University of Victoria

Landscapes in Transition: Commodification and the Erosion of Place

There is a growing awareness of the central role of the landscapes as embodiments of natural and historical values. In many areas, however, landscapes are being altered dramatically. Critics note a trend towards placelessness, as the forces of modernization replace local contours and textures with standardized forms. Landscapes are commodified, their shapes manipulated to meet new criteria of beauty and value. These changes are especially evident in western Canada and the US, where rural gentrification promotes landscapes that reflect the tastes and leisure-based lifestyles of affluent consumers. This session explores themes of landscape change and the erosion of place. The session does not focus exclusively on rural landscapes but will consider urban and peri-urban landscapes as well. Both theoretical and empirical papers are welcome.

Session Organizer: David MacLennan, Thompson Rivers University, dmaclennan@tru.ca

Nature, History and Authenticity: Redefining Coastal Newfoundland for Tourism through the Media

Mark Stoddart, Memorial University of Newfoundland, mstoddart@mun.ca , Paula Graham, Memorial University of Newfoundland, psg273@mun.ca

Since the 1992 cod fishing moratorium, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador has redefined social-environmental relationships in coastal landscapes in its dual pursuit of tourism and offshore oil development. In this paper, we examine websites produced by Newfoundland and Labrador tourism promoters and operators, television advertisements, and media coverage from Canada, the US and the UK in order to analyse the ways in which coastal landscapes are translated into internet and media images, connecting local environments to global flows of tourism. Through this analysis, we answer three questions: how are coastal landscapes packaged and circulated to potential visitors through traditional media (television ads) and digital media (websites)? How are images of coastal landscapes produced by Newfoundland-based promoters and operators tailored by “outsider” mass media outlets in Canada, the US and the UK? Are there meaningful differences in the ways that Newfoundland coastal environments are translated to potential tourists by Canadian, US and UK media? Drawing on recent work in the tourism mobilities literature, we argue that the post-moratorium shift towards tourism has resulted in the packaging and insertion of NL landscapes into global tourist/travel discourses in diverse ways that depend on medium of circulation and target audience.

Friday June 7, 2013 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-162

Constructing a Sense of Place: Global and Local Sensibilities in Iconic Architecture

Matt Patterson, Department of Sociology University of Toronto, matt.patterson@utoronto.ca

Place has been shown to influence social life in part by providing cultural cues for social action within a given locality. Yet we lack a full understanding of how people recognize, interpret, and respond to these cues. To develop a theory of place sense-making, this paper examines a situation where place became a topic of public debate: the architectural expansions of two eminent museums in Toronto. Tracing the cultural and spatial references used by museum leaders to plan and community members to evaluate the projects, I demonstrate the existence of two distinct “geographic sensibilities” held by each group. While museum leaders tended to look to international landmarks for precedents, community members focused primarily on spatial elements within the immediate environment. I explain the development of these sensibilities with reference to each group’s social position and their associated experience of space. This analysis advances our understanding of the “accomplishment of place” by identifying how notions of place are formed cognitively and used to guide social actions, including major urban development projects.

Friday June 7, 2013 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-162

Getting to know gentrified ruralities: representations, emotions and sensings of landscape in places of rural gentrification

Martin Phillips, University of Leicester, mpp2@le.ac.uk

This paper explores the relationships between rural gentrification and landscape drawing on the concept of the 'more-than representation' (Lorimer, 2005). Rural landscapes have long been viewed as representations that have the power to attract people to live in places quite distant, at least in terms of physical distance, from urban spaces. It has furthermore been argued that the movement of people has led to material restructurings of landscapes, in ways that both enact and potentially undermine their representational forms. Drawing from examples in the UK and North America, this paper both illustrates this argument and raises questions about the degree to which landscape representations actually come to move people affectually as well as spatially. Drawing on Anderson's (2006) concept of modality of affect, the paper explores how representations of landscape are often drawn into accounts of rural in-migration but these representation, as Carolan (2008) puts it, "tell only part of the story". Attention is drawn to the significance of emotional semi- or unconscious affectual relations with landscapes, including those of domestic rural space. The paper ends by considering the relationship of such affectual relations to understandings of the commodification of landscape and notions of the erosion of place.

Friday June 7, 2013 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-162