Familiarity as a Practical Sense of Place

What is it about?

This article focuses on how urban environments and their human entities become familiar and stop being familiar. The conceptualization process unfolds via five questions: What is familiarity? Where does it come from? What threatens it? What does it produce? How can it be operationalized and studied empirically?

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Photo by Sujith Devanagari on Unsplash

Photo by Sujith Devanagari on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Familiarity is an elusive concept, capturing what we know intimately and what we only recognize from having seen before. This article aims to disambiguate these interpretations by proposing a sociological conceptualization of familiarity as a dynamic relationship to the world that develops over time and through experience.