Book review of "Displaced: the human cost of development and resettlement" by Olivia Bennett and Chrisopher McDowell, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, USA

[Extract] Over the last twenty years, social scientists have engaged in ongoing debates to extend the understandings of place in ways that move beyond the common-sense level (see for example: Li, Hodgetts & Ho 2010). For instance, place has been explored within physical, socioeconomic, political and cultural contexts within which the individual's bond with place and his/her experiences are embedded (Heidegger 1958). Harvey asserts that "place, in whatever guise, is like space and time, a social construct" (Harvey 1996: 261). Place is indeed socially, politically and culturally constructed because the ways in which people experience place and the meaning people ascribe to it, come out of a socioeconomic, political and cultural milieu, which is in turn dominated by socioeconomic, political and cultural values. Social norms, values and practices give meaning to a place. The individual's feeling about a place which he/she inhabits is moulded by social ideologies as well as the individual's actions and relations to those social norms (Ahrentzen 1992). Important places are those in which events occur and that mark people's particular experiences in new or unique ways (Li & Chong 2012). Those experiences, either the positive or the negative, are considered as growth experiences because they are events that help move people's life journey forward. As Manzo (2005) concludes, places serve as markers in the individual's journey and become significant because of experience. Subjective experiences within particular places shape, and are shaped by, people's relationships to each other, society, and particular settings