Place and Placelessness Revisited

Robert Freestone, Edgar Liu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317385219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

Since its publication in 1976, Ted Relph's Place and Placelessness has been an influential text in thinking about cities and city life across disciplines, including human geography, sociology, architecture, planning, and urban design. For four decades, ideas put forward by this seminal work have continued to spark debates, from the concept of placelessness itself through how it plays out in our societies to how city designers might respond to its challenge in practice.

Drawing on evidence from Australian, British, Japanese, and North and South American urban settings, Place and Placelessness Revisited is a collection of cutting edge empirical research and theoretical discussions of contemporary applications and interpretations of place and placelessness. It takes a multi-disciplinary approach, including contributions from across the breadth of disciplines in the built environment – architecture, environmental psychology, geography, landscape architecture, planning, sociology, and urban design – in critically re-visiting placelessness in theory and its relevance for twenty-first century contexts.

1 The Paradox of Place and the Evolution of Placelessness

Edward Relph

DOI: 10.4324/9781315676456-2

Introduction

Within every place there lies a contradiction. No matter whether places are defined as containers, geographical localities, communities, territories of meaning, nodes in networks, or exceptional buildings and public spaces, their identity is always a function both of difference from, and similarities with, other equivalent places. A truly unique place would be incomprehensible, and if all places were the same the very idea of them would be nonsense. To appreciate the distinctive identity of somewhere requires understanding its sameness with elsewhere. This is the paradox of place. Distinctiveness is defined by reference to sameness. Place is a figure against a background of placelessness. The two are inseparable.

Relationships between place and placelessness are not constant. Place is a concept that spans everything from cupboards to continents, so relationships vary with spatial scale: a phenomenon such as an urban renewal involving slab apartment blocks, which at one scale can be interpreted as placeless, at a local level is a place with its own name (for example, see Figure 1.1). And the relationships vary over time. Distinctiveness usually prevailed in pre-modern eras, if only for the reason places were mostly made by those who lived in them using whatever materials were to hand because it was either impossible or very expensive to modify sites and move building materials around. It was not until the decades following World War Two when placelessness, which I defined in the 1970s (Relph 1976: 90) as “the weakening of the identity of places to the point where they not only look alike but feel alike and offer the same bland possibilities for experience,” became dominant.

In this chapter I argue that what appeared in the 1970s as an opposition between place and placelessness has subsequently evolved into something that seems like a fusion in which the two are tangled together. I suggest, first of all, that placelessness in the 1950s and 1960s was a powerful force manifest in attitudes and development approaches that were clearly anti-place. But in the 1970s concerns for place distinctiveness began to be reasserted through the emergence of heritage designation and postmodernism, and shortly thereafter processes hitherto associated with placelessness, such as corporate standardization, came to be mollified through diversification and place branding. This weakening of the once clear distinction between place and placelessness has, I argue, since been hastened by increased mobility, international migrations, and electronic communications, and these together have turned places everywhere into networked hybrids of distinctiveness and sameness. Disembedding and uprooting are now as likely to be voluntary as imposed, and to be precursors to re-embedding in places of our own choosing. I conclude that increasingly transitory, transnational, and multi-centered experiences have turned places everywhere into tangled manifestations of distinctiveness and sameness. The paradox of place now lies in the fact that while these two aspects can be differentiated it has become virtually impossible to disentangle them.

The High Age of Placelessness

Placelessness involves detachment from the particularity of places. For an individual it is the experience of not belonging anywhere, of being an outsider or a refugee. For those uprooted by civil wars or environmental disasters it is a social condition. As a geographical phenomenon, which is the sense in which I usually use it, placelessness is manifest wherever human-made landscapes lack distinctiveness and have little connection with their geographical contexts.

Some ideas of placelessness have positive connotations. Yi-Fu Tuan (in Tuan and Strawn 2010) has suggested that in religion there is directional thrust from the power of sacred places to an idyllic sense of placelessness that transcends the mundane rootedness of life on earth. And in his book The View from Nowhere the philosopher Thomas Nagel (1986: 19) maintains that when we reason we use arguments that “are not limited by our particular location, by the places we occupy.” Reason, he implies, allows us to escape parochialism, to grasp the universal problems and possibilities of humanity, and to develop tolerance for differences and compassion for others. Nagel’s argument is a powerful and important one, not least because it tempers the exaggerated sense of place that can lead to exclusionary attitudes and even ethnic cleansing. On the other hand, when reason is pushed to its rationalistic limits it brings diversity to its lowest common denominators, reduces people to statistical units, and treats places as empty locations.

The deep origins of the modernist placelessness of the 1950s and 1960s lay in the development of rational, objective philosophies in the 17th century that regarded human minds as somehow outside the world they contemplated. In due course this way of thinking filtered into policies and practices, including colonialism in which the transportation of people, animals, plants, and ideologies to other continents displaced local cultures and ecologies. Rationalism was central to the development in the 19th century of utilitarian philosophies and industrial technologies that leveled hills and reduced places to exchange values. It was, however, not until the first decades of the 20th century that an appropriate aesthetic style for modernism was created, one both rational and consistent with innovative technologies facilitating speed, mass production, and electric power. Modernist designs explicitly rejected everything old, celebrated the future, used universally available materials of metal, glass, and concrete, and were intended to work equally well everywhere. In almost every respect, these designs were indeed placeless.

Before World War Two the impact of modernist design on urban landscapes was limited to a handful of buildings and planning projects. In the quarter century after the war placeless modernism came into its own. This was partly a matter of necessity. War-damaged cities in Europe and Japan had to be rebuilt, and both there and elsewhere efficient solutions were needed to provide housing, schools, shops, and workplaces for rapidly growing populations. Furthermore, the loss of life and destruction caused by two world wars had made it abundantly clear that humanity shared one world and old ways of doing things had not worked well. Modernist approaches offered new, progressive ways to plan, rebuild and expand towns and cities, and from this perspective old places were impediments to progress and evidence of outdated approaches to place-making.

For two decades politicians, architects, planners, engineers, and corporations were caught up in an enthusiasm for various forms of creative destruction that would wipe the slate clean, renew blighted areas in cities, build new towns and suburbs, and give rise to a brave new world. In one sense, it was a remarkable achievement. Many people ended up better housed and with more stuff—cars, televisions, refrigerators, opportunities to travel—than they had ever had before. From the perspective of place, however, sameness rapidly began to displace geographical diversity. In the early 1970s when I was writing Place and Placelessness, the contrast between remaining older places and new modernist ones was obvious. Apartment slabs in Chicago and Toronto had a striking family resemblance to those in Moscow; social housing projects replaced pleasant old streets with sterile open blocks; suburbs and new towns were laid out in pods of scarcely differentiated houses; commercial strips lined with fast food and petrol station chains extended the uniform reach of multi-national corporations around the world (Figure 1.1).

I was not aware of it at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight it is clear that even by 1970 modernist placelessness was already beginning to lose authority. In the two preceding decades dramatic and destructive changes to distinctive places and landscapes had occurred with minimal public consultation, no environmental assessments, and very little public outcry. But in the late 1960s there were dramatic changes in cultural and political attitudes—apparent in widespread public protests for civil rights, against the Vietnam War, for women’s equality, against environmental degradation and, on a somewhat more modest scale, against the eradication of distinctive places. Those protests led in various ways to changes in practices and policies now so completely taken for granted that the conditions and ideas they challenged are difficult to imagine.

Figure 1.1 Placeless modernist Cabrini Green Apartments in Chicago. Slab apartments built in the 1950s and 1960s replaced almost everything of the former urban landscapes. The apartments have now been demolished

Source: Author, 1985.

The Reassertion of Distinctiveness

In the early 1960s Jane Jacobs offered implicit criticisms of modernist placelessness in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961: 443) when she condemned the “desegregated sortings” of modernist planning and praised the “organized complexity” of older unplanned parts of cities. However, the first practical signs that placeless approaches were losing momentum came in the last part of the decade with successful popular protests both against the construction of expressways (Jacobs was directly involved in New York and Toronto) and against the demolition of old buildings to make way for new developments. The latter were precursors to the 1972 UNESCO Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, which was a major turning point in the recognition of the value of place distinctiveness. It established the idea of World Heritage Sites and called upon participating nations to pass legislation to protect built heritage, which most of them did. Old places and buildings that only a year or two before had been generally regarded as obsolete and worthless suddenly became attractive, essential resources. Heritage preservation, which protects a key element of place diversity, immediately became an integral part of urban planning and design almost everywhere. There has been no turning back.

The change in attitudes to place heralded by heritage protection was echoed in several different and apparently unrelated ways over the next three decades. In architecture the stylistic stranglehold that modernism had held on design was broken by the emergence of post-modern approaches that once again made it acceptable to decorate buildings. At about the same time, old inner city residential neighborhoods, many of them recently slated for clean-sweep renewal, came to be identified as desirable places to live and were gentrified. Town planning experienced its own post-modern turn in the 1980s with the introduction of ‘neo-traditional’ or ‘new urbanist’ approaches that included elements of vernacular built-forms and turned the modernist principle, that the future should reject the past, on its head (Figure 1.2).

Even multinational companies, hitherto primary agents of uniformity, began to pay attention to place distinctiveness. I was in the habit of photographing McDonald’s fast food restaurants wherever I traveled in an attempt to document their essential sameness, but several years before 1990 it became clear to me that these were actually becoming increasingly varied, often slipped into old buildings and otherwise adapted to their urban settings. At about the same time developers began to master-plan new suburban developments around distinctive themes, often with some regional stylistic reference—Colonial in New England, brick neo-Gothic around Toronto. Corporations also began to change their locational strategies for head offices because their professional employees wanted to live and work somewhere distinctive with good restaurants, parks, golf courses, and a vibrant street life. For business consultants such as the Economist Intel ligence Unit and Mercer this provided an opportunity to develop methodologies to measure and rank the attractiveness of different cities as places to live and do business. Although these rankings have a neo-liberal function that promotes competition between global cities and exacerbates inequalities between winners and losers, their introduction soon translated into the realization by municipalities that their place identity matters. Place branding and marketing, such as the I Love NY campaign, were invented as means to promote distinctiveness, encourage foreign investment and attract tourists. Place branding has been helped by creating ‘destination’ architecture for museums and galleries, encouraging government investments in efficient transit, hosting international festivals and sporting competitions, and providing strong support for universities and schools, all of which benefit local citizens as well as attracting foreign attention and investment.

Figure 1.2 An instance of the reassertion of distinctiveness. This poster promoting the new urbanist development of Cornell near Toronto showed developer Larry Law shaking hands with Andrés Duany, the doyen of the neo-traditional movement

Source: Author, 1995.

I am well aware that these instances of the reassertion of place distinctiveness can be criticized on conceptual, aesthetic, and ideological grounds as being manipulative and arbitrary. My point is that, taken together and given their range of applications, they are compelling evidence of the growth of a broad resistance to the sort of placelessness that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s. But not everyone is so sure. In 1994, Howard Kunstler wrote The Geography of Nowhere (1994) as an expression of his anger about what he saw, to paraphrase some of his phrases, as depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading developments that no longer constituted a credible human habitat. From my perspective, however, there was in the 1990s considerably less nowhere in urban landscapes than there had been twenty years earlier. Of course, the processes of placelessness and their manifestations had not been entirely thwarted. They continued to be very evident in the sort of careless urban development that Kunstler criticized. However, by the end of the century they had unquestionably lost their previous, almost unquestioned dominance as the preferred way to develop cities and change landscapes.

This was not some superficial readjustment from placeless making to place-making. The reassertion of distinctiveness constituted a change far deeper than decorative cladding on post-modern buildings and neat slogans for place branding because it was contemporary with an epistemological upheaval that undermined the very foundations of the rationalism that stood behind placeless modernism. In 2001 Stephen Toulmin (2001), a well-respected philosopher of science, looked back over the previous four decades and saw evidence of a sudden and remarkable loss of confide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Contributor Biographies
• Foreword by Tim Cresswell
• Revisiting Place and Placelessness
• 1 The Paradox of Place and the Evolution of Placelessness
• PART 1 Place/lessness in Design
• PART 2 Place/lessness in Experience
• PART 3 Place/lessness in Practice
• PART 4 Place/lessness in Question
• Afterword by Edward Relph
• Index