Sharing Knowledge about Places as Community Building.

Our experience of places is one that comes hand in hand with social exchange. It is rare that we visit a place purely to experience it as an isolated encounter with a physical setting. Instead we visit places in groups, use a myriad of ways to tell others about the experience and we often seek out and take pleasure from encounters with local people in the setting. Our experience of place is embedded within a social framework for sharing knowledge. In this chapter we discuss the motivations for sharing place-based knowledge and how this can contribute to community building. We then proceed to review three projects that create platforms for knowledge exchange and discuss their different approaches. This is followed by a discussion on the range of practices for sharing knowledge about places and in particular those that support social frameworks in a community setting. In conclusion we propose directions for future work in the area.