The Intelligence of Place

This volume is a signal contribution to work in “place studies.” Malpas’s selection of contributors is prescient because they are some of the most perceptive thinkers writing conceptually about place today, including philosopher Edward Casey, writer Lucy Lippard, media-studies scholar Joshua Meyrowitz, geographer Edward Relph, and architects Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Perez-Gomez. The result is an interdisciplinary synergy provoking valuable new ideas and perspectives on place, place experience, and place meaning. -- David Seamon, Professor of Architecture, Kansas State University, USA and editor of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology
Today many scholars and students of place-based studies—architecture, geography, anthropology, politics and philosophy—feel that a choice between globalism and localism is wrongheaded and unproductive. Offered here is a forward-looking alternative, a set of reflections that restates the centrality of place in human experience, without resorting to nostalgic forms of place-identity or apocalyptic notions of place-disintegration. The idea that places have their own intelligence, that the wisdom that will guide ethical and practical choices in contemporary culture is in the world not only individual selves, is both timely and challenging. -- David Leatherbarrow, Professor of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, USA