Place identity or place-based identity refers to a cluster of ideas about place and identity in the fields of geography, urban planning, urban design, landscape architecture, environmental psychology, ecocriticism and urban sociology/ecological sociology.

The bonds between place and identity can influence social formations, cultural practices, and political actions. Place identity is a core concept in the field of environmental psychology which proposes that identities form in relation to environments.

Cultural identity is the identity or feeling of belonging to a group. It is part of a person’s self-conception and self-perception and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality or any kind of social group that has its own distinct culture.

Gender identity is the personal sense of one’s own gender. Gender identity can correlate with assigned sex at birth, or can differ from it. All societies have a set of gender categories that can serve as the basis of the formation of a person’s social identity in relation to other members of society.

Social identity is a person’s sense of who they are based on their group membership. (e.g. social class, family, football team etc.) which people belonged to were an important source of pride and self-esteem.

The term identity politics refers to political positions based on the interests and perspectives of social groups with which people identify. Identity politics includes the ways in which people’s politics are shaped by aspects of their identity through loosely correlated social organizations.

    Geographical identity is An individual or group’s sense of attachment to the country, region, city, or village in which they live. And the key characteristics with which a particular country, region, city, or village is associated.

    Loss of identity may follow all sorts of change; changes in the workplace, loss of a job or profession, loss of a role that once defined us, as a child, as a parent, as a spouse. When we lose our identity and sense of self, we are likely to seek our sense of self-worth from others.

case study 1:

Sam Contis

Sam Contis lives and works in California. Her work has been shown internationally with recent exhibitions in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and London, and solo shows at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York. She is a recipient of the 2017 Nancy Graves Foundation Artist Grant, 2016 Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship, and the Tierney Fellowship. Contis’s work is represented in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Deep Springs, her first book, was recently published by MACK. In 2018, her work will be on view in “Being: New Photography” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

1.   I spoke to him about his identity placement and this is what he  told me “sometimes i look in the mirror and i don’t even know who am i exactly. and he explained to me that this is due to the continuous movement between the two cultures which are English and Swiss

2.  Secondly i photographed him with my camera at a fast shutter speed with florescent shutter speed and while on manual mode. i used the day light coming from the window as it was a cloudy day and that means the light was diffused which produces a good portarait and mixed it with the florescent light from the class rooms lighting system.

3.   I created a mood board  and chose my final image then installed it on to Photoshop cc.

4.   I researched photographs of Switzerland and used the best one as my background as i don’t have any access to take photographs of Switzerland, so i cropped my portrait and added it on top of the landscape photo as a normal layer.

5.   Then i decreased the opacity of the portrait to when its just about right.

6.   Lastly i used the eraser with low opacity to soften the edges of the photograph and blend it in with the photograph.

personal view of difference between living in Jordan and the UK:

living between these two places really plays with your head and changes the way you see and think about stuff. but the biggest difference i have noticed about my self is that i got fat here in England, i’m not sure why exactly that is but probably because Jordan used to provide a good sports system and if a person was good at a certain sport they pay him for practicing it and i was good at cycling so i was in the Jordanian Olympic team and one several medals among playing against Arabic and bordering countries and i used to get payed for it so i practiced it a lot meanwhile in England i’m not doing much sports and eating a lot due to stress and that’s why i gained weight. to provide evidence for that i used two pictures, one was taken of my back in my homeland and the second one was taken of me in my current environment and these where the results:

The first portrait is of me two days before i moved to England, showing how healthy and skinny i was, meanwhile in the second one you can see how much i have gained weight. the first one was taken in the 30th of July during my birthday, while the second one was taken right before my mock exam to show exactly where i am at right now. in the first photograph my friends took of me because i had a unique expression on my face looking at that dish of ‘Mansaf’ the Jordanian traditional dish also my favorite dish. and i asked for it instead of a birthday cake due to how much i like it. and that look on my face basically means “i cant wait to put you in my belly”. Also you can notice the difference in the style of clothing between the two portraits, in the first one i was wearing a tank top in addition to shorts and that’s due to the climate there being very warm and humid, plus in that culture no one really cares what are you wearing so you wont find much people wearing formal clothes a most times; meanwhile in England you can see how different the style of clothing there is, first of i was wearing boots due to the rain with multiple hoodies and a puffer jacket, and lastly some jeans. i am wearing that type of clothes because of how cold and rainy it is, plus in England people normally wear normal to casual clothes at most times. lastly you can see the difference in the color of my skin being darker in Jordan due to the amount of sunlight i get exposed to there.                               The first photo was taken in my fathers restaurant using a mobile phone, while the second one was taken at my school using the school’s camera.

I also wanted to show the difference in the geographical characteristics between Jordan and England, because the geography of the place your living in plays a big role in your geographical identity.

In order to do that i took two photographs showing the view from both my rooms, the one in Jordan and the room in England and compare them with each other, so this is what i came up with:

You can see the difference between the geography of |Jordan and England, in England all i can see from my room is just the house behind us and the small backyard with a pale sky that you cant see due to the amount of clouds in England but it has some greenery and that’s something less common in Jordan. while in the photograph of the view from my room in Jordan you can see beautiful colorful skies with a lot of building and that’s due to the big size of the population in Jordan comparing to Jersey. i took the first photograph using my phone when i went back to Jordan during Christmas 2018. and the second one was taken using the school’s camera 2 days before my mock exam.

The last way to show the difference of the geography of both countries is by comparing two photographs taken from the plane in both England and Jordan and these were the results:

So the photograph on the right is a planes eye view of England from the window and you can see that its pretty much just clouds while in the photograph on the left its when i arrived Jordan in the same plane and its the bird’s eye view of Jordan and you can see that it’s pretty much just a desert but that’s the area that is uninhabited. both photographs were taken in December 2018 using my mobile phone.

Conclusion

So you can see now how much a person’s identity can be influenced by “place”, or belonging, tour environment or upbringing.