Place as Historically Contingent Process: Structuration and the Time-Geography of Becoming Places

New Zealand children’s health camps: therapeutic landscapes meet the contract state

“…To resist irrelevance, antiquation and closure, the health camp movement has increasingly emphasised the individual through a focus on personal skills and strategies. Pred's (1984) analysis of historical contingency and the`becoming' of places can assist us in explaining the tenacity of health camps. Not only have they been part of the time geographies of everyday life for thousands of children each year, but in addition, those New Zealanders without ®rst hand knowledge of a health camp are likely to be familiar with them by virtue of the health stamp tradition.…”

“…He draws on ideas developed by Allan Pred (1983Pred ( , 1984 who conceptualises place as neither imbued with intrinsic qualities (e.g.`a spa is natural and therefore good for health') nor static (e.g. once a hospital, always a site of care and cure').…”

Local history as productive nostalgia? Change, continuity and sense of place in rural England

“…These framings of nostalgia have helped to counter some of the derision conventionally associated with 'romantic' engagements with the past, and this has implications for re-thinking the tensions between heritage practices and change. Such interpretations of nostalgia resonate with relational accounts that emphasise the processual nature of place as never complete but always in a continuous state of becoming (Massey, 1994;Pred, 1984). From this perspective, heritage can be seen as enabling a temporal narrative where selected materials from an imagined past provide resources for an imagined future (Ashworth and Graham, 2005).…”

“…Such notions are reflective of romanticised representations that depict the countryside as an idyllic, traditional place that has escaped the typical pitfalls and time-pressures of globalisation and modernity (Bunce, 2003;Short, 1991;Woods, 2011). This forms part of the attraction of rural life and construction of rural identity for many people, but such idyllic timelessness can disguise the processes of change and transformation that places have constantly undergone and promote a desire to preserve them in a form of historical stasis (Massey, 2006;Pred, 1984). Arguably, these processes may be reinforced by local heritage practices that reinvigorate nostalgic images and mourn the changes that have occurred.…”

Données géographiques et construction institutionnelle d’une région transnationale. Le SOIA comme objet-frontière ?

“…Comme l'écrira bien plus tard Annsi Paasi, un contributeur important et souvent cité de ce nouveau champ, avec la NRG, « (it) has become typical to understand regions as historically contingent social processes emerging as a constellation of institutionalized practices, power relations and discourse » (Paasi, 2004). L'expression "historically contingent social process », utilisée pour la première fois par Allan Pred (1984), mettait l'accent sur le processus de régionalisation, plus que sur le produit, la région, et plus particulièrement sur les modalités de la construction et l'institutionnalisation de régions. Ce déplacement de la question scientifique a conduit les auteurs de ce courant à focaliser leur attention sur les pratiques d'acteurs et plus particulièrement sur l'articulation de leurs visions et de leurs projets dans un cadre qui de fait relevait de 2 catégories différentes : tantôt le niveau dit régional ou sub-national de l'organisation de l'Etat ; tantôt le périmètre de projets plus circonstanciels, que l'on a appelé parfois ad hoc regions ou unusual regions (Deas and Lord, 2006), ou encore régions de projet (project regions) (Debarbieux et al, soumis) comme dans le cas des initiatives transfrontalières en Europe.…”