Edward Relph

Edward Relph

Edward "Ted" Relph is a Canadian geographer, best known for Place and Placelessness. He grew up on the Welsh side of the Wye Valley and studied at the Joint School of Geography at the University of London and at the University of Toronto. He is an emeritus professor of the University of Toronto, where he served from 1991 to 1999 as Chair of the Division of Social Sciences at the Scarborough campus. From 1999 to 2005 he was Associate Principal responsible for the expansion and redevelopment of that campus, and served again as Chair of Social Sciences from 2008 to 2010. He now lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Place and Placelessness, first published in 1976 and reissued in 2010, is a phenomenological account of how places are experienced and how they are changing. It was one of the first books that explicitly examined the idea of place, and also one of the first phenomenological studies in Geography. It has been widely cited and has been described as a Classic in Human Geography in both Progress in Human Geography, Vol 24, No 4, 2000, and Classics in Human Geography, ed. P. Hubbard, R. Kitchen, & G. Vallentine, Sage, 2008. It has been translated into several languages including Japanese, Korean and Chinese. Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography, published in 1981, explores why modern built environments provide material comfort and efficiency yet breed criticism and despair rather than hope and commitment. It was reissued as a Routledge Revival in 2015. The Modern Urban Landscape, published in 1987, examines why urban landscapes built since about 1900 look as they do by tracing changes in planning and architecture through the rise of modernism to post-modernism and the corporatization of cities. It has been reprinted several times and translated into Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese. Toronto: Transformations in a City and its Region, published in 2014, draws on the ideas of Torontonians Marshall McLuhan and Jane Jacobs to explore the remarkable changes that have happened in and around Toronto since about 1970 as it has grown into one of the largest metropolitan regions in North America. There is a companion website at torontotransforms.com.

In 1990 he prepared The Toronto Guide: The City, Metro, the Region, as a field guide for the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers which was held that year in Toronto. This guide was revised and reprinted several times up until 2002.

Edward Relph has also written many academic articles and book chapters, including a number that investigate the phenomenological and experiential foundations of geography, and others which elaborate sense of place and the ways experiences of place are currently being transformed.

Publications

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