Visual Ecologies of Placemaking

Contributing to growing discourse in spatial humanities, this collection explores how we understand place as it is shaped through visual and sensory practices and performance.

Contributing to a growing discourse in spatial humanities, this collection of essays provides a unique, critical insight into how place is shaped through visual and sensory practices. By looking at a range of natural, built, and digital environments, across historical and contemporary contexts, Visual Ecologies of Placemaking offers an in-depth study into place as a spatial, social and cultural construct.

Essays explore public and private spaces, cities, gardens, sacred settings and domestic scenes, and particularly consider human beings’ relationships to place at times when places are undergoing radical shifts due to occurrences such as global pandemics, changing climates and widespread social unrest. This timely volume features a range of case studies that explore places from storage units to city streets, performances from sacred pilgrimages to drag shows, and identities from secessionists to imperial authorities. Essays also contribute to emerging areas of inquiry, such as queer and decolonial studies and the digital humanities.

Visual Ecologies of Placemaking offers a broad examination of the performative aspects of place and identity, and yields new ways of thinking about how places are shaped and negotiated. Leslie Atzmon and Pamela Stewart's collection provides fresh and essential insights into the varied roles that place plays in our understanding and expression of the world and our place within it.