Concepts of space and place as applied to human society have old philosophical roots. Space has had the sense since the seventeenth century of the plane on which events and objects are located. Place, the older term in Western languages, refers to the lived or occupied space. What is new is the varied ways in which these concepts and related ones are now being used, blending older understandings, drawing from the three classic geographic traditions that emphasize the environmental (physical-human), spatial (distributional), and regional (clustering) approaches to geographic sameness and difference, with new sensibilities and concerns about social and political divisions (from social class, ethnicity, disability and gender to the new political divisions of a post-Cold War world). The volumes in this series collect together the most significant articles published over the past forty years in the major fields of human geography. They will demonstrate that, if the foundations of recent thinking are rooted in the past, such thinking also mirrors recent developments. This sense of older ideas adapting to new circumstances is best summed up by the seemingly paradoxical title of the series: Contemporary Foundations of Space and Place.