The Importance Of Place

How do we value historic urban landscape in order to intervene within it as designers? This is the central question posed in this volume, and is tackled by its 16 essays which investigate different facets of value as bases of building and design practices on a range of spatial scales and brought about by a variety of historical circumstances. While the modernist metanarrative of universalism propagated functionalism and, through it, biological and psychological motives of design activity, contemporary building practices are based on more complex and diverse patterns of values that range from cultural to market-driven. Researched, reconstructed and critically assessed, the different case studies brought together here reveal the many possible shades of the ‘importance of place’ with which architects, urban planners and city officials work today in the Southern European context. Marked in recent decades by social and political transition and economic hardship, the reality of this region’s cities caused repeated revisions of value-systems in all spheres of public life, making it, thus, a particularly intriguing context to observe in these terms. In this sense, these essays will be of interest to university scholars in architecture, art history, urbanism and planning, in addition to practicing designers and public officials who encounter problems of value-definitions in their everyday working tasks related to the shaping and management of contemporary urban space.

The National Research Council (NRC) recently conducted several projects concerning urban poverty, racial disparities, and opportunities to change metropolitan areas in ways that have positive effects on residents' well-being. In reports such as Governance and Opportunity in Metropolitan America (1999), place, space, and neighborhood have become important lenses through which to understand the factors affecting opportunity and well-being. After the publication of Governance and Opportunity, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services became interested in what insights research focused on place might offer in terms of improving the conditions of vulnerable families-a population about whom ASPE is particularly concerned. Because of its interest in the topic, ASPE provided generous support to the NRC to hold a workshop on the importance of place and to produce a report based on the findings of the workshop. This report, Equality of Opportunity and the Importance of Place, is the culmination of the NRC's work on behalf of ASPE.

This book explores the potential benefits and disadvantages of geographical indication (GIs) registration schemes, analyzing the utility of GI registrations for the development and promotion of regional economies, both in national and international markets. The book draws on the van Caenegem, Cleary & Drahos Australian Provenance Report, along with the valuable empirical data collected in connection with it. The book situates the rural development question in an international context, presenting several case studies from Italy, France and Morocco, New Zealand and Australia. The book contains various chapters focused on comparing regulatory structures in various relevant jurisdictions and drawing on other countries’ experiences. It contains significant contributions from industry actors with extensive experience in regional branding initiatives and GI-related policy issues. Progressive in structure, the book starts from the ‘big picture’ level before moving down to the local and concrete scale. Geographical indications of Australian products are vital both in domestic and overseas markets by accurately representing the origin and quality of niche agricultural products. Thus, with a particular focus on Australia, the book promotes the assessment of geographical indications as potential regional assets that will help producers develop local quality indicators that will serve as public goods for successive generations of producers.

The book presents a long-term ethnographic study of arguably the largest environmental protest action in Australian history. Carsten Wergin offers a timely discussion of the sociocultural and political relevance of heritage and tourism for ecological preservation and the wider decolonial project in Australia and beyond.

By taking as its point of departure the privileged relationship between the crime novel and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last 20 years has become a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country. Nowadays there is a general acknowledgment of the importance of place in Italian crime novels. However, apart from a limited scholarship on single cities, the genre has never been systematically studied in a way that so comprehensively spans Italian national boundaries. The originality of this volume also lies in the fact that the author have not limited her investigation to a series of cities, but rather she has considered the different forms of (social) landscape in which Italian crime novels are set. Through the analysis of the way in which cities, the "urban sprawl," and islands are represented in the serial novels of 11 of the most important contemporary crime writers in Italy of the 1990s, Pezzotti articulates the different ways in which individual authors appropriate the structures and tropes of the genre to reflect the social transformations and dysfunctions of contemporary Italy. In so doing, this volume also makes a case for the genre as an instrument of social critique and analysis of a still elusive Italian national identity, thus bringing further evidence in support of the thesis that in Italy detective fiction has come to play the role of the new "social novel."

"Quality of life"..."livability"..."sense of place." Communities across America are striving to define these terms and to bring them to life, as they make decisions about transportation systems and other aspects of planning and development. Community and Quality of Life discusses important concepts that undergird community life and offers recommendations for collaborative planning across space and time. The book explores: Livability as an ensemble concept, embracing notions such as quality of place and sustainability. It discusses how to measure the "three legs" of livability (social, economic, ecological) while accounting for politics and personal values. And the book examines how to translate broad ideas about livability into guidelines for policymaking Place as more than location, including the natural, human-built, and social environments. The book discusses the impact of population changes over time, the links between regional and local identity, and other issues Tools for decision making in transportation and community planning. It reviews a variety of decision models and tools such as geographic information systems (GIS)â€"as well as public and private sources of relevant data. Including several case examples, this book will be important to planners, planning decision makers, planning educators and students, social scientists, community activists, and interested individuals.

This book explores the potential benefits and disadvantages of geographical indication (GIs) registration schemes, analyzing the utility of GI registrations for the development and promotion of regional economies, both in national and international markets. The book draws on the van Caenegem, Cleary & Drahos Australian Provenance Report, along with the valuable empirical data collected in connection with it. The book situates the rural development question in an international context, presenting several case studies from Italy, France and Morocco, New Zealand and Australia. The book contains various chapters focused on comparing regulatory structures in various relevant jurisdictions and drawing on other countries’ experiences. It contains significant contributions from industry actors with extensive experience in regional branding initiatives and GI-related policy issues. Progressive in structure, the book starts from the ‘big picture’ level before moving down to the local and concrete scale. Geographical indications of Australian products are vital both in domestic and overseas markets by accurately representing the origin and quality of niche agricultural products. Thus, with a particular focus on Australia, the book promotes the assessment of geographical indications as potential regional assets that will help producers develop local quality indicators that will serve as public goods for successive generations of producers.

This remarkable book introduces us to four unforgettable Apache people, each of whom offers a different take on the significance of places in their culture. Apache conceptions of wisdom, manners and morals, and of their own history are inextricably intertwined with place, and by allowing us to overhear his conversations with Apaches on these subjects Basso expands our awareness of what place can mean to people. Most of us use the term sense of place often and rather carelessly when we think of nature or home or literature. Our senses of place, however, come not only from our individual experiences but also from our cultures. Wisdom Sits in Places, the first sustained study of places and place-names by an anthropologist, explores place, places, and what they mean to a particular group of people, the Western Apache in Arizona. For more than thirty years, Keith Basso has been doing fieldwork among the Western Apache, and now he shares with us what he has learned of Apache place-names--where they come from and what they mean to Apaches. "This is indeed a brilliant exposition of landscape and language in the world of the Western Apache. But it is more than that. Keith Basso gives us to understand something about the sacred and indivisible nature of words and place. And this is a universal equation, a balance in the universe. Place may be the first of all concepts; it may be the oldest of all words."--N. Scott Momaday "In Wisdom Sits in Places Keith Basso lifts a veil on the most elemental poetry of human experience, which is the naming of the world. In so doing he invests his scholarship with that rarest of scholarly qualities: a sense of spiritual exploration. Through his clear eyes we glimpse the spirit of a remarkable people and their land, and when we look away, we see our own world afresh."--William deBuys "A very exciting book--authoritative, fully informed, extremely thoughtful, and also engagingly written and a joy to read. Guiding us vividly among the landscapes and related story-tellings of the Western Apache, Basso explores in a highly readable way the role of language in the complex but compelling theme of a people's attachment to place. An important book by an eminent scholar."--Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.