About

What is Loci Earth?

Some places affect how we feel. How we feel can, in turn, affect those places. Loci Earth maps that exchange.

The name comes from two ideas: genius loci, 'the spirit of place', and the method of loci, the ancient practice of anchoring memories to real familiar places so they can be recovered by retracing the steps between them.

The same connection runs through what researchers call the Proust Effect: the way a taste, a smell, or a place can restore autobiographical memory more completely than deliberate recall. Loci Earth works with that instinct. The places you keep are a record of the places that have shaped you, a kind of autobiography mapped out, conveniently in a simple web app.

A place on Loci Earth can be personal, a private record of somewhere that matters only to you. Or it can be shared with an interest: others who feel the same way about the same kinds of places.

What kinds of places?

Loci Earth is for places in the public realm: naturally accessible spaces, landmarks, footpaths, waterways, coastline, green spaces and places of community significance. Places that belong, in a civic sense, to everyone.

Why we built it

Places shape communities. Communities shape places. Yet most of what people know about the places around them, the local knowledge, the personal histories, the quiet corners and the shared memories, lives only in people's heads or in conversations that are never recorded.

Loci Earth exists to change that. It is a civic project, not a commercial one. Our purpose is to advance community development for the public benefit by giving people who feel the same way about the same kinds of places the infrastructure to find each other, connect, and contribute to a shared body of local knowledge that is free for everyone.

Who is behind it?

Loci Earth is developed and operated by the Spirit of the Place Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation registered in England and Wales. The Foundation's purpose is rooted in a belief that community knowledge about places belongs to communities, not organisations or platforms.

The thinking behind it

The intellectual foundation for this project is Living Patterns, a digital publication by the Foundation's founding trustee that explores the connections between people, place, community and the patterns that link them. Loci Earth is Living Patterns applied to mapping.

Open data

Places that members choose to publicize are made available on our open data portal under open licences. We believe the knowledge that grows around places should remain freely available to everyone, permanently.

Contact

For general enquiries or support, email support@loci.earth.