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Papers by edward relph

Geographical Review, 1987

Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 2024

This essay considers two questions relating to artificial intelligence. First, do the insights of... more This essay considers two questions relating to artificial intelligence. First, do the insights of the philosopher Hannah Arendt about artificial life and totalitarianism, apply to the possibility that self-serving individuals or groups might use AI's capabilities for conveying misinformation as a way to oppress the many? Second, could phenomenology, as a way of thinking about human experiences of the lifeworld, offer some resistance to the incursions and challenges posed by artificial intelligence, challenges which include Stephen Hawking's warning that it could bring new ways for the few to oppress the many. Its argument draws on Arendt's work, which is implicitly rather than explicitly phenomenological, to suggest that phenomenology differs radically from AI because it attempts to understand the lifeworld as we encounter it with our own senses and through unmediated, everyday experiences. In this phenomenology offers a foundation for identifying, challenging and perhaps mitigating the potential dangers in AI.

Unpublished, 2024

This unpublished paper is an experimental attempt to examine the relationships between displaceme... more This unpublished paper is an experimental attempt to examine the relationships between displacement and place, and pursues the idea that displacement cannot be understood without some prior understanding of place. Displacement is usually understood in social sciences as forced, mostly violent conflict or development. In this essay I proposes a broader definition of displacement from the perspective of place to include a range of experiences that can be voluntary as well as forced. Different types of forced displacement are summarised, including the permanent exile of international refugees, internal displacements, displacements because of environmental disasters and climate change, resource and urban development, solastalgia and homelessness. Voluntary displacements are associated with international migration, transnational employment, expatriatism, churning, and tourism, all of which are chosen and all of which inform sense of place. The conclusion is that while forced displacement has to be understood in terms of how it breaks attachment to place, it is also the case that sense of place is increasingly informed by memories of displacements, whether forced or voluntary.

Geographical Review, 1978

Elsevier eBooks, 2001

Place is a foundational concept in geography that can be traced to the classical origins of the d... more Place is a foundational concept in geography that can be traced to the classical origins of the discipline. It was accepted unexamined as an idea that implied a region or settlement. Since the 1970s it has been interpreted explicitly, originally from a phenomenological perspective as a territory of meanings and a way people connect with their worlds. These interpretations explore identity of place, sense of place, topophilia, and home, but have also recognized that intense parochialism can lead to a corrupted sense of place. Critical reinterpretations, based in part on changes in actual places, have indicated that place identities have been flattened, fabricated, and exploited to create first, a placelessness of modernist uniformities and then, in postmodernity, an arbitrary ageographical variety. These reinterpretations approach place as a distinctive local combination of general processes. They suggest possibilities for a progressive sense of place and for place-making which can resist imposed changes and provide a center of stability in the face of change, without being exclusionary.

Transformations in a City and Its Region, 2013

The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 1970

PHENOMENOLOGY is a branch of modern philosophy, initially formulated by Edmund Husserl at the beg... more PHENOMENOLOGY is a branch of modern philosophy, initially formulated by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of this century, that is concerned with the reorientation of science and knowledge along lines that have meaning and significance for man.l Although there is considerable disagreement about the exact nature of this philosophy,2 most phenomenologists seem to agree on at least three basic issues: first, the importance of man's "lived-world" of experience; second, an opposition to the "dictatorship and absolutism of scientific thought over other forms of thinking"; and third, an attempt to formulate some alternative method of investigation to that of hypothesis testing and the development of t h e~r y .~ The philosophy and method of phenomenology have made a considerable impact on psy~hology,~ and it seems to be largely through the adoption of various ideas and approaches of social psychology in studies of man's perception of his environment that phenomenological notions have recently been incorporated into geo

The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 1991

... scapes it would be &#x27;heterotopia.&#x27; This word originates with Michel ... more ... scapes it would be &#x27;heterotopia.&#x27; This word originates with Michel Foucault, and it is picked up by Harvey and Soja, who use it briefly to refer to the fragmentary and apparently incongruous spaces of post-modernity, such as the diverse ethnic districts of Los Angeles (Harvey ...

Changing Senses of Place, 2021

Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 2023

I directly experienced the heat dome in the Pacific North West in the summer of 2021. This short ... more I directly experienced the heat dome in the Pacific North West in the summer of 2021. This short essay discusses phenomenology as a way to understand how climate change is experienced.

Place and Placelessness Revisited

This essay examines the ways the paradoxical relationship between distinctiveness of place and un... more This essay examines the ways the paradoxical relationship between distinctiveness of place and uniformities of placelessness has varied from the subservience of placelessness to place in premodern times, to the era of modernist planning and architecture after WW2, when placelessness began to overwhelm place. Since then there has been an apparent resurgence of place distinctiveness, for instance because of heritage preservation loacalism, that has happened in the context of increased mobility, migrations and transnationalism, globalization and telecommunications. The evidence of urban landscapes suggests that placelessness has become intertwined with place distinctiveness. What was a dualism has become a fusion. Places in the 21st century are hybrids, simultaneously local and filled with remote and global influences.

Ted Relph is a Professor of Geography in the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Tor... more Ted Relph is a Professor of Geography in the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, a suburban Toronto campus. In his research and writings (sidebar, below), he has explored the nature and importance of places, landscapes, environments, and other taken-for-granted geographical dimensions of peoples’ everyday lives. A slightly different version of this essay appeared in Making Sense of Place: Exploring Concepts and Expressions of Place through Different Senses and Lenses, edited by Frank Vanclay, Matthew Higgins, and Adam Blackshaw (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2008). The editor would like to thank Frank Vanclay and NMAP Editor Julie Simpkin for permission to include Relph’s essay here. relph@scar.utoronto.ca. © 2008, 2009 Edward Relph. From Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology,vol. 20, no. 3 (fall 2009), pp. 24-31.

Geographical Review, 1987

Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 2024

Unpublished, 2024

Geographical Review, 1978

Elsevier eBooks, 2001

Transformations in a City and Its Region, 2013

The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 1970

The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 1991

Changing Senses of Place, 2021

Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 2023

Place and Placelessness Revisited

Unpublished, 2022

This is an essay, initiated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the coincidental publication o... more This is an essay, initiated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the coincidental publication of the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC a few days later, that considers the connections between war, peace and global warming. Warfare destroys places, it also exacerbates climate change both by increasing emissions and by distracting attention and resources from the need for transformative actions to meet the 1.5C target of the Paris Accord. Global warming will also destroy places through floods, sea level rise, droughts and wildfires, and the Sixth Assessment Report assumes a peaceful future in which places - towns, villages, nations - contribute to mitigation and adaptations that will minimize this destruction. In effect, the world is now engaged in a war against global warming, a war that requires peaceful cooperation not military actions.

unpublished draft, 2020

This essay considers the broad social trends that will probably impact how places, the built envi... more This essay considers the broad social trends that will probably impact how places, the built environments where everyday life happens, will be experienced and made over the course of the 21st century. It identifies as especially important the enormous legacy of present places (the largest there has ever been or will be) to the future, peak population and the consequences of population decline, continuing urban growth, and the impacts of climate warming. It also reflects on indications of a possible changes in worldview that could have implications for how places will be made. The conclusion is that current century will pose a variety of unprecedented challenges for places, but people have always found ways to make places that are distinctive and meaningful, no matter how great the challenges.

This is the second part (slightly revised in September 2018 to correct typos) of an unpublished t... more This is the second part (slightly revised in September 2018 to correct typos) of an unpublished two part essay on the changes that have happened to place since the publication of my book Place and Placelessness in 1976. It considers how experiences of places have changed since then as a consequence of increases in mobility, multi-centred living and electronic communications. The first part examines changes to the material identity of places. They draw on theories and ideas about place since 1975 and offer some theoretical speculations about heterotopia and the openness of place..
While both essays draw on ideas I have published elsewhere or posted on my Placeness website, this comprehensive synthesis is new and unlikely to be published.
The central theme is that there changes since 1975 have had profound implications for how places are made and experienced.

This is the first part (slightly revised in September 2018 to correct typos) of an unpublished tw... more This is the first part (slightly revised in September 2018 to correct typos) of an unpublished two part essay on the changes that have happened to place since the publication of my book Place and Placelessness in 1976. It considers how experiences of places have changed since then as a consequence of heritage protection, postmodernism, place branding, and placemaking. The second part examines changes because of increases in mobility, multi-centred living and electronic communications, and offers some theoretical speculations about heterotopia and the openness of place.
While both essays draw on ideas I have published elsewhere or posted on my Placeness website, this comprehensive synthesis is new and unlikely to be published.
The central theme is that there changes since 1975 have had profound implications for how places are made and experienced.

This is a summarized version of my book Place and Placelessness, which was first published in 197... more This is a summarized version of my book Place and Placelessness, which was first published in 1976, and which is the foundation for all my subsequent writing about place. I have made this summary partly for the benefit of those who have not have read it, but also because I will soon post on Academia original essays about how I think places, experiences of places, and conceptualizations of place have changed in since 1976

[This is a written version of a presentation I gave at the University of Calgary in 2005 that was... more [This is a written version of a presentation I gave at the University of Calgary in 2005 that was prepared for publication but never published. The section on Peak Oil turned out to be quite wrong about scarcity, though the arguments for energy conservation remain valid. The challenges of climate change, globalization, mongrel cities and post-modern uncertainties remain unabated, and have, if anything intensified. I would now add to them concerns about the end of urban growth (when global population begins to decline late in this century) and its consequences for economic growth, the impacts of Artificial Intelligence on the future of work, the depletion of soils that are being washed away at least 10 times faster than they are depleted, the sheer complexity of vast cities that are networked globally, and, given recent and current political developments, the fragility of democratic institutions. These will all be substantial challenges for placemaking over the next eight decades.]

This is the written version of a paper I gave at the Annual Meeting of the Urban Affairs Associat... more This is the written version of a paper I gave at the Annual Meeting of the Urban Affairs Association held in Detroit in 1991, hence the crude hand-drawn maps. This material was some of the foundation for my book Toronto: Transformation in a City and its Region, UPenn Press, 2014.

Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography, 1981

These are the first and last chapters from Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography, plus a f... more These are the first and last chapters from Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography, plus a few other pages that I think help to clarify my ideas. This book was published in 1981 and reissued by Routledge Revivals in 2016. It was originally meant to be a discussion of humanistic geography, but became a discussion of humanism, the conviction that we can best improve the world through exercising our capacity for reason, and how this is manifest in a profound ambivalence in modern places and landscapes: they are comfortable and convenient, yet have an ineffable sameness and aesthetic shallowness.

The Introduction offers a brief discussion of humanism and humanistic geography, and proposes "environmental humility" as a way of thinking and doing that respects what there is in the world and seeks to protect it. It also includes a brief account of the idea of landscape.

The extract from the Conclusion includes a short discussion from the preceding chapter of "landscapes for children," because designing and planning places for children (rather than forty year old men driving cars) will accommodate most of the needs of everyone. The actual conclusion discusses environmental design and the minimal state - the idea that a large measure of responsibility for design resides in the communities that occupy places - and returns to the notion of environmental humility.

The Modern Urban Landscape: 1880 to the present, 2016

This is the introduction to my book about the development of urban landscapes since 1880, which w... more This is the introduction to my book about the development of urban landscapes since 1880, which was first published in 1987, with the preface from the 2016 reprint that considers changes since the 1980s. The book answers the question: Why do modern cities look like they do? by considering architectural design, urban planning and shifts in technology and social thought in the century from the 1880s, when skyscrapers, electricity and socialism were introduced, to the postmodernism of the 1980s.

This is the Preface I wrote for the 2008 reprinting of Place and Placelessness, (Pion, London). ... more This is the Preface I wrote for the 2008 reprinting of Place and Placelessness, (Pion, London). It offers an account of how I came to write the book, and discusses some changes that had occurred both to places and to interpretations of place in the thirty years since the original version was published.