Can Leisure Become a Place Generator? Exploring the Idea through Stebbins’s Serious Leisure Perspective

It is surprising that only now leisure studies are starting to look at the importance of the physical environment (i.e. natural and built environments). Recently, an increasing number of research studies were conducted on leisure and space but most, if not all, were unidirectional, meaning that they only observed the influence of place on leisure. Consequently, research regarding the impact of leisure on place has been scarce. Specifically, this paper presents the concept of place and how it is understood in the field of geography. Using Stebbins’s Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP), this paper: (1) examines how leisure can be a generator of place, (2) illustrates Stebbins’s SLP and the three types of leisure it contains, and (3) demonstrates how serious leisure has the ability to generate place and culture.