ABSTRACT
Place is a wonderfully multi-scalar concept, extending from the armchair or desktop, to a room, building, street, neighborhood, city, nation, and planet. This chapter discusses some personal reflections on changing understandings of place and placelessness. It then seeks to unravel and problematize the concepts of place and placelessness in terms of everyday urban politics and urban political economy. The chapter suggests an assemblage approach, wherein the experience of place is seen as an emergent phenomenon. It outlines some challenges for rethinking conceptions of place and placelessness in the 21st century. The chapter describes the place-destructive force of global capitalism through a penetrating political economic critique but also empowering local practices of self-organization and resistance. Place is neither pre-existing nor made by designers, but something that emerges from a multiplicity of forces. Place is a multiplicitous, multi-scalar assemblage and it requires multiple responses.
