04/11/25 - Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society

4th November 2025

Research: Literature Review

Lucy Lippard’s The Lure of the Local offers a powerful lens for thinking about how we come to know the places we move through. Rather than treating landscape as something distant or purely visual, Lippard argues that place is lived, felt, and layered with history, culture, and memory. Her writing invites us to slow down, pay attention, and recognise the subtle ways our bodies, identities, and experiences shape, and are shaped by the land beneath us. This review reflects on her ideas, considering how they continue to influence contemporary approaches to walking, sensing, and engaging deeply with place.

Lucy Lippard’s The Lure of the Local examines how place is formed through lived experience, memory, cultural context, and embodied presence. Central to her argument is the idea that place is not fixed; it is dynamic and hybrid, continually shaped by those who enter it. She notes that “each time we enter a new place we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity,” emphasising the reciprocal relationship between individuals and their environments.

Lippard distinguishes between landscape and place: landscape is viewed from the outside, while place emerges through intimacy, participation, and time spent. Walking becomes an important mode of engagement, providing what she, via Solnit, describes as a means of measuring “the rhythm of the body against the rhythm of the land.” This focus on bodily presence and sensory awareness ties to her broader assertion that place is encountered through movement, attention, and lived experience rather than distant observation.

A significant strand of Lippard’s argument concerns the layered temporal and cultural dimensions of place. She frames landscape as a site of accumulated histories and interactions, comparable to archaeological strata where natural, social and cultural narratives converge. This understanding positions place as both material and temporal, shaped by past presences and practices, and carrying traces that influence contemporary experience.

Lippard also critiques conventional landscape representation, particularly photography, for often distancing the viewer from place. Instead, she argues for approaches that provide a “multilayered view” capable of conveying both the physical and experiential qualities of location. She advocates for artists to act as “experience, reporter, analyst and activist,” acknowledging the interdisciplinary nature of meaningful place-based work.

Ultimately, The Lure of the Local calls for an engaged, situated understanding of place rooted in attention, presence and cultural awareness. Place, for Lippard, is formed through sensory, historical and social entanglements, and demands methods that recognise its living, layered and relational characteristics.