The Intelligence of Place - by Jeff Malpas (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Place has become a widespread concept in contemporary work in the humanities, creative arts, and social sciences. Yet in spite of its centrality, place remains a concept more often deployed than interrogated, and there are relatively few works that focus directly on the concept of place as such. The Intelligence of Place fills this gap, providing an exploration of place from various perspectives, encompassing anthropology, architecture, geography, media, philosophy, and the arts, and as it stands in relation to a range of other concepts.

Drawing together many of the key thinkers currently writing on the topic, The Intelligence of Place offers a unique point of entry into the contemporary thinking of place - into its topographies and poetics - providing new insights into a concept crucial to understanding our world and ourselves.

Review Quotes

This volume is a signal contribution to work in "place studies.+? Malpas's selection of contributors is prescient because they are some of the most perceptive thinkers writing conceptually about place today, including philosopher Edward Casey, writer Lucy Lippard, media-studies scholar Joshua Meyrowitz, geographer Edward Relph, and architects Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Perez-Gomez. The result is an interdisciplinary synergy provoking valuable new ideas and perspectives on place, place experience, and place meaning.

Today many scholars and students of place-based studies-architecture, geography, anthropology, politics and philosophy-feel that a choice between globalism and localism is wrongheaded and unproductive. Offered here is a forward-looking alternative, a set of reflections that restates the centrality of place in human experience, without resorting to nostalgic forms of place-identity or apocalyptic notions of place-disintegration. The idea that places have their own intelligence, that the wisdom that will guide ethical and practical choices in contemporary culture is in the world not only individual selves, is both timely and challenging.

About the Author

Jeff Malpas is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Tasmania, Australia.