Murmuring Crowds and Flickering Lights: Exploring Sense of Place Across Spatial Materialities and Valences

Abstract

Sense of place (SoP) is the knowing of a space just as one knows a person—forming idiosyncratic and interpersonal-like connections. Limited scholarship indicates that people can feel SoP for sensorily immersive digital spaces just as they do for physical spaces—but the phenomenological construction of space-knowing is not yet well understood. Further, potentials for SoP to be negatively valenced has not yet been meaningfully addressed. To address this gap, we conducted a 2×2 experiment in which people described a space (physical or digital) with an affective valence (positive or negative). Descriptions were subjected to inductive thematic analysis, and comparisons were made across the four conditions. Findings indicate some core SoP dimensions (environmental, affective, social) persist across spaces, but there are materiality/valence-specific differences in situational, orienting, and agentic considerations.