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A Sense of Place: valuing landscapes in the Condamine Headwaters.

Angela Wardell-Johnson

Science and Engineering, Murdoch University, WA.
Email: angela_wj_05@internode.on.net

Abstract

Sense of place binds people to the landscapes in which they live. This grounding is established by individual and social practices in and through place (Malpas 1999). Landscapes are defined by people and are in turn defining in a dynamic and complex interaction.

People’s relationships with natural and social worlds generate responses to environmental policies that may distance individuals from one another or the agencies that develop policies. Working with diverse community sectors involved with landscape management requires some understanding of the values that form an individual’s structuring of and contribution to decision-making (Cantrill 2001). Expert or centralised resource decisions are often embedded within larger institutional or political decision frameworks that can obscure local qualitative values. sense of place values, meanings, and symbols are exposed when the qualities of and practices in a landscape are threatened (Brown 2005).

This paper locates people within landscapes to define sense of place. A numerical taxonomy of survey data exposed patterns and dichotomies of values expressed by people in the Condamine Headwaters. This was explored further through a focused qualitative inquiry.

People grouped thirteen different values into four frameworks. These value clusters offer insight into the relationships between symbolic, cultural and material values in landscapes. There is a distinct but unexpected relationship between association with a landscape over time and commitment to maintaining landscape values. The way in which these decision-makers value different elements of the landscape provides an insight into more effective development and implementation of policy for the conservation of resources in landscapes.

Introduction

Sense of place binds people to the landscapes in which they live. This grounding is established by individual and social practices in and through place (Malpas 1999). Landscapes are defined by people and are in turn defining in a dynamic and complex interaction.

People’s relationships with natural and social worlds generate responses to environmental policies that may distance individuals from one another or the agencies that develop policies. Working with diverse community sectors involved with landscape management requires some understanding of the values that form an individual’s structuring of and contribution to decision-making (Cantrill and Senecah 2001). Expert or centralised resource decisions are often embedded within larger institutional or political decision frameworks that can obscure local qualitative values. Sense of place values, meanings, and symbols are exposed when the qualities of and practices in a landscape are threatened (Brown 2005).

This research is part of a larger study into the relationships between sense of place, social capital and discourses of the environment in two rural Australian sub-catchments with contrasting environmental condition. The Headwaters of the Condamine, at the start of the Murray Darling Basin are generally in good environmental condition, while the Katanning Zone of the Blackwood Basin have endured deterioration and salinisation. This paper reports on the way in which people of the Condamine Headwaters value different places in their landscape and the way in which they form their identity within these landscapes. The relationships between these place values and attachment to landscapes locates people within the specific context of a landscape. This identifies sense of place as a distinctive way of defining community within the social catchments of decision-making.

Sense of place: three elements

Sense of place may be conceptualised within three social scales:

  • The individual
  • The collective expressed at the community scale, and,
  • Society.

Sense of place develops and evolves in each of these three scales through a dynamic interaction between three key interacting elements: identity, attachment and the physical landscape. Over time, the processes that define sense of place ideally result in an evolution from belonging, through attachment to commitment in landscapes.

The first element of sense of place, identity, is comprised of relationships that develop between the self, others and the landscape. To provide context for exploring the implications for landscape management and decision-making, the political sphere is included. The second element, attachment, is shaped by relations between groups over time. The strength and form of attachment reflects notions of meaning in sense of place that influence decisions in the use and management of places in the landscape. Landscape forms the third element. Landscapes are imbued with symbolic and material meanings that develop in relation to experience and memory within cultural and political expression.

Sense of place has been explored for reasons of planning and management of natural resources in landscapes; policy development for governance and the management of biodiversity, and for assessing environmental impact. A layered approach gives primacy either to theoretical issues or applied uses in research into sense of place. Sense of place thus captures the relationships between people and the landscapes in which they live, and serves a range of application ends.

The survey analysis

The first component in the research captured sense of place attributes through a broad based quantitative survey. The participants were personally contacted and most survey questionnaires were distributed by hand and returned by mail. The response rate was sixty percent showing no distinct non-participation. The research was based on a population sample that captured both scale of social engagement in the catchment and the virtual worlds of landscape value. This social catchment included a range of social representatives representing both geographical spread and representative cross section of people responding to the 2001 national census. In addition, three representations of community (Duane 1997) were included in the survey to ensure representation of a range of decision-makers that impact on landscape management. This social catchment included:

• communities of place: people who live and work in a place (eg. farmers);

• communities of identity: people who identify with a place through childhood, extended family, engagement with a place for other reasons (eg. extended family, weekend farmers, NGO people); and,

• communities of interest: people who derive their income or contribute to the state of a place through business interests without necessarily intending to live for the long term in a place, or whose attachments may belong elsewhere (eg. business, government agency staff members).

A numerical taxonomy (Belbin 1995)of survey data exposed patterns and dichotomies of values expressed by people in the Condamine Headwaters. This approach is not dependent on a normal distribution of data, nor does it favour one variable over another in the analytical approach. All cases and all variables are used simultaneously to portray clustering of values and people without socio-demographic descriptors driving the grouping. In addition ordination shows the way in which place values are clustered to offer insight into the relationships between symbolic, cultural and material values in landscapes.

The ordinations show participants or cases (the dots) in their relation to one another in three dimensional space based on the analysis of intrinsic variables. Testing for statistical significance is conducted to locate the variables that drive and define the social assemblages (groups of people) and define the differences between groups (Belbin 1993). The statistically significant variables are shown as biplot lines emanating from the centre of the ordination plot show positive correlation in the direction of the variable name, and negative correlation in the opposite direction. Vectors are derived from statistical evaluation of variables using Monte Carlo permutation tests of correlations (MCAO in PATN) derived by Principal axis correlation (PCC in PATN). These variables were also assessed in relation to the defined social assemblages using Kruskal Wallis tests. Each vector shown is thus statistically significant in relation to both the cluster analysis and the ordination, demonstrating congruence between different numerical taxonomic approaches. This analysis therefore shows the variables most critical to the expression of values, people and pattern derived in this analysis.

Valuing Places in the Landscape

People grouped a tested typology of thirteen different place values (Brown et al. 2001) into three frameworks (Figure 1). The first group of values shown in the dendrogram (Figure 1) shows a group of social values consisting of: recreation, historic, cultural and learning. The second group shows two related sets of values that might pertain to more intangible concepts relating to symbolic representations of wellbeing and the future and include in one half: life sustaining, biodiversity and values of the future, and in the second half, intrinsic, therapeutic, aesthetic and spiritual values. The third group pairs subsistence with economic values in a distinct and statistically different framing of values.

Figure 1. Dendrogram showing landscape value clusters.

The dendrogram (Figure 1) shows that economic values are more similar to spiritual values than to the set of social values that resists statistical fusion with the other two sets of values for longer. These landscape value clusters offer a unique insight into how the policy of landscape management can be more effectively developed and implemented to accommodate social and cultural values in rural agricultural Australia. These results reflect the necessity of considering economic, spiritual and social value frameworks explicitly.

Commitment to values

In an effort to gauge difference between attitude and behaviour, a comparison is made between frequency of visiting different places in a landscape and commitment to maintaining the values of those places (Figure 2). In the Condamine Headwaters there is greater commitment to historical and cultural values than is exhibited through visitation rates, in contrast to economic sites that hold lower rates of commitment than is reflected in visitation rates. Places with intrinsic, spiritual, therapeutic and aesthetic hold similar rates of commitment to visitation but there is a greater commitment to maintaining the values spiritual sites than is evident in the visitation rates. Commitment to maintaining the values of each of these kinds of places in the Condamine Headwaters landscape is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Histogram showing commitment to maintaining place values in the Condamine Headwaters.

Time and commitment

There is a distinct but unexpected relationship between association with a landscape over time and commitment to maintaining landscape values. When relationships between commitment to maintaining place values and community composition was assessed through the numerical taxonomy, five clusters of participants emerged to form statistically distinct social assemblages. Social assemblage one comprises most of the participants and shows a reasonable and somewhat uniform commitment to all landscape values. Social assemblages two and three have sparse commitment to any landscape values. Social assemblage four has little if any commitment to landscape value clusters pertaining to spiritual and economic sites or places. In a sharp contrast to the other social assemblages, the fifth group (Figure 3) of participants shows no commitment to maintaining the values of any places in the landscape despite showing a mix of both farmers who have lived in the sub-catchment for more than forty years and business people who derive their income from the state of the sub-catchment.

Figure 3. Ordination showing participants (both Condamine Headwaters and Katanning Zone) values and statistically critical socio-demographic descriptors.

Figure 3 shows the clustering of people in relation to their commitment to maintaining place values. Each dot represents a person and each colour represents a social assemblage in three-dimensional space emanating from the centre of the ordination (smaller dots are further away than larger dots). The overlaid statistically critical biplots show the correlation of variables with participants, which includes the relationship between individual place values and socio-demographic descriptors.

The qualitative ground-proofing

These results were explored further through a focused qualitative inquiry to reveal that the sense of stewardship is a significant factor in attachment and aesthetics plays a strong part in developing this attachment. There is an interaction between symbolic values in landscapes and the more material values they mutually confirm. The spiritual and social sets of values in landscapes are often the means for engaging people in landscape management that in turn result in the economic values being maintained. This interaction requires ongoing attention to ensure that communities of identity and interest (business and agency staff members) develop attachment and potentially commitment to place through interaction with engaged communities of place and identity (farmers and landholders).

Attachment is tangible through the social interactions between politics of place and politics of interests (Cheng et al. 2003) in landscapes. Formal political processes such as new forms of governance and regionalisation tend to centre on approving or opposing single issue policy positions favoured by coalitions of interest groups. This tends to silence or marginalise the moral and historical symbolic meanings of local context and identity where politics of place operates within the context of local scale and local landscapes. Where the interaction and engagement is developed and maintained between communities of identity and interest (politics of interests) and communities of place and identity (politics of place), there is an increased likelihood of maintaining resilience in landscapes.

Conclusions and Recommendations

The way in which decision-makers in this social catchment value different elements of the landscape provides an insight into more effective development and implementation of policy for the conservation of resources in landscapes. A full typology of place values that represent the social, spiritual and economic values nested in landscapes is a critical part of recognising the intrinsic relationships between the symbolic and material components of decision-making in landscape management. Different sectors of social catchments contributing to the decision-making making process have different ways of valuing landscapes. Explicit acknowledgement of these differences is critical if we are to adequately understand and effectively implement new approaches in governance or management. We can no longer afford to silence a contextualised politics of place in preference for a more abstracted and less attached politics of interests if we are to maintain resilience in rural Australian landscapes.

References

Belbin, L. 1993. Technical Reference: PATN. Pattern Analysis Package. Australia: CSIRO.

Belbin, L. 1995. "PATN: Technical Reference". Canberra. Australia: CSIRO.

Brown, G. 2005. "Mapping Spatial Attributes in Survey Research for Natural Resource Management: Methods and Applications." Society and Natural Resources 18: 17 - 39.

Brown, G.G., P. Reed, and C.C. Harris. 2001. "Testing a place-based theory for environmental evaluation: an Alaska case study." Applied Geography in press: 1 - 28.

Cantrill, J.G., and S.L. Senecah. 2001. "Using the 'sense of self-in-place' construct in the context of environmental policy-making and landscape planning." Environmental Science and Policy 4: 185-203.

Cheng, A. S, L. E Kruger, and S. E Daniels. 2003. "Place as an Integrating concept in Natural Resource Politics: Propositions for a Social Science Research Agenda." Society and Natural Resources 16: 87 - 104.

Duane, T. 1997. "Community Participation in Ecosystem Management." Ecology Law Quarterly 24: 771.

Malpas, J.E. 1999. Place and experience: a philosophical topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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