Originally published in 1997, as part of the Ethnoscapes: Current Challenges in the Environmental Social Sciences series, reissued now with a new series introduction, Tradition, Location and Community: Place-making and Development brings together the selected papers of seventeen architects, social scientists and planners. It offers a range of original perspectives on the relationship between the design and habituation of the built environment on the one hand and social and cultural development on the other. As an archival volume, it attempts to present a mixture of cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. It explores the view that planning and design (the organization of the physical/built environment) which follow from the rapid transformations wrought by development must respond to, and be based on, the wants and needs of the people affected; that is, it must be in accord with their notions of environmental quality.

Divided into two sections. The first section has five chapters which explore the theoretical and conceptual aspects of place-making and development. Section two consists of twelve chapters, each of which presents a case study.