Locating a ‘Sense of Place'

With the continued acceleration of globalization, the contexts in which we think about sport and physical culture, and the narratives we have woven about the places and spaces of our sporting past, are all coming under question as we try to understand a world we have not experienced before. ¹ We have become increasingly aware of the artificiality of the boundaries and centres that hitherto dominated our thinking about the world so that among the effects of globalization is increasing uncertainty about what we mean by a ‘sense of place’ and how we relate to the changing landscape of sporting and recreational life in our personal and professional lives. How, in the face of massive global movements, homogenization and the commodification of the landscape can we retain any sense of local places and their particularities? Should we try to reassure ourselves that one of the crucial roles played by sport may be that of delineating and confirming a ‘sense of place’, and a more secure sense of embodiment, of specific and lived space? ² Is a heightened sense of place an essential aspect in addressing the difficulties of time–space compression? ³