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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
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