Why do some places—the concourse of Grand Central Terminal or a small farm or even the corner of a skyscraper—affect us so mysteriously and yet so forcefully? What tiny changes in our everyday environments can radically alter the quality of our daily lives? The Experience of Place offers an innovative and delightfully readable proposal for new ways of planning, building, and managing our most immediate and overlooked surroundings.
Features some of the world's most transformative locales, from Norway's western fjords and Cambodia's Angkor Wat to Kyoto's Moss Garden and the urban surprises of Denver, Pittsburgh, and Vancouver.
While the "sense of place" is a familiar theme in poetry and art, philosophers have generally given little or no attention to place and the human relation to place. Jeff Malpas seeks to remedy this by advancing an account of the nature and significance of place as a complex but unitary structure that encompasses self and other, space and time, subjectivity and objectivity. He argues that our relation to place derives from the very nature of human thought, experience and identity as established in and through place.
A complete introduction to the history, evolution, and future of the modern city, this book covers a wide range of theory, including the significance of space and place, to provide a balanced account of why cities are an essential part of the global human experience. Covers a wide range of theoretical approaches to the city, from the historical to the cutting edge Emphasizes the important themes of space and place Offers a balanced account of cities and offers extensive coverage including urban inequality, environment and sustainability, and methods for studying the city Takes a global approach, with examples from Berlin and Chicago to Shanghai and Mumbai Includes a range of pedagogical features such as a substantial glossary of key terms, critical thinking questions, suggestions for further reading and a range of innovative textboxes which follow the themes of Exploring Further, Studying the City and Making the City Better Extensively illustrated with maps, charts, tables, and over 80 photographs Accompanied by a comprehensive student companion site featuring a list of relevant journals, a guide to useful web resources, and an annotated documentary film guide, alongside a useful instructor companion site with further examples, case studies, and discussion and essay questions; instructors will find a link to the instructor website on the student website at www.wiley.com/go/cities
Motoring unmasks the forces that shape the American driving experience--commercial, aesthetic, cultural, mechanical--as it takes a timely look back at our historically unconditional love of motor travel. Focusing on recreational travel between 1900 and 1960, John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle cover dozens of topics related to drivers, cars, and highways and explain how they all converge to uphold that illusory notion of release and rejuvenation we call the "open road." Jakle and Sculle have collaborated on five previous books on the history, culture, and landscape of the American road. Here, with an emphasis on the driver's perspective, they discuss garages and gas stations, roadside tourist attractions, freeways and toll roads, truck stops, bus travel, the rise of the convenience store, and much more. All the while, the authors make us think about aspects of driving that are often taken for granted: how, for instance, the many lodging and food options along our highways reinforce the connection between driving and "freedom" and how, by enabling greater speeds, highway engineers helped to stoke motorists' "blessed fantasy of flight." Although driving originally celebrated freedom and touted a common experience, it has increasingly become a highly regulated, isolated activity. The motive behind America's first embrace of the automobile--individual prerogative--still substantially obscures this reality. "Americans did not have the automobile imposed on them," say the authors. Jakle and Sculle ask why some of the early prophetic warnings about our car culture went unheeded and why the arguments of its promoters resonated so persuasively. Today, the automobile is implicated in any number of environmental, even social, problems. As the wisdom of our dependence on automobile travel has come into serious question, reassessment of how we first became that way is more important than ever.
Why do some places--the concourse of Grand Central Terminal or a small farm or even the corner of a skyscraper--affect us so mysteriously and yet so forcefully? What tiny changes in our everyday environments can radically alter the quality of our daily lives? The Experience of Place offers an innovative and delightfully readable proposal for new ways of planning, building, and managing our most immediate and overlooked surroundings.
This title was first published in 2002: This volume follows on from the tradition of humanistic geography to examine tourism from an experiential perspective - examining the experience of the tourists themsleves. By analyzing theories on tourism from anthropology, psychology and culural tourism, it aims to further the geographical debates on interactions which occur in tourism. The text offers a geographical approach which examines how the resulting experience of tourism can reveal something of our relationship with places in general, and also about ourselves.
The revised and updated second edition of Introduction to Cities explores why cities are such a vital part of the human experience and how they shape our everyday lives. Written in engaging and accessible terms, Introduction to Cities examines the study of cities through two central concepts: that cities are places, where people live, form communities, and establish their own identities, and that they are spaces, such as the inner city and the suburb, that offer a way to configure and shape the material world and natural environment. Introduction to Cities covers the theory of cities from an historical perspective right through to the most recent theoretical developments. The authors offer a balanced account of life in cities and explore both positive and negative themes. In addition, the text takes a global approach, with examples ranging from Berlin and Chicago to Shanghai and Mumbai. The book is extensively illustrated with updated maps, charts, tables, and photographs. This new edition also includes a new section on urban planning as well as new chapters on cities as contested spaces, exploring power and politics in an urban context. It contains; information on the status of poor and marginalized groups and the impact of neoliberal policies; material on gender and sexuality; and presents a greater range of geographies with more attention to European, Latin American, and African cities. Revised and updated, Introduction to Cities provides a complete introduction to the history, evolution, and future of our modern cities.
Spaces of Interaction, Places for Experience is a book about Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), interaction design (ID) and user experience (UX) in the age of ubiquitous computing. The book explores interaction and experience through the different spaces that contribute to interaction until it arrives at an understanding of the rich and complex places for experience that will be the focus of the next period for interaction design. The book begins by looking at the multilayered nature of interaction and UX—not just with new technologies, but with technologies that are embedded in the world. People inhabit a medium, or rather many media, which allow them to extend themselves, physically, mentally, and emotionally in many directions. The medium that people inhabit includes physical and semiotic material that combine to create user experiences. People feel more or less present in these media and more or less engaged with the content of the media. From this understanding of people in media, the book explores some philosophical and practical issues about designing interactions. The book journeys through the design of physical space, digital space, information space, conceptual space and social space. It explores concepts of space and place, digital ecologies, information architecture, conceptual blending and technology spaces at work and in the home. It discusses navigation of spaces and how people explore and find their way through environments. Finally the book arrives at the concept of a blended space where the physical and digital are tightly interwoven and people experience the blended space as a whole. The design of blended spaces needs to be driven by an understanding of the correspondences between the physical and the digital, by an understanding of conceptual blending and by the desire to design at a human scale. There is no doubt that HCI and ID are changing. The design of “microinteractions” remains important, but there is a bigger picture to consider. UX is spread across devices, over time and across physical spaces. The commingling of the physical and the digital in blended spaces leads to new social spaces and new conceptual spaces. UX concerns the navigation of these spaces as much as it concerns the design of buttons and screens for apps. By taking a spatial perspective on interaction, the book provides new insights into the evolving nature of interaction design.
