A GLOBAL SENSE OF PLACE: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND A CASE STUDY OF GUANGZHOU
QIAN Jun-xi1,3, QIAN Li-yun1, ZHU Hong1,2
1. Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China;
2. School of Geography, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China;
3. Human Geography Research Group, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9XP, Great Britain
Abstract The study on the social and cultural implications of place has been gaining increasing importance within western human geography. Most importantly, scholarly attention has been paid to the issue of how identity can retain an articulation with place-specific sociality and culture in a global age. David Harvey believes that the working of global capitalism has resulted in a fragmentation of places-a direct consequence of spatial uneven development and the dissolution of place meanings, which leads to place-bound and reactionary identities, as well as a rising xenophobia. In his viewpoint, any politics based on place meanings or identities is reactionary by nature and is at the risk of producing exclusionary place politics. Doreen Massey, in rejecting the binary opposition between the constructs of the local and the global, proposes a theory of a "global (progressive) sense of place". Based on the arguments of Massey, we raise a culture-based critique of the discourses that have been emerging in Guangzhou, with regard to the relationship between Mandarin Chinese and the Cantonese language, as well as the urban migrant population in the city. We argue that some of these discourses have hinted an essentialist and "authentic" sense of place that is rejected by Massey. And we also criticize that such a place-base narrative is at the stake of producing exclusionary and oppressive place politics that might victimize the already marginalized urban migrant population in the city.
2011, Vol. 26 
