Place as possibility

Photo by Flickr user clazzi

Place has often been viewed as a sedentary, romantic and somewhat conservative concept and as such it is frequently regarded with great suspicion. The same goes for the notion of 'home'. In a recent thoughtful article on the matter, Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting writes,

"The politics of home have had a fraught and vicious history on the continent, and perhaps this explains how they have been set aside, and so deliberately ignored. But belonging can be reinterpreted and that's where a host of seemingly unrelated cultural responses to our predicament seem to be forging a new understanding"

The article highlights a set of ideas that are currently refocusing attention on notions of home and the 'geography of our lives'. New localism and environmentalism are both identified as key to this recent re-engagement with place. Bunting goes on to reinterpret home and belonging as 'ongoing projects', the continuous result of a 'shared commitment' and not an allegiance to an unchanging common identity or homeland.

From landscapes of neglect to landscapes of hope

Photo by Flickr user Nicobobinus

In a recent interview for The Guardian, novelist Anthony Cartwright talks about ‘landscapes of neglect’, those mostly urban places which have seen dramatic decline in socio-economic fortune in recent decades and which thus become fertile breeding grounds for far-right extremism. Talking about the town in which he himself grew up, he explains,

"Even as a boy, I was aware of this landscape of decay as the physical fabric of the town was boarded up, and that fed into the psychology of the place… at times of economic collapse, people always look around for someone to blame."

It would seem that in the current climate, there are a lot of people looking around for someone to blame. This study funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2006 found that as many as 18 to 25 per cent of the UK population would consider voting for the British National Party and it is unlikely that this statistic has since dropped.