Place.

In ancient and medieval thought place was often center stage; the ground and context for everything else.  Aristotle thought place should take precedence of all other things because place gives order to the world.  Casey tells us that Aristotle claimed that place "gives bountiful aegis -- active protective support -- to what locates."  But the universalist pretensions of first, monotheistic religion and then The Enlightenment conspired to represent place as parochial, as a prosaic footnote when compared to their grand but abstract visions of global oneness.  Most modern intellectuals and scientists have hardly any interest in place for they consider their theories to be applicable everywhere.  Place was demoted and displaced, a process that was helped on its way by the rise of its slightly pompous and suitably abstract geographical rival, the idea of "space."  Space sounds modern in a way place doesn't: it evokes mobility and the absence of restrictions; it promises empty landscapes filled with promise.  When confronted with the filled-in business and oddity of place the reaction of modern societies has been to straighten and rationalise, to prioritize connections and erase obstacles, to overcome place with space.

In his philosophical history The Fate of Place, Casey charts a growing "disdain for the genus loci: indifference to the specialness of place."  We all live with the results. Most of us can see them outside the window.  In a hyper-mobile world, a love of place can easily be cast as passe, even reactionary.  When human fulfillment is measured out in air miles and even geographers subscribe to the idea, as expressed by Professor William J. Mitchell of MIT, that "communities increasingly find their common ground in cyberspace rather than terra firma," wanting to think about place can seem a little perverse.  Yet placelessness is neither intellectually nor emotionally satisfying.  Sir Thomas Moore's Greek neologism "utopia" may translate as "no place" but a placeless world is a dystopian prospect.

Place is a protean and fundamental aspect of what it is to be human.  We are a place-making and place-loving species.  The renowned and evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson talks about the innate and biologically necessary human love of living things as "biophilia."  He suggests that biophilia both connects us together as a species and bonds us to the rest of nature.  I would argue that there is an unjustly ignored and equally important geographical equivalent: "topophilia," or love of place.  The word was coined by the Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan about the same time as Wilson introduced biophilia and its pursuit is at the heart of this book.

There is another theme that threads its way throughout the places corralled here -- the need to escape.  This urge is more widespread today than at any point in the past: since fantastic vacation destinations and lifestyles are constantly dangled before us, it's no surprise so many feel dissatisfied with their daily routine.  The rise of placelessness, on top of sense that the whole planet is now minutely known and surveilled, has given this dissatisfaction a radical edge, creating an appetite to find places that are off the map and that are somehow secret or at least have the power to surprise us.  

When describing the village of Ishmael's native ally and friend, Queequeg, in Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote: "It is not down on any map; true places never are."  It's an odd thing to say but i think it makes immediate, instinctual sense.  It touches on a suspicion that lies just beneath the rational surface of civilization.  When the world has been fully codified and collated, when ambivalences and ambiguities have been so sponged away that we know exactly and objectively where everything is and what it is called, a sense of loss arises.  The claim to completeness causes us to mourn the possibility of exploration and muse endlessly on the hope of both novelty and escape.  It is within this context that the unnamed and discarded places -- both far away and those that we pass every day -- take on a romantic aura.  In a fully discovered world exploration does not stop; it just has to be reinvented.

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