Place and Placelessness Revisited

Robert Freestone is Professor of Planning in the Faculty of Built Environment at UNSW Australia. He joined UNSW in 1991 after six years with Design Collaborative, a Sydney planning, research, and heritage consultancy. He has also held appointments at the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, and the Australian National University. His books include The Planning Imagination (co-editor, 2014), Urban Nation (2012), and Designing Australian Cities (2004).Edgar Liu is a Research Fellow at City Futures Research Centre in the Faculty of Built Environment at UNSW Australia. He has academic backgrounds in economic and cultural geography, and his research interests include social aspects of public estate renewals, housing as social welfare, and the conceptualization of human identities.

• Foreword –Tim CresswellRevisiting Place and Placelessness –Edgar Liu and Robert Freestone1. The Paradox of Place and the Evolution of Placelessness –Ted RelphPart 1. Place/lessness in Design2. An Urban Designer’s Perspective: Paradigms, Places and People –Jon Lang3. Theory’s Role in Placelessness –Lucy Montague4. Reclaiming and Making and Places of Distinction through Landscape Architecture –Linda Corkery5. Regulating Place Distinctiveness: A Critique of Approaches to the Protection of ‘Neighborhood Character’ in Melbourne –Gethin DavisonPart 2. Place/lessness in Experience6. Insideness in an Age of Mobilities –John Tomaney7. Losing Control at Home? –Hazel Easthope8. Tuning In and Out of Place –Rachel Cogger9. The Risk of Placelessness for Children and Young People in the 21st Century Cities of Western Societies –Kate BishopPart 3. Place/lessmess in Practice10. Examining Place-making in Practice: Observations from the Revitalization of Downtown Detroit –Laura Crommelin11. Place-making in the Rise of the Airport City –Robert Freestone and Ilan Wiesel12. Urban Squares: A Place for Social Life –Nancy Marshall13. Placelessness and the Rigid Perception of Place Identities: Public Toilets as Multi-functional Places –Edgar LiuPart 4. Place/lessness in Question14. Extraordinary Ordinaryness: An Outsider’s Perspective on Place and Placelessness in the Japanese City –Matthew Carmona15. Extending Place: The Global South and Informal Urbanisms –Aseem Inam16. Place as Multiplicity –Kim DoveyAfterword –Ted Relph

Ted Relph’s notion of placelessness opened up many new possibilities of how we understand the slippery notion of place. Many of them are realized in this multidisciplinary collection. With case studies that range from graffiti to malls and airports and with examples from Detroit to Melbourne and Seoul, it is a welcome contribution that explores how the social constructions of space create different places.John Rennie Short is the author of Human Geography: A Short Introduction.Relph's "Place and Placelessness" Is the one seminal work that gave rise to a whole literature on the subject of place. It's about time that we look back to our original source of inspiration.Yi‐Fu Tuan, University of Wisconsin‐MadisonAs claims to 'place-making' proliferate in these neo-liberal times, the wide-ranging essays in this 40th anniversary homage to Place and Placelessness update both theory and practice in a global context.Professor John Punter, Cardiff University Awarded a commendation in the 'Cutting Edge Research and Teaching' category of the 2016 Awards for Planning Excellence from the Planning Institue of Australia (NSW Chapter).