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.
Place and orientation are important aspects of human experience. Place evokes geography and culture and conjures up history and myth. Place is not only a particular physical location but an idea, a mental construction that captures and directs the human relationship to the world. The distinguished contributors to this volume invite us to reflect on the significance of places, real and imagined, in the religious traditions they study and on how places are known, imagined, remembered, and struggled for. Whether looking at the ways myth and ritual reinforce the Yoruba's bond to the land or at Australian Aboriginal engagements with the origins of the created world, exploring Hildegard of Bingen's experience of heaven or myths of the underworld in contemporary American millennialism, listening to oral narratives of divine politics and deserted places of Rajasthan or investigating literal and literary images of the Promised Land, these essays underscore that place is constructed in the intersection of material conditions, political realities, narrative, and ritual performance.
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.
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
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.
The notion of data is increasingly encountered in spatial, creative and cultural studies. Big data and artificial intelligence are significantly influencing a number of disciplines. Processes, methods and vocabularies from sciences, architecture, arts are borrowed, discussed and tweaked, and new cross-disciplinary fields emerge. More and more, artists and designers are drawing on hard data to interpret the world and to create meaningful, sensuous environments. Architects are using neurophysiological data to improve their understanding of people’s experiences in built spaces. Different disciplines collaborate with scientists to visualise data in different and creative ways, revealing new connections, interpretations and readings. This often demonstrates a genuine desire to comprehend human behaviour and experience and to – possibly – inform design processes accordingly. At the same time, this opens up questions as to why this desire and curiosity is emerging now, how it relates to recent technological advances and how it converses with the cultural, philosophical and methodological context of the disciplines with which it engages. Questions are also raised as to how the use of data and data-informed methods may serve, support, promote and/or challenge political agendas. Data, Architecture and the Experience of Place provides an overview of new approaches on this significant subject and is ideal for students and researchers in digital architecture, architectural theory, design, digital media, sensory studies and related fields.
Humanistic geography is one of the major emerging themes which has recently dominated geographic writing. Anne Buttimer has been one of the leading figures in the rise of humanistic geography, and the research students she collected round her at Clark University in the 1970s constituted something of a ‘school’ of humanistic geographers. This school developed a significantly new style of geographical inquiry, giving special emphasis to people’s experience of place, space and environment and often using philosophical and subjective methodology. This collection of essays, first published in 1980, brings together this school and offers insight into philosophical and practical issues concerning the human experience of environments. An extensive range of topics are discussed, and the aim throughout is to weave analytical and critical thought into a more comprehensive understanding of lived experience. This book will be of interest to students of human geography.
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.
