Places, identities and geopolitical change: Exploring the strengths and limits of identity process theory

One field to which Identity Process Theory (IPT) has contributed is environmental psychology. Specifically, the theory has enriched our understanding of the nature of person–place bonds, extending theoretical and empirical work on place identity. In the first section of this chapter, we outline IPT research on human–environment relationships, focusing on its relevance for understanding how we evaluate and respond to events of environmental change. We compare this theory with some related perspectives and suggest that its holistic, integrative orientation has enhanced existing knowledge. In the second section of the chapter, drawing on work conducted during South Africa’s transition to democracy, we develop this argument by discussing the nature and consequences of “white” resistance to racial desegregation in post-apartheid society. Broadly in line with IPT, we demonstrate how events of desegregation may be associated with threats to identity distinctiveness, continuity, coherence and belonging and thus entail attempts to re-establish intergroup distances and boundaries. We also argue, however, that the dynamics of desegregation (and re-segregation) entail geopolitical processes that have been underspecified by IPT research on human–environment relations. First, they require us to reconceive identity threat as a discursively constructed, contested, strategic and ideological process. Second, they require us to reconnect the study of behavioral responses to environmental change with wider structural relations of intergroup dominance, inequality and political resistance. Environmental psychological research. The interconnection between places, identities and social change has featured extensively in research on place identity, much of which has been conducted within the sub-discipline of environmental psychology (e.g. see Lalli, 1992; Dixon and Durrheim, 2000). In Proshansky et al.’s (1983) formulation, “place identity” designated the psychological processes through which elements of our everyday physical environments become integrated within the fabric of the self, forming a subcomponent of personal identity. Employing an evocative if somewhat nebulous characterization, they described such elements as comprising a “pot-pourri of memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas and related feelings about specific physical settings as well as types of settings” (1983, p. 60).