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

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

is an assistant professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where he teaches rhetorical theory and creative writing in the writing studies program.