Introduction to Positioning Place and Placemaking: An Interview with Tony Hiss

Camden Miller & Robert G. Shibley: Introducing essays by Tim Cresswell, Joyce Weil, and Sharon Zukin is challenging because they come from very different intellectual traditions. We are excited to have you, Tony Hiss, on this task because the breadth of your writing embraces their disciplines and many others. Tim Cresswell writes from the perspective of a geographer and published poet. When we read his work, such as Place, An Introduction,¹ we are inevitably reminded of the depth of scholarship and cultural insight entrusted to us by the philosopher Edward S. Casey in his books The Fate of Place² and Getting Back into Place.³ For Casey, place is foundational, an organizing principle, the fabric of reality: “Space and time are contained in places rather than places in them… The world comes bedecked in places; it was a place-world to begin with.” Tim Cresswell is another wide-ranging place-theorist, and for him, too, place and placemaking are pervasive and inescapable. In his graceful writings, he brings together the insights of a geographer, a sociologist, and a philosopher.