Sense of Place # 2

"Creating a sense of place for a new or reinvigorated development is something constantly strived after, and for good reasons. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment's (CABE) 2007 report, ‘A Sense Of Place’ states that people value well-designed places and they like homes in developments with character that create a sense of place, but signals that a high proportion of people living on new developments feel these developments lack just that. People want to live in or visit places that are unique, they want places that offer up surprises and possibilities.

One way of achieving this is finding ways to make connections between the past, present and future of a place in flux, to hold these often seemingly contradictory elements in tension, and by doing so to strengthen each. An area's physical, social, and cultural heritage, its ecology, and its future, offer rich seams which can be explored and embedded into the fabric and collective memory of a development. Projects which aim to do this can enable communities and developers to find and honour the uniqueness of a place. They help create – or we might prefer to see it as uncovering and articulating – a ‘sense of place’.

The fear and suspicion surrounding new developments is often the fear of the past being obliterated and a soulless development being plonked down in its place, the fear that developers will come in and treat a place as a blank canvas. Nowhere is a blank canvas, and the complexity and joy of living in a city is created by these layers of time, marked by different styles; the endless possibilities for discovering new things."
http://www.urbanwords.org.uk/aplaceforwords/sense-of-place.shtml