The relationship between identity and place is one of the most recurrent themes in geography. Yet there seems to be no agreement on what the key works are within this large scholarship. Each geographer seems to have his or her own answer. This article, therefore, aims to incorporate the richness and diversity of this scholarship, without claiming any ultimate, comprehensive overview. Instead, it suggests where to look further in order to understand the ways in which place intervenes in the reproduction of individual and collective identities and, more generally, how place and identity are mutually constituted. The article follows somewhat a loose chronological order, rather than focusing on specific places (the home, the city, the region, the nation, etc.). After a brief overview on the subject, the article opens with the phenomenological literature, which explores the intimate, unique link between an individual and a place. This is followed by works in environmental psychology, a branch of literature that has offered important insights into the relationship between identity and place, but which is little known in geography. The rise of post-structuralist, postcolonial, and feminist scholarship in the early 1990s has led to a shift in the geographical literature from identity to difference. Geographers have since engaged more frequently with gender, sexual, racial, and class differences, among others, by investigating how they are constituted in relation to places. Finally, the article discusses key works that explore the impact of globalization, broadly understood, on place-based identities, focusing specifically on transnational, diasporic, and cosmopolitan identities and their relationship to places.
General Overviews