he Australian philosopher J. E. Malpas, in his Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (1999), has expressed points to the autobiographical novels of Proust, as crucial for understanding place, since in Proust Malpas finds the "explicit thematising" of the "idea of human life as essentially a life of location, of self-identity as a matter of identity found in place, and of places themselves as somehow suffused with the 'human.'"

Elizabeth Grosz reminds us, as well, of the political agency of place studies, since our human cultures are and have been threatened by spatial notions of conquest and colonization; terrible consequences are unavoidable "unless space (as territory which is mappable, explorable) gives way to place (occupation, dwelling, being lived in)." Overlapping Grosz is the work of Edward Casey , whose philosophical history of The Fate of Place (1997), protest the "neglect of place": In the past three centuries in the West--- the period of modernity---place, Casey argues, has come to be not only neglected but actively suppressed. Owing to the triumph of the natural and social sciences in this same period, any serious talk of place has been regarded as regressive or trivial.