Place Identity is formed primarily on the basis of repeated exposure to place, whether that exposure is based on actually experiencing the place or only hearing or reading about it (From Backlund)
http://www.ssrc.canterbury.ac.nz/research/RPHS/hh/homepub.pdf
Literature on old age links to housing careers and shifting meanings of home over one’s lifetime, as well as to the relationship between health and housing. Recent contributions indicate that the theorisation of the human body in physical space is a closely related topic (Mowl, Pain and Talbot 2000). As populations grow older, who is defined as ‘elderly’, what elderly persons do ‘at home’ and how elderly people conceive of their houses and homes are increasingly pertinent questions. Older people have to renegotiate meanings assigned to home in light of their health status, financial circumstances, geographical mobility into smaller homes, and/or accommodation in residential care institutions (Dupuis and Thorns 1998, Kontos 1998). Literature linking old age and the home environment has recognised that ‘home’ plays a critical role in maintaining a sense of personal identity and independence for ‘elderly’ people. Rather than representing a place in which elderly people are homebound, being ‘at home’ can be a means of resisting or flouting stereotypical notions of old age (Kontos 1998, Mansvelt 1997a, 1997b, Mansvelt and Perkins 1998, Mowl, Pain and Talbot 2000). Mowl, Pain and Talbot (2000), Kontos (1998), and Mansvelt (1997) all evaluate meanings of home for older people. Dupuis and Thorns (1998) also do this in the context of home ownership and ontological security. These contributions are largely qualitative in focus, concentrating on the narratives or stories of older people telling about their ideas and experiences of old age, instead of making presumptions on the basis of biological age.
From somewhere else:
Places, … on [this] argument, … can be understood as articulations of social relationships some of which will be to the beyond (the global), and these global relationships as much as the internal relationships of an area will influence its character, its “identity”. … It may [therefore] be useful to think of places, not as areas on maps, but as constantly shifting articulations of social relations through time; and to think of particular attempts to characterise them as attempts to define, and claim coherence and a particular meaning for, specific envelopes of space-time …the particular characterisation of that envelope of space time, that place, which it proposes is only maintained by the exercise of power relations in some form. The identity of places, indeed the very identification of places as particular places, is always in that sense temporary, uncertain, and in process.