Synopses & Reviews
Places are today subject to contrary tendencies. They lose some functions, which may scale up to fewer more centralized places, or down to numerous more dispersed places, and they gain other functions, which are scaling up and down from other places. This prompts premature prophecies of the abolition of space and the obsolescence of place. At the same time, a growing literature testifies to the persistence of place as an incorrigible aspect of human experience, identity, and morality. Place is a common ground for thought and action, a community of experienced particulars that avoids solipsism and universalism. It draws us into the philosophy of the ordinary, into familiarity as a form of knowledge, into the wisdom of proximity. Each of these essays offers a philosophy of place, and reminds us that such philosophies ultimately decide how we make, use, and understand places, whether as accidents, instruments, or fields of care.
Synopsis
A growing literature testifies to the persistence of place as an incorrigible aspect of human experience, identity, and morality. Place is a common ground for thought and action, a community of experienced particulars that avoids solipsism and universalism. It draws us into the philosophy of the ordinary, into familiarity as a form of knowledge,...
About the Author
\Andrew Light is assistant professor of philosophy and environmental studies at SUNY-Binghamton. Jonathan M. Smith is associate professor of geography at Texas A&M University.
Table of Contents
Introduction: philosophies and geographies of place / Jonathan M. Smith, Andrew Light, and David Roberts -- Finding place: spatiality, locality, subjectivity / Jeff Malpas -- In its place: site and meaning in Richard Serra's public sculpture / James Dickinson -- Sites of symbolic density: a relativistic approach to experienced space / Katya Mandoki -- Transformations in the myth of the inner valleys as a Zionist place / Izhak Schnell -- Democracy and sense of place values in environmental policy / Bryan Norton and Bruce Hannon -- From the inside out: the farm as place / Ian Howard -- Commonplaces / David Glidden -- Can a sense of place be preserved? / David Wasserman, Mick Womersley, and Sara Gottlieb -- New meanings of place: the place of the poor and the loss of place as a center of mediation / Lea Caragata -- Space-shaping technologies and the geographical disembedding of place / Philip Brey -- Something wild? Deleuze and Guattari and the impossibility of wilderness / Jonathan Maskit -- Down to earth: