Introduction

The relationship between people and place possesses a powerful fascination for governments. The belief that people feel an emotional bond with the place in which they live has motivated state strategies of localism, with their promise to devolve policymaking to neighbourhoods. Localism has been understood as a technology of spatial governmentality that uses place and place relationships to influence the behaviour and subjectivity of citizens (Gibson, 2001; Davoudi and Madanipour, 2015). The same bond between people and place is mobilised by community organisations and citizen groups to inspire participants and foster their ability to bring about change (Somerville, 2016). A political analysis of ‘emplacement’, therefore, can help us interpret government technologies of localism and decode the way in which they are acted out by communities.

This chapter explores the passion for place that can be expressed in localism and its planning initiatives. Planning scholarship tends to shy away from the emotional realm and planners, in practice, assert their distance from attachment (Umemoto, 2012). The policy of neighbourhood planning in England is unusual in that it addresses people's emotional commitment to place (Clarke, 2011). An exploration of its passions has much to offer our understanding of localism and community planning. The chapter reviews the literature on place and place attachment and draws on social movement studies to understand how place is invoked in neighbourhood plans and how place attachment can mobilise collective action. The first part of the chapter introduces emplacement as an issue of social policy and a topic of academic and philosophical study. I then move on to discuss the connections between place attachment and community action and to introduce the concept of place identity framing as a tool of analysis. Research with neighbourhood plans is then explored to understand how a convincing narrative of place attachment and place identity can be assembled, and how it can be used to mobilise community support.

Place and emplacement

The appeal to place is a recurring theme in strategies of ‘governing through community’ (Rose, 1999, p 176). Feelings for place and belonging have become biopolitical indicators of well-being, civic engagement and public order in a political rationality that turns loving attachment into a terrain of governance (Cruikshank, 1999).