Phenomenological Perspectives on Place, Lifeworlds and Lived Emplacement (David Seamon)

Phenomenological Perspectives on Place, Lifeworlds and Lived Emplacement is a compilation of fifteen previously published articles and chapters by David Seamon, one of the foremost researchers in environmental, architectural, and place phenomenology. These entries discuss such topics as body-subject, the lived body, place ballets, environmental serendipity, homeworlds, and the pedagogy of place and place making. The fifteen chapters are broken into three parts. Part I includes four entries that consider what phenomenology offers studies of place and place making. These chapters illustrate the theoretical and practical value of phenomenological concepts like lifeworld, natural attitude, and bodily actions in place. Part II incorporates five chapters that aim to understand place and lived emplacement phenomenologically. Topics covered include environmental situatedness, architectural phenomenology, environmental serendipity, and the value of phenomenology for a pedagogy of place and place making. Part III presents six explications of real-world places and place experience, drawing on examples from photography (Andre Kertesz's Meudon), television (Alan Ball's Six Feet Under), film (John Sayles' Limbo and Sunshine State), and imaginative literature (Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City and Louis Bromfield's The World We Live in). Seamon is a major figure in environment-behavior research, particularly as that work has applied value for design professionals. This volume will be of interest to geographers, environmental psychologists, architects, planners, policymakers and other researchers and practitioners concerned with place, place experience, place meaning, and place making.