ABSTRACT
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
part 1|58 pages
Place/lessness in Design
chapter 5|17 pages
Regulating Place Distinctiveness
part 2|58 pages
Place/lessness in Experience
part 3|70 pages
Place/lessness in Practice
chapter 10|16 pages
Examining Place-making in Practice
chapter 13|17 pages
Placelessness and the Rigid Perception of Place Identities
part 4|48 pages
Place/lessness in Question