° R e s e a r c h ° o n ° P l a c e ° & ° S p a c e ° |
| What Should I Read First?This site contains thousands of entries. Where should someone new to the field begin? Well, of course, everyone will have their favourite writers. And, it really depends on what your purpose is in researching place -- a fine article in one field may not be of much use to another field. Then again, it might - keep an open mind. But I thought I'd list some places to start. This is not a list of the most important works in the field (as if I would dare to construct such a list), nor are they the best introductions to place in specific disciplines, but rather the best places for someone who knows little or nothing about the history and uses of the concept of place to find an overview or orientation. Click on the person's name (in most cases) to go to more of his or her work. Or, go back to the main page and look for the "Quick Links to People" menu, which lists significant writers. Another good place to look for introductory material is at the end of Tim Cresswell's Place: A Short Introduction, listed below. He provides an annotated list of central books, papers, journals, etc.
1. Tim CresswellTim Cresswell is a geographer who has written some excellent introductory material on place (as well as very good advanced material). As an introduction, one could hardly do better than:
2. Edward Casey
Casey has done some of the most extensive work on place. Getting Back Into Place is a phenomenological reflection on the concept of place, while The Fate of Place is, as the title suggests, a history of the concept in philosophy. The first is probably more accessible to someone who doesn't have a philosophical background. Or, you could try this briefer introduction:
3. Michael R. CurryCurry has done much fine work on geography, technology and place (much of it available on the web as PDF files). One essay has a particularly useful overview:
4. Yi-Fu TuanEveryone looks back on Tuan's work as seminal. Anything by him is worth reading; I'll suggest one readily available work, that has just been re-issued:
5. David SeamonSeamon has been very prolific over the years, and has both written and edited work on place across many disciplines (see Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing, and Dwelling, Place and Environment, for starters). He also edits Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter. The following work is an excellent overview of writing on place:
6. David HarveyHarvey's work is well known in geography. The following article gets a lot of attention, for good reason. It has a nice overview of the concept, and it also contains one of the few (although not the only) conceptual critiques of the use of place, in this case a Marxian-inspired critique of Heidegger.
7. Edward RelphThis book is out of print, but it is an early and important reflection on place.
8. Lucy LippardThis well-known and iconoclastic art critic has written some very fine work on the (re)presentations of place. The best is:
9. Jennifer CrossSomeone whose work in general I don't know, but the following paper is very good on the notion of the "sense of place"
10. Irwin Altman & Setha LowA classic on place attachment.
And, there's another fine work, by Setha Low and Denise Lawrence, which gives a fine overview of the idea of place in cultural anthropology (at least, to 1990):
11. Phil Hubbard, Rob. Kitchin and Gill Valentine
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Page Location: http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb/place/readfirst.htm