Much has been written over recent decades about the potential effects of the hyper
refashioning of our environment, the acceleration of change and the compression of
space and time that result from new technologies of travel and communication. The
concept of ‘non-places’ (Augé 2009) problematizes the attachment to place of the
contemporary citizen, condemned to inhabit the soulless environments of modern
cities: has the modern world, with its standardized shopping malls and hotels, its global
brands, its ceaseless redevelopments, undermined our sense of place, creating rootless
populations with no attachment to their locality? The ‘post-modern thesis’ argues the
depthlessness of attachment, the creation of a fragmented self without fixed points of
reference suffering from ‘ontological insecurity.’ Others have argued that while it is true that identity in the modern world is increasingly
loosened from all territorial ties, new landscapes of belonging are created: Arjun
Appadurai, describing the creation through technological ties of networks uniting
world-wide diaspora, writes of the ‘ethnospaces’ that unite people scattered across
continents: