Place and Placelessness Revisited

by Robert Freestone (Editor), Edgar Liu (Editor)

Since its publication in 1976, Ted Relph’s Place and Placelessness has been an influential text in thinking about cities and city life across disciplines, including human geography, sociology, architecture, planning, and urban design. For four decades, ideas put forward by this seminal work have continued to spark debates, from the concept of placelessness itself through how it plays out in our societies to how city designers might respond to its challenge in practice. Drawing on evidence from Australian, British, Japanese, and North and South American urban settings, Place and Placelessness Revisited is a collection of cutting edge empirical research and theoretical discussions of contemporary applications and interpretations of place and placelessness. It takes a multi-disciplinary approach, including contributions from across the breadth of disciplines in the built environment – architecture, environmental psychology, geography, landscape architecture, planning, sociology, and urban design – in critically re-visiting placelessness in theory and its relevance for twenty-first century contexts.

278 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2016

Reviews

[Alyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collection of essays using place and placelessness as the launching point for a number of interesting perspectives and avenues of thought on urban design, public spaces, children's role in urban space, the meaning of home, insideness, and others.

They vary in my interest, but all are extremely well researched and written.