Place and Placelessness Revisited

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.

Table of Contents:
Foreword –Tim Cresswell Revisiting Place and Placelessness –Edgar Liu and Robert Freestone 1. The Paradox of Place and the Evolution of Placelessness –Ted Relph Part 1. Place/lessness in Design 2. An Urban Designer’s Perspective: Paradigms, Places and People –Jon Lang 3. Theory’s Role in Placelessness –Lucy Montague 4. Reclaiming and Making and Places of Distinction through Landscape Architecture –Linda Corkery 5. Regulating Place Distinctiveness: A Critique of Approaches to the Protection of ‘Neighborhood Character’ in Melbourne –Gethin Davison Part 2. Place/lessness in Experience 6. Insideness in an Age of Mobilities –John Tomaney 7. Losing Control at Home? –Hazel Easthope 8. Tuning In and Out of Place –Rachel Cogger 9. The Risk of Placelessness for Children and Young People in the 21st Century Cities of Western Societies –Kate Bishop Part 3. Place/lessmess in Practice 10. Examining Place-making in Practice: Observations from the Revitalization of Downtown Detroit –Laura Crommelin 11. Place-making in the Rise of the Airport City –Robert Freestone and Ilan Wiesel 12. Urban Squares: A Place for Social Life –Nancy Marshall 13. Placelessness and the Rigid Perception of Place Identities: Public Toilets as Multi-functional Places –Edgar Liu Part 4. Place/lessness in Question 14. Extraordinary Ordinaryness: An Outsider’s Perspective on Place and Placelessness in the Japanese City –Matthew Carmona 15. Extending Place: The Global South and Informal Urbanisms –Aseem Inam 16. Place as Multiplicity –Kim Dovey Afterword –Ted Relph