This edition first published 2015

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (1e, 2004)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cresswell, Tim.

    Place: an introduction / Tim Cresswell. – Second edition.

        pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-470-65562-7 (pbk.)

1.  Human geography.    2.  Geographical perception.    I.  Title.

    GF50.C74 2015

    304.2'3–dc23

                                                                        2014018394

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Untitled, South East Spain, 2006, Ben Murphy. From the series The Riverbed. Copyright Ben Murphy 2014.

For Yi-Fu Tuan

1.1 Demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, 2011

1.2 A Manhattan community garden

1.3 Tompkins Square Park, New York City

1.4 St. Mark's Place in Manhattan's East Village

1.5 Graffiti on the Lower East Side, Manhattan

2.1 Gay liberation monument, Christopher Park, NewYork City

2.2 The Millennium Gate at Chinatown, Vancouver, Canada

3.1 Desire lines on the Australian National University campus

3.2 Cinderella's Castle at Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida

3.3 Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Dartmoor, England

3.4 Chhatrapari Shivaji Airport, Mumbai

5.1 “Out of rear window tenement dwelling of Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Solomon, 133 Avenue D, New York City”

5.2 Christian cross at Auschwitz

5.3 The Statue of Liberty, New York City

5.4 Ellis Island Immigration Museum hall

5.5 and 5.6 Ellis Island and Angel Island

5.7 The inside of Nant-y-Cwm Steiner School in West Wales

5.8 Parc de la Villette, Paris

5.9 The Angel of the North

5.10 and 5.11 “Nowhereisland” by Alex Hartley

6.1 Illustration from Harper's magazine (1876)

6.2 A ringnecked parakeet on a bird feeder in Bromley, London, UK

Thinking and writing about place has, for me, been an interactive activity for many years. I have been fortunate enough to have encountered some outstanding teachers as a student. These include Peter Jackson, Jacquie Burgess, Denis Cosgrove, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Robert Sack. They have all inspired me in different ways and I hope some of that inspiration is evident in this book. Now that I am a teacher myself I find myself increasingly indebted to students who have taken ideas and run with them in startling directions. They include Gareth Hoskins, Peter Adey, Bradley L. Garrett, Kimberley Peters, Craig Martin, Amy Cutler, Andre Novoa, terri moreau, Rupert Griffiths, Weiqiang Lin, and Laura Prazeres. In the years between the first edition and this edition I spent seven happy years at the Geography Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, which proved to be a remarkable site of intellectual endeavor for a cultural geographer such as myself. Landscape Surgery was a particularly wonderful arena to discuss ideas about place, landscape, mobility, material culture, and just about anything else a cultural geographer could wish for. I am more particularly indebted to Carol Jennings for her careful reading of this manuscript and many useful suggestions. Michael Brown is the true inventor of the word anachorism that appears in Chapter 6. Finally, many thanks to Gerry Pratt and Nick Blomley for the invitation to write the original version of this book and to the good people at Wiley-Blackwell for helping along the way. Justin Vaughan at Wiley-Blackwell has been consistently encouraging and has provided much needed prods in the years since I agreed to write the second edition.

Extracts from Space, Place, and Gender (1994) by Doreen Massey are used by permission of Polity Press, University of Minnesota Press, and the author.

The first edition of Place: A Short Introduction was published in 2004 as part of a series of short introductions in geography. The idea was to focus on a concept rather than a traditional subfield. I had some doubt as to whether such a book would have a market as a teaching tool. While a concept such as place is clearly central to the discipline of geography – the discipline I was writing for and from – it is rarely the case that there is a course with place as its singular focus. I have been delighted, therefore, at the way the first edition has been used so widely both in geography and beyond. It was much more successful that I ever imagined. It certainly has been widely used as a text book in geography courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. What is more encouraging is the way it has been used across disciplines it was not explicitly aimed at. These include creative writing, English literature, American studies, religious studies, architecture, and interdisciplinary liberal arts. There are even courses with the title “place studies” that use it.

In addition to the obvious importance of place across a range of disciplines in the academy, there has been a resurgence of place issues in the wider world beyond. The events of the Arab Spring and Occupy were frequently framed around place issues. There have been lively discussions about the effects of multinationals and chain stores on the downtowns of cities. The idea of the local (a derivative of place) has been powerful in the rise of new-old forms of food culture and economic systems. Writing about place in the form of creative non-fiction has seen a renaissance in the United Kingdom (the place I know best) with place-based books appearing in national newspapers and in the bestseller lists. Art, too, has continued to ask questions of place and belonging.

Researching and writing about place, then, is clearly both an interdisciplinary endeavor and a practice that extends beyond the academy. For this reason the second edition of Place: A Short Introduction is a more interdisciplinary and outward-looking book, less focused on the discipline of geography. Geography has a lot to offer, thanks to its history of focusing on place, but it is not the sole owner of the concept. This is an offering, from the place of geography, to the wider world. This edition is about 50 percent longer than the first edition and, therefore, not so “short.” I hope, nevertheless, to have maintained the accessibility of the first edition. In addition to a more generally interdisciplinary sense to the book, there are added sections which reflect the engagement with place across disciplines. These include sections on philosophy, architecture, art and place, information technologies, assemblage theory, and animal geographies amongst others. Otherwise encouraging notes from a few readers noted a number of errors in the first edition and I am grateful to them. I have kept a list and have hopefully rectified these issues.