Reading Response

The article "What is 'Sense of Place'?" by Jennifer Cross had an impact on me by changing the way I view different places and identify with them. Cross identified and then categorized the different ways that people are attached and relate to the places where they are from or where they lived. Its something that people never take into consideration, yet where someone is from or where they live plays a big role in shaping that person into who they are. By studying Cross’s six different ways that people relate to places, one is able to consciously recognize and understand their sense of place.

Cross looks in depth into the issue of sense of place by looking not only at the different types of relationships that one can have with a place but also the different levels of community attachment as well. After defining the different ways that people relate to places scientifically, Cross breaks down the relationship to place into six different categories and gives specific examples from people she interviewed living in Nevada County. In the second part of her article Cross breaks down the level of community attachment into five different categories showing the different ways people are involved in their communities and making a correlation between how involved they are to how satisfied they are with where they live. By looking at these two different aspects of sense of place, Cross states that “we can create a more meaningful understanding of people’s attachments to places”. This complete look at sense of place helps us to understand how places affect people both long and short term throughout there life.

Any artist working in any medium, weather consciously or unconsciously, expresses part of who they are in their work. Through Cross’ article we can better understand who we are through identifying our sense of place, thus helping to explain motives for certain art pieces or common themes seen in ones art. With some art projects you would want your sense of place to come through strong but in others it would be better if there wasn’t a personal sense of place in it and without knowing your own sense of place there is no way to censor it from your artwork. If a media artist is attune to issues of sense of place they can manipulate their work to create different feels for places viewed by their audiences as well as adding depth to characters by giving them a believable sense of place.