I recently completed an online course, Water for Liveable and Resilient Cities, offered through Monash University and in partnership with the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities (CRCWSC). With an emphasis on the consideration of water as a critical component, this MOOC presented an in-depth review of the latest thinking on sustainable urban design.
The course content helped me expand my practical understanding of urban design, a topic that has long been an interest of mine. On another level it also got me thinking about urban geographies more generally, their realities and relevance and the peculiar set of issues that accompany those environments. In the context of this blog, the city creates some interesting possibilities too for the consideration of sense of place generally and how as a foundational concept it both supports and is defined by an urban location.
The lecturers in the Monash course spoke often of liveability as an overarching urban design goal and, along with sustainability and resilience, as one of the three core concepts driving the proper application of Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD). A holistic approach towards what is arguably our most precious resource, WSUD proposes an urban environment, the water-sensitive city, that embraces the complete water cycle as the integrated system it truly is and employs approaches like fit for purpose water to manage a city’s resources and infrastructure in a highly efficient manner.
In a very useful sense, each of the key ideas behind WSUD was defined in the course in terms of capacity:
- Sustainability = carrying capacity, the ability to provide basic needs;
- Resilience = coping capacity, the ability to respond to and recover from future uncertainties;
- Liveability = comfort capacity, the ability to provide safety, security, well-being, a high quality of life.
When considered from the perspective of place, all three of these urban outcomes are pertinent, though I believe a strong sense of place resonates most obviously perhaps with a positive liveability experience.
And as is often the case with place, the interplay with other ideas works beneficially both ways. A deeply felt awareness of place can certainly enhance and sustain urban liveability, whilst an affirmative experience of liveability can trigger and strengthen the urban resident’s sense of place, particularly within the context of a neighbourhood or local community.
For instance, many of the built environment features associated with a positive urban experience are classified as 
assets, perhaps in economic terms but also suggesting their beneficial contributions on many levels. A developed sense of place can heighten awareness of those assets, expanding the ways amenities are perceived as contributing to the city as a good place to live. The result is an urban environment made even richer in personal meaning and experience. Likewise the positive experience associated with those assets can lead to a deeper understanding of the urban location in which they are situated, resulting in a heightened sense of place.
It is in the nature of cities themselves and the way urban development often happens that allows for their consideration as a nexus for various elements of relevance to place. The city is a complex tapestry of peoples, environments, conditions and ideas – like WSUD, which itself serves as a nexus, bringing together hydrologic and civil engineering, urban planning, landscape architecture, biology, geography, politics and the arts.
And as is well documented, that composite of people and conditions and ideas, all situated within the boundaries of a relatively confined location, is increasing throughout the world at a rapid pace. More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities and that number is projected to reach seventy percent by 2050. Combined with increased effects of global climate change, this rapidly expanding urbanisation is creating conditions whereby the goals of urban design are increasingly difficult to realise.
Of significance to place, the sustained growth in urban populations is attributable not only to the natural increase of those already living within a city, but also to the net influx of migrants relocating there from external areas. The reasons for those relocations are varied, though often include cultural factors like conflict or natural ones like climatic pressures that make a rural subsistence untenable.
This pattern of urbanisation has been common to humankind through time, if not at the scale we see today. My own graduate research involved an analysis of the settlement patterns within what could be classified as relatively urban prehistoric settlements along the Salt River in Arizona. That proximity to consistent water was a strong draw, it is theorised, for many living in the hinterlands and exposed to the challenges of a long-term and widespread drought in the region at the time.
With sustained growth there is rapid and continuous change happening within the city boundary, involving the 
melting pot of varied cultures, settlement preferences, languages, architecture and so on of different groups residing in close proximity. And as urban populations increase and more people are either born into or drawn to a particular city, the challenges of managing the diversity of inhabitants and perspectives such that outcomes like improved liveability are properly and holistically realised, likewise intensify. More and more differing threads in other words threaten to make for a chaotic and dysfunctional urban fabric.
In one respect, the urban design challenges, compounded by rapid population growth and associated with a high level of complexity and diversity within the city, can be exacerbated by variable senses of place, often linked to particular neighbourhoods, and distributed across the metropolitan area.
As noted in previous blogs, that enhanced sense of neighbourhood identity, brought about and strengthened by an awareness of local place, is in itself often a very good thing, helping to bring about a stronger sense of community 
and feelings of inclusion amongst its residents. The agreed vision often associated with a shared place sense is moreover an important contributing factor for the successful realisation of urban design outcomes like sustainability, resilience and liveability on the local level.
So when acknowledging place as a variable, something of a paradox results for city planners and administrators. The unified sense of community required to get buy-in and ownership for urban design proposals within specific locational contexts can, as an element of a wider pattern of variability, simultaneously undermine the broader consensus required to enact urban design across the city in a unified way. What works for one community might very well be utterly unacceptable when considered through the lens of the neighbouring community’s vision and sense of place.
Since a sense of place is often intertwined with a community’s identity and therefore its vision in regards to things like liveability, it could be viewed simply as one of the factors constraining a broadly agreed urban design. But that would unfairly characterise it as something to be overcome and likewise fail to give it credit for its unique ability to transcend scale.
Place can indeed work across scales, to help acknowledge and solidify the unique contributions of specific locations to a broader perspective, while simultaneously presenting a wider level of locational awareness, at the city scale for instance, to lay across and connect those specific considerations of place-based identity into something of a unified view.
This characteristic for me brings place firmly within the theoretical camp of geography, as it should be.
Geography by its definition proposes a location-based perspective as a particularly effective way to understand how we as humans exist and have existed on our planet, and how too we might best realise that continued contract for habitation. As it is linked inexorably to the single planet that we all share, location is an intuitive condition. Geography is in this sense a common platform, one that can be employed effectively to establish connections, bridge gaps, facilitate meaningful communication and promote a genuinely shared vision.
As an inherently geographic concept, sense of place carries with it this capacity and is effectually utilised in situations that require collaboration and shared thinking to address a broad range of complex issues. In the urban design and planning context, it allows for the acknowledgement of identities developed out of awareness of specific constituent locations, while simultaneously transcending them and presenting a new perspective, still location-based, for assessment.
Establishing a location-based connection with participants that is highly intuitive, this idea of place therefore offers a relatively easy means of transition across scope and scale from the vested interests of a particular urban neighbourhood to the consideration of a proposal with the potential to improve the liveability of the city as a whole.
Whilst not acknowledged and employed currently at the level of its potential, sense of place then stands as a particularly effective means of advancing the goals of urban design and improving the quality of life of an increasing proportion of those of us residing in our cities.
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