The pedagogy of the American city: revisiting the concepts of place, non-place, and placelessness

The concepts of place, non-place, and placelessness were used in a course on reading the American city during the winter quarter of 2003 at the University of Cincinnati. The course was open to both graduate as well as undergraduate students and some 16 planning and architecture students registered for it. The class examined these concepts against the backdrop of the relevant literature and especially Grady Clay's concerns about the conventional ways of reading the city. Using each concept separately, students were asked to interpret Cincinnati's urban landscape both textually and graphically.While the students' case studies varied widely in terms of the scale and the verbal description of the selected concepts, they shared similarities. For example, students' projects on the concept of place emphasized identity, history, a sense of attachment, and memory. Case studies on non-place, however, focused on connectivity, freeways, bridges, and parking lots; projects on placelessness, on the other hand, stressed lack of meaning as a result of standardized developments with cookie-cutter buildings and theme parks. In sum, incorporating these concepts shows promise for interpreting the dynamics of the American city.