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Keywords: Las Vegas; sense of place; tourism; urban change; personality of place EN Las Vegas sense of place tourism urban change personality of place 206 212 7 01/17/22 20220101 NES 220101 Gragg, Larry (2013). The everyday life of locals maintains a strong, longstanding, and often oppositional bond to what Goodwin refers to as the Las Vegas "master narrative", what Foster sees as the "Vegas" reputation, and what Borer calls the "Las Vegas Syndrome" or "steep neon slope." The Las Vegas craft beer scene, for example, includes local breweries that embrace gambling imagery (Bad Beat Brewing and Aces and Ales) and others that take on local toponyms and historical moments connected to Las Vegas (Tenaya Creek Brewing and Atomic Liquors). [Extracted from the article]

This auto-geographical, sense of place essay represents one approach to understanding a personal attachment to a location that has been disrupted by time and a destructive wildfire. It is written in the context of increased frequency of natural and human-caused disasters and a growing literature engaging the impact of disasters on place. It is an attempt to illustrate how a personal essay can be an important venue through which geographers can explore longstanding disciplinary themes of human interaction with place and the physical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Olstad's book goes a long way to fill that gap for both seasoned and up-and-coming cultural geographers. How many times have cultural geographers read a piece of travel writing, a memoir, or a personal essay and wondered, "why was this excellent geography I not i written by a geographer?" I appreciated Olstad's strong bend toward memoir, thick and detailed description of land and place, and personal exploration of self in place. [Extracted from the article]

A shifting American cultural geography, stemming from clustering of like-minded people, has been much-discussed in recent years. The “voluntary region”, proposed by Wilbur Zelinsky in his path-breakingThe cultural geography of the United States, is a regional construct relatively unexplored by cultural geographers that may help in their contributions to such conversations. As described by Zelinsky, voluntary regions are places that attract individual, like-minded people away from long-standing “traditional regions” based on a desire for amenity and economic opportunity. I review the concept and its sparse embrace in the literature and suggest that it has much to offer our discipline. Using Las Vegas as a paradigmatic example, I explore methods that can be used to explore the formation and character of voluntary regions. I argue that the voluntary region framework is an encompassing lens through which cultural geographers can examine the complex nature of place and regional construction at the hands of dynamic forces that lead people to resettle in new places. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Religion is an important, yet overlooked, aspect of local life in Las Vegas, Nevada. Many residents attend worship services and practice faith in an environment that often promotes the opposite of their religious beliefs. Using qualitative data from interviews with clergy across the spectrum of faith traditions, I analyze the adaptation of institutional religion to local circumstances in order to understand how religious belief reflects local sense of place. In a city bifurcated into tourist and local parts, such analysis provides a glimpse into the insider/outsider place dichotomy of long interest to geographers. It further illuminates how religion and place interact. Religious believers, in Las Vegas and elsewhere, often negotiate between their spiritual beliefs and their surrounding cultural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased attention to global climate change in recent years has resulted in a wide array of maps and geovisualizations that forecast various scenarios. Since many consequences of climate change are inherently geographic in nature, effective cartographic representations that depict these risks are valuable for planning and mitigation purposes. In particular, sea-level rise resulting from climate change calls attention to the numerous representation issues that warrant consideration for hazard and risk mapping in general, including categorizing and representing risk, selecting an appropriate level of realism, and displaying potential impacts of a hazard on human populations as well as on the natural and built environments. Using examples of potential inundation from sea-level rise at global, regional, and local scales, the authors propose a conceptual framework of key cartographic considerations for maps, Web-based mashups, and geovisualizations that depict risk. The cartographic framework presented here may be extended to other risks of an ambiguous or fuzzy nature and may be used to organize key future research areas for hazard or risk mapping in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]