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.