With the increasing geographic mobility that Americans have experienced over the last century, it may be fair to ask whether our sensibility for place has steadily diminished, as has our reliance on interpersonal connection, our native senses, and the natural world.
There is an expansion in experience that occurs when people have multiple addresses over the course of their lives spread out over a wider area. Does this reflect a growth in our capacity to appreciate place or rather a shift in our set approach to place in our next location? An individual's memory of place is carried throughout one's lifetime. As we adapt to new surroundings, how much of our concept of place is purely functional and adaptive? How much of it survives in our memory?