Coming to Terms with Place- Toward a Topographic Technique of Language Use

Architects and urban planners have long discussed how the builtenvironment in many western cities suffers from a lack of place. Particularlyin the US this issue has become heated as people have reconsidered theexurban malaise we've built as our primary habitat.Coming to Terms with Place explores the rhetorical grounds for why this ishappening and looks forward to a technique that reconsiders our builtenvironment in terms of the language we use to describe and inscribe it.Believing experience of place is intrinsically tied into our choice oflanguage it follows that a concern for that language leads to changes in howour environment gets built and experienced. Drawing across a range ofphenomenological and rhetorical theories Coming to Terms with Placeconcerns itself primarily with a language-based ethics of placemaking that isecological in scope and human in scale.Architects urban designers and rhetoricians will find Coming to Terms withPlace particularly useful as it encourages people in those fields to reconsiderthe language they use in everyday practice and spurs further debate aboutthe nature and importance of place.