“Prospects for Places”

A leading early voice to identify and analyze the growing sense of placelessness that was occurring throughout the world by the latter half of the twentieth century was geographer Edward Relph. In his now classic book Place and Placelessness, Relph uses critical observation to make connections between the visible landscape, everyday life experiences, and the abstract social and economic processes that contribute to their transformation. Written in straightforward language and grounded in experience of actual places, Relph’s ideas were easily accessible to physical planners and urban designers, providing an intellectual base on which place-making proposals could rest.