Extending the Boundaries of Place

Abstract

Innovation in demography has been driven by new data, tools, and methods and less by theoretical advances. The thesis of this chapter is that new scholarship in demography requires a synthesis of existing theories and conceptualizations of place. More rigorous conceptual models will help enhance our understanding of the processes by which place ‘gets into people.’ Here we focus on measuring place in contextual analysis; this is, ironically, one of the weakest theoretical areas of current practice in demography and other disciplines new to spatial analysis. For the most part, studies of the relationship between demographic and health outcomes and place have been based on several conventional, and we argue naïve, assumptions about place. Specifically, places are often administratively bounded, static, and exist as isolated islands removed from meaningful nested and non-nested contexts. With revised conceptual models we will be better able to take advantage of the new spatial data on people and places and the emerging GIS-related technologies of the twenty-first century.