Invigorated by the emergence in the late 1960s of a
humanistic critique in geography, the concept gained
prominence among phenomenological researchers in architecture and geography in the 1970s with the publication of
work such as Norberg-Schulz’s (1980) Genius Loci:
Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, Relph’s (1976)
Place and Placelessness, and Tuan’s (1977) Space and
Place: The Perspective of Experience. Interest in the
concept of place was initially slow to spread beyond
phenomenological researchers and humanistic geographers
due to the dominance of quantitative and positivistic philosophies in environment and behavior research (Low &
Altman, 1992). Over the last two decades, however, place
has attracted considerable attention from researchers in a
variety of research traditions.