Regulating place distinctiveness: A critique of approaches to the protection of ʼneighborhood character’ in Melbourne

Insideness is a key concept in the analytical repertoire, developed by Edward Relph to understand place and placelessness. This chapter highlights a body of work that evidences the persistence of local attachments in the global era, although its nature may be being transformed. It focuses on the historical and political dimensions of belonging, before concluding that insideness persists as part of the human condition even alongside the growth of cosmopolitan values. Recent research suggests that insideness remains a feature of the human condition in an age of mobilities. Indeed, its importance may well be increasing as individuals are confronted with intensifying and destabilizing material and cultural flows. Place remains an important field for the production of culture and materiality and the construction of discursive boundaries, while forms of territorial attachment remain an important part of the human experience with a wide range of cultural and political implications.