ABSTRACT
No matter whether places are defined as containers, geographical localities, communities, territories of meaning, nodes in networks, or exceptional buildings and public spaces, their identity is always a function both of difference from, and similarities with, other equivalent places. To appreciate the distinctive identity of somewhere requires understanding its sameness with elsewhere. This is the paradox of place. Distinctiveness is defined by reference to sameness. Place is a figure against a background of placelessness. This chapter argues that what appeared in the 1970s as an opposition between place and placelessness has subsequently evolved into something that seems like a fusion in which the two are tangled together. It suggests that placelessness in the 1950s and 1960s was a powerful force manifest in attitudes and development approaches that were clearly anti-place. The chapter concludes that increasingly transitory, transnational, and multi-centered experiences have turned places everywhere into tangled manifestations of distinctiveness and sameness.
