Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America

ISBN 10: 1641771178 / ISBN 13: 9781641771177

Published by Encounter Books, 2020

About this Item

Used - Acceptable: All pages and the cover are intact, but shrink wrap, dust covers, or boxed set case may be missing. Pages may include limited notes, highlighting, or minor water damage but the text is readable. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting, but the text cannot be obscured or unreadable. Any access codes or passwords originally included with the book may be expired, used or no longer valid. Image is stock photo and cover art edition may be different than pictured.

Seller Inventory # MERV.1641771178.A

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1641771178
• ISBN 13: 9781641771177
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: acceptable

About this title

Synopsis

Contemporary American society, with its emphasis on mobility and economic progress, all too often loses sight of the importance of a sense of place; and community. Appreciating place is essential for building the strong local communities that cultivate civic engagement, public leadership, and many of the other goods that contribute to a flourishing human life.

Do we, in losing our places, lose the crucial basis for healthy and resilient individual identity, and for the cultivation of public virtues? For one can't be a citizen without being a citizen of some place in particular; one isn't a citizen of a motel. And if these dangers are real and present ones, are there ways that intelligent public policy can begin to address them constructively, by means of reasonable and democratic innovations that are likely to attract wide public support?

Why Place Matters takes these concerns seriously, and its contributors seek to discover how, given the American people as they are, and American economic and social life as it now exists; and not as those things can be imagined to be in some utopian scheme; we can find means of fostering a richer and more sustaining way of life. The book is an anthology of essays exploring the contemporary problems of place and placelessness in American society.

The book includes contributions from distinguished scholars and writers such as poet Dana Gioia (former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, urbanist Witold Rybczynski, architect Philip Bess, essayists Christine Rosen and Ari Schulman, philosopher Roger Scruton, transportation planner Gary Toth, and historians Russell Jacoby and Joseph Amato.

About the Author

Wilfred M. McClay is the SunTrust Chair of Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Ted V. McAllister is the Edward L. Gaylord Chair and Associate Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University.