Random Comments

To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review and the Carroll School of Management invited Jane Jacobs to a symposium in her honor. To accommodate Ms. Jacobs, the symposium participants were divided into two panels. After each panel’s presentations, Ms. Jacobs offered her comments, and she and the panel members responded to audience questions. This essay, in part, reflects some of the comments Ms. Jacobs made both after the panel presentations and in response to audience questions. Her candor at the symposium was as refreshing as it is in her writing

A geography of big things

This paper sketches some conceptual tools by which cultural geographers might advance geographies of architecture. It does so by thinking specifically about one architectural form: the modernist residential highrise, which is the ‘big thing’ of this paper. The paper draws on recent developments in material semiotics in order to interrogate features often uniquely associated with the highrise, such as its global reach, uniformity, and scale. The paper first rethinks how cultural geography has traditionally explained the movement of built forms, explicitly turning from diffusionist accounts to the notion of translation. It then offers a reconsideration of the way geographers might think about scale in relation to a ‘big’ and ‘global’ thing like the modernist highrise, arguing that scale is produced relationally and in specific contexts. Finally, it offers a template for cultural geographical scholarship which takes seriously the technical work entailed in things, like a highrise, materialising or de-materializing. It does so by way of two illustrative stories: one about the productive social science of highrise suicides in Singapore; the other about the destructive role of the inquiry into collapse of Ronan point in the UK

Sophisticated geographies

This paper offers a reflection on the relevance of Nietzsche to recent geographical scholarship. It starts by questioning the more general relationship between geography and philosophy/theory and interrogates what we might mean by theoretically sophisticated geographies. Drawing on a specific context - the postcolonial apology in contemporary Australia – the paper turns to the relevance of Nietzsche’s thinking about morality, in charting everyday moral geographies and imagining more ethical futures

Hybrid Highrises

This paper is drawn from some new research I am getting underway on the fortunes of the highrise. I should say that this paper is largely speculative and has benefited greatly from discussions with my co-researcher on this project, Stephen Cairns who is in architecture at The University of Edinburgh. I invite you today to speculate with me about the fortunes of the highrise in the contemporary city

Too many houses for a home: Narrating the house in the Chinese diaspora

The scale and extent of human mobility in contemporary times has added a new inflection to a question that has long pre-occupied scholars: this being the matter of ‘what is home?’ or, more precisely and following Agnes Heller (1995), ‘where are we at home?’. These questions are both minor and major. They implicate something as ordinary as ‘the house’ and as extraordinary as our sense of belonging. Martin Heidegger’s well known essay from 1951, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, provides one starting point for thinking about how a building like a house is attached to an experience like dwelling (Heidegger 1975). He investigates how dwelling requires building (as a process and as a thing) and how, in turn, building helps constitute our sense of dwelling. Heidegger draws at one point on the example of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which he uses to illustrate how building both cultivates and expresses dwelling. His conception of ‘proper dwelling’ relies, then, on the example of a house that is embedded in its place of origin -- where building and dwelling and location are co-constitutive. Through an architectural diagnostic, a dwelling such as Heidegger’s farmhouse might occupy the category of ‘the vernacular’. Through a sociological diagnostic, we might think of it as a type of ‘ancestral home’. Such models of ‘proper’ dwelling are being radically transformed in contemporary times. Not least, current levels of mobility act as a force of compromise. Mobility compels our lives to be full of radical open-ness, proliferating differences and multiplying loyalties. It produces flows of information, people and things that do away with, or render residual, what might be thought of as monogamous modes of dwelling. Within this restructured world, both vernacular architectures and ancestral homes come to assume new positions and are sutured into our modes of dwelling in quite different ways

A geography of big things

The journal Cultural Geographies, and its predecessor Ecumene, has provided flagship scholarship in cultural geography for over a decade. Cultural Geographies has played this part in a period that has witnessed both unprecedented enthusiasm for the (now not so new) cultural turn, and an emergent scepticism around what cultural geography has come to stand for, and specifically its apparent over- emphasis on representation. As Catherine Nash and I have observed elsewhere, this new scepticism is evident in a range of cultural geographical writings. For example, the recent Handbook of Cultural Geography, itself an exemplary account of the vital contribution of cultural geography to the discipline, opens with a picture of a tomb with the epitaph ‘Here Lies Cultural Geography, Born 1925, Died 2002. In Loving Memory’. There could be no clearer expression of the peculiar combination of commitment to and disenchantment with the concept of culture in contemporary geography. It is not the only death wish that cultural geography has had to endure recently. Don Mitchell concludes his review of Mike Crang’s Cultural Geography with the following epitaph: ‘Despite a brief and brilliant beginning, in the end, it never amounted to much’. A mere decade ago cultural geography was seen as an analytic frame that could promise not only a productive, but also a necessary, reshaping of geographical scholarship. Now it seems we can’t decide if we want this sub-field to be dead or alive! This paper is not a defence of cultural geography per se, nor even an attempt to police the ways in which we might use the term ‘culture’ in our geographies, although that has been one evident response to the confusion over the value of cultural geographical approaches. It does, however, have something to say about things being alive or dead – and it does presume that the approach taken, in significant and worthy ways, is indebted at least in part to the vital novelty bequeathed by a sub-disciplinary field known as ‘cultural geography’. Not least, the paper’s focus on building technology and building practises self-consciously resuscitates and extends a theme common to cultural geographical scholarship, old and new