Yi-Fu Tuan, who died in August 2022, was considered the father of humanistic geography. His scholarship on our sense of space and place can tell us a great deal about the challenges we face today.
Re-imagining cities after COVID-19 is both a practical and philosophical task. People’s perceptions of places are changing. It is a time for planners and policymakers to plan with, not for, people.
Public spaces have become more, not less, important to our experience of cities in the digital era. These technologies can be used to confound and enlarge our experiences of and connections to place.
Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology and Mirko Guaralda, Queensland University of Technology
Smart cities are usually optimised like a business for speed and efficiency. Placemaking can slow down cities to improve health and wellbeing and promote more democratic engagement of citizens.
Big ideas and big dollars have been invested in making ‘memorable’ places. Paradoxically, as similar solutions are adapted in diverse settings worldwide, this can lead to an uneasy new placelessness.