ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that some of the key criticisms levelled at city planners and designers by Edward Relph in the 1970s apply equally to approaches to the regulation of place character today. It focuses on the city of Melbourne, Australia, where neighborhood 'character' is a key consideration in the assessment of residential planning applications. For Relph, place distinctiveness and sameness are something formed through the combinations and interrelations of three key elements, such as physical setting, activities, and meanings. The contemporary concern for character in city planning has its origins in negative reactions to the destructive and standardizing effects of modernist architecture and planning from the 1950s. The chapter concludes that forty years on from Relph's influential treatise on place, a need still remains for much greater acknowledgment by city planners that places are more than physical locations, and that the experts on those places are the people who live and work there, not planners themselves.
