Common preamble to three posts on changes to place over the last 50 years
I recently posted an unpublished and not previously circulated essay at Academia.org on the ways that places and place experiences have altered since about 1970. It draws on some of my posts on this website, and also on my publications about place (mostly book chapters that might not be easily available) since about 1990.   My main reason for writing the essay is that experiences of being rooted in place, belonging, attachment and so on, and indeed the forces of placelessness that might be eroding these, are not timeless and unchanging. What made sense in 1970, when I was writing my book Place and Placelessness, needs to be updated both because there are now practices for protecting, making and promoting places that did not exist then, and because the ways places are experienced have shifted dramatically in a world of cheap air travel and omnipresent electronic devices.

I assume those looking at this website and those reading Academia are mostly from different audiences, so this and two additional posts offer a sort of point form summary of my Academia essay, which is about 60 pages long. This post (#3) offers some theoretical speculations about changing relationships between place and placelessness and what they portend for the future of places. The first post (#1) considers recent changes to ways places are made. The second post (#2) deals mostly with changes since 1970 to the ways places are experienced.

Although they are really only summaries of ideas, I hope that together the three posts offer enough suggestions about recent changes for you to be able to explore them further, perhaps question some conventional assumptions about roots and sense of place, or, conversely, to refine arguments that place provides continuity in the face of change.

Changing relations of place and placelessness
The forces of placelessness and the processes of place constantly push and pull against each other in ways that change over time. In Place and Placelessness I presented them as in opposition to each other, with placelessness eroding the distinctiveness of place. Something like this:

I subsequently began to regard them as in a dynamic balance, always pushing against one other. This interpretation, which regards everywhere as to some degree placeless, and in some ways distinctive, is both more flexible than the idea that place and placelessness are opposing forces. It also makes room for the recognition that a balance is necessary to offset situations where distinctive becomes associated with exclusion, or situations where uniformity is so extreme that identification with place becomes virtually impossible.

But even this sort of yin-yang idea of the relationship between place and placelessness fails to capture what seems to have happened with increasing mobility and the intrusions of electronic media. It does not reflect the complexities of hybrid places in mongrel cities, non-places, and the ways even heritage preservation has resulted in standardization. It now seems more appropriate to understand the relationship of place and placelessness as one of entanglement, at least partially. In some places distinctiveness is clear, elsewhere uniformity is clear, but it is also the case that non-places can be considered as distinctive places, World Heritage Sites can be overrun by mass tourism, the celebration of place can involve NIMBYism and exclusion, and the confusions of hybridity can contribute to complex and distinctive places. This simple diagram is an attempt to capture this blend of balance and entanglement:

Place as a lens to the world
There are many different ways to understand place, but one that I think has considerable methodological value is to regard it as a lens to the world. In other words, all places are microcosms of larger patterns and processes, albeit adapted to local circumstances, because they are the consequences of those processes and also contribute to them. Places are fusions of physical settings, activities and meanings that are parts of the whole world, and they are themselves wholes. It is in and through place, or more specifically through specific places with their own names, that we know the world. The wholeness of place is not something mysterious. It is what we experience everyday, at home, when we step outside, when we travel.

Given this fundamental relationship, the deliberate study of place and of places offers a means to understand the complex unity of the larger world as it is directly known and experienced, and the ways this world is changing. That said, given the heterotopian confusions of the present-day world this is not a straightforward process.

Trend to Heterotopia
Place, and the processes that give rise to places are not immutable. Fifty years ago, when I was writing Place and Placelessness, it seemed that local processes that had once led to distinctive places were being eroded by the abstract forces of modernism. This simple, binary interpretation does not apply well to many landscapes created since then in the light of heritage preservation, branding, mobility and electronic media, all processes that seem to simultaneously enhance yet undermine place identities.

Two examples of present-day place confusion. On the left: Sense of Place clothing store is in the shopping mall underneath Kyoto Japan Rail Station. A sign in the store reads: “Sense of place is about confidence in knowing who you are and what style means to you.” On the right: a conflation of iconic skylines from world cities, on a sign entirely in Chinese in Seattle Premium Outlets, a discount mall on the Tulalip Indian Reserve, north of Seattle, where many of the shoppers are Chinese-Canadians.

Michel Foucault suggested the word “heterotopia” to characterize this confusion. A heterotopy is literally something out of place. In heterotopia most things seem out of place and it is difficult to identify any coherent logic underlying them. Old geographical notions about regions and settlements no longer apply. Everything everywhere is now interconnected, yet filled with unlikely juxtapositions and dislocated experiences.

This fragment of a streetscape in North York in Toronto is a mundane example of the unlikely juxtapositions of heterotopia. Roses New York offers a fusion of North American and Persian food, upstairs is an Egyptian psychic, next door a Korean-Japanese restaurant, the billboard advertises fictional places on Canadian TV. 

Although heterotopia is not entirely new (unlikely juxtapositions have always happened whenever different cultures have come into close contact), in the last half century it has hugely intensified with multi-centred living, mobility and transnationalism. What is remarkable is that, not unlike electronic devices, it has so quickly become familiar and taken for granted in the mobile world and mongrel cities of the early 21^st century. What is perhaps even more remarkable is that it seems to be associated with the decline of Enlightenment ideas of rationalism, truth and reality. The “thrown-togetherness” (Doreen Massey’s term) of many newly created places seems to be one expression of the sense that anything goes, that any belief or ideology is valid even if it unsupported by empirical evidence. Hybrid places and heterotopian landscapes are in themselves harmless, and in some ways reflect the diversity and openness of the present-day world that is a consequence of the decline of oppressive, restrictive practices that masqueraded as rational and realistic. However,  they are not incidental superficial phenomena so much as manifestations of confusion associated with the paradigm shift that is happening at the end of the rationalist era that has lasted several centuries, confusion that is being reinforced by the emergence of social and political forces that deny evidence, resist diversity and promote exclusion.

The most intense example of heterotopia may be the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. The ruined building was remarkably left standing at the epicentre of the atom bomb explosion. It is a World Heritage Site that preserves destruction and reasserts the continuity of place, yet is also the place where rational knowledge reached beyond reason.

The Openess of Place
Though there are no obvious guidelines to help make sense of what is happening as rationalism loses its once privileged position, I think a phenomenological return to place offers possible clarifications in a way that is neither poisoned by the confirmation biases of exclusion nor coldly detached. What I mean by a phenomenological return not only considers the importance of belonging somewhere, but, in the present-day context, also attends to flows of information, mobility and heterotopia. More specifically it has to consider the constant interconnections between here and elsewhere that are an unavoidable aspect of current place experiences. Jeff Malpas refers to place as an “open, cleared yet bounded region in which we find ourselves gathered together with other persons and things, and in which we are opened to the world and the world to us.”

The increased openness of place has eroded the distinction between place and placelessness. One response to this is an attempt to reverse change and deny difference; this is a retreat into parochialism and exclusion that are manifestations of a poisoned sense of place, and it has been exacerbated by the echo chambers of social media. The other response embraces openness and diversity, and recognizes that local and global connections are present everywhere. From this perspective every place is a portal to the world. This is implicit in multi-centred lives, time-space compression, and the global village. It is increasingly how people everywhere connect with geography. It regards heterotopia as positive even if its manifestations are baffling. Above all it acknowledges that humanity is shared regardless of local differences.

An everyday instance of the openness of place.  A sign in the small town of Sidney in British Columbia for LaLoCa, a store that sells products, according to the small print. “Products from ethical social enterprises and fair trade producers from Vancouver Island, BC & around the world.”

Responsibility and the Future of Places
The social and technological changes of the last fifty years which have affected place and place experiences will not be undone in the foreseeable future. We have moved far beyond the world before modernism in which the distinctiveness of places arose from rooted and geographically separated communities. Distinctiveness is now based partly on the protection of cultural, built and natural heritage defended by forceful international, national and local organizations, partly on place branding and placemaking that have become entrenched in business and planning practices, and partly on what people with multicentred lives bring to the places where they currently live. And not least because of these new commitments to distinctiveness it is inconceivable that there will be an untrammelled revival of the modernist placeless predilection for replacing whatever was old with something efficient and new, though principles of international uniformity will continue to be manifest in landscapes of skyscraper offices, production plants, distribution centres and non-places associated with the global economy.

Mobility, whether for tourism or migration, is expected to increase substantially in the coming decades. Cities will continue to hybridize, electronic communications will intrude further and in devious ways into place experiences, heritage preservation and branding will further reinforce distinctiveness. The specific consequences of these trends will vary in intensity and character from place to place and over time. From the perspective of those who consider mobility, multi-centred lives and electronic communications as processes that diminish sense of place and erode rootedness, this is regrettable. My own view is that while these irreversible changes have may have diminished lifelong rootedness in place, they have actually reduced the prevalence of placelessness and have broadened experiences of the diversity of places. They are not without their problems, such as the inconsistent uses of the idea of heritage, the fact that place branding is an indication of submission to neo-liberal economics, the way tourism sometimes overwhelms cities, and electronic media can facilitate exclusionary, parochial attitudes. Nevertheless, on balance I regard the changes a positive trade-off because both because they mostly reinforce place identities and especially because they foster a sense of the openness of place, the understanding that places are portals to the world.

The importance of the openness of place lies in the ways it directly informs how we can understand and take responsibility for places. First, in this ‘post-truth’ age our direct experiences of place allows us to compare the claims and opinions of politicians and supposed experts against what we encounter ourselves – actual people and real things, not ‘the public’ and consumer goods. Second, in a multi-centred mobile world we need to take responsibility for where we are, no matter how briefly we are somewhere. This can happen in countless different ways – gardening, helping neighbours, buying local produce, participation in community activities, and protesting developments that are socially or environmentally damaging. Third, openness to the world is of fundamental significance in understanding the profound challenges of the global village we all now live in, perhaps most significantly, the challenge of climate change, but also water shortages, intensifying social inequality, and the rise of exclusionary authoritarian governments.

Michel Foucault 1970 The Order of Things, (London: Tavistock Press). p.xv.
Jeff Malpas, 2006, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p.221.
Doreen Massey 2005 For Space (London: Sage Publication), Chapter 13

Common preamble to three posts on changes to place over the last 50 years
I recently posted an unpublished and not previously circulated essay at Academia.org on the ways that places and place experiences have altered since about 1970. It draws on some of my posts on this website, and also on my publications about place (mostly book chapters that might not be easily available) since about 1990.   My main reason for writing the essay is that experiences of being rooted in place, belonging, attachment and so on, and indeed the forces of placelessness that might be eroding these, are not timeless and unchanging. What made sense in 1970, when I was writing my book Place and Placelessness, needs to be updated both because there are now practices for protecting, making and promoting places that did not exist then, and because the ways places are experienced have shifted dramatically in a world of cheap air travel and omnipresent electronic devices.

I assume that those looking at this website and those reading Academia are mostly from two different audiences, so this and two additional posts offer a sort of point form summary of my Academia essay, which is about 60 pages long. This post (#2) deals mostly with changes since 1970 to the ways places are experienced. A previous post (#1) considered recent changes to ways places are made. The third post (#3) offers some theoretical speculations about changing relationships between place and placelessness and what they portend for the future of places.

Although they are really only summaries of ideas, I hope that together the three posts offer enough suggestions about recent changes for you to be able to explore them further, perhaps question some conventional assumptions about roots and sense of place, or, conversely, to refine arguments that place provides continuity in the face of change.

A small installation I came upon in a coffee shop in British Columbia that expresses a complementary relationship between roots and mobility in experiences of place.

Increased Mobility In 1965 the Interstate highway system in the US was under construction but far from complete, and there were no motorways in Britain; both now have networks of expressways that have effectively shrunk the distances between places. In 1975, when the world’s population was about 4 billion, there were estimated to be about 250 million motor vehicles in the world, or one for every 16 people; in 2018 there are about 1.25 billion for 7.6 billion, or one for every six people. In 1950 there were about 22 million international tourist arrivals, which amounted to less than one per cent of the world’s population travelling internationally; by 1975 the number had grown to 222 million, equivalent to 6 per cent of the world’s population; in 2016 the there were over 1.25 billion such arrivals, equivalent to 17 percent of the global population. At any given moment there are now estimated to be about one million people in the air, on their way to visit and experience for themselves formerly exotic places, to see their families, or to work.

This graph showing the growth of tourism clear shows one aspect of the change in mobility that has happened over the last fifty years. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/tourism, and data from UN World Tourism Organization.

In short, fifty years ago most people experienced a few places quite slowly; now many people have easy, quick access to many places, and many of which are experienced quite briefly. The consequences of this increase in mobility for place experience means that the deep but confined sense of a few places that prevailed for most of human history, has in half a century for most people been replaced by a relatively shallow experience of many places. Whether this trade-off is beneficial is, I think, an open question.

Merits of Tourist experiences and the Inauthentic Authenticity of Mass Tourist Destinations In effect, what has happened is that travel and tourism have been democratized. No matter how brief, crowded or programmed the consequent experiences of place may be, experiences of many places involves opportunities for appreciation and learning. It is difficult to argue that this is not beneficial because it increases appreciation of the variety of the world and its people, and it challenges the parochialism and exclusion that can all too easily follow from a narrowly rooted sense of place.

On the other hand mass tourism is a mixed blessing for those places that are on its receiving end, where sheer numbers are beginning to undermine the very place qualities that made them attractive. Venice is perhaps the most extreme example, where the dwindling resident population of about 55,000 is confronted annually by about 25 million visitors, many from cruise ships, but Barcelona, hiking trails in New Zealand and many World Heritage sites, such as the Pantheon in Rome, shown here in 2017, are confronting the same problem of authentic place qualities being eroded by sheer numbers of visitors.

Non-Place Places The term “non-places” was coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to refer to airports, service stations, hotels, theme parks, hospitals and similar facilities that have no history, no resident population, and where everyone is an outsider – a client, customer or employee. They have standardized elements that can be understood by outsiders and they have certainly made travel much easier.

Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam is a non-place with few signs in Dutch, but, as the indigenous art installations at Vancouver International indicate, even a non-place can be a distinctive place.

Paradoxically, as Tim Cresswell’s study of Schiphol has shown, they also have their own identities for those who use them frequently or work in them, and their designs and art installation often reflect the local setting. To that degree even non-places are places.

Multi-centred Lives Lucy Lippard describes modern society as multi-centred because many people live for extended periods in different places, or effectively have two different homes (where they come from, where they live now, a cabin or cottage they can escape to,and so on). Multi-centredness is not entirely new, but it has intensified over the last few decades. The UN reports that that are now over 250 million international migrants in the world, and one third of those have migrated since 1990. Global diasporas, transnationalism and multi-centred lives have become a major aspect of the demographic reality of the present age.

There can be little doubt that multi-centredness has changed how people experience and relate to place. For example, research by Stephanie Taylor in Britain has suggested that for women the ‘born and bred narrative’ of long-term family connections to a home place is questionable as increasing numbers choose to participate in the opportunities offered by mobility between places.

Mongrel Cities and Hybrid Places, yet the Beginnings hold Everything Diasporas are not a new phenomenon, but their variety and character has given rise to cultural heterogeneity in cities that represents a substantial change especially in Anglo-American and European cities that had previously homogeneous cultures. The result of immigration either from former colonies or from places with very different cultural histories has given rise to what have been called “mongrel cities”, filled with hybrid mixtures of races, restaurants, festivals, and religious buildings. If continuity and coherence are considered important aspects of place, clearly neither applies to mongrel cities.

Nevertheless, in all this hybridity, in multi-centred lives, in restless mobility, in displacement of all types, there seems to be one constant. The places where people come from and grew up remain locked in memories that inform subsequent place experiences. In short, in the words of psychoanalyst Elena Liotta, who comes from Argentina but lives in Italy, “the beginnings hold everything.”

Electronic Media, the Global Village and an Electronic Sense of Place Electronic media permeate almost all place experiences of the present day. There was a recognition of the potentially pervasive effects of these in the 1960s with Marshall McLuhan’s suggestion that they shrink the world into a global village filled with immediate and undigested gossip about places that were once considered remote. But since the 1980s personal computers, the internet, mobile phones and social media have turned this suggestion into an continuous, omnipresent reality. It has been suggested that electronic media completely undermine sense of place, or rendered it obsolete, but a more nuanced argument is that in just a few decades they have reinforced the changes to place experiences associated with increased mobility because, as Sharon Kleinman suggests, they provide “nearly seamless anytime, anyplace connectivity” in which “here and there can be almost anywhere, and, moreover, both can be moving.” It is not exactly that a sense of local place has been destroyed but that an electronic sense of place has turned it into an elusive component of topological networks that connect it with a wider world.

Non-Place communities and an electronically poisoned sense of place There is another more ominous aspect to the impact of electronic media on place. They have made it easy for non-place (i.e. geographically scattered) communities of like-minded individuals to use social media to reinforce what they regard as the distinctive, exclusive and superior qualities of their place. Social media provide echo chambers for otherwise unrelated  individuals to share prejudices and exacerbate the sorts of exclusionary convictions that arise whenever populations develop excessively protective attitudes about their neighbourhood, or their nation. This is an electronically poisoned sense of place that challenges the positive place effects and appreciation of diversity that arise from increased mobility, multi-centred living, and mongrel cities.

Comment As with changes that have happened to the character of places in the last fifty years, the changes that have happened to place experiences have had mixed consequences. In some ways they have reinforced place, in others they have reinforced placelessness, and sometimes they appear to do both simultaneously. They have broadened sense of place, changed it in ways that are still far from clear (especially in the case of electronic media), yet also amplified some its most unpleasant, parochial aspects. In the third post about changes to place I will offer some theoretical comments about how to understand these implications, and what they might bode for the future of place.

Marc Augé 1995 Non-Places: introduction to the anthropology of supermodernity, (London: Verso)
Tim Cresswell 2006 On the Move: mobility in the modern western world (London: Routledge), see p.257 about Schiphol
Sharon Kleinman 2007 Displacing place: mobile communication in the twenty-first century (New York: Peter Lang)
Elena Liotta 2009 On Soul and Earth: the psychic value of place (London: Routledge)
Lucy Lippard 1997 The Lure of the Local: senses of place in a multi-centered society, (New York: W.W.Norton)
Stephanie Taylor 2010 Narratives of identity and place (London: Routledge)

Common preamble to three posts on changes to place over the last 50 years
I recently posted an unpublished and not previously circulated essay at Academia.org on the ways that places and place experiences have altered since about 1970. It draws on some of my posts on this website, and also on my publications about place (mostly book chapters that might not be easily available) since about 1990.   My main reason for writing the essay is that experiences of being rooted in place, belonging, attachment and so on, and indeed the forces of placelessness that might be eroding these, are not timeless and unchanging. What made sense in 1970, when I was writing my book Place and Placelessness, needs to be updated both because there are now practices for protecting, making and promoting places that did not exist then, and because the ways places are experienced have shifted dramatically in a world of cheap air travel and omnipresent electronic devices.

I assume that those looking at this website and those reading Academia are mostly from two different audiences, so this and two additional posts offer a sort of point form summary of my Academia essay, which is about 60 pages long. This post (#1) considers recent changes to the ways places are made. The next post (#2) deals mostly with changes since 1970 to the ways places are experienced. The third post (#3) offers some theoretical speculations about changing relationships between place and placelessness and what they portend for the future of places.

Although they are really only summaries of ideas, I hope that together the three posts offer enough suggestions about recent changes for you to be able to explore them further, perhaps question some conventional assumptions about roots and sense of place, or, conversely, to refine arguments that place provides continuity in the face of change.

Changes to places since 1970 that reinforce distinctiveness

1.Heritage Protection. Heritage in the sense of protecting distinctive buildings and place from demolition was effectively an invention of the 1970s, especially a UNESCO convention in 1972 on the protection of cultural and natural heritage that led to the creation of World Heritage Sites and encouraged  nations to develop heritage protection policies. From the mid-70s heritage protection was rapidly and widely adopted through legislation and planning practices and it has become a powerful force for protecting the identity of places that it is an essential consideration in most forms of urban development.

Heritage preservation is not unproblematic. An honest assessment is that the results often seem to be jumbled amalgam of buildings and bits from different eras that happen not to have been destroyed. Moreover, there are questions about exactly whose heritage is worth preserving, and heritage sites can be awkwardly out of context. Nevertheless, it is clear that there has been a dramatic change in the treatment of places between the 1950s and 60s, when almost anything or anywhere old was considered obsolete and in need of renewal, and the present-day, when almost all development has to protect old buildings and archaeological sites as a way to maintain visible links to the past of places.

2.Treatment of Natural Environments. The development of policies for environmental protection happened at much the same time as the emergence of heritage protection. In the 50s and 60s natural environments were usually engineered into submission, bulldozed, dammed, destroyed. But since about 1970 environmental conservation and ecological understanding have become accepted practices of most planning and development. Of course, there are still instances of wanton environmental destruction, but there is now widespread recognition of the importance of sustainability (a concept developed in the 1980s) and the need to work with rather than against natural processes and environmental conditions.  The result has been that the environmental distinctiveness of places, which 50 years ago would have been of little consequence, is now usually regarded as an amenity to be protected or even reconstituted in cases where it was more or less obliterated.

Here is a specific case:

On the left, a creek in suburban Toronto abut 1970, engineered into a concrete channel to speed run-off. On the right, a section of the same creek in 2005 that had recently been re-engineered into something approximating its original ecological characteristics in order to slow run-off. 

3. Post-modern design. Contemporary with the rise of heritage protection was a movement in architecture and urban planning away from simplistic modernist designs. In architecture these “post-modern” approaches incorporated decorative elements, and quoted older building forms styles. At the larger scale of planning post-modernism was revealed in “new urbanism” and “neo-traditionalism” which aimed to echo regional traditions of domestic building and street layouts with features such as rear laneways and front porches. These post-modern design approaches have reintroduced elements of distinctiveness, especially in master planned developments, into suburban landscapes.

Post-modern design is significant not just a design style, but because it is a visible expression of what in philosophy appears to be a fundamental epistemological shift associated with the decline of the rationalistic approaches of modernist philosophy that promoted uniform ways of thinking and doing. Post-modernism acknowledges diversity, a shift that is apparent socially in the emergence over the last 50 years of  civil rights, gay rights and the women’s movement.  I discuss the implications of this shift in the third post in this series about theoretical shifts in the relationships between place and placelessness.

4. Place branding. Modern economic globalization is powerfully positivist in its commitment to numbers and rationalistic abstractions. It was initially assumed that rational economic decisions about where to locate businesses had nothing to do with the qualities of places. By the late 1980s it had become clear that this was a flawed assumption and that investment was heading to places that had qualities other than an economically efficient location. The response to this was the business-oriented practice of place branding, a practice that encourages places to promote their distinctive qualities, whether environment, culture, history, in order to attract investment. In the last thirty years place branding has become an important aspect of marketing not only for cities and regions but also for universities, and there are academic programmes and journals devoted to it.

Place branding is held to be most effective when it is based on manifest qualities of a place, and the skill is in identifying and amplifying those. This requires that a place lives up to its brand image, and that can involve such things as investing in destination architecture, and policies that reinforce, for instance, heritage character and other aspects of distinctiveness.

5. Place making. As place branding became increasingly popular from the 1990s on, so, quite independently, did the idea and practice of placemaking. There were a few isolated discussions about placemaking before then, including my own in Place and Placelessness, but it was the publication in 1995 of Linda Schneekloth and Robert Shibley Placemaking: the art and practice of building communities (Wiley), that seems to have triggered widespread interest. There are now thousands of publications devoted to it, numerous consultancies specializing in it, and official plans that attempt to implement it.

The idea of placemaking covers a range of possibilities as wide as place itself – it can involve an act of personal self-awareness about experiences and memories of somewhere, or planting a garden, or contributing to neighborhood awareness, or master-planning a new development. The notion that has had most impact on place identities is one is one that involves an element of design that will make somewhere more attractive. The American consulting firm Project for Public Spaces, which describes itself as the “central hub of the global placemaking community,” offers this definition: “Placemaking is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighbourhood, city or region.” The hands-on tool requires community involvement to devise ways to make otherwise dispiriting parts of cities attractive, for instance by closing streets or widening sidewalks or adding artwork that will attract people and encourage business vitality.

Placemaking is usually promoted or written about with unalloyed enthusiasm. But all placemaking is in some way an act of creative destruction, an act of replacement. Jame Kalven, who spent many years working and placemaking (by which he means community building) in the public housing projects in Chicago, uses the term “unmaking of place” to describe the consequences of the “Plan for Transformation.” Under that plan the city demolished modernist projects in order to make places supposedly better but which were, in his view, an assault on the identities of those for whom these doomed places were home. His argument is significant because those formerly placeless projects had been transformed into territories of meanings for their inhabitants.

Comment. There are really two conclusions from this summary of changes to way places have been made since 1970. The first is the obvious one that the ways places are now being made and modified is very different from how this happened in the 1960s. This is apparent simply by looking at whatever remains of shopping plazas or social housing projects from then, although many of them have been demolished or deeply renovated. The second conclusion is less obvious. It is that these moves toward greater place distinctiveness are by no means perfect. For all its merits heritage protection is biased in its selections of what to protect, and World Heritage Sites are surrounded by placeless parking lots filled with tour buses. Place branding is a branch of the faceless processes of neo-liberal globalization. Placemaking has paradoxically become a global buzzword, often using a familiar kit of urban design practices – bollards, interlocking pavers.  What seems to have happened is that the once clear distinction between place and placelessness has faded because distinctiveness and standardization have become intermingled.