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Edward "Ted" Relph is a Canadian geographer, best known for the book ''Place and Placelessness''.


Career

Relph grew up in
Wales Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the Bristol Channel to the south. It had a population in ...
in the
Wye Valley The Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB; cy, Dyffryn Gwy) is an internationally important protected landscape straddling the border between England and Wales. The River Wye ( cy, Afon Gwy) is the fourth-longest river in th ...
and studied at the Joint School of Geography at the
University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...
and at the University of Toronto. He is an emeritus professor of the
University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 ...
, where he served from 1991 to 1999 as Chair of the Division of Social Sciences at the Scarborough campus. From 1999 to 2005 Relph was Associate Principal responsible for the expansion and redevelopment of that campus, and served again as Chair of Social Sciences from 2008 to 2010. Relph now lives in
Victoria, British Columbia Victoria is the capital city of the Canadian province of British Columbia, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada's Pacific coast. The city has a population of 91,867, and the Greater Victoria area has a population of 397,237. The ...
. Relph has written many academic articles and book chapters that investigate the phenomenological and experiential foundations of geography, and others that elaborate sense of place and the ways experiences of place are currently being transformed. ''Place and Placelessness'' was reassessed and updated at a conference organized by Rob Freestone and Edgar Liu of the University of New South Wales that resulted in the publication of ''Place and Placelessness Revisited'' (edited by Freestone and Liu) in 2016.


Publications

*''Place and Placelessness'', first published in 1976 and reissued in 2010, is a phenomenological account of how places are experienced and how they are changing. It was one of the first books that explicitly examined the idea of place, and also one of the first phenomenological studies in Geography. It has been widely cited and has been described as a Classic in Human Geography in both ''Progress in Human Geography,'' Vol 24, No 4, 2000, and ''Classics in Human Geography'', ed. P. Hubbard, R. Kitchen, & G. Vallentine, Sage, 2008. It has been translated into several languages including Japanese,
Korean Korean may refer to: People and culture * Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula * Korean cuisine * Korean culture * Korean language **Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl **Korean dialects and the Jeju language ** ...
and
Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
. *''Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography'', published in 1981, explores why modern built environments provide material comfort and efficiency yet breed criticism and despair rather than hope and commitment. It was reissued as
Routledge Revival
in 2015. *''The Modern Urban Landscape'', published in 1987, examines why urban landscapes built since about 1900 look as they do by tracing changes in planning and
architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...
through the rise of
modernism Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...
to
post-modernism Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of modern ...
and the corporatization of cities. It has been reprinted several times and translated into Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese. (Johns Hopkins University Press1987) *''Toronto: Transformations in a City and its Region'', published in 2014, draws on the ideas of Torontonians Marshall McLuhan and
Jane Jacobs Jane Jacobs (''née'' Butzner; 4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book '' The Death and Life of Great American Cities ...
to explore the changes in Toronto since about 1970.(University of Pennsylvania Press 2014) *''The Toronto Guide: the City, Metro, the Region'' (1990), reissued by the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto 1997 and 2002 *"An Inquiry into the Relations between Geography and Phenomenology," ''Canadian Geographer'', 1970 *"To See with the Soul of the Eye," ''Landscape'', 1979 (republished in ''Orion'' 1984 and the ''Utne Reader'' 1986) *"Seeing, Thinking and Describing Landscape", in ''Environment, Perception and Behavior'', eds. T. Saarinen, D. Seamon and J. Sell, University of Chicago, Department of Geography Research Series, No. 209, 1984 *"Geographical Experience and Being-in-the-World", in ''Dwelling, Place and Environment'', eds. D. Seamon and R. Mugerauer, Martinus Nijhof, 1985 *"The Reclamation of Place" ''Orion'', 1993 *"Sense of Place" in ''Ten Geographical Ideas that Have Changed the World'', ed. S. Hanson, Rutgers University Press 1997 *"The Critical Description of Confused Geographies" in ''Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies'', eds. P. Adams, K. Till, S. Hoelscher, University of Minnesota Press, 2001 *Spirit of Place and Sense of Place in Virtual Realities", in ''Techne: Research in Technology and Philosophy,'' ed. E. Champion, 2007 *"A Pragmatic Sense of Place" in ''Making Sense of Place,'' eds. F. Vanclay, et al, Australian National Museum, 2008 *"Place and Connection" in ''The Intelligence of Place: Topographies and Poetics'', ed. J. Malpas, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015 *"The Paradox of Place and the Evolution of Placelessness" in ''Place and Placelessness Revisited'' eds R. Freestone and E. Liu, Taylor and Francis, 2016 *"The Openness of Place" in ''Place and Phenomenology'' ed J. Donohue, Rowman and Littlefield, 2017 *"Landscape as a Language without Words" in ''Handbook of the Changing World Map'' ed S. Brunn, Springer online, 2018 *"The Inconspicuous Familiarity of Landscape" in ''The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places'' ed E. Champion, Routledge, 2019


External links


Award for Scholarly Distinction in Geography
* Curriculum vita

{{DEFAULTSORT:Relph, Edward 1944 births Canadian geographers University of Toronto faculty Living people