Relph, Edward (1944–)

Throughout his professional career as a geographer, Edward Relph has explored the nature and importance of places, landscapes, environments, and other taken-for-granted geographical dimensions of peoples’ everyday lives. His books include Place and Placelessness (1976), one of the earliest and most accessible phenomenologies of place; Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography (1981), a powerful explication of philosopher Martin Heidegger's notion of appropriation as a potential vehicle for a lived environmental ethic grounded in respect and care for the natural world; and The Modern Urban Landscape (1987), an exploration of why modern cities look the way they do. The empathetic effort to see, describe, and understand everyday places and environments as thoughtfully and as thoroughly as possible is at the heart of Relph's geographic research and writings.

Born in 1944, Relph grew up in a small village in Southern Wales. At the University of London, he completed a bachelor's degree in geography in 1965 and a master's in 1968. He did his doctoral work in geography at the University of Toronto and in 1973 completed his dissertation, The Phenomenon of Place, which was revised and published as Place and Placelessness in 1976. From 1973 to the present, Relph has been a professor of geography in the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, a suburban Toronto campus.

During the 1970s, Relph became associated with humanistic geography. Like other geographers of the late 20th century, such as Anne Buttimer, David Ley, Marwyn Samuels, David Seamon, and Yi-Fu Tuan, Relph sought to move [Page 2411]geographic research away from objectified, measurable phenomena studied through positivist science and toward an understanding of geographical and environmental behaviors, experiences, and meanings as they could be interpreted through the Continental philosophical approaches of existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics.

Of all the work in humanistic geography arising from this period, Relph's Place and Placelessness has had the most lasting influence because it explained, in simple but versatile language, why places are an integral part of human life and how their existential core can be described phenomenologically in terms of insideness—that is, the degree to which an individual or group feels a sense of belonging and attachment to a locale or environment, which thereby existentially is transformed into a place. In this sense, place gathers human worlds spatially and environmentally, marking out centers of human intention, meaning, and action that, reciprocally, help make place.

After Place and Placelessness, Relph continued to examine the existential and geographical aspects of place and its opposite, placelessness—present-day environments and landscapes of standardization, uniformity, and disconnection from human and environmental context. In The Modern Urban Landscape, for example, Relph considered how shifts in architecture, technology, planning, and social developments have been largely responsible for the changing physical appearance of Western cities in the past century. In Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography, he sought ways of seeing and understanding that might facilitate a gentle caretaking of places, people, and the things of nature—what Relph called an environmental humility. Relph (1981) argued that if the current human relationship with nature is to improve ecologically and existentially, the primary need is “for guardianship, for taking care of things merely because they exist, for tending and protecting them. In this there is neither mastery nor subservience, but there is responsibility and commitment” (p. 187).

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