Sites and locations exist in nature, but they are transformed into place through human knowing and experience, both individual and collective. People and societies create places--and out of them, spaces--as means of engaging with the world. Yet place is not just personal, social, and cultural; it is also temporal. Sense of place develops over time in a complex interplay of material and immaterial engagements between people and their surroundings. Perceptions of the past influence what is imagined in the present, both for good and for ill: Ascriptions of heritage and inheritance imbue locations with localised value to and for particular people, while memories of disaster, chaos, or decay can cling to sites and contribute to a negative sense of place. Temporally conditioned ideas about place can open up or foreclose possible futures.
No one group has a monopoly on the power to construct place. Culture and folk knowledge have historically belonged to both common people and the nobility, while elite worldviews have been challenged by those with fewer social, economic, and political resources. Multiple and contradictory places can be constructed on the same site, with places coexisting or competing across time and influencing the cultural lives of residents and visitors. These placemaking processes are occurring now. They have always been occurring in the present. In ages and eras past (with the 'age' and the 'era' themselves being human constructs), then-current conceptions of history were instrumental in the creation of place, and the places created in the past echo into future placemakings.
Senses of place travel across space through movements of people and ideas. Long-distance communication of place may previously have taken months, years, or centuries as peoples and individuals physically traversed landscapes and seascapes. Today's information technologies, however, have not only produced opportunities for new kinds of people to communicate their knowledge and experience across great distances; they have also dramatically altered the temporalities of placemaking. Ideas and representations of place can be transmitted nearly instantaneously to individuals and groups spatially dispersed around the world.
Organised by Island Dynamics, this multidisciplinary academic conference on 'Placemaking across time' welcomes presentations on the interactions between place, culture, and time. Examples of potential topics include past senses of place; the cultural drivers and impacts of changes in place over time; the ways in which places are altered through selective processes of heritagisation; the coincidence of multiple places in a single location; how shifts in political and economic cultures alter place; conscious historical constructions of place; and how particular place ideals have risen in or fallen out of popularity over time. All presentations must have a clear focus on how people have known, experienced, conceptualised, and/or constructed place either in specific historical circumstances or across temporal scales.
