Contemporary American society, with its emphasis on mobility and
economic progress, all too often loses sight of the importance of a
sense of place; and community. Appreciating place is essential for
building the strong local communities that cultivate civic engagement,
public leadership, and many of the other goods that contribute to a
flourishing human life.
Do we, in losing our places, lose the crucial basis for healthy and
resilient individual identity, and for the cultivation of public
virtues? For one can't be a citizen without being a citizen of some
place in particular; one isn't a citizen of a motel. And if these
dangers are real and present ones, are there ways that intelligent
public policy can begin to address them constructively, by means of
reasonable and democratic innovations that are likely to attract wide
public support?
Why Place Matters takes these concerns seriously, and its contributors
seek to discover how, given the American people as they are, and
American economic and social life as it now exists; and not as those
things can be imagined to be in some utopian scheme; we can find means
of fostering a richer and more sustaining way of life. The book is an
anthology of essays exploring the contemporary problems of place and
placelessness in American society.
The book includes contributions from distinguished scholars and writers
such as poet Dana Gioia (former chairman of the National Endowment for
the Arts), geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, urbanist Witold Rybczynski, architect
Philip Bess, essayists Christine Rosen and Ari Schulman, philosopher
Roger Scruton, transportation planner Gary Toth, and historians Russell
Jacoby and Joseph Amato.
