4 Identity, Place, and Memory

Identity develops through place

Identity is not simply an inherited label or a fixed connection to a homeland. It develops and changes through relationships, experiences, and everyday choices.

Homes, streets, workplaces, schools, places of worship, and public spaces provide settings where people meet, remember, and express who they are. Repeated encounters and practices can make a place feel familiar and meaningful, while exclusion or displacement can make belonging uncertain.

Landscapes carry memory and meaning

A cultural landscape includes both visible features—such as buildings, farms, signs, and memorials—and the meanings people attach to them. It can express histories of work, settlement, faith, or political change. The same place may mean different things to different groups, and its meanings may change over time.

Memory connects past experience to present identity. It can be personal, such as remembering a childhood home, or collective, sustained through shared stories, commemorations, and cultural traditions. Places can prompt memories of people and experiences, including experiences from elsewhere.

Memory is selective. Groups may disagree about what a place represents, whose history is recognized, and what should be remembered or forgotten. Memory and belonging are expressed not only through monuments and official ceremonies, but also through ordinary routines such as shopping at a familiar market, preparing food, speaking a family language, or visiting a place of worship. These practices can create and transmit belonging.

Intangible cultural heritage refers to community-recognized practices, knowledge, and expressions that pass between generations and adapt over time.

Migration creates connections across places

Migration changes people’s relationships with place, but it does not necessarily sever them. Migrants may develop new attachments where they settle while maintaining ties to places of origin through family, language, religion, food, media, travel, or remittances. Identity can therefore be translocal, shaped by relationships across more than one locality.

Memories of a former home may also be revised over time as people compare remembered places with present experiences. For example, a family that moves to a new city might speak one language at home and another at school or work, celebrate religious holidays with relatives nearby and abroad, and adapt familiar dishes to locally available ingredients. These practices neither simply preserve an unchanged culture nor erase it; they show identity being maintained, negotiated, and reshaped in everyday life.

Notice identity in everyday landscapes

To understand how identity and place interact, consider:

• Practices: What language, food, dress, worship, work, and social gatherings take place here?

• Histories: What migration routes, place names, buildings, memorials, and community stories are present?

• Belonging: Who uses the space, who is represented, and who may be excluded?

• Change: How have migration, redevelopment, policy, or generational change altered the landscape and its meanings?

These questions can reveal how identity is expressed through routine interactions as well as formal symbols. Landscapes, memories, and practices continually shape one another, so belonging is continually made and remade.