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Sense of Place- Coastal Community Well-Being
Sense of Place: In environmental psychology, sense of place—how we perceive a place— includes place attachment and place meaning (Kudryavtsev, Stedman and Krasny, 2012).
Historically, Parks Canada has primarily focused on the ecological side of monitoring National Parks and National Marine Conservation Areas and more or less focused on social/human dimension aspects. More and more, scientists and conservationists have realised the importance of incorporating social science and appreciating interdisciplinary work, and is essential to incorporate to find solutions to complex issues. As part of my placement with Parks Canada, I've been asked to identify various targets and indicators of Coastal-Community Well-Being. One target, we deemed to be "Sense of Place". Now the tricky part is how to actually capture this in a meaningful way? One way could be through an in-depth social science study with interviews etc. Does anyone have any thoughts/suggestions? How would you go about capturing what a place means to a community?
Last night, I went out for a walk at Petrie Island along the Ottawa River. I grew up coming to this beautiful city beach. I played, swam, walked my dogs here and observed wildlife. For 4 consecutive summers, I worked as a nature centre monitor. I have a strong emotional connection to this place and it made me who I am today and probably even why I wanted to be in this Direct Action placement!
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Sounds like a very interesting placement Caleigh, similar to mine actually - I am also with Parks Canada. For mine I have to gather knowledge on local communities perceptions (what they value about oceans/marine conservation, uses, etc) so I am thinking of creating an online survey and possibly doing an online workshop to gather this research. If Covid were not a thing (my placement is virtual) then I would be certainly conducting in person interviews/running workshop. So my suggestion would be to do something similar to gather your findings and could possibly do zoom interviews/workshops or phone chats? I just started my placement so I am still buzzing with different ideas - feel free to share any thoughts/suggestions for mine as well :)!
Also not sure if your into podcasts but there is one i follow that i LOVE I think you'd enjoy it - its called Future Ecologies - they have an episode that talks about place attachment you might find some inspiration here.
Lovely photo too!
Thank you Katrice for your thoughtful reply! I'll be sure to check out that podcast as well:)
Katrice Baur
Sep 2, 2020