There has been much discussion of natural and wild places within environmentalist literature, but there is an increasing recognition of the need to interrogate the distinction between the natural and the human, the wild and the tamed, as well as to more carefully examine the character of urban and built places. For many people, the places with which they are most familiar are those of the shopping mall, the suburban backyard, the city street, the high rise and the townhouse. How should these places be understood? How do the pressures and publicity of development affect the character of place and our understanding of it? Urban places themsleves refer us to rural places, both through the way urban places are encompassed by th erural in spatial terms, and through the way the urban itself engenders images of the rural idyll. The rustic bucolic image however is far from the reality of rural life. The processes of change are often greatest in rural areas, with large population shifts away from the rural, increasing farm size and changing social relationships. Environment degradation through poor management practices and anthropogenic or human - accelerated change like salinity is also changing the landscape and people's connection to the land. An understanding of place can assist in environmental management, and in understanding the stress people experience as a result of change.