ABSTRACT
In the last decade, place and placemaking have drawn renewed attention among scholars and practitioners who increasingly understand the importance of these concepts and the urgency of safeguarding the creation and maintenance of meaningful environments. This renewed appreciation follows a period toward the end of the 20th century when many were convinced of the declining importance or even obsolescence of place in the modern world. This decline seemed an inevitable result of an escalating disruption of the traditional geography of social life. This disruption was associated with a wide range of factors: the globalization of capital, and the geographic fluidity of economic life; the decentralizing and homogenizing characteristics of contemporary urban development; and a combination of cultural and economic processes that have seemed to reduce the differentiation of places to shallow signifiers meant solely to entice consumption. One could reasonably expect this erosion of the importance of place to continue or even accelerate in the 21st century due to ongoing innovations in the global information environment that facilitate remote work arrangements, tailor news content sent to personal devices, and allow social media to liberate social interaction from physical locations. “Places” themselves may not fully vanish, of course, as even spaces that are commonly considered “placeless” are still places with implications for the spatial dimensions of social life. However, these tendencies clearly erode many of the qualities that make places unique and meaningful, and suggest that place no longer has a central significance in social life.
