ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a review of the literature on sense of place, in an effort to enhance communication about sense of place and to recognize its unique contribution as a place-related construct to health. For the purpose of this chapter, health will be broadly defined in accordance with the World Health Organization (WHO) definition1 and as such, health and well-being will be used interchangeably. The overarching aim is to frame the sense of place literature within the context of health. To begin with, an overview of the sense of place concept will be provided to highlight its use in a wide range of disciplines, including architecture, forestry, geography and psychology. This objective involved consulting and retrieving a myriad of sources, including: books, abstracts, citations and journal articles, both empirical and theoretical, from a variety of geography, psychology and sociology databases.2 The results yielded a collection of over a thousand abstracts. The sources included in the present discussion represent those works that most encompass the concept of
sense of place relative to the objective of the discussion. In the second section of the chapter, the concept of place will be discussed to help delineate sense of place as the product of the relationship between people and places. The final section will explore a number of studies that provide evidence to support the connection between sense of place and well-being in addition to the variables that influence sense of place. This section demonstrates that the relationship between sense of place and well-being has yet to be fully investigated and warrants further exploration in light of present day human and environmental health challenges. For practical reasons, the following review is non-exhaustive. Studies, which focused on sense of place with no apparent connection to well-being, were not included in the literature review given both the objective and the limited scope of the discussion.
