The Atrophy of place

Date

2017

Author

Kesim, Berk

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The built environment is designed to make places, and design behavior is a prerequisite for lack of place. This thesis identifies lack of place as a problem of urban place design within the human-environment relationship. Lack of place is a precondition of the design act. Despite the fact that no every design effort results in the creation of places, it originates from a certain deprivation in an environmental setting. Accordingly, the thesis claims that the lack of place is more than a mere pessimistic, realist ethos, in that it implies not only an absence of care for places, but also an intrinsic will in need of a place. Lack of Place can be linked to the concepts of Non-Place, Loss of Place and Placelessness. Contemporary authors bemoan the loss of urban place, however the concepts are not sophisticated enough to describe the phenomenon, and this thesis argues that the concepts underestimate the phenomenon. The thesis will present a new phenomen-o-logical framework for the place identity and lack of place, as despite all the observable manifestations of lack of place, the city has already been identified as place by its inhabitants. In this regard, the phenomenon of lack requires re-identification. Ultimately, the phenomenographic research to identify the deficient parts of the theory arrives at the conclusion that an Atrophy of Place has taken place, in which the term “Atrophy” refers to a new consciousness for understanding the human-environment relationship.  

Subject Keywords

Urbanization., City planning., Phenomenology., Existential phenomenology., Architecture and philosophy.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12621181/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/26512

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis