Gentrification has become a widespread form of urban transformation during the last decades. While gentrification has been vastly theorised and studied from the point of view of its economic, sociological, cultural or geographical underpinnings, the psychosocial implications of gentrification have been seldom explored. In this chapter, we argue that changing senses of place implicated in gentrification processes can be interpreted not as a mere, even less neutral, effect of capitalist logics of creative destruction of the city, but as one of its main subjective catalysers. Based on the empirical analysis of a study conducted in the neighbourhood of Gràcia (Barcelona, Spain), we discuss the symbolic mechanisms that renew senses of place, transforming them while re-creating them, to channel, re-produce and capture place-based profitable value, i.e. the creative destruction of senses of place. The study advances empirically based knowledge on the ‘semiocapitalist’ processes that reshape sense of place by capitalising on place-related meanings, affect, desire and identification with the urban symbolic environment.

Many countries are considering the deployment of renewable energy technologies in marine or coastal locations to mitigate climate change. Here, we consider ways that senses of place have implications for the deployment of offshore wind, tide and wave energy projects. We use in-depth interviews with auto-photography to explore multiple senses of places in an island context with the aim of gauging public views about the acceptability of potential deployment of wind, tidal and wave energy technologies. The study captured many instances where senses of place were invoked to construct arguments around the fit (or lack of) between place and technology, with place used flexibly to refer to specific marine or coastal locations, the island itself and its relation to other places. Auto-photography revealed the diversity of ways in which the land and the sea were meaningful to islanders – as a place for social relations, a place for fun and sport, a place for escape and a place for aesthetic beauty. By combining visual and verbal data to reveal multiple senses and scales of place, the study provides a rich foundation for understanding the acceptability of renewable energy projects.

In this chapter we examine multiple, competing senses of place in a rapidly changing city in the USA through a lens of critical theory. In particular, we analyse discourses around urban change in the city of Seattle, one of the fastest growing and most dramatically changing cities in the USA, in order to uncover how hegemonic discourses are constructed and deployed to establish a normative order, and how those dominant narratives are challenged by divergent perspectives. Although the specifics of the urban change and discourse we highlight are fairly unique to Seattle, the broader dynamics around multiple competing senses of place vying for expression pertain to any city undergoing transformation. In analysing competing narratives and demonstrating the power of dominant discourses to create a falsely homogenised sense of place, this chapter offers a cautionary tale for vigilance against the erasure of multiple senses of place.

Taking IKEA catalogues from 2010 to 2017 as the objects of analysis, this chapter examines how this global furniture retailer constructs the ideal homes that offer Chinese consumers aspirations for good homes and good lives, and their cultural implications. We argue that IKEA’s popularity in China is attributed to a ‘cultural odourlessness’, which, for its ease in travelling globally, has also become an odour in itself in the Chinese context. In its global circulation, IKEA’s transcultural odourlessness attracts – rather than rejects – diverse translocal experiences of different places and therefore powerfully enriches and pluralises senses of place. IKEA exemplifies how transcultural flows de-territorialise and re-territorialise home, endlessly pluralising senses of home.

In spatial planning, sense of place mostly entails singular, universal conceptualisations. This paper reflects on a case study of 22 purposively selected participants’ senses of place on the farm Kromdraai in Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site, South Africa in order to integrate pluralised senses of place into global policy principles for the purpose of spatial planning decision-making. A qualitative, transdisciplinary research approach was utilised to generate textual (interview) and visual data (photographs and collages) that were analysed using non-computerised thematic analysis. The research illustrates a shift away from singular universal conceptions towards the politicisation of senses of place in spatial planning by means of a democratic participatory process where power imbalances are minimised and that allowed senses of place to emerge spontaneously from the bottom-up, instead of imposing a preconceived framework in which senses of place are categorised or universalised. A flexible framework is suggested towards pluralising senses of place in spatial planning by using normative global principles in international policy.

We seek to analyse the appropriation of space by people living in the streets (PLS), focusing on Brazilian cities, from a materialistic, historical and dialectical conception of reality, problematizing traditional conceptions of sense of place. The spaces in the city that need to be appropriated as a condition of survival are the same ones that reject PLS as subjects, and the set of elements they can appropriate and that unfold in multiple senses of place is largely determined by urban social and racial inequalities. Thus, to understand senses of place by this group, we must pay attention to the historical determinations in the process of appropriation–objectivation of PLS. In this sense, because of its power to synthesise the humanization–alienation dialectics taking into account both social structures and the elements of people’s living spaces, appropriation of space is a category that allows us to historicize and pluralize senses of place.

We unpack the role of sense of place in relation to urban experimentation. We conceptualise urban experimentation as a governance approach to foster and activate innovation capacities of communities and places for climate adaptation and institutional trialling of novel approaches. We focus on an urban living laboratory (ULL) as one specific type of urban experiment that has received increasing attention in European cities recently, and use experimentation in ULL as an example to reconsider a dynamic and pluralistic understanding of place. We find that our case study, BlueCity Lab in Rotterdam, NL provides a space where new place-related narratives of change, novel practices and relations emerge, while being embedded within wider, translocal networks of practice. Backed by these insights, we contend that a translocal, pluralised and dynamic concept of place promises to be a valuable lens in order to understand the impacts, manifestations and appropriate responses to global challenges in everyday life.