Architects and urban planners have long discussed how the built
environment in many western cities suffers from a "lack of place." Particularly
in the US, this issue has become heated as people have reconsidered the
exurban malaise we've built as our primary habitat.
Coming to Terms with Place explores the rhetorical grounds for why this is
happening and looks forward to a technique that reconsiders our built
environment in terms of the language we use to describe and inscribe it.
Believing "experience of place" is intrinsically tied into our choice of
language, it follows that a concern for that language leads to changes in how
our environment gets built and experienced. Drawing across a range of
phenomenological and rhetorical theories, Coming to Terms with Place
concerns itself primarily with a language-based ethics of placemaking that is
ecological in scope and human in scale.
Architects, urban designers and rhetoricians will find Coming to Terms with
Place particularly useful as it encourages people in those fields to reconsider
the language they use in everyday practice and spurs further debate about
the nature and importance of place.