1

A Summary Version of Place and Placelessness

Introductory Explanatory Comments

It occurred to me recently that a summary of my book Place and
Placelessness, which was published in 1976 and was one of the first academic
discussions about place, might be of value to those following me on Academia who
are not directly familiar with it. Although it has been widely referenced, and is still
in print (currently with Sage, who took over from the original publisher, Pion, in
2015), I understand that it is not always easy to find a copy.
What I provide here is an unadorned précis of Place and Placelessness,
chapter by chapter. I have added a few phrases to clarify the context (for instance, at
the beginning of Chapter 1). I have omitted the photos, illustrations, supporting
quotations, and references in the original. Chapter titles and numbers are identical
to those in Place and Placelessness. Underlined phrases correspond to section
headings. I have retained the English forms of spelling that were in the original
book.
It is now approaching fifty years since Place and Placelessness was published
and there have been many social, technological and conceptual developments that
qualify the arguments I made in it. My intention is to post on Academia in the near
fuure an original essay that considers how the ideas expressed then need to be
updated to reflect changes in how ways places are made and experienced, which
include heritage preservation, placemaking, mass air travel and tourism, and
electronic media. Since the 1970s place has become a subject of enquiry in many
different academic disciplines (geography, philosophy, psychology, sociology,
literature, anthropology and neuroscience) and from a variety of perspectives. In
due course I will post a separate original essay that reviews what I believe to be the
most important of these perspectives.
_______________________________________________
 2

Place and Placelessness Summarized

Edward Relph 2018

Chapter 1 Place and the Phenomenological Basis of Geography

When I began to write Place and Placelessness in the 1970s my aim was to
correct an omission in my discipline of geography. This had often been defined as
the study of place or places, but there had only been brief attempts to explain what
this involved, presumably because it was considered self-evident. I quickly realized
that place, unlike words such as location, region and space, is more than an abstract
concept. Geographical reality actually begins with the places we know and
experience. From this perspective place has to be understood as a profound,
complex and meaningful aspect of our everyday encounters with the world that is
best described using phenomenological methods which proceed from experiences
rather than concepts. According to philosophers Martin Heidegger and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology is a way of clarifying the lived-world that precedes
all formal knowledge and which cannot be confined by the boundaries of any
specific academic discipline. So the aim of Place and Placelessness is an exploration
of place as a phenomenon of the lived-world of everyday experience. It is not about
developing theories or models, nor about specific places. It is about the various
ways place is manifest in our experiences, the characteristics of places as they are
expressed in landscapes, and about how these are being increasingly threatened by
processes of placelessness that weaken diverse experiences and identities of places.
Phenomenology is a way of thinking that accepts the wholeness of human
experience, acknowledges that meanings defined by human intentions are central to
those experiences, and then aims to clarify those meanings. While this method
informs the discussion in Place and Placelessness, it is used implicitly rather than
explicitly because it is the phenomenon of place that is important, not the method.
From this phenomenological perspective place is approached with as few
 3

presuppositions as possible about its character or form, except to recognize that it

has a range of significances potentially as wide as human experiences of the world.

[2018 Note: while phenomenology is the methodological foundation for Place and
Placelessness, the actual research involved a sort of academic detective work
because then not only were there no academic books about place, it was not even a
subject in library card catalogues. My approach was to read widely, look at the
indexes in books to see if they mentioned place, follow leads, and keep an open mind
about possible sources. The fragments I found, many of which I cite in Place and
Placelessness but not in this summary, provided the foundation for creating an
implicitly phenomenological description of place.]

Chapter 2 Space and Place

Space has often been described as the context for places. There are many
meanings of space that range from direct experience to geometric abstraction, and
this chapter examines these in terms of how they relate to place.
Primitive or pragmatic space is the space of instinctive and biological
behavior, of up and down, in front and behind, within hearing or out of sight. At this
level it is difficult to distinguish space and place. Perhaps primitive space is simply a
continuous series of egocentric places where things performing certain functions or
meeting specific needs can be found.
Perceptual space is organized around our immediate needs and actions. It is
perceived subjectively in terms such as near and far, and this way or that, rather
than measured. It also has emotional qualities, apparent for instance in our
reactions to space of the sky, mountains, the ocean, or streets and cities, which may
variously evoke feelings of immensity, solidity, or enclosure.
Perceptual space is differentiated by particular personal experiences into specific
places, some of them currently significant and other remembered. These are
personal but they are not isolated in individuals. In part this is because the
 4

landscapes where they happen are shared (our home is shared with other members
of our family and so on) and in part because of the intersubjective links of culture,
experience and intention. Intersubjectivity acknowledges that the lived-world does
not consist of individuals each at the centre of their own perceptual spaces, but is
from the outset shared with others who have similar perceptual spaces and places.
Existential or lived-space is the structure of space as it appears in the shared
experiences a cultural group. This is intersubjective because all members of the
culture have been socialized according to common set of experiences and symbols.
Although these are constantly remade to correspond with changing beliefs and
practices, they are readily apparent to members of that culture though they may not
be obvious to outsiders.
Sacred space is a specific form of existential space associated with religious
experience. It is replete with sacred places that are occupied by gods or spirits that
need to be propitiated or worshipped, some marked by temples, others where some
miraculous event happened. In modern societies sacred space has been largely
replaced by profane space that lacks transcendent meanings.
Geographical space is the desacralized space of modern societies. It may be
referred to generically, for instance as valley, forest, town, farm and so on.
Geographical space has been cultivated and built on, it has histories and uses, and
the places in it have been given their own specific names. Experiences of
geographical space are composed of blends of sounds, smells, present purposes,
memories, and the unfolding sequence of scenes as we move through a landscape.
Intentionality gives direction to experiences of geographical space,
Christian Norberg-Schulz has vertical and horizontal structures for
geographical (though he calls it existential space). Vertically, the widest scale is that
of nations and continents, which are familiar yet beyond direct experience; below
that is the space of regions and landscapes which are the context of human
interactions with environments; next is urban space, which differs from regions in
that it almost entirely built; within that is the space of the street; and at the most
detailed level is the spaces of the home, the central reference point of human
existence. At each of these vertical levels space has a horizontal structure, and
 5

Norberg-Schulz draws on Kevin Lynch’s notions of districts, paths, and centres of

meaning to describe this. Places in geographical or existential space are these
centres of meaning. The are focuses of intention within the lived-space of everyday
social life.
The deepest meaning in geographical space comes from what Heidegger
referred to as ‘dwelling’, the manner in which we relate to the earth and develop a
sense of belonging to somewhere, to a place where our hopes and intentions are
grounded. This happens not only in traditional cultures, such as those of the Black
Forest that Heidegger described, but also to some degree in contemporary urban
and suburban developments, which may look uniform and placeless but
nevertheless involve the intentions, hopes and fears of those who make their homes
there.
Architectural space is a distinct form of geographical space that is the result
of a deliberate attempt to create spaces. Architectural space are manifest in the
relationships between buildings, in their hollow interior, and in interrelationships
between the exterior and the interior. There is of course much functional
architecture in which spatial experience plays only a trivial role, but exceptional
buildings can generate imaginative awareness and aesthetic experiences of space. In
these cases architecture creates places that express cultural and symbolic
complexities and serve as specific centres of meaning within geographical space.
The space of urban planning has sometimes been closely related to
architectural space, for instance in the Renaissance there was often continuity
between buildings, urban forms and the piazzas they created. More recent
approaches to urban planning have paid scant attention to the experience of space
and have treated urban space mostly as an empty surface on which things can be
arranged according to functional and economic imperatives. In this context place
means little more than a location where certain limited functions are served, such as
a shopping centre. This owes little to spatial experience but is tied to cognitive
space.
Cognitive space is a abstract construct based on attempts to develop theories
about space. It is homogeneous and neutral It is manifest, for instance, in map
 6

projections and geometry. Cognitive space has a long history in Western thought,
dating somewhat paradoxically from Aristotle’s theory of place. Aristotle’s argument
that a place is defined by “the boundary of that which encloses it,” which leaves little
scope for imagination or experience. Aristotle’s theory was perhaps derived from
previous suggestions by Archytas that “every body occupies some place and cannot
exist unless its place exists,” and that “it is plain that place, where what is done and
suffered exists, is the first of all things.” Although Archytas hinted at something akin
to existential space, Aristotle’s theory reduced it to an abstract and geometric
concept in which places are defined by sets of locational coordinates.
Abstract space is a human construct of logical relations that allow the
description of space without founding that description on empirical observations.
The concrete differences of sense experiences are eliminated and space is conceived
of as isotropic, uniform, finite or infinite, and places are merely points.
Relationships between the forms of space. These various types of space are
not clearly separate, and they should not be understood as a clear progression from
pragmatic experience to abstract reflection. Space has a multiplicity of interrelated
meanings that are linked in our experience and thought. These are drawn on
selectively depending on context and our intentions. We use the cognitive spaces of
maps to find our way around the unfamiliar parts of the cities where we live, and
what is shown on those maps can influence our perceptual and existential
experiences by drawing attention to significant buildings.
Those aspects of space that we distinguish as places are differentiated
because they have attracted and concentrated our intentions, and this sets them
apart from the surrounding space while remaining a part of it. Indeed the meanings
of space, and particularly lived-space, come from the existential and perceptual
places of immediate experience. Martin Heidegger wrote that: “Spaces receive their
being from places and not from ‘the space’…Man’s essential relationship to places,
and through them to space, consists in dwelling…the essential property of human
existence.”
 7

Chapter 3 The Essence of Place

In everyday life places are not experienced as bounded or clearly defined.

They are multi-facetted phenomena that blend setting, landscapes, routines,
activities, other people and elements of other places. Nevertheless, it is possible to
identify the various properties of places and to assess the relative importance of
these so that the essence of place and its sources of meaning can be disclosed.
Location is a common but not an essential attribute of place. For instance,
camps of nomadic peoples and ships are both places even though they are mobile.
Landscape or appearance is an obvious but not defining attribute of place. A
place where a significant event occurred may otherwise be indistinguishable from
its surroundings. There is the familiar experience of returning to a place after an
absence of several years and feeling that everything has changed, even though there
have been no changes in its appearance.
Time, especially in terms of an enduring identity, is important. Places are the
expressions of past actions, repeated experiences and hopes they will endure into
the future. But we know from ancient monuments and ghost towns that some places
die and lose their meaning even though aspects of them may persist. Time is an
unavoidable dimension of place, but it alone does not define the essence of place.
Community. The idea that a place is its people and people are their place is a
powerful one. When communities share a territory and a landscape the result is a
collective place consciousness that is reinforced by distinctive architecture and
public spaces and shared values. But not all place experiences are social and
communal.
Private and personal places. We are individuals as well as members of
communities, and although our experiences are conditioned by community and
cultural values, all places are individually experienced because nobody else can
experience them for us. Individual experiences are coloured by specific memories
and intentions, or very occasionally by a peak or ecstatic moment of topophilia that
is intensely personal that serves as a touchstone for other personal place
experiences.
 8

Rootedness or attachment to a place is associated with knowing and being

known here, in this specific place, and with having had both communal and personal
experiences that lend meaning to it. Having roots also involves care for a place.
Caring has been called an “essential need of the human soul” that calls forth complex
affections, concerns and responsibilities. Caring means letting things be as they are
rather than subordinating them to one’s will. And letting things be is essential to
realize home because home is where you belong but cannot have it all your own
way.
Home places are profound centres of human existence. A home is not just a
house but an irreplaceable centre of meaning and the foundation of our identity as
individuals and members of a community. It is a particular setting to which we are
attached, and a point of departure from which we orient ourselves and grasp the
larger world. This may seem obscure but it is a common, everyday experience. In the
modern world this profound experience of home does seem to be diminishing,
perhaps because of our transience or perhaps because it is covered up by
materialism and now only reveals itself in times of loss or uprooting, for instance
because of urban renewal or war.
Even if we usually unaware of the deep ties we have with the places where
we live, those ties are no less important for that. A deep relationship with places is
as necessary, and perhaps as unavoidable, as close relationships with people.
The drudgery of place. Experiences of place and home are not all positive. A
place becomes oppressive and imprisoning if we are confined to it. And there is
drudgery in the routines of place experience that reflect the misery of everyday life
with its tedium, humiliations, hardships, avarice and meanness. Drudgery is part of
caring for place and any commitment to a place must involve acceptance of the
restrictions that place imposes. Experiences of place, and especially of home, are a
sort of dialectical balance between the desire to escape and merits of staying and
belonging.
The essence of place comes then not from location or function or community,
though all these are common and necessary. It comes from the experiences and
largely unselfconscious intentionality that define particular places as profound
 9

centres of human existence. For almost all of us there is a deep association with the
home places where we were born and grew up, and where we live now, even if
those associations are not entirely positive.

Chapter 4 On the Identity of Places

It has been suggested that the identity of places can only be conveyed either
through artistic insight, which captures their uniqueness, or through some
systematic description of general properties that allows them to be classified, for
instance as business centres or small towns. Neither approach is helpful is
understanding the identity of places as phenomena of experience because this has to
recognize that places are simultaneously unique in their content and meanings, and
are also products of shared values and processes.
The identity of places. The notion of identity is fundamental in everyday life –
it applies to people, plants, even nations, yet it is difficult to define. This is in part
because it refers both to individual distinctiveness (for instance, the identity of a
person) and to shared characteristics (identity with and between people). The
identity of somewhere refers simultaneously to what differentiates it from other
places, such as its unique landmarks, and to the sameness it has other places, such
as its building styles. Similarly, the experience of identifying somewhere is both
personal and subjective, and also intersubjective because that experience is partially
shared with others who also recognize the place’s identity. Furthermore, subjective
and intersubjective experiences are both coloured by memories and knowledge of
other places and how they are different or similar. This involves the fundamental act
of identifying sameness in difference, while also identifying differences in sameness.
The components of the identity of places that can be discerned through direct
observation and reflection are:
• the buildings, objects, and landscape (which can, for example, be depicted in
photographs or drawings)
 10

• the activities that happen there, both regular and occasional (which can be
observed and described much as an entomologist observes ants)
• meanings, including qualities such as whether the buildings are beautiful or
ugly, whether the activities are productive or hindrances, or whether the place is
attractive or alienating. While meanings may be rooted in setting and activities
they are not a property of them, and they have their own distinctive qualities of
complexity and imagination and memory.
These three components are always bound together in our experiences of
places, yet they are clearly distinguishable from each other and are irreducible one
to another. Setting, activity and meaning are always interrelated in the identity of a
place, though one component may dominate the others. It is the distinctiveness of
this interrelationship that gives rise to what has been variously called the ‘spirit of
place,’ ‘sense of place’ or ‘genius of place, an attribute that can persist in spite of
profound social, cultural and technological changes.
Insideness and Outsideness. The identity of place lies in large part in the
experience of an ‘inside’ that is distinctive from an ‘outside.’ It is this that sets it
apart in space and defines a particular set of physical features, activities and
meanings. To be inside a place is to belong to it and identify with it, and the more
profoundly you are inside the stronger is this identity with the place.
There are several levels of insideness and outsideness that can be
distinguished by the different intensities and meanings, although the boundaries
between these are never as clear in experience as the following classification
suggests.
• Existential outsideness is the state of mind associated with alienation from
everything, in which places are no more than backgrounds to activities in a life
that makes no sense.
• Objective outsideness is the deliberate adoption of a dispassionate attitude
towards place that sees them as locations or spaces having certain measurable
attributes. In urban planning it is manifest in approaches that manipulate places
in terms of instrumental principles of rationalism and efficiency.
 11

• Incidental outsideness is the largely unselfconscious experience of places as

incidental backgrounds because they are overshadowed to whatever we are
doing, such as travelling on business or playing sport. It applies to places where
we are visitors and towards which our intentions are limited.
- Vicarious insideness happens when we engage with a place in imagination, for
instance through works or art or reading about them. It is perhaps most
pronounced when the depiction of a place corresponds with our experiences of
similar places.
• Behavioural insideness involves being in place and looking at it deliberately as
having a set of observable qualities, such as buildings and public squares that
create enclosures. This idea of insideness is especially associated with
experiences of townscapes and urban design.
- Empathetic insideness is a deliberate attempt to attend the identity of a place,
its qualities of appearance, the activities that take place there, and the meanings
it holds. It requires a willingness to be open to the significances of place and the
hope is to see it as rich in meaning for those place it is.
• Existential insideness occurs when a place is experienced unreflectively
because it is known, familiar, filled with meanings, and objects and activities
that have meaning. It is knowing implicitly that this is where you belong and are
at home, in this house, or neighbourhood or region.

Images and Identities of Places are related because identities are in large
measure socially constructed and as social constructions they are influenced by the
images, or shared mental pictures, that a society holds about those places. Such
images are shared interpretations of what places are supposed to be like. They have
a vertical structure that appears to correspond with the levels of outsideness and
insideness, and a horizontal structure that relates to individual experiences, social
groups and mass society.
As individuals we all experience places differently and have our own
idiosyncratic images of them. This was demonstrated when four artists deliberately
attempted to paint a specific landscape in Tuscany as realistically as possible, and
 12

the result was four very different pictures. Nevertheless, the pictures were
recognizably of the same place. It seems that individual images are combined into a
shared group image, though this is not as an average but through a flexible,
intersubjective combination of distinctive features and meanings, a process that is
facilitated by shared language, symbols and experiences within a community.
Communities are, of course, not all the same, and different communities have
differing images of places, so a city presents a different image to those living in its
mansions and those living in its slums.
The public identity of a place, for instance at the scale of city or region, is a
type of lowest common denominator, a consensus understanding of its identity. It is
shared by most of the communities associated with it and represents a superficial
level of integration of interest. Public or mass identities are often contrived,
provided ready-made by opinion-makers for widespread audiences, and
disseminated through mass media, advertising and promotions. They can, of course,
have a substantial impact on individual and community images of place because
they seem more appealing and convincing than personal experience.
The development and maintenance of identities of places. Place images and
identities are not built on a tabula rasa but arise from a complex and progressive
process that assimilates, accommodates and shares experience and information.
Experiences of places are assimilated into mental images, and those images are
continually readjusted both as changes occur to those places and as social
knowledge of them evolves. As existential insiders in our home places were are
mostly unaware of these processes of assimilation, accommodation and
readjustment, but an empathetic insider, can, with some deliberate effort,
appreciate them. For outsiders they are largely immaterial because established
attitudes and the public identity of a place will always outweigh direct experience.
Once developed the identity of a place will persist as long as it is plausible,
which is to say that there is reasonable correspondence between the image and the
experience of a place. It can become implausible, for instance because of substantial
environmental changes, such as urban renewal, or when fashions and attitudes
changes, for instance when factories once regarded as prosperous because of their
 13

smoking chimneys come to be seen as sources of pollution and illness. In such cases
a new image of the identity of a place is developed.
Types of identities of places The three components of the identity of place –
appearance, activities and meaning – each have an infinite range of content, and
there are numberless ways in which they might combine. Hence there is no
discernible limit to the diversity of the identity of places. Nevertheless our
experiences of places does suggest that several types of identities of places can be
distinguished, and that these correspond to the levels of insideness and outsideness.
These various types of identity are neither mutually exclusive nor discrete nor
unchanging. For instance, we know our home town as existential insiders and as
filled with memories and meanings, yet we can also view it as professional planners
or geographers through the lens of objective outsideness. In other words, how we
experience the identity of place depends on our intentions, and these can be
superimposed on one another. Furthermore, it cannot be held that the true identity
of a place relates to existential insideness. The experience of existential insideness is
intensely meaningful, but it is also narrow, and an empathetic insider or an outsider
with knowledge of other places can reveal that narrowness and reveal the ways in
which its identity is comparable to elsewhere.
In short, the identity of a place is not something that can be presented in a
brief factual description or a brand. It is not a separable quality of a place. It persists
yet is constantly changing, it is diverse yet shared, and it is the basis of experiences
of this particular place as opposed to any other.

Chapter 5 A sense of place and authentic place-making

(in the book this chapter includes numerous photos and other illustrations)
 14

The most meager meaning of a sense of place is the ability to recognize

different places, something that almost everyone does for finding their way around.
But it usually implies something much more complex than that – identity with a
place that is necessary to a sense of reality and which can range from simple
recognition of somewhere to existential insideness. Moreover, sense of place can be,
to borrow two words from phenomenology, authentic or inauthentic. Authenticity
suggests a genuine and direct experience, while inauthenticity is contrived or
borrowed. It is important to acknowledge that in our experiences the two are not
always clearly separated, and what is authentic can sometimes emerge from
contrivance and vice versa. Nevertheless, this distinction offers a useful basis for
interpreting sense of place.
Authentic sense of place is an aspect of an authentic existence in which a
person takes responsibility for his or her own life and actions, rather than
transferring that responsibility to fate, history, or some anonymous process (as in
‘the public’ or ‘they say’). An authentic attitude to place implies an understanding of
direct experience of the complex identities of places, and is an attitude that is
sincere, without hypocrisy, unadulterated and based on awareness of the places as
the products of human intentions that serve as meaningful settings for human
activities.
This attitude can be mostly unselfconscious, in which person and place are
intimately connected in what the theologian Martin Buber referred to as an “I-Thou”
relationship. A place is experienced from inside and through a sense of familiarity
and belonging, both as an individual and as member of a community. Alternatively
sense of place can be selfconscious, an attitude Buber described as an “I-You”
relationship. This is the attitude of a stranger who wishes to experience a place as
openly and honestly as possible, both empathetically and sympathetically. The more
open and honest these experiences are, the greater is the degree of authenticity.
Authentically created places are those that acquire meaning because they
follow from an authentic and deep sense of place. They can be made
unselfconsciously, for instance in traditional cultures that practice long-established
vernacular building practices which embed aesthetic, cultural, social, spiritual and
 15

physical needs. Unselfconscious authentic place-making lacks theoretical

pretensions, yet it often creates places that visibly display a harmony with their
social and physical contexts. In much of the developed world such places mostly
seem to be the remnants of largely obsolete vernacular traditions. However, even in
present-day cities and suburbs that display considerable uniformity, there are
authentic places filled with meanings because they are homes that are lived in and
personalized by memories and responsibilities. However, these will not necessarily
be apparent to outsiders because they are within landscape have been mass-
produced.
Authentic and selfconscious place-making occurs when there is sensitivity to
the significance of place in everyday life and landscape that involves a clear
conception of human existence. One aspect of it is often revealed in buildings such
as Classical temples, Gothic cathedrals, and the works of exceptional modern
architects, and the authenticity of these is presumably an implicit reason why they
are widely appreciated. But authentic self-conscious place-making can also be
encountered at a humbler scale and in less pretentious forms in self-built houses,
whether the log cabins of pioneers or more recent idiosyncratic structures, and
wherever individuals and communities have invested some of their hopes and ideals
in making a place for themselves. The present trend, however, seems to be away
from authentic place-making and places that reflect diverse intentions and values,
towards a non-place realm of internationally similar landscapes and placelessness.

Chapter 6 Placelessness
(in the book this chapter includes numerous photos to reinforce the text)

There is a widespread sentiment that distinctive places are being replaced by

a monotonous, shallow, placeless flatscape, lacking intentional depth and providing
possibilities only for mediocre experiences. It is easy to condemn such placelessness
as an undesirable, inauthentic aspect of the modern age, but geographical
uniformity is not an entirely new phenomenon. Roman and other empires have
imposed a degree of homogeneity on formerly varied landscapes, partly to
 16

demonstrate authority and partly because of the diffusion of a common culture.

What is new and different is the sheer scale of placelessness and the virtual absence
of any adaptation to local contexts. While superficial expressions of placelessness
are not an infallible guide to underlying experiences it does appear that current
placelessness is making it increasingly difficult to develop a deeply felt sense of
place.
Inauthenticity should be regarded not as lower or lesser than authenticity,
but rather as a different way of experiencing the world (although in practice it is
difficult not judge it negatively). It can often be an unselfconscious, intersubjective
aspect of everyday life – we unthinkingly do as others do because theirs is a socially
acceptable way of behaving. As a more selfconscious attitude inauthenticity is
associated with the artificial world of “the public” in which average or abstract
needs supplant individual and local community intentions to allow goals of
functional efficiency to take precedence as ways of achieving narrowly focused ends.
Inauthentic attitudes to place. Inauthenticity is prevalent in industrialised,
mass societies. It involves essentially no sense of place because it ignores the
meanings of places and their identities, and treats them only in terms of their use or
superficial qualities.
Inauthentic attitudes that are mostly unselfconscious are revealed through
the many manifestations of kitsch, a style in which the trivial is made prominent and
whatever is significant is made trivial, such as velvet cushions embroidered with
‘Home Sweet Home.’ Indeed, home becomes something that real estate agents
advertise and sell. Mass tourism is pervaded by kitschy attitudes that reduce travel
to sites that somebody else or some guide-book has ranked as worth seeing, where
cafes sell food exactly like cafes in the country the tourists come from. In kitsch
nothing has depth or relationship or promise. Everything is pleasant, uncomplicated
and easily consumed.
Inauthentic attitudes that are mostly selfconscious are expressed in in the
application to place of technique, especially through various forms of urban
planning. Technique is a French word that indicates an overwhelmingly
technological state of mind and an overriding concern with functional efficiency and
 17

objective organization. For example, modern planning and urban development are
founded on the assumption that space is uniform and that objects and activities can
be manipulated and freely located within it. If place is considered at all, it amounts
to little more than location, and cities are regarded, to borrow Le Corbusier’s phrase
about houses, as giant “machines to live in.”
Placelessness is the consequence when inauthentic attitudes to place prevail.
Placelessness is the weakening of the identity of places to point where they not only
look alike but feel alike, and offer similar bland possibilities for experience. It is
disseminated through various overlapping processes or media that disseminate
kitsch and technique, and do little or nothing to create and maintain distinctive and
significant places. These processes are: mass communications, mass culture, big
business, powerful central authority, and the economic system that embraces all of
these.
Mass communications include television, radio, journals and newspapers and
other media that have reduced the need for face-to-face contact and freed
communities from their localities. They tend to report problems as general and
widespread rather than local and specific. Expressways are another aspect of mass
communications, imposed on landscapes and, although they may seem to lead to
places they mostly pass them by and unlike old roads lead nowhere in particular.
Mass culture promotes fashions that encourage similarity rather than
difference. Its effect on places can be seen in other-directed architecture, covered
with signs and architectural ornaments aimed to appeal to outsiders and visitors.
This can be seen in “disneyfication,” which is the creation of other-directed
amusement parks where everything is fun and everyone smiles, and fantasies are
made real. It is also apparent in “museumisation” – a particular form of
disneyfication that idealises history in pioneer villages and reconstructed fragments
of former places. Museumised places sanitize and simplify history, they select the
best bits of whatever past they aim to reveal, and are fenced off from the real world.
Mass culture is also demonstrated in “futurisation” – sites and buildings that are
selfconsciously futuristic. They ignore history and even the present by using the
most modern styles and materials that anticipate the possibilities of technique.
 18

When translated into the everyday landscapes of suburbia, other-direction,

disneyfication, museumisation and technique result in what has been called
“subtopia” – the mixing up of buildings and roads and uses without any clear pattern
of intent or relationship. Subtopia consists in part of endless subdivisions of almost
identical houses, some with vaguely historical styles, some with models of dwarves
as lawn ornaments; it also consist of arrays of identical apartment buildings, and of
shopping plazas that are apparently unrelated to whatever surrounds them because
they are meant to be driven to along wide arterial roads that lead to great parking
lots.
Big business emerged as an important player in creating placeless landscapes
in association with industrial mass production in the nineteenth century. This was
and continues to be based partly on abbauten, a German word meaning unbuilding.
This refers to everything from open-pit mines, to wartime destruction, to bull-
dozing things flat. More recently large corporations have been responsible for
landscapes of mass tourism and subtopia, and in standardization of retail outlets.
Their primary aim to achieve efficiencies that will boost profit.
Central authority and government can function much like big business in
such areas as public housing, but state-governed standardization is mostly manifest
in designs of post offices, national parks, and more indirectly through tax and
building codes that ensure similar building practices. Central government prefers
uniformity throughout its territory because that relieves it from concern with local
details.
Finally, the economic system that is the overarching context for both big
business and central government is directed by the rational imperatives of
economics about growth and productivity. This is a way of thinking that turns
human beings into units of labour and pushes aside the needs and subtleties of
individual people and places. Indeed, in a perfectly economic world sense of place
and attachment to place are not merely unimportant, but their very absence is
regarded as beneficial.
The components of a placeless geography. A diverse geography, one filled
with diverse places that reflect their cultural and environmental context and have
 19

been created authentically by insiders, has probably never existed. What remains of
landscapes and places created before about 1800 does, however, seem to suggest
that sense of place and diversity did once prevail.
In the present day there is ample evidence that the depth of meaning and
diversity of places has been greatly diminished. The trend now is towards a
placeless geography. The manifestations of this described in this chapter are: other
directedness, uniformity and standardization, formlessness and lack of human scale
in places, place destruction whether in war or through excavation and demolition,
and impermanence and instability. These are transmitted and reinforced by mass
communications and mass media, by big business and multi-national corporations,
by central authority, and through the economic system that now permeates most
aspects of modern culture. Behind these lie the inauthentic attitudes of technique,
which promotes functional and technical efficiency, and kitsch, which subtly
imposes stereotyped, superficial and contrived values on all types of places.

Chapter 7 Experiences of the present-day landscape

If place and placelessness are regarded as opposed phenomena this leads
easily to assumptions that old places are authentic and good, while new landscapes
are placeless and bad. This interpretation appeals to the common idea that the past
was better than the present, and leads to the view that we should return to making
places the old way. This is far too simplistic. This chapter examines the complexities
of the relationship between place and placelessness by considering their association
with landscapes, both urban and rural. Landscapes express and condition cultural
attitudes, and significant changes to landscapes and the places in them are not
possible without major changes in those attitudes.
With place intentionality is focused onto an inside that is different from an
outside; with landscape intentionality is diffuse and without concentration.
Furthermore many of our experiences of landscapes involve a sort of selective
vision that blanks out much of what is ugly or boring or familiar, and is attracted to
 20

sights that we have somehow been pre-conditioned to notice, such as elegant old
streetscapes, or snow-capped mountains. In most everyday experiences landscapes
are merely visual backgrounds to whatever we are doing, and it only when we
something unusual happens, such as a remarkable sunset, or when are travelling
and the scenery is unfamiliar, that we are likely to pay much attention to our visual
environment.
The distinctiveness of experiences of present-day landscapes. If we can
overcome selective vision and to look carefully at all landscapes, no matter how
familiar and ordinary they may seem, it is clear that modern landscapes, especially
those made since the 1940s, are the distinctive products and expressions of new
beliefs, aesthetics, technologies and economies. We live now in what the
philosopher Henri Lefebvre characterized as “a bureaucratic society of controlled
consumption.” This has created its own distinctive landscape, one that has no clear
precedents and which can be variously described as rational, absurd and confused.
This is the context of present-day placelessness.
The landscape of reason. Our age is one in which the dominant mode of
being is rationalism, in which problems are identified, defined, analysed and
resolved through technique, and in which there is no opinion or belief that cannot
be questioned. Modern landscapes are created through the application of rational
methods in which the main concern is to create orderliness. The designers of the
landscape of reason are developers, planners and bureaucrats, who are little
concerned with imponderable, qualitative matters such as the distinctive identities
of places where people will live. Their concerns are with the wholly reasonable aims
of providing adequate housing, or transportation, or profit.
The landscape of reason surrounds us. It is revealed in arrangements of
suburbs, in modernist architecture, in airports, networks of highways, and
hierarchies of shopping centres that meet our consumer needs and are largely
destitute of moral ideals. The landscapes of reason pay no attention to the sort of
individual and community commitment that is necessary for a sense of place.
The absurd landscape. Whereas reason applies to the creation of modern
landscapes, absurdity refers to subjective experiences of them. This is not an
 21

esoteric suggestion but central to life in a modern age when many people see
themselves as trapped in a web of meaningless or incomprehensible processes
beyond their control. The most serious instance of this incomprehensibility lies in
the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation that makes almost everything seem
pointless. One landscape reaction to this can be seen in the superficially frivolous
yet somehow humourless, kitschy cartoon character such as Ronald McDonald and
Colonel Saunders that are used to sell food. But absurdity is mostly an aspect of
everyday experience that silently undermines commitment to landscapes and
places.
The mediating machine. Almost all present-day experiences of landscapes
are mediated by machines, particularly cars. Although these are often said to have
separated us from landscapes and places, this is too simple. Rather they seem to
have slipped into the gap between person and landscape that has been created by
rationalism and absurdity. Automobiles offer new options, comforts and
experiences, as well as extending our mobility, and they have fundamentally
changed how we experience the everyday world. They have separated us from our
surroundings so that landscapes many of us probably know best are the view of the
road and the view from the road. There is little room in these machine landscapes
for the handmade places of bygone ages.
The everyday landscape in any era is the context and product of everyday life
and consists of ordinary and taken for granted things and their arrangements. In the
present age everyday life is characterized by mass production and consumption, and
the everyday landscape consists of the commonplace objects, spaces, buildings, and
activities that are the setting for daily routines. It has lurid signs, wires, car parks,
gas stations, commercial strips along highways and suburban subdivisions. In some
respects this is an unpretentious yet vital mess. It is the product of a rationalism that
pays close attention to the design and planning of all the specific things in a
landscape – buildings, highways, subdivisions, parking signs - and almost none to
how the parts are put together. Hence it is messy and disorganized. Yet it is vital
because it mostly functions well enough as the immediate setting of everyday life.
 22

Confusion and proteanism in present-day landscapes. Present-day

landscapes are confusing not only because there is so little attention to how things
are put together, but also because they seem to lack coherent centres (except
perhaps shopping centres). They have no intuitively comprehensible order. To get
somewhere, especially by car, you have to follow signs. This confusion is
compounded because so many landscapes and places are protean, constantly
changing as old buildings are demolished to make way for new ones, highways are
expanded, new skyscrapers are constructed to be taller than the ones that preceded
them, and architectural styles change from year to year for no obvious reason. This
compulsion for change and newness constantly challenges our familiarity with and
commitment to places.
The simple landscape. The present-day landscape is paradoxical. In some
respects is frequently confusing and incomprehensible, yet it is often also simple
and superficial, filled with big blank buildings and expressways where there are no
details that might distract drivers. Indeed, in so far as the entire modern landscape
has been rationally planned and is infused with absurdity, it is simple. It presents
itself openly, without complexities or surprises or subtlety. The present-day
landscape is based on an easy unity of excluding variety, rather than the difficult
unity of inclusion. It is bland, uniform, ordinary and placeless
Significance in the present-day landscape. Present-day landscapes lack
profound symbols that point to something higher, deeper or more complex than
themselves. Instead they have elements such as architectural details that serve as
superficial references to, for example, an ideal past, or perhaps an ideal future, or
possibly somewhere else in the world that is considered attractive.
Concluding comments on the present day landscape. Places with landscape
settings that are distinctively local, reflect continuity of tradition, and suggest care
and responsibility, are mostly part of an old cultural order. We may look back at
them nostalgically and enjoy them as tourists, but neither they nor the processes
that made them play an active part in the making of the modern landscape. In other
words, placelessness is an essential aspect of the present-day landscape, not just
some incidental manifestation of it. This modern landscape may be more or less
 23

uniform but our experiences of it are varied in the sense that we encounter different
and sometimes contradictory aspects to it. It is variously rational, absurd, mediated
by machines, simple and confusing. No matter how we experience it, the roots of
meaning in this landscape are shallow and there is little scope for developing more
than casual sense of place.
This suggests that our experiences of these landscapes and the placelessness
associated with them are mostly negative, but this conclusion needs to be
considered carefully. Much of the language and many of the ideas used for
describing landscapes and places are derived from accounts of how things were in
earlier ages, and when they are applied to the present-day they are bound to seem
pejorative. Obviously our experiences of present-day landscapes are not all
worthless and negative. While modern landscapes may offer mostly shallow
experiences there is nevertheless much in them that gives pleasure. Depth of
experience appears to have been traded for breadth of experience. The
standardization of landscapes and the things in them makes it possible for us to
experience many places and to compare them. Placelessness can mean freedom
from the drudgery of place, and modern everyday landscapes can mean comfort as
well as entrapment in a bureaucratic consumer society.

Chapter 8 Prospects for places

There is an experienced geography of diverse places and another that is a
placeless labyrinth of similarities. There are very strong indications that placeless
geography has become the more forceful of these. The consequence is that prospects
for diverse places are uncertain. If these are the remnants of former, obsolete place-
making practices it seems likely that they will gradually disappear under tide of
placelessness. If, however, place-making that leads to diverse and meaningful places
has only been suppressed by placelessness, then it should be possible to find ways
to encourage it. This concluding chapter considers the prospects for place in the
context of summaries of the main features of place and placelessness.
 24

Places are phenomena of the lived-world, and there is ample evidence that a
deep human need exists for experiences of meaningful places. Such experiences are
just as necessary, and sometimes perhaps just as unpleasant, as our relationships
with other people. The places that meet this need are enormously varied, with their
own identities and names, but these identities are comprised of distinctive
combinations of natural and human-made objects, of activities, and of meanings
given to them by human intentions. While places can range in scale from a single
room to a continent, what differentiates them from space or environment is the
experience of being inside somewhere. Insideness has different levels of intensity
that range an existential sense of belonging, through deliberate efforts to develop an
empathy for somewhere, to incidental experiences of places as little more than
backgrounds to current concerns and activities.
These different intensities of insideness are manifest in how places have
been made. Existential insideness is apparent in the unselfconscious making of
places that fit their cultural and environmental contexts and are as varied as those
contexts. However, incidental insideness opens the door for place-making that is
directed by abstract ideas or mass fashions rather than direct experience.
Placelessness refers both to an environment lacking significant places and to
the underlying attitudes that do not acknowledge significance in places. At its most
extreme placelessness cuts roots, replaces diversity with uniformity and supplants
experiential order with conceptual order. It seems to be a consequence of technique,
or the overriding concern with efficiency as an end in itself, which treats places as
little more than interchangeable locations. It is also associated with mass culture
and the dissemination of fashions and ideas that result in kitschy landscapes filled
with arbitrary objects and designs. While some measure of placelessness and
standardisation is an aspect of all cultures, in the present-age it has become
powerful and pronounced, and the consequence is an accelerating replacement of
diverse, meaningful places with anonymous spaces and exchangeable environments.
The Inevitability of Placelessness? Many who have commented on modern
society and how current values are manifest in landscapes and urban development,
seem to regard something like placelessness as inevitable (though they have not
 25

used that particular word). The various social processes associated with technique,
mass culture, central authority and capitalism are too invasive and too far advanced
for them to be deflected or prevented.
Designing a world of lived-places. Such pessimism and fatalism is not
justified. As long as there is awareness of what is being lost there is the possibility of
revival of a sense of place. This revival cannot be solely by the preservation of old
places, which would be museumisation, nor in a return to ways of place-making that
were practiced before the rise of technique and mass production. It has to happen
through a deliberate effort not to leave the recognition and creation of geographical
diversity to chance, and not to give outsiders the unquestioned authority to design
behavioural settings into which others are supposed to fit. Instead it has to identify
and respond to the ways in which each place is different and meaningful for those
who experience it most intensely as insiders. It is not possible to guarantee that
diverse identities of places will emerge from this identification of difference, and it
is certainly not possible to design rootedness and meaning. But it may be possible to
create conditions that will allow roots and care for places to be sustained and to
grow. What is needed to challenge the forces of placelessness is a place-making
approach that is responsive to local conditions and which allows individuals and
communities to give significance to their own places by dwelling in them.