Spatiophilia, the attraction for space

By the term spatiophilia, I present the result of the photographic survey I have been conducting for a couple of years now on how the concepts of space and place are perceived and used with communicative intent through the streets of Milano, Italy.

The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.
MICHEL FOUCAULT, Of Other Spaces

Foreword

It was surprising for me when I recently typed the word spatiophilia in the box of different web search engines, and, after I pushed enter, I got almost no results:^[1] I was looking for a term, a single word, that could actually resume with a concise expression the feeling for space in the sense of attachment for space, or an expression to communicate the bias or preference that people have for space and its linguistic usage, in regard to the description of different environmental contexts or situations, including daily routines. That was what resulted from the photographic report that I am presenting here. After all, as proclaimed by Michel Foucault a few decades ago, the present epoch is ‘the epoch of space’.^[2] Therefore, the existence of that phenomenon — the conscious or even unconscious attraction that people have for space and its frequent linguistic usage to account for the description of the physical surrounding context (i.e., the circumambient world), especially — seemed to me a well-diffused phenomenon, even outside the architectural domain. In the end, I was surprised that nobody described this apparent bias for space using a particular term or a technical term such as spatiophilia can be.^[3] But I think there is an explanation for that.

All scholars who have some interest in the humanistic study of spatial/placial concepts have probably already understood what I want to say: spatiophilia is here intended as the correlative expression or counterpart of ‘topophilia’, a well-known spatial term and concept since the ‘70s, when the Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, used it as the title of his fortunate, often-quoted book Topophilia (1974), to describe ‘the affective bond between people and place’.^[4] The term topophilia was already used years before by Gaston Bachelard, in his Poetics of Space (1957, the first French edition), for which Tuan wrote a review in the Landscape Magazine (Autumn 1961, Volume 11, Issue 1); the same term was also used a few times, by the British-American poet W. H. Auden, in his introduction to the book of poems by Sir John Betjeman Slick but not Streamlined (1947). However, we can go back further to 1842 – the first published record I was able to find – to see topophilia with a slighty different, more specific, connotation as ‘habitationis amor’, the love for home or dwelling, in a Latin manual of Phrenology by the Italian physician Gaspare Moro.^[5]

In Bachelard, as well as in Foucault — see note [2] —, there was a supreme ambiguity, if not a superposition of meanings between concepts of space and place, as also observed by the Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas.^[6] Probably, so far, that was a good reason to include the term ‘space’ (and, therefore — I believe — the attraction or bias that people have for its frequent linguistic usage) within concepts derived from the old Greek root topos (e.g., topophilia, or even topology, which, since the XIX century, is the name frequently associated with the discipline that studies the properties of geometrical space—after Leibniz’s invention of analysis situs).^[7] But, as you probably know if you have read some articles of this website, I reject, more often than not, the possibility to understand space as a derivative notion from topos (or a synonymous): that is the root cause of many confusing and ambiguous interpretations regarding the concepts of space and place, in almost any domain of human knowledge. Without a specific study of the origins and histories of thoses spatial/placial notions — which is the route I’m following and proposing at RSaP–Rethinking Space and Place — it is impossible to disentangle their intricate interconnections. The fact that I use the term spatiophilia as a counterpart of topophilia means that spatium and topos, which, here, are used as representative terms for space and place, are very different concepts, not far from Heidegger’s differentiation traced between the two terms in the famous essay Building Dwelling Thinking.^[8] Then, two terms deeply related, but different; a relation of continuity and opposition I’d say. This means that topos and derivative concepts cannot indifferently play the part or resume the sense of space or place, as it seems by reading Bachelard’s and Foucault’s narratives (but they are just the tip of the iceberg). Leaving aside for the moment the ambiguities behind Bachelard’s and Foucault’s spatial terminology, and accepting Tuan’s genuine intuition, if ‘topophilia’ is ‘the affective bond between people and place’, your guess is right: here, spatiophilia is the correlated technical term to define the bias, attachment, or preference — if not properly an affective bond or love, as the beautiful land art installation in the image below seems to suggest — that people have for space and its linguistic usage to describe different types of environmental situations (I mean ‘space’ apart from its astronomical sense: in that case we speak of spacephilia, properly — see note [3]).

Image 1: Spazio Amato (i.e., Loved Space), neon installation by the italian artist Massimo Uberti, Capalbio (GR), Italy, 2020 (Info: Hypermaremma.com).

Spatiophilia: Photographic Report on how the concepts of space (spazio) and place (luogo) are perceived and used with communicative intent through the streets of Milano

I wasn’t able to synthesize better, in other terms than spatiophilia, the result of the report that I’m presenting in the photographic galleries below, after more than two years of surveys: I wanted to see how the concepts of space and place were perceived and used with communicative intent through the streets of Milano, my city of birth. Sometimes used interchangeably in the same context and with the same intent, sometimes not, there is an evident unbalance between the times the word space is used with respect to the word place. The bias for ‘space’ — for its frequent linguistic usage — rather than ‘place’ to describe either a specific or generic environing/environmental situations (e.g., apartment rooms, shops, offices, showrooms, classrooms, buildings, parks, flowerbeds, streets, squares, etc.) is tangible: as the 50 galleries of 300 images below show, the approximate ratio between the usage of the two words is 5 to 1. That is: the word ‘space’ (in Italian, spazio) used in signs, billboards, shop windows, public warnings, street banners, description of activities, hand-writings, tags, stickers, etc. is five times more frequent than the word ‘place’ (in Italian, luogo). This seems to be an indication that the mind of the modern man is space-biased rather than place-biased, which means that one tendency is more abstract than the other: we tend to think we are living in a domain of space, forgetting that, to begin with, the reality we live in is a concrete realm made of specific situations, places or locales. This (natural? induced?) tendency or bias that people have for space is what I mean here by spatiophilia. After all, in the past decades, this abstracting feeling or tendency towards our understanding and descriptions of the environments we live in has also been indirectly proved by the success of cognate conceptualizations like ‘non-places’ (Marc Augé) or ‘placelessness’ (Edward Relph), in social and political contexts, especially. At RSaP, I’m arguing that this spatially-biased, metaphorical and abstracting vision of reality, if not contrasted by more concrete attitudes, is the root of dangerous distortions which affect some of the most important questions of our contemporary epoch — biological, environmental, social, political, and economic questions (not to mention architectural and urban questions). These are questions inextricably connected to the way we think about reality — i.e., the surrounding environment — in terms of space and/or place, that is in terms of permeability/impermeability, presence/absence of limits, borders, boundaries, thresholds, or other liminal notions on which the meanings of place and space are also constructed. To address these questions with the most appropriate theoretical tools, we need to rethink space and place as complementary concepts, encompassing the whole of reality between concrete, material and qualitative aspects on the one side (the side of place), and abstract, ideal and quantitative aspects on the other (the side of space). In this way, we should avoid one aspect of reality cannibalizing the other, as it is especially evident in our contemporary epoch – ‘the epoch of space’ – where the sense of place has been buried in space or other recently discovered symbolic realms (e.g., artificial, digital, hybrid, virtual worlds).

In the past decades, architectural historians and critics Kenneth Frampton and Christian Norberg-Schulz have associated this excessive bias for the environments understood as space with some of the distortions of our universal civilization, among them the loss of place.^[9] To borrow a concept from Norberg-Schulz which perfectly adapts to the phenomenon we are describing, ‘spatiophilia’ could be seen as the sign of ‘a growing trend in this direction: the qualitative world with all its immediacy has fallen victim to quantification, which estranges us from the deeper meanings of our everyday experiences’.^[10] Here, ‘the qualitative world with all its immediacy’ is the world immediately accessible to us and expressed by ‘concrete names’ such as – shop, school, park, square, office, beauty salon, etc. – which are all names for specific places that evoke certain activities and experiences; conversely, the ‘quantification, which estranges us from the deeper meanings of our everyday experiences’, refers to the inalienable, abstract, quantitative connotation of space because of its original meaning as a distance, measure, or extension, which are all abstract determinations. To put it differently, this means that place has fallen victim to space, given that – the photographic report also suggests – we tend to replace the name of specific things or places, which are bearers of qualitative, experiential values and memories, with the more abstract and neutral term space, which is intrinsically devoid of such values. A loss of descriptive quality, a linguistic loss, which reflects the loss of place ‘that has its origins in an inadequate understanding of the environment’ and is a cause of human alienation, Norberg-Schulz argued.^[11] With somewhat different words but similar intent, such inadequate understanding of the environment due to the power of abstraction (i.e., the power of space), which is one important factor of human alienation, has also been described by the physicist and system thinker Fritjof Capra, in the following terms: ‘The power of abstract thinking has led us to treat the natural environment – the web of life – as if it consisted of separate parts, to be exploited by different interest groups. […] The belief that all these fragments […] are really separate has alienated us from nature and from our fellow human beings and thus has diminished us.’^[12] Behind the power of abstract thinking, we find space: space is a divisive factor, both metaphorically and physically. Even according to the American novelist and poet Wendell Berry, this psychological distance from the places we are part of, which is, after all, a distance from the flesh of reality that removes any intimacy we have with it, is proved by the abstract vocabulary we use in our descriptions. With the same fundamental principle, but more radically than I am doing for the occasion by addressing this alienating sentiment to space, Berry calls into question the abstracting function of language (he also considers ‘environment’ a too abstract word) which is ‘incapable of giving a true description of our relation to the world’, and, therefore, he describes it as ‘academic, artificial and pretentious’,^[13] concluding his attack to the bifurcating power of abstract language with exactly the same message that ‘spatiophilia’ wants to convey: ‘The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes, roads, creatures, and people.’^[14] Only the concrete names of things can express our intimacy with the flesh of the world, not certainly their substitution with the neutral term space, which, by its very nature, signifies the distance between things. How can we psychologically connect or reconnect to the world we are part of and the things it is made of if the language we use in our descriptions is a sign of separation or bifurcation?

Space, as a diffused mode of environmental description, has contributed and is still contributing to reduce people’s original qualitative understanding of the environment or circumambient world – i.e., place, ultimately – to a neutral realm without any qualitative determination, such as a system of geometric coordinates or their recent evolution into sets of GPS coordinates can be. This is an abstract conception of the environment, where space has taken the role that, in antiquity, the ancient atomists assigned to the void. And no matter how hard physicists and phenomenologists have tried to convince us that space is not void and can be the conveyor of temporal and material, or even qualitative and existential characters: common people, and among common people I include practitioners, entrepreneurs and politicians, do not know much about relativity, quantum mechanics or phenomenology. If, as Confucius affirms in The Analects, ‘the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name’, let’s start calling a spade a spade again.^[15] An office an office. A flowerbed a flowerbed. A place place. I believe physicists, philosophers, social scientists, architects, artists and the laymen could benefit from that.

space… the most obsessing of metaphors in today’s languages
MICHEL FOUCAULT, The Language of Space

Video 1: SPAZIO PREMUDA. ‘Space’ carved into the asphalt, Milano, Italy.

Spatiophilia in Charts and Numbers

In the slideshow above, I have included some charts that I derived from the analysis of the 300 hundred photographic shots you find in the galleries below. With those charts and numbers, I wanted to offer further material to ponder spatial questions. Those charts are a tentative hypothesis to unveil some connections between spatial language and the society that produced and developed such a language – I mean our modern ‘universal civilization’ in ‘the epoch of space’. If I had to pick up one reasonable argument for discussion, among others, I would take the reciprocal influence between the development and diffusion of the common concept of space on the one side (our traditional idea of space is the translation into ordinary language of the XVII-century conception of absolute space from physics – space as the neutral stage for processes), and the development and diffusion of modern economy and finance on the other side. Why such a suggestion? It seems to me – as the images also reveal – that there is more than occasional correspondence between the use of the term space and activities or situations which are, more often than not, finalized to economic processes, ultimately. Such economic processes are always getting more abstract without or with negligible regard to local processes (e.g., sociocultural processes); they are often based on the provision of services or the even more abstract productive aspects of knowledge and information (these latter aspects constitute the advanced tertiary sector of the economy). That raises the following questions: To what extent were the conceptual ‘triumph of space’ (space: the neutral, abstract container which is not rooted in any specific territorial reality or activity) and the correspondent ‘demise of place’ or ‘loss of place’ (place: the responsive, concrete container which is rooted in actual territorial realities and activities) functional to such economic plans and processes since the period after the first Industrial Revolution? Conversely: to what extent did such human plans and processes aiming at economic strategies and business forms growing in abstraction (from the production of physical goods to the provision of services, knowledge and information) contribute to the ‘triumph of space’ and the ‘demise of place’ or ‘the loss of place’? ^[16]

Foucault expressed his understanding of modern society in terms of space in the ‘60s, parallel to the sentiment expressed by Paul Ricoeur in ‘History and Truth’, 1965, where, regarding the emergence of a flattening, universal civilization, he talked about ‘a sort of subtle destruction, not only of traditional cultures […] but also of […] the ethical and mythical nucleus of mankind.’^[17] As we have mentioned in a passage above, that sentiment was intercepted by architects, historians and critics Kenneth Frampton and Christian Norberg Schulz, who, between the ’70s and the ’80s, proposed a turn to place to save architecture and our cities from the monotony and the flattening excesses of standardization associated with space, which was considered a vehicle for the diffusion of universal, abstracting aspects and an alienating sentiment. However, this request for a turn to place was contrasted by real happenings that went in the opposite direction – the direction of ‘spatiophilia’: in fact, during the 1980s and the 1990s, with the adoption of neo-liberal, free-market economic policies that emphasized on privatization of enterprises and services to pull out of global recession, the diffusion of multinational corporations and their business plans overtook national governments and any frontiers, state’s borders or physical limits, promoting even more than in the past the diffusion of a universal civilization (i.e., globalization):^[18] space, an un-limited domain, is what such multinational corporations needed for their plans, for the open and uninterrupted (i.e., unbounded) flow of goods and capital, and space – open and unbounded – is what they got–what we got. Even our language has been increasingly influenced by space, especially in recent decades; this abstracting trend is leading to the replacement of traditionally concrete, place-based terminology: for instance – the photographic report shows – old ‘cultural centers’ (center is a term that has specific place-based connotation) are now often referred to as ‘cultural spaces’; similarly, ‘kindergartens’ are changing to ‘spaces for kids,’ and ‘flowerbeds’ are being replaced by ‘green spaces’, while students or activists reclaim spaces instead of places. This shift illustrates a broader movement toward a more abstract conceptualization of community and the immediate environment. This is the historical phenomenon that ‘spatiophilia’ illustrates.

Trying to imagine the development of spatial language and use of spatial concepts beyond present times, I conclude this presentation of the spatiophilia phenomenon with the following consideration: as I said in the Preliminary Notes to this website, a new understanding of nature has been affirming for one century, at least, and a reformulation of spatial concepts is underway; this fact of incomparable scientific, sociocultural, and intellectual relevance, coupled with another relevant fact of our contemporary epoch – the environmental question and the discovery of climate change exacerbated by anthropic factors – is inverting the trend of interest between abstraction and concreteness, between ‘space’ and ‘place’ ultimately, that is: a new necessity from different social, economic, and cultural actors is felt to link processes and events to the actual reality where processes are located – this meaning a return to ‘place’, independently of the fact that ‘place’ is the term we use for dealing with a building, a urban district, a territorial region, planet Earth, or the Universe at large. If this trend continues in the coming decades and centuries, we should expect a more balanced spatial vocabulary to be developed to describe phenomena and events between physical, abstract (or metaphorical), and new virtual worlds. However, there is no absolute certainty about that expectation: the quite recent coming into the scene of artificial/virtual/hybrids/digital worlds and information technologies is a new contrasting force to counteract if a return to place and concreteness is still and will remain an actual concern, as observed by Frampton, Norberg-Schulz or Casey (see note 15, below). The worldwide diffusion of service economies, financial capitalism, and information technologies represent a set of forces that certainly reinforce our human bias for abstraction and our attraction for spatial domains – our spatiophilia.

Conclusive Remarks

‘To rethink space as place – and not the reverse, as in the early Modern Era…’ is the urgent task of many contemporary thinkers, the American philosopher Edward S. Casey concluded in the book The Fate of Place,^[19] indirectly pointing out the dangers behind traditional forms of spatial understanding and descriptions. The photographic report shows that the word ‘space’ is overused in various contexts where other terms (e.g., place, locale, location, room, classroom, park, shop, office, street, square, etc.) could be more effective or appropriate to describe and, therefore, to understand the different nuances of an immediate situation or its qualitative and experiential character. The critical attention that contemporary scholars and practitioners are directing towards traditional and more recent spatial or placial terminology, using terms like ‘place’, ‘atmosphere’, ‘ambience’, ‘environment’, ‘region’, ‘bioregion’, etc., for the description of contexts, situations, and backgrounds concretely experienced can be seen as an indication of the ongoing shift of interest from the inherently abstract and neutral character of space to the more concrete qualities of places (see also From Space to Place: A Necessary Paradigm Shift…). However, there are abstracting forces to counteract (e.g., the diffusion of free-market economic policies, information technologies and artificial worlds) before a more balanced attitude towards the environmental realities we belong to can be reached, in between space-based and place-based understanding and descriptions.

Spatiophilia: Galleries

Gallery 01 (Images 01-06)

Gallery 02 (Images 07-12)

Gallery 03 (Images 13-18)

Gallery 04 (Images 19-24)

Gallery 05 (Images 25-30)

Gallery 06 (Images 31-36)

Gallery 07 (Images 37-42)

Gallery 08 (Images 43-48)

Gallery 09 (Images 49-54)

Gallery 10 (Images 55-60)

Gallery 11 (Images 61-66)

Gallery 12 (Images 67-72)

Gallery 13 (Images 73-78)

Gallery 14 (Images 79-84)

Gallery 15 (Images 85-90)

Gallery 16 (Images 91-96)

Gallery 17 (Images 97-102)

Gallery 18 (Images 103-108)

Gallery 19 (Images 109-114)

Gallery 20 (Images 115-120)

Gallery 21 (Images 121-126)

Gallery 22 (Images 127-132)

Gallery 23 (Images 133-138)

Gallery 24 (Images 139-144)

Gallery 25 (Images 145-150)

Gallery 26 (Images 151-156)

Gallery 27 (Images 157-162)

Gallery 28 (Images 163-168)

Gallery 29 (Images 169-174)

Gallery 30 (Images 175-180)

Gallery 31 (Images 181-186)

Gallery 32 (Images 187-192)

Gallery 33 (Images 193-198)

Gallery 34 (Images 199-204)

Gallery 35 (Images 205-210)

Gallery 36 (Images 211-216)

Gallery 37 (Images 217-222)

Gallery 38 (Images 223-228)

Gallery 39 (Images 229-234)

Gallery 40 (Images 235-240)

Gallery 41 (Images 241-246)

Gallery 42 (Images 247-252)

Gallery 43 (Images 253-258)

Gallery 44 (Images 259-264)

Gallery 45 (Images 265-270)

Gallery 46 (Images 271-276)

Gallery 47 (Images 277-282)

Gallery 48 (Images 283-288)

Gallery 49 (Images 289-294)

Gallery 50 (Images 295-300)

Notes

[1] Actually, I got two false positives from a book written in 1538 by Pietro Bembo, an Italian scholar and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church: here, the algorithm of the search engine misplaced ‘spatiophilia’ for the bastard Latin-Italian expression ‘spatiosa sia’, which, in the original treatise, was written with a baroque style which could have deceived the algorithm.

Slideshow (below): The unsuccessful query for the term spatiophilia on different web search engines.

Post Scriptum (Dec 2024): Meanwhile, information technology has blessed us with the help of Artificial Intelligence making our way to knowledge ‘easier’. So, I prompted ChatGPT with the question: ‘What is spatiophilia?’ In the image below you will find the answer, but do not expect too much, apart from the obvious juxtaposition of the meaning of the two words ‘spatio’ + ‘-philia’, where ‘spatio’ indifferently plays the part of ‘space, places, or environments’, which means that, for the AI, there is no real distinction between ‘topophilia’ and ‘spatiophilia’. After all, that makes sense given that the photographic report points out a phenomenon that often goes unnoticed: the common habit of skipping distinctions between space and place, given that parks, flowerbeds, streets, plazas, shops, schools, etc., which are all places, are named ‘space’. But, as I have said in the text, I reject that common habit: there are linguistic, historical, physical, philosophical, and psychological divides between space and place and, therefore, between ‘topophilia’ and ‘spatiophilia’.

Unsatisfied with the answer given by AI, yet, curious about its staggering, mechanic, intellectual ability, I asked for the meaning of ‘nothingfilia’ and its opposite, ‘whateverphilia’, (the first absurd ‘philias’ that came to my mind), but I immediately understood that Artificial Intelligence was very much ahead of me, offering me, in the blink of an eye, serious answers suggesting me that, one day, I could meet a nothingfiliac or a whateverphiliac.

[2] In a manuscript prepared for a conference held in Tunis, in 1967, at the Cercle d’études architecturales, and later published and translated into English with the title ‘Of Other Spaces’, Michel Foucault wrote: ‘The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.’ In Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, Spring 1986, 22. I must point out that in that brief essay, it is difficult to disentangle concepts of space and place, which are indiscriminately included within the term topos and derived terminology (e.g., utopias, heterotopias). It seems topos takes it all. For me, that is a limit in Foucault’s otherwise-interesting analysis of space and place (heterotopology or heterotopoanalysis), as also Edward Casey observed in The Fate of Place: ‘heterotopology… harbours three problems. First, Foucault nowhere makes a clear, much less a rigorous distinction between such basic terms as “place”, “space”, “location” and “site”. As a consequence, these terms are often run together or interchanged indifferently…’ In Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997),300.

[3] Of course, immediately after the search for spatiophilia, I wanted to see if there could be some ‘more popular’ variations of the same concept: so, I typed the less-fascinating, but certainly more popular word spacephilia, and, as I expected, I found a lot of results concerning different Institutions and individuals who have an attraction or attachment for astronomical space. In addition to the attraction for space in the astronomical sense, I found one Instagram account of an Interior Design Company presenting some zenithal images of tables and chairs with their respective measures to see the extent that people need to move around tables and chairs (the floor-space or area taken up by furniture is the ‘ABC’ of architects and house-planners). So, in the end, even the more popular term ‘spacephilia’ did not give me the indications I was looking for.

[4] Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 4.

[5] Casparis Moro, Brevis Phrenologiae Expositio (Patavii: Typis Penada, MDCCCXLII), 15.

[6] ‘… many of the discussions of place in the existing literature suggest that the notion is not at all clearly defined. Concepts of place are often not distinguished at all from notions of simple physical location, while sometimes discussions that seem implicitly to call upon notions of place refer explicitly only to a narrower concept of space. Is Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, for example, really about place or space?’, in Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 19.

[7] We read from the historian of philosophy and science Vincenzo De Risi: ‘…topology… was usually called “analysis situs” in the 19th century‘. In Vincenzo De Risi, ‘Analysis Situs, the Foundations of Mathematics and a Geometry of Space’ in The Oxford Handbook of Leibniz, ed. M.R. Antognazza (Oxford: Oxford univeristy Press, 2019), 250.

[8] Heidegger, in Building Dwelling Thinking, attributed space and place different meanings and values: qualitative and primary, or existential, is the nature of place, which allows the existence and presence of (offers the room to) things as concrete, qualitative facts, according to original Greek meaning topos; quantitative and subordinate, or dimensional is the nature of space as ‘extensio’, i.e., extension – which is the modern, traditional way of understanding of space (where trigonometry applied to astronomy and geometry applied to physics are highly relevant historical moments for such understanding) – from the Latin ‘spatium’ as distance, measure or interval (analogously to the Greek ‘stadion’ – I’ve talked about that in the article Back to the Origins of Space and Place). In Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. In Basic Writings, ed. by David Farrel Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 357. The subordinate nature of space is reinforced by Heidegger’s often-quoted remark that ‘spaces receive their essential being from locales [i.e. places] and not from space’, which is present in the same text.

[9] Concerning Frampton’s position on the dichotomy between place and space and the necessity to refer to place rather than space to face some of the problems of our ‘universal civilization’, see paragraph ‘2.1 Architecture, Place and the Spirit of Time: Different Forms of Regionalism’ in the article The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part II: A Historical Survey. Concerning Norberg-Schulz’s reference to ‘the loss of place’ – exposed in the book Genius Loci – due to the transposition of space-based techniques from architecture to urban planning see paragraph ‘2.3 Presence and the Human Body: Existential and Phenomenological Approaches to the Architecture of Place’ in the same article.

[10] Christian Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place (Milano: Skira Editore, 2000), 20.

[11] Ibid., 59, 74. See also: Christian Norberg-Schulz.Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980), 189.

[12] Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 296.

[13] Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 34-35.

[14] Ibid., 35.

[15] See Confucius on Names and Things.

[16] The terminology ‘triumph of space’ and ‘demise of place’ follows the interesting narrative on the history of the concepts of space and place explained by Edward Casey in ‘The Fate of Place’ (see the article Place and Space: A Philosophical History). The terminology ‘the loss of place’ is taken from Norberg-Schulz, see notes [8] and [10] above.

[17] Kenneth Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism. Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern, ed. Hal Foster, 2019, 16.

[18] cited in Chrisna du Plessis, ‘Towards a Regenerative Paradigm for the Built Environment’, in Building Research & Information, 40:1 (2012): 11. For an overview of the phenomenon of globalization and its implication on spatial/placial boundaries see Jessica T. Mathews, ‘Power Shift’ in Foreign Affairs, 76, 1 (1997): 50-66.

[19] Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 309.

Works Cited

Augè, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 1995.

Berry, Wendell. Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1996.

Casey, Edward. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

du Plessis, Chrisna. ‘Towards a Regenerative paradigm for the Built Environment’. In Building Research & Information, 40:1 (2012): 7-22.

Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces’, in Diacritics, Spring 1986.

–. ‘The Language of Space’, in Geography, History and Social Sciences edited by Georges Benko and Ulf Strohmayer, The GeoJournal Library, vol 27. Dordrecht: Springer, 1995.

Frampton, Kenneth. ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’. In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern, edited by Hal Foster, 2019.

Heidegger, Martin. ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. In Basic Writings, edited by David Farrel Krell, 347-363. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993.

Malpas, Jeff. Place and Experience: A philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Mathews, Jessica T. ‘Power Shift’. In Foreign Affairs, 76, 1 (1997): 50-66.

Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980.

–. Architecture: Presence, Language and Place. Milano: Skira Editore, 2000.

Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion Limited, 1976.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.