cover image The Experience of Place

The Experience of Place

Tony Hiss. Knopf Publishing Group, $24.5 (233pp) ISBN 978-0-394-56849-2

Spanning the fields of environmentalism and urban and regional planning, this primer's basic premise is simple: the places where we spend our time--homes, offices, train stations, parks, stores, etc.--affect who we are. New Yorker staff writer Hiss begins by minutely examining his on-site responses to Manhattan's Grand Central Station, Times Square and Central Park. He then ranges further afield: from downtown San Francisco to towns in Maine's north woods, from protected landscapes in England and Wales to Frankfurt's public open spaces. His revelatory odyssey is an invitation to stop, look, linger--and preserve what is life-enhancing in the environment. Hiss hails planning tools of the emergent science of place, including environmental simulations, satellite photographs, experimental watchdog groups and other regionalist projects that link city to countryside. His humane essay, originally published in the New Yorker , offers much food for thought. (Aug.)