According to Holloway & Hubbard (2001, 7475), ‘to
develop a sense of place requires that one knows the place
intimately and reacts to it emotionally rather than ra-tionally.. .A sense of physically being and feeling ‘‘in place’’
or ‘‘at home’’ can be regarded as a sign that an individual
has established an emotional tie to a place.’ Studies have
shown that people’s sense of place can either be positive or
negative. In the humanistic tradition of the 1970s, early
studies of people’s sense of place focused on the experiences
of home or rural villages as being positive and fulfilling.
Home was regarded as a place to withdraw to, a place of
rest, and a place where one had a large degree of control over
what happens (Seamon 1979). These studies have been
criticized for exaggerating the beauty of rural landscapes
and the harmony of the relationships between people in
households and for giving universal identities to places,
assuming that all people have similar experiences of
particular places (McDowell 1999, Holloway & Hubbard
2001). In Place and Placelessness, Edward Relph (1976)
broadened the place discourse by suggesting that while sense
of place is important for individual identity, people’s positive
sense of place has been lost or degraded in the modern
world. Many people consequently feel placelessness and
experience fear, disgust, or sadness (Cosgrove 2003).
Further, feminists have argued that the idea of a positive
universal sense of place has a masculine perspective;