Edward Relph

John Sayles is one of America’s most successful independent filmmakers, whose works include Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), City of Hope (1991), and Lone Star (1996). This article examines Sayles’ portrait of place in Sunshine State (2002), a film set in Plantation Island, Florida, where large-scale corporate development is transforming two communities—one black, the other white—into upscale winter resorts. Sayles’ film probes the place experience of some sixteen vividly drawn characters and illuminates how the same physical place, for different individuals and groups, can evoke a broad spectrum of situations, meanings, and potential futures. One of Sayles’ conclusions is that people cannot escape the place in which they find themselves. They can, however, learn from that place and thereby decide whether and in what ways they will offer that place commitment or not.

This book,  A Geography of the Lifeworld (1979), focuses on a wide-ranging phenomenon labelled everyday environmental experience—the sum total of peoples’ firsthand involvements with the geographical world in which they live. By geographical world is meant the everyday places, spaces, and environments in which people find themselves. The source of experiential descriptions was environmental experience groups, small focus groups of students and other interested participants who were willing to meet weekly to examine in their own daily experience such themes as movement patterns, emotions relating to place, the nature of noticing and attention, the meaning of home and at-homeness, places for things, deciding where to go when, and so forth.

Through a phenomenological explication of the more than 1,500 personal observations offered in these environmental experience groups, the study identifies three overarching themes—movement, rest, and encounter—that appear to mark the essential core of everyday environmental experience.

The section on movement examines the habitual nature of everyday environmental behaviors and argues, after French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), that the lived foundation of these behaviors is the body as preconscious but intelligent subject. The section on rest explores people’s attachment to place and gives particular attention to at-homeness and positive affective relationships with places and environments.

The book’s final section on encounter considers the multifaced ways in which people make attentive contact with their world. Group observations indicate that this range of awareness extends from obliviousness and minimal attentive contact with the world at hand through watching, noticing, and more intense kinds of encounter where the experiencer, at least metaphorically, feels a sense of “merging” with some aspect of world.

The last section of the book examines lived relationships and interconnections among movement, rest, and encounter and argues that their threefold structure offers one simple but integrated way to envision human environmental experience conceptually and to think about design and policy implications practically.

LIFE TAKES PLACE argues that, even in our mobile, hypermodern world, human life is impossible without place. Seamon asks the question: Why does life take place? He draws on examples of specific places and place experiences to understand place more broadly. Advocating for a holistic way of understanding that he calls “synergistic relationality,” he defines places as spatial fields that gather, activate, sustain, identify, and interconnect things, human beings, experiences, meanings, and events.
  Recognizing that places always change over time, Seamon examines their processual dimension by identifying six generative processes that he labels interaction, identity, release, realization, intensification, and creation. Drawing on practical examples from architecture, planning, and urban design, he argues that an understanding of these six place processes might contribute to a more rigorous place making that produces robust places and propels vibrant environmental experiences.
  Written in an accessible style that will appeal to academics, practitioners, and the lay public, this book is a significant contribution to the growing research literature in “place and place-making studies.”

Course description: This seminar introduces students to qualitative, descriptive approaches to research in environmental behavior. The first part of the course explores methods for studying the built environment intuitively, particularly the approach of phenomenology.  Next, the course examines such themes as space as experienced, sense of place, environmental encounter, built form as experiential symbol, and architecture and landscape architecture as community making. A major focus is architecture and environmental design as place making.

A review of Relph's seminal PLACE AND PLACELESSNESS, first published in 1977 and reprinted in 2008. The book is one of the first phenomenologies of place and remains the most accessible. And excellent introduction to place and the phenomenological approach.

Using public toilets and latrinalia (graffiti found inside public toilets) as demonstrations, this paper questions the rigid perception of place identities and how this rigidity may ultimately contribute to the persistence of placelessness. It draws specifically on Relph’s 1976 discussions on the three elements that constitute placelessness – (in)authenticity, (lack of) distinctiveness and (dis)connection – and examines these in view of Butler’s theorisation of human identities.

book reviews:
* Philip Graus (2017) Place and Placelessness Revisited, Urban Policy and Research, 35:3, 369-371, DOI: 10.1080/08111146.2017.1329802
* Yiwei Huang (2020) Place and placelessness revisited, Journal of Cultural Geography, 37:2, 254-255, DOI: 10.1080/08873631.2020.1761581

Esta comunicación presenta las reflexiones teóricas acerca de la sostenibilidad psicosocial de las ciudades. Se analizan los factores que hacen psicosocialmente insostenibles las ciudades y aquellos que, por el contrario, promueven la habitabilidad de las mismas: en particular, ...

Salama, A. M. (2013). Urban Diversity Under the Microscope: A Brief Examination of Public Open Spaces in the City of Doha. B’Here Annual Review-Qatar 2013, Arab Communication Consult, Beirut, Lebanon, PP.126-129.


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With their socio-physical, socio-economic, socio-cultural, and socio-political presence, cities have always been highly differentiated spaces expressive of heterogeneity, diversity of activities, entertainment, excitement and pleasure. They have been - and still are - melting pots for the formulation of and experimentation with new philosophies and religious and social practices. They produce, reproduce, represent, and convey much of what counts today as culture, knowledge, and politics. This article presents a brief examination of public open spaces, Doha, Qatar.

This winter 2011 issue of EAP includes four feature essays. First, naturalist Paul Krafel explores the experience of looking at stars in the night sky, and British writer Christine Rhone describes the sacred landscape of Painted Rock, California. In turn, historic-preservation planner Jeremy Wells considers the need for preservationists to incorporate the lived qualities of historic places in methods of evaluation, and architect Reza Shirazi examines architectural phenomenologist Christian Norberg-Schulz’s critique of Japanese architect Tadao Ando’s Vitra Conference Center in Germany. Shirazi’s essay is especially provocative because it demonstrates how different phenomenologists can interpret the same buildings differently in terms of their experiential dimensions. Such variations in phenomenological understanding raise the important matter of interpretive accuracy and trustworthiness—always a difficult issue in phenomenological and hermeneutic research.

Whenever we hear the word 'place', we immediately recognize an inconspicuous 'image', that isn't just visual imagery, but a memory that is embodied within ourselves. It is this memory that roots all us people to the world and gives an existential meaning to the 'survival'.

"Press overview:
How did the American people come to develop a moral association with this land, such that their very experience of nationhood was rooted in, and their republican virtues depended upon, that land? And what is happening now as the exclusivity of that moral linkage between people and land becomes ever more attenuated? In Place and Belonging in America, David Jacobson addresses the evolving relationship between geography and citizenship in the United States since the nation's origins.

Americans have commonly assumed that only a people rooted in a bounded territory could safeguard republican virtues. But, as Jacobson argues, in the contemporary world of transnational identities, multiple loyalties, and permeable borders, the notion of a singular territorial identity has lost its resonance. The United States has come to represent a diverse quilt of cultures with varying ties to the land. These developments have transformed the character of American politics to one in which the courts take a much larger role in mediating civic life. An expanding web of legal rights enables individuals and groups to pursue their own cultural and social ends, in contrast to the civic republican practice of an active citizenry legislating its collective life.

In the first part of his sweeping study, Jacobson considers the origins of the uniquely American sense of place, exploring such components as the Puritans and their religious vision of the New World; the early Republic and agrarian virtue as extolled in the writings of Thomas Jefferson; the nationalization of place during the Civil War; and the creation of post-Civil War monuments and, later, the national park system. The second part of Place and Belonging in America concerns the contemporary United States and its more complex interactions between space and citizenship. Here Jacobson looks at the multicultural landscape as represented by the 1991 act of Congress that changed the name of the Custer Battlefield National Monument to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and the subsequent construction of a memorial honoring the Indian participants in the battle; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He also reflects upon changing patterns of immigration and settlement. At once far-reaching and detailed, Place and Belonging in America offers a though-provoking new perspective on the myriad, often spiritual connections between territoriality, national identity, and civic culture."

Reviews:
Jacobson's lucid and insightful analysis is multilayered and interdisciplinary. Along with deft historical interpretation and incisive sociological investigation, he integrates discussions on politics, philosophy, literature, and religion, highlighting their roles in revealing American's evolving sense of place and identity.
(Virginia Quarterly Review )

Paying keen attention to interpretation, textuality, and the social uses of landscape, Jacobson's study engages questions that make it a must read.
(Susan Kollin, Journal of American History )

A thoughtful overview of major events and changes to the American linkages of place and identity to the landscape.
(William G. Holt, Contemporary Sociology )

Modeling the best of interdisciplinary scholarship, David Jacobson demonstrates the ways in which American representations of self, the human, and consciousness are interwoven with shifting American conceptualizations of time, place, and civic life. Grounded in historical analysis, philosophical in tone, and shaped largely by insights derived from the social sciences, Place and Belonging in America recalls Jonathan Edwards's eighteenth-century reflections on the beauty of history as much as the most slashing postmodern depictions of historical irony. This is an impressive work of synthesis, a beautifully-written book that deserves a wide audience.
(John Corrigan, Edwin Scott Gaustad Professor of Religion and Professor of History, Florida State University, author of Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century )

This well-written and well-researched book addresses a topic of particular interest to a variety of disciplines: the symbolic representation of space. Its specific concern is the shifting understanding and experience of 'place' in the history of the United States. In addressing this specific concern, the author has drawn upon material from the disciplines of law, history, art, and architecture. David Jacobson has moved into new areas from those covered in his previous book, and Place and Belonging in America places that earlier, good work in a conceptually richer context.
(Stephen Grosby, Clemson University )

Place and Belonging in America should provoke reflection on the importance of issues such as immigration, geographic mobility, and globalization for the viability of politics, properly understood.
(Jeremy Beer, Perspectives on Political Science )

The Balcony; as defined by Rem Koolhass in his book elements of architecture; projects into the outside but floats above it. Balcony serves as a laboratory where it is a mixture of public and private and inside and outside.

For most of our history we have used artefacts, architecture, pictures and words to create a vision of our past. It’s only in the last ten seconds or so on our historical clock that we’ve been able to capture and archive sound. Almost all our sonic heritage has passed by completely unrecorded. I think it’s important that the everyday sounds around us, the sounds we hear but seldom listen to, are recorded and archived so that future generations will have the sounds of our time to explore, to study and to enjoy.
The balcony is one of the building's physical components in which the latter is one of the soundscape's main components. The person who uses the balcony exposes himself to the soundscape as a matter of choice.

An underdeveloped focus regarding nostalgia is ‘the urban’ realm. A greying society, societal upheaval, lack of empirical (Dutch) research on urban nostalgia, the need for a theory-inclined approach and a stimulus for new academic exploration make this study relevant. The primary objective is to gain new insights regarding the elderly people’s experience of place, while using these to give direction to the development of a theory on urban nostalgia. Methodologically, a re-photography, semi-structured interviews with residents of Tilburg aged 63 years and older, and archive research have been conducted. The analysis was done via Atlas.TI and has been structured along (1) the ‘what’ and (2) the ‘how’ of urban nostalgia. The ‘what’ exposed the presence of personal, inter-relational and ‘everyday’ (‘social’) objects as well as architectural, urbanistic and ecological (‘spatial’) objects of nostalgia. The ‘how’ showed a variety of expressions, such as critical, forward-looking, reflective, restorative, meliorative, conservative, ambiguous, comparative, adaptive, contrasted and integrative nostalgia. The findings indicate the need to consider elderly resident’s experience to space and place in the perspective of attractiveness and place-making. Future research on gender, age, education and ethnicity differences as well as on other cities could enhance in-depth understanding of the topic.