Phenomenological Perspectives on Place, Lifeworlds, and Lived Emplacement:
Selected Writings of David Seamon (London: Routledge, 2023)
This volume is a compilation of 17
previously published entries that focus
on the significance of places and place
experiences in human life.
Chapters are broken into three parts.
Part I includes four chapters that
consider what phenomenology offers
studies of place and place making. These
chapters illustrate the theoretical and
practical value of phenomenological
concepts like lifeworld, homeworld,
natural attitude, and bodily actions in
place.
Part II incorporates five chapters that
aim to understand place and lived
emplacement phenomenologically.
These chapters consider Merleau-
Ponty’s thinking on place-as-
situatedness, the value of
phenomenology for a pedagogy of place
making, how architecture might be
understood phenomenologically, and the
significance of place serendipity in
human life.
Part III presents phenomenological
explications of real-world places and
place experience, drawing on
photography (André Kertész’s Meudon),
television (Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under),
film (John Sayles’s Limbo and Sunshine
State), and imaginative literature (Doris
Lessing’s Four-Gated City, Penelope
Lively’s Spiderweb, and Louis
Bromfield’s The World We Live in).
Chapter 1. An Introduction: Going
Places
Part I: What Phenomenology
Offers Studies of Place and
Placemaking
Chapter 2. Lived Bodies, Place, and
Phenomenology
Chapter 3. The Wellbeing of People and
Place
Chapter 4. Body-Subject, Time-Space
Routines, and Place Ballets
Chapter 5. Whither Phenomenological
Research? Possibilities for
Environmental and Place Studies
Part II: Understanding Place
and Lived Emplacement
Phenomenologically
Chapter 6. Merleau-Ponty, Lived Body,
and Place: Toward a Phenomenology of
Human Situatedness
Chapter 7. Serendipitous Events in
Place
Chapter 8. Architecture, Place, and
Phenomenology: Buildings as
Lifeworlds, Atmospheres, and
Environmental Wholes
Chapter 9. The Value of
Phenomenology for a Pedagogy of Place
and Placemaking
Chapter 10. A Phenomenological
Reading of Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life
of Great American Cities.
Part III: Places, Lived
Emplacement, and Place
Presence
Chapter 11. Place, Placelessness,
Insideness, and Outsideness in American
Filmmaker John Sayles’s Sunshine State
Chapter 12. Place, Belonging, and
Environmental Humility: The
Experience of “Teched” as Portrayed by
American Novelist and Agrarian
Reformer Louis Bromfield
Chapter 13. Finding One’s Place:
Environmental and Human Risk in
Filmmaker John Sayles’s Limbo
Chapter 14. Phenomenology and
Uncanny Homecoming: Homeworld,
Alienworld, and Being-at-Home in Alan
Ball’s HBO Television Series, Six Feet
Under
Chapter 15. A Phenomenology of
Inhabitation: The Lived Reciprocity
between Houses and Inhabitants as
Portrayed by American Writer Louis
Bromfield
Chapter 16. Using Place to Understand
Lifeworld: The Example of British
Novelist Penelope Lively’s Spiderweb
Chapter 17. Moments of Realization:
Extending Homeworld in British-African
Novelist Doris Lessing’s Four-Gated
City
Chapter 18. Looking at a Photograph—
André Kertész’s 1928 Meudon:
Interpreting Aesthetic Experience
Phenomenologically
Appendix: Other Selected Works by
David Seamon (1978–2022)
Reviews
For over forty years, David Seamon has
been a central figure in interdisciplinary
work on place and space. This new
volume brings together a selection of
Seamon’s essays that showcases the
breadth and depth of his engagement.
The volume admirably complements
Seamon’s recent Life Takes Place
(Routledge, 2018) and is an essential
volume for those interested in
humanistic and phenomenological
thinking about place, world, and lived
experience.
—Jeff Malpas, Emeritus Distinguished
Professor at the University of Tasmania,
Hobart, Australia, and author of
Rethinking Dwelling and Place and
Experience
This volume demonstrates clearly why
David Seamon is considered both a
leading advocate for phenomenology
and, also, through his work in geography
and architecture, one of its pre-eminent
practitioners. These eighteen chapters,
mostly published since 2010 in diverse
journals and edited collections, reveals
the depth and range of his scholarship
about the inseparability of person, place
and lifeworld. This book demonstrates
the diverse ways to do phenomenology
and the complex wholeness of place and
place experience.
—Edward Relph, Professor Emeritus of
Geography, University of Toronto, and
author of Place and Placelessness
David Seamon is one of the world’s
foremost place theorists. This unique
collection is not only a compelling
compilation of his work but also an
insightful, rich thematic overview of the
fulness of meaning of the phenomenon
of place. Each entry throws new light on
phenomenology, lived experience,
architecture, cities, environmental
humility, home, and place-making. It is
an exceptional volume that will be of
interest to both the novice as well as
those specializing in building and
dwelling in place.
—Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Professor
Emerita, University of Toronto, and
author or editor of Safeguarding Our
Common Future, The Natural City, and
The Wonder of Water
In this wide-ranging collection of
writings, David Seamon actually “goes
places.” He puts his ideas on places and
placemaking into dialogue with other
authors and disciplines (including artistic
media like films, novels, short stories,
and photographs), without forgetting to
also verify those ideas through his own
and others’ experience. After introducing
the fundamental concepts of lifeworld,
lived bodies, and environmental
embodiment, and place ballets, Seamon
illustrates brilliantly how lived
emplacement should be understood and
specific place situations might be
improved via design, planning, and
policy.
—Tonino Griffero, Full Professor of
Aesthetics, University of Rome “Tor
Vergata,” Italy, and author of Quasi-
Things: The Paradigm of Atmospheres
This collection offers readers a broad
perspective on experiencing places and
human lifeworlds. Throughout the book,
Seamon incorporates other conceptual
traditions and thoughtfully relates them
to a phenomenological perspective—for
example architectural theorist Bill
Hillier’s space syntax and architect
Christopher Alexander’s pattern
language. The entries are written in a
clear, accessible language that allows
non-phenomenologists to readily follow
Seamon’s arguments. This volume is a
keystone text for phenomenological
research dealing with place and place
making.
—Akkelies van Nes, Professor of
Architecture, Western Norway
University of Applied Sciences, Bergen,
Norway, and co-author of Introduction
to Space Syntax in Urban Studies
Marking over forty years of
perseverance by phenomenological
geographer David Seamon, this
anthology is optimistic, strong, and
resolutely defends the phenomenological
tradition of Edmond Husserl, Martin
Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Unlike Edward Casey's intellectual
archaeology of place or Jeff Malpas's
topological reading of place, Seamon's
interest focuses on day-to-day situations
and events. He takes a close look at
literary, cinematic, architectural, artistic,
and photographic depictions of everyday
experiences, reflecting on taken-for-
granted aspects of human worlds.
Seamon’s efforts lead to a better
understanding of the importance of place
and place experience as an anchor in
people’s lives. The chapters in this
volume explicate a phenomenology of
the everyday, but also a phenomenology
adapted to the everyday and to the
everydayness of place. As a result,
entries do not feel distant but more like
the murmuring of a familiar but often
neglected friend—place and place
experiences.
—Xu Huang, Associate Professor of
Geography, Nanjing Normal University,
Nanjing, China
David Seamon’s abiding interest is the
inseparability of our humanity from our
contexts, our places—towns, homes,
workplaces—where we live, die, love,
dream. His concern is a sorely needed
investigation if we wish to feel at home
in our private worlds, become competent
at urban planning, or, on a larger scale,
address issues such as immigration,
mobility, and globalization.
—Jenny Quillien, anthropologist and
board member of the Sustasis
Foundation, Portland, Oregon
This book is a retrospective over the
extremely productive and influential
career of David Seamon. His work has
paved the way for a phenomenological
approach to geography and architecture,
one which foregrounds the ways in
which place is implicated in the human.
Seamon’s approach to phenomenology
in built and natural space has been
widely influential and deeply insightful.
His ability to connect scholarly work
with art, literature, photography,
television, and film ensures that the
human’s debt to and dependence on
place is seen in sophisticated and
compelling ways. This book is a real
joy—not only does it give a sense of the
trajectory of Seamon’s sustained passion
for seeing human flourishing in its
places, but it also reminds us just how
seminal his work has been for others in
their own fields and suggests ways that a
phenomenology of place remain relevant
to academia and human life to this day.
If anyone still doubts that place should
matter for understanding the richness
and creative spark in our humanity, this
book is a resounding answer.
—Bruce Janz, author of Philosophy in an
African Place and Professor of
Philosophy and Co-Director of the
Center for Humanities and Digital
Research at the University of Central
Florida, Orlando
It is irrefutable that persons and places
interact in complex and multitudinous
ways. David Seamon is an original and
insightful thinker, whose earlier Life
Takes Place is a career-defining work.
His innovative reworking of
phenomenology reveals his percipience
in appreciating the ongoing relevance of
Husserl and Heidegger in the twenty-
first century. This latest work is a
wonderfully inventive and readable
collection of essays that will repay
attention myriad times. Chapters
entertain as much as they educate.
—Carole Cusack, Professor of Religious
Studies, University of Sidney, Australia
David Seamon writes with complex
clarity about phenomenology and place.
This new anthology addresses core
phenomenological phenomena including
those related to education—for example,
place-based education evoking active
learning, community engagement, and
environmental stewardship in times of
digital abstraction. Through examples
from art (novels, short stories, film, and
television), he engagingly examines the
lifeworld directly and clarifies tacit,
unnoticed aspects of human life that can
be better accounted for theoretically and
practically. Seamon amalgamates
phenomenological method, philosophy,
and presentation in a classic volume for
future generations of phenomenologists.
—Tone Saevi, Professor of Education,
VID Specialized University, Bergen,
Norway
Further information:
https://www.routledge.com/Phenomenol
ogical-Perspectives-on-Place-
Lifeworlds-and-Lived-
Emplacement/Seamon/p/book/97810323
57294
Chapter Abstracts
Chapter 1. An Introduction: Going
Places
This introduction identifies the central
theme of this volume as the inseparable
links between people and place. The
volume’s seventeen chapters are
overviewed via their division into three
parts: first, phenomenology as a means
for studying place; second,
phenomenological insights relating to
place; third, phenomenological studies of
specific place experiences and situations.
The chapter ends with a discussion of the
current state of place and lived
emplacement. The suggestion is made
that, today, the most encouraging
possibility is human beings’ realizing the
significance of places in their lives and
finding ways that those places might be
regenerated, sustained, and revitalized.
PART I. What
Phenomenology Offers
Studies of Place and Place
Making
Chapter 2. Lived Bodies, Place, and
Phenomenology
Most simply, phenomenology is the
description and interpretation of human
experience. A central focus is the
lifeworld—the typical, taken-for-granted
context of everyday experience of which,
most of the time we are unaware.
Phenomenologists argue that an integral
structure of the lifeworld is the lived
body, which, through unique modes of
encounter and interaction with the world
at hand, contributes to the generative
structure of each person’s experiences
and lifeways. In this chapter, I review
the notion of lifeworld and highlight the
significance of the lived body in human
experience. I suggest that lived bodies
are in an intimate relationship with the
worlds in which they find themselves.
This situation is described in terms of
environmental embodiment. In turn,
environmental embodiment points to the
crucial significance of places in human
life. I examine the dynamic relations
between lived body and place by
highlighting how each interanimates the
other.
Chapter 3. The Wellbeing of People
and Place
In this chapter, I draw upon the
phenomenological concepts of lifeworld,
natural attitude, homeworld and place to
clarify what human-immersion-in-world
and lived obliviousness might mean for
research in wellbeing. To provide a real-
world context for my argument, I present
three narrative accounts of ordinary and
out-of-the-ordinary place experiences
written by interior designer Jane Barry
(2012); novelist Doris Lessing (1984);
and sociologist Eric Klinenberg (2002).
Using these three examples as evidence,
I contend that place is an integral, non-
contingent aspect of human life and
helps to explain why wellbeing can
typically be out of sight and thus not
recognized as a significant dimension of
one’s day-to-day experience. I conclude
that, because of the always-already-
present reciprocity between human-
immersion-in-place and lived
obliviousness, professional efforts to
enhance wellbeing might sometimes be
more successfully accomplished
indirectly by changing aspects of place,
including creative neighborhood design
and planning that facilitate place
attachment and a strong sense of
environmental belonging.
Chapter 4. Body-Subject, Time-Space
Routines, and Place Ballets
This chapter develops a phenomenology
of everyday movement in space by which
is meant any spatial displacement of the
body or bodily part initiated by the
person herself—for example, biking to a
friend’s house, driving to a shop, or
walking downtown for lunch. The
chapter overviews two conventional
approaches to everyday movement—
behaviorist and cognitive theories.
Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
conception of “body-subject,” the
chapter then introduces a
phenomenological alternative and asks
its value for environmental theory and
design.
Chapter 5. Whither Phenomenological
Research? Possibilities for
Environmental and Place Studies
This chapter reviews the current state of
phenomenology. To focus discussion,
three themes are discussed, the first of
which is “placing phenomenology”—
i.e., examining recent academic
controversies relating to what
phenomenology is as a philosophy,
research method, and way of
understanding. The second theme
discussed is “evaluating
phenomenology”—i.e., considering what
trustworthiness is in phenomenological
research and how descriptive and
interpretive validity are to be gaged
phenomenologically. The third theme
discussed is “displacing
phenomenology”—i.e., asking if
phenomenology has run its course
academically and whether it must be
recast as so-called “post-
phenomenology” or “critical
phenomenology.” The chapter concludes
with a review of phenomenological work
relating to place studies; attention is
given to the question of geographical
rootedness versus mobility.
PART II. Understanding
Place and Lived
Emplacement
Phenomenologically
Chapter 6. Merleau-Ponty, Lived
Body, and Place: Toward a
Phenomenology of Human
Situatedness
In this chapter, I draw on French
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s understanding of perception and
corporeal sensibility to consider the
significance of human situatedness as
expressed via place and place
experience. To illustrate how Merleau-
Ponty’s conceptual understanding might
be applied to real-world place
experiences, I draw on two sources of
experiential evidence, the first of which
is a passage from Colombian writer
Gabriel García Márquez’s magical-
realist novel, One Hundred Years of
Solitude (1967/1970). The second source
is a set of first-person observations
describing events and situations that I
happened to take note of during weekday
walks between my home and university
office over the course of several months.
My aim is to use these two narrative
accounts to illustrate, via vignettes of
everyday human experience, Merleau-
Ponty’s central concepts of perception,
body-subject, and lived embodiment. I
contend that these accounts substantiate
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological
claims and point to additional significant
elements of human situatedness and
place experience.
Chapter. 7. Serendipitous Events in
Place
This chapter focuses on environmental
serendipity—unexpected events and
situations arising because of
happenstance encounters in place. In Life
Takes Place (Seamon 2018), I called this
environmental serendipity place release.
Through unexpected actions, events, and
situations in place, people are “released”
more deeply into themselves. Partly
because of surprises happening in place,
“life is good” as when one meets an old
friend on the sidewalk or notices by
chance a street poster advertising a
neighborhood coffeehouse reading by a
local poet one admires. Importantly,
release can also unsettle place when
serendipitous events happen that are
inappropriate, distressing, threatening, or
deadly—for example, an older man is
mugged in his own neighborhood. In this
chapter, I probe place release by
considering journalistic and cinematic
descriptions of two contrasting modes of
place serendipity, one felicitous, the
other ill-starred: on one hand, meeting
one’s life partner because of
happenstance encounter in place; on the
other hand, losing one’s life because of
happenstance encounter in place. My
aim is to better understand what place
release entails and how both human and
environmental aspects contribute to its
role in the life of places.
Chapter 8. Architecture, Place, and
Phenomenology: Buildings as
Lifeworlds, Atmospheres, and
Environmental Wholes
This chapter draws on a
phenomenological perspective to
consider three ways in which buildings
work as places: first, as lifeworlds;
second, as architectural atmospheres;
and, third, as physical and spatial fields
that sustain environmental and place
wholeness. These three themes because
they have been given only minimal
attention in the growing literature on
“architectural phenomenology,” which
can be defined as the phenomenological
study of architectural experiences and
meanings as constituted by qualities and
features of both the built environment
and human life
Chapter 9. The Value of
Phenomenology for a Pedagogy of
Place and Place Making
This chapter illustrates how
phenomenology can be useful
pedagogically to understand the central
importance of places in human life and
for improving those places, particularly
via architecture and environmental
design. A central focus is the work of
architect Christopher Alexander,
particularly his method of “pattern
language,” which provides an invaluable
pedagogical tool for envisioning
architecture and environmental design as
place making. The chapter also discusses
how a phenomenology of place
contributes to a place-based education
that incorporates active learning,
community engagement, and
environmental stewardship.
Chapter 10. A Phenomenological
Reading of Jane Jacobs’s Death and
Life of Great American Cities
This chapter argues that Jane Jacobs’s
Death and Life of Great American Cities
can be interpreted as a phenomenology
of the city and urban place. Four aspects
of the book are considered as they relate
to a phenomenological approach: (1)
Jacobs’s mode of seeing and
understanding as phenomenological
method; (2) her claim that citiness is a
phenomenon in its own right and has the
power to draw and hold people in
particular urban places; (3) her portrait
of urban experience and place as they are
founded in environmental embodiment;
and (4) her pointing toward a
constellation of place relationships and
processes that potentially strengthen or
weaken citiness.
PART III. Places, Lived
Emplacement, and Place
Presence
Chapter 11. Place, Placelessness,
Insideness, and Outsideness in
American Filmmaker John Sayles’s
Sunshine State
John Sayles is one of America’s most
successful independent filmmakers,
whose works include Return of the
Secaucus Seven (1980), City of Hope
(1991), and Lone Star (1996). This
article examines Sayles’s portrait of
place in Sunshine State (2002), a film set
in Plantation Island, Florida, where
large-scale corporate development is
transforming two communities—one
black, the other white—into upscale
winter resorts. Sayles’s film probes the
place experience of some sixteen vividly
drawn characters and illuminates how
the same physical place, for different
individuals and groups, can evoke a
broad spectrum of situations, meanings,
and potential futures. One of Sayles’s
conclusions is that people cannot escape
the place in which they find themselves.
They can, however, learn from that place
and thereby decide whether and in what
ways they will offer that place
commitment or not.
Chapter 12. Place, Belonging, and
Environmental Humility: The
Experience of “Teched” as Portrayed
by American Writer Reformer Louis
Bromfield
This chapter considers the question of
facilitating respect and reverence for
places and the natural world by
examining two short stories by
American novelist, agriculturalist, and
agrarian reformer Louis Bromfield
(1896-1956). In his writings, Bromfield
emphasized a way of being with the
natural world that he called teched
(rhymes with “fetched”)—the capacity
for experiencing an intuitive intimacy
with the natural world’s things,
creatures, landscapes, and places.
Bromfield believed that this direct
openness to the world leads to a truer,
more sincere understanding of nature
and an instinctive wish for working with
and using the natural world in a more
kindly, responsible way. This chapter
explicates Bromfield’s understanding of
teched via two 1944 short stories, “Up
Ferguson Way” and “The Pond.”
Chapter 13. Finding One’s Place:
Environmental and Human Risk in
American Filmmaker John Sayles’s
Limbo
This chapter discusses Limbo, a 1999
film by independent filmmaker John
Sayles, one of America’s most spiritually
astute directors. His character-driven
films regularly explore self-
transformation stymied or propelled by
personal misfortune, social change, or
the mystery of fate. Several of his films
explicate the hazardous relationships
between people and places, particularly
as those places incorporate existential
limitations or possibilities. In Limbo, the
place is early-twenty-first-century
Alaska, which is both the setting and
antagonist for three main characters who
face personal and interpersonal risk as
that risk is impelled by place in both its
human and natural forms. Sayles
suggests that what one’s place is may not
be the place where he or she really needs
to be. Finding one’s place is never
guaranteed, but, if we are successful, we
break free from “limbo”—what Sayles
defines as “a condition of unknowable
outcome” but also as “an intermediate or
transitional place.” In the film, Sayles
suggests that searching for one’s place
may ultimately be as important as
finding it.
Chapter 14. Phenomenology and
Uncanny Homecomings: Homeworld,
Alienworld, and Being-at-Home in
Alan Ball’s HBO Television Series, Six
Feet Under
This chapter considers the meaning of
home and at-homeness in writer and
director Alan Ball’s popular Home Box
Office cable-television series, Six Feet
Under, which completed its fifth and
final season in 2005. The chapter
contends that there is much about the
home life presented in the series that
represents a traditionalist understanding
of home. The chapter argues, however,
that in other ways—including the fact
that the presence of death is always
calling the world of the living into
question—the series’ portrayal of
contemporary inhabitation reflects an
innovative postmodernist understanding.
The chapter ends by considering how Six
Feet Under uses the uncanny as one
means to propel characters’ personal
transformations and thereby point toward
a more progressive mode of home and
at-homeness.
Chapter 15. A Phenomenology of
Inhabitation: The Lived Reciprocity
between Houses and Inhabitants as
Portrayed by American Writer Louis
Bromfield
This chapter examines houses and
inhabitation as portrayed by American
novelist and agricultural writer Louis
Bromfield (1896-1956). A central theme
in Bromfield’s writings was the lived
relationship between human beings and
the world in which they find themselves.
One way in which he explored this
relationship was via narrative accounts
of the interconnections between houses
and their inhabitants. Regularly in his
novels and short stories, Bromfield
depicted a lived reciprocity whereby
house and inhabitants mutually afford
and reflect each other, sometimes in
positive ways that facilitate engagement
and care; at other times in negative ways
that intimate or spur personal or social
dissolution. This chapter draws on
Bromfield’s 1939 short story, “The Hand
of God,” to explicate this lived
reciprocity and to illustrate how
unfavorable relationships precipitate
unfortunate place consequences.
Chapter 16. Using Place to Chapter 18. Looking at a
Understand Lifeworld: The Example Photograph—André Kertész’s 1928
of British Novelist Penelope Lively’s Meudon: Interpreting Aesthetic
Spiderweb Experience Phenomenologically
This chapter clarifies the This chapter draws on a photograph by
phenomenological concept of lifeworld the eminent Hungarian-American
by drawing on the geographical themes photographer André Kertész (1894–
of place, place experience, and place 1985) to point toward a phenomenology
meaning. Most simply, lifeworld refers of aesthetic encounter. This photograph
to a person or group’s day-to-day, taken- is Kertész’s frequently published 1928
for-granted experience that ically goes image of Meudon, a Parisian, working-
unnoticed. One aim of class suburb. Drawing on my own
phenomenological research is to examine interpretive experience of the photograph
the lifeworld directly and thereby as well as student responses, I delineate a
identify and clarify tacit, unnoticed continuum of lived encounter ranging
aspects of human life so that they can be from partial seeing to deeper aesthetic
accounted for theoretically and insight. Making use of the progressively-
practically. This chapter discusses some intensive designations of philosopher
key phenomenological principles and Henri Bortoft, I highlight a spectrum of
then draws on phenomenological aesthetic experience that extends from
renditions of place to clarify some of the limited assimilation to a more
lifeworld’s social, environmental, and comprehensive and engaged
geographical aspects. To concretize participatory understanding.
discussion, the chapter draws on
descriptive evidence from British writer Further information:
Penelope Lively’s Spiderweb, a 1990s https://www.routledge.com/Phenomenol
novel describing one outsider’s efforts to ogical-Perspectives-on-Place-
come to inhabit a place—a fictitious Lifeworlds-and-Lived-
present-day village in the southwestern Emplacement/Seamon/p/book/97810323
British county of Somerset. 57294
Chapter 17. Moments of Realization:
Extending Homeworld in British-
African Novelist Doris Lessing’s Four-
Gated City
For Husserl, the homeworld is the tacit,
taken-for-granted sphere of experiences,
understanding, and situations marking
out a world that is comfortable, usual,
and “the way things are and should be.”
Always, according to Husserl, the
homeworld is in some mode of lived
mutuality with an alienworld—a world
as seen as a realm of difference,
atypicality, and otherness. In this
chapter, I draw on British-African
novelist Doris Lessing’s 1969 novel, The
Four-Gated City, to consider the shifting
homeworld of protagonist Martha Quest,
a young white African woman
emigrating to battle-scarred London
immediately after World War II.
Throughout the novel, Quest finds
herself in unfamiliar or challenging
situations where the world she takes for
granted is called into question. Lessing
draws on these life-testing experiences to
portray Quest’s shifting understandings
of other individuals’ homeworlds that, at
first, she sees as atypical, abnormal, or
unreal.