ABSTRACT
In recent years the concept of place has moved into the mainstream of geographical and other discussions, to the extent that it is now difficult to see that not so long ago it was absent. Before the path-breaking works by Tuan (1971a, 1971b, 1974), Relph (1976), and Buttimer (1974), discussion within geography focused instead on concepts such as space, distance, and especially region.1 Now only 25 years old, those pioneering works have nonetheless receded into the penumbra cast by the very popularity of the concept. Today we seem constantly to hear of the “death of distance”; at the same time geographers of all stripes proclaim that “place matters,” and we are led to imagine that within geographical writing it must always have been so.
