Around 1990 there were two important events that have had growing implications for places. The establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 brought global warming to widespread public attention. And in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, which opened the door for the global expansion of the internet.

I discuss these at the end of this post. But first, and more briefly (because I have I discussed aspects of them in previous posts on this blog) I describe other recent trends that have affected ways of understanding, promoting, making, and experiencing places. Most seem to have grown exponentially since 1990.

The remarkable rise of academic interest in place
Since the 1990s the formerly esoteric interest in place has seen a veritable explosion in academic disciplines, including architecture, anthropology, business, geography, psychology, literature, art, political science, neuroscience, ecology, sociology, urban design and planning, and archaeology. It’s impossible to survey it all, but my sense is that much of the research is theoretical though some has spilled over into place practices and policies, perhaps most obviously place branding and placemaking. This dramatic increase in research and publication lies in the background of recent trends that have affected places.

Numbers of peer reviewed publication by decade that refer in some way to place and sense of place, as counted by ProQuest The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences.

	1960-69	1970-79	1980-89	1990-99	2000-09	2010-2019
Place	476	801	2,473	56,858	167,538	210,722
Sense of Place	222	192	483	28,815	80,482	90,811

Place branding (see my post here)
The practice of promoting places to attract visitors or new residents has a long history. In the 1990s, in the context of neo-liberalism and competition between world cities and other places to attract investment, it came to be called ‘place branding’, a term that captures its relationship to advertising and product branding. It involves the creation of slogans, logos, website design and marketing strategies to attract investors and tourists, and also aims to generate identity with place among residents. Most cities, regions and universities have now been place branded, and there are numerous consultancies, journals, and even an academic Institute of Place Management (defined as “a coordinated, area-based, multi-stakeholder approach to improve locations”) devoted to both place branding and placemaking.

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Placemaking (see my post here)
I have used the term ‘placemaking’ in this series of posts in a broad sense to refer to ways places have been built over the last two and half millennia, including architecture, plans, infrastructure, beliefs and world views. However, the term was rarely used before the 1990s, when it came to be used variously to refer to approaches that express suppressed identities of ethnic groups, to ways people transform the environments in which they find themselves into places where they live, and to the socio-economic production and reproduction of places. The American consultancy Project for Public Spaces, which considers itself the central hub of the global placemaking community (and is the source of the image on the right), provides a definition of how it is most commonly understood: “Placemaking is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighbourhood, city or region.” It is along these lines that placemaking has become a widely used idea and practice in planning, urban design and development.

Non-places (see my post here)
In the 1960s Melvin Webber wrote about the “non-place urban realm,” by which he meant communities, such as those of academic, professional or business groups, formed around shared interests rather than around proximity and propinquity. In 1995 French anthropologist Marc Augé’s book Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity expressed a different idea – that non-places are the parts of modern built environments without history, culture, or residents, such as hospitals, expressway service stations, shopping malls and airports. In these non-places experiences are contractual and temporary because we are patients, customers, have bought a ticket and are passing through on our way somewhere else. They are convenient, efficient, and largely anonymous because they have to be comprehensible to people with diverse backgrounds. They are essential in a mobile society.

Mobility, Overtourism, AirBnB
Mobility broadens experiences and reduces parochialism, yet also contributes to the need for non-places and weakens long-term commitments to particular places. The increased mobility that began with railways, and was dramatically reinforced by the invention of motor vehicles and airplanes, has continued to accelerate since 1990 at rates that far exceed population growth. The number of motor vehicles per capita has risen in all parts of part the world since 2005 (140% increase in Asia, 35% in Africa, 9% in Europe, 6% in North America). In short, more people everywhere are driving more, and place experiences involve views through windows.

Global Increases in Mobility 1990-2019.
Sources: Motor Vehicles OICA; Air Passengers World Bank; Tourists UNWTO; Cruises Cruising

	1990	2019	Percent growth
Population	5.30 billion	7.70 billion	45%
Motor Vehicles	0.80 billion	1.3 billion	62%
Air Passengers	1.0 billion	4.2 billion	420%
International Tourists	425 million	1.5 billion	353%
Cruise Passengers	3.7 million	30.0 million	810%

These increases in travel and tourism have led to serious overcrowding in popular destinations. Even before 1990 World Heritage Sites were experiencing problems, but since then entire cities, especially in Europe (Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Venice, Bruges, Prague, Cambridge, Amsterdam, etc), have been overwhelmed by what, since about 2015, has been called overtourism. Places experiencing overtourism are diminished to something like a blend of theme parks and non-places, and the place experiences of tourists are reduced to glimpses through crowds and brief opportunities for selfies. 

The explosive growth of Airbnb since it was founded in 2008 as a modest attempt to enable travellers to connect with hosts through the internet, has played a role in this. By 2019 it had 500 million listings in 191 countries and 81,000 cities. Airbnb’s mission is in part to create “a world where anyone can belong anywhere…” in other words to make all places equally accessible. Its international success has, however, contributed to local housing shortages and pushed up housing costs as its listings have displaced conventional rentals. While Airbnb has enhanced place experiences for travellers, it has undermined place experiences of residents unable to find accommodation or paying inflated rents.

Electronic Media and Places
Airbnb, and indeed all the booking, control and GPS systems that make current international travel affordable as well as possible, owe much of their success to the invention of the world wide web in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, whose intention was to create “an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere, to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries.” In other words, to make all places equal for communications. Electronic media had been shrinking and permeating the world since the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s, but this had happened from the top-down through institutions, corporations and broadcasters. The web passed that ability on to individuals, making us all potential producers of media, who can share information regardless of where we happen to be.

The web was supplemented by search engines (Google late 90s), social media platforms (Facebook 2004, YouTube 2005) and smart phones (iPhone 2007). Together these opened a floodgate. In 1990 there were few million internet users, mostly in universities; this has now grown to 4.5 billion active users spending an average of about 3 hours a day online. A change of behaviour of this magnitude has to have had an impact on places. But, as is known from the introduction of printing, the initial effects of innovations in communications media on the physical character of places can be slight, even though their long-term social and experiential effects might be profound. The dramatic popularization of electronic media is so recent and still in process that its effects are open to diverse interpretations.

First of all, it is worth noting that the direct impacts of electronic media on the forms and appearance of places have so far been incremental – poles, wires, satellite dishes, buried cables, wireless signals that leave all existing built forms mostly as they were. Built forms seem to be have been scarcely affected.

Electronic media have changed experiences of places, though exactly how is open to interpretation. At the most personal level Sharon Kleinman refers to the consequences of talking on mobile phones in public spaces, scarcely aware of what is around us, as “displacing place.” On the other hand, it has been suggested that locative media (smart phones, tablets), which always know our location, can combine immediate experience with online data about the place we are in, for instance about wayfinding and amenities, in effect drawing information into and out of a place in ways that enhance experiences of places.  

At a larger social scale Joshua Meyerowitz argued in his book No Sense of Place, that “Where one is, has less and less to do with what one knows and experiences.” In other word social relationships are no longer dependent on local communities. The web has no landscape and no geography and the communities that form there are non-place communities formed on the basis of shared interests. These can be short-lived, sometimes generating so-called “smart mobs” of people who don’t know one another yet react compulsively to online memes about events or attractions, and this can lead to behaviour that spills over into real places, such as tens of thousands turning up to take selfies in a place where wild flowers bloomed in a spectacular way in California in 2019. Smart mob behaviour may also lie in the background of overtourism, prompted by websites that promote iconic tourist attractions.

More positive manifestations of non-place communities that impact actual places include, perhaps ironically, the Città Slow movement that began in Italy as way to celebrate local food and culture, and is now an interconnected global phenomenon. City Mayors is an online network that http://www.citymayors.com/ promotes “good, open and strong local government” by enabling cities around the world to learn from each other and act together. However, non-place virtual communities also form around anti-social, prejudicial convictions that are amplified in on-line echo chambers and filter bubbles. These, too, can spill over into real world behaviours, such as acts of terrorism and attacks on mosques and synagogues.

A more direct manifestation of the role of electronic media in places occurs in attempts to design “smart cities”, such as that by Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google, for a neighbourhood in Toronto that will be monitored with “data integration that provides ubiquitous connectivity for all” and claims to be “creating a new type of place to accelerate urban innovation and serve as a beacon for cities around the world.” Critics of smart cities, and indeed of Google and the entire tech industry, see them as engaged in data gathering that involves constant surveillance and invasion of privacy. Many cities (especially in China) are now festooned with security cameras, some using facial recognition technology, ostensibly for security (Shenzen has 159 cameras per 1,000 residents, London 68, Atlanta 16, Singapore 15). It seems likely that places in the future will be data collection machines, but whether this will be for surveillance or to improve urban management is not so clear. 

More than fifty years ago Marshall McLuhan, who is perhaps most famous for coining the idea of the global village, wrote presciently about the social impacts of electronic media. He thought that the outcome of electronic communications, which circle the world at the speed of light, compress time and space and “turn the world back in on itself in a global embrace,” would be that person-to-person relationships take on the emotional and social characteristics of oral cultures as if in “the smallest village.” The global village, he suggested, was not so much an electronic melting pot (which is usually how the phrase is used), but filled with trivial electronic gossip from elsewhere, often abrasive and where personal concerns and emotions get magnified. It is, in effect, superimposed on the countless material places inherited from previous centuries when rational ways of thinking associated with print media prevailed. Skyscrapers, suburbs and megacities are not easily changed, at least in the short run. What are upset are ideas of history, geography, truth, reason and the ways we experience places. In the global village it seems that the significance of places as discrete, material entities has been diminished and compressed.

“In the age of the speed of light what cropped up yesterday, here and there, now happens everywhere at once…there is no longer ‘here,’ everything is ‘now.’” (Paul Virilio, 1997)

Climate Change and Places.
The creation of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) in 1988 vaulted climate warming from a mostly scientific issue into a matter of broad concern. It is widely expected to be the critical environmental, social and economic problem of the 21^st century. It has considerable implications for places.

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The trend which triggered awareness in 1988 of global climate change was the steady increase in atmospheric CO2 measured at a particular place – the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii. The trend continues. (Source: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.png). On the right, the dome of Mauna Loa shield volcano is in the background; Kilauea, which erupted in 2018, is smoking in the middle-ground.

Some of those implications are epistemological. Climate change requires that all places be considered simultaneously as locally distinctive (because the increasingly intense weather events it causes are local) and globally interconnected (because all places contribute to and share the atmosphere of the earth). Furthermore, its rapid onset has converted what was formerly a background longue durée factor for places into into short-term intense weather events – coastal and river floods, severe droughts, wildfires, tropical cyclones –that are impacting places, and demand immediate place-based responses.

Although responses to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to impacts of changing weather may be directed by national or regional policies, their implementation is necessarily local. And if national governments, notably the United States, choose to ignore climate warming, local municipalities cannot afford to be so ideologically myopic and are building flood walls, requiring energy efficient buildings, expanding urban forests, instituting water conservation, providing cooling centres. and acting proactively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, numerous mayors and local municipalities participate in global networks to share experiences and practices.

In short, many places are already being retrofitted and modified to respond to the local environmental challenges presented by climate change. This is consistent with recommendations in Global Warming of 1.5C the 2018 special report of the IPCC that focuses on measures needed to keep warming below that level. This report explicitly and repeatedly uses the language of places to describe strategies for mitigation and adaptation. It recommends that: “Pursuing place-specific adaptation pathways towards a 1.5C warmer world has the potential for significant positive outcomes for well-being in countries at all levels of development” (5.3.3).

These pathways have to acknowledge the various scales of places, different groups involved in them, uneven power structures, historical legacies, and the local priorities and trade-offs that shape the sustainability and capabilities of everyday life (5.3.3). For much of the mid-century urban populations will grow by 70 million people a year, and “Cities are places in which the risks associated with warming of 1.5C , such as heat stress, terrestrial and coastal flooding, new disease vectors, air pollution and water scarcity, will coalesce.” (4.3.3.3). In other words, the diversity and distinctiveness of places is critically important – one set of climate actions will not work everywhere.

Keeping global warming below 1.5C will not be easy and could require both transformational adaptations ( i.e more than incremental modifications to existing practices) and disruptive innovations that will have to be related to the communities, location, context and vulnerability of specific places (4.2.2.3). Indeed, while responses have to be coordinated between all levels of government – international, national, regional and municipal – to be effective, “progressive localism” is especially important because the “proximity of local governments to citizens and needs makes them powerful agents of climate action” (Cross Chapter Box 13, Cities and Urban Transformation).

A Note on the Coronavirus Covid-19 Pandemic and Places
Previous epidemics, even though their social consequences might have been great, do not appear to have had long-term impacts on how places were made or experienced. While the Covid-19 pandemic may follow this pattern, there are indications, even as we are the midst of it, that it has interrupted some trends that have been affecting places and has reinforced others.

It has interrupted the upward trend in international travel and tourism. This will persist as long as travel restrictions remain, which is likely to be until a vaccine is widely available, perhaps in two years. While this immediately reduces problems of overtourism, it will also undermine the economies of places dependent on tourism.

Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, thinks travel restrictions will accelerate the fragmentation of the global economy with the effect that “local resilience will be prized over global efficiency.” If so, this will reinforce a background trend to localism that has been underway for some time (see my post here). This would be supplemented by increasing local tourism, possibly aided by initiatives in place branding and placemaking and the “progressive localism” recommended the by the IPCC as an essential part of any strategy for climate action.

The pandemic has led to a surge in the use of electronic communications both as the preferred means for getting local and international news, and for establishing versions of non-place communities for social interactions on Zoom, and for working at home. If the latter turns out to be productive it will have implications for the need for offices and commuting. Proposals for using mobile phones for for tracing contacts have raised concerns about surveillance that will make all places part of an electronic panopticon.

More generally, the pandemic has brought into the spotlight the interconnections between global processes and their consequences in the places where we live. Climate change is a slower-moving version of these interconnections and consequences, potentially with even more devastating outcomes. In this respect, the novel coronavirus, is both a cause of immediate disruptions and suffering, and a wake-up call about the necessity of taking early actions to mitigate global disasters whose consequences are visited on everyday lives in particular places.

References
Marc Augé 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso
Sharon Kleinman (ed) 2007 Displacing Place: Mobile Communication in the Twenty-First Century, Peter Lang
Marshall McLuhan 1964 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Signet PressJoshua Meyerowiz 1985 No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxofrd University Press
Paul Virilio 2000 Landscape of Events, Cambridge University Press

Sometime around 1970 there was a shift in how places were made and experienced that is still evolving. Whether it will amount to the sort of radical change that happened with place practices, for instance when the Middle Ages transformed into the Age of Reason, remains to be seen. What is clear is that there are substantial differences between the ways that places are treated now and what happened before 1970, when little attention was given to history, tradition, community or environmental consequences of development, and places were either ignored or regarded as irrelevant to progress.

I have discussed these recent changes to place in previous posts on this blog, here, here and here. In this post, which considers trends from 1970 to 1990, and the following post, which considers trends since 1990, I review these briefly and add interpretations relevant to the future of places. Because I devote only one or two paragraphs to topics which are enormously complicated I want to stress that my main interest here is in places and the remarkable diversity of social trends that have affected them over the last fifty years.

Environmental Conservation, Sustainability, Ecological Awareness
In the 19th and first part of the 20^th century, with the notable exception of the creation of National Parks, natural environments were treated mostly as somewhere for free waste disposal or something that could be improved by engineering – building dams, straightening rivers, levelling hills, using chemicals to kill pests and improve yields. In the 1960s those attitudes came under intense criticism (for instance Rachel Carson’s revelations about DDT in her book Silent Spring) as it became increasingly apparent that from an ecological point of view this was doing immense environmental damage.

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The concrete channel to approve flow in this creek in Toronto was constructed in the 1960s at about the same time the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge was created in Maine. It typifies the engineering approach to improve environments that prevailed then. The photo on the right shows a section of that same watershed just after it had been renaturalised in the 1990s according to ecological principles in order to prevent downstream flooding caused by concrete channels.

The birth of the modern environmental movement is often held to be the first Earth Day, celebrated across the U.S. in 1970 in popular demonstrations to promote reforms in environmental practices, and now recognised annually in 180 countries. Perhaps more significant for its effects on places was the establishment, also in 1970, of the Environment Protection Agency to coordinate federal government strategies in the U.S. to monitor the condition of environments and enforce policies for conservation. This sort of approach was expanded internationally in 1972 through a United Nations conference in Stockholm on the state of the environment that was held in Stockholm in 1972. This was substantially reinforced in the late 1980s by the UN sponsored the Brundtland Commission that introduced the notion of sustainable development – an approach that considers the consequences of environmental impacts for future generations.

The significance for places of this lies in the fact that ecological thinking is at the root of modern conservation, and ecology requires paying close attention to the particularities of places because ecosystems are expressions of local geological, topographical and microclimatic conditions. Developments that are environmentally damaging and unsustainable still happen, and the sheer scale of urban development needed to accommodate population growth can outweigh good intentions, but since 1970 conservation and sustainability have come to be so widely integrated into plans and policies for places at all scales from neighbourhoods to nations that it is difficult to realise that fifty years ago environments warranted no special attention and policies for environmental protection scarcely existed.

Heritage Preservation.
Growth of interest in heritage preservation to protect built environments was almost exactly contemporary with the rise of environmental conservation. As an international and widespread concern it is mostly an outcome of a UNESCO convention in 1972 on the protection of cultural and natural heritage. This convention led to the designation of World Heritage Sites as a way to protect sites of great cultural significance that are threatened by development, and it actively encouraged individual nations to legislate their own heritage protection policies.

Before 1970 the word ‘heritage’ meant ancestry, and old buildings and districts were regarded mostly as impediments to progress, best removed to allow urban renewal or for economically profitable development. Since then heritage protection has been widely given legislative authority and implemented through local planning practices. It has become a very powerful force for protecting a sense of the continuity of places almost everywhere, from World Heritage Sites (an average of 25 have been added every year, and there are now about 1100), to urban districts and individual buildings that are zealously protected as essential aspects of local history.

Globalization and Deindustrialization
The effects on places of globalization, which in its current neo-liberal, free-trade form was a response to problems of inflation in the 1970s associated with post-war economies that were based on controls over capital and wages, are less direct and locally apparent than heritage preservation and environmental conservation. One large scale consequence appears to have been the emergence of ‘world’ or ‘global’ cities that act as command centres in the global economy, with offices and institutions monitoring and controlling international flows of goods, people, ideas and money.  They privileged places attract wealth and attention, and are characterized by stock exchanges, corporate headquarters, international institutions, hub airports, and, because they attract immigration, ethnically diverse populations. London and New York are at the pinnacle of a hierarchical network of perhaps 150 world cities (whose interactions are thoroughly documented by the GaWC or Globalization and World City research network.) These are in many ways more connected with other world cities by financial trading, cultural activities, airline routes and fibre optic cable, than they are with the regions and nations where they are located.

Another, almost opposite, place consequence of globalisation and worldwide trade has been deindustrialization. Manufacturing has been moved to wherever production costs, especially costs of labour, are lower. This has created new manufacturing zones in less developed nations, and deindustrialized regions and rustbelt cities in developed nations. The latter are disadvantaged places in a globalized world, with closed mines and abandoned factories, and few prospects for sharing in the growth and prosperity of world cities.

Mobility
One aspect of globalization has been a rapid increase in international and regional mobility both for business travel and tourism. This is an important change because for much of history most people experienced only a few places in the course of a lifetime, life was about stability and having deep roots. Now the reverse is true – daily commuting, weekends away, vacations in previously remote countries on the other side of the world. It seem that within one or two generations depth of place experience has been traded for breadth in which many different places are encountered briefly. Whether this improves or diminishes place experiences is an open question – it may be relatively shallow but by exposing travellers to different cultures it also overcomes parochialism.

The recent surge in mobility has, in concert with rapid urbanization, stretched urban areas outwards until they connect in sprawling megalopolitan regions (hundred mile cities, as Deyan Sudjic has called them). The built environments of these vast places are formed around a skeleton of expressways, high-speed rail lines, intermodal facilities (where containers are moved from rail to trucks, etc), distribution centres and airports. Hub airports are especially notable because their immense buildings have no architectural or planning precedents, and are the largest single places (or non-places, which I will discuss in the next post) in the landscapes of cities.

Migration and Hybrid Places
Another form of modern mobility is migration from less to more developed parts of the world where it is needed to maintain population and economic growth. The consequence for places is that new cultures and traditions have been added to the older national ones, especially in world cities that have become especially attractive for new immigrants because they are where prosperity is.  Leonie Saundercock in her book Cosmopolis II (2003) refers to these as mongrel cities because such a large proportion of their population (in Toronto, for example, it is over 50 percent) comes from a variety of different countries. Places that in the 1960s could be considered culturally homogeneous have become complex hybrids, filled with people of different races and religions, celebrating their own heritage in festivals and foods (and engendering tensions as local traditions lose their once privileged positions).

This hybridity has a global aspect because electronic communications and relatively inexpensive air travel have allowed the modern diasporas of cultural groups to interact closely both with their homeland and with their transnational fellows in other countries. In effect, hybrid places, no matter how geographically separated, are now closely connected. 

Postmodern Architecture and Planning
In the 1970s architecture and urban planning began to move away from the rectangular, uniform designs of modernism to more decorative ‘postmodern’ forms. In architecture these have involved elements from older building styles, such as pilasters, pediments and colours. In planning it has been manifest in ‘new urbanist’ or ‘neo-traditional’ approaches, a form of master planning that aims to enhance place identity both by responding to local ecological processes, copying local vernacular architectural styles and creating walkable streets,

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Postmodern architecture and Planning. Mississauga City Hall, Ontario, from the 1980s was designed to reflect the old farms that once occupied the land (farmhouse in front, windmill tower, barn behind). A new urbanist main street in Garrison Woods in Calgary, built in the late 1990s.

And Postmodern Philosophical Shifts, Heterotopia and the World of Where and When
There is a deeper, philosophical meaning of postmodernism that could herald a fundamental shift in approaches to how places are made and experienced because it implies that the rational way of thinking that has prevailed since the Enlightenment may have run its course. This rational attitude, with its assumptions about the power of reason and objectivity to reveal truth and reality, has informed the development of science, law, economics, technology, political institutions and ways of making places for the last four centuries.  But in the 20th century its privileged status came into question, initially in art (abstraction and surrealism) and science (uncertainty, indeterminacy, probability), and then with the use of rational methods to develop nuclear weapons capable of destroying humanity.

Protest movements in the late 1960s made it clear that many social and political issues – civil rights, economic inequality, gender and sexual discrimination – are not susceptible to rational solutions and that what is considered true and just depends, at least in part, on race, gender, wealth and poverty. What seems to have happened is that the one approach fits all assumptions of rationality had lost their authority. In 2001 Stephen Toulmin (p.3) looked back over the previous thirty or so years and noted the remarkable loss of confidence in traditional ideas about rationality.  In a sequence of books on pragmatism and social hope written in the 70s and 80s, Richard Rorty argued that truth is made, it is what we choose to believe in rather than something found in nature or identified empirically, and what some consider just and valid can be regarded by others with a different perspective as unjust and invalid. These differences cannot be resolved or adjudicated objectively. Even before that, in 1970, the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1970, p xvii) had described the outcome of the sorts of postmodern epistemological changes underway as ‘heterotopia’, a situation in which “things are ‘placed’ or arranged in ways so different from one another that it is impossible to find a common place beneath them”, a world in which somehow almost everything seems to be out of place.

” Heterotopia – a situation in in which things are placed or arranged in ways so different from one another that it is impossible to find a common place beneath them.” Michel Foucault 1970

From the perspective of place the rationalist ways of modernity had led to the placeless uniformity of international styles of architecture and planning of the 1950s and 60s. By 1990 modernity had given way to postmodernity and this was evident in the revival of place distinctiveness associated with heritage preservation, new urbanism, mongrel cities and hybrid places. Philosophers have had a rather different take on what has happened, though their suggestions also seem to come back to place. In the absence of generally accepted rational strategies Foucault proposed ‘local discourses’ that could make some sense of matters and suggest improvements to problems in specific contexts. Stephen Toulmin (2001, p. 7, p. 213) thought that the idea of reasonableness rather than reason or rationality allows us to steer a middle way and keep an even keel because this involves getting back in touch with the experience of everyday life and a return to “the world of where and when.”

This may seem very positive in terms of places, yet Foucault, Rorty and Toulmin realised that a loss of confidence in the authority of rationality, objectivity and empirical knowledge poses problems because it means that what is considered just, true and real becomes mostly a matter of who exercises the greatest powers of persuasion. The implication is that proposals to solve social and political problems will inevitably be contested by those who view them from a different perspective, and indeed that the very fact that they are problems can be questioned regardless of empirical evidence. Since 1990 this has been most obvious with denials that the climate is warming because of human activity and more generally in partisan politics and the echo chambers of social media where alternative accounts what constitutes the true history and identity of places are constructed on the basis of nothing more than shared and often exclusionary convictions. In other words, while postmodernity suggests that a fundamental shift in worldview might be underway, the consequences of this for places are enigmatic because they seem simultaneously to involve both enhanced distinctiveness and arbitrary parochialisms.

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Environmental and heritage protection, economic globalization, mobility, migration and hybridity, and new urbanism have all continued to expand and intensify. Their impacts on places have been complicated and compounded by trends since 1990 – including the world wide web, social media, climate change, place branding, placemaking, the international diffusion of localism, and now the coronavirus pandemic. These impacts will the subject of my next post.

References
Rachel Carson, 1962 Silent Spring
Michel Foucault, 1970, The Order of Things, Tavistock Press
Richard Rorty, 1982, The Consequences of Pragmatism, University of Minnesota Press
Richard Rorty, 1999, Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin Books
Leonie Saundercock, 2003 Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century, Continuum
Deyan Sudjic, 1992, The 100 Mile City, Andre Deutsch
Stephen Toulmin, 2001, Return to Reason, Cambridge University Press

Recent and Current Trends Affecting Places
In this and the two following posts I outline trends in the processes that are currently impacting places. I have discussed some of these processes in three previous posts on this website, noting how distinctiveness of places has been reasserted since about 1970 (when the placeless practices of the Modern Era began to be questioned), how experiences have been affected by increased mobility, and how theoretical notions of place have been elaborated. In the two next posts I will variously summarise and elaborate those discussions. Here I want to consider the ways that long-term processes, especially population and urban growth, are affecting places.

Uneveness and Other Recent Shifts in Population Growth
Population growth has been in the background of making places throughout human history (see my comments in History of Places 10,000 BCE to 1,000 CE). In the last fifty years there have been significant shifts in how this plays out.

First, while we are still living through the enormous acceleration of population growth that began in the late 18th century (from just under 1 billion then, to 3.7 billion in 1970, to about 7.8 billion in 2020), the rate at which this growth is happening peaked in the 1960s at about 2.2% a year, and has steadily declined since then to about 1.05% (probably because of programmes of population control and improvements in standards of living, like the one illustrated). Growth continues but ever more slowly and this downward turn is unlikely to be reversed. For places this was a pivotal moment because for the first time an end is in sight to the trend of more places to accommodate more people.

Secondly, paralleling this reduction in rate of growth, life expectancy has increased. In 1950 global life expectancy was about 50 years, roughly where it had been for much of human history. By 1970 it has risen to about 60 years and is now 73 years. In Europe and North America life expectancy is in the order of 80 years. To put it simply, populations everywhere are aging. For places this is significant because it means that they, too, are showing signs of aging and decline.

Global population numbers mask considerable variations. About 90 percent of the worldwide increase of 4.0 billion since 1970 has happened in Africa and Asia, and there places, especially towns and cities, have had to expand rapidly to accommodate more people. However Europe has witnessed a remarkable drop in population growth. Since 1970 in many European countries – Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Hungary, France, Britain, Russia – the fertility rate has fallen well below 2.1 children per woman, the rate needed just to maintain an existing population. There is always a time lag before population totals begin to reflect changes in fertility rates, but this drop in fertility rates means that without some intervention (such as the policies introduced in 2019 in Hungary to try to boost the birth rate), populations will get older, there will be fewer young people, and totals will inevitably decline. Something similar has happened in Japan, Canada, and Australia; the US is a bit of an exception because its replacement rate has hovered just under 2.0 (data on replacement rates are here).

An aging or declining population has significant consequences for economic growth (more money needed for pensions, less consumption of goods). Presumably because of this (though it is rarely stated explicitly) potential declines have been offset by national policies to increase immigration, most of which has been from less developed countries, including former colonies, where populations continue to grow. Immigration is the reason that Europe’s population has grown by 100 million since 1970, and North America’s by 150 million. These are small increases by comparison with the 3.7 billion in the rest of the world, but have been sufficient to allow most cities, where most immigrants settle, to continue to expand (albeit in ways that have transformed and diversified their cultural character – I discuss this further in the next post).

Uneven Urban Growth
Population growth over the last 50 years has been increasingly concentrated in urban areas. In 1970 urban areas in the world had 37 percent of the world’s population, in 2020 they have 56 percent. As long as the rate of urban growth remains higher than the population growth rate this urban intensification will continue. Again, these global numbers mask major variations – in Japan 90 percent of the population lives in urban areas, in North American 80 percent, in European countries 70 to 75 percent; in Africa is the population still mostly rural.

There is another significant uneveness in urban growth – over the last 50 years it has mostly been in very large cities. In 1950 there were about 175 cities with populations over 500,000, accommodating 33% of the world’s urban population; in 1970 there were 335 over 500,000, housing 40%; in 2020 there are 1200, housing 57% of the urban population or one third of the total global population. In addition, the last seventy years have seen remarkable growth in megacities (cities with populations over 10 million). In 1950 there were just two of these (New York and Tokyo), in 1970 there were three, now there are 34 according to the UN World Urbanization Report (other sources claim as many as 47 because they measure the size of cities differently). Whatever the number, the undeniable fact is that over the last fifty years large urban places have been getting larger and larger, building upwards and outwards to create megalopolitan areas that are continuously built-up for a hundred kilometres or more. One incidental consequence is that when we talk now of cities we are referring to something very different from the relatively small places that were considered to be cities throughout most of history.

City Population	1950	1970	2020	2035
>10 million	2	3	34	48
5-10 million	5	15	51	73
1-5 million	69	127	494	639
0.5-1 million	101	190	626	757

Number of cities in the world by population size, 1950, 1970, 2020, projected to 2035
Source: (United Nations 2018, World Urbanization Prospects, Data File 12,

Not all towns and cities in North American and Europe have not shared in this growth. Even as most urban places have boomed, others have stagnated or declined, especially former industrial cities and remote small towns. Spain, for example, has recently been described as “hollowed-out” (La Espana Vaciada) because much of the interior has been turned into a youth desert, isolated small towns in France and Italy have almost no residents left, and in Canada entire rural settlements on the Prairies have disappeared.

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Instances of decline and abandonment in places since 1970. In the Bronx in 1980s there were streets of abandoned and brick-sealed buildings in the Bronx. The monument is the only evidence of a small town that flourished in the Canadian prairies from 1910 until it was abandoned in 1990 because the grain elevators that were the reason for its existence were no longer needed. The small crowd in Detroit had gathered to watch the demolition of the apartment building, one of several in a social housing complex that was being demolished.

Industrial cities in both North America and Europe that boomed from the 19th century to the 1960s and 70s have declined as manufacturing jobs have been shipped offshore and their technologies made obsolete. The population of Detroit has dropped from 1.8 million in 1950 to 700,000 now. Detroit is an extreme example, but most rustbelt cities and old industrial regions have seen some decline or stagnation. In these cases the obvious reasons have been economic and technological change, but in an age of low fertility rates and aging populations they are harbingers of the broader demographic phenomenon of “shrinking cities.” This is especially apparent in Japan, a nation which does not support immigration policies, has a fertility rate of just 1.4, an aging population mostly living in large cities, and is expected to experience a population decline of 20 million over the next 20 years. It is a moot question what will happen to neighbourhoods and streets as this happens.

What I think has begun to happen is the emergence of urban place inequality that has developed in the current context of continuing population growth, aging populations and economic transformations, and is manifest at global, national and regional scales. At one extreme are cities that are so attractive they have developed great gravitational force, pulling in ever more people, and the bigger they get the more they attract. Then there are all the other places, many growing and changing relatively slowly, others slowly slipping into decline as people drift away and buildings are closed up or abandoned.

Persistence of the Place Practices of the Modern Era
Every historical period leaves a legacy of places for the future – both its built-environments and sets of practices and its attitudes about place that linger on. What I have described as the Modern Era, which lasted from about 1900 to 1970, was a period both of radical innovation in ways of making places, and a time of rapid population growth when the population of North America grew by about 150 million. Britain 18 million, France by 9 million, Italy by 22 million, the world by 2.1 billion. This has left a huge place inheritance that has four enduring manifestations.

First, most of the places created in the Modern Era still exist and are actively used – which is to say street patterns, institutions, parks, schools, apartment buildings, suburbs, new towns, airports, expressways. Places destroyed in the two world wars were largely rebuilt. The only notable exception is social housing complexes of modernist apartments (like the ones in Detroit illustrated above) that have been demolished because they proved to be more or less unlivable.

Secondly, and especially following WW2, the making of most of those places involved comprehensive planning. The academic planner Leonie Saundercock has described this as based in simplistic assumptions about objectivity and rationalism, and, according to Jane Jacobs, these contributed to urban renewal and “desegregated sortings” where the elements of places are pulled apart into categories of land use. Partly because of these criticisms the hard rationalist edges of planning have softened, but the general practice nevertheless persists, written into legislation and manifest in the official plans that municipalities everywhere are required to prepare in order to guide development and anticipate growth and change.

Thirdly, the modernist style of architecture conceived in the early decades of the 20th century, which used concrete, glass and metal to create undecorated, angular buildings, and was then widely used in the decades of growth and reconstruction following WW2 for institutions, office towers and apartments, continues to prevail. The designs now are sleeker, the shapes more complex, the buildings are often taller and larger, but their modernist genealogy is unmistakeable. They mark the cityscapes of prosperous, growing cities everywhere.

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Fourthly, motor vehicles and the paraphernalia associated with them, continue to play the key role in how places are made that began with the mass production of Model Ts in 1908. The popular enthusiasm for motor vehicles has not diminished. Motor vehicles requires asphalt surfaces, highways and motorways designed for speed, street lights, service stations, parking lots, garages traffic signals and roundabouts, and drive-to shopping centres. These continue to be dominant elements of placemaking.

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An interesting diagram from The Motorist in 1926 showing families with and without cars since 1900; a mid-century modern house with its contemporary car in Palm Springs, California (in 2016); motor vehicles in Rome (2017).

While it is a frequently expressed hope of urban planners that cars will decline in popularity and large areas of cities will be pedestrianised, and some of that has happened locally, the fact is that motor vehicle use has increased faster than population. In 1970 there were 250 million motor vehicles in the world, in 2016 there were 1.32 billion, so the numbers of vehicles quintupled as global population doubled. The same disparity applies even in Europe: in 2014 the population of the European Union was 507 million, and there were 284 million motor vehicles; in 2018 the population was 512 million and there were 308 million motor vehicles – 5 million more people but 24 million more vehicles. A recent audit of increased investments for public transportation and bicycle infrastructure, that were initiated in 2014 in the EU, found that they have had no significant impact on private car usage. I am not enthusiastic about this, but the clear indications are the machine-friendly characteristics of places associated with motor vehicles, which began to be created a century ago, have not only endured but show few signs of vanishing in the near future.

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The next post will consider changes and trends in ways of making and experiencing places between about 1970, when the practices of the Modern Era were brought into question, and 1990, when the world wide web was invented and a new wave of place impacting practices began.

This post summarises two considerations that are I think are essential for an attempt to forecast the future of places over the next thirty or more years,
• Continuity, or the aspects of places that persist in spite of change
• The triggers that have frequently played a role in causing changes in how places have been made

Continuity in Places
The identities of places are the product of both continuity and of change. Some aspects of their identities tend to persist, enduring for centuries or even millennia. Other aspects, the ones that comprise much of the character of places, are the result of adaptation to and accommodation of changes.

Persistence: The names of particular locations, unless they are forcibly removed by conquest and colonisation, can stick for centuries, even millennia. The same can be said of roads and street patterns, Once created, these are unlikely to be changed in any substantial way, presumably because they are public rights-of-way that are needed for places to function. Some institutions – the Catholic and other Churches, universities – have found ways to survive repeated political and economic turmoil. And it is striking that the even though the hey-day of religious placemaking was in the Middle Age, not only have cathedrals built then survived to the present, but new ones, for instance in Liverpool and Barcelona, were still being built in the 20^th century. The first universities were also a product of the Middle Ages, and university campuses have multiplied and are still expanding.

Another form of place persistence happens when towns or villages were by-passed by progress yet were sufficiently resilient to survive in spite of that. The result is landscapes and townscapes left mostly untouched by changes happening elsewhere, where local architectural styles and other placemaking practices continued to be used. (Now, of course, places like this are deliberately preserved for their picturesque heritage qualities and new buildings are required to be in complementary designs).

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Vernazza in the Cinque Terre in Italy, and Weobley in Herefordshire, England.  Two places demonstrating persistence of identity – each with a distinctive styles of vernacular architecture that has been used over several centuries. In Weobley the oldest black and white buildings in the middle distance date from the 15^th century and those in the foreground from the 19^th century.

Adaptive Continuity: The second form of continuity in places happens through the accommodation of shifts in ways of building or social and economic circumstances by adding to or modifying whatever already exists. The consequence is that, although there may have been a radical change in ways of making and experiencing places, the personality of a particular place has continuity because it has been altered incrementally around a core identity that involves names and older buildings. Elements from different eras are interspersed and juxtaposed, and the resulting townscape expresses what might be called adaptive continuity.  

Of course, villages and small towns have sometimes been abandoned because they are economically obsolete, or effectively disappeared because they have been swallowed by urban development. Nevertheless, most large towns and cities that were founded more than about a century ago are likely to show evidence of adaptive continuity to meet changing  circumstances. The overwhelming evidence is that place want to survive and that the largest ones also want to continue growing. For places on the scale of Uruk or Tikal to be abandoned in takes the collapse of entire civilization.

Triggers for Change in Places
As I have indicated in previous posts (here and here) the history of places also shows that, for all their continuity, there have been several fundamental changes in how places have been made and experienced over the last 2500 years. Each of these changes was the result of a radical shift that involved some combination of, I think, four major processes
• technological innovations
• new ways of thinking about the world and the role of humans in it
• the emergence of political and social structures that allowed those new technologies and ways of thinking to be turned into practices
• underlying all of these, population and urban growth drive the need for more and larger places. 

Technological Innovations: The invention of new technologies – especially media of communication (roads, printing, railways, telegraph and telephone, highways and motor vehicles) – modified relationships between places by speeding up how knowledge and practices were transferred between them. In addition, other innovations (columns, domes, pointed arches, domes, steam power, materials such as concrete and steel frames for skyscrapers) introduced new types of building that made possible new ways of making places. In hindsight, these technologically induced changes seem to be clear, but at the time their consequences can be far from obvious and are easily misinterpreted.

Ideas and Systems of Belief: The emergence of new world views or religious beliefs played a role in the emergence of every new period of places – Roman imperialism and pragmatism overwhelmed Classical Greece; Christianity provided an organisational foundation for societies to emerge from the Dark Ages; the Age of Reason drew inspiration from the Classical Period relegated religion to a secondary role and remade landscapes along geometric lines; the refinement of economic thought by Adam Smith was a foundation for the industrial capitalism in the Industrial Era that converted reason into utilitarianism for the benefit of profit; Modernism rejected historical revivals and turned capitalism towards efficiency and an international view of the future in which the distinctiveness of places was almost irrelevant.

 
Political and Social Values: Changes in belief systems were usually connected with shifts in political values and power. The Romans developed practices of government and administration that made possible the expansion of the Empire; failure of that system of government and the security it provided resulted in the disorder of the Dark Ages. The administration of the Catholic Church, which was the foundation for making places at the beginning of the Middle Ages, was weakened as popes and cardinals became increasingly absorbed with their own power and wealth. Authority passed to kings and princes, but in due course, they too became self-aggrandizing and detached from the people they ruled, and monarchies were overthrown in various revolutions that established versions of liberal democracies that have prevailed since the early 19th century.  
In general, it seems that whenever social and economic inequality has intensified it has contributed to enduring shifts in political systems, and that these have been associated with new ways of making and experiencing places.

Growth: Population and urban growth underlie the entire history of places (as I indicated here). It is, however, not clear in what ways these have been triggers for particular changes except as ongoing background demands that have had to be resolved by making more places, for instance by creating colonies or new towns, and by making existing places larger. In these respects the very rapid population and urban growth since 1800 has had a profound impact on how places have been made. This impact has been especially pronounced since about 1970 as global population doubled and cities almost everywhere have grew both upwards and outwards at unprecedented rates and scales.

Implications for the Future of Places
The message of persistence and adaptive continuity for the future of places is clear. Notwithstanding some massive disaster, many aspects of places as they are now will continue to exist for decades and possibly centuries. Furthermore, because the world’s population has doubled from 1970 to 2020 (from 3.7 billion to 7.5 billion), and the majority of that growth has been accommodated in urban areas (from 1.4 billion to 4.3 billion), most of the current built environment and its places are products of the last half century. There will, of course, be modifications and adaptations to these as new technologies are developed, and new ideas and social systems emerge, but in some form the places made over the last half century will be a huge part of the places of the foreseeable future.

In order to contemplate the future of places, the almost certain fact of this continuity has to balanced against indications that the various triggers for change – technological innovations, systems of belief, social and political values – could be intensifying. In my next post I will examine trends hat have emerged in the last half century which are affecting ways that places are made and experienced, and are likely to continue to do so in the immediate future.

This post is the second part of a history of places and is one in a series about the past and future of places. An initial post explained my overall aims, and noted that my emphasis is on material places rather than the more abstract notion of place. The first part of the history of places considered how places changed from about 10,000 BCE to 1000 CE, noted my criteria for identifying historical periods of places, and identified some qualifications about my approach, including the fact that population and urban growth have always been in the background of how places have been made.

Note that the brief history in these two posts is only intended to provide sufficient information to give a broad indication of the different ways places have been made and experienced over the course of human history.  Rather than primary research, it draws on secondary and web sources, combined with my direct experiences of the remnants of places from particular historical periods (which I illustrate where I can with my own photos).

This post considers places in four distinct periods – the Middle Ages, the Age of Reason, the Industrial Century, and the Modern Era.

Religion and the Places of the Middle Ages
The Dark Ages between about 500 and 1,000 CE witnessed a disaggregation of places as towns and settlements that had been established throughout the Roman Empire declined or were abandoned in the absence of political coherence. From the 10th century some measure of stability began to be re-established as Christianity, which had developed as an organized religion in the last centuries of the Roman Empire and then slowly spread across Western Europe, was increasingly adopted by the rulers of regional kingdoms. With stability came the possibility of making places that might endure, and from the 11th to the 15th centuries Christianity dominated the character of how those places were made. Villages and towns were essentially built around churches or cathedrals, which were often magnificent structures with pointed arches, stained glass windows, ornate decorations, flying buttresses, and spires pointing heavenward. They were physical demonstrations of the narrative that religion and faith were the most important aspects of existence. Everyday life for everyone was permeated by religion, princes and peasants alike. It set the rhythms of the day, the week and the year; it was the foundation of education; nuns and monks ran hospitals and attended to the poor and destitute; everyone contributed in some way to the building of churches, if not with money then by providing their labour.

This was, however, also a time when kingdoms jostled for power and control of territory. Wherever there was a threat of attack by a marauding army places were built with security in mind – villages on hilltops that offered some degree of defence, towns surrounded by walls or protected by a castle. Perhaps this generated a sense of security in the thousands of small villages producing food, or perhaps technological improvements in water and wind mills were responsible, but whatever the reason there were increases in agricultural production that contributed to economic prosperity. This led to the development a trading network across much of Western Europe, especially for wool but also for tin, lead, wine and timber, and this trade generated the wealth necessary for constructing churches, and for making the places where those churches were located.

With economic growth came population growth, and in the 11^th and 12^th centuries the population of Europe doubled. Much of that growth was accommodated by rebuilding towns that had decayed during the Dark Ages or by constructing new towns. The former often had an organic maze of streets following routes of old tracks and paths; many of the new towns were roughly planned with a loose grid pattern of streets, a square or wide street for a market, and a castle wherever defence was a priority. In both cases streets would have been crowded with a variety of buildings, some substantial with workshops or stores at ground level and residences above, others little more than shacks, and all constructed of whatever materials were locally available – limestone, sandstone, timber frames filled with wattle. The result was that places, even if they were centrally planned, for instance as defensive settlements, were as diverse as the regions where they were located. This diversity has now come to be regarded as a major amenity, and many medieval places, with their picturesque combinations of church, castle, distinctive architecture, and a maze of streets most easily travelled on foot, have recently been pedestrianized and become popular tourist attractions. 

On the left the small town of Gordes in Provence, France, is an example of a medieval village on a hilltop site that provided some security from attack, with the church and a castle occupying the highest parts of the site. The buildings on the steep hillside illustrate the organic character of many medieval town plans, as do the winding, narrow streets of Arles, also in Provence, on the right.

Medieval place experiences were not entirely local.  Although travel was dangerous and roads were little more than grassy, muddy tracks used by pack animals that could only be travelled on foot or horseback, clerics on official Church business and merchants on their own business regularly travelled between towns and different countries. A few million devout Christians took part in Crusades to Jerusalem, the central place of the Christian world. Many others made pilgrimages either to nearby shrines or to more distant ones such as Canterbury or Santiago de Compostela. In short, knowledge was shared throughout the places of the Christian world, including the principles for the layout of Gothic churches and abbeys, such as their orientation and the arrangements of altar, nave, choir, transept, and so on. Indeed the masons responsible for much of the construction of churches were itinerant, but they also had to adapt the standard design requirement to specific sites and to use mostly local building material because it was too difficult to move stuff around. This was done with remarkable skill, and the consequence was buildings that, although they shared the same standard elements, enhanced rather than diminished the identities of places.

In spite of the remarkable solidity and scale of medieval churches and castles (many of which have survived to the present day), there seems to have been a sense at the time that medieval places were just stepping stones to heaven, that religion was not a whole solution to life’s problems. This became especially apparent with the plagues of the 14^th century, when the Black Death spread along trade routes and caused the death of more than 30 percent of the population of Europe. Neither faith, nor churches, nor castles were able to protect people and places from epidemics (nor, it seems in the covid-19 pandemic, can science and the efforts of centralised governments, though those should mitigate the relative scale of the consequences). Many villages were abandoned because almost everyone died, and in towns as well as the countryside the resulting shortage of labour weakened the authority of the Church. This was exacerbated by the fact that the secular ideas of classical Greece and Rome had begun to infiltrate medieval thinking in Western Europe. The character of medieval places began to shift. While religion remained important and great churches and cathedrals continued to be built for several centuries, trade and manufacturing began to play increasingly important roles in politics and daily life. Self-governing guilds of professional craftsmen formed in prosperous cities, market halls were constructed, some almost as large as cathedrals, and a sense of secular community and cooperation began to develop. A new phase of placemaking was emerging.

Well-ordered Places and Uprooting in the Age of Reason
 “Tis all in peeces, all cohaerance gone” declared the poet John Donne at the end of the 16^th century. I think he had suddenly become aware that the values of religious world in which he had grown up had lost their import. For places a new type of coherence, one based on reason rather than religion, had in fact been developing for some time. The writings of the Roman architect/engineer Vitruvius had been discovered in the mid-15^th century, and since then newly made buildings and places had begun to take on a classical character. Churches in Italy, including St. Peter’s in Rome, were built with columns, pediments and domes similar to those of ancient Rome, and plans for towns, including the square in front of St. Peter’s, were given geometric regularity.

The merits of a rational approach to making places was made explicit by Rene Descartes in 1637 in Discourse on the Method, the foundational philosophical text for the Age of Reason. At the beginning of Part 2 he declares: “Old cities which, from being at first only villages, have become, in course of time, large towns, are usually ill laid out compared with the regularity of constructed towns which a professional architect has freely planned on an open plain.” He suggested that the “indiscriminate juxtaposition [of buildings]” and the “crookedness and irregularity of the streets” in old cities (i.e. those of the Middle Ages) must have been a matter of chance. However, towns planned by architects demonstrate “human will guided by reason.” He may have been thinking of entirely new towns that had to be fortified because they had a strategic role in defence and were built in elaborate geometric star patterns.  

In fact, the shift to rational order in making places had been underway for more than a century partly because of the renaissance of classical ideas, and partly because the dissemination of these had been facilitated by the invention of the printing press in 1450. This promoted literacy, democratised education, and made it possible for new ideas to spread rapidly from place to place. Contemporary improvements in navigation ensured that some of these places were in distant colonies on recently discovered continents. Place names and cultural practices were transplanted, and, in perhaps the most notable indication of the placemaking preferences of the Age of Reason, so were the rational town plans that were coming into fashion. This was nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in Spanish Colonies. In 1513 King Ferdinand of Spain issued instructions for the expedition to the coast of Central America: “Let the city lots be regular from the start, so once they are marked out the town will appear well ordered as to the place which is left for a plaza, the site for the church, and the sequence of the streets; for in places newly established proper order can be given from the start.” These general guidelines were elaborated in minute detail in 1573 in Philip II’s Laws of the Indies for building new settlements. Their impact is still apparent in the regular townscapes of almost all the colonial settlements of Latin America.

From about 1550, as the theocracy of the Middle Ages waned, the growing power and wealth of kings and nobles came to be displayed in great palaces and country houses which left no doubt that these, not cathedrals, were now the places where real authority resided. Their architecture was often in the classical revival styles of the Renaissance, and they were surrounded by geometrically arranged landscape gardens, incorporating sophisticated topiaty, lakes and fountains that revealed the strength of human reason in bending nature to its will.

Wherever towns were created, such as St Petersburg in Russia, or remade, such as Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755, or added to, such as the New Town in Edinburgh in the late 18^th century, they were laid out in the rational manner, guided by human reason.  In the countryside the irregular strips and furrows of feudal agriculture were remade into angular fields more suited to more efficient agricultural practices. The Age of Reason imposed order on the landscape.

The apex of this redesign of the world came at the end of the 18^th century in the newly created United States of America, where orthogonal surveys were adopted as the basis for preparing much of the new nation for settlement. Rectangular patterns were imposed on countryside and towns alike. In that same spirit, the new government commissioned a plan from the French-born American architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant for the capital city of Washington D.C., a plan that celebrated the rational principles of democratic government, with a great avenue (the Mall) leading to the Capitol, and other, slightly less grand avenues leading to the White House and cutting across much of the the rest of the city.

However, places in the Age of Reason were not all order and reason. The Enlightenment cast some dark shadows. The historian Fernand Braudel described the great capital cities of the time as “urban monstrosities… machines for creating both civilization and misery.” He was thinking of Paris, which by the mid-18^th century had grown to 600,000 people, and London which had 750,000.  While these both had new districts of elegant streets with circles and squares lined with well-proportioned dwellings, they also had neighbourhoods of great poverty, often where medieval bits of cities remained, and where, as William Hogarth’s contemporary engravings of Beer Street and Gin Lane show,  people survived in crowded squalor and dulled their misery with wine or gin.

Furthermore, the Age of Reason was no exception to the fact that the creation of new places, no matter how reasonable, inevitably involves the destruction of existing places. The great palaces and country homes with their landscapes gardens often required the displacement of entire villages. On a far larger scale the massive placemaking aspects of colonialism were counterbalanced by equally huge place unmaking as indigenous peoples were pushed aside and devastated by imported diseases. Most dramatically of all, about 13 million Africans were uprooted from their homes and transplanted to other continents and unfamiliar places – 4 million to Brazil, 2.5 million to Spanish colonies, 2 million to British colonies of the West Indies and North America. The history of place is about uprooting and destruction no less than the making of places.

Places in the Industrial Century
The orderly practices of the Age of Reason for making places trickled on into the early 19^th century in urban developments of elegant Georgian houses and in orthogonal surveys to prepare territories for settlement. However, their impetus had begun to wane before the end of the 18^th century as innovations in manufacturing, such as the spinning jenny for cotton weaving and steam engines, heralded the onset of the Industrial Revolution and entirely different, utilitarian approaches to making places that prevailed until 1900 and lingered well into the 20th century.

The impact of this industrial shift outweighed all previous changes in placemaking. Indeed it effectively made all previous places appear obsolete. In 1800 at the beginning of the Industrial Century, city streets and farms still had much in common will all the places that had been made in previous ages – whether the Middle Ages or Ancient Rome and Greece – buildings were assembled by hand, on sites prepared by hand, most people still walked everywhere, houses were lit with candles, noises and smells were of animals and people. A hundred years later smells and noises were of machines which did much of the work, including making mass-produced possessions, buildings were coated in coal dust, hills were levelled with steam-shovels, people rode in streetcars or railways, streets had electric lights and were draped with telephone wires. The industrial age changed places in ways that that were utterly unprecedented.

In the background of these changes was a dramatic acceleration rate of population growth, with its inevitable consequence of more people in more and larger places. The population in Europe doubled between 1800 and 1900 (numbers are not precisely known, but from about 152 million to 296 million); the  population of England, the hearth of the Industrial Revolution, quadrupled, from 7.8 million to 30 million. Even though industrialisation caused serious pollution and, for some, grinding poverty, the main reason for this growth was reduced mortality – fewer children were dying and people were living longer, probably because of improved diets. It helped that a large share of the growth was accommodated by emigration to the great spaces of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and particularly North America, where the United States grew from 5.3 million to 76.2 million between 1800 and 1900, at least 30 million of them immigrants. Many of those immigrants had come from rural regions with failing economies who had chosen to uproot themselves to seek a better life. In the new world the result was placemaking that spread across continents as settlers put down new roots. In the process, of course, indigenous populations were displaced, so this was also a time of great place unmaking.

Population growth in both the old world and the new was concentrated in towns and cities where factories provided relatively unskilled jobs paying wages which afforded a quality of life that, in spite of the pollution and slums, was often better than that of a rural labourer. In the United States in 1800 only 6 percent of the population was urban, by 1900 it was 40 percent; in England in 1800 about 33 percent was urban, in 1900 it was 77 percent. The rates of growth in individual towns and cities was dramatic. Bolton, a centre of innovation in cotton manufacturing in England, grew from 12,500 to 168,000 over the course of the century. London grew from about 1million to 5 million. Chicago grew from 5,000 in 1840 to 1.7 million in 1900. The character of urban places was remade, not least because so much of them was new and on a huge scale.

Almost everything about industrial cities was unprecedented. Factories with endlessly repetitive work done in shifts were themselves new types of workplaces; huge foundries; steam driven machines; iron bridges; skyscrapers with steel frames. Tenements and row houses, more or less mass-produced to minimal standards, were new types of placeless living places. Railways provided ways of travelling at speeds hitherto considered inconceivable. And because factories and railways were voracious consumers of iron and coal or wood, the provision of these required new types of places – towns entirely devoted to a single purpose, mining towns coated in coal dust and surrounded by spoil tips, factory towns choking in smoke; a rhythm of life dictated by the demands of production and shift work. Factories, not palaces or cathedrals were the great new buildings of the industrial age, widely illustrated in engravings and birds-eye view of particular places with smoke streaming from their chimneys as symbols of progress and the power of steam. Less illustrated but scarcely less substantial were legislatures, parliament buildings and town halls, usually large and elaborate buildings prominently situated in park-like spaces. They served as a demonstration that governments of liberal democracy, whether at a municipal, regional or national level, were seats of power in the places where liberal democracy now prevailed – equal players in a capitalist world.

In spite of these symbols of progress, in the Industrial Age cities were for the most part unpleasant, polluted, congested and uncomfortable places, especially for the poor but also for the well-to-do, because smogs, unpaved streets covered in horse manure, and epidemics of cholera and typhoid caused by unsanitary conditions, did not respect class differences. The more affluent were able to escape the worst discomforts by locating themselves on relatively pleasant hilltop locations, or moving to villas in suburban developments easily accessible by railways or streetcars. These were well-built in whatever revival style was fashionable at the time – Gothic, Italianate, Neo-Classical, Queen Anne – and many are still attractive residential districts. And over the course of the 19th century there were several major innovations that improved in the quality of places for everyone. For instance, in 1858 very hot weather in London caused unbearably foul odours to rise from the Thames, an event known as the Great Stink, and this led to improvements in urban sewerage systems (it probably helped that the Houses of Parliament are next to the river). And as urban places grew, governments ensured that they included schools, hospitals, and public parks such as Central Park in New York, and urban filtration and water distribution systems. These improvements must have contributed to the continuing rapid population and urban growth.

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Contrasts in places where poor and rich people lived in the Industrial Period

Over the course of the 19th century relationships between places underwent a radical change. Railways and the telegraph, and then electric streetcars and telephones, worked in concert to collapse time and space, the former by moving goods and people at previously inconceivable speeds, the latter by sending messages faster than messengers. What had previously been remote was made quickly accessible, locally, regionally, nationally and globally.  By the 1880s suburbs were expanding rapidly along streetcar lines, Europe and India were laced with networks of railways, North America had been crossed by transcontinental railroads, and submarine cables had been laid across the Atlantic and Pacific linking Europe, Australia and America, distributing technologies, people, products, architectural fashions and practices for making places around the world. In a single century there had been a metamorphosis affecting both the identities of places and relationships between them.

Places (and Placelessness) of the Modern Era
During the 19^th century there were many attempts to find ways to redress the social and other problems of industrialization and rapid urban growth, especially the living conditions in the places of the poor. Towards the end of the century these coalesced into socialist and reform movements that received boosts from two  popular speculations about utopian places in which pollution and social injustices had been resolved: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887, and William Morris’ New from Nowhere. These appear to have informed a remarkable proposal in 1898 by Ebenezer Howard, who had no background in politics or planning, for what he called “garden cities,” places that would offer an alternative to industrial cities.

From the perspective of place what was remarkable about Howard’s proposal was that his plan was less about street patterns, which had been the focus of city planning from ancient Greece to the Age of Reason, than about creating a sort of place that would address people’s everyday needs in a way that was both economically viable and equitable. The innovative strength of his proposal attracted immediate and widespread attention, and within five years of its publication a company had been formed and land acquired to create a prototype garden city at Letchworth in England.  Garden cities and new towns, following more or less along Howard’s lines, were subsequently constructed in many regions of the world. More significant is the fact that the garden city is an essential foundation of the approach to urban planning that is now used around the world, and addresses physical, social and economic aspects of how places are created and modified.

Whether by chance or because of some ineffable spirit of the time, the proposal for garden cities was one of several innovations and inventions in the first decade the 20^th century that have had ramifications for places. Rutherford’s ideas about nuclear physics and Einstein’s on relativity (that led to atomic weapons and the constant threat they pose for all places); the abstract art of Picasso, Braque and others (which redefined aesthetic standards); Ford’s mass-production of automobiles (which resulted in due course in automobile oriented urban development); Marconi’s wireless transmission across the Atlantic and the Wright brother’s first controlled flight (which reinforced and extended the shrinking of distance and interconnections between places that had begun with the telegraph and railways); and the conception by Adolf Loos and other European architects of a modernist, undecorated way of building that deliberately turned away from everything old and looked to the future.

This remarkable burst of innovative thinking was interrupted by the First World War, then in the 1920s and 30s it was reinforced, for instance, by modernist designers and architects at the Bauhaus and the architect Le Corbusier. They developed modernist designs for almost everything – dishes, chairs, light fixtures, houses, apartments, (even, in Le Corbusier’s case, entire cities) that were considered efficient, progressive and ideally could be mass-produced. Their approach to architecture used modern materials of glass, steel, and concrete, took advantage of the clean energy of electricity, and had plain, unornamented surfaces. It was called the International Style, and as the name implies, it was considered equally appropriate everywhere. It was, in other words, deliberately intended to be placeless. It has been used ever since, with some refinements, for commercial, institutional and high-rise apartment buildings around the world, for airport terminals, hospitals, hotels, shopping centres and gas stations. It is placemaking that is always familiar and provides no surprises.

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On the left, Le Corbusier’s 1930 proposal for an entirely new type of urban place, a Radiant City, of 60 storey cruciform skyscrapers that would free up the ground level for open spaces, or, in this case in the centre of the city for expressways, and (remarkably) and airport between the towers. Nothing on this scale was ever built, but Corbusier’s ideas have influenced modern places – on the right are cruciform towers of about 20 storeys, built about 1980 in Mississauga, a suburban city adjacent to Toronto in Canada.

As architects and others developed their modernist, international approaches between the two world wars, city officials found ways to adapt cities to social and technological changes. Zoning was introduced as a way of separating undesirable uses, such as abattoirs and office skyscrapers from residential areas, and quickly became a means for the segregation of most land uses – low density residential here, high density there, retail and industrial somewhere else – in effect dismantling places into component parts. To deal with rapid increases in use of motor vehicles, signs and signals were invented, different categories of roads were established with residential neighbourhoods identified as places to be protected from through traffic which would use arterial roads. Expressways were conceived (though few were built until after the Second World War. The first commercial airports were built. Billboards, neon signs, electric street-lights, gas stations, and much of the everyday paraphernalia of city streets that we take for granted, were introduced.

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Neighbourhoods as new types of places. On the left, a diagram of a 1929 proposal for a neighbourhood unit by Clarence Perry shows a maze of curving streets and culs-de-sac for housing, with an elementary school and parks in the centre, and apartments and shops on the edges; the aim was to keep through traffic on arterial roads at the outside of the block. In the middle, curvilinear streets as part of the neighbourhood design of Don Mills, a 1950s new town development on the edge of Toronto. On the right, the idea of neighbourhood planning for suburban places explained in an exhibit in Canberra in Australia in 1985. Almost everything to do with placemaking in the 20th century was internationally shared.

The impact on places of all these innovations was quite limited because the Depression and the Second World War intervened.  The war did lead to some unprecedented types of places and place experiences – vast cemeteries, concentration camps – and to deliberate campaigns of place destruction by bombing. But it was in the decades after t1945 that the approaches to placemaking developed earlier in the century were extensively adopted. And this happened in the context of a widely held view that whatever was old – buildings, street patterns, the attitudes that had led to the war – was obsolete, best removed and replaced with something modern and progressive. Modernist practices were efficient, affordable, comprehensive, made use of new technologies and available materials, and responded to new consumer trends such as automobile use.

In the 1950s war damaged parts of cities in France, Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union and Japan were rebuilt using versions of modernist approaches for making places. This was done under the aegis of comprehensive town planning, which was legally adopted in many countries (all previous planning had been advisory). Comprehensive planning considered requirements for different types of housing, schools, public parks, retailing, and traffic, was made a requirement in many countries (before the Second World War it had been mostly voluntary). In Britain it was the basis for designing new towns built from scratch on greenfield sites. In North America social housing projects of tall apartment towers designed along lines developed in the Germany in the 1920s replaced entire city blocks of old houses, while developers created automobile-oriented suburbs of boxy houses neatly arranged on mazes of curvilinear streets.  Shops and services in new towns and automobile suburbs were arranged in commercial strips, drive-to plazas, enclosed shopping malls. Many stores in those places were outlets of multi-national corporations using standardized signs and selling the same products. Parking lots became a major type of land use. Zoning ensured that different types of land uses were separated. Arterial roads and networks of expressways continued the process that had been started by railways of redefining relationships between places by making everywhere accessible by car.  

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On the left, Cabrini Green in Chicago in the 1990s, showing the apartment slabs built in the 1950s as part of an urban renewal project to replace the sorts of houses and commercial blocks shown in the foreground. The slabs have now been demolished. In the centre, Soviet style apartments from the same period in Tallinn in Estonia. On the right, suburban Paris in 2005. High rise apartments were a new type of accommodation that was internationally popular in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, both as a way to replace old or war-damaged parts of cities, and to provide social housing. While all these projects were in some limited sense places, each with its own name and location, they ignored local environments and culture and were similar in form wherever they were constructed, so they were also manifestations of placelessness.i

This functional, modernist approach to making modern places can be understood as a response to the need after the Second World War both to rebuild and to accommodate very rapid population growth, almost all of it in urban areas. Between 1950 and 1970 world population grew by about 1 billion; Europe by 100 million (the equivalent of a city with a million people every two years) and the US by 50 million. Modernist placemaking provided ways to do this while improving living conditions and meeting people’s expectations for a better quality of life. It was used, with minor variations, almost everywhere – in Britain, France, the United States, Australia, Japan, the Soviet Union. The same sorts of apartment towers in the same sorts of clusters, the same classifications of roads according to projected traffic flows, the same gas stations, similar curvilinear street mazes in residential suburbs. In order to do this local traditions and ecosystems, old buildings and settlements, were treated as impediments to progress and growth. They were built over or demolished..

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Commercial strips and the ordinary international modernism of the 1960s and 1970s was inherently placeless – similar designs, the same activities, the same multi-national corporations in urban places almost everywhere.

Of course, in some superficial sense each new town, housing project, suburb and modernist apartment tower was a place, a unique location, often with a name invented by planners or developers, somewhere people worked, lived and made their home. Nevertheless, the overwhelming effect of the landscapes created between 1945 and 1970 was one of diminished distinctiveness, of similar places offering similar possibilities for experiences, of no surprises, of placelessness.

A Summary of the Historical Periods of Places
• Ancient Greek places blended spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual qualities. Public places – temples and the agora – were for expressions of shared communal identity.
• Roman places demonstrated pragmatism and control that were part of an Empire with a consistent identity everywhere; spiritual life was largely domesticated, and public spaces were primarily for spectacles or displays of authority.
• Medieval places had an original character because previous history had been forgotten; their the focus was religion, both literally and symbolically, though there was parallel attention to trade and security.
• Places in the Age of Reason borrowed from Classical traditions to promote rational, geometric order, in part in buildings and estates that expressed the power of the aristocracy, in part by imposing rectangularity on landscapes and street plans, and in part by colonising and uprooting cultures which did not shared rationalist convictions.
• Industrial places reflected the utilitarian demands of growth, capitalism and unprecedented consequences of innovative technologies, including urban expansion, pollution and the collapse of distance as a barrier between locations.
• Modernity reinforced the collapse of distance, rejected the past, celebrated progress toward the future, and promoted standardization that encouraged uniformity at the expense of the identities of places.

A Shift to Different Approaches to Placemaking since About 1970
There has been a shift away from the placelessness of modernity since about 1970. Although modernist practices continue to be used they have been increasingly challenged by a widely shared recognition of the need to respect ecological processes and cultural heritage. At the same time many remnants of the industrial age – coal mines, old factories, railway lines – have been closed, dismantled or converted to other uses. There has been an enormous rise in global trade and international tourism, electronic communication has become part of everyday life, the world’s population has doubled, climate change has been identified and its consequences have intensified, migrations patterns have shifted, the deepest levels of poverty have decreased but inequality has increased.

I have reviewed these recent trends in three previous posts (Reinforcing Distinctiveness, Experiences, Theoretical Speculations). In the next post I will summarise them as part of a consideration of the implications of continuity and change for figuring how places might be made, redeveloped and managed over the course of the next few decades.

This post is the second in a series about the past and future of places. The previous one explained my overall aims and approach, and noted that my emphasis is on material places rather than the more abstract notion of place.

This is also the first of two specifically about the history of places that examine changes in the ways people have made and related to particular places since the first permanent human settlements were made about 12,000 years ago. I have divided this history into two parts mainly because I think it makes what would otherwise be a very long post much more manageable. I have take the year 1000 as a mid-point partly for convenience, but also also because evidence of how places were made and experienced before then is mostly in the form of ruins and archaeological sites, and since about then there are whole buildings, landscapes and parts of towns that are more or less intact and have been continuously used. A second post on the history of places considers, the Middle Ages, the Age of Reason, the Industrial Period and the Modern Era.

My hope is that this broad historical survey gives some indication of how places have changed over the course of human history, and will clarify whether we are currently going through another place shift, and, if so, how this might play out.

Approach and Initial Qualifications
Approach: I summarized my approach, which borrows the ideas of the historian Fernand Braudel, in a previous post. To that I will simply add here that here my aim is to identify historical periods which demonstrate consistency in the ways places were made and experienced. Evidence of placemaking practices can be seen in the street patterns, heritage buildings and archaeological traces of places that still exist [incidentally, the first widespread use of the term ‘placemaking’ seems to have been by archaeologists in the 1970s]. Experiences of and relationships to places, which are more difficult to ascertain retroactively, I will consider mostly in terms of advances in communication – roads, printing, railways and so on.

The periods I identify are mostly familiar ones, corresponding for instance to those in Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, and other historical studies. I illustrate them where possible with my own knowledge of particular places, especially in Europe and North America. The histories of places in Asia, Africa, and Latin America follow different paths, although advances in communications, colonialism and global trade since about 1500 have ensured that large swathes of recent place history have been shared across continents and cultures. 

Some initial qualifications (actually determined by writing a couple of drafts of the history):
• Periods of places do not have precise start and end dates. Innovative practices and attitudes to place evolved over decades or centuries, came to prevail for a length of time, then were gradually replaced.
• The periods are generalisations about ways of making and relating to places that reflect a particular conjuncture of social and technological practices. In effect, they identify a distinctive and widely shared sense of place which reflected the spirit of the times.
• In each period there was a variety of different types of places, some wealthy, some poor, some the centres of trade and power, some remote and culturally resistant. In this brief history I am mostly interested in innovative practices that were widely shared, and I pay little attention to these non-conforming places.
• Many non-conforming places were ones inherited from previous eras. Sometimes these were little more than traces in ruins and names, sometimes they were almost complete landscapes that endured because there was no good reason to replace them, sometimes they have been manifest in revivals of values and architectural styles. These remnants indicate the importance of continuity in places, which I will examine in a separate post.
• Because the complete landscapes of places at any given time have always included a legacy of places from earlier periods, over the course of history this legacy has become both increasingly deep and more extensive. In other words, the current era has the greatest legacy of past places.

• And, very important, population growth and urban growth are two long-term, almost longue durée trends that underly the entire history of places. I will begin with those.

Population Growth and Urban Growth
Population Growth: Almost every century in the last 12,000 years has seen more people in more parts of the world, and since about 1800 there have been many more people in much more populous places. Graphs of population growth have two distinct elements. A gentle upward incline, almost horizontal, from about 10,000 BCE, when the world population is thought to have been about 4 million, to 1800 when it reached about 1 billion. And since 1800 an almost vertical line to 2020 and the present population of about 7.7 billion. There have been regional and temporary setbacks because of plagues, famines and wars, but these scarcely show. The fundamental fact is that the history of places is a history of accommodating population growth.

Urban growth. Population growth has been accommodated through diffusion – more people in more places – and in some ways from the outset but especially over the last two hundred years, by concentrating populations in urban places. The first cities (by current standards, actually small urban settlements with populations of a few thousand) were founded about 3500 BCE. Since then the tendency of cities everywhere has been to grow bigger. This is important to the history of place for two different reasons. One is that the proportion of people living in cities has steadily increased, though it probably remained under 10 percent in most parts of the world until about 1800. Since then it has accelerated faster than population growth, and now surpasses 50 percent for the world and 80 percent in most developed countries.

The second reason is that the history of cities is better documented in archaeological and written records than the history of rural areas. This means that there is a bias towards urban places, even when they held only a small proportion of the population, simply because there is more information about them.

The First Stable Places
Humans in the Stone Age depended on foraging and hunting, were continually on the move, and left little evidence of life in fixed places, presumably because they did not have the skills, means or inclination to modify environments. Nevertheless, they must have had the sense of place shared by all sentient beings that made it possible to find their way around, and to get back to wherever there was good shelter or food. In addition, cave paintings in Indonesia and Spain, dated respectively to 44,000 BCE and 35,000 BCE, indicate that they identified places with special significance.

Places as distinctive and enduring creations where people lived and died, and through which they connected to the world around them, begins with sites of stone monoliths, such as the one at Gobleki Tepe in Turkey made about 9,000 BCE. That, and other places with standing stones made over the course of several millennia (including Stonehenge about 3000 BCE), seem to have been associated with burial and/or ceremonial sites. Given the considerable work necessary to create those, and the fact that they were roughly contemporary with the gradual domestication of crops and animals, it is reasonable to assume that these were associated with settlements that provided a measure of security and made possible long-term connections between communities and particular locations. In other words, though there is scant archaeological evidence of domestic placemaking, it was probably then that enduring attachments to place first developed.

The Invention of Urban Places
A placemaking leap from small settlements and ceremonial sites to cities happened about 3,500 BCE in several locations around the world, most notably in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia. These ancient cities were distinctively different from all previous settlements because of their relatively large and dense populations, planned streets laid out in a grid pattern, tall buildings, marketplaces, and grand temples. They were also centres of administration where writing on stone tablets was invented, perhaps to keep records of food supplies, and this presumably resulted in a class distinction between the literate few and everybody else. Although the great majority of people continued to live in small villages for the next three millennia, these early cities were a place invention that endured, steadily grew, and now prevails.

The first city in Mesopotamia is thought to have been Uruk, not far from what is now Baghdad. At its peak about 2,000 BCE it may have had a population of 50,000 but eventually declined for various environmental and political reasons, and was abandoned before 300 CE. What is often considered the first work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, was written there about 1800 BCE in cuneiform on stone tablets. It begins with what probably the first written description of a place:

“The massive wall of Uruk, which no city on earth can equal. See how its ramparts gleam like copper in the sun. Climb the stone staircase, more ancient than the mind can imagine, approach the Eanna Temple, sacred to Ishtar, a temple that no king has equaled in size or beauty, walk on the wall of Uruk, follow its course around the city, inspect its mighty foundations, examine its brickwork, how masterfully it is built, observe the land it encloses: the palm trees, the gardens, the orchards, the glorious palaces and temples, the shops and marketplaces, the houses, the public squares.”

The Epic of Gilgamesh, Stephen Mitchell translation, 2004

Greek City-States and Knowledge of Other Places
The practice of building urban places slowly spread from Mesopotamia east to India and westwards to the Mediterranean. In Ancient Greece in the first millennium BCE the practice began to take on a distinctive character that is notable in part because such good archaeological and written records have survived.  An important part of this distinctiveness was the development of city-states, essentially politically defined urban regions, each with a city supported by an agricultural economy, and with its own deity revered and honoured in temples such as those on the Acropolis for Athena, the goddess of Athens. Each city-state also had its own form of government to direct the everyday life of its citizens. The most notable was the democratic system invented in Athens, which redefined how at least some people related to place because citizens (which meant adult males, not women or slaves) could meet in a public space, the Agora, to debate and vote on matters that would affect life in the places where they lived.

Some Greek cities, such as Athens, had inherited irregular or organic plans from earlier settlements, but where possible considerable attention was paid to creating a carefully arranged layout of spaces such as the Agora and sites of temples. In cities that had to be rebuilt (for instance after a war) these public spaces were incorporated into a layout system of rectangular city blocks in what can be considered the first systematic instances of placemaking and town planning,

In Hellenic Greece people were often identified by their birthplace – Hippodamus of Miletus, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, and so on, and the intellectual culture included a desire to understand the world and its places. Eratosthenes, the person who is attributed with the invention of the word ‘geography,’ was for some years around 225 BCE the librarian at Alexandria, and his books, though all lost, are known to have included both a map and a set of descriptions of known countries. While Ancient Greece did not have an empire, its citizens explored and migrated to various places in their known world, in effect creating what in retrospect appears to have been a geographically open and extended sense of place.

Standardized Places of the Roman Empire
About 150 BCE the city-states of Ancient Greece were assimilated into the expanding empire of the Romans, who then borrowed and adapted many aspects of Greek thought and placemaking, including architectural styles and aspects of town planning. But whereas the Greek attitude to place tended to be cerebral, democratic, spiritual and aesthetic, the Roman attitude was mostly administrative and practical. The Romans added innovations such as aqueducts, communal baths, and tenement buildings; amphitheatres for mass entertainment were substituted for theatres; monuments were built to honour emperors; religion was domesticated (every dwelling had its gods).

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Roman placemaking. On the left, a domestic scene in a mural from Pompeii (now in National Archaeological Museum, Naples). In the centre, a commercial street with a stepping-stone crosswalk that allowed wheeled carts to pass. On the right, the Arch of Constantine (built to celebrate his military victories) and the Colosseum in Rome.

Perhaps most notably in terms of impacts on place, the Romans developed a continent wide network of roads that facilitated both communications by messages written on papyrus and rapid deployment of troops. This network allowed the imperial centre of Rome to command an empire that came to include territory all around the Mediterranean, far into the Middle East and into Britain. Wherever those roads and trade routes led, new settlements were created along lines specified in the first century BCE by the architect Vitruvius, whose books precisely detailed site selection, grid street patterns, street widths and orientation, the location and character of colonnades, and the size of city blocks. The roads and settlements offered both security and comfort to local peoples and their places, who where assimilated into the Roman way of life.

The Roman attitude to place was described by the geographer Strabo about 10 CE. “A knowledge of places,” he wrote at the beginning of his Geography (section 1.2.12), “is conducive of virtue,” and and by virtue he meant living in harmony with nature. Geographers, with their knowledge of the cosmos, wide travel, and careful observations, were especially capable of evaluating places, and this enabled them to interpret the providential order of landscapes, to distinguish good sites from unpropitious ones, and to advise others, especially political and military leaders, on how to take advantage of them. Whether the leaders paid much attention to this advice is not clear, but there is ample evidence that the great Roman network of roads and trade routes carried fashions for amphitheatres, therapeutic baths, villas with under-floor heating and elegant mosaics, and carefully organised grid town plans throughout the empire. This could be considered an early form of placelessness, though Strabo’s remarks suggest that it did involve adaptations to the particularities of places.  

Roads and trade routes do, however, run in two directions. As they took Roman culture to the frontiers, they also brought people from throughout the empire to Rome. At its peak the city had a population of about 1 million (perhaps 30 percent of whom were slaves).  It had many of the elements we still identify with large cities – stadiums, centres of government, multi-story tenements, water supply and sewerage systems. But it was also filled with noise, congestion, inequalities and what Lewis Mumford ( The City in History, p.237) describes evocatively as “megalopolitan elephantiasis.”  

The Dark Ages and the Disaggregation of Places
After about 200 CE the Roman empire began to decline for reasons that included corrupt emperors, widespread decadence, internal power struggles, overdependence on slave labour, administrative inefficiency, and a series of assaults by Saxons, Vandals and Goths that pushed back the frontiers and eventually reached Rome in 476 when the capital of the empire was moved to Constantinople. What happened to places during and after this decline is open to debate because between about 300 CE and 1000 CE there are few descriptions and little evidence of how people lived.

One view is that the decline of imperial control opened the way for decentralization and this led to an period of local independence and creativity. A more conventional view is that literacy and learning plummeted as government and administration collapsed, and that populations declined dramatically because of violence, starvation and disease (a devastating plague in 540 may have wiped out 1/3^rd of Europe’s population, a sobering thought in 2020 as an epidemic of novel coronavirus spreads around the world and appears to be particularly acute in Europe). By the end of the 5^th century the population of Rome had dropped to about 30,000, and people lived in the ruins of civilization. Elsewhere places were disaggregated, the infrastructure built by the Romans crumbled, towns and villages were abandoned or became barely self-sustaining, and the countryside was taken over by waves of immigrant invaders – Goths, Huns, Saxons or Vikings, depending on the specific region of Europe.

Those new immigrants left remarkably little evidence of placemaking and except for legacy of place names, which have filtered through into the names of towns and cities. In Britain, for instance, the suffix –borough is derived from the Anglo-Saxon –burh (e.g. Middlesborough) meaning fortified settlement, while –ham (Birmingham) and –by (Grimsby) both mean village, York probably comes from the Viking Jorvik. Normandy means the land of the North Men, or Vikings. Otherwise, the primary impact of the Dark Ages was one of taking places apart or allowing them to decay, of placeunmaking rather than placemaking.

The History of Places continues in another post….
Places in the Middle Ages or Medieval Period that (about 1000 to 1500), the Age of Reason (about 1500 to 1800), the Industrial Period (about 1800 to 1900), and the Modern Era (about 1900 to 1970) is summarised in the post The History of Places Part Two: 1000 to the present

This post introduces a series in which I consider how places and experiences of place have changed in the past, and how they may change in the future.

Current trends in population, climate and environmental change, electronic communications, social and economic inequalities, migration, urbanization, and international travel, could combine in the near future to have profound affects on place.  While these trends are global in their scope, their consequences will probably play out in the neighbourhoods, villages, towns, cities and regions of everyday life. In this sequence of posts I want to try to project how places might change in the next thirty or so years in the context of these trends. And to do this a way that is well grounded, it is, I think, necessary to have some understanding of the history of places. 

This introductory post outlines some of the assumptions I have made, and the approach I will follow. The next posts will offer an overview of how places have changed over the course of human history, and an examination of the role of continuity in place identities or what has not changed. Continuity matters because much of what exists now in places will continue to exist in the future, regardless of any technological or social revolutions. The series ends with a consideration of current trends, and prognoses for the future of places and place experiences.

The Fundamental Role of Place
“To exist in any way,” philosopher Ed Casey wrote in the foreword to his book The Fate of Place (p.ix),  “is to be somewhere. Place is as requisite as the air we breathe, the ground on which we stand, the bodies we have…We are surrounded by places.  We walk over and through them.  We live in places, relate to others in them, die in them.” This expresses concisely the fundamental significance of place and the fact that it is through places that we know much of the world. It follows that it is important to understand something about how places have changed in the past and might change in the future.

In these posts I draw a distinction between “place” and “places.” Obviously, as the quote from Casey indicates, these terms are closely related (simply put, place is about places), but “place” by itself it is a relatively abstract and elusive concept that is difficult to define precisely (see my first post in this blog, which notes at least 29 different definitions). To mitigate this uncertainty I ground my approach as much as possible in consideration of the identities of “places,” the ones we walk over and through and live in. Some of these places are our homes, or locations where we have had formative experiences that are significant only to us. In these posts, however, my interest is about places at the geographical scales of neighbourhoods, cities, villages, sites, and regions, and the social processes that govern how these are made and experienced.

I have discussed the future of place in two previous posts . One summarized ideas expressed in a conference about ways to advance placemaking. The other outlined what I call a “pragmatic sense of place.” Those posts advocate the need to bring ideas of place and placemaking into the foreground of policy and planning.  In contrast, here my emphasis is on the identities of material places, the ways they have been made, are being made, and might be made in the near future.

By material places I mean nothing mysterious. They are what we encounter whenever we go outside, whether into a village, a park, or an urban neighbourhood. They are the sites, districts, towns and cities we visit, and the regions we know because we have travelled across them. Material places are lived in and known through direct experiences, they have names and are filled with buildings, streets, landscapes, and activities, they are permeated by memories, values and beliefs that lend meaning to them. It was in material places that all historical events occurred, and it will be in them that the consequences of climate change, electronic media, inequality and migration will play out over the next few decades.

Although several of these posts are devoted to the history of places, my goal is to offer prognoses about the future of places. At the outside I acknowledge that this is an uncertain exercise.  Some trends affecting them, such as demographic change, can be predicted with a modest degree of accuracy; but others such as technological innovations and their implications are very difficult to anticipate. One way to reduce some of this uncertainty is to attend to the history of places because this can indicate the types of processes and influences that have affected places in the past, and might reasonably be expected to do so in the future.

A construction site sign at Union Station in Toronto in 2014 provides a cautionary tale about projecting the future of place. Tomorrow was not a better place for Carillion, a multinational British construction company considered too big to be allowed to fail. Yet when it became hugely overextended the British government refused to bail it out and in 2018 Carillion was liquidated. Nevertheless, the material places Carillion constructed, such as the renovation to Union Station, do continue to exist.

An Approach to Understanding Change in Places
It is clear to me that any attempt to indicate how places could change in the future benefits from knowledge about how they have changed in the past. Therefore my approach begins with a survey of the history of places over the course of human history from 10,000 BCE to the present. As far as I know nobody has attempted anything like this (in The Fate of Place, from which I quoted above, Ed Casey does trace the the ups and downs of the concept of place over the last 2500 years but doesn’t say much about actual places). Of course, a brief account of the history of places over such a long time span is superficial, and cannot do justice to the differences between circumstances in previous ages and those of the present. Nevertheless it does provide a comprehensive framework for beginning to understand how places have evolved since the first permanent settlements were made. It is a valuable foundation for interpreting how places are currently changing, and offers cautions for making prognoses about the future of places.

A consideration of the history of material places is an exercise in thinking about change at social and geographical scales. I have taken as a guide for doing this the approach of the French historian Fernand Braudel, and I have adapted it to my specific purposes.

Braudel interpreted history through three concurrent time scales: the longue durée in which things endure or change very slowly; conjunctures in which consistent values and practices prevail for several generations; and events, which are idiosyncratic, filled with fascinating details but have short-lived consequences. In effect these three concurrent scales of time correspond to what might be called long-term, mid-term and short-term changes that are always occurring everywhere.

Aspects of longue durée from the perspective of place are those for which change is so slow that it is scarcely perceptible, such as rivers, mountains and (until very recently) climate. But they also include underlying processes such as population growth and urban growth, which have continued for millennia and underlie all change in places. Beliefs, traditions, a sense of national or regional identity, and even some institutions such as universities, can also endure across centuries in spite of political, economic and technological changes.

Conjunctures correspond to phases of place identity that demonstrate a distinctive combination of built forms, values, political systems, and ways of life that last for several generations or centuries. Then they are replaced by another phase as a result of technological innovations, a shift in beliefs, migrations, or other altered circumstances. These phases are apparent in familiar historical periods, such as the Middle Ages or the Industrial Revolution. Within each conjuncture there is consistency in how places are made and in the character of the identities of those places. While shifts in ways of making places do occur within a conjuncture, these are incremental around a consistent and coherent core, for instance in the way that Gothic architecture was refined over several centuries while retaining its basic characteristics.

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Indications of clear differences between place conjunctures – the Middle Ages and Modernity.

Extraordinary place events, for instance revolutions, destruction by wars, or natural disasters such as the great earthquake of Lisbon in 1775, are locally dramatic in the short-run, and sometimes serve as triggers that herald the emergence of a new conjuncture. However, Braudel notes that the apparent significance of events can be deceptive. Many have relatively little impact on wider and enduring characteristics of places and place experiences.

These ideas of longue durée, conjuncture and event provide a basis for contemplating the past and the future of places. I pay particular attention to the following:

 • The identification of phases of place that lasted for several centuries or generations. I only consider short-term events if those appear to have had longer-term consequences. Because I am mostly interested in broad trends in place identities, I pay little attention to the longue durée role of physical geography, for instance, mountains as barriers and rivers as means of communication, which may have had significance for regional places. I do consider population and urban growth to be important long-term processes that have had major implications for places.

• The identities of places. By this I mean their plans, buildings and landscapes, and the ways they were made. There is material evidence of identities in archaeological sites, old buildings and fragments of old townscapes, and this provides a basis for distinguishing historical phases of places.

• For each phase of place I stress what is innovative in way of making places, whether because of new technologies or because of shifts in thinking. However, I recognize that continuity and persistence in the identities of places is no less important than change, and that what happened in each phase was always superimposed on whatever remained of earlier ages. In a sense this is a longue durée aspects of place, not unchanging but incrementally accumulating elements from the past. I will address this in a post about continuity. An important implication is that whatever exists now will be a foundation for the identities of places in the future.

• The history of places provides a basis for critical assessment of the implications of current trends in heritage and environmental protection, globalization, urbanization electronic media, increases in travel, and climate change. Are these manifestations of a shift from one conjuncture or phase of place experience to another (perhaps from a modern era to a postmodern, post-industrial one)? If this is the case, the result could be substantial changes in ways places are made and experienced in the near future.

• For most of the last 10,000 years the natural environment, including weather systems and ecosystems, could reasonably be considered as part of the longue durée background to everyday life, changing or being changed very slowly. With climate change, species extinction, and other profound anthropogenic impacts, these longue durée aspects of places could shift in unprecedented ways with radical implications for place experiences

References
Fernand Braudel 1949 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
Fernand Braudel 1979 Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century
Ed Casey 1997 The Fate of Place: A philosophical history

Common preamble to three posts on changes to place over the last 50 years
I recently posted an unpublished and not previously circulated essay at Academia.org on the ways that places and place experiences have altered since about 1970. It draws on some of my posts on this website, and also on my publications about place (mostly book chapters that might not be easily available) since about 1990.   My main reason for writing the essay is that experiences of being rooted in place, belonging, attachment and so on, and indeed the forces of placelessness that might be eroding these, are not timeless and unchanging. What made sense in 1970, when I was writing my book Place and Placelessness, needs to be updated both because there are now practices for protecting, making and promoting places that did not exist then, and because the ways places are experienced have shifted dramatically in a world of cheap air travel and omnipresent electronic devices.

I assume those looking at this website and those reading Academia are mostly from different audiences, so this and two additional posts offer a sort of point form summary of my Academia essay, which is about 60 pages long. This post (#3) offers some theoretical speculations about changing relationships between place and placelessness and what they portend for the future of places. The first post (#1) considers recent changes to ways places are made. The second post (#2) deals mostly with changes since 1970 to the ways places are experienced.

Although they are really only summaries of ideas, I hope that together the three posts offer enough suggestions about recent changes for you to be able to explore them further, perhaps question some conventional assumptions about roots and sense of place, or, conversely, to refine arguments that place provides continuity in the face of change.

Changing relations of place and placelessness
The forces of placelessness and the processes of place constantly push and pull against each other in ways that change over time. In Place and Placelessness I presented them as in opposition to each other, with placelessness eroding the distinctiveness of place. Something like this:

I subsequently began to regard them as in a dynamic balance, always pushing against one other. This interpretation, which regards everywhere as to some degree placeless, and in some ways distinctive, is both more flexible than the idea that place and placelessness are opposing forces. It also makes room for the recognition that a balance is necessary to offset situations where distinctive becomes associated with exclusion, or situations where uniformity is so extreme that identification with place becomes virtually impossible.

But even this sort of yin-yang idea of the relationship between place and placelessness fails to capture what seems to have happened with increasing mobility and the intrusions of electronic media. It does not reflect the complexities of hybrid places in mongrel cities, non-places, and the ways even heritage preservation has resulted in standardization. It now seems more appropriate to understand the relationship of place and placelessness as one of entanglement, at least partially. In some places distinctiveness is clear, elsewhere uniformity is clear, but it is also the case that non-places can be considered as distinctive places, World Heritage Sites can be overrun by mass tourism, the celebration of place can involve NIMBYism and exclusion, and the confusions of hybridity can contribute to complex and distinctive places. This simple diagram is an attempt to capture this blend of balance and entanglement:

Place as a lens to the world
There are many different ways to understand place, but one that I think has considerable methodological value is to regard it as a lens to the world. In other words, all places are microcosms of larger patterns and processes, albeit adapted to local circumstances, because they are the consequences of those processes and also contribute to them. Places are fusions of physical settings, activities and meanings that are parts of the whole world, and they are themselves wholes. It is in and through place, or more specifically through specific places with their own names, that we know the world. The wholeness of place is not something mysterious. It is what we experience everyday, at home, when we step outside, when we travel.

Given this fundamental relationship, the deliberate study of place and of places offers a means to understand the complex unity of the larger world as it is directly known and experienced, and the ways this world is changing. That said, given the heterotopian confusions of the present-day world this is not a straightforward process.

Trend to Heterotopia
Place, and the processes that give rise to places are not immutable. Fifty years ago, when I was writing Place and Placelessness, it seemed that local processes that had once led to distinctive places were being eroded by the abstract forces of modernism. This simple, binary interpretation does not apply well to many landscapes created since then in the light of heritage preservation, branding, mobility and electronic media, all processes that seem to simultaneously enhance yet undermine place identities.

Two examples of present-day place confusion. On the left: Sense of Place clothing store is in the shopping mall underneath Kyoto Japan Rail Station. A sign in the store reads: “Sense of place is about confidence in knowing who you are and what style means to you.” On the right: a conflation of iconic skylines from world cities, on a sign entirely in Chinese in Seattle Premium Outlets, a discount mall on the Tulalip Indian Reserve, north of Seattle, where many of the shoppers are Chinese-Canadians.

Michel Foucault suggested the word “heterotopia” to characterize this confusion. A heterotopy is literally something out of place. In heterotopia most things seem out of place and it is difficult to identify any coherent logic underlying them. Old geographical notions about regions and settlements no longer apply. Everything everywhere is now interconnected, yet filled with unlikely juxtapositions and dislocated experiences.

This fragment of a streetscape in North York in Toronto is a mundane example of the unlikely juxtapositions of heterotopia. Roses New York offers a fusion of North American and Persian food, upstairs is an Egyptian psychic, next door a Korean-Japanese restaurant, the billboard advertises fictional places on Canadian TV. 

Although heterotopia is not entirely new (unlikely juxtapositions have always happened whenever different cultures have come into close contact), in the last half century it has hugely intensified with multi-centred living, mobility and transnationalism. What is remarkable is that, not unlike electronic devices, it has so quickly become familiar and taken for granted in the mobile world and mongrel cities of the early 21^st century. What is perhaps even more remarkable is that it seems to be associated with the decline of Enlightenment ideas of rationalism, truth and reality. The “thrown-togetherness” (Doreen Massey’s term) of many newly created places seems to be one expression of the sense that anything goes, that any belief or ideology is valid even if it unsupported by empirical evidence. Hybrid places and heterotopian landscapes are in themselves harmless, and in some ways reflect the diversity and openness of the present-day world that is a consequence of the decline of oppressive, restrictive practices that masqueraded as rational and realistic. However,  they are not incidental superficial phenomena so much as manifestations of confusion associated with the paradigm shift that is happening at the end of the rationalist era that has lasted several centuries, confusion that is being reinforced by the emergence of social and political forces that deny evidence, resist diversity and promote exclusion.

The most intense example of heterotopia may be the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. The ruined building was remarkably left standing at the epicentre of the atom bomb explosion. It is a World Heritage Site that preserves destruction and reasserts the continuity of place, yet is also the place where rational knowledge reached beyond reason.

The Openess of Place
Though there are no obvious guidelines to help make sense of what is happening as rationalism loses its once privileged position, I think a phenomenological return to place offers possible clarifications in a way that is neither poisoned by the confirmation biases of exclusion nor coldly detached. What I mean by a phenomenological return not only considers the importance of belonging somewhere, but, in the present-day context, also attends to flows of information, mobility and heterotopia. More specifically it has to consider the constant interconnections between here and elsewhere that are an unavoidable aspect of current place experiences. Jeff Malpas refers to place as an “open, cleared yet bounded region in which we find ourselves gathered together with other persons and things, and in which we are opened to the world and the world to us.”

The increased openness of place has eroded the distinction between place and placelessness. One response to this is an attempt to reverse change and deny difference; this is a retreat into parochialism and exclusion that are manifestations of a poisoned sense of place, and it has been exacerbated by the echo chambers of social media. The other response embraces openness and diversity, and recognizes that local and global connections are present everywhere. From this perspective every place is a portal to the world. This is implicit in multi-centred lives, time-space compression, and the global village. It is increasingly how people everywhere connect with geography. It regards heterotopia as positive even if its manifestations are baffling. Above all it acknowledges that humanity is shared regardless of local differences.

An everyday instance of the openness of place.  A sign in the small town of Sidney in British Columbia for LaLoCa, a store that sells products, according to the small print. “Products from ethical social enterprises and fair trade producers from Vancouver Island, BC & around the world.”

Responsibility and the Future of Places
The social and technological changes of the last fifty years which have affected place and place experiences will not be undone in the foreseeable future. We have moved far beyond the world before modernism in which the distinctiveness of places arose from rooted and geographically separated communities. Distinctiveness is now based partly on the protection of cultural, built and natural heritage defended by forceful international, national and local organizations, partly on place branding and placemaking that have become entrenched in business and planning practices, and partly on what people with multicentred lives bring to the places where they currently live. And not least because of these new commitments to distinctiveness it is inconceivable that there will be an untrammelled revival of the modernist placeless predilection for replacing whatever was old with something efficient and new, though principles of international uniformity will continue to be manifest in landscapes of skyscraper offices, production plants, distribution centres and non-places associated with the global economy.

Mobility, whether for tourism or migration, is expected to increase substantially in the coming decades. Cities will continue to hybridize, electronic communications will intrude further and in devious ways into place experiences, heritage preservation and branding will further reinforce distinctiveness. The specific consequences of these trends will vary in intensity and character from place to place and over time. From the perspective of those who consider mobility, multi-centred lives and electronic communications as processes that diminish sense of place and erode rootedness, this is regrettable. My own view is that while these irreversible changes have may have diminished lifelong rootedness in place, they have actually reduced the prevalence of placelessness and have broadened experiences of the diversity of places. They are not without their problems, such as the inconsistent uses of the idea of heritage, the fact that place branding is an indication of submission to neo-liberal economics, the way tourism sometimes overwhelms cities, and electronic media can facilitate exclusionary, parochial attitudes. Nevertheless, on balance I regard the changes a positive trade-off because both because they mostly reinforce place identities and especially because they foster a sense of the openness of place, the understanding that places are portals to the world.

The importance of the openness of place lies in the ways it directly informs how we can understand and take responsibility for places. First, in this ‘post-truth’ age our direct experiences of place allows us to compare the claims and opinions of politicians and supposed experts against what we encounter ourselves – actual people and real things, not ‘the public’ and consumer goods. Second, in a multi-centred mobile world we need to take responsibility for where we are, no matter how briefly we are somewhere. This can happen in countless different ways – gardening, helping neighbours, buying local produce, participation in community activities, and protesting developments that are socially or environmentally damaging. Third, openness to the world is of fundamental significance in understanding the profound challenges of the global village we all now live in, perhaps most significantly, the challenge of climate change, but also water shortages, intensifying social inequality, and the rise of exclusionary authoritarian governments.

Michel Foucault 1970 The Order of Things, (London: Tavistock Press). p.xv.
Jeff Malpas, 2006, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p.221.
Doreen Massey 2005 For Space (London: Sage Publication), Chapter 13

Common preamble to three posts on changes to place over the last 50 years
I recently posted an unpublished and not previously circulated essay at Academia.org on the ways that places and place experiences have altered since about 1970. It draws on some of my posts on this website, and also on my publications about place (mostly book chapters that might not be easily available) since about 1990.   My main reason for writing the essay is that experiences of being rooted in place, belonging, attachment and so on, and indeed the forces of placelessness that might be eroding these, are not timeless and unchanging. What made sense in 1970, when I was writing my book Place and Placelessness, needs to be updated both because there are now practices for protecting, making and promoting places that did not exist then, and because the ways places are experienced have shifted dramatically in a world of cheap air travel and omnipresent electronic devices.

I assume that those looking at this website and those reading Academia are mostly from two different audiences, so this and two additional posts offer a sort of point form summary of my Academia essay, which is about 60 pages long. This post (#2) deals mostly with changes since 1970 to the ways places are experienced. A previous post (#1) considered recent changes to ways places are made. The third post (#3) offers some theoretical speculations about changing relationships between place and placelessness and what they portend for the future of places.

Although they are really only summaries of ideas, I hope that together the three posts offer enough suggestions about recent changes for you to be able to explore them further, perhaps question some conventional assumptions about roots and sense of place, or, conversely, to refine arguments that place provides continuity in the face of change.

A small installation I came upon in a coffee shop in British Columbia that expresses a complementary relationship between roots and mobility in experiences of place.

Increased Mobility In 1965 the Interstate highway system in the US was under construction but far from complete, and there were no motorways in Britain; both now have networks of expressways that have effectively shrunk the distances between places. In 1975, when the world’s population was about 4 billion, there were estimated to be about 250 million motor vehicles in the world, or one for every 16 people; in 2018 there are about 1.25 billion for 7.6 billion, or one for every six people. In 1950 there were about 22 million international tourist arrivals, which amounted to less than one per cent of the world’s population travelling internationally; by 1975 the number had grown to 222 million, equivalent to 6 per cent of the world’s population; in 2016 the there were over 1.25 billion such arrivals, equivalent to 17 percent of the global population. At any given moment there are now estimated to be about one million people in the air, on their way to visit and experience for themselves formerly exotic places, to see their families, or to work.

This graph showing the growth of tourism clear shows one aspect of the change in mobility that has happened over the last fifty years. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/tourism, and data from UN World Tourism Organization.

In short, fifty years ago most people experienced a few places quite slowly; now many people have easy, quick access to many places, and many of which are experienced quite briefly. The consequences of this increase in mobility for place experience means that the deep but confined sense of a few places that prevailed for most of human history, has in half a century for most people been replaced by a relatively shallow experience of many places. Whether this trade-off is beneficial is, I think, an open question.

Merits of Tourist experiences and the Inauthentic Authenticity of Mass Tourist Destinations In effect, what has happened is that travel and tourism have been democratized. No matter how brief, crowded or programmed the consequent experiences of place may be, experiences of many places involves opportunities for appreciation and learning. It is difficult to argue that this is not beneficial because it increases appreciation of the variety of the world and its people, and it challenges the parochialism and exclusion that can all too easily follow from a narrowly rooted sense of place.

On the other hand mass tourism is a mixed blessing for those places that are on its receiving end, where sheer numbers are beginning to undermine the very place qualities that made them attractive. Venice is perhaps the most extreme example, where the dwindling resident population of about 55,000 is confronted annually by about 25 million visitors, many from cruise ships, but Barcelona, hiking trails in New Zealand and many World Heritage sites, such as the Pantheon in Rome, shown here in 2017, are confronting the same problem of authentic place qualities being eroded by sheer numbers of visitors.

Non-Place Places The term “non-places” was coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to refer to airports, service stations, hotels, theme parks, hospitals and similar facilities that have no history, no resident population, and where everyone is an outsider – a client, customer or employee. They have standardized elements that can be understood by outsiders and they have certainly made travel much easier.

Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam is a non-place with few signs in Dutch, but, as the indigenous art installations at Vancouver International indicate, even a non-place can be a distinctive place.

Paradoxically, as Tim Cresswell’s study of Schiphol has shown, they also have their own identities for those who use them frequently or work in them, and their designs and art installation often reflect the local setting. To that degree even non-places are places.

Multi-centred Lives Lucy Lippard describes modern society as multi-centred because many people live for extended periods in different places, or effectively have two different homes (where they come from, where they live now, a cabin or cottage they can escape to,and so on). Multi-centredness is not entirely new, but it has intensified over the last few decades. The UN reports that that are now over 250 million international migrants in the world, and one third of those have migrated since 1990. Global diasporas, transnationalism and multi-centred lives have become a major aspect of the demographic reality of the present age.

There can be little doubt that multi-centredness has changed how people experience and relate to place. For example, research by Stephanie Taylor in Britain has suggested that for women the ‘born and bred narrative’ of long-term family connections to a home place is questionable as increasing numbers choose to participate in the opportunities offered by mobility between places.

Mongrel Cities and Hybrid Places, yet the Beginnings hold Everything Diasporas are not a new phenomenon, but their variety and character has given rise to cultural heterogeneity in cities that represents a substantial change especially in Anglo-American and European cities that had previously homogeneous cultures. The result of immigration either from former colonies or from places with very different cultural histories has given rise to what have been called “mongrel cities”, filled with hybrid mixtures of races, restaurants, festivals, and religious buildings. If continuity and coherence are considered important aspects of place, clearly neither applies to mongrel cities.

Nevertheless, in all this hybridity, in multi-centred lives, in restless mobility, in displacement of all types, there seems to be one constant. The places where people come from and grew up remain locked in memories that inform subsequent place experiences. In short, in the words of psychoanalyst Elena Liotta, who comes from Argentina but lives in Italy, “the beginnings hold everything.”

Electronic Media, the Global Village and an Electronic Sense of Place Electronic media permeate almost all place experiences of the present day. There was a recognition of the potentially pervasive effects of these in the 1960s with Marshall McLuhan’s suggestion that they shrink the world into a global village filled with immediate and undigested gossip about places that were once considered remote. But since the 1980s personal computers, the internet, mobile phones and social media have turned this suggestion into an continuous, omnipresent reality. It has been suggested that electronic media completely undermine sense of place, or rendered it obsolete, but a more nuanced argument is that in just a few decades they have reinforced the changes to place experiences associated with increased mobility because, as Sharon Kleinman suggests, they provide “nearly seamless anytime, anyplace connectivity” in which “here and there can be almost anywhere, and, moreover, both can be moving.” It is not exactly that a sense of local place has been destroyed but that an electronic sense of place has turned it into an elusive component of topological networks that connect it with a wider world.

Non-Place communities and an electronically poisoned sense of place There is another more ominous aspect to the impact of electronic media on place. They have made it easy for non-place (i.e. geographically scattered) communities of like-minded individuals to use social media to reinforce what they regard as the distinctive, exclusive and superior qualities of their place. Social media provide echo chambers for otherwise unrelated  individuals to share prejudices and exacerbate the sorts of exclusionary convictions that arise whenever populations develop excessively protective attitudes about their neighbourhood, or their nation. This is an electronically poisoned sense of place that challenges the positive place effects and appreciation of diversity that arise from increased mobility, multi-centred living, and mongrel cities.

Comment As with changes that have happened to the character of places in the last fifty years, the changes that have happened to place experiences have had mixed consequences. In some ways they have reinforced place, in others they have reinforced placelessness, and sometimes they appear to do both simultaneously. They have broadened sense of place, changed it in ways that are still far from clear (especially in the case of electronic media), yet also amplified some its most unpleasant, parochial aspects. In the third post about changes to place I will offer some theoretical comments about how to understand these implications, and what they might bode for the future of place.

Marc Augé 1995 Non-Places: introduction to the anthropology of supermodernity, (London: Verso)
Tim Cresswell 2006 On the Move: mobility in the modern western world (London: Routledge), see p.257 about Schiphol
Sharon Kleinman 2007 Displacing place: mobile communication in the twenty-first century (New York: Peter Lang)
Elena Liotta 2009 On Soul and Earth: the psychic value of place (London: Routledge)
Lucy Lippard 1997 The Lure of the Local: senses of place in a multi-centered society, (New York: W.W.Norton)
Stephanie Taylor 2010 Narratives of identity and place (London: Routledge)