Making Place: Identity Construction and Community Formation through “Sense of Place” in Westland, New Zealand

How do “community” and the attributes of landscape and setting shape personal identity and the way in which individuals develop an attachment to place? An exploration of the relationship between these ideas within two New Zealand West Coast rural communities revealed the need for a more inclusive conceptual understanding of “sense of place.” By drawing upon the seemingly mutually exclusive scholarly contributions of both social constructionists and environmental reductionists, we make a case for the inclusion of both approaches within the understanding of localized identity and its relationship with place. We argue that communities carry with them a specificity that binds them to particular locales, while locales provide a set of parameters, or boundaries, to the possibilities of what can be symbolically drawn upon. In this way identity is still culturally reproduced (constructed) but it draws upon particularized attributes within particularized landscapes.