lack distinction. In contrast, attachment to a chosen place may develop

quickly, as a result of a dramatic experience based in an extraordinary landscape.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

This latter characterization is the exemplar of the tourist form of attachment, which

is often marginalized as relatively unimportant. However, I will take to my grave

my memory of my first sight of the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado.

While driving south from Grand Junction on a drab March day, all of 20 years old

and turned loose on an unsuspecting world, I crested a small rise and the mountains

were suddenly, impossibly there: huge, snowy, incredible. I had to pull the car over

on the shoulder; I was shaken to the core. Nearly 20 years later, writing these

words still raises the hair on the back of my neck. Did I have any prior experience

with these mountains? No. Did I understand the subtleties of the ecosystem or how

people lived there? No. Was my life changed? Forever: I have been fighting to return to the mountains ever since. Attachment to chosen places need not be shallow.

Of interest to this research is the question of whether a given setting can

simultaneously embody both a “chosen place” and a “home place,” as suggested

by the tourist and year-round resident mode of interaction. As reflected in Tuan’s

writings, year-round residents value their community as “home,” and tourists value

it as an “escape” from their everyday lives. Articulating the middle ground meanings of the second-home owner is more of a challenge: many of their behaviors are

“consumptive,” emphasizing recreation and relaxation. Their meanings for the local

setting are likely aligned with these behaviors.

Are particular meanings associated with particular behaviors? The dominant

modes of interaction with the northern Wisconsin landscape can be divided several

ways: year-round versus seasonal residence; and lake frontage owners versus nonlakeshore-frontage owners.2

 The next section of the paper compares symbolic

meanings between these sets of groups, using t-tests to compare means (table 1).

Note the inclusion of several summed scales for symbolic meanings (“up north”

and “community of neighbors”). A maximum likelihood factor analysis revealed a

clear two-factor solution explaining 55 percent of the variation in symbolic meanings: my lake as “up north” (alpha = 0.824) or my lake as “a community of neighbors” (alpha = 0.680).

2

 Although one might think these redundant, this is not the case. There is a reasonably

strong correlation (r = 0.306), but the two concepts are hardly redundant. Nearly half of

year-round residents (46.3 percent) have lake frontage (a testimony to the strong presence

of lakes in the region). Most (82.7 percent) seasonal residents have lake frontage (the

dominant location of seasonal homes still tends to be on lakes), but this is becoming

progressively less the case as lake areas fill in with development, and those seeking

solitude (or who cannot afford the exorbitant prices associated with lakeshore areas) are

acquiring off-lake parcels.
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Comparing respondents according to the two groupings reveals that some of the

place meanings differ according to mode of interaction with the setting. Year round

and seasonal differ strongly on symbolic meanings attributed to their lake. Quite

reasonably, year-round residents are more likely to see their lake as a community

of neighbors, while seasonal residents are more likely to see it as up north escape.

Similar differences are observed between those who do and do not own lake frontage. People who own frontage are less likely to think their lake is like a community

of neighbors, and more likely to think of it as up north (fig. 6). It is clear that we

are looking at sites that, therefore, are simultaneously “home” for some, and

Table 1—Meanings by mode of encounter (t-test)

Year- Significant No Lake Significant

Seasonal round differences frontage frontage differences

Meana Meana

(n) (n)

Summed scales

Community of

neighbors 2.70 3.01 0.001 2.93 2.76 0.05

(427) (194) (161) (459)

The real “up north” 3.82 3.38 .001 3.41 3.77 .001

(430) (197) (165) (466)

Individual items

A family place 4.37 4.12 .001 4.01 4.39 .001

(442) (203) (168) (476)

A pristine 3.42 3.03 .001 3.13 3.36 .05

wilderness (436) (200) (167) (468)

A residential 2.51 2.91 .001 2.92 2.53 .001

“neighborhood” (432) (195) (164) (462)

A place mostly 3.13 2.96 NS 3.21 3.03 NS

for vacationers (435) (198) (167) (465)

A place of high 3.83 3.53 .001 3.51 3.82 .001

environmental (432) (199) (165) (465)

quality

A place to escape 4.04 3.44 .001 3.48 3.98 .001

from civilization (440) (199) (165) (473)

A community 2.91 3.15 .01 2.96 3.00 NS

of neighbors (432) (200) (165) (466)

The real “up north” 3.97 3.55 .001 3.55 3.94 .001

(440) (202) (168) (473)

NS = no significant difference.

a

 Measured on a 5-point scale where 1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

“escape” for others, and that much of this variation is driven by the way people

experience these settings. Although it may not exactly be breathtaking news to

assert that those who live in a setting year round are more likely to see it as a

home place, the implications of this finding (and being able to demonstrate it

clearly) are very important for the management of recreation sites that embody

both sets of meanings.

Where else do meanings come from? Deceptively simple statements such as

“meanings are created from experience” are worthy of more scrutiny. The experience-based model examined above so endemic to sense of place implicitly (at

times, explicitly) assumes that people construct meanings of their own via freely

chosen behaviors that reflect their own preference structure. This rational actor

model may neglect the reality that not all meanings compete on an equal footing.

Rather, exogenous forces may play a strong part in the creation of meanings. The

material setting is one such force. The role of the physical environment in contributing to sense of place has been under-analyzed relative to the role of shared

behaviors and cultural processes. Tuan suggested that an un-experienced physical

setting is “blank space,” without important characteristics of its own: “What begins

as undifferentiated space becomes place when we endow it with value” (Tuan 1977:

6). Much work has followed this path. Greider and Garkovich (1994: 2 emphasis in

original) asserted “landscapes are the reflections of these cultural identities, which

are about us, rather than the natural environment.” They continued (1994: 2): “Of

Figure 6—People who own lake-front homes are likely to think differently

about their lake than those who do not own frontage homes.

Richard Stedman

The role of the

physical environment in contributing

to sense of place

has been underanalyzed.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

course, humans reside in a natural...world that is there...but this world is meaningless. Meanings are not inherent in the nature of things...” Eisenhauer et al. (2000:

422) added: “In essence, people confer meaning on the environment in ways that

reflect their social and cultural experiences.” In this way, it is possible for a single

space to encompass multiple “places,” reflecting the uniqueness of human culture

and variations in experiences people have had with the landscape.

Illustration: Shoreline Development, Meanings, and Attachment

Because shoreline development is such a pressing topic in Vilas County, I examined

whether lakes with a high proportion of developed shoreline differ in meaning

from lightly developed lakes. Respondents were separated into groups based on the

level of shoreline development of their lake. Means for each of these domains were

compared (t-tests) between respondents on relatively highly developed lakes (more

than 30 structures per total mile of lake frontage) versus those on relatively lightly

developed lakes (less than 15 structures per mile of frontage). For analytical clarity,

respondents in the middle category (moderately developed lakes) are excluded from

the analysis. All were asked to respond to the cognitive (symbolic meaning and

evaluative belief) items detailed earlier (table 2).

It is clear that lightly developed lakes mean different things than do those

ringed by shoreline development. Respondents on more highly developed lakes

were significantly less likely to consider them a pristine wilderness, places of high

environmental quality, places to escape from civilization, scenic, peaceful, with

clear water and abundant forests. They were more likely to think of their lakes as

residential neighborhoods, crowded with shoreline development and recreationists,

and polluted water. Stedman and Hammer (2006) also found that lakeshore development levels affect perceived water quality: people on more developed lakes also

perceive the water of their lakes to be more polluted and less clear, even though

limnological data on variables such as chlorophyll and turbidity do not support

these perceptions.

Are differences in development levels associated with differences in attachment? No. Although there were differences for two items of the attachment scale

(see Jorgensen and Stedman 2001, Stedman 2002 for more information on the

development of the attachment scale), overall there were few differences in attachment variables (table 3). This suggests that although beliefs about what kind of

place a lake represents may be affected by setting characteristics, identification

with it as an important place remains relatively strong.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Table 2—Lake meanings by lakeshore development level

Less More

developed developed Significance

– – – – – Meana 

– – – – – p

My lake is...

A family place 4.29 4.28 NS

A pristine wilderness 3.61 2.72 0.001

A residential “neighborhood” 2.27 3.21 .001

A place mostly for vacationers 2.99 3.15 NS

A place of high environmental quality 3.90 3.36 .001

A place to escape from civilization 4.05 3.48 .001

A community of neighbors 2.71 3.66 .001

The real “up north” 3.95 3.50 .001

NS = no significant difference.

a

 Measured on a 5-point scale where 1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree.

Table 3—Place attachment by lakeshore development level

Less More

developed developed Significance

– – – – – Meana – – – – – p

I feel that I can really be myself there 5.61 5.28 0.01

I feel happiest when I am there 5.35 5.14 NS

For the things I enjoy most, no other

place can compare 4.78 4.65 NS

It is my favorite place to be 5.09 5.00 NS

As far as I am concerned, there are

better places to beb 3.04 3.67 .001

It reflects the type of person I am 5.04 4.76 NS

I really miss it when I am away too long 5.50 5.26 NS

It is the best place to do the things I enjoy 5.26 5.10 NS

Everything about it is a reflection of me 4.55 4.39 NS

Summed attachment scale (alpha = 0.937) 5.12 4.87 NS

NS = no significant difference.

a

 Measured on a 7-point scale where 1 = strongly disagree and 7 = strongly agree.

b

 Reverse coded for inclusion in summed attachment scale.
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Other external factors, net of characteristics of the material environment, may

also contribute to meanings. Urry (1995) noted that the place myth comprises a

number of place images, but those embraced by the ruling classes are more likely

to determine the character of the landscape. Pred (1984) asserted that place meanings are shaped by goals and desires of power-holding individuals or coalitions

(e.g., the growth machine). Molotch et al. (2000) noted how certain interests may

set place aspects in motion, which over time become seen as “normal” aspects of

the landscape. Greider and Garkovich (1994: 17) also addressed the role of power

in the social construction of landscape: “In the context of landscapes, power is the

capacity to impose a specific definition of the physical environment, one that

reflects the symbols and meanings of a particular group of people.”

These definitions do not necessarily remain at the symbolic level but may result

in changes to the physical landscape. Thus, power interests and the material environment are linked. Institutional actors, such as forest or recreation managers may

play a large role in the creation of place meanings: official mandates that “freeze” a

landscape at a particular point in time (e.g., National Park Service approaches that

preserve “vignettes of primitive America”), interpretative signs directing tourists to

particular views (while also telling them what it is they are supposed to be seeing)

directly affect the meanings that visitors to national parks may glean from their

visit. Other policies, such as restricting access to certain areas (i.e., camping only

in designated backcountry campsites) or specific types of activities (i.e., allowing

hunting in national forests but not national parks) can indirectly affect the meanings attributed to the landscape via affecting the behaviors that support these

meanings. Other power interests (i.e., tourism-based growth machine) have interests in the promulgation of certain meanings.

These processes are neither independent of each other nor mutually exclusive.

People can only behave in relation to what is there; at minimum it is far easier to

“go with the flow,” taking advantage of recreational opportunities and infrastructure that readily present themselves, and re-creating meanings that are consistent

with attributes of the material environment and its signature uses. Understanding

the role of power in shaping place meanings transcends the type of quantitative

measurement employed in this paper, but is well worth exploring in subsequent

research.

Based on these factors, we may have a hard time predicting meanings through

conventional quantitative measures. Both from theory and from empirical research

we see that meanings come from experience (individual or social) and that they

are also embodied in characteristics of the setting and shaped by power interests.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

However, meanings remain fairly elusive to standard quantitative measurement,

suggesting that there may exist idiosyncratic factors based on particular experience

with particular places. In short, we cannot discount the importance of the specifics

of place.

Implications of meanings: Do some meanings foster greater attachment?

Because “meanings and attachment” are so often linked in sense of place writings,

there is the immediate tendency to assume that certain sets of meanings are more

likely to foster place attachment. However, we might also suggest that one could be

attached to a setting from a number of different meanings: i.e., there is no “magic

meaning” that is associated with higher levels of attachment.

Illustration: Predicting Attachment From Meanings

A simple multiple regression was employed to predict attachment from meanings;

the previously described evaluative beliefs and symbolic meanings are both entered

into the equation predicting the composite attachment variable (table 4).

Several of the meaning items are associated with higher levels of attachment;

most of these are in the “up north” domain. “Escape from civilization” and “the

real up north,” were strongly predictive of attachment. Interestingly, two of the

items in the community domain had opposite effects: “like a residential neighborhood” was associated with less attachment, while “a community of neighbors”

was associated with stronger attachment (even though these items were positively

correlated). I had initially expected that the particular meanings one holds for the

landscape would have relatively little to do with the level of attachment (i.e., one

can be attached from multiple dimensions). The results support this contention to

a degree: for example, although “escape from civilization” and “a community of

neighbors” were negatively correlated, agreeing with each of these is associated

with higher levels of attachment. Primarily, however, it appears that agreeing with

“up north as an escape” is strongly associated with higher attachment. Given the

predominance of “up north” meanings described earlier, it may be that disagreeing

with a commonly accepted (even hegemonic) meaning is a form of social resistance

or indicator of real dissatisfaction with what’s occurring in a place (“Sure, everybody around here thinks this is the real up north, but trust me, it is not”).

The importance of meanings goes beyond their relationship to attachment. Meanings may be associated with phenomena other than attachment that

might be far more relevant to managers. Underscoring this contention is the demonstrated lack of linkage between environmental quality and attachment. People

may remain attached to degraded settings even as one set of meanings may come to
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

take precedence over another. Contrasting meanings, therefore, may underpin

contentious place politics such as conflict over land use. Cheng and Kruger (in this

report) note that the increasingly diverse and conflicting social demands for federal

public lands and resources is perhaps the critical challenge for land managers. Such

conflict may be based in, among other factors, disagreement about what meanings

describe a setting rather than attachment per se. Simply put, acrimonious conflict is

probably less likely to occur between groups with differing strengths of place

attachment, but rather between two sets of interests that are both strongly attached

but with conflicting visions about what the setting means.

Illustration: Meanings and Environmental Support

Are certain meanings associated with active support for more stringent environmental laws? To demonstrate the relationship, simple bivariate correlation analysis

is performed between two indicators of environmental behavior: (1) overall levels

of support for environmental regulations and (2) willingness to join or help form a

group opposing further shoreline development (table 5).

Symbolic meanings appear to be associated reasonably strongly with levels of

support for environmental regulation and willingness to organize to resist unwanted

environmental change. As we might reasonably intuit, meanings associated with a

more pristine “escape” meaning of place (wilderness, high environmental quality,

Table 4—Predicting attachment from meanings by multiple regression

Unstandardized Standard Standardized

coefficients error coefficients T Significance

Beta Beta P

(Constant) 1.992 0.398 5.01 0.000

A family place .258 .062 .162 4.127 .000

A pristine wilderness -.045 .056 -.038 -.803 NS

A residential “neighborhood” -.121 .052 -.107 -2.324 .020

A place mostly for vacationers -.250 .045 -.022 -.563 NS

A place of high environmental quality .510 .067 .036 .762 NS

A place to escape from civilization .263 .064 .209 4.104 .000

A community of neighbors .222 .059 .176 3.855 .000

The real “up north” .209 .079 .163 2.524 .004

NS = no significant effect.

Adjusted R square = 0.182.

F = 17.40.

P = 0.000.

Symbolic meanings

appear to be associated with support

for environmental

regulation and

willingness to

organize to resist

unwanted environmental change.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

escape from the everyday, and the real up north) appear to be associated with

feelings that current levels of environmental regulation are not sufficiently restrictive. People recognize that their pristine north is vulnerable. Further, people who

hold these views express more willingness to engage in collective action to protect

their lake from increased shoreline development. In contrast, other meanings

(family place, vacation place, community of neighbors) are apparently less based

on the presence of a high-quality natural environment, and they are not threatened

by increased lakeshore development (the meaning “residential neighborhood” is

linked to decreased willingness to counter such change).

The lesson here is that although meanings may or may not be very strongly tied

to attachment, (nor very predictable from the suite of variables shown here) they

may be related to other constructs that tourism and recreation managers may care

much more about: levels of support for environmental regulations, and willingness

to become actively involved in opposing specific environmental change.

Conclusions

In this piece I have intended to turn the attention away from place attachment and

articulate the importance of place meanings. To recap, I suggest that meanings have

a strong cognitive base, and can (and should) be distinguished from more evaluative elements such as attachment. These meanings are neither invariant nor ad hoc

in their variation. Rather, the multiple meanings that characterize a setting are

created through patterned experience. In illustrating these themes with data, it

becomes clear that although Vilas County seasonal and year-round residents exist in

Table 5—Meanings and environmental support (bivariate correlation analyses)

Support more stringent Join or form a group to fight

environmental regulations shoreline development

Correlation P Correlation P

A family place 0.026 NS 0.027 NS

A pristine wilderness .080 0.047 .130 0.001

A residential “neighborhood” .021 NS -.135 .001

A place mostly for vacationers .045 NS -.043 NS

A place of high environmental quality .111 .006 .073 NS

A place to escape from civilization .079 .050 .129 .001

A community of neighbors .064 NS -.009 NS

The real “up north” .136 .001 .106 .008

NS = no significant effect.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

the same spatial settings, they are experiencing different “places.” Although there is

a choice in the behavior that shapes these meanings, structural factors need to be

considered as well: the arrangement of the physical environment—what it contains

and does not contain—plays a strong role in shaping meanings. The Vilas County

results described here tell us quite clearly that lakes ringed with houses mean different things than lakes encircled only with white pine and maple. We also need to

seriously think about the people and institutions that create meanings for us: land

managers who shape the “natural” landscape through their actions, interpreters who

tell us where to look and what we should think and feel when we look, powerful

actors who have a vested interest in the promulgation of meanings that fit their

ability to turn a profit, and the simple, iterative structuration of place (see Molotch

et al. 2000 for a wonderfully articulated consideration of this) that leads inexorably, almost imperceptibly, to some elements being present in a landscape while

others are not.

Messages to Managers

There are important implications of this work for resource and recreation managers. Most importantly, at least as suggested in this research (I’ll soon introduce the

place-specific caveats that attenuate the strength of this conclusion), trying to manage for attachment may be a mistake. I reach this conclusion from several different

avenues. First, environmental quality and attachment may have little to do with

each other. At least in Vilas County, the environmental attributes of lakes—their

level of development, as described here, but also their clarity, their chlorophyll

levels, their acidity—have no effect on attachment. For those who agree that maintaining environmental quality of outdoor recreation settings is an important goal,

the finding that people seem to have the capacity to be attached to environmentally

degraded settings is somewhat disturbing. There is a second reason that managers

should not worry too much about managing for attachment: doing so appears to

be very difficult. Much of the capacity people have to be attached to a setting is

outside the control of resource managers. As Fitchen (1991) pointed out, people

have the capacity to maintain attachment through memories of past events, selective

attention to detail, and a host of other factors.

If managers might want to worry less about creating attachment for recreationists, forest stakeholders, and other interested parties, they may want to worry

more about understanding their role in creating meanings. In some ways, this

represents unexpected “good news”: meanings are perhaps more fundamental than

attachment, and managers probably have more capacity to influence what kinds of
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

meanings will be attributed to the setting than attachment to it. Based on this and

related research (see Stedman 2003) managers’ actions can create or influence

meanings in several specific ways. First, and most obviously, their land management activities affect the material landscape that serves as the basis for meanings.

Decisions about timber harvest plans, for example, will change the appearance of

the landscape and potentially the meanings attributed to it. Second, because meanings are still tied somewhat to the mode in which a setting is encountered, recreation managers create meanings indirectly through their provision for certain

experiences, and their prohibitions on others. For example, decisions to open or

close an area to certain types of uses (e.g., motorized versus nonmotorized recreation) is likely to affect place meanings. Stedman et al. (2004) found that certain

use prohibitions in Canadian National Parks (e.g., limiting hiking to designated

trails, and prohibiting hunting) led some local residents to attribute a “nature under

glass” meaning to the setting. Finally, recreation managers need to realize that they

are always in the process of communicating meanings through interpretation of the

landscape for visitors. Most obviously, roadside informational kiosks and signage

communicate certain messages about the setting, but communication is hardly

limited to these instances. There are a host of subtle and not-so-subtle cues about

what kind of place a setting represents; managers need to pay attention to the kinds

of signals they send, intentionally or unintentionally. Whether by individual inclination, institutional constraint (i.e., what is the official position of an institution

such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service), or through external

pressure on the institution (i.e., find a way to increase visitation so that local

communities benefit economically) most resource managers are hardly “meaningneutral”: they will (and ought to) have their own vision of what is right for a

certain landscape.

A meaning-based management framework can also help clarify management

objectives and their communication to stakeholders. I have suggested that conflict

over controversial issues—land use, recreational activities allowed, how benefits

may or may not flow back into local communities—can be best understood as conflict over questions of “What kind of place is this?” Settings characterized by a

multiplicity of viable meanings present special challenges to managers, especially

as they come to terms with their own preferred meanings as described above. By

asking stakeholders to articulate their concerns in terms of the meanings they are

ascribing to place—asking them to put their cards on the table, so to speak—greater

analytical clarity may be obtained, leading perhaps to more effective conflict

resolution.
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Setting-Specific Caveats

Having made some fairly strong statements about meanings based on my Vilas

County findings, I would like to back down ever so slightly. My findings and the

implications drawn from them are of course rooted in the place-specific attributes

that produced these findings. Much of my work on place is driven by my goal of

seeking general principles about place, and moving away from highly particularistic studies of people and settings that do not extend beyond these particulars. I

would like to contribute to theory that is rooted in the particulars of setting and

social actors, but has the capacity to transcend these settings and be used to understand other settings and ways of interacting with the landscape. To a degree,

however, all findings and generalizations about place will remain rooted in the

particulars of the setting that produced them. Some of the Vilas County findings

may have been affected by a lack of diversity both in the quality of the physical

environment as well as the behaviors through which people encounter them. The

lakes as attitude objects are all of reasonable environmental quality: none, for

example, are so polluted that they are devoid of fish. Would my finding that the

quality of the physical environment matters little to attachment still hold up if the

range of variation were expanded to include some truly woeful places? Similarly,

there is a very limited range of human behaviors associated with these lakes: people

recreate on them, look at them, live on them. No one is trying, for example, to

make a living by extracting natural capital from them. Settings such as national

forests that really serve a wider range of uses may produce different findings about

the contributing role of experience to both meanings and attachment, and produce a

wide range of meanings. My finding that the “up north” meaning really is associated with higher attachment may hold primarily for settings where there really is

only one dominant meaning for the landscape, such as witnessed here. In settings

where there is greater multiplicity of meanings, selecting one over another may not

imply much about attachment.

Clearly, more research on meanings is needed. But what should this research

look like? I would like to see the themes identified here used as organizing principles and applied to different settings that may have a greater diversity of experiences and characteristics of the physical environment. As I mentioned at the outset,

this research does not have to be quantitative: there are ways of assessing meanings

other than translating them into Likert-scaled belief statements. Many of the most

interesting questions about how power interests contribute to place meanings probably escape simple quantitative measurement. Regardless, more effort (both by
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

researchers and managers) should be put into developing measurement frameworks,

discovering where place meanings come from, and how such meanings may articulate with ongoing management objectives.

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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Chapter 5—Place Meanings in Stories of Lived

Experience1

William Stewart2

Abstract

Place meanings characterize reasons that an environment is valued and describe

the uniqueness of a locale. The purposes of this paper are to explain the following

complexities of place meanings: (1) place meanings are derived from lived experience, (2) place meanings are difficult to express, (3) articulating place meanings is

hampered by dominant cultural values, and (4) representation of place meanings is

audience-sensitive. These complexities lead to a crisis in representation of place

meanings for environmental planning. The crisis is not a technical problem and

cannot be resolved by the usual path of more data or further information being

brought into a decisionmaking process. Responding to the crisis requires reviewing

goals for decisionmaking forums with expanded capacity for citizenry to represent

and negotiate place meanings.

Keywords: Sense of place, environmental management, land use planning.

Introduction

Sense of place is about meanings of place. These meanings arise from people’s

experiences with the environments and people of their lives (Brandenburg and

Carroll 1995). Although place meanings are constructed through our interactions

with an environment, we often think of them as being inherent parts of the environment—something that exists even if we are not there. As humans, we create place

meanings, we share them with others, we revise their meanings to fit our needs, and

we resist meanings we do not like or that threaten our sense of who we are (David

and Wilson 2002, Oldenburg 1989). As argued by Stokowski (2002: 372–373), the

conversations and interactions with others are the processes by which place meanings are shaped.

1

 A previous version of this paper was presented at a preconference roundtable at the

Canadian Congress on Leisure Research, Nanaimo, British Columbia, May, 2005. I

appreciate the helpful comments on earlier drafts by Erik Backlund, James Barkley, Troy

Glover, Troy Hall, Gerard Kyle, and Lynne Manzo. Research for this paper was partially

supported by both the USDA North Central Research Station and the USDA Pacific

Northwest Research Station.

2

 William Stewart, University of Illinois, Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism,

104 Huff Hall, 1206 S Fourth Street, Champaign, IL 61821, email: wstewart@uiuc.edu.
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Meanings of place are important in land use decisionmaking. Our place meanings tell us which alternatives to support, and which ones to oppose. Our place

meanings give us visions for land use planning, and serve as a reference to evaluate

land uses and assess environmental degradation (Yung et al. 2003). Place meanings

are embedded in the thoughts and feelings we have about specific environments

(Brandenburg and Carroll 1995, Greider and Garkovich 1994, Williams and

Stewart 1998). We come to know people’s place meanings by talking with them.

This does not say the physical environment—the land, the water, the plants—is not

important (Stedman 2003a). This simply says that if one wants to learn another’s

meanings of the physical environment, then one needs to know the thoughts of

other people. To say it in a different way, place meanings are not found in the

physical nature of the outside world, they exist in the minds of people and in the

life of their communities.

In his thorough review of place literature, Gieryn (2000: 464–465) indicated

that places have three necessary and sufficient features: geographic location,

material form, and the “investment with meaning and value.” The latter feature is

the con-cern herein, and as a specific focus, this chapter is directed at understanding issues in coming to know and tell about our place meanings. “Place meaning”

could be confused with several other terms related to place. Place meanings that

individuals and groups assign to environments are “embedded in historically

contingent and shared cultural understandings of the terrain” (Gieryn 2000: 473);

these meanings qualitatively describe our thoughts and feelings about a place.

These descriptions do not necessarily tell us the strength of our attachment to a

place (Williams et al. 1992), the degree of our bonding, or the extent that one place

is better than another. These latter phrases are connected to “place attachment” or

“place bonding,” whereas “place meanings” characterize ways in which an environment may be valued, and in doing so, describe the uniqueness of a locale in ways

that differentiate it from other locales. Stedman (2003a: 826, italics in original) has

distinguished “place attachment” from “place meaning” in the following way:

[Place] meanings and attachment are not the same thing....

empirical treatments have not looked at the meanings, or descriptive sense of place. Understanding the content of meanings is

critically important for understanding resource conflict. It is not

enough to know the strength of one’s attachment to the setting, but

precisely to what one is attached.

Place meanings are

not found in the

physical nature of

the outside world,

they exist in the

minds of people and

in the life of their

communities.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

In short, place meanings do not entail “how much,” rather they build a context

to understand “what kind.” This chapter situates place meanings within decisionmaking about recreation resources. It positions managers as needing to understand,

and having the capacity to influence, the social construction of place meanings.

The value orientation of this chapter appreciates the potential of identifying

and understanding a diversity of place meanings in planning for land use change,

urban and rural growth, and park development. Although there may be several

explanations for land use change, the intentions of this chapter are concerned with

undifferentiated growth and development, such as urban sprawl, strip development,

and other land use changes that do not provide a sense of time or place (Lynch

1972). Development that fails to reflect a community’s sense of itself is partially

due to the inability of people and groups to assert place meanings within contexts

of decisionmaking. The value orientation is not against traditional place meanings

or dominant values, but recognizes the challenges of representing a diversity of

place meanings in planning processes owing to the privileged position of traditional

meanings and dominant values.

Place meanings are complex. There are several overlapping reasons to explain

the complexity of place meanings. This chapter details the following:

• Place meanings are derived from one’s lived experience—either by being in

the place, reading about it, or in some way knowing something about a

given locale.

• Place meanings may operate at a subconscious level, are multifaceted, and

in a continual state of flux, making them difficult to express.

• The articulation of place meanings may be hampered by dominant cultural

values, with people inclined to rely on customary values and meanings and

those already legitimized by the discourse of a planning process.

• Representation of place meanings is audience-sensitive, that is, the telling

of one’s place meanings depends on who is being told and why they need

telling.

The purposes of this chapter are to explain these complexities of place meanings and argue that collectively they lead to a crisis in the representation of place

meanings for environmental planning. The crisis is not a technical problem and

cannot be addressed by the usual path of research that brings more data and further

information into decisionmaking. Rather it serves as a premise for decisionmaking

and casts roles for citizens from being an involved public to being stakeholders

within a dialogue process about place meanings.
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Place Meanings Are Derived From Lived

Experience

Lived experience refers to our immediate consciousness of everyday life (Dilthey

1987; Schwandt 2001: 84–86; Van Manen 1990). Sometimes labeled “biographical

experiences” (Denzin 2001) or “experiences of the present” (Hodder 2000), lived

experiences possess a temporal quality indicative of the way life is lived. Our

thoughts, feelings, and emotions simply unfold as we engage in the day’s activities,

and by their nature, we generally experience them uncritically (Ceglowski 2002,

Holveck 2002, Van Manen 1990). The lived experience is not given to direct assessment; researchers can surround it, but as soon as one considers it beyond the state

of immediate consciousness, it becomes filtered and gains new meaning (Holveck

2002). When we reflect on the past and reconstruct the events of our lives, we

develop contexts to further understand our lived experiences. We usually represent

these meanings through stories or narratives that tell about our lived experiences

(Richardson and Lockridge 1991, Riessman 1993). Such narratives are not the

same as lived experiences, but they give meaning to lived experience. It is these

representations of lived experiences, usually in the form of stories, that are important to understand place meanings.

We have grown accustomed to learning about place meanings by hearing stories

of lived experience (Glover 2003, Tuan 1993). For example, advocates for prairie

restoration would characterize their experiences in prairie restoration projects as

transforming a degraded state of nature into a healthy and functioning ecosystem.

Schroeder (2000: 252) found that restoration volunteers refer to their projects

through several kinds of narratives, including metaphors of invasion and war that

evoke vivid portrayal of their place meanings:

On this frigid March day, our small band of intrepid volunteers

went to war, armed with a rag-tag assortment of loppers, pruning

shears, [etc.]... to help tip the delicate balance ever so slightly

back in favor of the little prairie, and help it fight for its existence,

before the battle—and the prairie—are lost forever.

Schroeder (2000: 250) also found restoration volunteers characterizing place

meanings through stories about healing a wounded landscape:

Large tracts of woodland such as Cedar Glen are important today

because they represent our best chance to restore and preserve this

ecosystem.... We [will] reclaim this land from farmland and turn it

back to native prairie and woodland.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Conversely, farmers have told about their daily lives as transforming unproductive fields into beneficial crops. For many farmers, stories connecting their daily

lives to their land evoke a sense of pride in bringing their produce to market for

nourishment of families near and far (Riley 1985, Sell and Zube 1986). These

stories are not to be evaluated in any sense of being “right” or “wrong.” They are

simply reflections on a day in life by people who live it.

The starting point for place meanings is that they are complex and not easily

represented. This is a prairie restoration project near the Midewin National

Tallgrass Prairie southeast of Chicago, Illinois. The project is just a few acres

yet represents the hard work of numerous volunteers who helped restore it to

its current state. They know its past and anticipate its future. Industrial and

residential development is surrounding this prairie. Nearby Midewin has

initiated the restoration of 15,000 acres of land ultimately to be part of a

system of prairies on the fringe of the Chicago metropolitan area. This prairie

could be characterized as contemporary and historical, urban and rural, natural

and artificial, healthy and isolated, holding promise as a prototype for other

projects and doomed by urban sprawl, to name a few descriptors that would

collectively confuse and fail to do justice to the place meanings held by

stakeholders of the site. Single-word descriptors and brief landscape preference statements are not place meanings. Place meanings are embedded in

narratives of lived experience of those familiar with this site. Photo courtesy

of Park Planning and Policy Lab, University of Illinois.
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Although correctness is not at issue, stories that reflect on lived experiences

provide insight to place meanings, and more generally, tell us ways in which particular environments are valued. Several scholars have argued that narratives are a

universal human expression of value (Fine 2002, Linde 1993, Polkinghorne 1988,

Rappaport 2000). In their study of special places near the USDA Midewin National

Tallgrass Prairie, Stewart et al. (2004) found place meanings were embedded in

stories about people’s lived experiences. This is particularly noteworthy given their

research methods; they asked participants to take pictures of special places in the

community, and participants subsequently were interviewed to discuss the meanings

of landscapes they photographed. Participants were not guided to construct stories

about the meanings of their pictured places—place meanings emerged naturally as

stories of lived experience. The research at Midewin, as well as that of other

scholars (Albrecht and Amey 1999, Campbell 2003, Glover 2003, Polkinghorne

1995), suggests that people express place meanings by organizing lived experiences

into the whole of stories.

With place meanings being expressed through stories of lived experiences, they

are enmeshed in a “plot” that connects the past, present, and future (Denzin 2001,

Labov 1982). The plot provides values that lead sequentially to the final conclusion

of the story. Denzin (2001: 59) argued that stories provide coherence to life’s

events in ways that make sense to the narrator. By construing place meanings as

embedded in narratives, we assess not only place meanings, but also understand

the social and community context upon which place meanings depend (Schneekloth

and Shibley 1995). Sometimes referred to as “place-making,” the social processes

that give rise to place meanings are critical to fully understand the meaning of the

place (Brandenburg and Carroll 1995; Greider and Garkovich 1994; Stokowski

1996, 2002). Reflections of lived experience often depict interaction between the

story-teller, other people, and environments (Johnstone 1990). The narrative

structure is arranged to detail the social processes, causal action, and set of conditions that lead to the meanings of place. By knowing the groups of people and

events included in the narrative, the extent to which meanings are shared is suggested.

As an example of a place-making story, a participant in the study at Midewin

discussed the meaning of a local diner in her small town. “Cristina” referred back

on some of her experiences with this diner to express meanings of the place:

By construing place

meanings as embedded in narratives,

we also understand

the social and community context upon

which place meanings depend.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Basically it’s the only restaurant that’s really close to us so we go

there a lot. And there’s nice people. My husband’s a carpenter and

contractor. One of the carpenter’s girlfriend bartends there. And

we just kind of know everybody...If something bad happens, our

local people come out. I know a woman who found out she has

cancer. On the way to cancer treatment, she was in a really bad

car accident...and so all of the people had a huge benefit, and

everybody gave things. And they had raffles and auctions. And you

see that all of the time. We come together and do benefits when

somebody dies, somebody’s kid is sick. You see, we feel a lot more

a part of the community in Manhattan [Illinois] than we did in

Bloomington [a larger city to the south]. (quoted in Stewart et al.

2004: 326).

For Cristina, meanings of the diner are intertwined with stories about her community. Her story tells about the people she knows there, their relationships to her,

and the activities they have collectively done to support each other (cf., Wilkinson

1986). This chapter asserts, for example, that the meaning the diner has for Cristina

is based upon her time spent there and the experiences she has shared with others

in (and about) this place. Numerous scholars have developed this assertion from

various theoretical perspectives; their work generally suggests that place meanings

(and related concepts) are continuously being created, reformulated, and maintained because of our experiences with people and environments of daily life (e.g.,

Albrecht and Amey 1999, Kuentzel 2000, Stokowski 2002, Urry 1995).

With a different emphasis than a “lived experience” perspective, recreation

research traditionally has conceived experiences (and other cognitions or states of

mind) through some layer of abstraction detached from experiences actually lived

by people. Although there are some noteworthy exceptions (e.g., Glover 2003,

McCormick 1996, Patterson et al. 1998), more than four decades of recreation

research indicate some general ways in which concepts have been operationalized

(or measured), and suggest that concepts linked to recreation experiences are

abstracted from lived experiences. Assessments typically provide information about

a summary or appraisal of recreation experiences and are not meant to reflect the

situationally-defined experiences of life.

For example, the Recreation Experience Preference (REP) scales require

people to recollect their leisure experience and to summarize their experience

across a variety of items by reporting some degree of achieving a generalized
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experience, say, “being with friends” as one of several categories of experience

(e.g., Driver et al. 1991). The target of most traditional approaches, such as the use

of REP scales, is not to depict recreation experiences as they are lived, felt, or

made sense of by the people being studied. In other words, such approaches assume

that one person’s “being with friends” is similar with another person’s experiences

of “being with friends,” and that the two cases could be aggregated as sharing the

same experience of “being with friends.” Although there is still significant work to

be done by using scales to assess some generalized level of experience, there is

growing interest amongst scholars to understand the meanings of experiences and

ground them in the life world of the people we study (Allison 1988, Gobster 2002,

Klitzing 2004, Patterson et al. 1998, Williams and Carr 1993). The point is not to

disparage the use of universal scales in recreation research, but to distinguish the

goal of using such scales from qualitative or meaning-based approaches. If one

wants to know the meaning of places or things, then the context by which one

experiences the places or things needs to be identified, developed, and understood

(see Lincoln and Guba 2003 for discussion of meaning-making and axiology).

Place Meanings Are Difficult to Express

It is difficult for people to express their own place meanings. Various authors have

claimed that place meanings operate at a subconscious level, are multifaceted, or in

a continual state of flux. Each of these claims will be examined in turn, and serve

to qualify our abilities to express place meanings.

Fried’s (1963) research has indicated that we are unaware of the meanings of

everyday environments like home, work place, or neighborhood, unless such places

are threatened or disrupted. His study was one of the first to support place meanings as coming to consciousness only during one’s “grief for a lost home.” Others

have indicated that place meanings “arise naturally in the context of daily experience, often without conscious intent” (Brown and Perkins 1992: 82-3; see also

Hester 1993, Tuan 1980). In their study of residential relocation processes, Brown

and Perkins (1992: 301) concluded that most people have a “taken-for-granted”

orientation to the environments of their everyday life, and suggest that people

rarely understand the meanings of environments until after they have moved away

from the environment. However in the past decade or so, several scholars have

recognized that place meanings operate at both conscious and unconscious levels.

Although focused on emotional relationships to places, Manzo’s (2003: 57) conclusion provides insight to place meanings by suggesting that feelings “can be part of a
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

conscious process where people interact with the physical environment to suit their

needs, express themselves and develop their self concept.” She acknowledged the

“taken-for-granted” everyday world, but argued that this is not exclusively the case,

particularly in situations where people have experienced exclusion from environments through conflict, displacement, and difference, which thereby “prompts

people to become more conscious of place” (Manzo 2003: 57). In short, the literature indicates that we are conscious of some place meanings and not conscious of

others. When environments are disrupted, we may come to know our place meanings—or at least, we think critically about the environment lost, and in doing so,

create a frame for the expression of our place meanings.

Place meanings are multifaceted. By construing place meanings as reflections

of lived experience, several perspectives to guide reflections of our lived experience

could be formed. Some scholars have organized these perspectives into individual

and group-based meanings, with the latter meaning being either shared or contested. In their thorough review of place literature for recreation management,

Farnum et al. (2005) distinguished personal (or individual) cognitions of place

from social or community-based processes of place. They linked personal meanings

of place to preferences, memories, feelings, and unique individual experiences with

environments and linked community-based processes to shared meanings common

to a particular group of people (Farnum et al. 2005: 9–12). At least two stories of

lived experience could result, with one focused on individual implications and the

other portraying collective action with others. From a different approach, Williams

and Patterson (1996) detailed the “sociocultural paradigm” of natural resource

management. They characterized the need for sensitivity to “social meaning” and

provided several examples of plurality in meanings (and ensuing conflict) directed

at the same environment. Extending their argument to the multifaceted nature of

place meanings, another layer of complexity would be to include resistance to other

narratives within one’s own reflections of lived experience. In other words, my

place meanings not only reflect my lived experiences, but are a reaction to competing meanings that threaten my own. From yet another approach, Cheng and Daniels

(2003) suggested that the meaning of a place is contingent on the geographic scale

of one’s interaction with the place.

Place meanings are dynamic as a result of their dependence on geographic

scale, competing place meanings, and whether they are personal or community

oriented. Several researchers have suggested that place meanings are in a continual

state of flux, or put differently, place meanings are negotiated with day-to-day

interactions about the place (cf., Ahrentzen 1992, Cooper Marcus 1992, Greider

When environments

are disrupted, we

think critically about

the environment

lost, and create a

frame for our place

meanings.
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and Garkovich 1994, Hannigan 2002, Hester 1993). Stokowski (2002) was explicit

in her depiction of the unstable nature of place relationships. She argued “places

are always in the process of being created, always provisional and uncertain, and

always capable of being discursively manipulated towards desired (individual and

collective) ends” (Stokowski 2002: 374). Her discussion detailed the social processes of place-making, and depicted place meanings as never finalized but always

in the process of being made. Manzo (2003) also depicted place relationships as

“fluid” and “quite dynamic.” She traced the work of several authors who explained

our dynamic relationships with places through our movement from home to work,

inside to outside our community, dwelling to journey, to name a few variables

(Manzo 2003: 51–52). Because we move through various places, the context to

appreciate places from our past also changes. The implication of Manzo’s discussion is that our place meanings, as stories of lived experiences, are affected by

the vantage point from which we tell our story. The research indicates that place

meanings are not stable, but have potential for revision owing to several forces,

including our encounters with other people and places.

This discussion casts place meanings as being difficult to express. We are not

always conscious of the meanings of our environments, reflections of the same

lived experience may result in multiple layers of stories, and the meanings themselves are situationally defined and dependent upon negotiations with other people

and places. Until we consciously reflect on the environments of our lives, we may

not fully know, nor can we tell, their current meanings.

Place Meanings Are Different Than Dominant

Environmental Meanings

Place meanings are about a distinctive whole that includes the person, the environment, and their lived experience with the locale. Place meanings characterize the

unique whole, and in some sense, exist as arguments to distinguish the place from

other environments (Gieryn 2000: 464–465). However there are other environmental meanings “out there.” These other meanings permeate society, and have been

shaping ways we collectively conceive environments for hundreds of years. Referred to as dominant cultural meanings, the other meanings “out there” are different than individual place meanings and often prevent distinguishing them.

Dominant cultural meanings inhibit the articulation of other place meanings by

inviting acquiescence, positioning a normative claim, and having potential to

diminish the relevance of alternate place meanings.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

As an example, a dominant environmental meaning that has been privileged by

American culture has been the construction of pristine land and has been coupled

with a well-developed lexicon that further signifies the value of pristine land.

Several excellent histories of cultural meanings have chronicled the development

of the untouched and virgin wilderness as the North American idealized landscape

(Hannigan 2002, Nash 2001, Oelschlager 1991, Runte 1992) (fig. 7). These histories have involved politicians, academics, artists, writers, journalists, businessmen,

various layers of government, and numerous organizations. Indeed, there is nary

a profession or academic discipline that has not played a role in the crowning of

pristine land as being America’s most sacred myth of origin (e.g., Burnham 2000,

Cronon 1995, Denevan 1998, Gottlieb 1993, Hannigan 2002, Takaki 1979). The

vocabulary of dominant cultural meanings has expanded to provide detail about the

array of values connected to such landscapes. Terms such as biodiversity, endangered species, ecological integrity, and ecosystem health, for examples, have made

their way into public consciousness. These terms ostensibly facilitate our ability as

a culture to label the meaning of any given environment, provide a comparison to

the ideal, and protect a dominant meaning.

However the public language of conservation and land use planning has limited

overlap with personal and community-based meanings of place. The purpose of

public forums and other meetings between land use planners and citizens could

be viewed as struggles to communicate with one another and search for mutual

understanding. The negotiation of common ground often favors the use of a public

language so that all sides will recognize the discourse as shared knowledge, and

presumably the meanings will be mutually understood. The problem lies in the

representation of place through use of a public language that fails to do justice to

our lived experience in the environment and the place meanings constructed as part

of this experience. The result of place meanings being articulated as part of public

discourse is that place meanings may appear to agree with dominant environmental

meanings. In actuality the public discourse is reflective of tension between the

language of conservation and one’s lived experience linked to place meanings. The

problem of representation is one of expressing place meanings in ways that recognize their tangency to dominant meanings but encourages their multilayered, fluid,

and contextualized content to be told.

Even though public language fails to fully capture our place meanings, we

acquiesce to the discourse, and may even feel as if our intended place meanings

were received by others. As an example, Gottlieb (1993) characterized the emergence of the anti-toxics movement of the 1970s as separating from the tactics of

Public forums and

other meetings

between land use

planners and citizens could be

viewed as struggles

to communicate with

one another and

search for mutual

understanding.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

traditional environmentalism. He chronicled their learning process that eventually

led to strategies of direct action, public protests, and personal testimony, and

attributed this movement to the inability of the language and meanings of traditional environmentalism to represent their perspectives (Gottlieb 1993: 162–204).

Part of the enticement to use public language is connected to the ambiguity in

“language and terminology used to discuss nature” (Hull and Robertson 2000: 97).

Although focused on restoration ecology, the discussion by Hull and Robertson

(2000) is applicable to many forums and conversations about environments of our

lives. They asserted “the language of nature matters,” and argued:

The problem is that the language of nature is often neither

precise nor value neutral. There exist multiple, conflicting,

imprecise, and biased definitions of the terms used to discuss

nature. These vagaries of language can cause conflict that delays or

derails well-intentioned efforts to restore and manage nature. This

conflict results when people use the same terms to intentionally or

unintentionally mean different things or use particular definitions

to suppress or promote particular values. (Hull and Robertson

2000: 97).

Rather than dominant cultural meanings facilitating representation of place,

they act as invitations to grasp words we know others will recognize. By using a

public vocabulary and accepted format of representation, our place meanings

Figure 7—Several histories of cultural meanings have chronicled untouched

and virgin wilderness as the North American idealized landscape.

Maria Stiefel
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

become abstracted from the nuances of lived experience, unwittingly deviate

toward dominant meanings, and ultimately lead to a diminishment of any difference. This acquiescence toward dominant meanings is likely to happen in many

contexts, but in particular, within forums in which place meanings are being told

to an audience unfamiliar to the speaker.

Dominant cultural meanings often exist in binary oppositions that structure

debate about land use change (Gottlieb 1993, Gray and Kusel 1998). The “use

vs. preservation” dichotomy has a longstanding history as the generic casting of

dominant meanings. The poles of this dichotomy shape public discourse, which in

turn, influences the representation of place meanings (White 1995). The tendency

is for place meanings to acquiesce to dominant meanings and to regress toward one

of the poles of the dichotomy. As a result, the qualitative distance between the place

meaning and the public discourse may lose its tension, and differences between the

two will ultimately disappear.

Although not focused on the ambiguity of language, Stokowski (2002) was

nonetheless concerned about “discourses of power” reaffirming dominant meanings.

Her essay argued that power differentials in society favor traditional cultural values

regarding recreational environments. She observed that forces behind dominant

cultural values generally legitimize, and ultimately garner support for, their idealized landscapes, by effectively marginalizing other meanings and other landscapes

(Stokowski 2002: 376–377). Her observations caution us about the normative force

behind dominant cultural values, and their ability to manipulate negotiations of

place to reaffirm traditional values. Stokowski provided a compelling argument

that dominant cultural forces are staking a claim with their idealized landscapes

and sufficiently deflating any sense of urgency to understand “alternate” meanings.

Albrecht and Amey (1999) also framed dominant environmental values in a

normative context. They characterized the construction of community-based

narratives that integrate public language and symbols. These narratives act as

“truths” and become crystallized, visible, and carry authority during times of conflict and threatened change. Although not explicitly focused on place, their study

depicts the ability of dominant cultural values to function as imperatives and to

manipulate in land use decisionmaking. Place meanings, when unique to a community or group of citizens, may not be fully defined, whereas traditional meanings

will be more immediately known and identifiable. In such cases, the claims of

traditional meanings will appear as commonly accepted truths. There is more than
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a century of momentum behind traditional meanings that makes community-based

place meanings, particularly if they are not aligned with dominant meanings,

challenging to voice.

With place meanings being asserted in contexts of dominant cultural discourse,

community-based and alternate place meanings may appear trivial, narrow in

scope, and lacking relevance. When the narrative of one landscape is socially and

politically privileged through decades of build-up, other meanings and other landscapes decrease in status. To this point, Cronon (1995) framed wilderness as a

“dangerous” land ethic owing to its power to diminish the value of other places—

particularly places of home, work, and everyday life. In his critique of wilderness

as a dominant environmental value, he argued that it poses a serious threat to

responsible environmentalism:

Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the

environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better

or worse we call home. Most of our serious environmental

problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve those

problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much

about using nature as about not using it. (Cronon 1995: 85)

The point is not to disparage wilderness per se, but to illustrate the power of

dominant cultural meanings to frame community-based, localized, and otherwise

unique place meanings as low priority in a policy triage of environments to “save”

and meanings to “defend.” The upshot is that when place meanings compete in the

same arena as dominant cultural meanings, place meanings are challenged to

maintain their integrity and usually fail to enhance their political strength. Such is

the concern of Cronon (2003) who wondered about the representation of the layers

of humanity who have inhabited the Apostle Islands in the southwest corner of

Lake Superior. His essay detailed the challenges of managing a wilderness full of

human stories that directly compete with cultural and institutional meanings of

wilderness.

Place Meanings Are Audience-Sensitive

In our daily life, what we say depends upon to whom we say it. If I describe a

committee meeting to a colleague, it sounds different than when I describe it to an

office secretary and different yet again when I describe it to a neighbor. There may

be as many ways to characterize my committee meeting as there are kinds of people

who would listen to my story. Each person reflects a different relationship with me

When local place

meanings compete

in the same arena

as dominant cultural

meanings, place

meanings are challenged to maintain

their integrity and

usually fail to enhance their political

strength.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

and implies a different purpose for telling the story that, in turn, affects the telling

of the lived experience. Likewise with depictions of place meanings—the intended

meaning of the telling depends upon who is being told.

Place meanings are consciously expressed when a proposal is being considered

to develop or change the landscape. A public meeting or workshop is held to gather

public input, and place meanings are voiced by using the proposed change as a

focus. In these cases, place meanings usually are defined in contrast to the “other”

with the purpose of demonstrating the moral superiority of the speaker’s place

meaning (Albrecht and Amey 1999). Such forums tend to be adversarial and competitive in that expectations of the public hearing and planning process are that one

meaning will win and others will lose (Freudenburg and Gramling 1994, Yaffee

1994).

Because of the adversarial nature of many public hearings or forums for dialogue, we frame our place meanings to carry the most powerful message to the

audience, or more importantly, to decisionmakers. In these cases, power is embodied in large numbers of people, who tell similar stories, that clearly lead to

commonly-held moral principles for behavior. For example, Gottlieb (1993)

characterized the rise of women in environmental activism as intimately connected

to their roles as mothers and homemakers. He stated that “one of the most powerful

protest images that emerged out of the Love Canal protests was a Mother’s Day

Die-In, focusing on children’s exposure to hazardous wastes and issues of reproductive health” (Gottlieb 1993: 209). Although the “Die-In” effectively protested the

violation of home as a safe place for raising a family, other protesters further

advanced their place meanings by exchanging stories that brought out the pain and

suffering of their own family and neighborhood (Gottlieb 1993: ch. 5). The “DieIn” was an expression of a collective narrative detached from the place meanings of

any individual protester, but was directed at gaining public attention for their cause.

Albrecht and Amey’s (1999) concern was that community-based narratives may

grow distant from the reality of lived experiences. Their study provides insight to

ways in which communities engage in place-making to “create and market their

definitions of reality based on a wide variety of stated or hidden agendas” (Albrecht

and Amey 1999: 755). The implication is that place meanings are constructed for

particular purposes and consciously developed for particular audiences. In some

sense, the audience-sensitive nature of expressing place meanings reiterates their

dynamic qualities and also underscores their function as political tools (Stokowski

2002).
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A Crisis of Representation

On the surface, place meaning is a simple concept that describes reasons an environment is valued and considered unique. However, the meanings themselves are

anything but simple and exist in many forms:

• From subconscious, to conscious, to politically-manipulated.

• From detailing lived experience of a day in life to reflecting the struggles

of a community.

• From describing land to portraying cultural imperatives.

• From stable to fluctuating.

This complexity of meanings reflects the varied ways we develop relationships

with environments and with other people. However, if place meanings are at the

core of land use decisionmaking, and many authors have argued as much

(Brandenburg and Carroll 1995, Cheng and Daniels 2003, Stedman 2003b,

Williams and Patterson 1996), what forums are developed that allow the complexity of place meanings to come forth? Although there are some creative exceptions

(Gobster and Barro 2000, Kruger and Shannon 2000, Lee 1993), land use planning

processes too often are characterized by one-way flows of communication that fail

to represent and effectively negotiate place meanings (Cortner and Moote 1999,

Fischer 2000, Yaffee 1994).

The lack of adequate venues to negotiate place meanings is symptomatic of

a larger crisis of representation across society. For several reasons, forums for

community-based dialogue and collective action have weakened over the past century (Wilkinson 1986). In his elaborate argument, Fischer (2000) claimed that the

increased authority of technical expertise runs counter to democratic ideals, and by

implication, has precluded the development of forums for citizen participation in

decisionmaking. Yankelovich (1991) also has been concerned with the privileged

position of technical expertise within environmental decision processes at the exclusion of the representation of public values. Through a framework of communication theory, Yankelovich (1991: 217) argued for a “kind of open dialogue among

public, experts, and leaders in which there is give-and-take, two-way communication” that shapes a common destiny for a community. Yankelovich (1991) suggested

that a critical element of representation is the audience to whom we are speaking.

If our audience is only experts or decisionmakers, then only experts are informed.

In addition, if we tell place meanings to others, we expect to hear place meanings

The lack of adequate

venues to negotiate

place meanings is

symptomatic of

a larger crisis of

representation

across society.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

from others. Yankelovich (1991) recommended the development of creative forums

for dialogue to encourage participants to learn from one another.

In their argument for a civic science, Kruger and Shannon (2000) championed

approaches to inquiry that allow people to express aspects of their lived experiences

to others, referred to as social learning. They concluded, among other things, that

social learning processes improve relations among citizens and create a common

vision for a community (Kruger and Shannon 2000: 475). Also concerned with the

lack of forums to bring together citizens, Putnam (2000) argued that opportunities

for citizens to “discover” their collective selves and strengthen their sense of community through the creation of shared visions are gradually being re-invented.

Historically, recreation managers have defined their positions as ones that develop

opportunities for social learning and community engagement. In the context of

concern for the disappearance of community and the loss of public places for

collective action, Hunnicutt (2000: 58) argued that recreation researchers and managers at one time were driven by “visions of social reform and transformation” of

community. He urged us to re-visit “our fields’ traditional concern with revitalizing

communities” (Hunnicutt 2000: 60). From a similar starting point, Arai and Pedlar

(2003) also questioned the movement of recreation research and management away

from community revisioning and social learning, and toward a context of individualism that emphasizes personal choice, individual experience, and self-interest.

They rejected the notion of community as being “simply the utilitarian context for

meeting private ends” (Arai and Pedlar 2003: 187) and argued a position of social

engagement that emphasizes the value of bringing “people together around practices of shared meaning” (Arai and Pedlar 2003: 188).

Sandercock (2003) characterized the paradigm shift in urban planning from a

similar perspective. In her comprehensive critique she argued that the “old model”

of planning was centered on expert-based, hierarchical decision structures in which

knowledge was technically based and grounded in quantitative analysis. She described “new models” based on communicative and value-driven rationality focused

on interaction among people who essentially exchange stories grounded in experiential and contextual knowledge (Sandercock 2003: 209-210; cf., Weber 2000,

Wilson et al. 2004). Sandercock (2003) concluded her text on new strategies for

planning by calling for an expanded language of planning. She argued for a

“language to encompass the lived experience” of our cities in order to bring to

the forefront questions of value and meaning (Sandercock 2003: 221).
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What To Do About Place Meanings?

By detailing their complexity, some hurdles have been identified to integrating

place meanings into land use planning processes. If the past 20 years are viewed as

a shift from “expert-based” to “citizen-involved” decisionmaking, the next 20 years

will further democratize decisionmaking (Cortner and Moote 1999, Wondolleck

and Yaffee 2000). Responding to the crisis of representation of place meanings will

be a major task, and will require expanded forums for public dialogue and deepening citizen access. The complexity of place meanings suggests several tenets for

approaching citizen dialogue forums. As transition to a democratized decision

structure and more engaged citizenry, the following tenets are suggested:

• To know a person’s place meanings, is to know the person.

• To know another person’s place meanings does not diminish the value of

your own place meanings.

• A person’s place meanings will change across time and situations, yet such

change does not decrease the credibility or legitimacy of the person’s place

meanings.

• Place meanings shared by a large number of people do not connote a

comparatively larger truth or more definitive moral authority.

• There is no last word (or final truth) in place meaning; there is no last

word in appropriate management regime.

• Dialogue forums should encourage scientists, professionals, and citizens to

share, argue, and negotiate place meanings.

• Dialogue forums are about building community, and are not about

reaching consensus or resolving conflict over place meanings.

• Decisions should have transparent links to dialogue forums.

These eight tenets are provided in the spirit of expanding the boundaries of

public involvement and reconsidering the roles of scientists, professionals, and

citizens in planning processes.

The need to develop stakeholder dialogue forums is not new, nor is the call

to integrate notions of place into resource management. In addition, the above

tenets do not tell resource managers what to do with information from stakeholder

dialogue forums, nor do they contain specifics that connect place with decisionmaking. However, seldom discussed is the importance of place meanings and the

challenges to their representation. This chapter contributes to the transition of

agency decisionmaking from expert-based to citizen-involved by identifying a

major challenge: the representation of place meanings.

Responding to the

crisis of representation of place meanings will be a major

task, and will require

expanded forums

for public dialogue

and deepening

citizen access.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

The shift to citizen-involved decisionmaking is not without its concerns.

Citizens who identify as stakeholders may not reflect the diversity of voices in a

community, state, or nation. Some might argue that the lack of balance in public

forums privileges some voices at the expense of others (Hibbard and Madsen 2003).

Whether democratized planning models privilege certain groups remains an open

question (Sturtevant and Bryan 2004). The eight tenets above suggest that roles for

stakeholders are ones requiring commitment of time, energy, and willingness to

listen and learn. Those who join dialogue forums may share characteristics that

others do not hold and that may be related to stage of life, career cycle, income, or

family situation.

The concern of this chapter is not about who enters into stakeholder dialogue

forums—even though it is a worthwhile question to ask. This chapter takes

the dialogue forum as a given, and considers challenges to the discourse. In

Sandercock’s (2003) “new models,” goals for planning are related to level of trust

developed among participants and the extent of social value created for places and

events of the locale. Sandercock (2003: 214–227) provided several examples of

successful projects in which trust among stakeholders was enhanced and value for

various places was created because of the mutual sharing of lived experiences of

citizens. The message of this chapter is to put place meanings as lived experiences

at the forefront of decisions about land use change.

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Chapter 6—Understanding Cultural Variation in Place

Meaning

Gerard T. Kyle and Cassandra Y. Johnson1

Abstract

In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding variation in stakeholder

attitudes and behaviors related to public lands and natural resources. In this framework, we suggest that individual and collective perspectives related to these resources can best be understood by examining the congruence between the

individual’s identity, the identity of their cultural group, and the identity of the

setting in question. Adopting a social constructivist orientation, we suggest that

identity governs the meanings associated with place that are manifested in attitude

and behavior. Although a variety of propositions have been presented in the literature that have been tailored toward the perspectives of specific populations, testing

of those propositions have highlighted significant limitations. Our framework

transcends the characteristics of specific social units and provides insight on an

approach that can be used to understand the perspectives of a broad range of

stakeholders.

Keywords: Identity, culture, natural resource management.

Introduction

...walking in the same place, people from different cultures see,

experience and value different landscapes, and construct with those

landscapes entirely different relationships. They do this according

to their cultural beliefs and knowledge, locating value in the things

that their culture values. (Strang 1997: 276)

Over the past decade there has been growing understanding within the natural

resource management community that people are part of the ecosystem and, as

such, the human dimensions of ecosystems ought to be integrated into public land

management policy and practice (Clark and Stein 2003, Galliano and Loeffler

1

 Gerard T. Kyle is an assistant professor, Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism

Sciences, Texas A&M University, 2261 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-2261, email:

gerard@tamu.edu. Cassandra Y. Johnson is a research social scientist, U.S. Department of

Agriculture, Forest Service, Southern Research Station, 320 Green Street, Athens, GA

30602, email: cjohnson09@fs.fed.us.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

1999, Williams and Patterson 1999). This realization has been a long time coming

and the execution of policy designed to integrate stakeholder perspectives within

ecosystem management plans has been complicated by the heterogeneity of the

communities in which these lands exist. Finding consensus on a range of issues is

becoming increasingly difficult. These challenges are likely to be exacerbated by

the continued disproportionate growth among minority groups and shifting migration patterns within the United States. Although there may be agreement within the

community concerning the physical attributes of a particular setting, there is often

divergence on the appropriate use of these settings, their importance, and how they

ought to be managed.

One approach that is producing some success for managers attempting to

navigate these complex issues has been to focus on the meanings relevant stakeholders ascribe to the resources in question (Kruger and Jakes 2003). This approach

acknowledges that public lands, and the places that lie within, are symbolic landscapes that differ in meaning dependent on the cultural lens through which these

environments are viewed. Further, Greider and Garkovich (1994: 1) noted that

these place meanings “reflect our self definitions that are grounded in culture.”

Although recent efforts documenting place-based approaches in natural resource

management have demonstrated its utility for integrating the perspectives of a

variety of stakeholders (Austin and Kaplan 2003, Laurian 2004), efforts to integrate these approaches to address issues arising from growth among racial and

ethnic groups within the United States remain scant. Whereas a growing body of

work has developed that has explored the meanings various racial and ethnic groups

within the United States associate with natural environments and public lands, few

attempts have been made to integrate these perspectives into existing management

plans. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to present a framework for understanding

the meanings different cultural2 groups assign to natural environments and suggest

ways in which this framework can be applied in the day-to-day management of

public lands.

2

 Throughout this paper, we use culture to refer to socially transmitted, often symbolic,

information that shapes human behavior and that regulates human society so that people

can successfully maintain themselves and reproduce. Culture also has mental, behavioral,

and material aspects; it is patterned and provides a model for proper behavior (Bodley

2005).

Although there may

be agreement within

the community

concerning the

physical attributes

of a particular setting, there is often

divergence on the

appropriate use of

these settings, their

importance, and how

they ought to be

managed.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Our conceptualization of place meaning3 is grounded in Saegert and Winkel’s

(1990) sociocultural paradigm. This perspective suggests that the meanings people

assign to landscapes are not only constructed by individuals, they are also conveyed

by the social and cultural group with which people are most intimately connected.

Working from a symbolic interactionist perspective, Greider and Garkovich (1994:

2) reaffirmed Saegert and Winkel’s perspective and suggested that “Meanings are

not inherent in the nature of things. Instead, the symbols and meanings that comprise landscapes reflect what people in cultural groups define to be proper and

improper relationships among themselves and between themselves and the environment.” Greider and Garkovich also suggested that the construction of landscapes

by cultural groups and the symbols used to communicate their meaning provides

insight on the group’s definition of themselves. In this sense, group identity acts to

shape the meanings different cultures ascribe to specific environments, but it also

provides these groups with their own sense of self (Stewart et al. 2004). The connection between self-identity and place identity is also reflected in the work of

Proshansky (1978).4

 He suggested that place identity is an important component of

an individual’s self-identity where the self is reflected in the physical environment.

Just as the roles humans occupy throughout the day (e.g., parent, employee, coach)

shift to reveal different aspects of the self, the various settings in which these roles

are acted also provide insight into individual identity. Combined, the work of these

authors suggests that the meanings people ascribe to specific environments are

influenced by how they define themselves individually and as part of a collective.

These meanings are communicated through language and symbols that individuals

and collectives associate with specific environments. Thus, the framework we have

adopted for understanding the meanings different cultural groups assign to natural

environments emphasizes the importance of understanding cultural and individual

identities of those in question.

3

 We use place meaning throughout this manuscript to refer to the thoughts, feelings, and

emotions individuals and collectives express toward place; where place may differ in scale

(i.e., geographic expanse) and tangibility (i.e., symbols vs. settings). Thus, an individual or

collective’s attachment to place is reflected in the constellation of meanings they associate

with the setting or symbol. These meanings often vary in type and intensity and provide the

descriptive foundation for understanding human-place bonding.

4 Saegert and Winkel (1990) and Greider and Garkovich’s (1994) perspectives on identity

place greater emphasis on broader macro forces of culture and social group affiliation,

whereas Proshansky (1978) was more concerned with self-identification processes

occurring at the individual level.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

We suggest that a better understanding of individual and cultural definitions

of public lands can be gained by examining the congruence between individual

identity, cultural identity, and place identity (fig. 8). Our perspective draws from

work related to symbolic interactionism and social identity theory (SIT). Social

identity theory focuses on the extent to which individuals identify themselves in

terms of group memberships (Tajfel and Turner 1986). The central tenet of SIT is

that individuals define their identities along two dimensions: (a) cultural—defined

by membership in various social groups and (b) personal—the idiosyncratic attributes that distinguish an individual from others. Cultural and personal identities

are said to lie at opposite ends of the spectrum, becoming more or less salient

depending on the context. Place identity can be considered an element of both

individual and cultural identity. The meanings that are ascribed (by both the

individual and society) to identities are also reflected in the spatial contexts in

which the individual or cultural groups exist. For individuals with strong cultural

ties, the lens through which they view the world around them is likely to be shaped

by the dominant perspective of the cultural entity to which they are most intimately

connected.5

 For example, research has shown that some African Americans perceive

wildland environments as hostile and threatening (Johnson 1998, Johnson and

Bowker 2004). For these people, their identities are rooted in a history of prejudice

and discrimination (e.g., slavery, share-cropping, lynching). Wildland environments

were often the stage where these unsavory events occurred and, more recently, have

5

 Cultural ties are reflected in individuals’ sense of belonging to their culture (Parham and

Helms 1981, 1985a, 1985b) and the extent to which they embrace their culture’s attitudes,

values, and behaviors (Pope-Davis et al. 2000).

Figure 8—Framework for understanding the cultural dimensions of place meaning.

For individuals with

strong cultural ties,

the lens through

which they view

the world around

them is likely to be

shaped by the dominant perspective of

the cultural entity

to which they are

most intimately

connected.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

been used as a tool to perpetuate inequality. Although we do not suggest that these

historical events solely define the individual and culture, these events and efforts of

resistance act to shape how some African Americans view themselves and how they

would have others view them. In this context, their cultural identity and the meanings this culture ascribes to wildland settings compels them to avoid these environs.

Often, it is only when individuals from these groups are able to ignore the structure

and norms imposed by their cultural affiliation that they are able to more comfortably interact with these environments. We will return to our identity-based framework toward the end of our review and discuss how the framework can be used to

better enable managers to more effectively integrate varied cultural perspectives

within their management plans.

With this in mind, we first discuss the importance of understanding the meanings different cultures ascribe to natural environments for public land management.

We then provide an overview of the various theoretical perspectives researchers

have used to understand variations in meanings among different populations and

document the diversity of meanings that have appeared in the literature. Finally,

we discuss several potential applications of our framework.

The Importance of Understanding the Meanings

Specific Populations Ascribe to Natural

Environments and Public Lands

The need to critically examine the cultural dimensions of place meaning arises out

of the rapidly changing demography of the United States. For example, over the

next 50 years, the U.S. population is expected to increase 50 percent over 1995

population levels (U.S. Department of Commerce 1996). Much of this growth will

be driven by immigration and relatively higher fertility rates among the largest immigrant groups. Over this period, the proportion of African Americans will increase from 12 to 15 percent, the proportion who are Hispanic will increase from 9

to 21 percent, and the proportion who are of other ethnic origins (including Asians

and other ethnic classifications) will increase from less than 4 percent to more than

11 percent (Cordell et al. 2002, Johnson et al. 2004).

Several authors have noted that this rapid population growth has important

implications for the manner in which available land resources, including public

lands, are managed (Cordell et al. 2002, Johnson et al. 2004, Pimentel et al. 1998).

For example, Cordell et al. (2002), using data collected from the National Survey

on Recreation and the Environment, observed that Hispanics, African Americans,
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

and Asian/Pacific Islanders are more likely to indicate that humans have a right

to modify and control nature and that our technology will ultimately allow us to

correct large-scale impacts of human habitation and activity on Earth. At a more

local level, Chavez (2002) observed that Hispanics’ use of picnic grounds situated

in southern Californian national forests differs from use by the White majority. In

her data, Hispanics were more inclined to use these areas for family gatherings

involving large groups. Reflecting White recreationists’ preferences, these settings

were originally developed to support single groups of no more than 10 people.

Other authors have also expressed concern that public lands risk being considered

irrelevant by minority populations (Chavez 2002, Johnson et al. 2004, Low et al.

2002, Taylor 2000). Given their dependence on public support, the prospect of

growing ambivalence among minority populations toward these environments has

serious implications for the future of public land management agencies. Failure to

more actively embrace the multicultural milieu in which these settings exist will

inevitably lead to declining public support and, perhaps, their demise.

Finally, Dwyer and Childs (2004) also noted that the changing distribution of

people across the landscape has eroded many of the traditional demarcations used to

distinguish urban and rural environments. Urban sprawl and the development of

“recreational enclaves” that lie adjacent to public lands have consumed large tracts

of open space. These migration patterns have involved new people in planning and

development activities who sometimes hold different perspectives from those of the

existent residents. In addition to affecting the social and ecological structure of

local communities, the influx of new residents also has the potential to affect the

use of neighboring public lands. Managers of these settings face a difficult task of

integrating new perspectives into existing management frameworks without alienating existing stakeholders. Inevitably, competing claims to the resource will emerge.

Although resolutions for these kinds of issues may not always be feasible, insight

on the meanings that these groups ascribe to the resource provides managers with

valuable information as to why these conflicts exist.

Therefore, there are indications that policy and practice related to the management of public lands will undergo dramatic change over the coming decades. It is

our contention that an understanding of the meanings relevant stakeholders ascribe

to public lands provides managers with a valuable tool for accommodating the

growing racial and ethnic diversity within the United States in addition to resolving

conflicts among stakeholders.

Failure to more

actively embrace

the multicultural

milieu in which

public lands exist

will inevitably lead

to declining public

support and, perhaps, their demise.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Theoretical Perspectives Used for Understanding

Variation in Place Meanings Among Specific

Populations

The Marginality/Ethnicity Hypotheses

Early work appearing in the outdoor recreation literature focused primarily on

minorities’ under-participation in outdoor recreation compared to the level of participation by the White majority. This work was guided primarily by two theories:

marginality and ethnicity hypotheses. The marginality hypothesis was originally

developed to explain low levels of outdoor recreation participation among African

Americans. This view holds that African American participation patterns result

from limited socioeconomic resources, which in turn are a function of historical

patterns of discrimination (Washburne 1978). Alternately, the ethnicity hypothesis

explains differences in participation as reflecting divergent norms, value systems,

and social organization between majority and minority populations. As an initial set

of alternative explanations, the two hypotheses served to bring attention to the role

of poverty and historical discrimination and cultural influences as major determinants of intergroup differences in patterns of recreation participation.

Several authors, however, have questioned the utility of the marginality/

ethnicity theories for examining minority issues in outdoor recreation contexts

(Floyd 1998, Floyd and Gramann 1993, Hutchison 2000, Stodolska 1998). These

criticisms touch upon (a) the theories’ biased ideological assumptions (Floyd

1998), (b) independent applications of each theory that fail to acknowledge other

influences, and (c) investigations that focus only on participation rates rather than

understanding the factors driving difference. According to marginality theory, the

reduction of socioeconomic barriers should lead racial and ethnic minorities to

exhibit leisure preferences valued by the dominant group (Allison 1988). Additionally, there are those who suggest that assimilation in its later stages weakens ethnic

ties and produces behavioral styles similar or identical to mainstream society. Both

of these explanations have been criticized for their Anglo-conformity bias given

that they reflect a normative viewpoint specifying how difference in racial and

ethnic participation in outdoor recreation should be addressed rather than a more

objective assessment of their actual causes.

In spite of these criticisms, these theories have and continue to provide a lens—

albeit with limitation—to understand minitories’ interaction with outdoor recreation settings. We would consider it inappropriate to fully discard the tenets offered
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

by them in search of an all-encompassing explanation that accounts for all variation. Seldom are such “golden eggs” found in social science. Incorporating these

with other contemporary explanations that provide insight on the underlying

causes or processes that contribute to variation among groups, we may then begin

to make progress toward understanding cultural variation in its entirety. To this

end, Hutchison (2000) recently suggested that focusing on the identity of the

cultural unit in question may provide a complementary addition to the marginality/

ethnicity theories. This work extends earlier efforts by providing insight on the

underlying (or “intervening”) influence of variation in leisure styles. He noted that

identity theory examines the degree to which individuals identify with the larger

group to which they are reported to be affiliated. Understanding that affiliations

exist along a continuum, we are then in a better position to state the extent to which

variations in attitudes and behaviors are attributable to cultural affiliations.

Place Interaction and Place Meaning

Participation rates in outdoor recreation activities are not the focus of this paper

per se, but several studies have shown that place interaction plays an important role

in shaping the personal meanings that individuals ascribe to place and preferences

for these settings. Tuan (1977) was among the first to note the importance of place

interaction in shaping place meaning when he suggested that what begins as undifferentiated space becomes a place imbued with meaning as we get to know it better.

Since then, a number of investigations of place meaning and related concepts (i.e.,

sense of place, place attachment, place dependence) have reaffirmed Tuan’s observation in a variety of contexts (Eisenhauer et al. 2000, Hammitt et al. 2004,

Milligan 1998, Vorkinn and Riese 2001). In the context of natural environments,

several studies have also shown that the preferences for these settings and outdoor

recreation activities are influenced by early childhood experiences (Bixler et al.

2002, Chawla 1999, Palmer et al. 1998). Overall, these studies indicate that early

and persistent exposure to natural environments, often coupled with social reinforcement from family and friends, engenders lasting preferences for these landscapes and environmental sensitivity in adult years. Without place interaction,

however, the meanings individuals ascribe to natural environments are likely to be

more strongly influenced by the dominant perspectives embodied in their cultural

affiliations (Johnson et al. 1997). Given the “collective memories” of these groups

relative to natural environments, the identities of these settings in the minds of

Place interaction

plays an important

role in shaping the

personal meanings

that individuals

ascribe to place and

preferences for

these settings.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

minority groups may act to further inhibit setting interaction. In addition to suggesting that African Americans avoided natural environments because they were

symbolic reminders of racism and oppression, Virden and Walker (1999) also noted

that their respondents’ perception of natural environments as threatening spaces

could also have been influenced by their anxiety derived from potential encounters

with undesirable and dangerous animals (fig. 9). Wallace and Witter (1992) observed a similar response among African American focus group members when

asked about their attitudes toward natural settings.

The notion that wildland environments are the preserve and construction of

White America, a theme that runs through much of the literature that will be

reviewed here, is also reflected in a more recent explanation concerning minorities’

engagement in activities that occur within these settings (Shaw 2001, Shinew and

Floyd 2005). Recently, Shaw suggested that leisure can be considered a domain in

which people, either individually or collectively, are able to challenge (or resist)

power distributions within society. Unlike in other domains in life, the relative

freedom of leisure settings “make them prime locations for resistance activities as

a result of increased opportunities to exercise personal power” (Shaw 2001: 187).

Although her presentation of ideas related to resistance was discussed largely within

the context of women’s leisure and the structure imposed by gender roles, she noted

that her framework could also be applied to understanding leisure-related constraints confronting minority populations. Shinew and Floyd subsequently adopted

this framework to understand the leisure choices made by African Americans. They

suggested that resistance among African Americans could take three forms: (a)

pioneers who, as individuals or collectives, participate in leisure activities in spite

of being an extreme minority; (b) participation in parallel or corresponding activities, although doing so exclusively within their own race; and (c) abstention by

individuals or groups who choose not to participate in certain leisure activities as a

form of protest. Thus, in addition to concerns related to fear and feeling threatened

in wildland environments, some African Americans may also deliberately choose to

avoid these settings because they are perceived to be reflective of White America.

Although direct empirical evidence of this phenomena has yet to appear in the

literature, Shinew and Floyd pointed to Outley’s (2002) examination of leisure

socialization among African American youth as a potential illustration of resistance

(i.e., abstention). Outley observed that youth, particularly boys, sanctioned their

peers for engaging in middle-class activities such as golf or tennis. At both school

and within their neighborhoods, such activities were labeled “White activities” by

In addition to concerns related to fear

and feeling threatened in wildland

environments, some

African Americans

may choose to avoid

these settings

because they are

perceived to be

reflective of White

America.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

the boys, and those who participated in the activities were said to be “acting

White.” Floyd and Shinew indicated that by rejecting “White activities” and

favoring the activities indigenous to the neighborhood (e.g., basketball or football),

they are able to perpetuate perceived boundaries.

Meaning-Based Approaches

Recent work examining minority perceptions of natural environments has begun to

explore the meanings these populations assign to nature. Reflecting Saegert and

Winkel’s (1990) sociocultural approach, this work acknowledges that the meanings

people assign to place are not only constructed individually, they are also conveyed

by the social and cultural groups with which people are most intimately connected.

Commenting on the utility of the sociocultural approach, Williams and Carr (1993)

noted that the approach elucidates the linkages between macro-level factors such as

culture and ethnicity, and the micro-level meanings people ascribe to place. Contrary to much of the earlier work cast within the marginality—ethnicity hypotheses,

research cast within the sociocultural framework sought not only to explain divergence in their attitudes and behaviors, but rather to understand the underlying

personal and sociocultural factors and processes that contribute to the differences.

The following review examines several approaches that have been couched within

the sociocultural framework.

Figure 9—Anxieties derived from potential encounters with

dangerous animals could influence some people’s perception

of natural environments as threatening spaces.

USDA Forest Service
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Several authors have suggested that the meanings minority groups ascribe to

natural environments are conditioned by these groups’ cultural backgrounds and

experiences (Meeker et al. 1973, Mohai 1990, Mohai and Bryant 1998). Taylor

(1989), for example, suggested that before being influenced by Europeans,

Africans did not see nature as a separate place for finding refuge from the stresses

of everyday life and for finding peace and revitalization. Africans saw no discontinuities and considered nature as something of which everyone is a continuous

part. Taylor suggested, however, that slavery resulted in decidedly negative values

among African Americans toward natural environments. The land became a place

of punishment and imprisonment. Even after slavery ended, continued racial discrimination barred African Americans from access to natural recreation areas (e.g.,

beaches and parks). Johnson (1998) and Johnson and Bowker (2004) have suggested that African Americans’ “collective memory” of certain historical events

have led them to associate wildland environments with negative experiences.

Although many African Americans have no personal memories of these atrocities

(e.g., slavery, share-cropping, lynching), stories have been relayed by parents,

older relatives, and others who have lived these experiences. For this reason,

African Americans have tended to avoid wildland environments. Virden and

Walker’s (1999) findings, which illustrated that White respondents were more

inclined than African American respondents to indicate that forests were safe environments, offers further support for Johnson et al.’s hypothesis. It may be that for

some African Americans, natural environments symbolize a dark and sinister past.

With regard to the meanings ascribed to natural environments by other ethnic

groups, relatively little is known. In fact, as noted by Virden and Walker (1999),

for some ethnic groups the concepts of natural environments may be different. For

example, there is no equivalent word for “wilderness” in the Spanish language.

Further, Carr and Williams (1993) indicated the phrase “respecting the forest”

could not be translated directly into Spanish. Regardless, Carr and Williams observed that when asking Anglos and Hispanics what “respecting the forest” meant

to them, respondents from both groups born in the United States focused on issues

related to not littering, vandalizing, or having open fires. They attributed differences among foreign-born Hispanics and Anglos and the similarity between U.S.-

born respondents (i.e., both Anglos and Hispanics) to the processes associated with

acculturation and awareness of social norms related to being in and using the

forests. They suggested that U.S.-born Hispanics were more likely than foreignborn Hispanics to have been acculturated and, correspondingly, were more cognizant of the social norms associated with natural environments. Consequently, the

Relatively little is

known about meanings ascribed to

natural environments by other

ethnic groups.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

meanings they now associate with natural environments more closely reflect those

of the White majority. Similarly, Floyd and Gramann (1993) observed that highly

assimilated6 Mexican Americans exhibited recreation behaviors similar to those

exhibited by Anglos in a national forest in Arizona.

Another group of studies have examined, albeit indirectly, the congruence

between individual/cultural identities and the identities that these groups construct

for natural environments. As has already been discussed, natural environments and

public lands carry with them a diversity of meanings dependent on the cultural lens

through which these settings are viewed and experienced. Walker et al. (2001)

recently used the concept of self-construal to examine differences in motivations to

engage in outdoor recreation among Chinese immigrants to Canada and Euro-North

Americans.7

 Building from the work of Markus and Kitayama (1991), Walker et al.

suggested that Chinese culture and tradition encourages individuals to be more

cognizant of others. Consequently, Chinese are said to possess interdependent selfconstruals, which are reflected in a stronger sensitivity and attention to others’

needs relative to individual needs. Alternately, whereas individual self-structure is

intimately connected to others within Chinese culture, Western culture places

greater value on independence, self-expression, and self-assertiveness. Thus, an

independent self-construal values autonomy. Walker et al. also noted that the form

of self-construal also influences the affective domain. Whereas positive emotions

are derived from performing tasks associated with being the independent self in

Western culture, interdependent selves value belonging, maintaining harmony,

fitting in, and maintaining one’s proper place. Walker et al.’s findings were consistent with the Markus and Kitayama theory underlying the self-construal construct.

That is, Chinese respondents’ motivations to engage in outdoor recreation activities

were more socially derived, whereas Euro-North Americans were more inclined to

value individual outcomes. Their analysis also indicated that self-construal had a

stronger effect on respondents’ motivations than their indicators of ethnicity and

acculturation.

6

 Assimilation was measured by using two items. The first asked respondents about the

ethnicity of friends or family members who were most likely to accompany them on visits

to the recreation area. The second asked respondents to indicate the ethnicity of friends that

respondents talked to at least once a week.

7

 Euro-North Americans consisted of American, Canadian, British (English, Scott, Welsh,

Northern Irish) and Western Europeans (Austrian, Belgian, Dutch, German, Swiss).
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

The implications of Walker et al.’s (2001) findings for understanding place

meaning suggests that for cultures with interdependent self-construals, natural

settings are environments that allow for the reinforcement of social values; e.g.,

social order, group harmony, and community. Although this does not necessarily

imply that individuals with interdependent self-construals would prefer developed

settings that can accommodate large communities of recreationists, it does provide

a potentially interesting contrast for the preservation of pristine areas. Given that

many of the values Anglo-Americans have historically associated with natural

environments are grounded in concepts related to freedom, independence, and

democracy (Taylor 2000), these findings add to a growing literature suggesting

that such constructions require further consideration in a multicultural America

(Johnson et al. 2004). Although it is understood that the constructions of natural

settings emerging from transcendentalist, romantic, and frontierist ideals that have

long ignored the orientations of those occupying the land prior to European settlement, the growth of communities with differing value systems is placing increasing

pressure on existing philosophies of land management. Frameworks that have long

served public land management may need to be reconsidered to accommodate these

differing meanings. As noted by Williams et al. (1992), viewing recreation settings

as a collection of interchangeable attributes from which managers can craft specific

experiential outcomes ignores the experiential nature of human interaction with

place—whether the place is natural or influenced by humans. Whereas physical

attributes often define what is possible within place, the elements that make many

settings special are often products of what individuals bring to the setting (i.e.,

inter/intrapersonal factors) (O’Sullivan and Spangler 1998).

Integrating Place Meaning in Public Land

Management

This review of the literature illustrates that there is considerable variation within

the United States with regard to the meanings various cultural groups ascribe to

public lands and wildland environments. We, along with others, believe that an

understanding of place meaning provides insight into the public’s attitudes and

behaviors relative to public lands and wildland environments. Given the reported

current and projected growth of minority populations, an understanding of their

attitudes and behaviors has become an important priority for public land management agencies. There is, however, evidence to suggest that these groups do not

share the perspectives of White America; perspectives that have long governed
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

policy and management of public lands. If public lands are to remain relevant to

the broader community, greater effort is required to understand the meanings these

groups assign to public lands and wildland settings and incorporate these meanings

within planning frameworks. As stated earlier, failure to do so may threaten their

existence.

Building from the work of several authors (Greider and Garkovich 1994,

Proshansky 1978, Saegert and Winkel 1990), we suggested that an understanding

of the congruence between self-identity, cultural identity, and place identity provides insight on how place meaning shapes individual/group attitudes toward public

lands and subsequent behaviors relative to the setting (see fig. 8). This framework

also links macro-level meanings (i.e., cultural level) to the micro-level meanings

that individuals ascribe to place. To briefly elaborate, our framework suggests that

the degree to which an individual is tied to his or her culture8 will determine how

closely his or her identity is reflected in the identity of the specific culture. In

instances where there is strong cultural identification, the meanings assigned to

place by the cultural group will likely mirror individual meanings.

The identity of the setting will also determine individual and cultural attitudes

and behaviors relative to the setting. We acknowledge that setting identities are

social constructions and, as such, can hold multiple identities dependent on cultural

affiliation. A strength of our framework is its ability to transcend the specific

characteristics of the racial/ethnic group in question. Recently, Stodolska (2000)

commenting on the limitations of the marginality/ethnicity theories, noted that

there are certain fundamental characteristics of humans that are independent of

race, ethnicity, or culture. As such, she suggested that enough is known of the

human condition to understand minority perspectives within existing theories of

human behavior. Thus, the framework discussed here could be equally applied to

understand the perspectives of other homogenous groups that share common

understandings, norms, and behaviors related to the natural environment.

So how can the meanings that different cultures ascribe to place be integrated

into public land management? First, this framework provides insight on how public

land management agencies can begin to reach out to traditionally underrepresented

groups. Although there appears to be general concern and appreciation for natural

8

 These cultural ties are often reflected in the strength of familial bonds. In instances,

however, where the connection between self-identity and cultural identity is weak, other

social world affiliations may provide insight into individual-level meanings. An understanding of the perspective shared by an individual’s reference group is likely to shed light

on the individual’s perspective.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

environments among both majority and minority populations within the United

States (Jones 1998), it is unclear how this concern equates in behaviors related to

local settings. We would suggest that localized action, in a variety of forms, is most

likely to emanate from programs that help minority groups identify the relevance

of local wildland settings within the context of their own cultures. This does not

necessarily imply the need for them to be regular visitors or to engage in naturalresource-based recreation. Efforts to directly promote these behaviors would reflect

what Floyd (1998) referred to as an Anglo conformity bias,9

 although we acknowledge that some form of place interaction is most conducive for place creation.

Within the context of our model, efforts to increase the relevance of these environments can best be served by examining the congruence between cultural identity

and place identity. For example, as noted earlier, Hispanic identity is rooted in

close family ties and family tradition. Consistent with this, a number of studies

have shown that Hispanics hold preferences for developed recreation areas that can

accommodate large groups consisting of immediate and extended family (Baas et

al. 1993, Chavez 2002, Chavez et al. 1993). For the Hispanic groups in these

studies, Forest Service lands provide a spatial context for family gatherings and

support opportunities for the reinforcement of family values. Chavez (2002)

provided an example of a national forest in southern California that integrated

Hispanic users’ preferences and altered the design of their day-use picnic areas.

This involved placing picnic tables close together to better accommodate larger

groups, as opposed to tables that were relatively isolated from one another (fig.

10). This forest was able to balance the needs of these groups without compromising the ecological integrity of the setting.

In the case of African Americans, the work of several authors (Johnson 1998,

Johnson et al. 2004, Taylor 1989) has suggested that their collective memories

related to wildland environments have been the product of several centuries of

discrimination and prejudice. Consequently, shifting the identities of these settings

to positions that are less antagonistic is not likely to occur overnight. One approach

suggested by Low et al. (2002) is to better acknowledge these groups’ history and

presence in the area. As noted by Taylor (2000: 175), “while interpretive exhibits in

wildland areas celebrate European American experiences, conquests, exploration

and heritage, the same is not true for people of color.” Thus, it can be argued that

9

 An example of this would be reflected in youth-based programs that encourage

participation in conventional outdoor recreation activities supported by settings managed

under plans that have been guided by romantic/transcendentalist ideals.

Efforts to increase

the relevance of

these environments

to minorities can

best be served by

examining the congruence between

cultural identity and

place identity.
124

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

visitor centers and interpretive exhibits need to better reflect the cultural history

of those that have previously occupied and shaped the setting. Low et al.’s findings

illustrated that disconnects between cultural and place identities result in places

without meaning. Whereas their study focused on the meanings various racial and

ethnic groups ascribed to Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia,

parallel contexts exist within less developed public estates throughout the country.

For example, Schelhas’ (2002) review of literature related to race, ethnicity, and

natural resources provides other examples of groups’ histories that have been erased

from the landscape. For places to carry meaning and relevance, a personal connection to the setting is required—if not through personal experience, then through

cultural heritage (preferably both).

Finally, consistent with sound management practice, decisions concerning the

management of resources—be they public or private—should be firmly grounded

in data collected by using accepted scientific protocols. The collection of such data,

however, is often time consuming and, depending on the issue at hand, expensive.

It may also require expertise and the use of technologies not immediately available

to public land managers or their staff. Management decisions stemming from such

data, however, provide managers with a better platform to implement policy that is

acceptable to stakeholders in addition to withstanding litigation from disenchanted

groups or individuals. In our final example below, we provide an overview of an

issue confronting a National Park Service (NPS) unit in southeast Texas and our

proposed methodology for collecting data to assist NPS staff develop policy to

address the issue. Although the issue at hand is not one that solely affects a distinct

Figure 10—Picnic tables that are isolated from one another do not accommodate larger groups, and may not meet the needs of some users.

Gary Norcross

For places to carry

meaning and relevance, a personal

connection to the

setting is required—

through personal

experience, or

cultural heritage

(preferably both).
125

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

racial/ethnic minority population, it does relate to conflicting preferences reflected

in differing cultural traditions relating to the use of the land. Its relevance for the

current manuscript relates to our application of the identity-based framework as

well as providing some insight on the methods used to collect relevant data. For

one group, in particular, the meanings they associate with the setting are strongly

tied to both their self-identity and the identity of their community. For others, the

identification processes appear to occur at a more individualistic level with influences from other activity-based groups (i.e., social worlds).

The investigation is in its preliminary stages and is taking place in and around

the Big Thicket National Preserve. Its focus is on the environmental impacts arising

from feral hog populations in the region. One of the challenges faced by the NPS

in their attempt to manage the feral hogs concerns conflicts among local groups

over an appropriate strategy (fig. 11). Based on preliminary discussions with

various stakeholders (i.e., NPS staff, resident groups, environmentalists), the most

salient conflict lies between those who have historically hunted hogs on the preserve and those who would like to see the animal completely removed from the

preserve10 by the NPS and hunting-related activities banned. The conflict is exacerbated by two underlying issues. First, Big Thicket received its designation as a

National Preserve in 1974 and was the first to be managed by the NPS. Prior to

receiving this designation, the area (i.e., nine noncontiguous units spanning 97,000

acres) reflected an agglomeration of federal, state, and private land holdings.

Beyond values associated with a rich biological system, the units were and continue

to remain popular for the hunting opportunities they provide local residents. The

population of feral hogs in southeastern Texas, however, has grown tremendously

in recent years, and the impact on native flora and fauna within the preserve has

been significant (Mapston 2004). Whereas this issue appears not to have bothered

many local hunters who have historically enjoyed hunting hogs, the destruction

caused by their rising numbers has caught the attention of local environmentalists

keen to see their removal. The dependence of some local residents on hunting feral

hogs is reflected in stories of locals releasing domestic hogs within the preserve in

an effort to maintain the hog population. These stories also include discussions of

locals having hunted hogs on the preserve for several generations, for meat as well

as sport, well before it received its “National Preserve” designation. For some, this

designation has severely impinged upon their ability to hunt hogs in ways they had

10 Complete extraction of feral hogs is highly unlikely: (a) the species’ habitat extends

beyond park boundaries, and (b) the resources required to capture and remove the animal

are beyond current provisions.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

done for generations prior (e.g., use of dogs, trapping, use of horses and off-road

vehicles). For many, hunting hogs is a continuation of a family tradition.

The second issue contributing to the management dilemma concerns rapid

(human) population growth and development in the area. This growth is largely a

product of urban sprawl and the popularity of “recreational enclaves” that allow

residents to commute to Houston for work but maintain proximity to large undeveloped tracts of land (i.e., Big Thicket). This rapid growth has also brought longterm residents who have been hunting hogs in the area for several generations into

direct conflict with newer residents who have different recreation patterns and

management preferences. For some of the long-term residents, the history of

association spans several generations. The accrual of sentiment reflected in family

narratives and memories of experiences shared with significant others have meant

that the preserve occupies an important place in their lives. For these residents,

hunting hogs on the preserve is an expression of their cultural identity. For the

newer residents, the meanings of place are substantially more varied owing to the

diversity in these residents’ cultural backgrounds11 and experience with natural

environments.

Therefore, in the context of examining how to accommodate these varied

positions related to managing feral hogs, we have begun to collect data from stakeholders about the diversity of meanings they ascribe to the preserve and the effect

of feral hogs on these meanings. From preliminary interviews it appears that feral

hogs and hunting opportunities they provide are an extension of some long-term

residents’ cultural traditions. For other groups, both hunting and feral hogs

11 Historically, the population of this southeastern pocket of Texas comprised descendants

of Western European settlers (England, Ireland, France, Germany, and Italy).

Figure 11—The feral hog population has led to conflicts among local groups

over an appropriate management strategy.

Miles D. Phillips
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

along with the effect they have upon the ecosystem, run contrary to their conceptualization of a “preserve” dedicated to the conservation of rare flora and fauna.

Thus, for one group, the hunting of hogs on the preserve affirms their individual

and cultural identities, whereas as for others, the damage caused by hogs is seen as

eroding their bond with nature; a bond also that underlies their own sense of self.

Thus, our data collection procedures will first provide us with an understanding of

the meanings various individuals/groups ascribe to the preserve and how these

meanings are created. Dependent on the extent of cultural and social world affiliations (e.g., activity-based groups), our identity theory/interactionist framework

would also suggest that individual-level meanings are likely to reflect the perspective of the affiliated group. Given the social nature of these meanings, we anticipate

considerable variation among stakeholders. It is our intent to analyze how these

meanings are manifested in attitudes, behaviors, and management preferences

related to feral hogs and the preserve.

Therefore, our formal data collection protocols will include (a) focus group

interviews with relevant stakeholders (e.g., residents, hunting groups, environmentalists); (b) a mail survey sent to residents in surrounding communities and relevant

interest groups (e.g., hunting associations, volunteer/advocacy groups); and (c)

monitoring feral hog populations and site impacts within the preserve.

It is anticipated that the data from the focus group interviews will provide

insight on relevant issues underlying the management of feral hogs in addition to

helping us better understand what these lands mean to affected groups. These data

will also help inform the design of the mail survey. For the mail survey, beyond

basic indicators of sociodemographic characteristics and use/residential history,

questions that provide insight on the meanings respondents associate with the preserve (e.g., attachment to the setting and factors driving these attachments) will

also be included. Consistent with our identity-based framework, the data will also

help us understand the role the preserve (and the activities occurring within the

preserve) plays in contributing to stakeholders’ personal identities and the identities

of their cultural group or social world affiliation. Lastly, for the mail survey, geographic data will be collected that allow us to develop overlays depicting the

variety of meanings and activities different groups associate with regions throughout the preserve. It is anticipated that these data, coupled with the data from the

feral hog population and impact monitoring, will enable managers to implement a

feral hog management plan that allows them to control the feral hog problem and

at the same time accommodate the needs of relevant stakeholders.
128

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

Conclusion

These examples provide insight related to the influence of culture on place meanings and how these meanings are reflected in both the use/nonuse of public lands

and management preference. They also provide limited guidance on how to integrate these diverse perspectives in public land management. It has been our thesis

that stakeholders’ attitudes, behaviors, and preferences related to public lands can

be understood by understanding the congruence between individual, cultural, and

place identities. The identities bestowed upon specific settings are socially constructed symbols that reflect cultural perspectives. In some instances, these symbols

will be intimately connected to individual and cultural identities. For these populations, management action related to the affected setting will attract intense scrutiny.

Actions that have the potential to disrupt human-place bonding, as discussed above

in the context of feral hogs, have the potential to sever people’s ties to place and

arouse negative sentiment. Alternately, actions that support groups’ ongoing

identification with the setting will be embraced. The identity-based framework

discussed here also provides insight on how managers might be able to reach out to

populations that have traditionally been underrepresented on public lands. As

exemplified in Low et al.’s (2002) discussion, including the place histories of other

cultural groups that have previously inhabited or interacted with the setting,

perhaps through interpretive media, offers a way for people to link their own

cultural identities, reflected in historical narratives, to the locations where these

narratives were born.

Finally, to effectively implement place-based management practices, we

emphasize that managers of public lands need to understand the variety of meanings their stakeholders ascribe to the resource in question. We feel that this understanding is best obtained through the systematic collection of data shedding light on

these meanings. The literature related to the meanings humans ascribe to built and

natural environments has grown considerably over the past two decades. This

literature also documents various procedures for collecting and analyzing data that

provide insight on the meaning people associate with place.12 The recommendation

for continued research is one that managers have likely heard many times before,

but it remains imperative for including stakeholder perspectives within management

plans.

12 Other examples of scientific approaches for collecting place-related data can be found in

the work of Austin and Kaplan (2003), Clark and Stein (2003), Laurian (2004), and

Stewart et al. (2004).

Stakeholders’ attitudes, behaviors,

and preferences

related to public

lands can be understood by understanding the

congruence between individual,

cultural, and place

identities.
129

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Chapter 7—Understanding Human Relationships to

Place and Their Significance for Outdoor Recreation

and Tourism

Lynne C. Manzo1

Abstract

As we are all embedded in a physical context, we are compelled to try to understand the nature of our relationships to place. This task is critical for the care and

management of our natural resources and outdoor recreation sites. Insights into the

nuances and complexities of our relationships to place can help guide management

strategies that are more responsive to people’s experiences and needs. This paper

explores the multiple dimensions of our relationships to place and the significance

of these relationships for outdoor recreation and public land management through

an indepth study of people’s place experiences. Findings reveal that significant

places are those that (1) enable people to explore and develop their sense of self;

(2) provide opportunities for privacy, introspection, and reflection; (3) serve as

developmental markers in a person’s life journey; (4) serve as bridges to a person’s

past; and (5) provide important social experiences such as a sense of belonging and

social connectedness. Implications for the management of outdoor recreation

settings are discussed.

Keywords: Place attachment, place identity, environmental psychology, leisure

studies.

Introduction

What makes us value and care for places? What makes us return again and again to

some places but avoid other places? What is the hold that some places have on us?

For centuries, thinkers have pondered these questions. But in the past three decades

in particular, a rich body of scholarly literature examining the nature of people’s

relationships to places has blossomed. There are now theories and research from an

array of disciplines on sense of place, place attachment, and place identity, all of

which can be considered the building blocks of our relationships to place. Explorations of these concepts have made a critical contribution to our understanding of

1

 Lynne C. Manzo, environmental psychologist, Department of Landscape

Architecture, University of Washington, Box 355734, Seattle, WA 98195-5734,

email: lmanzo@u.washington.edu.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

our relationships to place. They have validated an important aspect of the human

experience by articulating the roles and meanings that places have in our lives.

This is an important but complicated task. Yet, as we are all embedded in a physical

context, we are compelled to try to understand the nature of our relationships to

places. This task is critical for the care and management of our natural resources

and outdoor recreation sites. Insights into the nuances and complexities of our

relationships to place can help guide management strategies that are more responsive to people’s experiences and needs.

The need for a greater awareness of place is greater than it has ever been

(Steele 1981). In suburban areas, there has been a drift toward standardized,

unstimulating settings. Continuing urbanization and growth has brought the interface between urbanized areas and wildlands to the fore (Ewert et al. 1993). With

the health and survival of our ecosystems hanging in the balance, an understanding

of our relationship to places, and to nature in particular, has become urgent. We

must try to understand our relationships to place better, not only to understand the

foundation for our attitudes and behavior toward natural environments, but also to

learn how to use and manage our natural resources and public lands more thoughtfully. For example, we now know that the once prevailing paradigm of humanity as

separate and above nature has fostered a consumption approach to nature. Such an

approach has manifested itself in recreational land management practices that treat

outdoor recreation resources as a “supermarket of trails and trees...to be arranged

by recreation programmers and managers for consumption as leisure experiences”

(Williams 2002: 353). This approach has had significant environmental and experiential repercussions and has rightly been critiqued (see especially Williams et al.

1992). However, understanding consumption better as a social practice can help us

to challenge that approach in the management of outdoor recreational settings.

As MacNaghten and Urry (1998) argued, our understanding of nature develops

through various sociocultural practices and our responses to the environment are

embedded in daily life. For example, Preston-Whyte (2001), in his study of seaside

leisure space, discussed how such settings are socially constructed—that is, through

social practices of use, spaces are discovered, conceived, and acted upon by different groups of people. Place is at the same time a location, an idea, and an ideal.

Similarly, Stokowski (2002) observed that places are more than geographic locations, they are fluid and changeable contexts of social interaction and meaning.

Dynamics of power, ideology, and conflict manifest themselves in place-based

behaviors. Not only are attitudes toward, and uses of, outdoor recreation settings

influenced by this, but so are management practices. Stokowski (2002: 370)

Insights into the

nuances and complexities of our

relationships to

place can help guide

management strategies that are more

responsive to

people’s experiences and needs.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

pointed out that the managerial contexts of places, usually treated “as stable and

predictable elements of recreation experiences,” are themselves changeable social

practices and they need to be recognized as such.

If our relationships to places—including both our experiences of them and

management ideologies and strategies—are a result of sociocultural practices, then

it follows that these relationships would best be understood within the context of

the larger communities and societies in which they are embedded. We cannot disconnect outdoor recreation/tourism experiences from the daily rounds of people’s

lives. It is essential to see nature, and our experiences of it, in this context. The

way to “unpack” and understand these complex phenomena is to investigate place

meaning and our lived experiences of place and how they fit into the larger puzzle

of our lives.2

This paper explores the multiple dimensions of our relationships to place and

the significance of these relationships for outdoor recreation and public land management through an indepth study of people’s place experiences. This research was

conducted to learn more about the kinds of places that are meaningful for people,

the role these places play in their lives, and the processes by which they develop

meaning. Given that many of the significant places in the research participants’

lives are natural settings, the findings of this research have implications for the

management of outdoor recreation settings.

Overview of Critical Concepts

To better understand the findings and implications of the research presented in this

paper, it is helpful to begin with an overview of the ever-growing body of literature

on people’s relationships to place, particularly writings on place attachment, place

identity, and sense of place regarding natural settings (Bonaiuto et al. 2002, Bricker

and Kerstetter 2000, Jorgensen and Stedman 2001, Kyle et al. 2004, Williams

2002, Williams and Carr 1993, Williams and Kaltenborn 1999, Williams and

Roggenbuck 1989, Williams and Vaske 2003). As a whole, this work can provide

natural resource managers with “a way to anticipate, identify and respond to the

bonds people form with places” and thus help to develop management strategies

that are more responsive to the ways that people think and feel about place

2

 For a further discussion of lived experience and place meaning, see Stewart’s “Place

Meanings in Stories of Lived Experience” also in this report.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

(Williams and Stewart 1998: 18). An important starting point, therefore, is to

examine existing theory and research findings to get a better sense of what we

know to date about people’s relationships to place.

Place attachment is generally considered to be “the bonding of people to

places” (Altman and Low 1992). That definition has been further developed to

include “a positive affective bond between an individual and a specific place, the

main characteristic of which is the tendency of the individual to maintain closeness

to such a place” (Hidalgo and Hernandez 2001: 274). This definition is noteworthy

because it reflects the implications of place attachment on one’s intentions toward

and use of places. Indeed, natural resource and leisure studies explore place attachment among campers, hikers, and other outdoor recreationists in terms of ecological stewardship, a commitment to return to a setting, and membership in special

interest groups (Bricker and Kerstetter 2000, Vitterso et al. 2001, Wickham 2001).

It is also measured in terms of attitudes toward the setting and level of concern

about how a place is managed (Mitchell et al. 1993). Thus, it has both emotional

and functional dimensions (Williams and Vaske 2003).

There are a few ways in which this definition has, or could be, expanded

further. First, we can add a community level of analysis. Recent research explores

important social dimensions to place attachment (Clark and Stein 2003, Hummon

1992, Stewart et al. 2003) revealing that shared place meanings develop among

communities and groups that can then lead to both individual and community-level

attachments. Looking at a community level of analysis also opens up the possibility

of discovering contested meanings, a difficult issue to be sure, but one that is

necessary to address. Even in instances where there is a lack of consensus on what

a place means, it is clear that meaning develops through social processes. Second,

in almost all of its uses, place attachment refers to a positively balanced affective

bond to place (Manzo 2003, 2005). But as Relph (1985: 27) pointed out, “relationships to places need not be strong and positive”; sometimes there is strong affection

for particular places (topophilia), but there may be an aversion for other places

(topophobia). This diversity in responses to places and in place meaning is essential

to address in managing public lands. However challenging it may be, it is just too

important to ignore.

Being connected to a place may give some people a positive sense of belonging,

but for others it may feel oppressive and restrictive (Relph 1976). This is what

Chawla (1992: 66) called the “shadow side” of our attachments: “if place forms

the circumference of our experience, we are attached to it for better or for worse.

Therefore, there is a shadow side...composed of...frustrating or frightening

Looking at a community level of analysis

also opens up the

possibility of discovering contested

meanings.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

places.” This dimension of place attachment is important to explore if we are to

understand why some do not frequent, or even avoid, certain outdoor recreation

settings. Of particular relevance to outdoor recreation and public land managers,

are the findings of research on how different racial and ethnic groups perceive

nature and wildlands. For example, recent research demonstrates that AfricanAmericans perceive wildland environments as threatening (Johnson 1998, Virden

and Walker 1999). This has even been connected to different levels of environmental concern and action between African-Americans and Whites (Taylor 1989).

Other research argues that labor-related institutions such as forest labor and plantation agriculture have impacted negatively on African-Americans producing an

ambivalence toward wildland areas that contrasts with the dominant perspective of

these places as a refuge (Johnson and Bowker 2004). Finally, an ethnographic study

of a national park suggests how ethnic and immigrant groups can feel excluded

because of a lack of sensitivity to cultural identity and lack of representation (Low

et al. 2004). Together, these studies show how a sociocultural approach to the study

of place meaning enables us to better see a range of place experiences and meanings, both positive and negative. They also reveal how social constructions of

identity affect place experience and create diverse meanings (Manzo 2005). Knowing this can help public land managers reach out to underserved populations in a

more sensitive manner.

Place identity is another important concept for natural resource and outdoor

recreation management. It has been defined as “those dimensions of the self that

define the individual’s personal identity in relation to the physical environment by

means of a complex pattern of conscious and unconscious ideas, beliefs, preferences, feelings, values, goals and behavioral tendencies” (Proshansky 1978: 155). It

is a malleable construct that can encompass a range of feelings and experiences of

place, as it comprises a “cluster of positively and negatively valenced cognitions of

physical settings” (Proshansky et al. 1983: 62). The concept of place identity has

been further developed by Twigger-Ross and Uzzell (1996) who argued that place

identity is not a distinct subsection of identity. Rather, there is a dynamic interplay

between identity processes and the places with which we interact so that our experiences of place are infused in our self-concept. They offer four principles of

identity in regard to place: distinctiveness, continuity, self-efficacy, and self-esteem.

This has important implications for our use of space. For example, Korpela (1989)

suggested that we use the environment in strategic ways to maintain a sense of self

and that our use of place is a result of environmental self-regulation. If this is
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

indeed true, as research suggests (see also Korpela et al. 2001, Williams 2002), then

it is worthwhile to explore how such identity processes affect our use and valuation

of outdoor recreation environments.

Research on leisure has put forward the notion of “leisure identities” (see

especially Kelly 1983, Kuentzel 2000, Williams 2002), which examines how recreation serves as a medium for personal enhancement and self-development. This

research demonstrates how people become committed to certain self-images and

seek identity-confirming behaviors in their recreational activities (Haggard and

Williams 1992, Kuentzel 2000). In addition to individual self-definitions, however, leisure identity includes social practices that create a sense of continuity and

stability in one’s self-concept (Kuentzel 2000). This goes beyond the rational actor

or functionalist approach that views recreationists as motivated goal-directed actors,

and it tries to incorporate social structure into our understanding of leisure activity.

This approach challenges “the imperialism of individual experience” (Giddens

1984, as summarized in Kuentzel 2000), and seeks to understand how routine

patterns of social interaction reproduce structural conditions that are the scaffold

of individual actions (Keuntzel 2000: 89). This is useful for public land managers

who seek to understand outdoor recreation and leisure behavior on the social level.

Then there is the notion of “place dependence,” originally considered to be “the

perceived strength of association between a person and specific places” (Stokols and

Shumaker 1981: 457). It is said that dependence results when people perceive that a

place meets their needs better than alternative places (Brown 1987). Over time, this

concept has evolved in a way that focuses specifically on behavior, and how a place

might support people’s goals and desired activities (Williams and Roggenbuck

1989). For example, we might depend on a place to provide us with a certain experience or opportunity, and we might even depend on that place to afford us the

same experience time and again. Place dependence has even been considered a

“functional attachment” and thus a component of place attachment (Williams and

Vaske 2003). Focusing on behavior clearly has value for managing natural resource

recreation and tourism. But we must “round out” this utilitarian approach with

other elements of place experience—thoughts, feelings, meanings and values—as

well as behaviors. Hence, place dependence should continue to be studied in the

context of place attachments, identity and meaning, each of which express somewhat different dimensions of place meaning and our overall relationship to place.

Finally, we have the concept of “sense of place” (Lewis 1979, Tuan 1980). In

one of its earlier uses, it is defined as “an experiential process created by the setting

combined with what a person brings to it” (Steele 1981: 9). This concept embraces

Place dependence

results when people

perceive that a

place meets their

needs better than

alternative places

and supports

people’s goals and

desired activities.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

a transactional view of people and places that reflects the true richness and dynamism of our relationships to place. It recognizes that these relationships are a

combination of what people bring to a place (their past experiences, culturallybased worldviews, attitudes, beliefs, preferences, thoughts, feelings) and what the

place brings to the person (affordances of certain behavioral and experiential

opportunities). In this framework, we can see place as both an object (of people’s

interest, concern, and alteration), and as a cause (of people’s feelings, thoughts, and

behaviors) (Steele 1981: 9). This definition has recently been expanded to include

“the social and historical processes by which place meanings are constructed,

negotiated and politically contested” (Williams and Stewart 1998: 20). Interestingly, some landscape architects also talk about sense of place, using the expression

to refer to a feature or essential character of a place, or they talk about how to

create a sense of place through design. Insofar as qualities of a setting might foster

some experiences more than others, this is worthy of exploration certainly for

natural resource and outdoor recreation managers. Indeed, sense of place as an

essential character of a place (landscape) is embedded in the Forest Service’s

Scenery Management System. However, it is important to remember that meaning

cannot exist outside of a human interpreter, and so a more transactional perspective

that seeks to understand the bidirectional nature of people-place relationships is

warranted.

It is both a strength and weakness that these concepts are all rather broadly

defined. The strength is that such broad definitions allow for the inclusion of a

range of place experiences, feelings, values, attitudes, and thoughts. The weakness

is that the broadness of the definitions has caused subsequent research to conceptualize and use these concepts differently. Nonetheless, it is generally agreed that

place attachment, place identity, and sense of place make up a constellation of

concepts that address place meaning, and they are related to our fundamental

relationships to places in our lives. As such, these concepts are all interrelated.

So although there are differences in how scholars apply them, there are important

commonalities, the most important of which is a belief in the importance of

understanding the qualities and dynamics of our relationships to place as a way to

achieve a more socioculturally and environmentally sensitive way of life, and as a

way to develop sound management strategies based on how people respond to and

experience place. This work can provide insights for policy and management of

natural resources, outdoor recreation, and tourism in a way that respects people’s

needs, values, and desires along with the integrity of the environment.

Place attachment,

place identity, and

sense of place make

up place meaning

and are related to

our fundamental

relationships to

places in our lives.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

The Need for Multiple Perspectives and Levels

of Analysis

When studying such multifaceted, complex phenomena as sense of place, place

attachment, and place identity, a truly interdisciplinary approach is needed. To push

the boundaries of current research and explore the full dynamism of people-place

relationships, we must learn from an array of disciplines. For example, the literature in political geography and urban planning (Bondi 1993, Cresswell 1996,

Davidoff 1965, Forester 1989, Hayden 1995, Massey 1993) has a great deal to

offer to our understanding of our relationships to place through extensive theory

and research on the politics of place and on place as a social construction (Keith

and Pile 1993, LeFebvre 1974). Planners have long tackled the politics of place

and contested meanings—from the advocacy planning efforts of the 1960s (see

especially Davidoff 1965) to the multicultural planning of today (Sandercock

1998). Most current planning efforts employ community participation strategies

and can teach us a great deal about how to address both shared and contested place

meanings, as well as the negative and positive implications of place attachment

(Forester 1999). Moreover, environmental psychologists who focus on place

attachments and identity in relation to urban settings or other cultural settings (Low

2000, Rivlin 1987) can also provide useful insights for the use and management of

outdoor settings, particularly when taken in the context of people’s everyday lives.

To be sure, writings on the politics of place are gaining a foothold in the natural

resource recreation literature as noted earlier in the paper (see also Cheng and

Kruger in this report, Williams and Carr 1993, Williams and Stewart 1998, Yung

et al. 2003). However, this work has been somewhat overshadowed by studies that

seek to measure place attachment, partially because such studies are site-specific

and relatively easy to do.3

 We could benefit from a greater integration of the

insights from geography, planning, and urban studies, and a more holistic and

interdisciplinary approach in general.

To develop a fuller understanding of relationships to place we must also

include an array of methodologies in our research. This is important because

different methodologies have led to different interpretations of the concepts. For

example, place identity and place dependence have both been treated as dimensions

3

 Williams, D. 2005. Personal communication. Research social scientist, U.S. Department

of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, 2150A Centre Avenue,

Fort Collins, CO 80526-1891.

We would benefit

from a greater

integration of

the insights from

geography, planning, and urban

studies, and a more

holistic and interdisciplinary approach

in general.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

of place attachments in much of the recent quantitative research, but as Farnum et

al. (2005: 8) noted, this is “encouraged by the fact that the common standardized

measures used to assess place attachment in recreation and tourism view attachment

as” comprising these two dimensions. That is, if place identity is equated with

emotional attachment conceptually from the outset, then subsequent scales to

measure place attachment would include items considered related to identity. This

particular framework gets institutionalized with further use of the measurement

tool. In such cases, conceptualizations have become artifacts of statistical manipulations, all of which are predicated on assumptions about the original concepts in the

first place. We must be careful that the methods of inquiry do not solely drive the

conceptualization of phenomena. Although some might argue that an irreconcilable

gap exists between quantitative and qualitative approaches based on differences in

beliefs about what constitutes “valid” knowledge, I would argue that these two

approaches can complement one another and provide a more complete picture of

people’s relationship to outdoor recreational environments. This is, in fact, an

essential part of the more holistic perspective that I call for in this paper.

Contribution of a Qualitative Approach

Whereas some research on place attachment, identity, and meaning in relation to

outdoor recreation and tourism takes a quantitative approach and endeavors to

measure these concepts (Stedman 2003), other work takes a more qualitative

approach to understanding the nuances and complexities of meaning (Fishwick and

Vining 1992, Frederickson and Anderson 1999). In many ways, this makes sense,

as much of the earlier literature on people’s relationships to places has roots in

phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that focuses on meanings and experiences

via a descriptive, qualitative discovery of things in their own terms (Husserl 1970).

Phenomenology calls for an understanding of everyday lived experience (Dovey

2002). When applied to explorations of the environment, it provides a conceptual

language that allows us to explore the everyday, often taken-for-granted experiences of place (Manzo 2005, Seamon 1996). In this framework, place is an inseparable part of our existence (Heidegger 1962, 1971). As such, it is essential for

human psychological existence and well-being (Casey 1993, Searles 1960, Tuan

1974). This approach has been adopted by numerous scholars who recognize that,

by their nature, people-place relationships involve poetic, essential qualities

(Bachelard 1969; Relph 1985; Seamon 1982, 1984). These philosophical and

theoretical roots can provide a continuing source of inspiration. Looking at what
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

we know now in the context of these seminal theories on people-place relationships

can help us to think more critically about our current state of knowledge and

identify areas for further exploration.

A number of studies that engage in qualitative explorations of the lived experience of place (see also Stewart in this report) add new dimensions to our understanding of our relationships to place (Mitchell et al. 1993). For example, indepth

explorations of “deep ecology” and the ecological self provide unique insights into

outdoor/wilderness experiences and how they might encourage environmentally

responsible attitudes and behaviors (Bragg 1996, Nash 1989, Zimmerman et al.

2004). One recent qualitative study of wilderness experiences reveals that these

settings offer important, even spiritual, experiences (Frederickson and Anderson

1999). This study documents a process of so intensely identifying with nature that

the boundaries of the self-construct shift to encompass the natural environment. As

more is learned about relationships to natural environments, we see new dimensions

of place experience and meaning unfold. Although this has caused some qualitative

scholars to argue that past quantitative research on place attachment “has produced

simplistic interpretations of the person-place interaction” (Frederickson and Anderson 1999: 22), I believe less harshly that it simply suggests a need to expand

current explorations and include both quantitative and qualitative methods in our

research.

A qualitative approach is quite helpful for exploring the unique qualities of

people’s relationships to places. First, it is sensitive to the nuances of place meaning, something that does not readily lend itself to quantification. Moreover, qualitative studies can provide insights for addressing contestations over place meaning,

shedding light on how socially constructed identities (of race or ethnicity, for

example) affect people’s responses toward, and uses of, place (Williams 2002,

Williams and Stewart 1998). For example, research on multiethnic urban communities reveals how multiple cultural identities inform and (re)form the meanings

and uses of space, as well as community planning and development efforts

(Abramson et al. 2006). Finally, as we can see in this example, a qualitative

approach can help us to understand the ways that larger macrostructural forces

(sociocultural, historical, political, economic) influence place meaning allowing

for a richer understanding of community dynamics to unfold.

An Empirical Exploration of Relationships to Place

In this section, I will provide some key findings of an indepth qualitative study that

are of particular relevance to natural resource management and outdoor recreation
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

and tourism. The findings of this research reveal that people develop powerful

relationships with a wide variety of places, and that meaning develops from an

array of emotions and experiences. Because of the general nature of the inquiry—

most questions did not specify any place or type of place—participants described a

number of places that were important in their lives. That is, people were not asked

exclusively about nature or outdoor recreational settings. It is noteworthy, however,

that almost half (48 percent) of participants discussed nature when describing at

least one significant place in their lives. This is congruent with other research

findings that show people’s favorite places are often natural settings (see e.g.,

Korpela 2003, Korpela and Hartig 1996). Participants talked about the value of

what Kaplan et al. (1998) call “nearby nature”—i.e., natural environments in the

city itself—in addition to natural settings outside of the city. Significant places

were quite diverse (fig. 12). Some places were outdoors (beaches, parks, woods,

waterfalls, the desert); others were indoors (churches, bars, laundromats, airports).

Some were tiny niches (a closet, a hallway in a grandmother’s apartment, a “pocket

park” in the city); others were entire cities (Budapest, Winston-Salem, San Francisco, New York); and still others were entire countries (Scotland, Hungary, Russia). Some were places from the past that no longer existed or were no longer

accessible, whereas others still existed and were actively used. One thing is quite

clear—each person had rich relationships to places in their lives that influenced

their sense of self and the quality and meaning of their lives.

Figure 12—Significant places can be quite diverse, with some outdoors and some indoors.

Maria Stiefel
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

Research Procedure

This research takes a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967, Strauss

and Corbin 1998), which focuses on the nuances of people’s experiences to develop

and explore concepts and theories. Indepth interviews were conducted with 40

participants to explore the nature of their relationships to the places in their lives.

All participants were adults, aged 25 to 35, residing in New York City.4

 This age

range was selected based on research findings that adults in this age bracket are

experiencing increased autonomy and establishing their “place in the world”

(Horwitz and Tognoli 1983). Participants were obtained through a networking

procedure or what is also referred to as “snowball sampling” (Bernard 2005). In

this strategy, participants are initially obtained through acquaintances who meet

the criteria for participation. Then, subsequent participants are obtained through

recommendations from previous participants. Throughout the data collection

phase, demographic data on participants were monitored to ensure a diverse sample

of sex, ethnicity, income, and household configuration, because these demographics

emerged as important in early interviews. This sampling procedure follows Trost’s

(1986) strategic nonprobability sampling, which seeks a range in qualities of

respondents in order to explore phenomena (Gustafson 2001b: 671).

The interview itself explored participants’ experiences in places that they considered important and meaningful. The interview instrument was semistructured

and involved a series of open-ended, indepth questions that covered the following

themes: (1) the meaning and importance of different places in the lives of participants; (2) the social implications of those places, i.e., the kinds of experiences and

people that have played a role in their experience of places; (3) feelings about their

place of residence and the experiences they have had there; and (4) past environmental experiences, i.e., experiences with significant places from childhood and

whether they affected feelings about current places in their lives.

All interviews were tape recorded and transcribed. Interview transcripts were

analyzed by using the procedures typical of a grounded theory approach (Glaser

and Strauss 1967): To begin, the data were analyzed for content by using the “open

coding” technique. In this technique, conceptual codes are developed to describe

discrete events, experiences, and feelings reported in the interviews. These codes

4

 A more thorough description of this research, including the methodology, appears in

“For better or worse: exploring the multiple dimensions of place meaning” in the Journal

of Environmental Psychology, 2005. Please contact the author for copies or additional

information.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

were then used in two ways: to analyze each individual interview across all questions for meta-themes within each interview, and to analyze responses to each

individual question across all participants, which allows meta-themes across all

interviews to emerge. Through this analysis, similar phenomena were grouped

together in an effort to identify the various dimensions of people’s experiences and

place meanings. This is the “axial coding” phase wherein “the data are put back

together again in new ways...creating new connections between the various categories, resulting in new conceptualization of the data” (Strauss and Corbin 1998: 97).

Demographics

Of the 40 participants in the sample, 24 were women and 16 were men. Respondents represented a mix of race and ethnicities—56 percent of participants were

White, 22 percent were African-American, 11 percent were Hispanic, 8 percent

were of mixed race, and 3 percent were Asian. Twenty percent of participants were

gay or lesbian. Participants’ household size ranged from one (living alone) to five

(living with four others). Educational background ranged from some high school

experience to doctoral training, with 70 percent having at least a bachelors degree.

Sixty-five percent worked full time and the remaining 35 percent worked part time.

Annual income ranged from under $10,000 to $105,000.

Experiential Dimensions of Relationships to Place

People develop multifaceted relationships with places that coalesce around personal, emotional experiences. This suggests that it is not simply the places themselves that are significant, but rather what can be called “experience-in-place.” This

is what ultimately creates meaning. The concept of experience-in-place takes as the

fundamental unit of analysis both the physical location and the nature of the

experience, recognizing that each is inextricably bound to the other. This also

emphasizes the transactional nature of our relationships to place. In examining the

findings, several critical themes emerged. Significant places were those that (1)

enable people to explore and develop their sense of self; (2) provide opportunities

for privacy, introspection, and reflection; (3) serve as developmental markers in a

person’s life journey; (4) serve as bridges to a person’s past; and (5) provide

important social experiences such as a sense of belonging and social connectedness,

or conversely threat and exclusion, particularly in terms of culture and subculture.

As we shall see, many of these themes reflect the political underpinnings of our

relationships to places. Although the interviews did not focus specifically on nature,

Significant places

were those that

(1) enable people

to explore and

develop their sense

of self; (2) provide

opportunities for

privacy, introspection, and reflection;

(3) serve as developmental markers

in a person’s life

journey; (4) serve

as bridges to a

person’s past;

and (5) provide

important social

experiences such

as a sense of

belonging and

social connectedness, or conversely

threat and exclusion, particularly in

terms of culture and

subculture.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

each of these experiential dimensions has important implications for the use and

management of outdoor recreation settings, and the examples provided below to

illustrate each theme are explicitly about natural or outdoor settings.

Identity Confirmation and Development

Participants felt it was very important to have places where they could be themselves and explore who they are. Their stories suggest that relationships to places

are often a way of working out or confirming one’s identity in the world. Many

respondents (39 percent) talked explicitly about how a particular place “made them

who they are” and how their understanding of themselves changed through their

relationship with that place. One participant described how outings on his family’s

boat as a youth dramatically changed and developed his sense of self:

When I was growing up, my family had a boat and we spent a lot

of time on the water...That is an important place to me. I associate

some of my best times with being out there. It was a place where I

could be myself, where I was in my element more than any other

place. There is something about the whole way of life on the boat

that I took to. It was more than just an activity, it was a defining

part of my life.

Not only do many places contribute to one’s sense of self over time, but also

several places can simultaneously contribute to one’s identity. An example of the

former is well captured in this participant’s comment: “most places that are important to me played a role in who I am as a person. Each of them was a stepping

stone to where I am today.” An example of the latter process is illustrated in

another participant’s discussion of important places. She went to a particular

neighborhood to attend a church that she felt fostered her spirituality; she also

frequented another neighborhood for its bars, and spent time in Central Park to

have contact with nature and remind herself of a childhood spent in the country.

This is not to say that people expressed only one aspect of themselves in a given

place. Our understanding of ourselves, and our sense of how the world views us,

are not that easily compartmentalized. Rather, this example suggests that, together,

many places form a “web of meaning” in our lives and that each is a part of the

gestalt of who we are. Finally, important identity-related experiences in place

included those that reflect one’s personal journey in the world. Many places that

become meaningful do so because they served as markers in that journey. Typically,

the experiences people had in these places marked a turning point, some right of
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

passage, or they serve as a symbol of change. In some cases it was a change in the

way people perceived themselves, their abilities, or their view on life. Comments

such as: “This is a place where I really got to learn about myself and explore who

I am” typify this experience. In other cases, the salient experience was a rite of

passage like a first experience with sex. In still other cases it was a dramatic event

such as a severe car accident, a fight with a lover, or a parent’s death. Although

some of these are clearly negative experiences, everyone talked about them as

important growth experiences, and they described these places as especially important and meaningful because of it.

These findings support Kuentzel’s (2000) discussion of self-identity and leisure

activities in outdoor recreation places. He proposed that people’s engagement in

outdoor recreation places reflects a working out of the self through a constantly

developing process (see also Kelly 1983). In the research presented in this paper,

we see evidence of both identity-confirming behaviors and experiences of place,

and a more fluid process of identity development as a negotiated process in a

context of change. These findings are important for outdoor recreation and public

land management because they move us beyond the consumptionist, goal-directed

models and help us to appreciate people’s experience in such settings as a fluid

process of balancing change and stability in a complex world (Kuentzel 2000).

Privacy, Introspection, and Reflection

Certain places become meaningful particularly when they afford people the

opportunity for reflection and introspection—two fundamental aspects of place

experience that are also associated with identity. Many participants discussed the

importance of natural settings to think and reflect on life and who they are. For

example, one man explained that the mountains and rivers have always “had a tug

for him” and provided a place for reflection:

A lot of the appeal of those natural places where I have been is

that...I really sat and thought about who I was and what I was

doing and what my direction was. Self-evaluation type of things. I

really have not had a really good self-evaluatory experience in the

last few years, so...I feel an urge to go to those places to relive the

sense of peace and relaxation and comfort with myself that I

associate with those places.

Certain places

become meaningful

particularly when

they afford people

the opportunity for

reflection and introspection.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

Another participant who went mountain climbing regularly explained:

I like to get on top of something like a mountain or a rock.

Something where I have a view and am up high. Something that

places me to see far externally, so that I can see far internally and

get on top of things internally.

For others, it wasn’t necessary to leave the city altogether, but they did seek

places with natural elements. For example one woman’s “favorite place” was Paley

Park, a lovely vest-pocket park in midtown Manhattan, which she enjoyed for the

waterfall and chairs beneath the tree:

I just love it here. I come here a couple of times a week when it is

open. It is a place where I can just relax, and it is peaceful. It puts

life back in perspective.

Such a remark reflects Appleton’s (1975) point that people seek observation points and prefer places where they can observe their surroundings, but the

findings presented here put a new experiential spin on it. Such places not only

enable us to look outward but to look inward as well. As Cooper Marcus and

Francis (1990) observed, places offering views help people to think and “put

things into perspective.”

Not surprisingly, the issue of privacy emerged in these particular discussions,

as some felt this was an important ingredient in the experience of reflection and

introspection. What is noteworthy is that people felt they could achieve this in both

public and private spaces. A full 60 percent of participants went to places outside of

their residence to seek privacy to think and reflect on life. Of these, most (58 percent) sought out natural settings. These locations enabled participants to become

lost in their thoughts and to reflect on their problems. Some people sought physical

solitude to achieve privacy, so they selected secluded areas that gave them “room to

think” (fig. 13). For example, one participant went regularly to the Arizona desert

to be alone and reflect on life:

It is out in the middle of nowhere. It is pretty much natural, the

way it should be. You can drive out to a spot and just camp out. It

is really great to leave all of the paperwork in New York and live

out of my backpack. And that is all you have to concern yourself

with. There are no forms to file or paperwork to get done. I find

that really liberating.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

This supports the notion of privacy as a dynamic boundary-regulation process

(Altman 1975) that can also enhance place attachment if one can regulate the

amount and kind of contact one has with others (Harris et al. 1996). For example,

some people did not feel it was necessary or desirable to be alone to achieve

privacy, although they still often sought out natural elements. Many people (42

percent) talked about their regular use of city parks to achieve this experience.

One woman explained why she enjoyed going to Central Park so much:

It is almost like everybody can be in their own separate space and

not really bother each other. People are there to just hang out. It

seems like the rules are different in the park than everywhere else

in Manhattan.

This suggests that allowing for private experiences in public space is a valuable

strategy. And whereas this often means allowing enough space for some physical

solitude, solitude is not absolutely necessary to provide for a feeling of privacy.

Moreover, people do not automatically assume they will be alone or have privacy

in a public space. As effective public park design shows, allowing for different

subspaces for distinct activities and providing visual or acoustical privacy work

well to achieve a sense of privacy (Cooper Marcus and Francis 1990). If we understand privacy in this more dynamic sense of boundary control, then we can see how

this can be facilitated through strategies that apply not only to urban parks, but to

more removed nature settings. Protecting opportunities to achieve multiple types of

privacy are important in such settings.

Figure 13—Some people selected secluded areas that gave them “room to think.”

Kip Tyler
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Places as Bridges to the Past: Continuity and the

Value of Memories

People’s experiences of places remain with them over time, either through memories of places from their past, or through repeated use of the same places over time.

Both past places and past experiences in currently used places were threads of the

tapestry of people, places, experiences, and feelings that make up their lives. It is

through places that people can make connections among a whole collection of

feelings and experiences in both the present and the past. In some cases, places

enable the memory of people and events to emerge; in other cases, the memories

of people and events enable places to emerge as significant. Further, past experiences with currently used places enable people to make comparisons between where

they once were, and where they are now, literally and figuratively. Thus, places act

as bridges to the past, and provide continuity in people’s lives. For example, one

participant felt that the New Jersey coast was particularly important to her because

of the many happy times she spent there with her family before her father died.

She explained that she continued to visit there because the place reminded her of

those special times:

The shore is a very important place for me. The whole feel of the

shore and that area is very emotional for me. As a family, we used

to take trips down there. It was a place that was very special to my

father. It was one of his favorite places, and now it is one of mine

too.

Revisiting past places helped people feel part of a larger whole; it was a way to

put themselves in a larger context. The return to these places represented a search

for the context of their lives. By going to their past, they were creating their own

history, their own context, and claiming it for themselves. Some people made it a

point to go back to certain places that meant a great deal, even if such places were

difficult to access. One participant described a tour that she had taken of past

places:

I took a trip once around the country to go back to all of the places

that I have lived, because I really needed to touch base with them. I

bought one of those Greyhound tickets, and went back to all of

them.

Occasionally, new places linked a person to past experiences because there was

some feature of the new place—either a similar quality in the landscape or the

Through places,

people can make

connections among

a whole collection

of feelings and experiences in both

the present and the

past.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

people whom they encountered—that felt familiar to them and provided a sense of

continuity. For example, another participant found that going camping and hiking

in New England evoked the feelings and memories of being in the small town of

her childhood, a place she considered her “spiritual home:”

One of the reasons I like New England a lot is that it reminds me

of Washington. It lets me recreate it even though I am way over

here on the other coast of the United States. The physical and

social flavor is very similar...So, I can go there and I can have

Trout Lake again.

Evidently, new places can provide linkages to past places, events, and people by

building emotional and psychological “bridges” that help create and maintain a

sense of continuity and wholeness in people’s lives.

In the cases described above, revisiting places helped connect participants with

happy times in the past, a sentiment encapsulated in one person’s comment that

“there are too many good memories to not go again.” But for others, revisiting a

past place created a sense of loss and sadness if it had changed, particularly if it

were perceived as a change for the worse. For example, one participant who grew

up in the California desert went back regularly to go hiking. Her most recent visit

was bittersweet:

I was walking through the desert—this is one of my best

experiences—I saw a roadrunner run by. That was a really neat

experience. It was just how it was supposed to be. And I always

think, how can you recapture that, how can that stay with you?

And every time I go to California now it gets worse and worse.

You think, okay, Palm Springs is all developed, so let’s go a little

further out because that is still natural. And then you go a little

further and you just can’t go anymore. You are going to be in

Nevada or Arizona by the time you find a natural desert setting

because all these towns are spreading!

In this case, the sense of continuity is challenged when an anticipated experience is more difficult or in some cases impossible to achieve. But the problem does

not seem to lie in a resistance to change per se. It seems more based on the nature

of the change in the place, and in this example, a threatened ecosystem.
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Childhood Experiences of Place

Childhood play experiences in the outdoors were a strong influence in how people

thought and felt about nature and how they interacted with it in their adult lives.

Participants told very rich, vivid stories of many different places of play, including

empty lots, campsites, skating rinks, hills, parks, and alleys. Descriptions of tree

houses and forts were not uncommon. As one participant recalled:

We lived on a sloped area of Staten Island where it goes down to

the Bay. There was this open land that was a wonderful place to

play. There was a large chestnut tree that was just tremendous, and

it was rotting away and was a good place to hide. We would draw

maps of pirate things and buried treasure, and build caves. We

would take the old Christmas trees after Christmas and build them

up, devise a door, and that would be our clubhouse.

These places were locations for growing experiences, and times for exploring

the world. Such place experiences stayed with participants beyond the form of fond

memories. They influenced their lives in adulthood. For example, among one

participant’s “most important places” was an old, over-grown field:

When I was a really little kid in Colorado, there was an old field

where they stuck old farm equipment and left it to rust. I would sit

out there and pretend that I was farming. It was my imaginary

world, and it was a big one.

This man maintained a strong fondness for rural landscapes and farming. He

also made a point to maintain a garden in the city.

In this section we have seen that important and meaningful places helped

people build bridges to their past. These places were either currently used places in

which a person had a history, places from the past which were revisited, or new

places that echoed significant places from the past. People often went to these

visited places to recapture some moment, feeling, or experience that was important

to them. We also see how childhood experiences of place influence our adult

relationships to place. Generally, connecting to past experiences of places provided

a sense of continuity and wholeness, but as we have also seen, this was not the case

when one’s expectations were unmet, thus breaking that sense of continuity. Either

way, we can see the critical role that memory plays in the use and appreciation of

places over time. Further investigation of those aspects of places that make them

memorable would be quite fruitful.
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Social Experiences of Place

Participants in this research described a strong connection between their feelings

about places, the experiences they have had there, and the people with whom they

interacted in those places. That is, places often became important because of the

people encountered there. As one participant noted, “We live in a world of our

friends. You will be most comfortable with them.” Other people help shape

people’s experiences in places, which, in turn, help create an attachment to those

places. Many people explained that it was through their social experiences in places

that the places themselves developed meaning on their own. Social experiences also

reinforced their view of the place as a facilitator for social gatherings or intimate

connections to those held dear. Although these stories are not necessarily about

shared meanings, they underscore how meaning develops through social exchange.

Participants described a host of places to which they went to be social, ranging

from bars and restaurants, to churches, beaches, zoos, their office, and school.

Although some spoke of a general type of a place, like restaurants, or a neighborhood as a whole, others described specific places, such as a particular hunt and fish

club, the Sierra Club Headquarters, and the West Side “Y.” In these places, people

met with friends or found others who shared their interests and viewpoints. From

their accounts, it is evident that people create communities of shared interest that

sustain and reinforce their identity. It is noteworthy, though, that place is an

inextricable part of this experience even when the value is placed on a community

of others because such communities do not occur in a vacuum, they are embedded

in a physical context. For example, a self-acclaimed “jazz head,” loved going to

jazz clubs in Greenwich Village, and those clubs were a very important part of his

life. Sometimes he went with friends. Other times he went alone and invariably met

people who shared his love of jazz music. In perhaps a more relevant example,

another participant talked about going kayaking regularly with a group that formed

around their mutual interest in kayaking. Not only was this group personally very

important to him, but their trips, and the specific place where they kayaked became

very special for him. Not only was this an enjoyable social and physical activity,

but the place came to encapsulate many of his values:

It’s a great activity. I always loved kayaking. It is peaceful and you

are low and connected to the water. You are with other people who

appreciate the same thing, so you know you are all on the same

wavelength and they are having a good time too. So I’m connecting with the people, the place, and myself all at the same time.

It doesn’t get much better than that.
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When considering the impact of social relationships on people’s feeling about

and use of places, it is important to recognize that it is not just that people are

connecting to places because they socialize with other people there, it is also that a

place may represent a quality of a relationship or an experience with a significant

other (friend, family member, spouse, lover) that is especially meaningful. So

enjoying places with loved ones solidifies a bond to the place on its own merit, and

people would consequently frequent that place even if those loved ones were not

with them. It could be a place in which an experience occurred that marked a

turning point in a relationship (like the markers in the journey described earlier) or

a place that strongly reminds a person of someone special. So the impact of other

people on creating place meaning is not just in providing ongoing social opportunities, but also in enabling people to honor and remember past or current relationships. We also see this in cases where people share enthusiasm for the same outdoor recreational activities, like whitewater rafting or rock climbing (Bricker and

Kerstetter 2000). Here, individuals with specific shared interests come together in

particular places to enjoy this shared activity (fig. 14). This helps people solidify

connections not only to each other, but also to the places they come to know, use,

and enjoy together. This is a critical factor in enduring leisure involvement (Kyle

and Chick 2004). In such cases, people meet and reunite in the same places over

time, and thus people and place become intertwined.

However, it is important to note that meaningful places in participants’ lives

were not merely containers for social experiences. Part of the social dimension of

place meaning also includes the social construction of the place itself. That is, the

appearance, meanings, and uses of a place are all influenced by sociocultural and

political processes as well the social construction of participants’ identity. Even on

an individual-level analysis, these issues emerged as significant. Although these

experiences are based on social processes, they reflect a distinctly political dimension of place experience.

Political Dimensions of Place Experience

The findings of this research reveal that participants’ race, ethnicity, gender, and

sexuality affected their relationships to places influencing which places they used

and which they avoided as well as where they felt comfortable and where they did

not. In particular, participants from socially marginalized groups—women, people

of color, lesbian and gay participants—all told powerful stories about belonging,

safety, and threat as critical elements in their experiences of place. It is noteworthy

Participants’ race,

ethnicity, gender,

and sexuality

affected their relationships to places

influencing which

places they used

and which they

avoided as well as

where they felt

comfortable and

where they did not.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

that this issue was not explicitly probed in the interview; nonetheless all members

of some “minority” group (30 percent of the total sample) talked about it. Many

commented that a sense of belonging in place was so critical because feeling

accepted and free to be who they were in the world was more of a struggle for

them. They attributed this to their race, sexuality, and gender, and they sought out

places where they could find people “like me.” These findings support Lee’s (1972)

writing on the social definition of recreation places that describes how social interactions with others perceived as similar to oneself is an important aspect of choice

and use of outdoor recreation places.

Conversely, minority participants talked about feelings of discomfort in places

in which they were either the only one or one of a few people from their particular

group. And many concerns about marginalization emerged in stories about safety

and threat. For example, one gay man who used to camp out West explained that

when he was a child he would pinpoint places on maps to visit when he got older.

At that time, he planned to hitchhike to them, which is something he would no

longer do: “You can’t do that anymore, I’ve grown aware that it is no longer safe.

There are too many murderers out there, and the way I flit around, someone will

probably do something regrettable.” Gays and racial minorities told similar stories.

Many African-American participants talked about neighborhood and other geographic boundaries drawn sharply along racial lines. Two told poignant stories of

Figure 14—People with shared interests in the same outdoor recreational activities, like

kayaking, come together in particular places to enjoy this shared activity.

Linda Kruger
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

racial attack and the discomfort of walking through an all-White neighborhood—

places that they learned implicitly were “just not where I belong. People start

looking at you and wondering what you are doing there, looking at you funny.”

Women also clearly navigated their daily rounds with a conscious judgment about

where they could or could not go, particularly when alone after dark. One woman

was the victim of a mugging, and although it happened several years ago, she

would not walk down the block on which it happened, even if it meant going out

of her way to get somewhere. Such findings are important for outdoor recreation

management, especially in light of the research on African-American’s attitudes

toward, and experiences in, wilderness and other nature settings (Johnson 1998,

Johnson and Bowker 2004, Taylor 2000, Virden and Walker 1999). Inclusive management strategies and environmental features that can enhance a sense of safety

are critical for more widespread use of outdoor recreation sites. More importantly,

understanding the nuances of place meanings—including the shadow side that

nature might hold for some—as well as appreciating the sociopolitical roots of

these meanings is essential for sensitive public land management.

Conversely, minority participants also talked about a sense of “cultural connectedness” in certain places. For many, living in New York City in general provided a

valuable reprieve from living in what they perceived as more oppressive places. For

others, it was culturally specific places within the city that were important and

meaningful. For example, several African-American participants went to Harlem

regularly for that sense of connection. One woman explained:

125th Street is very rich in cultural elements. So I feel good there, I

feel like I have some kind of connection there...I really like

Malcolm X Boulevard. It is the heart of black Harlem, and that is

really culturally rich. I can feel a certain at-homeness there.

Another African-American participant was quite enthused about the revitalization in his Brooklyn neighborhood: “I don’t know of another place that has as

many young active, bright, striving black folks.”

Together these stories make an important statement about the political underpinnings of our relationships to places. Significant place experiences, at least for

minorities, provided powerful messages either of exclusion or belonging. This is

where we can see the intersection of identity and political and sociocultural processes in our relationships to place.

Inclusive management strategies

and environmental

features that can

enhance a sense

of safety are critical

for more widespread

use of outdoor

recreation sites.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

The Process of Developing Meaning

The findings of this research offer insights on the process of how place meaning

develops. Naturally, the element of time was a critical factor. In some cases, places

became meaningful through the steady accretion of experiences over time and

memories of those experiences of place. In such cases, people came to rely on a

particular place because it predictably provided them with a desired experience (an

activity or emotional experience). In such instances, it seems that intimate familiarity with a place fostered a sense of comfort and self-affirmation as per Kuentzel’s

(2000) discussion of self-identity in leisure research. In other cases, repeated use

of a place enabled participants to engage in a variety of experiences, keeping that

place fresh and new, allowing them to explore new opportunities. Through either

of these processes, repeated experiences in places added many facets and layers of

meaning to those places, as people “collected” experiences in them. As we have

seen, it also offered people a sense of continuity. This is important because relationships to places are a life-long phenomenon. They develop and transform over

time, so that past experiences in places influence our current relationships to places.

This supports Gustafson’s (2001a) discussion about the temporal dimension of

place meaning (i.e., the development of place meaning through the “lifepath”).

This is also evident in the research on enduring leisure involvement in particular

outdoor recreational areas and encampments (Kyle and Chick 2004). Together these

findings provide firm testimony to the importance of memory and long-term

experience of a place or type of place.

However, it was not always necessary for a person to spend a lot of time in a

place for it to have an emotional impact. In some cases, it was a singular, pivotal

moment—a flashpoint experience—that solidified place meaning for people. This is

usually an intense experience. It could be a sudden realization—about one’s life,

one’s hopes or desires, or abilities—a moment of insight, a turning point in a

relationship, or the making of an important decision. Such an experience can be

facilitated by the environment, especially if it offers opportunities to take on a

challenging task such as finishing a difficult hike. Other times these experiences

occur in places that afford the opportunity for reflection. These flashpoint experiences were sometimes related to serendipitous discovery. As the findings in this

research suggest, unexpected discoveries, about a place or oneself, are valued

experiences. For example, one man on a walk through what became his favorite

woods, rounded the bend of a path and encountered a sparkling lake that he had not

known was there. That moment of discovery stayed with him and drew him to that

place again and again. These experiences are unexpected learning and even growth
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opportunities. They are what I consider the spatial equivalent of the “ah-ha!”

moment. The value of these experiences has interesting implications for public

land managers. We must continue to allow for multiple experiences in places and

exercise some restraint in interpreting environments/nature for visitors so that some

degree of self-guided discovery is possible. At the same time, paths, trails, viewpoints, and sitting places can be designed in a way to capitalize on environmental

features that support experiences of discovery without dictating what people should

do and look at, and when and where they should do it. Although one cannot design

or anticipate ah-ha moments—indeed their very nature requires the serendipity—

we can nonetheless allow for multiple opportunities for independent exploration

and discovery without over-interpreting a site.

Other meaning-making processes also emerged as significant, particularly in

terms of place specificity and interpretive scale. Place specificity refers to whether

relationships to place are specific to a particular setting or whether they can be

generalized to a type of setting, whereas interpretive scale refers to different levels

of place interpretation—from individual-level psychological processes to larger

societal processes. Findings indicate considerable flexibility in both of these areas,

suggesting the fluid nature of our relationships to places. In terms of place specificity, participants sometimes extrapolated from their experiences with a specific

place, developing bonds not only to that particular setting, but more generally to a

similar “type” of setting. In this study, bonds were generalized to a type of setting

most often when a person no longer had access to a specific place that was important to them, either because it no longer existed or because it was too far away to

visit often. However, other research demonstrates that some outdoor recreationists

develop attachments to a general type of place even when there is no loss of access.

In terms of interpretive scale, findings indicate that place experiences and consequent meaning are influenced not only by the individual’s thoughts, beliefs, values,

feelings, etc., but also by social processes—either smaller social groups or larger

sociocultural and political processes. Together these findings underscore the dynamic nature of people’s relationships to place and the importance of a holistic

perspective that allows for multiple levels of analysis of multiple environmental

domains, as discussed earlier.

Finally, as we have seen, people have an array of meaningful places in their

lives. Clearly, different significant places hold different meaning and play different

roles in a person’s life. They all are in a dynamic relationship with one another,

creating a web of meaning that informs our sense of self and how we situate

Although one cannot design ah-ha

moments, we can

nonetheless allow

for multiple opportunities for independent exploration and

discovery.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

ourselves (literally and figuratively) in the world. This occurred both with the array

of places that are used concurrently in the present, and among places across a

person’s lifetime. They can include places that are geographically scattered or no

longer in our current lives.

Conclusions

The research findings presented in this paper highlight the various dynamics of

people’s relationships to places and reveal their rich complexity. Place meanings are

inextricably linked to the specifics of the experiences that take place in them. As we

have seen, a host of experiences—both positive and negative, dramatic and mundane—occur in a variety of places. However, several particular types of experiences

in place emerged as salient in this research. First, the role of place is critical for

informing and expressing identity, and opportunities for identity development—

including privacy, introspection, and reflection—are critical components of place

experience that foster personal growth. Second, relationships with places are

dynamic over the lifecourse, and place memories are fundamental to providing a

sense of continuity of the past with the present. In this way, important and meaningful places can serve as developmental markers in one’s life journey. Third,

places are important for developing, revisiting, and honoring important social

relationships. Fourth, a sense of belonging and safety are important experiential

dimensions of meaningful places; at the same time, experiences of threat and exclusion also critically shape our relationships to place and cause us to avoid some

places. Fifth, our relationships to place are influenced by the larger sociopolitical

context in which we live. This context includes social and cultural norms, the biases

and assumptions of the dominant culture that ignore the experiences and needs of

minority groups, as well as economic constraints and existing management policies.

Finally, we form important and meaningful relationships with a variety of places in

our lives, and each relationship is best understood within this context of multiple

places, rather than any one site. Thus, many places form a web of meaning in our

lives.

Each of the points mentioned above highlight distinct aspects of our relationships to place, but all of these themes are interrelated. For example, a place that is

meaningful can inform one’s sense of self, and conversely our self-concept influences where we prefer to go and where we feel comfortable. It also influences

which places make us uncomfortable and which we might avoid. As Twigger-Ross

and Uzzell (1996) pointed out, not only do people choose environments that are

congruent with their self-concept, they also move on to find places that are more
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

congruent with their sense of self. This process is influenced by past experience—

with both place and people, as social relationship are also critical—and memory.

And all of this is informed by social processes and the political context in which we

live (Dixon and Durrheim 2000). This happens on both an individual and collective

level. As writings on the experience of African-Americans in wilderness areas show

us, our relationships to place are not just about our own individual experiences,

both past and present; collective memories are salient in the preference and use of

places too (Johnson and Bowker 2004, Taylor 2000). Thus we can see that places

are not merely containers for significant experiences. People take an active role in

their relationships to place.

Implications for Natural Resource Recreation and Tourism

The findings of this research have particular relevance for outdoor recreation and

public land managers because they shed light on what experiences make people

value places, what makes these experiences meaningful, and what people seek when

going to particular places. We have seen how, together, many different places form

webs of meaning in people’s lives. Given that, it is useful for public land managers

to take a broad view of people’s experiences with nature settings and include urban

nature and other places in current research to see how the opportunities that they

provide fit into the suite of places that are valued by the public.

As we have seen, significant places can serve as developmental markers in

people’s evolving sense of self over time, and they can serve as important bridges

to the past. This suggests that outdoor recreation settings do not have to serve all

functions for all people, as these settings exist in a larger “web of meaning” in

people’s lives. People will always bring their own set of experiences and needs to

a setting that can either enrich or diminish their experience. They will also seek

out particular places to meet different needs and expectations. However, more work

needs to be done to better understand shared meanings of place and how they may

be influenced by social relationships as well as qualities of settings.

Although no one mentioned nature settings exclusively, it is noteworthy that

almost half of the research participants discussed the importance of nature settings

without being prompted. Perhaps this is an indicator that such settings are best

equipped to provide some of us with experiences that we particularly value. This is

congruent with other research findings on people’s favorite places as nature settings

with restorative qualities (Korpela and Hartig 1996). It is a compelling idea, but

one that warrants further investigation. As this research and other literature shows

It is useful for public

land managers to

take a broad view

and include urban

nature and other

places in places that

are valued by the

public.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

us, we have to be mindful of biases in research. For example, we must ask: Is this a

valued setting for all or just a certain demographic? But if, in fact, there are

important experiences that natural settings can uniquely provide, greater effort can

be made to promote visitation to such places. This can dovetail with efforts to reach

out to the full range of potential visitors.

This study does shed some light on the diverse roles that places play in people’s

lives and why some people might use places that others do not. In general, such

insights are important for effective, sensitive management of natural resources and

outdoor recreation places. They can help us understand how meanings impact the

use of specific recreation and tourism sites and provide insights for negotiating

diverse meanings within and among different social groups. This knowledge, in

turn, can offset and help resolve conflicts over use of space.

It has been noted that “resource management is, at heart, a very political

process” (Cortner and Moote 1999). The findings of this research suggest that a

proper understanding of people’s relationships to places must include a politicized

view of these relationships (Manzo 2003, 2005). An appreciation of the politics of

people’s relationships to place can, in turn, help managers in the decisionmaking

process to negotiate difference as well as common ground (Yung et al. 2003). As

we have seen, the politics of place emerge at the individual level of analysis, but it

is also important to explore relationships to places at the social/community level of

analysis. This better enables us to examine shared and contested meanings as well

as how the appearance, meanings, and uses of a place are influenced by sociocultural practices.

The politics of place are particularly salient in regard to tourism. Here, the

places at issue are usually iconic places that hold considerable symbolic value for a

society or social group, although these, too, can be contested (Williams and Stewart

1998). Hence, the dynamics of identity and belonging illustrated in this paper are

critical, as are notions of “insideness” and “outsideness.” We must ask who feels

invited in to certain outdoor recreation sites and what messages are sent out to

people about who belongs here. This framework can shed light on why some

people use some places and others do not, why some feel a sense of belonging

and others feel alienated. Contestations over meaning can occur among different

groups, and an understanding of these diverse meanings is essential for conflict

management, as it can help people to allow multiple meanings and uses to

emerge—or at least to start negotiations. Here we can also learn from urban design

and planning research that addresses the NIMBY (not in my backyard) phenomenon. Although some research shows how place meanings and place attachments

We must ask who

feels invited in to

certain outdoor

recreation sites and

what messages are

sent out to people

about who belongs

here.

Understanding of

diverse meanings is

essential for conflict

management.
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have been used to justify the NIMBY response, newer research suggests that a

deeper appreciation of place meaning sheds light on the motivations and rationale

used by people to either resist or push forward certain preservation or development

efforts.

We are now beginning to more fully appreciate the importance of research on

sense of place, place attachment, and place identity for redirecting understandings

of natural settings as more than commodities. This is an important rediscovering of

Aldo Leopold’s argument that we abuse land because we see it as a commodity

belonging to us. However, “when we see land as a community to which we belong,

we may begin to use it with love and respect.” (Leopold, as quoted in Sanders

1996: 48). This suggests the importance of place meaning and attachment for

environmental stewardship. If we are to develop effective policies to foster stewardship, we must begin with a better understanding of place meaning and people’s

relationships to place.

Directions for Future Research

As outdoor recreation and tourism continue to grow, management efforts and the

public policies created to support such efforts must be informed by different levels

of analysis of place meaning—not only the individual level, but the group, community, and societal level. Moreover, there must be more interdisciplinary collaboration. There is a great deal we can learn from an array of disciplines—geography,

planning, philosophy, community psychology—and we must mine this work for

insights for natural resource management. A more holistic perspective is necessary

to understand fully the nature of people’s relationships to places and to incorporate

the full range of people’s place experiences into that understanding (Manzo and

Perkins 2006). Such a perspective includes multiple environmental domains (physical, social, political, and economic) as well as multiple levels of analysis. Each of

these levels and domains informs the other and plays a part in the use and meaning

of the environment. For example, our use of a place is informed by our individual

thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and values, which are also shaped by our sociocultural

context. That context influences the appearance, qualities, and uses of a place. This,

in turn, is affected by the political economy as well as the behavior of both individuals and groups. So all levels and domains are interconnected and we must try

to appreciate all of them in a more integrated program of study. This more holistic

approach can contribute important insights for the use and management of outdoor

recreational settings and natural resources, shedding light on issues that have

hitherto been under-explored in this specific field.

If we are to develop

effective policies to

foster stewardship,

we must begin with

a better understanding of place meaning

and people’s relationships to place.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

It is also important to conduct further research on the social meanings of

natural resource recreation and tourism sites and the sociocultural processes

through which their meanings develop. More broadly, we must better understand

the political underpinnings of outdoor recreation space use, experience, and meaning. This should include exploration into the expectations and experiences of place

for those who choose to work in public land management. This can help shed light

on how and why policies are made, and what people value and prioritize in managing public lands.

As MacNaghten and Urry (1998) argued, our understanding of nature develops

through various sociocultural practices. Social practices produce, reproduce, and

transform different natures and nature-related values. It is essential to see nature

and our experiences of it in this context. Moreover, how people (including the

media) talk about and conceptualize nature in their day-to-day lives is critical,

as is people’s sense of power or powerlessness in how they make sense of, and use,

natural settings. Related to this, the findings that some people do not choose to

leave the city to have contact with nature and that they have meaningful experiences in nearby nature suggests that further research must contextualize our relationship to nature within an urban world. The fact that some participants felt

decidedly less comfortable “in the middle of nowhere” supports the argument that

we need to appreciate and better understand experiences in more developed recreation areas (Stewart et al. 2003, see also Farnum et al. 2005).

As Hayden (1995: 112) pointed out, “place is one of the trickiest words in the

English language, a suitcase so overfilled we can never shut the lid.” The challenges

behind understanding this word reflect the complexity of our relationship to the

world around us. But despite these challenges—or perhaps because of them—we

are compelled to try to understand our relationships to place. Those of us who

conduct research in this area, or who work in natural resource management and

tourism, share some broad value about the importance of place in our lives, particularly natural settings. Although specific meanings, roles, and strategies might

differ, in the end, we share this fundamental common ground. And this moves us

forward to learn more fully about the nuances of relationships to place so that we

can better appreciate their complexities—the positive and the negative, the commonalities and contestations. This will open possibilities for more sensitive public

land management and will ultimately help us to learn how to better live our lives.

Place is, after all, part of the human endeavor for understanding, dignity, and the

honoring of our heritage as members of the Earth.

Further research

must contextualize

our relationship to

nature within an

urban world.
166

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Chapter 8—Collaborative Place-Based Forest

Planning: A Case Example From the Grand Mesa,

Uncompahgre, and Gunnison National Forests in

Western Colorado

Antony S. Cheng and Linda E. Kruger1

Abstract

This paper describes a collaborative process in which diverse stakeholders, including USDA Forest Service staff, defined a shared vision for the geographic places

making up the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison National Forests

(GMUG) in western Colorado as the first phase of the GMUG forest plan revision.

A thematic mapping process was used in which geographic places serve as starting

points for dialogue and deliberation among diverse stakeholders over desired future

conditions for the national forest. Place becomes a platform upon which people can

come together and craft shared vision. Although the GMUG case focuses on an

ecologically based set of place themes and, therefore, does not encompass the full

range of experiences, values, and uses that are bundled in “sense of place,” we show

how conflict can be considerably narrowed and common ground significantly

expanded. The approach used on the GMUG is but one alternative framework for

developing desired future conditions in national forest plan revision exercises, and

can serve as a template for other collaborative planning processes.

Keywords: Planning, place, conflict, collaboration.

Introduction

Natural resource social scientists have used the concept of “place” in the past

decade as a lens for understanding and analyzing people’s values and policy preferences for federal public lands and resources (Brandenburg and Carroll 1995, Cheng

et al. 2003, Eisenhauer et al. 2000, Kruger 1996, Schroeder 1996, Williams and

Stewart 1998, Williams et al. 1992). Given that people value public lands and

resources in vastly different ways and for divergent reasons, is it possible for

1

 Antony S. Cheng, associate professor, Forestry and Natural Resource Policy, Department

of Forest, Rangeland, and Watershed Stewardship, Colorado State University, Fort Collins,

CO 80523-1472, email: Antony.Cheng@ColoState.edu. Linda E. Kruger, research social

scientist and team leader, Alaska Communities and Forest Environments Team, Forestry

Sciences Laboratory, 2770 Sherwood Lane, Suite 2A, Juneau, AK 99801-8811, email:

lkruger@fs.fed.us.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

diverse stakeholders to collaboratively develop a shared vision for national forest

places? The purpose of this paper is to provide federal public land planners and

managers practical strategies for maximizing such collaboration by using a placebased framework.

This paper describes a collaborative process in which diverse stakeholders,

including USDA Forest Service (USFS) staff, defined a shared vision for the

geographic places making up the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison

National Forests (GMUG) in western Colorado as the first phase of the GMUG

forest plan revision. In this context, “place” is defined in two ways. In the most

basic sense, place is geographic: the land parcels that compose the GMUG. The

places are most easily delineated on maps and represent distinct geographic features, such as a ridge, valley, plateau, recreation corridor, or watershed. Second, a

thematic mapping process was used in which geographic places serve as starting

points for dialogue and deliberation among diverse stakeholders over desired future

conditions for the national forest. Place becomes a platform upon which people can

come together and craft shared vision.

Although the GMUG case focuses on an ecologically based set of place themes

and, therefore, does not encompass the full range of experiences, values, and uses

that are bundled in “sense of place” (Williams and Stewart 1998), we show how

conflict was considerably narrowed and common ground significantly expanded.

The approach used on the GMUG is but one alternative framework for developing

desired future conditions in national forest plan revision exercises, and can serve as

a template for other collaborative planning processes.

Place as a Locus of Conflict or Collaboration in

Public Lands Planning

Daniel Kemmis, in his book, Community and the Politics of Place (Kemmis 1990:

119), wrote:

Places have a way of claiming people. When they claim very

diverse kinds of people, then those people must eventually learn to

live with each other; they must learn to inhabit their place together,

which they can only do through the development of certain

practices of inhabitation which both rely upon and nurture the oldfashion civic virtues of trust, honesty, justice, toleration,

cooperation, hope, and remembrance.

The approach

used on the GMUG

is but one alternative framework for

developing desired

future conditions in

national forest plan

revision exercises,

and can serve as a

template for other

collaborative planning processes.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Based on his personal experiences as former mayor of Missoula, Montana,

Kemmis painted a rather rosy picture of citizens who typically stand on opposite

sides of issues coming together around their shared place. What might be the role

of place in shaping conflict and collaboration, especially in national forest planning

contexts? Is there a process by which diverse people become “claimed” by the place

and begin working together toward a shared vision?

We do know that conflict exists in national forest planning because the process

is generally conducted by USFS planning teams in a way that forces tradeoffs

among what are assumed to be mutually exclusive, competing demands (Behan

1981, Bettinger and Chung 2004). Conflict is defined as the interaction between

interdependent parties who perceive incompatibility of goals and interference with

achieving their own goals (Folger et al. 1997). In many cases, forest planning

processes generate conflict by the way geographic places are labeled and presented

to public stakeholders. A prime example is the use of management areas in forest

plans. Management areas delineate the landscape into distinct parcels (places) with

each parcel emphasizing one dominant use or value as defined almost exclusively

by the USFS planning team and resource specialists. These parcels are typically

designated by the team with generic labels such as “suitable commercial timber,”

“livestock grazing,” or “winter elk habitat.” Alternative management scenarios are

then presented to the public where each alternative has a different number of acres

per management area. Coalitions of citizens and groups line up behind the alternative that maximizes the number of acres for their primary use, value, or interest.

Stakeholders often end up counting and comparing how many acres there are in

Management Area 1.1 versus Management Area 3.2, for example.

By assigning generic, general labels to management areas, national forest planning teams preclude opportunities for discussions between the USFS and stakeholders, and among stakeholders themselves, about the particularistic, nuanced interactions, uses, interests, and values diverse people have with and for the landscapes.

Stakeholders are typically not part of the process of assigning values, uses, and

desired conditions. The general place meanings assigned by the planning team

result in a social process where stakeholders are pitted against one another even

if there is common ground between them (Blahna and Yonts-Shepard 1989,

Wondolleck 1988). Forest planners effectively (albeit likely inadvertently) divide

citizens and groups into competing camps, each fighting for their own share of the

landscape. Approached in this way, places are loci for conflict.

On the flip side of conflict is collaboration. Collaboration is defined as a

process by which diverse stakeholders who see different aspects of a situation
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

constructively explore their commonalities and differences, and systematically

search for ways to improve the situation that go beyond their limited vision of what

is possible (adapted from Gray 1989; Daniels and Walker 2001). Collaborative

processes have emerged in federal public lands planning that seek to address areas

of conflict and work toward common goals, such as the Applegate Partnership in

southern Oregon (Rolle 2002, Sturtevant and Lange 2003) or the Ponderosa Pine

Partnership in southwestern Colorado (Richard and Burns 1999).

In the case of the Applegate Partnership, individual citizens, interest group

representatives, and representatives from local, state, and federal agencies have

focused their energies since 1992 on achieving the shared goal of restoring and

enhancing ecological and community health in the Applegate watershed. The partnership developed integrated watershed analyses and landscape-level plans to which

individual projects are tiered. Hence, USFS, Bureau of Land Management, state

and local governments, and even timber industry land management activities are

coordinated so as to minimize ecological fragmentation while still meeting each

landowner’s objectives. By facilitating the development of action plans where each

stakeholder benefits and the collective also benefits, participants in the Applegate

Partnership have been able to achieve ecological and social gains that they would

not have otherwise achieved alone. Additionally, the partnership focuses on onthe-ground results, such as the removal of small-diameter trees to reduce hazardous

fuel loadings, riparian fencing, removal of fish passage barriers, and even proposing local ordinances on gravel extraction along local creeks and rivers (Rolle

2002: 4).

In the case of the Ponderosa Pine Partnership, the USFS, local governments,

timber industry, and conservation groups came together in 1992 around a shared

concern over the health of ponderosa pine forests in southwest Colorado. The

partnership took a study group approach where stakeholders collaboratively learn

about specific resource conditions and issues. This was done through intensive

field trips as well as facilitated study sessions where scientific, technical, and local

knowledge is presented and exchanged in a workshop setting. From this collaborative learning, the stakeholders jointly developed, implemented, and evaluated specific treatments to achieve collectively defined desired conditions for that particular

landscape. To date, over 4,000 acres of the San Juan National Forest have been

treated.2

2

 Dallison, D. 2004. Personal communication. Silviculturalist, San Juan National Forest,

15 Burnett Court, Durango, CO 81301.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

In both the Applegate and the Ponderosa Pine Partnerships, the geographic

place provided an organizing principle, a starting point for diverse stakeholders to

collaboratively develop and implement a shared vision. In this way, places can be

loci for collaboration. One possible interpretation for the role of geographic place

in collaboration is that, through a collaborative forum and process, stakeholders can

articulate the particularistic nature of their respective interactions with, and knowledge of, the geographic place. In both aforementioned partnerships, stakeholders

eschewed the traditional process by which an agency planning team assigned generic, general labels to the landscapes such as “suitable timber” or “Class IV watershed” and, instead, developed shared understandings and desired future conditions

of this place in particular based on a collaborative learning process.

Empirical research has shed light on the mechanisms by which stakeholders,

interacting in a collaborative process, are able to engage in an approach to define

the desired future conditions and activities of specific locales rather than abstract

philosophical or policy positions. Collaboration is a deliberate process of learning

where stakeholders intentionally share idiosyncratic experiences, knowledge,

information, and perspectives (Bentrup 2001; Cestero 1999; Daniels and Walker

1996, 2001; Pipkin and Doerksen 2000; Schuett et al. 2001; Webler et al. 2001;

Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000). Stakeholders build working relationships around

issues and desired conditions affecting specific pieces of ground (Bentrup 2001,

Cestero 1999, Cheng and Daniels 2005, Michaels 2001, Schuett et al. 2001).

Through a collaborative learning process, stakeholders examine and analyze the

nuanced, multidimensional character of issues affecting specific places rather than

seeking general, generic prescriptions across all situations (Bentrup 2001, BorriniFeyerabend 1996, Cheng and Daniels 2003, Daniels and Walker 1996, Richard and

Burns 1999, Sturtevant and Lange 2003). Because the focus is on a specific resource situation or landscape, stakeholders are able to participate in implementation, monitoring, and evaluation, resulting in a commitment to productive

improvement in a specific situation (Bentrup 2001, Schuett et al. 2001).

Through a collaborative process, especially one that emphasizes learning,

stakeholders are afforded the structure and opportunity to articulate a shared vision

of a place, drawing on their own interactions with the place. By doing so, stakeholders have found ways to induce changes in the management of places at various

scales—from 100-acre ponderosa pine stands to 200,000-acre watersheds. It is

important to note that collaboration emerged primarily in response to a demand

from citizens who desired planning processes that respected and valued more

Collaboration is a

deliberate process

where stakeholders

build working relationships around

issues and desired

conditions affecting

specific pieces of

ground.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

nuanced experiences and knowledge (Brick et al. 2001, Buckles 1999, Weber

2000). Many observers attach the moniker “community-based” indicating that a

collaborative planning process emerged from the grassroots level, as opposed to an

“expert-driven” planning process.

In sum, federal public land planning processes are about places to which

diverse people assign value and meaning. Collaboration has opened up this process

of assigning meanings, desired conditions, and prescriptions to specific places by

valuing individuals’ place-based knowledge, experience, and stories versus general/

generic labels. In practice, this involves intensive dialogue and requires a substantial investment of time, people, and resources to plan, implement, and adaptively

manage the dialogue. Because of this, several national forests, including the

GMUG, have initiated place-based dialogue in the assessment phase of planning

prior to the Notice of Intent and scoping phases required under the National

Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA 1969). These approaches move away

from delineating management areas by prescription to one where the desired conditions and proposed management actions for each geographic place are collaboratively defined by USFS staff and stakeholders. Key to these approaches is involving

stakeholders in defining geographic boundaries and naming geographic areas,

developing vision statements for the area, and defining current and desired future

conditions. In the next section, we describe the pre-NEPA place-based collaborative

process used on the GMUG.

The Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison

National Forests Plan Revision Process

The GMUG is approximately 3.2 million acres of federal public land spanning a

7-million-acre subregion in eight counties in western Colorado (fig. 15). Western

Colorado, like many parts of the Western United States, has experienced a transformation in its primary economy from agriculture and resource extraction to tourism

and “amenity” values, although both of these economic factors are present on the

landscape. The GMUG forest plan revision was divided into phases, with phase 1

beginning in February 2002 with a series of geographic area assessments.

Geographic area assessments define and synthesize issues, current conditions,

trends and risks, desired future conditions, and recommended management options

to achieve desired conditions. In short, the geographic assessments lay the foundation for defining and analyzing decision alternatives for the revised forest plan. By

their very nature, geographic area assessments are place based, drawing on data and

information specific to a geographic location. The place-based approach to the
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

assessments also provided opportunities for structuring a public involvement effort

that built on stakeholders’ interactions with the geographic places on the GMUG.

The GMUG was divided into five geographic areas along topographic or watershed boundaries by forest employees. This was a marked departure from the

smaller, prescriptive management areas approach taken in the first round of forest

planning. For each geographic area assessment, a landscape working group (LWG)

was convened as the forum for public involvement. The LWGs were not formal,

organized groups per se; they were venues for the public to contribute to defining

issues, current conditions, and desired future conditions. The name was chosen

to accentuate the working nature of the meetings. Between February 2002 and

October 2003, 42 community meetings were conducted with 1,035 registered

participants. From the sign-in sheets we find that 15 percent of the participants

were formally affiliated with an organized interest group; the remainder did not

claim an organizational or interest group affiliation. Sixty-eight percent of the

participants were male and had lived in the geographic area for an average of 11.3

years (with a range of 2 to 58 years). The self-identified occupations of the participants ranged from traditional land use-oriented employment, such as farming and

ranching, to more urban-oriented service jobs, such as computer systems analyst

and bike shop owner. Approximately 35 percent of the participants were retired.

Figure 15—Location of the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison National Forests

in western Colorado.

 GMUG National Forests
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

The primary technique for engaging diverse stakeholders that maximized

collaboration and minimized conflict was a participatory mapping exercise called

the “Landscape Management Themes” exercise. In the mapping exercise, the LWG

participants worked together to identify what the landscape will look like in the

future—the desired future condition of the geographic area. The exercise divided

participants into small groups of six to eight individuals. The USFS personnel sat

at each table to clarify technical questions and encourage open dialogue. Each

small group table was equipped with:

• 3- by 5-foot maps of the geographic area divided into landscape units

ranging from 1:250,000 scale to 1:50,000 scale.

• Landscape theme reference guide.

• Data summaries for each landscape unit.

• Desired condition worksheet.

The planning team, working together with district staff, generated the maps

and data summaries. The maps are digital replicas of maps commonly used for

recreation pursuits, such as hiking, motorcycling, and car touring. Maps of different scales were used, from small-scale, large-area forestwide maps (approximately

1:250,000) to large-scale, small-area watershed maps (approximately 1:50,000).

Figure 16 is an example of a medium-scale map used in the Gunnison Basin LWG.

The map scale is approximately 1:125,000 and depicts the northern half of the

Gunnison River basin. Inset in Figure 16 is an example of a small-scale map used

in the Gunnison Basin LWG. The map scale is approximately 1:50,000 and depicts

the Taylor Park area. Hence, the maps were of places and at geographic scales that

were familiar to stakeholders.

The landscape units on the maps are color-coded by theme. The landscape

themes classified landscape conditions on a continuum.

Theme 1: Natural Processes Dominate

These areas are managed to perpetuate semiprimitive to pristine conditions. Natural

processes and conditions are not measurably affected by human use. This theme

includes designated wilderness areas and other primitive areas. Lands must be a

minimum of 5,000 acres or be contiguous with other wilderness/undeveloped areas

to qualify for theme 1 management. Ecological processes such as fire, insects, and

disease are allowed to operate essentially free from the influence of humans. Vegetation composition and structure result predominately from natural succession, and

An exercise in mapping landscape

management

themes maximized

collaboration and

minimized conflict.
183

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management Figure 16—The north half of the Gunnison River Basin Geographic Area. Theme 1 = Natural processes, Theme 2 = Minimal use special areas, Theme 3 = Natural landscape with man- agement, Theme 4 = Recreation emphasis special areas, Theme 5 = Modified natural environments, Theme 6 = Grassland, Theme 7 = Residential-forest intermix, Theme 8 =Permanently altered. (Courtesy of the GMUG National Forests)
184

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

nonnative vegetation is rare. Visitors should be self-reliant and expect low levels of

contact with other people. Few, if any, human-made facilities and structural improvements are present. Travel is nonmotorized with rare exceptions of winter

motorized travel outside of designated wilderness areas. A minor amount of motorized use may be needed to restore desired conditions in restoration areas. Mountain

bike use may be allowed. Livestock grazing is generally an established use, and it is

carefully managed to maintain the ecological integrity of rangeland and riparian

systems.

Theme 2: Minimal Use Special Areas

These special emphasis areas provide for the conservation of representative,

unique, or rare ecosystems, ecological components, or culturally significant features. Theme 2 areas help ensure conservation of ecosystems that may provide

important contributions to the overall sustainability of larger landscapes. Human

influences on ecological processes or special resources are limited to the degree

possible, but sometimes evident. The type of human use can vary; however, it is

generally not intensive. Travel generally is nonmotorized. These areas are managed

for a particular objective and are often formally designated. These lands can range

from a few hundred to several thousand acres and include such areas as Research

Natural Areas—special biological, geological, or cultural/historical areas. The

balance of management activity favors elimination of uses that are incompatible

with the area’s primary management objective.

Theme 3: Natural Landscape With Management

Moderate levels of resource management and recreational activities can occur, but

the natural character of the landscape is emphasized. Resource management activities such as timber harvest, grazing, and mineral leasing may be conducted, but on

balance, management objectives favor natural ecological processes. Although these

areas are characterized primarily by natural-appearing landscapes, a variety of

management tools may be used to restore or maintain natural ecological processes.

This may result in some evidence of human activities. In some areas, users will

experience considerable isolation from the sights and sounds of people in a setting

that offers considerable challenge and risk. Backcountry areas within this theme

are generally a minimum of 2,500 acres. Restrictions on motorized travel may

differ from area to area or from season to season. Motorized travel is not common

but is allowed at low density on motorized trails. Trails are made of native substrate
185

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

(dirt/rock). Resource use may change over time to accommodate priority ecological

objectives. Livestock grazing, although common, is managed to maintain the

ecological integrity of rangeland and riparian systems.

Theme 4: Recreation Emphasis Special Areas

Lands are managed to emphasize recreation opportunities and scenery values while

maintaining ecosystem integrity. These areas typically are centered on transportation corridors or bodies of water. Other resource uses are not emphasized and

therefore have little impact on ecological conditions. Effects can occur from

facility development and hardened surfaces at recreation sites. Human use is recreation oriented; potential for contact with other users is high. Sights and sounds of

people on the site are expected and may even be desired. Motorized transportation

is common. Examples range from developed scenic byways and recreation areas to

relatively undeveloped natural areas often near natural attractions such as lakes and

streams. Unstructured recreational activities occur, such as fishing, snow play,

camping, etc. Various management activities are allowed but limited to be compatible with the recreation setting, public safety, and stewardship objectives.

Theme 5: Modified Natural Environments

These forest and grassland communities are managed with a strong multiple-use

emphasis on various resource objectives. Management is usually a combination of

livestock grazing, timber treatments to maintain or enhance stand vigor, and

prescribed fire or mechanical vegetation treatments to improve forage and browse

production. One or more commodity resource program areas (e.g., livestock,

timber harvest, minerals) may be emphasized, while providing a wide array of

recreational opportunities and diverse ecological conditions. A mosaic of vegetation

conditions are present, some showing the effects of past management activities,

others appearing predominantly natural. These lands often display a high level of

investment, use, activity, facility density, and vegetation manipulation. Users expect

to see other people and evidence of human activities. Recreation opportunities

range from dispersed to developed. Facilities supporting the various resources are

common. Motorized transportation is common.

Theme 6: Grassland Condition

Does not apply to the GMUG.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

Theme 7: Residential-Forest Intermix

Public lands are intermingled with private lands to such an extent that management

objectives for forest lands are generally secondary to community or landowner uses

and objectives. These areas, often referred to as the “wildland-urban interface,”

have a high priority for fuel and vegetation treatments to reduce wildfire hazard.

Human activities have altered the natural appearance of these landscapes in most

areas on both public and private lands. Resource extraction (logging, grazing,

mining, etc.) is not planned on a sustainable basis, but may occur in concert with

surrounding community and private landowner objectives. Motorized transportation

is common. Sights and sounds of people predominate. Vegetation management may

be done to minimize fuel loading and to improve public safety or enhance scenery.

Some dispersed recreation uses (e.g., overnight camping) are not encouraged.

Access to existing areas of high recreational use is provided. Land exchanges and

acquisitions are compatible with community and other landowner objectives.

Theme 8: Permanently Altered Areas

These areas, which are generally small in scale, are permanently altered by human

activities such that ecological conditions and landscape appearance are likely outside their natural range. Management emphasis is generally for a single program,

such as leasable mineral development or highly developed recreation. Human

activities are generally commercial in nature and directly or indirectly provide

jobs and income. Ecological conditions are maintained to ensure public health

and safety and secondary aesthetic and amenity values. Motorized transportation

is common. Examples of permanently developed sites include utility corridors,

mining sites or districts, and highly developed and concentrated recreation complexes such as ski areas.

Pubic Involvement in Theme Mapping

In essence, the themes describe different kinds of disturbances affecting the landscape, from purely natural to purely human alterations, and the resulting landscape

conditions one might see. They obviously are not as nuanced as the broad range of

individual’s “sense of place” for the GMUG. Nevertheless, the themes do provide a

platform from which diverse stakeholders can articulate their own interactions with,

knowledge of, and perspectives on the geographic places that make up the GMUG.

Through the collaborative learning process in each LWG, stakeholders were able to

use the themes as a common language for communicating the current and desired

Wildland-urban

interface areas have

high priority for fuel

and vegetation

treatments to reduce wildlife hazard.
187

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Table 6—Data summary for the Taylor Park area of the Gunnison Basin Geographic Area (160,900 acres)

Existing condition

Road Vegetation Area Outstanding Existing uses and mangement

suitable for or unique past manage- Management

Type Length Type Total area timber harvestb characteristics ment activities Themea Area concerns

Miles Percent Acres Percent

Improved 106 Aspen 2 100 Summer range for Livestock grazing Theme 1 2 Relatively quick

High clearance 199 Conifer 68 52,000 bighorn sheep, Taylor Canyon Road Theme 3 17 access from Front

Administrative 6 Shrub 17 mountain goat, upgrade Theme 4 24 range brings

Closed 31 Grass 8 and moose Colorado Trail Theme 5 43 increasing numberMotorized travel 154 Water 1 Historic mining Gunnison spur Theme 7 8 of visitors to the area

Barren 3 towns Developed Theme 8 6 Potential upgrade of

Presence of campgrounds Cottonwood Pass

boreal toad and Heaviest developed Road could escalatenorthern pike and dispersed number of visitors

Regionally recreation activities to the area

renowned high- on the GMUG National marketingquality fishery: Recreation activities: of the areas’ motorTaylor River camping, rafting, cycle trails draws

below reservior fishing, hunting, gold high numbers

Sensitive plan dredging of users

populations and Outfitters/guide Travel managementunique fen wetlands activities: rafting enforcement

fishing, hunting Development of

Winter recreation: private land

snowmobile, dog sled fragmentingice fishing landscape
188

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744 Table 6—Data summary for the Taylor Park area of the Gunnison Basin Geographic Area (160,900 acres) (continued) Existing condition Road Vegetation Area Outstanding Existing uses and mangement suitable for or unique past manage- Management Type Length Type Total area timber harvestb characteristics ment activities Themea Area concerns Miles Percent Acres Percent Recreation events: Boundary identification Ride the Rockies between the forest and bike tours, Colorado private land often 500 motorcycle tour, unclear Round-up Riders of the Union Park Rockies horse trail ride Project–potential Privatly owned reservoir transmountain Prescribed fire water diversion

Timber harvests and

extensive forestvegetation treatments

Developed sewage

lagoon

USFS permitted

summer homes

a Existing management themes:

Theme 1–Natural processes dominate Theme 5–Active managementTheme 2–Minimal use special areas Theme 6–Rangeland/grazing managementTheme 3–Minimal management Theme 7–Private land intermixTheme 4–Recreation emphasis Theme 8–Permanently altered lands

b According to the 1991 GMUG Forest Plan Amendment.
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

conditions and proposed alterations of the landscape units. Furthermore, the themes

differ from the traditional “management area” labels by encompassing a much

broader range of potential uses, values, and people-place interactions. The data

summaries are tables of key information of the area, such as vegetation types,

amount of area in roads and trails, recreation opportunities, potential for timber

and other resource production activities, and unique ecological and social values,

such as endangered species or historical landmarks. Table 6 is a data summary for

Taylor Park in the Gunnison Basin Geographic Area.

The first stage of the mapping process was to affirm, adjust, and amend the

information for each landscape unit on the map. In their small groups of six to

eight people, individuals compared the information on the data summary with what

they knew or had experienced on the specific landscape unit (see fig. 17). A group

facilitator—typically a USFS staff member—ensured that everyone at the table had

a chance to speak and offer their perspectives. The facilitator took notes directly on

the data summary of any discrepancies identified by the group participants. It was

common for group participants to share stories of a recent hike or drive up a specific trail or road, or about historic events or activities on the landscape unit. It was

also common for participants to challenge one another about whether a change was

permanent or temporary, or whether conditions had remained the same, gotten

better, or gotten worse.

Figure 17—Community stakeholders participating in the landscape management theme

exercise.

Sandy Guerreri
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

The point of this first stage is for participants to realize and appreciate the

diversity of experiences, knowledge, and values associated with this landscape unit,

and to encourage the participants to develop a common understanding of the current condition of the landscape unit. Although the landscape themes and data

summaries are primarily biophysical, the dialogue among group participants was

about how their own experiences and knowledge compared to the themes and

information presented by the USFS. Participants were also encouraged to redraw

the boundaries for the landscape unit, as well as question the landscape theme

assigned by the USFS. Any changes were recorded directly on the map or on the

data summary sheet. Throughout this process, participants drew on their own and

one another’s local knowledge of the landscape, resources, and uses, and matched it

up to the information provided by the USFS. This was a unique opportunity for

local stakeholders to contribute to the production of information and knowledge

about the local landscape.

The second stage of the mapping process is to define the desired condition of

the landscape. This is a highly deliberative process because it requires people to

integrate individual visions for how the land should look in the future and the role

of people in achieving this vision. In their group of six to eight people, individuals

were asked by the facilitator, “Should this landscape unit remain a theme ‘X’ or

should its desired future condition be another theme? If the theme should not be

changed, why? If the theme should be changed, how will this change be achieved?”

In this stage, diverse individuals are presented with the opportunity to explore their

differences and discover commonalities. In the case of disagreements over desired

conditions, the facilitator continued to probe asking the disputing parties to explain

and justify their perspectives. The facilitator ensured that each individual had an

opportunity to express his or her perspective.

In addition, the facilitator asked about whether the proposed desired future

condition theme is feasible—what realistically needs to happen for the condition

to be achieved. A Desired Condition Worksheet was formatted to encourage stakeholders to use the landscape themes to describe the findings of small group deliberations. Specific comments and concerns were written on the worksheets to

provide equal voice to dissenting viewpoints. For example, if the majority of the

group decided that Taylor Park should be primarily landscape theme 3 with designated areas of 1 and 5, but two individuals wanted the whole Taylor Park to be a

theme 5, their perspectives were written on the sheet with a brief explanation for

why this is a desired future condition. The point of this second stage is to uncover a

range of potential desired future conditions for each landscape unit, not necessarily

Defining the desired

condition of the

landscape is a highly

deliberative process; it requires

people to integrate

individual visions

for how the land

should look in the

future.
191

Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

to force a consensus around one theme. The Gunnison Basin LWG meeting summaries for Taylor Park, a landscape in the Gunnison Basin, are given in appendix 3.

A total of 83 landscape management theme areas in the five geographic areas

were assigned management themes and values by stakeholders. Twenty-three out

of the 83 areas (28 percent) were assigned themes that had conflicting desired

future conditions—primarily a disparity between themes 1, 3, and 5. For the

remaining areas (60 out of 83, or 72 percent), LWG participants generally agreed

on the landscape themes. At this writing, the GMUG has finalized the geographic

area assessments and, based on the assessments’ findings, has formulated a preliminary proposed action (PPA) for each of the five geographic areas (see http://

www.fs.fed.us/r2/gmug/policy/plan_rev/index.shtml). The LWGs, through the

participatory mapping exercise, directly influenced the decisionmaking process.

For example, the desired future condition landscape themes for Taylor Park PPA

closely aligned with the thematic input received from the LWG meeting in October

2003. The GMUG planning team worked with stakeholders through September

2005 on collaboratively developed objectives, guidelines, and a plan monitoring

program. Unfortunately, an administrative delay postponed the release of the draft

forest plan until fall 2006.

Postmeeting evaluation questionnaires also provide quantitative indication of

how LWG participants viewed the mapping exercise. Table 7 shows mean rankings

to questions focusing on the process. As the table indicates, participants nearly

universally valued a deliberative process early on in the planning process well

before decisions were being made, with a mean rank of 4.59 on a scale of 1 to 5.

This indicates the importance of engaging stakeholders in the situation assessment

phase of planning. Participants also indicated that they valued the knowledge that

others possess (mean rank = 4.30), including the Forest Service (mean rank =

4.22). Participants generally found value in small group discussions (mean rank =

4.29) when using the mapping process (mean rank = 4.36), but were slightly less

comfortable with large group discussions (3.96). Participants who attended the

LWGs were already well versed in deliberative processes, having previously been a

part of two or three collaborative groups. Indeed, federal land managers can expect

stakeholders to already have experience in collaborative processes.

In sum, preliminary results indicate that taking a place-based approach to

engaging stakeholders in the situation assessment phase of the GMUG planning

process produced qualified success. By collaboratively defining desired future conditions for geographic places rather than reacting to aggregate management area

By collaboratively

defining desired

future conditions

for geographic

places rather than

reacting to aggregate management

area acreages,

stakeholders were

able to come together to expand

common ground

and narrow conflict

with regard to landscapes they all care

about.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

Table 7—Mean response rankings to learning-based questions from postmeeting questionnaires, Grand Mesa, San

Juans, and Gunnison Basin Landscape Working Groups

Mean response ranking

(n = 329, except where noted)

Mean ranking

(1 = strongly disagree;)

Evaluation question 5 = strongly agree Standard deviation

I understand how this evening’s meeting fits into the GMUG 3.81 1.05

forest plan revision.

My knowledge of the area provided important contributions 4.06 1.05

to this meeting.

Other citizens’ knowledge of the area provided important 4.30 .98

contributions to this meeting.

The district staff’s knowledge of the area provided important 4.22 .98

contributions to this meeting.

It is important that the public is being involved at this early stage 4.59 .91

of the Forest Plan Revision.

Presentations by Forest Service staff help me better understand various 4.11 1.04

issues affecting the area.

I was comfortable discussing public land issues with people 4.11 .00

I don’t know. (n = 273)

I was comfortable discussing public land issues with people 4.11 1.02

who hold different viewpoints. (n = 273)

I was comfortable contributing to discussions during the large 3.96 1.10

group activity.

I was comfortable contributing to discussions during the small 4.29 .95

group activity.

I felt comfortable using maps during the landscape management activity. 4.36 .95

I am comfortable talking to Forest Service staff about issues in 4.34 1.03

the area. (n = 273)

How many collaborative processes have you participated in over 2.55 1.10

the past 5 years?

How many of these involved the GMUG forest? 2.16 1.14
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

acreages, stakeholders were able to come together to expand common ground and

narrow conflict with regard to landscapes they all care about.

Implications

The GMUG case offers valuable lessons with implications for national forests

embarking on revising their forest plans or other landscape-scale plans. First, the

participatory mapping techniques and LWG processes used on the GMUG can serve

as templates for other national forest planning processes. They were effective in

bringing together technical and social information in ways that seemed to make

sense to the LWG participants. The participatory mapping process, in particular,

struck a balance between imposing enough structure and background information,

and allowing stakeholders ample opportunities to articulate their own experiences,

knowledge, and perspectives. At a broader level, the process might have initiated

communities of GMUG places. Gathering diverse stakeholders around maps can

cause them to recognize how interdependent their uses and values are with one

another. Maps especially can facilitate this recognition of interdependence.

Second, it is clear that the GMUG landscape themes are but one of any number

of thematic frameworks planning teams and stakeholders can use as a starting point

for collaboratively defining desired future conditions. The GMUG planning team

decided to base their themes on categories of disturbance and resulting landscape

conditions; however, it is conceivable—and perhaps necessary—that other themes

be used, such as variations of the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum or themes collaboratively developed by a planning team and ad hoc group of stakeholders. It all

depends on the issues, geographic scale of the planning context, the relevant land

management laws and policies (in this case, the National Forest Management Act

and associated administrative rules), and the stakeholders involved in the process.

The key point is that the thematic approach taken by the GMUG is adaptable to any

number of planning contexts, providing a starting point from which USFS staff and

stakeholders can begin articulating and sharing their unique knowledge, experiences, and perspectives on a geographic place.

Third, the GMUG case clearly demonstrates that a broad range of people—

from organizational representatives to lay persons—have the willingness and capacity to participate in collaborative national forest planning processes when given

the opportunity. The postmeeting questionnaires from the GMUG process demonstrate that stakeholders show clear preferences for processes that afford opportunities to articulate and share nuanced, individual interactions with and knowledge

of geographic places. Such stakeholders desire a participatory process that gets

Gathering diverse

stakeholders around

maps can cause

them to recognize

how interdependent

their uses and

values are with one

another. Maps especially can facilitate

this recognition of

interdependence.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

away from “acre counting” of management areas and builds capacity for being

full partners in national forest planning, including defining management objectives, guidelines, and monitoring protocols. Obviously, the LWG process used on

the GMUG is geared toward people living relatively close to the national forest

and, therefore, may not necessarily include a representative set of values, uses, and

desired conditions for the larger population. However, recent research on incorporating spatial analyses of social values for public lands in random sample surveys

shows promise for getting a more representative set of values, uses, and desired

conditions (Brown 2005, Brown et al. 2002).

In conclusion, national forest planning is evolving as innovative planners and

managers attempt to address the ever-increasing diversity of demands on federal

public lands. Much of the innovation is taking a place-based approach. It is not an

area where research is providing tools and answers. Indeed, research in place-based

planning is in its infancy in federal public land planning, although a larger body of

research is developing in urban and regional planning. As a result, planners and

managers are constantly experimenting and adapting approaches to their specific

contexts. Interestingly, the constantly evolving terrain of place-based planning

affords opportunities for partnerships between planners, managers, and researchers

that can be productive and educational for everyone involved. The nature of placebased dialogue among stakeholders also requires the different skill sets of planners,

managers, and researchers, especially skills in multiparty negotiation, conflict management, and interpersonal and group communications. These skills bring planners

and managers into contact with social science researchers they may not have

worked with before. The working relationships that evolve can be of tremendous

benefit to all parties.

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Acknowledgments

This research is part of the Recreation and Tourism Initiative. Funding came

through the Focused Science Delivery Program and the Human and Natural Resources Interactions Program of the Pacific Northwest Research Station. The

editors would like to thank all the workshop participants, especially the contributing authors for their efforts and patience with the writing and publication process.

Metric Equivalents

When you know: Multiply by: To find:

Acres 0.405 Hectares

Feet (ft) 0.305 Meters
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Appendix 1: Workshop Participants

Kelly Bricker

Dept. of Parks, Recreation and Tourism

University of Utah

Salt Lake City, UT 84112

kelly.bricker@health.utah.edu

Jena Daly

Jennifer Farnum

VP of Marketing and Research

12504 Roosevelt Lane 16A-1

Eaglewood, CO 80112

Jfarnum@teresafarnum.com

(303) 248-3011

Troy Hall

University of Idaho

College of Natural Resources

Dept. of Conservation and Social Science,

Box 441139

Moscow, ID 83844-1139

troyh@uidaho.edu

(208) 885-9455

Gerard Kyle

Dept. of Recreation, Park and Tourism Studies

Texas A&M University

2261 TAMU

College Station, TX 77843

gerard@tamu.edu

(979) 862-3794

Linda Kruger

USDA Forest Service

PNW Research Station

Juneau Forestry Sciences Lab

2770 Sherwood Lane, Suite 2A

Juneau, Alaska 99801-8545

lkruger@fs.fed.us

(907) 586-8811 ext. 228

Lynne Manzo

University of Washington

Landscape Architecture

348 Gould Hall

Box 355734

Seattle, WA 98195-5734

lmanzo@u.washington.edu

(206) 616-8697 

Bill McLaughlin

University of Idaho

College of Natural Resources

Dept. of Conservation and Social Science

Box 441139

Moscow, ID 83844-1139

billm@uidaho.edu

(208) 885-6659

Richard Stedman

Dept. of Natural Resources

122 D Fernow Hall

Cornell University

Ithaca, NY 14850

rcs6@cornell.edu

(607) 255-9729

Bill Stewart

University of Illinois

Leisure Studies

104 Huff Hall, MC 584

1206 South 4th

Champaign, IL 61820

wstewart@uiuc.edu

(217) 244-4532

Dan Williams

Rocky Mountain Research Station

USDA Forest Service

2150-A Centre Avenue

Fort Collins, CO 80526-1891

drwilliams@fs.fed.us

(970) 295-5970
200

GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Appendix 2: Research Questions

Research questions were identified by the group by using a brainstorming process.

Participants then identified their highest priority questions. The six questions that

ranked highest in importance are listed first, followed by the other questions the

group rated important and of interest but less pressing.

• How do local and nonlocal social processes interact to create place

meanings?

• How do relevant management groups (e.g., demographically defined

groups, activity groups, gender groups, ethnic groups) differ in place

meanings?

• How do meanings for specific recreation and tourism sites become

negotiated within social groups?

• Under what condition(s) (planning processes) does a management focus on

place attachment and place meaning reduce or avert increases in conflict?

• What are the different meanings of place elicited by different research

methods (e.g., surveys, diaries, narratives, 2nd document analysis)?

• How are changes in place meanings affected by changes in the physical

environment?

• How do place meanings relate to community identities? (Keep in mind

multiple communities.)

• How do place meanings change over time for recreationists, communities,

user groups, tourists?

• What are effective strategies to assess place meanings (particularly issues of

representativeness of all stakeholders)?

• How do place meanings and place attachment differ or change throughout

one’s life course?

• How do place meanings change in the face of threat?

• How are changes in place meanings affected by changes in the political

context of a place (e.g., wilderness designation)?

• How do stakeholders’ place attachments and place meanings relate to their

view of resource and recreation/tourism management?

• What roles do education and interpretation (broadest sense) play in

developing place attachment and place meaning?

• How do disruptions of place affect individuals’ psychological construct of

the disrupted place?
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

• What kinds of spatial scales seem to be effective for management?

• Is place attachment always positive to the person who is attached? (To

whom or to what?)

• What is the effect of shifting demographics on the range of meanings for

recreation and tourism places?

• What kinds of spatial scales seem to resonate with recreationists and

tourists?

• How do we understand how recreationists and tourists “fit” (more than just

describing differences) into settings that also entail other uses (year-round,

seasonal, etc.)?

• What available technologies can assist in understanding and locating place

meaning?

• What management techniques effectively promote place attachment?
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Understanding Concepts of Place in Recreation Research and Management

Appendix 3: Gunnison Basin Landscape Working

Group Summaries1

Taylor Park landscape was discussed at two Landscape Working

Group Meetings:

• September 24, 2003, in Gunnison: A large percentage of this landscape is

currently actively managed as a theme 5, with spectacular views and

recreational opportunities in a theme 4/theme 8 setting.

Three groups discussed this landscape. Much of the discussion in all of the

groups centered around the idea that with increased people comes increased

impacts. It was difficult for participants to discuss other resources than people,

recreation, and the way people travel. One group did not directly discuss future

management in themes but did view their opinion that:

• In theme 4, the Forest Service should control and enforce recreation,

and designate dispersed camping sites.

• In theme 5, the Forest Service should keep timber roads open for

recreation.

• In all areas that allow for all-terrain vehicle use, improve management.

One group noted corrections/changes to the current management theme display.

A theme 2 should be applied to the Tincup Cemetery, which is located on

National Forest System lands noted on table 3 map. The Manganese and Doctor

Park area should be displayed as a theme 4 area, rather than a theme 3. The

South Kellen Creek (east of American Flag Mountain) should currently be

displayed as a theme 3 rather than a theme 4 because it does not receive high

recreation use, nor does it have high recreation value.

This same group discussed the Park Cone area, and participants thought it is

receiving an increase of road and trail use. Future management of the area

south of Park Cone to Slaughterhouse (as displayed on map 3 from a theme 5)

should shift to a theme 3. The Cameron Creek Trail should continue as a

motorized trail. Future management of the area east of Willow Creek should

shift from a theme 4 to a theme 1 for future management (see map 3). Also

manage the area around Sanford Basin as a theme 1, not a theme 4. Continue to

manage the Texas Ridge Trail and surrounding areas as a theme 3 and keep the

trail nonmotorized.

1

 Source: USDA FS 2005.
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GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PNW-GTR-744

There is concern over timber production in the future in the Pie Plant Creek

area, but the concern was not clarified.

Another group discussed the area west of Mirror Lake and into the Pitkin

landscape. It is currently managed as a theme 1, and participants want this area

to shift to a theme 3 to allow for some logging and fuel reduction. This group

also agreed that the current management themes within this landscape should

continue into the future, but that enforcement, regulation, and management

should be improved.

• October 9, 2003, in Crested Butte: Two groups discussed the Taylor Park

landscape unit. One group recommended that in the southeast corner the

theme 1 management should move toward theme 3 “for the benefit of the

proximate community.”

One group recommended in the American Flag Mountain area, to move from a

theme 4 to a theme 3, which, in their opinion, may help to help protect singletrack trail use. They also recommended a special designation (theme 2) in this

area to protect a rare salamander species (delineated on the group 2 map).

The Taylor Canyon area is currently shown as a theme 8, but one group recommended it should be managed in places with a theme 7 emphasis because of the

residential/forest intermix.

In the Union Park area, there was agreement that the current and future management is within theme 5 management, but all participants in one group

agreed that Lottis Creek should not be dammed for future water development.
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