Placemaking: Production of Built Environment in Two Cultures

Originally published in 1993, as part of the Ethnoscapes: Current Challenges in the Environmental Social Sciences series, reissued now with a new series introduction, Placemaking: Production of Built Environment in Two Cultures is a book about the context of placemaking – the production of vernacular architecture and settlement. It is an attempt at prototheory, the formation of a perspective with which to view built environment produced by traditional societies. Focusing on two examples: carved dwellings and other masonry structures of Anatolian Turkey and pre- and post-conquest Southwestern pueblos in the US. Architectural and settlement phenomena are analyzed primarily in terms of the social forces that gave rise to them, rather than their formal properties.

David Stea is Professor Emeritus of Geography and International Studies at Texas State University and Research Associate with the Center for Global Justice in Mexico. As Carnegie Interdisciplinary Fellow at Brown University from 1964 to 1966, he developed the new field of Environmental Psychology and the related study of spatial and geographic cognition. David is a member of the editorial boards of a number of journals, the co-author or co-editor of several books and author of some 150 articles and book chapters on various subjects, including sustainable development and environmental issues in Latin America. In 1987 he was nominated for the Right Livelihood Prize (also known as the “alternative Nobel”) for his international work with indigenous peoples.

Mete Turan taught structural and architectural design for more than fifty years in Architecture Schools at different universities, among them Middle East Technical University in Turkey, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, University of New Mexico, University of Michigan in the US, and has now retired from Roger Williams University. His current interests are in philosophy and architectonics.