ABSTRACT
This chapter begins to look at the importance of myths in shaping the way in which people think about particular people and places. Here, a number of ideas have been suggested as fundamental for helping us to understand how people and places come to have identities. Myths are part of the way in which we define ourselves and the places we live in, often through opposition. Imaginative geographies ascribe meanings to people and places, often through the opposition of 'self' and 'other'. Place identities are often highly ambiguous so that the same characteristics can be regarded simultaneously as 'good' and 'bad'. Although myths may not be accurate representations of 'real' people and places, they can and do have actual effects on the ways in which groups of people interact with other people and with their physical and social surroundings, playing a role in the history of planning, politics and internal relations all of which impinge on the everyday.
