1. Objective characteristics of places Simon Oakes
The concept of place (1)
Objective characteristics of places
Simon Oakes
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2. Click to reveal the definitions
Key terms
Place
A portion of geographic space whose identity is distinctive in some way. Particular places have unique landscapes deriving from underlying physical geography and the way people have shaped their surface appearance.
Site
The actual land a place is built on. Settlements have historically taken root wherever geographical site factors favour economic activities that cannot be carried out as profitably elsewhere. Local resources such as coal or water explain why some places are where they are.
Function
What a place does in terms of providing services and work for people. Originally, this was often linked closely with site factors. But many places have changed their function over time. Liverpool and Manchester are now post-industrial cities where services have replaced manufacturing.
Cultural landscape
Everything we see in a place. It is the totality of the changes which people have brought to the natural landscape, including the architecture, infrastructure, heritage and demography of a place. It also includes the art, music (soundscape) and sporting life of a place.
Do you know what these terms mean?
Click to reveal the definitions
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3. Place and scale
A place is a portion of geographic space whose identity is viewed as being distinctive in some way.
The inner-city district of Bootle and the fringe village of Formby both belong to the city of Liverpool in the northwest of England. All these entities — Bootle, Formby, Liverpool and the Northwest — can be understood as places, insofar as each possesses a set of physical and human features which provide identity.
However, in A-level geography a place is best understood in narrower as a distinctive locality at a geographical scale somewhere between a street and a city or region (i.e. places are villages, small towns and local urban neighbourhoods).
Cities and regions are entities which are larger than but include local places (villages, small towns, local urban neighbourhoods).
‘Note that a local place may be a locality, neighbourhood or small community, either urban or rural’ (Department for Education)
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4. Visualising place elements
How can this model be applied to the local place where you live?
Can you apply this model to another near or far place which you have studied or visited?
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5. Place boundaries
Some places have clear boundaries but others do not (hence the dashed boundary line in Figure 1 on the previous slide).
Local boroughs, wards and electoral constituencies are clearly demarcated on administrative maps.
In some places, rivers and coastlines provide at least one well-defined settlement margin.
Other places are far less clearly bounded. Some urban neighbourhoods do not actually correspond with ‘official’ administrative areas and lack definitive margins. In London, it is not clear where Clapham or Chelsea actually begin and end, for instance. In rural regions, topography and vegetation can create a sense of place but it is often difficult to establish practically where one upland environment ends and a lowland area begins.
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6. Interlinked place elements
The cultural landscape has been shaped by the city’s economy
Traditional economy (1700–1950)
Population peak
Cultural landscape
Liverpool
Docks, glass-making, textile and soap manufacturing, sugar and tobacco processing, engineering
846,000 (1951)
Scouse dialect, old Irish and Chinese migrant districts, history of music, poetry and football
Birmingham
Iron and metalwork, jewellery-making, cotton and textiles, engineering and car-making
1,113,000 (1951)
A rich musical heritage, ranging from the work of Elgar to the birthplace of heavy-metal music
London
Docks, textile and furniture making, food and drink processing, munitions, engineering
8,600,000 (1939)
A wide range of local cultures, from the Cockney East End to Chelsea and Bloomsbury
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7. Interlinked place elements
Urban cultural landscapes may reflect strongly a settlement’s traditional economic functions.
City football teams originally drew their amateur players from local factories.
For instance, the cannon on Arsenal’s badge reflects the club’s birth in the 1880s among the munitions factories of Woolwich, sited by the River Thames.
By 1900, London supported over 100 local football teams, each one rooted in a different factory neighbourhood.
In contrast, Welsh coal and slate mining communities often became renowned for their male voice choirs.
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8. Place characteristics are shaped by local and global flows
How can outflows of people, ideas and goods help to shape other places? Has the place where you live influenced other places over time?
Place
Rural–urban migration
International migration
Ideas and commodities
Resources and merchandise
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9. Changing places
These present and past photographs of Ecclesfield (Sheffield) show how local place functions have changed over time. How would you describe these changes?
How has the local environment changed as a result of changing economic functions over time?
This factory helped to produce local coal into fuel used by Sheffield's steel industries. Site factors explain why these industries grew here. But why did they decline?
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10. This illustration shows how a place has changed over time as a result of its evolving connections with other places. How far can you apply this model to the place where you live?
Place stories may therefore have several
chapters, each of which features important
connections with other near or far places
(Figure 2). These layered connections have
built up to produce an ‘accumulated history’
shown in each place’s cultural landscape.
Roman pottery, Viking burials and medieval
building foundations lie under the streets
of York. Surviving buildings from different
eras are reflected in the contemporary glass
structures in the City of London. Flows of
goods, people and money have shaped these
places over millennia to produce ‘a nexus of
connections and linkages’.
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11. Fieldwork ideas
Survey of how a place is networked with other places e.g. hinterland/sphere of influence survey of commuters or customers, local newspapers, place-based social networks
Field survey of variations in deprivation in urban areas: environmental quality, unemployment, crime, housing tenure, council tax bands, benefit uptake, house prices
Further reading
Changing Places (Emma Rawlings Smith, Simon Oakes, Alastair Owens - Geographical Association, July 2016)
Royal Geographical Society A-level resources
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12. This resource is part of Geography Review, a magazine written for A-level students by subject experts. To subscribe to the full magazine go to:  
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