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Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, edited by Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher, and Karen E. Till. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 496 pp. $64.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8166-3756-- 3. $25.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8166-3757-1.
Despite the fact that Manuel Castells reinvigorated a sociological study of the urban question in the early 1970s, according to one speaker on the panel "Urban Studies and Urban Sociology-the British and American traditions" at the 2001 ASA annual meeting in Anaheim, "urban sociology has dropped the ball on the question of space." By contrast, urban studies and geography are the two disciplines to have focused on the role of space in social analysis. Textures of Place represents work within "critical human geography": In essence, it can be described as an interpretative sociology of space and place, in contrast to the more explanatory approach of the political economists (such as David Harvey or Logan and Molotch). Growing out of an older phenomenologically based humanistic geography that aimed at uncovering the underlying spatial elements of the "lifeworld," this new approach exhibits the suspicion of universality common to contextualist and postmodern perspectives. Its aim is to elucidate the texture or "feel" of the myriad environments, broadly defined, of...