Abstract

In order to explore problems of ever-increasing alienation in contemporary urban society, this paper is to suggest that we need to transform our concern from the concept of ‘loss of place’ to that of ‘place alienation’. Thus this paper first reconsider the concept of place and related terms such as placelessness, non-place, displacement, place anachorism, and liminal space. Then, this paper tries to formulate the concept of place alienation, applying existing concepts of aliened labour and four type of alienation, commodity fetishism, and reification in the Marxist tradition on the one hand, and defining place alienation as thing’s detachment of or removal from its own place, domination of agency by structural mechanisms in locale, and loss of sense of place or weakening of place affect, in terms of three elements of place, that is, site, locale, and sense of place on the other. Finally this paper reinterprets briefly writings of Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, and de Certeau to see and identify significance and possibility of extending the concept of place alienation.