Place

I wrote a book forty years ago, Place and Placelessness (1976, originally Pion, now published by Sage), which has been translated into several languages, and was reprinted in 2010 unchanged except for a new preface. It has been widely referenced in many different disciplines, perhaps because this was one of the first academic books devoted to the c... oncept and experience of place. Place and Placelessness was a revised version of my thesis in Geography, The Phenomenon of Place, that I completed at the University of Toronto in 1973. In that I aimed to make sense of a word that was widely regarded as central to my discipline and about which almost nothing had been written about it. The card catalogs in libraries, which at the time were the closest things to search engines available, had almost no entries for place, genius loci, or sense of place, so my naive approach was to look systematically through books on the shelves in what seemed to be relevant sections of the library, follow whatever lead this turned up, and then to write an account that clarified whatever I learned about place and place experiences and was illustrated with photos and diagrams. I approached this phenomenologically because phenomenology addresses things from the perspective of how they are experienced rather than as abstract concepts, and that seems entirely appropriate for place, which is first experienced and then thought about. I juxtaposed place and placelessness because at that time - around 1970 - international approaches of modernist planning and architecture were ascendant and it seemed to me that there was a disjuncture between ideas and experiences of place, and the placeless ways in which landscapes were then being made. Place was a subject of peripheral academic interest, and though a handful of books about it were published in the decade after mine my own focus turned mostly to the question of why urban and other landscapes look as they do. And in the early 1990s, when there was a surge of academic and popular interest in place ...Read More