Alan Watts's autobiography, In My Own Way (1972), starts with the sentence: "Topophilia is a word invented by the British poet John Betjeman for a special love for peculiar places."
[2] The term later appeared in the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard's highly influential The Poetics of Space (1958).
Yi-Fu Tuan employed the term for the feeling-link between person and place as part of his development of a humanistic geography.
Referring to the work of sports geographer John Bale, he cites five metaphors that make stadiums particularly topophilic: Topophilia, a feature-length documentary from 2015 by artist Peter Bo Rappmund that follows the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
[5] Topophilia also has a darker side, serving as a motive force behind nationalism and social exclusion,[3] and even extending sometimes to the nazist celebration of Blood and Soil.